cold

Distinctions

kor (קור)

Cognates appear three times in Tanach: the annual season called kor (Bereishis 8:22), and mayim karim, cold water, twice (Yirmiyahu 18:14, Mishlei 25:25). Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim traces kor and kar to the biliteral ק-ר, a strong impact from concentrated mass or speed. Coldness fits because the body holds itself warm, so meeting something cold is a collision of opposed temperatures. The same root gives mikreh and keri, occurrence, the sudden collision of a person with new circumstances; and kir (wall), korah (beam) and tikrah (ceiling), all of them points where weight bears down.

On the scale: Pappenheim holds kor is the extreme, felt only on the coldest winter days, and it also describes a solid gone so cold that touching it hurts, cold metal or marble. Tanach names the winter season kor not because the season regularly reaches that pitch but because that is when real kor is likeliest.

tzinah (צנה)

In this sense the word appears once: "like the tzinas sheleg on a harvest day, so is a trusty messenger to those who send him" (Mishlei 25:13). Rashi: the longing in harvest heat for the cold of the snow season. Rabbi Yosef Kimchi: a cool winter breeze blowing on a summer day. Ibn Ezra and Rabbi Yishaya of Trani: the point of the mashal is that a touch of icy cold on a summer day gives the same relief as being able to rely on one's agent.

The word's other sense is "shield," and the two are linked in both directions. Rabbi Moshe Kimchi (in the Mishlei commentary mistakenly attributed to Ibn Ezra) suggests that cold is called tzinah because it shields from the summer heat. Abarbanel (Amos 4:2) runs it the reverse way, that a shield guards from the heat of battle. Shoresh Yesha links both to tzanua and tzenius: as the modest person keeps to himself, winter is the season of withdrawing indoors, and a shield likewise covers and conceals.

Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim traces tzinah to the biliteral צ-נ, whose core sense is a thorn. The tzinah shield is the spiked kind, used to strike as well as to guard; tzinah as cold is the stinging bite of frost, like the prick of a thorn. Rav Hirsch (Shemos 16:33) similarly: tzinah is primarily a painful cold. On the scale, though, Pappenheim puts tzinah at the bottom: the plain coldness of a solid kept from any heat source, or of a liquid that simply feels cold, a natural cold that neither sickens nor injures.

Three further words are read by some as cognates: the Midbar Tzin (Bamidbar 13:21, 20:1, 27:14, 33:36, 34:3; Devarim 32:51; Yehoshua 15:1), which Rabbi Dovid Golumb (Targumna to Shemos 17:1) explains as a notably cold place; the tzintzenes that held the manna (Shemos 16:33), which Rav Hirsch describes as an ice box keeping the manna cold; and tzinim in Mishlei 22:5, thorns to most commentators but cold to Rabbi Yosef Nechemias and to Radak in Sefer HaShorashim. Bamidbar 33:55 warns that the remaining Canaanites will be sikim in your eyes and tzninim in your sides: most read both as kinds of thorn, but Rashbam ties tzninim to tzinah, cold. Rashbam does not say how that fits the context; the article offers, as its own suggestion, that the Torah may mean a sharp, stinging coldness that vexes a man and hampers what he can get done.

Rabbi Yehoshua Steinberg of the Veromemanu Foundation uses the pairing of tzinah with sheleg, snow, in Mishlei 25:13 to join the word's two senses: just as snow covers a wide area and surrounds a person on every side, so does a tzinah, a shield or perhaps armor, cover a wide area and surround the man it protects. On that basis he argues that tzinah as coldness does not name the drop in temperature, as kor does, but an all-encompassing cold that covers a wide area and envelops a person entirely.

tzonen (צונן), the rabbinic form

Radak: in rabbinic Hebrew the final nun doubled, giving tzonen for coldness, generally as the opposite of hot (Maasros 4:4; Shabbos 3:4-5, 22:4, 22:6; Pesachim 3:3-4; Yoma 3:5; Nedarim 8:7; Zevachim 11:7; Keilim 3:7; Mikvaos 10:6; Machshirin 5:10). The form spread: an animal that is metzuneness is not a tereifah (Chullin 3:5), which Rashi (Chullin 58b) explains as one sickened by cold; and Sanhedrin 39b says Achav was metzunan, frigid.

Rendering guidance

• Default: tzinah = cold or chill; kor = bitter cold or freezing. Reserve "cool" for tzonen against hot, never for kor.
• Bereishis 8:22, kor vachom: "cold and heat." The pair is a merism for the whole year, so the plain word is right there even though kor is the strong term; if the passage is being darshened on intensity, note it.
• Mishlei 25:13, ketzinas sheleg beyom katzir: "like the chill of snow on a harvest day." Following Rabbi Steinberg, "the enveloping cold of snow" is defensible where the drashah needs the covering sense; say which reading you took.
• Trap: English "cold" absorbs both words and "chilly" collapses the scale. Fix the grades before translating a passage that has both, and do not let kor come out milder than tzinah.
• Trap: tzinah is also "shield." Decide by context, and where a commentary is deliberately playing the two senses off each other (Rabbi Moshe Kimchi, Abarbanel), transliterate once and gloss both senses rather than picking one and losing the argument.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Freezing Cold," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 7 Teves 5782 (2021-12-11): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/9482-freezing-cold.md. Primary loci cited: Bereishis 8:22; Yirmiyahu 18:14; Mishlei 22:5, 25:13, 25:25; Amos 4:2; Shemos 16:33, 17:1; Bamidbar 13:21, 20:1, 27:14, 33:36, 33:55, 34:3; Devarim 32:51; Yehoshua 15:1; Chullin 3:5 and 58b; Sanhedrin 39b; Radak, Sefer HaShorashim; and the Mishnayos listed above for tzonen.