nature
camel
גמל · נאקה · בכר · בכרה · כר · כרכרות
Bottom line
These are not synonyms but stages and kinds. Becher (masculine) and bichrah (feminine) are the young camel, newly born and not yet able to carry loads; grown, it becomes gamal for a male and nakah for a female (Rabbi Nosson of Rome, Sefer HeAruch). Gamal is the default word and covers females too when no distinction is being drawn; Tanach marks a she-camel by the phrase gemalim meinikos, nursing camels (Bereishis 32:16). Kar and kirkaros are contested, and rendering either simply "camel" adopts one view against others. The trap: English "camel" absorbs all four and erases the age and gender the Hebrew is carrying.
At a glance
| Hebrew | translit | English | what sets it apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| גמל | gamal | camel | the mature load-bearing camel; masculine in form but inclusive in use (Sefer HeAruch; Rabbi Yitzchak Avineri) |
| נאקה | nakah | she-camel | Mishnaic, the grown female (Shabbos 5:1, Keilim 23:2); from נ-ק, the nursing root (Pappenheim) |
| בכר / בכרה | becher / bichrah | young camel | newborn, load-free, and so impulsive (Rashi to Sanhedrin 52a) |
| כר | kar | swift camel / saddle-basket | a running camel (Ibn Ezra), a saddle-basket (Ibn Ezra elsewhere), or a lamb (Rabbi Yosef Kimchi) |
| כרכרות | kirkaros | swift beasts | prominent camels (Ibn Ezra), any fast animal (Radak), or skipping calves (Bechor Shor) |
Where the authorities disagree
What bichrei means in Yeshayahu 60:6. Targum, Rashi, Mahari Kara, and Radak there, and Ibn Janach and Radak in their Sifrei HaShorashim, read it as ב-כ-ר: young camels, becher in the absolute. Rabbi Saadia Gaon (in his Tafsir) and Ibn Ezra read the beis as the preposition "with" or "through," leaving kar. Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Parchon (Machberes HeAruch) explicitly refuses any connection between bichrah and the kar hagamal of Bereishis 31:34. The column leaves the dispute standing; the Bottom line above follows the first camp, which is ours, not the column's ruling. Rabbi Ernest Klein holds becher cognate with the Arabic bakuru and the Akkadian bakru, both of them a young camel.
What kar means. Ibn Ezra himself gives two answers in two places. To Yeshayahu 16:1 it is a kind of camel that runs very fast; Rabbi Yehuda Ibn Balaam links this to the Gemara's gamla parcha, the "flying camel" (Yevamos 116a, Sanhedrin 107b). To Bereishis 31:34, where Rachel hides Lavan's terafim in the kar hagamal, it is the camel's saddle-basket. Rabbi Tanchum HaYerushalmi (HaMadrich HaMaspik) reconciles them: the core sense is a pillow, a camel's saddle is called kar because it looks like two pillows side by side, and from the saddle the name passed to the animal. Ibn Janach (Sefer HaShorashim) makes kar a young camel outright; Radak (Sefer HaShorashim) cites his father Rabbi Yosef Kimchi that kar is a keves, a young sheep, not a camel at all. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim leaves the camel aside and ties kar to כ-ר, digging: a kar is a fertile field, marked out by ditches dug round it, and karim are the fattened animals that graze there.
What kirkaros are (Yeshayahu 66:20). Ibn Ezra: an especially prominent kind of camel, which he links to his own kar. Radak (there and in Sefer HaShorashim): a general word for a camel or any swift-running animal. Rabbi Yosef Bechor Shor (to Bamidbar 7:3): young female calves that skip and jump as though dancing. All three are live; render by context and say which you took.
