other
Egypt
מצרים · מצור · פתרוס · רהב · כפתור · ארץ חם
Bottom line
Mitzrayim is Egypt, and also the name of the man from whom the Egyptians descend. Patros is properly Upper Egypt or the Patrusim who came from Mitzrayim; the paytanim use it, and Ludim, Anamim, and Lehavim, for Egypt as a whole by poetic license, not because the words are synonyms. Rahav is Egypt named for its haughtiness and the name of its heavenly minister; eretz Cham is the liturgical name. The trap is flattening all of these to "Egypt" in a piyyut, where the obscure name is the poet's whole point.
At a glance
| Hebrew | translit | English | what sets it apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| מצרים | Mitzrayim | Egypt | the standard name, 680 times; a person before it was a land (Bereishis 10:6) |
| מצור | Matzor | Egypt, singular | Radak's singular form of the name; others read it as "narrow places" |
| פתרוס | Patros | Upper Egypt | southern Egypt (Rabbi Aharon Marcus), or the Patrusim; used loosely for Egypt in piyyut |
| רהב | Rahav | Egypt, the haughty | Rashi, Chizkuni, Radak; also the angelic minister of Egypt and the sea |
Where the authorities disagree
Why Mitzrayim has a plural or dual ending. Six accounts, no reconciliation. Radak (to Bereishis 10:13): unknown, perhaps something in the circumstances of his birth, and once Cham's son bore it he named his own sons the same way. Peirush HaRokeach and Rabbi Yehuda HaChassid (there): each of those nations came from a pair of twins whose families intermarried, which explains the sons' names but not Mitzrayim's own. Bereishis Rabbah 37:5 notes that the sons' names all carry a yam ending; Maharzu, that they settled along the coast, and Ramban (to 10:13) places them all in Egypt's vicinity. Rabbeinu Bachaya (to 10:13): the yod-mem hints that these family-nations were destined to drown at Krias Yam Suf. Many sources read the name as a portmanteau of meitzar, a narrow place, border or strait, and yam, sea, each explaining the connection its own way; the earliest the column found is Rabbi Chaim Vital, that Egypt places a limit on the Upper Seas, since its fecundity hinged on the Nile and it was not as reliant on rain as other countries, a state of affairs that could, chas v'shalom, lead people to forget Hashem in their pursuit of a crop, no longer feeling the need to look upward for rain (see Bereishis 13:10, Devarim 11:10). Sodei Semuchim, ascribed to Rabbi Elazar Rokeach of Worms: it is the inflection Hebrew uses for paired things, and Egypt earned it as a nation assembled out of several of Cham's lines, like Yerushalayim, two cities joined. Ibn Ezra (to 10:13) reads the whole list as names of countries, not of men.
Whether "Mitzrayim" at the Yam Suf is the man. Midrash Sechel Tov (to Shemos 14:30): "Yisrael saw Mitzrayim dead on the seashore" means Grandfather Mitzrayim himself, revived to watch his wretched descendants destroyed; some baalei Tosafos had a tradition extending this to Shemos 14:10 and 14:25 (Ateres Zekeinim and Hadar Zekeinim to 14:10, Sefer Chassidim §607, Siddur Rokeach pp. 213 and 222, Peirush HaRokeach to 14:30). The plain reading takes it collectively.
Who the Luvim are. The Luvim come up four times in Tanach: countless of them march with Shishak against Yerushalayim (Divrei HaYamim II 12:3, in Rechavam's reign; the article places it in Shlomo's), again as soldiers a few generations later in Asa's day (16:8), and at Nachum 3:9 and Daniel 11:43. Rid and pseudo-Rasag (to Daniel 11:43, where the article prints "Pseudo-Radag"), and Tosafos with Tosafos Chitzoniyos (in Shitah Mekubetzes to Bechoros 5b), state plainly that the Luvim are the Lehavim, probably, the column adds, because hei and vav interchange. Rabbeinu Tam (cited by Tosafos to Shabbos 51b, and see Rabbeinu Nissim Gaon to Shabbos 90b): the word simply means Egyptians. Rashi: Luvim donkeys were of especially high quality (Bechoros 5b), and they came from Luv, the land of the Luvim (Shabbos 51b, and see Rabbeinu Chananel there). Rabbi Aharon Marcus and Dr. Alexander Kohut take Luv, the homeland of the Luvim and Lehavim, to be Libya, west of modern Egypt; the column offers as an alternative of his own that Lehavim/Luvim may be another term for the Nubians, who lived just to Egypt's south, lamed and nun being often interchangeable.
Distinctions
Mitzrayim (מצרים)
First a person: a son of Cham (Bereishis 10:6, Divrei HaYamim I 1:8), father of Ludim, Anamim, Lehavim, Naftuchim, Patrusim, and Kasluchim, the last two of whom begot the Plishtim and Kaftorim (Bereishis 10:13 to 14). Then the land. Rabbi Elazar Rokeach of Worms adds a sign: the pasuk of Makkas Bechoros (Shemos 12:23) holds every letter of the alef-beis but tes, whose value is nine, for the nine families struck.
