border

Distinctions

gevul (גבול)

Root ג-ב-ל. The Torah uses gevul and its inflections fourteen times in the twelve pesukim laying out the borders of Eretz Yisrael (Bamidbar 34:1-12). The root also means to limit: Hashem tells Moshe to bound the people off (v'higbalta) around Har Sinai (Shemos 19:12; HaKtav VeHaKabbalah there).

Rav Hirsch (to Shemos 7:27) makes the key point: gevul at its core is the area within the borders, not the edge. Hashem strikes Pharaoh's whole gevul with frogs (Shemos 7:27) and brings locusts into his gevul (Shemos 10:4); chametz is forbidden "in all your borders" (Shemos 13:7). The frogs are not confined to Egypt's edges but fill the whole country, and the last two cases likewise take in a whole country rather than the border region (see Yerios Shlomo p. 836 and HaKtav VeHaKabbalah to Shemos 13:7). Rav Hirsch links gevul to yevul, produce, what one brings inside one's bounds, on the gimmel/yod interchange.

Radak (Sefer HaShorashim) adds givlim, "stonecutters" (Melachim I 5:32), for giving stones a bound by cutting them to size, or a gentilic for men of Geval (Yechezkel 27:9); Rabbi Yehoshua Steinberg proposes a metathesis of galav, "barber," both trades being cutting. Two further etymologies: Rabbi David Golumb reads ג-ב-ל as a metathesis of ב-ל-ג, "strengthening" (Amos 5:9, Tehillim 39:14, Iyov 9:27, 10:20), since what sits on a border needs fortifying. Rabbi Avraham Rivlin raises the opposite problem: in Rabbinic Hebrew the same root means to knead and mix (Ohalos 2:2, Shabbos 24:3, Bava Metzia 10:5, Parah 9:5), which unifies rather than divides. He answers that the border separating one land from another is what unites that land as one; HaKtav VeHaKabbalah (to Shemos 19:12) answers that a gevul is the point of convergence, where one domain ends the other begins, so that it both separates and merges. The article adds a third possibility of its own: Hebrew roots not uncommonly carry a sense and its opposite, shoresh (root) beside l'sharesh (to uproot), since a word stands in for the abstract concept it represents, and opposites are conceptually related, inversely.

Outside the parshanut, the column notes that philologists such as Wilhelm Gesenius have long taken gevul as cognate with the Arabic jabal, "mountain," mountains serving as natural borders between two polities or even between two plains. The column adds that the Yemenite Jewish surname Jibli/Gibli, from that Arabic word, is the equivalent of the Hebrew surname Harari and the Yiddish/German Berg, all of them meaning "mountain."

techum (תחום)

The standard Targumic rendering of gevul (Targum to Bereishis 10:19, 23:17, Shemos 19:12, 19:23, Devarim 19:4), and in Mishnaic Hebrew the word for what falls inside a bound: techum Shabbos, the two thousand amos outside the city within which one may walk on Shabbos (Eruvin 5:5, Beitzah 4:2, Sotah 5:3). Rabbi Ernest Klein, in his etymological dictionary of Hebrew, takes the Rabbinic Hebrew techum as a loanword from that Aramaic word, which he in turn sees as borrowed from the Akkadian tahumu. Rabbi Benzion Chaim Lubetzki (Midrash Safah Echas) reads it as a metathesis of chasum, "sealed," the space inside being sealed off by what rings it. Rabbi Golumb sets the tav aside and takes the core root as ח-ו-ם, "brown/red," again from the fortifying a frontier needs; the article records the derivation without being able to reconstruct how he gets from the color to the border.

meitzar (מיצר) and mitzarim (מצרים)

Rabbi Yehuda Ibn Kuraish (Risala) identifies mitzarim in Eichah 1:3 as the plural of the Rabbinic meitzar, "boundary," as in dina d'bar meitzra, the neighbor's right of first refusal on an adjoining field (Kesubos 44a). He notes that this is not the Biblical meitzar of "from the straits I called out to Hashem" (Tehillim 118:5), which belongs to tzar, narrowness, and denotes something slightly different. Some commentators, among them Ibn Ezra (to Eichah 1:3) and Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (Cheshek Shlomo), do connect the two. The article suggests the connection can be accounted for thematically: a border serves to narrow down the contours of a given plot.