Why the camel is named from ג-מ-ל. Menachem Ibn Saruk simply lists three senses of the root, growing, repaying, and camel, without joining them. Rav Hirsch (to Bereishis 12:16, 21:8, 24:17) unifies them under "sufficiently nourished and no longer needing outside help": a weaned child (Bereishis 21:8, Shmuel I 1:23, Yeshayahu 28:9, Hoshea 1:8), a ripened fruit the tree has finished feeding (Bamidbar 17:23, Yeshayahu 18:5), a debt repaid and so brought to its conclusion (Tehillim 7:5, Shmuel I 24:18, Mishlei 31:12, Tehillim 13:6, 116:12); and he suggests that perhaps the camel too, having filled its hump with water and needing none for a long while, seems "weaned" from drinking. The column adds, as its own, that Rav Hirsch does not say so but that these explanations may support tying ג-מ-ל to ג-מ-ר, gamar, "finishing," on the lammed/reish interchange: a toddler or a fruit is weaned only on completing its term of growth, a debt is repaid only when the loan reaches maturity (see Bava Basra 5b), and a camel functions in the desert once it has finished drinking. Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh of Carpentras (Aholei Yehudah) prefers a compound: gav (body, inside) plus maleh (full), the beast that fills itself before a long crossing. He offers three the column finds less compelling, from gamad (a dwarf, the camel's opposite), from gav plus mal (the column notes it is unclear whether he means "cut" or "speaking"), and from giben (humpbacked) on the interchange of mem with beis and lamed with nun. He also connects gamal to gomel, repaying, on the strength of Chazal's teaching that camels are modest in mating and will not couple before others (Rashi to Bereishis 32:16, Bereishis Rabbah 76:7): the camel behaves as though it knows Hashem repays those who act properly.
Distinctions
gamal (גמל)
Fifty-four occurrences as the animal, on the root ג-מ-ל, whose verbs mean weaning, ripening, and requiting and run to another thirty-seven appearances in Tanach by Even-Shoshan's concordance. Three men in Tanach carry the root in their names, Gamliel (Bamidbar 1:10, 2:20, 7:54, 7:59, 10:12), Gemali (Bamidbar 13:12), and Gamul (Divrei HaYamim I 24:17), and Gamla appears in the Mishnah (Yoma 3:9, Yevamos 6:4); whether these are camels or one of the other senses is open. Rabbi Aharon Marcus (Keses HaSofer to Bereishis 10:2) connects the name Gomer to the root as well, on the lammed/reish interchange.
Gamal has cognates across the Semitic languages, Aramaic gamla, Arabic jamal, Akkadian gammalu, and was borrowed into non-Semitic languages too, Greek kamelos and Latin camelus; the gimmel, whose own name seems related to gamal and whose character looks much like a camel, became there a hard c or k, which is the English "camel." The Mishnah, for its part, calls the third Greek letter gamla rather than gamma (Shekalim 3:2).
nakah (נאקה)
Twice in the Mishnah (Shabbos 5:1, Keilim 23:2), spelled נאקה or נקה depending on the text; not in Tanach, though its apparent cognate meinikos is, and the Mishnaic word is cognate with the Arabic nakah, likewise a female camel. Radak (Sefer HaShorashim) notes two roots for nursing used almost interchangeably, י-נ-ק and נ-י-ק. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim strips the yud and then the nun, arriving at the monoliteral ק, "expulsion of what is superfluous," parent of hakaah (regurgitation), kei (vomit), and kaas, a bird that throws up what it eats (Ibn Ezra to Vayikra 11:18). From ק comes נ-ק, cleaning: menakiyos, the tubes of the shulchan that kept the lechem hapanim from spoiling; nakik, a hollow rock as though cleaned of its minerals; naakah, prayer, emptying the heart of its sorrows; anakah, a lizard whose sound resembles unbroken prayer; and yenikah and meineches, emptying the mother's milk. The Mishnaic tinok and Aramaic yenuka, a baby, belong here too. On that basis the column says it seems cogent to assume that nakah for the female camel likewise relates to nursing, hers being the camel from which other camels nurse.
