Before we talk about this week’s word, I want to talk about the structure of Hebrew words more generally.

A normal word in Biblical Hebrew is built around a root of three consonants. English words have roots too, of course — the omni- in omnipotent, the -itis in arthritis — but Hebrew roots function a little differently. For starters, you usually can’t stack roots together in Hebrew. English is perfectly happy to throw together conglomerations like unpigeonholeability, but outside of exceptional situations, in Biblical Hebrew, each word has one, and only one, root. Secondly, the consonants of a Hebrew root function something like pillars that frame the façade of a building while leaving plenty of room for other architectural details to fill in the gaps between them. The three Hebrew consonants גדל | GDL make a root having to do with being big, but in turning those consonants into full words, you often fit things in between them, as with גָּדוֹל | gadol | “large” or הִגְדִּֽילָה | higdílah | “she did great things”. If you aren’t familiar with all the rules (and, frankly, sometimes even when you are), these journeys from root to word can sometimes be hard to trace. נְטוּיָה | nətuyah, מַטְּךָ | matəkha, הַטֶּֽינָה | hatéinah, and וַיֵּט | vayeit all come from the same root, נטה | NTH, which has to do with extending, or stretching out.

This feature of Hebrew opens up many linguistic doors. Just by tweaking the vowels, you can shunt a word from being a noun to a verb, and the persistence of the consonants can reveal etymological linkages with striking clarity even between words with very different surface meanings. Small wonder that scholars and mystics across the ages have made a lot of hay out of tracing back the roots of scripturally significant words. Hold on to that thought.

In parashat vayishlaḥ, Ya’aqov wrestles with an angel. It’s a famous story; many of you probably know it well. Ya’aqov is waiting overnight to cross a river, an angel shows up and they wrestle, the angel can’t win so cheats by wrenching Ya’aqov’s hip, Ya’aqov refuses to let the angel go without a blessing, the blessing turns out to be a new name: Yisra’eil.

Except the Biblical text never actually calls Ya’aqov’s wrestler an angel. Ya’aqov seemingly ascribes divinity to it in Bəreishit 32:31, but the narrative is more laconic. It just says that Ya’aqov wrestled with an אִישׁ | ish — with a “man” (32:25) [a].

[a] As an aside, the verb for wrestle used here is יֵאָבֵק | yei’aveiq, a word that only shows up in this story, nowhere else. Altho the root is clearly אבק | ’VQ, it’s almost certainly used here as a play on יַבֹּק | Yaboq, the name of the river Ya’aqov is waiting to cross. (Yaboq probably comes from the unrelated root בקק | BQQ; for all that Hebrew root linkages illuminate the language on a deep level, Biblical writers sometimes do just follow sound instead of etymology.)

Modern translations often fudge this. It’s rare to find the ish of 32:25 translated directly as man — much more common is something like JPS’s “figure”. The usual explanation is that the narrative is giving us a tight focus on Ya’aqov’s perspective: He thinks he’s wrestling with some guy at first and only later realizes that something more than human is going on here. This is a pretty standard technique in Biblical prose, and on a factual level, this is a perfectly serviceable explanation. Which is why I’m going to ignore it and go haring off in another direction.

What’s the root of ish? At first blush, this might seem like a trivial question. Hebrew roots are usually three letters long, אִישׁ is three letters long, surely the root is just ish minus the vowels, אישׁ. But perhaps you know that a yod (י) in the middle of a Hebrew word is frequently not part of the root. And perhaps you also know that the plural of ish is אֲנָשִׁים | anashim, and that there’s another word in Hebrew for a human being, אֱנוֹשׁ | enosh, that looks pretty similar. You may even know that the Hebrew word for woman, אִשָּׁה | ishah, looks a lot like the feminine version of ish, and that the plural, women, is נָשִׁים | nashim. All of which might make you start to wonder whether the correct root isn’t | ’NSh, or maybe even something without that initial alef (א) at all.

And this is where it becomes very important to pay careful attention to morphological rules, because it turns out none of these words are etymologically related at all.

Like English male and female, Hebrew ish, enosh, and ishah, despite their similarity in spelling and closeness in meaning, come from different roots. They’re not the same substrate sprouting into varied forms; they’re rooted in disparate soils at the source [b]. Enosh and ishah come from two distinct אנשׁ | ’NSh roots [c] — the former perhaps having to do with sociability and the latter with softness — and ish comes from . . . well.