Rashi to Eichah 1:3, following Eichah Rabbah 1:29, reads bein hametzarim as the three weeks bookended by Shivah Asar B'Tammuz and Tishah B'Av, taking mitzarim as a cognate of tzarah, "sorrow," "suffering"; he then gives the contextual, plain-sense reading, that the Jews were caught where they could not escape, penned between two fences, and glosses with gevul, while Targum and Mahari Kara gloss with techum. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchok Shain (Birkas Ish) theorizes that the name Mitzrayim (Bereishis 10:6, Divrei HaYamim I 1:8) comes from this sense of boundary: Cham, set on sparing his sons the in-fighting he had known with his own brothers, and that Kayin and Hevel had known, took pains to mark out Kush's territory clearly once his second son was born.

sfar (ספר)

The word typically refers to something located near the border: an ir hanidachas at the sfar is not destroyed, lest the gap invite the neighboring nations in (Sanhedrin 1:5), and eglah arufah is not done for a corpse found near the sfar (Sotah 9:2). Targum uses it likewise (Bereishis 49:13, Devarim 1:7, Tzefaniah 2:5-6). In the sense of "border" the word seems to belong only to later Rabbinic Hebrew; there is one possible Biblical appearance, sefarah in Bereishis 10:30, where the land of Shem's descendants stretches from Meisha (Mecca, per Rabbi Saadia Gaon) to its sfar at Har HaKedem, and Targum Onkelos renders with sfar. On that basis Rabbi Mecklenburg (HaKtav VeHaKabbalah to Vayikra 23:16; Iyun Tefillah to Tehillim 147:5) calls it the only instance of sfar in Biblical Hebrew, though most other commentators appear to take sefarah there as a place name. The etymology is not clear; Rabbi Golumb conjectures that sfar comes from perazi, used of a city-wall fortification, by samech/zayin interchange and metathesis, border cities having been especially fortified. Ramak (Pardes Rimonim, shaar 8 ch. 2) uses sfar to explain sefirah: as a border marks off the limits of an area, a sefirah is Hashem's influx as it reaches man in finite, bounded form, kin to mispar (number) and sippur (what can be told, as Hashem Himself cannot).

Rendering guidance

• Translate gevul by the sense the pasuk needs. "Border" for Bamidbar 34, where the line is the subject; "territory" or "throughout your domain" for Shemos 10:4 and 13:7, where "border" would give a false picture of frogs or chametz confined to the edge.
• Trap: English "boundary" will absorb gevul, techum, and meitzar. Where Rashi glosses with gevul and Targum with techum on one phrase, that is one gloss in two dialects, not two opinions; render both "boundary" and say so.
• Bein hametzarim as the calendar period stays transliterated, with "the Three Weeks" as the gloss. Where Rashi's second reading is in play, render "between the boundaries" and keep "straits" for the Tehillim 118:5 sense.
• Techum Shabbos stays transliterated, glossed once as "the Shabbos limit."
• Sfar is "frontier" or "border region," never plain "border," since the point in both mishnayos is exposure to the outside.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Matos/Masei: On the Border," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 28 Tammuz 5784 (2024-08-03): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11471-matosmasei-on-the-border.md. Primary loci cited: Eichah 1:3 with Eichah Rabbah 1:29, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Targum, Mahari Kara; Bamidbar 34:1-12; Shemos 7:27, 10:4, 13:7, 19:12, 19:23; Bereishis 10:6, 10:19, 10:30, 23:17, 49:13; Devarim 1:7, 19:4; Melachim I 5:32; Yechezkel 27:9; Tzefaniah 2:5-6; Amos 5:9; Tehillim 39:14, 118:5, 147:5; Iyov 9:27, 10:20; Divrei HaYamim I 1:8; Kesubos 44a; Eruvin 5:5, Beitzah 4:2, Sotah 5:3 and 9:2, Sanhedrin 1:5, Ohalos 2:2, Shabbos 24:3, Bava Metzia 10:5, Parah 9:5; Radak, Sefer HaShorashim; Yerios Shlomo p. 836; Cheshek Shlomo; HaKtav VeHaKabbalah to Shemos 13:7, 19:12 and Vayikra 23:16; Pardes Rimonim shaar 8 ch. 2. The article also brings Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz on why there is no Zohar to Matos, Masei, and Devarim: the mind is constricted in these weeks, which belongs to the meitzar sense of narrowing.

The article prints the frogs pasuk as "Ez. 7:27" in one place; the locus is Shemos 7:27, as its own earlier citation has it. On techum it writes that Rabbi Golumb "sees the TAV as a radical, thus identifying its core root as CHET-VAV-MEM," which reads backwards, since a root of chet-vav-mem is precisely one in which the tav is not a radical; the substance, that he works from ח-ו-ם, is not in doubt, and that is what is given above.