The column then offers its own answer to the question it opened with, that both Hebrew terms for the camel carry a tie to nursing: the female word straight from nursing, the male word from weaning, the move away from it, which is the thing the male camel does not do. It suggests this may arise from the animal's physiology, camels drinking in quantity and storing the water in humps it calls breast-like, so that the camel's physical makeup is itself linked to nourishment drawn in abundance and stored.
becher and bichrah (בכר, בכרה)
Yirmiyahu 2:23 likens Israel to a bichrah kalah, a swift young she-camel twisting her ways. Rashi and Radak there: a young she-camel runs faster and wilder than a male or an older animal. Rashi (to Sanhedrin 52a) explains why: she is not accustomed to heavy loads, so she acts impulsively and without responsibility. Targum renders becher and bichrah as hugnei (see also Rashi to Yeshayahu 60:6, Yirmiyahu 2:23, Sanhedrin 52a); the word occurs once in Bavli (Sanhedrin 52a) and once in Yerushalmi (Chagigah 2:1). Dr. Michael Sokoloff, in his dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, defines hugna as a dromedary, as against the two-humped Bactrian camel, which is not native to the Near East. Hugnei is not a native Aramaic word at all but a loanword from the Greek εὐγενής (eugenes), "noble," "of good stock," from eu, "well," and genos, "race" or "stock"; the name Eugene and the term eugenics come from the same root. The related Talmudic mehugan or hagun carries the sense of worthy, of good stock (Kiddushin 70a, Eruvin 100b, Nedarim 20a, Yevamos 108a, Kesubos 22a and 54a, Bava Kama 80a).
Becher/bichrah also surfaces where one would least expect it. Rabbi Ernest Klein and other etymologists derive the English "albacore," a kind of tuna, from the Spanish albacora, and that from the Arabic al bakrah, "the young camel"; the column says how camels relate to tuna is beyond it and would like to know, and notes that the Oxford English Dictionary cites this etymology and rejects it.
Rendering guidance
- Trap: "camel" alone will absorb gamal, nakah, becher, and bichrah. Where the age or sex is doing work, write "she-camel," "young camel," "young she-camel."
- Bereishis 32:16 lists gemalim meinikos and their young against thirty male camels. Render the first "nursing she-camels," not "camels," or Yaakov's gift loses its structure.
- Yirmiyahu 2:23: bichrah kalah is "a swift young she-camel." "Young camel" drops the feminine, and with it Rashi's point about a beast never yoked.
- Kar in Bereishis 31:34 must be the saddle-basket, since Rachel sits on it. Kar in Yeshayahu 16:1 is disputed; do not silently harmonize the two.
- Do not press gamal into "dromedary" or "Bactrian." Tanach does not mark the distinction. Sokoloff's "dromedary" is a gloss on Targum's Aramaic hugnei, not on gamal, and even there hugnei is a Greek loanword for "of good stock"; keep the two apart.
Sources
Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Vayishlach: Go Camel," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 13 Kislev 5785 (2024-12-14): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11619-vayishlach-go-camel.md. Primary loci: Bereishis 10:2, 12:16, 21:8, 24:17, 31:34, 32:16; Vayikra 11:18; Bamidbar 1:10, 2:20, 7:3, 7:54, 7:59, 10:12, 13:12, 17:23; Shmuel I 1:23, 24:18; Divrei HaYamim I 24:17; Yeshayahu 16:1, 18:5, 28:9, 60:6, 66:20; Yirmiyahu 2:23; Hoshea 1:8; Tehillim 7:5, 13:6, 116:12; Mishlei 31:12; Mishnah Shabbos 5:1, Keilim 23:2, Yoma 3:9, Yevamos 6:4, Shekalim 3:2; Sanhedrin 52a and 107b; Yevamos 116a; Bava Basra 5b; Yerushalmi Chagigah 2:1; Bereishis Rabbah 76:7; Sefer HeAruch; Sifrei HaShorashim of Ibn Janach and Radak; Machberes HeAruch; HaMadrich HaMaspik; Aholei Yehudah; Keses HaSofer to Bereishis 10:2; Even-Shoshan's concordance; Rabbi Ernest Klein; Dr. Michael Sokoloff's dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic; the Oxford English Dictionary.
The article prints the Shmuel I locus for gemaltani as "I Sam. 24:17," which is the English versification; in the Hebrew it is Shmuel I 24:18, and that is what is given above.