corpse

Distinctions

peger (פגר)

Some twenty-two appearances in Tanach, among them the sentence on the wilderness generation, where it falls three times: "in this wilderness your pegarim shall drop... you are pegarim who shall fall in the wilderness... until your pegarim are finished in the wilderness" (Bamidbar 14:29-33). Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur (Sefer HaTishbi, and his glosses to Radak's Sefer HaShorashim): peger is a human body, and specifically the rotting body of a wicked man. He allows one exception, Bereishis 15:11, where peger names the animal carcasses of the Bris bein HaBesarim; Rashi there writes that peger is related to pigul, disgusting, and other commentators note that reish and lamed are sometimes interchanged. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim maintains that peger is a portmanteau of po gar, "here he lives," but does not elaborate; the column suggests this possibly refers to the dead body being immobile, unable to move elsewhere, so that it lives in its place for eternity. In Aramaic the root פ-ג-ר carries inactivity or at least lagging behind: a festival is a yoma d'pagra, a day of no work, and the Modern Hebrew cognate mifager means "retard."

neveilah (נבלה)

Close to fifty appearances. Its root sense is balah, worn out or decayed, which is what any carcass left in the open becomes. In halachah neveilah is the fixed term for a kosher animal that died without proper shechitah, and its meat is forbidden. Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur holds that neveilah can name human remains as well, but only where the person was killed by an outside force, not where he died naturally. He raises the difficulty of Yeshayahu 26:19, "may Your dead live, my neveilah shall arise": why would the navi call himself that? One answer is that Yeshayahu was killed by his grandson Menashe (Yevamos 49b), so his own body fits the definition. Another is that "my neveilah" is not his own body at all but the bodies of future martyrs whose devotion resembled his, and they too were killed by outside forces.

challal (חלל)

Close to a hundred appearances. The root means empty or hollow: a human body emptied of its soul is like an emptied vessel. In Modern Hebrew challal also means outer space. The same root gives chalil, a flute, obviously hollow inside, and chalulim, the body's inner parts, cavities holding the important organs. On the same principle, things one would expect to be holy and which are not are reckoned hollow, something being missing: chullin, the Gemara's term for non-sacred meat, and Chol HaMoed, the days of the festival that are not as holy as Yom Tov in the activities they forbid. And the child born to a kohen from a marriage forbidden to him is a chalal or chalalah, desecrated or emptied of the kehunah he or she would otherwise have received through the father. The word chalus (which yeshiva students commonly pronounce chaloys), the effectuation of a halachic status, may be linked here too, on the pattern of a Hebrew word carrying its own opposite: a chalus is really what fills the void.

Why the siddur says pegarim

Elokai Neshamah thanks Hashem for returning souls lifgarim meisim, to dead bodies. Rabbi Yosef Teomim (Pri Megadim), building on Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur, explains the choice: since peger connotes the body of a wicked man, the berachah is saying that Hashem returns the soul even to the most wicked, who have done nothing to deserve it. That is the measure of His kindness.

Rendering guidance

• Peger: corpse, and in a passage of judgment or contempt carcass is right for a human body too. Bamidbar 14 is deliberately harsh; do not soften it to "bodies."
• Neveilah in halachah: leave it as neveilah, or render an unslaughtered carcass. Never "roadkill" or a merely descriptive "dead animal"; the word is a status.
• Challal: the slain where a person is meant, hollow or cavity where the root's plain sense is in play. Chalal of a kohen's child: disqualified, with the emptying sense glossed once.
• Trap: English "corpse" absorbs all three, and "carcass" absorbs peger and neveilah. Where a source contrasts them, or where neveilah is a halachic category and peger a description in the same sentence, hold two English words apart.
• Second trap: challal is a family, not a word. In one paragraph it may run from a dead body to chullin to Chol HaMoed; keep the thread of "emptiness" visible in English rather than translating each occurrence independently.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Of Corpses and Carcasses," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 26 Sivan 5778 (2018-06-09): https://articles.ohr.edu/articles/of-corpses-and-carcasses, raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/7788-of-corpses-and-carcasses.md. Primary loci cited: Bamidbar 14:29-33; Bereishis 15:11 with Rashi; Yeshayahu 26:19; Yevamos 49b; Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur, Sefer HaTishbi and glosses to Radak's Sefer HaShorashim; Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim on po gar; Rabbi Yosef Teomim (Pri Megadim) in his letters on Hebrew grammar, on Elokai Neshamah.