What’s in a Word?

nature

elephant

פיל · שנהב · שנהבים · פלדש

Bottom line

Pil is the ordinary word for elephant, but it is post-biblical; it belongs to the language of Chazal, not to Tanach. Shenhav (plural shenhabim) is the biblical word, and most of the commentators render it ivory, not the animal (Targum, Rashi, Radak, Metzudos, Ralbag, Rabbi Yosef Karo). A minority read it as the elephant itself (Ibn Janach, HaKallir, Rabbi Avraham ben Shlomo, and the commentary printed as Rashi to Divrei HaYamim). Render shenhabim at Melachim I 10:22 as ivory and note the minority; even on the minority reading, as the article's own summary has it, the word focuses on the elephant specifically as the source of ivory, so "ivory" loses less than "elephant" would. That is the difference the article settles on: shenhav names the beast for its tusks, while post-biblical pil names it for other properties, its superlative mass or possibly its knack for burying the dead.

Distinctions

shenhav (שנהב)

Twice in Tanach, in the identical lists of what Shlomo HaMelech's ships brought back: gold and silver, shenhabim, monkeys and peacocks (Melachim I 10:22; Divrei HaYamim II 9:21). The whole question is which half of the list it joins, the precious materials or the exotic animals. The taamim attach shenhabim to the animals. The commentators mostly go the other way: the Targum to both places renders it shen d'pil, an elephant's tooth, that is ivory, and Rashi, Radak, the Metzudos, Ralbag, and Rabbi Yosef Karo follow. Abarbanel (to Melachim I 10:22) records that the Christian commentators read it as pearls, which is again a material rather than an animal. On the other side, the commentary printed under Rashi's name to Divrei HaYamim (not his) says shenhav means both the tusk and the animal, tying the word to the clauses on either side of it. Rabbeinu Yonah Ibn Janach (Sefer HaShorashim) suggests that it is a compound of two words stuck together, without explaining himself; it is safe to assume, the column says, that he means shen, tooth, plus hav, gives, so that shenhav would be the beast that "gives" teeth, and he too seems, on that reading, to mean the animal rather than the ivory. HaKallir, in an unpublished piyut for Yom Kippur, lists shenhabim among animals of exceptional height, implying that the word means elephant, and Rabbi Avraham ben Shlomo, the fourteenth-century Yemenite commentator to Melachim, says outright that it means elephants and not ivory.

Rabbi Dr. Ernest Klein and others parse the word differently again. They agree that shen is "tooth," but hold that hav is related to the Ancient Egyptian yev, elephant, the word behind the name of the island of Elephantine in the Nile, also known as Yev or Yebu. Rabbi Dr. Klein adds that English ivory itself comes ultimately from Egyptian yev, by way of the Latin ebur. Dr. Chaim Tawil points out that shenhabim is a semantic cognate of the Akkadian sinni piri, "elephant tusk."

pil (פיל)

Absent from Tanach. Standard from the Mishnah on: Kilayim 8:6, in sorting which creatures count as a behemah and which as a chayah, and repeatedly in the Gemara, in Aramaic as pila. Chazal use it for the outer bound of the impossible, the elephant passing through the eye of a needle, in proving that a man dreams only of what he has seen or thought of (Berachos 55b); they debate whether an elephant in a dream is a good sign (Berachos 56b-57a); and one recites a berachah on seeing one (Berachos 58b). Rabbi Dr. Ernest Klein notes that the Mishnaic word is related to the Persian pil, the Arabic fil, and the Akkadian piru/pilu; and, parenthetically, that the chess piece we call a bishop was the alfil, Arabic for "the elephant," shaped like one and likewise moving diagonally, though it could move only two squares at a time and could jump over whatever stood between. Where the word comes from within Hebrew is unsettled:

  • Rabbi Yehoshua Steinberg: Chazal themselves seem to associate pil with pele, wonder (Berachos 56b, 57b), which suits a creature of wondrous size.
  • Rabbi Yechiel Michel Stern: pil belongs with nefilim, giants, since both elephants and giants make dread fall on whoever sees them (Bereishis Rabbah 26:7). Rabbi Steinberg adds that Rabbi Yosef Bechor Shor (to Bereishis 6:4 and Bamidbar 14:33) likewise ties nefilim to pele.
  • The column's own suggestion: פ-ל is bound up with death, in nefel, a stillborn (Iyov 3:16; Tehillim 58:9), and in nefilah as a euphemism for dying (Shemos 19:21; Devarim 21:1; Shoftim 3:25, 4:22). Rabbi Menashe ben Israel writes that an elephant that kills a man stands by the corpse until it can bury its victim; other researchers, the column adds, have noted that elephants bury dead animals of all kinds and otherwise seem to take a special interest in death, citing a 2014 BBC World News headline, "Kenya elephant buries its victims." The column offers all this humbly as a suggestion, farfetched as it may sound, not as a received reading.

The column closes with a further curiosity: the Oxford English Dictionary cites the suggestion that English elephant derives ultimately from the Hebrew elef, ox, which might itself be related to pil/pila by metathesis; and the Jewish surnames Helfand, Gelfand and Elfant all mean "elephant."

pildash (פלדש)

The sixth son of Nachor (Bereishis 22:22), whose etymology the column calls somewhat unclear. Some linguists read the name as a portmanteau of pladot, torches, and aish, fire, two words that stand side by side in the pasuk (the article cites Nechemiah 2:3; the words are at Nachum 2:4); pladot itself occurs only once in Tanach and seems to be a metathesized form of the more familiar lapidot, torches. Another tradition, from Rabbeinu Efrayim ben Shimshon, reads the name as pil plus dash, an elephant that threshes, an allusion to Pildash's superlative height, which let him "thresh" over everyone shorter than himself. That is the only place pil comes near the biblical text, and only by way of a name.

Rendering guidance

  • Shenhabim in Shlomo's cargo list: "ivory." If the passage is arguing from the taamim or from the shape of the list, say in a note that the accents group it with the animals and that a minority renders "elephants."
  • Pil in a Gemara: "elephant," plainly. Do not reach back for "shenhav"; the words belong to different strata of the language.
  • Trap: English "ivory" and "elephant" split cleanly, but shenhav on the minority reading is both at once. Where a source turns on that double sense (the beast named for what it yields), render "ivory" and gloss, rather than choosing "elephant" and losing the material the pasuk is listing.
  • Second trap: a derashah on pil and pele, or on pil and nefilim, cannot survive translation. Keep the Hebrew in the body and put the wordplay in a note.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Elephants Galore," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 20 Cheshvan 5781 (2020-11-07): sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/8913-elephants-galore.md. Primary loci: Bereishis 22:22 with Rabbeinu Efrayim ben Shimshon; Melachim I 10:22 and Divrei HaYamim II 9:21 with Targum, Rashi, Radak, Metzudos, Ralbag, Rabbi Yosef Karo, and Abarbanel; Mishnah Kilayim 8:6; Berachos 55b, 56b-57a, 57b, 58b; Bereishis Rabbah 26:7; Bereishis 6:4 and Bamidbar 14:33 with Rabbi Yosef Bechor Shor; Iyov 3:16; Tehillim 58:9; Shemos 19:21; Devarim 21:1; Shoftim 3:25 and 4:22; Ibn Janach, Sefer HaShorashim. The article cites Nechemiah 2:3 for pladot; the word is at Nachum 2:4, and the entry gives both. The article's comparative material (Rabbi Dr. Ernest Klein on Egyptian yev and on Persian, Arabic and Akkadian pil; Dr. Chaim Tawil on Akkadian sinni piri; the Oxford English Dictionary on English elephant) is reported here as the article reports it.