Raise your hand if you know what a terebinth is.

Until sitting down to research this dəvar, I didn’t. I bumped up against it every time I came back to parashat Lekh-Ləkha, and every time I was like, “Huh, I should look up what that means”, but there’s so much other stuff going on in this chunk of Torah that I simply never got around to it. Until now.

It turns out it’s a type of tree. It’s a nut tree, in fact, related to pistachios and cashews, and was at one point used to make turpentine. (“Terebinth” and “turpentine” actually come from the same Greek word, which makes sense now that I think about it, but which I would never have guessed if I didn’t look it up.) Nowadays, my understanding is that they make turpentine from pine trees, not terebinths, but still. When Abraham and Sarah came to the terebinth of Mamre after leaving Ḥaran (Bəreishit 12:16), they could have made paint thinner. So that’s cool, I guess.

Where does this word come from? As mentioned above, the English word “terebinth” comes from Ancient Greek: τερέβινθος | terebinthos in that tongue means, well, terebinth. Before that, it’s hard to say. It doesn’t seem to be a Proto-Indo-European root. The Online Etymology Dictionary cites a certain scholar Klein who argues that it comes to Greek from Minoan, which is difficult to check since Minoan is, as yet, undeciphered [a]. So like, maybe! But also: maybe not.

[a] This is probably the language Linear A encoded, but it’s hard to feel certain of much beyond that.

The Hebrew is little better. Brown-Driver-Briggs, one of the standard dictionaries for Biblical Hebrew, traces אֵלוֹן | eilon back to אַֽיִל | áyil, meaning “terebinth” (helpful!), but I’ve seldom seen so many question marks in so little space as there are in the etymological notes. Klein [b], a later, more general dictionary, traces it to the root אול | ’UL, meaning “strong” or “prominent”, but hedges with not one but two “probably”s along the way. So maybe it originally referred to some kind of strong or prominent tree and then got more specific from there with time. Or maybe it’s just a word for a specific kind of tree with no clear origin. It’s not like we know where the English word “dog” comes from either, after all.

[b] Unsure if any relation to the Klein cited by the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Can we get any sap from this trunk at all? If you assign numerical values to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, you can then add the letters of a word together to a single sum. Many Jewish mystics have understood this as a way of finding linkages between key words in our sacred texts — two words that sum to the same value are, in some sense, two sides of the same coin. This letter-based numerology is known as gematria, from the Greek word for geometry.

If you add up the Hebrew letters in eilon, you get the number 87. And there’s another word that sums to 87, a word that is only used once in all of Tanakh. In Iyov 26:7, Iyov describes G-d as the one Who תֹּלֶה אֶֽרֶץ עַל־בְּלִימָה | toleh éretz al-bəlimah | “hangs the earth over the void”. That final word, בְּלִימָה | bəlimah | “void”, also has a gematria value of 87. What does this tell us?

Well, from an etymological perspective, bəlimah is made of two parts: bəli, meaning “without”, and mah, meaning “something” or “what?”. So if we’re ok getting a little loosey-goosey with it, we could say that bəlimah is a thing that doesn’t have any reason to ask “What’s this?” about it. And one of those things, gematria tells us, is the terebinth.

Fair enough! Question answered, topic closed.