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 (the article prints 10:5), 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-צ ("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. The column brings 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 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. The column adds that in light of the etymology tying garzen to generic verbs for cutting, the problem is less acute to begin with. (In summarizing, the column glosses garzen as the "adze" in woodworking and the "pick" in stoneworking, though elsewhere throughout it renders the word "axe/pick.")

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. Forms of the same wanderwort in other languages, the column reports, 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, which is why kardum takes that word.

The root raises a question the column takes up at length. 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 column reports the consensus of scholars 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.

The column adds a bracketed aside of its own: he wondered 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.

Rendering guidance

• Trap: English "axe" will absorb garzen, kardum, kashil and keilapot at once. Reserve "axe" for garzen, give kardum "adze-axe" or "mattock", maatzad "adze", kashil "large axe" and keilapot "hatchets."
• Tehillim 74:6 puts kashil and keilapot side by side in one clause. The two must read differently in English ("with axe and hatchets they smashed"), or the pasuk loses its own pairing.
• Where garzen cuts stone (Melachim I 6:7, Yeshayahu 10:15), "pick" or "iron tool" reads better than "axe"; where it cuts wood (Devarim 19:5, 20:19), "axe."
• Avos 4:5: the familiar English "a spade to dig with" is a translation of the Mishnaic digging sense, not of the Biblical tool. Keep it, but do not carry "spade" back into a pasuk; there Radak's double-headed tool is meant.
• For magal and chermesh, the harvesting tools, see sickle-chermesh-magal.md; for the kurnas Rashi compares the maatzad to, see hammer-makevet-patish-kurnas.md; for the verbs of cutting, see cutting-bokea-korea-gozer.md.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Vayigash: Cutting Tools," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 4 Teves 5785 (2025-01-04): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11644-vayigash-cutting-tools.md. Primary loci: Devarim 19:5, 20:19; Yeshayahu 10:15 (the article prints 10:5) 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 He'Aruch; Rav Hirsch to Shemos 26:6. The article states that much of its information comes from Dr. Aaron J. Koller's The Semantic Field of Cutting Tools in Biblical Hebrew: The Interface of Philological, Semantic, and Archeological Evidence (2012) and from his 2013 article in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies on maatzad; his views, the Siloam Inscription, the Gezer Calendar, the Akkadian and Hittite comparanda and the aside on the English word adze are reported here as the column gives them.