Patros (פתרוס), Ludim (לודים), Anamim (ענמים), Lehavim (להבים)
Patros appears seven times, five for the land of Egypt (Yeshayahu 11:11, Yirmiyahu 44:1 and 44:15, Yechezkel 29:14 and 30:14) and twice for the Patrusim (Bereishis 10:14, Divrei HaYamim I 1:12). Rabbi Aharon Marcus: in Egyptian, the land of the south, Upper Egypt, since the Nile flows northward, near the border with Nubia and Ethiopia. The Hungarian maskil Solomon Löwisohn and Shadal (to Bereishis 10:14) add that Patros, Pathyris in Greek, was a major city in Upper Egypt, and that the region took its name from the city, as in Greek times the region took the name Thebias from the city of Thebes while Aegyptus meant Lower Egypt in particular. Patros, then, is closely associated with Mitzrayim but not quite synonymous with it. It seems, the column concludes, that Yanai's Makkas Bechorei Pasros uses it for Egypt at large as a poetic way of naming Mitzrayim by a more obscure term; he reached that conclusion after consulting Professor Shulamit Elitzur, the world's expert in piyyutim, who confirmed that there is probably no deeper meaning in these substitutions. HaKallir does the same with Lud in the weekday Sukkos piyyut, and Yom L'Yabashah calls the Egyptians Anamim, as do many less popular piyyutim. The Ludim themselves appear five times (Bereishis 10:13, Yechezkel 27:10 and 30:5, Divrei HaYamim I 1:11, Yirmiyahu 46:9). Rashi (to 10:13, and possibly to Yeshayahu 13:8) presumes a connection between Lehavim and the root LAMED-HEY-BES, flame or blade, saying that their faces resembled a lahav without explaining what that means. Ibn Gabirol's Azharos reads "I desired you and loved, I redeemed you from Lahav", and in some versions "from Rahav".
Rahav (רהב), Matzor (מצור), and eretz Cham (ארץ חם)
Rahav as a name for Egypt: Rashi to Bereishis 40:23, Chizkuni to 43:32, Radak to Tehillim 87:4; in divrei Chazal Rahav is the sar of Egypt and of the sea (Bava Basra 74b, Bamidbar Rabbah 18:22, Zohar Terumah 170b, Zohar Chadash Bishalach 38b). The word means confident, strong, haughty, an apt description of the Egyptian mentality, and Rabbi Aharon Marcus surmises that it is a permutation of Lahav, lamed and reish interchanging. Matzor is Radak's singular of the name (Sefer HaShorashim, and to Melachim II 19:24, Yeshayahu 19:6, 37:25), which other meforshim read as the ordinary noun for narrow places; in the same vein the column notes that the Arabic for Mitzrayim is Misr, which seems to be simply the singular form. Eretz Cham is Tehillim's name (105:23, 105:27, 106:22), with admas bnei Cham in the weekday Maariv and malchus eglah in Maoz Tzur (see also Yirmiyahu 46:20); Kaftor (Amos 9:7, Yirmiyahu 47:4, Tzefaniah 2:5) is the Plishtim's homeland, a related place and not Egypt, which Shadal (to Bereishis 10:14) takes to be either Cyprus or Crete, also known as Kandia.
Where the English word "Egypt" comes from
Rabbi Aharon Marcus claims that "copt" is a corruption of the Hebrew Kaftor, and that from that corruption came the Greek Aíguptos and the Latin Aegyptus, the eventual etymons of English "Egypt." Others argue that those antecedents derive instead from the native Egyptian phrase meaning "temple of the soul of Ptah," Ptah being the deity of the Egyptian city of Memphis, whose name the Greeks applied to the region as a whole. Two early forms of the word turn up in Chazal: a language called Gipti (Shabbos 115a to 115b, Megillah 18a), which seems to be Coptic; and the parsing of totafos (Devarim 6:8, 11:18) as tot, two in Kapti, plus pat, two in Afriki (Sanhedrin 4b, Zevachim 37b, Menachos 34b), where the consensus takes Kapti for Coptic and Afriki for Phrygian. The column adds as an aside that the Romani were once thought to have come from Egypt, hence "Gyptians" and eventually "Gypsies," though anthropologists now place their origin in South Asia.
Rendering guidance
- In a piyyut, keep the poet's word and gloss it: "the firstborn of Patros" with a note that Patros is Egypt. The same for Lud, Anamim, Lahav, and Rahav; flattening them deletes the poem's device.
- Trap: English "Egypt" will absorb Mitzrayim, Patros, Matzor, and Rahav at once. Reserve "Egypt" for Mitzrayim and transliterate the rest.
- Mitzrayim in Shemos 14 may be the nation or the man; translate "the Egyptians" and put Midrash Sechel Tov in a note. In a frum text keep Mitzrayim, Mitzrim, and Mitzri transliterated for the people.
Sources
Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Tzav-Pesach: Escape from Patros," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 10 Nisan 5783 (2023-04-01): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/10890-tzav-pesach-escape-from-patros.md. Primary loci cited: Bereishis 10:6, 10:13 to 14, 13:10, 40:23, 43:32; Divrei HaYamim I 1:8, 1:11 to 12; Divrei HaYamim II 12:3, 16:8; Shemos 12:23, 14:10, 14:25, 14:30; Devarim 6:8, 11:10, 11:18; Yeshayahu 11:11, 13:8, 19:6, 37:25; Yirmiyahu 44:1, 44:15, 46:9, 46:20, 47:4; Yechezkel 27:10, 29:14, 30:5, 30:14; Amos 9:7; Nachum 3:9; Tzefaniah 2:5; Tehillim 87:4, 105:23 to 27, 106:22; Daniel 11:43; Melachim II 19:24; Bereishis Rabbah 37:5 with Maharzu; Bamidbar Rabbah 18:22; Zohar Terumah 170b and Zohar Chadash Bishalach 38b; Bava Basra 74b; Bechoros 5b; Shabbos 51b, 90b, 115a to 115b; Megillah 18a; Sanhedrin 4b; Zevachim 37b; Menachos 34b; Sefer Chassidim §607; Siddur Rokeach pp. 213 and 222. The article's comparative and academic material (Löwisohn and Shadal on Pathyris, Kohut on Luv, the Greek and Latin etymons of "Egypt," and Professor Elitzur on the piyyutim) is reported here as the article reports it. The article prints "Pseudo-Radag" for pseudo-Rasag on Daniel.