cutting tools

Distinctions

Garzen (גרזן)

Four times in Tanach, and split evenly between the two crafts. Twice it cuts wood: the woodsman whose garzen head flies off the handle and kills a man, so that he must flee to a city of refuge (Devarim 19:5), and the prohibition against felling a fruit tree in a siege (Devarim 20:19). Twice it cuts stone: Yeshayahu 10:15, where the axe boasts against the one who hews with it, and Melachim I 6:7, where no iron tool was heard in the building of the Beis HaMikdash. Rav Hirsch (to Shemos 26:6) groups ג-ר-ז with the phonetically near roots ק-ר-ס ("crashing, tearing"), ג-ר-ס ("grinding, crushing") and ק-ר-ץ ("cutting, severing"), since GIMMEL and KUF interchange, as do ZAYIN, SAMECH and TZADI, and finds one sense running through all four: cutting, breaking or separating by force.

The stonecutting sense also turns up outside Tanach, in the Siloam Inscription, written in Biblical Hebrew and found in the late nineteenth century in Hezekiah's Tunnel in Yerushalayim, the tunnel built to secure water from the Shiloach in Chizkiyahu's reign (Melachim II 20:20; Divrei HaYamim II 32:30). The inscription commemorates the two teams of diggers meeting in the middle, and uses garzen for the tools with which they carved through the rock.

That one word should name two distinct tools of craftsmanship is somewhat unusual, and Dr. Aaron J. Koller addresses the problem with two possible explanations: a semantic shift in the term over time, letting it cover both contexts, or garzen as a descriptive term for a tool shape that fits both uses. Rabbi Klein adds that in light of the etymology tying garzen to generic verbs for cutting, the problem is less acute to begin with.

On cognates, Ibn Janach sees the Hebrew word as the etymon of the now-obsolete Arabic karzam, also "ax," on the interchangeability of GIMMEL and KAF. Apparently, forms of the same wanderwort in other languages include the Akkadian hassinnu and the Aramaic chatzina (Targum Yonasan to Yeshayahu 44:12, and Yoma 37b).

Kardum (קרדם)

Five times in Tanach: once in third-person possessive singular (kardumo, Shmuel I 13:20), once in the masculine plural (kardumim, Shmuel I 13:21), and three times in the feminine plural (kardumos, Tehillim 74:5, Shoftim 9:48, Yirmiyahu 46:22). Taken together the pesukim put it in the hands of soldiers and of farmers both. Because it first appears in Shmuel and not earlier, Dr. Koller suggests that the kardum was introduced to the Levant by the Pelishtim, who held a monopoly on certain kinds of metallurgy in the period of the Shoftim. The Mishnah vocalizes it kordom in the many places it appears (Peah 4:4, Sheviis 4:6 and 5:4, Shabbos 17:2, Beitzah 4:3, Avos 4:5, Meilah 5:1, Keilim 13:3, 20:3, 29:4-7, Taharos 9:7, Parah 12:5).

Maatzad (מעצד)

Root ע-צ-ד. An adze is not an axe: an axe blade lies parallel to its handle and strikes perpendicular to the surface, while an adze blade sits perpendicular to the handle and works at an oblique angle. The axe fells the tree and trims the branches; the logs are then cut into workable planks, and the adze shapes the wood afterward. A tool that does both jobs is a mattock in English; the Mishnah's description suggests the kardum is such a tool.

The root raises a question. The Gezer Calendar, an ancient Canaanite inscription found at Gezer, lists agricultural tasks by bi-monthly period, and one entry uses a declension of the Canaanite root ע-צ-ד for some action done to flax. The verb's precise sense is not obvious, but the consensus of scholars takes it as "harvesting." Since Ancient Canaanite was close to Biblical Hebrew, that should suggest the Biblical maatzad, from the same triliteral root, is a scythe or sickle for harvesting rather than the adze most commentators take it for. Dr. Koller resolves this by holding that the Biblical Hebrew maatzad is an adze and derives from the Biblical Hebrew ע-צ-ד, while the Canaanite ע-צ-ד of the Gezer Calendar is unrelated to it, being in fact a cognate of the Aramaic ח-צ-ד, the standard Targumic rendering of inflections of the Hebrew ketzirah, by way of the interchangeability of AYIN and CHES.

Rabbi Klein wonders whether the English adze ultimately derives from the Semitic ע-צ-ד with metathesis of the last two consonants, notes that the Oxford English Dictionary lists the etymology of adze as unknown, and reports that he wrote to Dr. Theo Vennemann, who has written on supposed Semitic influence on the Germanic languages, and had no reply as of press time. Dr. Koller, in private correspondence, admitted to having wondered about the same connection.

Kashil (כשיל) and keilapot (כילפות)

Both appear once, in the same pasuk, Tehillim 74:6, describing the wrecking of the Mikdash. Their halachic weight comes from Bava Kamma 10:10, which asks whether a craftsman keeps the scraps of a job he was hired for. He keeps them when he worked with a maatzad and returns them when he worked with a kashil: the kashil is the bigger tool and leaves scraps large enough to be worth something to the one who hired him, while the maatzad leaves only fine shavings he has no use for. Keilapot seems to be a foreign synonym for kardum. Dr. Koller takes it as a foreign loanword not native to Hebrew and connects it with the Akkadian kalappu and Hittite cognates, and points out that Targum (to Shmuel I 13:20) and the Peshitta (to Shmuel I 13:20-21) render the Hebrew kardum with a variant of keilapot, the PEH interchanged with a BEIS.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Vayigash: Cutting Tools," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 4 January 2025.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Cutting Tools," What's in a Word? Synonyms in the Hebrew Language (book manuscript).

Cited in the essay: Devarim 19:5, 20:19; Yeshayahu 10:15 and 44:12; Melachim I 6:7; Melachim II 20:20; Divrei HaYamim II 32:30; Shmuel I 13:20-21; Shoftim 9:48; Tehillim 31:23, 74:5, 74:6; Yirmiyahu 46:22, 10:3; Mishnah Peah 4:4, Sheviis 4:6 and 5:4, Shabbos 12:1 and 17:2, Beitzah 4:3, Bava Kamma 10:10, Avos 4:5, Erchin 6:3, Meilah 5:1, Keilim 13:3, 13:4, 20:3, 29:4-7 and 29:6, Taharos 9:7, Parah 12:5; Yoma 37b; Rashi to Yeshayahu 44:12 and Shabbos 102b; Radak, Sefer HaShorashim, and to Shmuel I 13:20; Menachem Ibn Saruk, Machberes Menachem; Ibn Janach, Sefer HaShorashim; Ibn Parchon, Machberes HeAruch; Rav Hirsch to Shemos 26:6; Dr. Aaron J. Koller, The Semantic Field of Cutting Tools in Biblical Hebrew: The Interface of Philological, Semantic, and Archeological Evidence (2012), and his 2013 article on maatzad in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies; the Siloam Inscription; the Gezer Calendar; Shabbos 102b with Rashi; Mishnah Shabbos 12:1 with the Rambam; Piskei Rid.