[b] In English, male comes from Latin masculus by way of French (which is how it lost the SC that masculine retains), while female comes from Latin femella — the earliest English spelling is femele, but the second E changed to an A due to the misleading closeness of male.
[c] This isn’t all that an unusual thing for a language to do. In English, scale as in “we ask for donations on a sliding scale based on income” comes from the Latin scala, “ladder”, and is unrelated to scale as in “the little things that cover a snake or a fish”, which comes from Proto-Germanic *skæla, “to split, divide”. Languages are always sloshing around and playing tricks on you.

The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon has a whole excursis about the etymology of ish, a rarity given its usual preference for concision abbreviated to the point of crypsis. The upshot is that “probability seems to favor” ish deriving from the root אישׁ | ’YSh, even tho the “existence & [meaning]” of this root are “somewhat dub[ious]”. BDB usually gives a meaning for the root itself, or at the very least a selection of meanings for equivalent roots in other Semitic languages; here, they can’t even really do that [d]. Ish definitely comes from somewhere, but where that place is and what it might mean are lost to the white-noise oblivion of time long past.

[d] Because, they note, there is a “lack of clear parallels for אישׁ in cogn[ate] lang[uages]”. You can’t offer a translation of a word that doesn’t exist!

I think that’s beautiful, especially here. Much has been written about the identity of the entity Ya’aqov wrestles with. Was it really an angel, or was it some shadow version of himself? Did Ya’aqov have to grapple with his past — his treatment of his brother, his dealings with Lavan — before he could move forward into his future? The Biblical text seems to get out ahead of all this furore by using the word it does in this moment. Ya’aqov wrestles with an ish. And what is an ish, at its linguistic heart [e]? A shadow, a ghost, a thing whose past is lost to us. In an ambiguous moment of an ambiguous story, an ambiguous word comes to name a critical, mysterious being. “Why would you ask my name?”, the being says, when Yisra’eil seeks to know who he’s been wrestling with. Yisra’eil’s question is one that can have no answer.

[e] G-d speaks the world into creation at the beginning of this very book. The world is created thru words; to know the name of a thing — to know whence the name of a thing — is to know a little bit the source, the root, the spark of the creation of that thing.

This teaches us that the past need not always preordain the present. Like ish, we all come from somewhere. We have a past that we were shaped by, and in knowing that past, there is a danger of being trapped by it — because thing A happened then, thing B must happen now. There is an easy inevitability to it, the ceding of agency to the momentum of history. It can be frightful to be known; knowing a thing can fix it in place with no room for growth, change, surprise. It can do that to a person, too; being known can be like being embalmed. But this is not the only way to be.

Ya’aqov/Yisra’eil is hemmed in by the weight of etymology; his names are freighted with meaning. He is the one who grabs his brother’s heel, the one who schemes, the name-giver to a nation, the one who prevails in wrestling with G-d and man. His is a nominative determinism that seems almost too much to bear. Perhaps he would have been better off simply being an ish, unburdened from the obligations of etymology, untethered from the demands of history, free to choose a future based on the needs of the moment, not the reverberations of the past. It is a terrible thing to lose one’s connections to the past, but it can be a terrible thing to keep them, too. Perhaps that is one of the duties of being human: to have a past, to be deeply shaped by it, while still being free to make a different future in spite of what has come before.

Or maybe that’s not us, not quite. Perhaps it is still night, and we are still alone, wrestling with an unmoored way of being in the world. Watch out for your hip; freedom likes to cheat.

Addendum, 2024-12-16: Two unincorporated additional thoughts from shabbos:

G-d famously self-etymologizes the Four-Letter Name as “I am that I am”. is G-d a fixed point, immovable and unalterable, immune to growth, change, and surprise? are we distinct from G-d specifically in order that we may be not who we are, that we may grow and change and startle? was the initial tzimtzum an act of making room for existence without explanation?
how many of the foolish statements of our past selves are preserved in the amber of social media? how often are we bound to them? should we be? what are the limits of disavowal of our past selves? how can we escape a perfectly remembered past? should we?