Umbrae said:
I’d like to thank you Filipas for a
brilliant and comprehensive post.
I do have one question. In certain cases you’ve stated that a letter does not mean, and then provided a commonly accepted word. Examples would be: HA deos not mean ‘window’, LMD does not mean ‘ox goad’ etc..
Are these modern attributions, that is attributions not used in the fourteenth century? Or are you stating that never ever in the Jewish linguistic traditions have they ever held such meanings, that they are ascribed to Gentiles who think they are Hebrew scholars?
Marks work is based on the lexicon, therefore he is looking at the
names of the letters and their meanings as can be found in a dictionary. The meanings of the letters that have become associated with them in kabbalah however are not based on literal meanings of their names alone.
There is the meaning associated with the ideogram [the form or shape of the letter representing an idea or concept] itself, and in kabbalistic literature the ideogram Lamed [LMD] is associated with 'ox goad', also in this case the name is the root of the word for ox-goad, mLMD. Rabbi Ray commenting on the enlarged lamed in the phrase 'vayashlichem' [Deut 29:27 ‘and he cast them into another land’] in "Masechet Sofrim" [a Talmud tract] says that : "lamed in Egyptian hieroglyphics is the symbol for an ox-goad. Thus this is a very relevant image when God is driving Israel out and perhaps the form reverts to its original usage in ancient Egyptian." LMD is the root for the word "Ox goad" in Hebrew [MLMD which also has the meaning of "Teacher"] which can be verified in the Hebrew Lexicon at
www.onlinebible.com [ref: 03925; TWOT 1116b]. It is also the root of LIMD - disciple. So lamed refers to both learning and teaching, as does the letter Aleph which is also related to the Ox. The idea of teacher/student in Aleph [Ox] is that a young untrained Ox would be yoked to an older experienced Ox in order to train it. In [M]Lamed Ox Goad it is of the teacher who spurs on and directs the student [who submits to his authority and discipline]. Mark uses roots elsewhere, I don't know why he finds this one unacceptable.
Aryeh Kaplan also gives 'fish-hook' for TzDI [Tzadi] and 'snake' for Teth. These meanings are based not on the name of the letter [at least not in Hebrew], but on their shape as a form of ideogram. The form of the letter Tzadi itself is said to represent a hook and TzDI is the root for 'hunters of fish' TzYDVN from root TzD [hunt] with Nun [fish] suffixed. It is also connected to fish/Nun in that the form of the letter is said to be composed of a letter Nun/fish and letter Yud/hand [for example see Sefer Bahir 61;Zohar 1:2b].
The meaning of Teth as snake is also based upon the shape of the letter as an ideogram: "The tet (TYTh) is the basic consonant letter in the words MTH ("staff"), HTYH ("inclination"), MTH ("below"), and MTH ("bed"). The symbol of the staff is related to that of the snake, as in the story of the Divine sign which Moses performed before Pharoah of the staff becoming a snake. According to kabbalah, the tet resembles a snake coiled head into tail."
Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg's "The Alef-Beit"
Also some meanings have become associated with letters as commonly used metaphors in kabbalistic allegories. As an example of the latter for example is the connection between the letter HH and 'window', a metaphorical connection that goes back to at least the Bahir, and may have suggested itself through the shape of the letter as an ideogram. Marks examples can be found in Jewish kabbalistic literature, but as the meaning is not based on the literal name but derive from the processes of kabbalistic exegesis or possibly the original meaning of the
non-hebrew name for the letter and its hieroglyph such meanings won't be found in a hebrew dictionary.
Aryeh Kaplan lists these meanings in his table of hebrew letter meanings in his Sefer Yetzira, and I don't think he comes under the description of a 'Gentile' with pretensions to a knowledge of Hebrew. Mark is correct to say that these meanings do not derive from the names of these letters [at least not in Hebrew] and to correct any misunderstanding that this is so; however to imply that these meanings are down to the errors of hermetic or christian cabbalists or 18th and 19th linguists is to perpetuate an error himself.
It might also be suggested that looking for the meaning of the names of the hebrew alphabet in a hebrew dictionary is somewhat flawed anyway, as the names did not originate in Hebrew. The names belong to a close enough semitic family that share the same words in the majority of cases with the same or similar meaning, but some, like Teth, have no meaning in Hebrew. Interesting then that kabbalistic texts have retained the meaning of the names of the letters [for example that the name lamed and its pictogram or hieroglyph means ox-goad, and according to kabbalistic texts the name teth and its pictogram means serpent] even in the case where Hebrew shared no such word [though as said above lamed is the root of the hebrew word for ox-goad]. How much is genuine retention of meaning and how much mere speculation of the kabbalists I don't know. In Greek of course, in which language the names of the letters had no meaning whatsoever, the names divorced from meaning went through changes such as aleph to alpha, beit to beta; so I suppose it is better to look in a hebrew dictionary than a greek
Kwaw
~Rosanne
Love it!