exchange

Distinctions

temurah (תמורה)

The Torah's name for the prohibition at the close of Vayikra: transferring the kedushah of a consecrated animal onto another, with the result that both become consecrated (Vayikra 27:10, 27:33).

• Rabbi Yisrael Yaakov Algazi: temurah is one man swapping one of his own animals for another of his own.
• Rabbi Yehuda Leib Shapira-Frankfurter: temurah is trading something better for something worse. The Torah forbids the transfer either way, better for worse or worse for better.
• Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer follows him with a tightening: temurah is exclusively good-replaced-by-bad, and he works this through a series of pesukim.
• Rav Hirsch takes his great-uncle's reading of temurah and draws the consequence: once the transfer is forbidden, any attempt at it counts as "for the worse" even when the second animal is objectively better, which is why the pasuk stating the outcome says hamer yamir and does not return to chalifah.
• Malbim: temurah looks at the person who effects the switch and chalifah at the objects switched, which the column casts as a classic cheftza/gavra construct. The same event can be described either way. Hence Tehillim 106:20 on the eigel, vayamiru es kevodam: Hashem was not in fact replaced, since from His side nothing changed, so the object-word chalifah would not fit; from the people's side there was an exchange, so a temurah cognate is used.

Root: Ibn Chayyuj מ-ו-ר or מ-י-ר; Ibn Janach and Radak מ-י-ר; Menachem Ibn Saruk, a biliteralist, simply מ-ר. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (Cheshek Shlomo) defines מ-ר as "getting rid of a thing so that another can take its place," and derives mohar (given in exchange for a woman's maidenhood), maher (what does not stay in one state), mar (a taste the palate rejects and wants replaced), morah (the razor that clears the way for new hair), and amirah (speech, where the parties alternate between listening and speaking).

chalifah (חליפה)

The Torah's second verb in the same prohibition.

• Algazi: chalifah is two people swapping animals, a transactional transfer.
• Shapira-Frankfurter: chalifah is trading up, worse for better.
• Wertheimer: chalifah is neutral, covering both directions.
• Rav Hirsch: chelef/chalifah is at bottom moving a thing out of one place or state into another, whether or not anything takes its place. Yeshayahu 2:18 uses yachalof for idols simply vanishing. The slaughtering knife is a chalaf because it moves an animal from living to dead. (Others maintain, the column adds in a bracket, that chalaf in the sense of knife comes from the Arabic chalaf, "sharp," which is itself likely derived from the Hebrew charif, the r-sound and the l-sound being often interchangeable.) And because the word fits what one discards and replaces, it is the verb for changing clothes (Bereishis 35:2, 41:14) and then the name of the outer garments themselves (Bereishis 41:14, Shmuel II 12:20); in Modern Hebrew a chalifah is a suit.
• Malbim: chalifah looks at the objects switched, not the switcher.

Root: most read ח-ל-פ. Pappenheim (Yerios Shlomo) builds it from two biliterals, ח-ל (circle, turning) and א-פ (face, present), so chalifah is pivoting away from the present situation. This lines up with Rav Hirsch on what one is getting rid of, and it runs against what Pappenheim himself writes in Cheshek Shlomo, where temurah is "out with the old" and chalifah "in with the new"; Pappenheim concedes that in practice the two have become largely interchangeable.

Rendering guidance

• Where the two stand together in the parashah of temurah, render temurah "substitute" and chalifah "exchange." English "swap" and "change" will absorb both without a trace, so keep them out of a passage that turns on the pair.
• Hamer yamir (Vayikra 27:10, 27:33): "if he shall indeed substitute." Rav Hirsch's point rides on the fact that the second pasuk uses only this root, so a translation that renders both roots "exchange" destroys the derashah.
• Tehillim 106:20 vayamiru: "and they exchanged their glory," but if the Malbim's reading is being cited, "and they traded away" or "and they put in its place" carries the gavra sense better; the point is that the change was on their side, not on Hashem's.
• Chalaf as the slaughtering knife: leave it transliterated. Translating it "knife" loses Rav Hirsch's derivation from moving an animal from one state to another, which is the whole reason the word is discussed.
• Trap: "replace" reads naturally for both. Reserve it for temurah, where the substitute is the point, and never use it for the Yeshayahu 2:18 yachalof, where nothing takes the idols' place.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Old Switcheroo," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 29 Iyar 5780 (2020-05-23): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/8714-old-switcheroo.md. Primary loci: Vayikra 27:10 and 27:33; Bereishis 35:2 and 41:14; Shmuel II 12:20; Yeshayahu 2:18; Tehillim 106:20; Pappenheim, Cheshek Shlomo s.v. מר and Yerios Shlomo on ח-ל-פ. The anonymous Arabic derivation of chalaf as "sharp," which the article gives in a bracket, is reported here as the article reports it.