explanation

Distinctions

Peirush (פירוש)

Root פ-ר-ש (kin to parashah, prishah, parush, parash, peresh; and to perushim, which in the Mishnah, Yadayim 4:6 to 8, names the Torah-loyal Jews against the antinomian Tzedokim, and today the non-Chassidic Yerushalmim of the Old Yishuv).

• Shadal: the means of making known what was unknown, kin to פ-ר-ש with a sin, "spreading out," since new information spreads the enigmatic matter open; so the blasphemer and the mekoshesh waited because Hashem had not yet porash, made known, their sentence (Vayikra 24:12, Bamidbar 15:34).
• Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim: the root means "separating"; the verdict was separated out from the possible outcomes, and meforash, "explicitly," is the true reading separated from the ambiguous alternatives. On the same root he explains parash, cavalry, as troops kept separate from the infantry, and peresh, dung, as what is separated off from the body.
• Rabbi Moshe Tedeschi-Ashkenazi: clarifying in an unambiguous way, as evidence is spread out (Devarim 22:17).
• Malbim (Yair Ohr): peirush reveals the exoteric, the surface facts and the normative implications, what everyone can see once it is spread out.

Beiur (ביאור)

Root ב-א-ר, which the classical lexicographers (Ibn Saruk, Ibn Janach, Radak) read as two senses, wellspring (be'er) and elucidation (ba'er).

• Pappenheim treats the aleph as non-essential and drops to the biliteral ב-ר, "separated, choicest, clear" (barah, bari, bahr for grain parted from its chaff, bar for a son parted from his mother's womb, bor/boris for the soap that separates off filth, birah, bahir, and more); bor, a pit, and be'er, a well, are both products of digging the earth away to separate the dirt from the water underneath, and a beiur separates the correct explanation from the mistaken ones.
• Shadal: beiur is a clear manner of writing, expanding on an idea with words; the verb appears only three times in Tanach, each about writing to clarify (ba'er heitiv on the stones, Devarim 27:8; Moshe's be'er of the Torah, Devarim 1:5; Chavakuk's tablets, Chavakuk 2:2). Mecklenburg (HaKsav VeHaKabbalah) cites Shadal's explanations of poser, beiur and peirush.
• Tedeschi-Ashkenazi: the beis is non-essential and the core root is א-(ו)-ר, light; one who elucidates metaphorically sheds light on the matter, an etymology that parallels English "elucidate" itself, from Latin lux/lucidus and ultimately the proto-Indo-European leuk, whence lucid, translucent and pellucid.
• Malbim: beiur is clarification of the esoteric, an in-depth probing of the core elements that lie beneath the surface, as against peirush, which is occupied with a matter's external trappings. Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein adds on his own account that beiur accordingly relates to be'er in the sense of a wellspring, whose waters are hidden deep underground and which is the mechanism for drawing them up into daylight.
• Rabbi Dr. Asher Weiser explains bur, the uncultured man, as a cognate of bor, a pit, a person whose mind is empty like a pit, and sees be'er, a wellspring, which holds only a limited amount of water, and beiur, the antidote to the ba'ar's ignorance, as related to them.

Commonly pronounced biur.

Hesber (הסבר)

Clearest from the Aramaic svar, to think or hold a position (Daniel 7:25; Talmudic sover, mistaber, svara, the Rabbanan Savora'ei who added a layer of logical structure to the sugyos after Ravina and Rav Ashi, the savri called out before Kiddush). Two related usages: the anonymous Masbir whose novellae appear in Rabbi Chaim Dov Altusky's Chiddushei Basra, whom yeshivish lore takes for Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik on the strength of the acronym; and Modern Hebrew hasbarah, still "elucidation," but often specifically pro-Israel advocacy.

Similar Hebrew words might also account for the origin. The root ש-ב-ר appears ten times in Tanach, usually for waiting, anticipating or hoping (Tehillim 145:15, 119:166, 104:27, 146:5), sometimes perhaps for planning or thinking (Esther 9:1). Shammai's sever panim yafos (Avos 1:15) spells the word with an opening samech, as a Biblical sin often becomes a rabbinic samech; per Meiri it means greeting people so cheerfully that they think you are glad to see them.

• Ibn Janach and Radak present the two senses as discrete meanings of one root, and Ibn Saruk lists only the first.
• Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein bridges them by observing that waiting and hoping are done in the mind, so that all these verbs name abstract acts of thought.
• Rav Hirsch (to Tehillim 145:15): sover is a mental process that computes separate pieces of information and joins them into one complete, logical thought, so that one who puts his hope in Hashem concludes intellectually that He is the One who powers all of creation; by the interchange of beis and peh Rav Hirsch connects sover to sofer, counting, likewise a mental joining, and by the interchange of sin/samech with tzadi to tzover, gathering, the verb behind tzibbur.

Rabbi Reuven Subar, whose surname may or may not be related to the word, proposes a way of splitting hesber from beiur: both relieve perplexity, but beiur answers what is being said and hesber answers why, laying out the svara behind the matter and meeting the questions it raises. This is why ba'er heitiv is associated with translation (Rashi to Devarim 27:8), which renders the what in a plainer register. The Aramaic sover also means "bear" or "lift up" (Targum to Bereishis 13:6, Bamidbar 11:12, Yeshayahu 40:11, 63:9), so a hesber lifts the idea by supplying its rational support, the give and take of masa u'matan. (This carrying sense of savar may be related to the Hebrew sovel, to bear a burden, reish and lamed interchanging.)

Pesher (פשר) and pitaron (פתרון)

Radak (Sefer HaShorashim), reasoning only from where inflections of pitaron actually appear, concludes that in Tanach the word means the interpretation of a dream and nothing else; Malbim (Yair Ohr) makes the same point and uses it to separate pitaron from peirush and beiur, which interpret other things, like enigmatic texts. The root פ-ת-ר runs fourteen times through Bereishis 40 to 41 and appears nowhere else in Tanach. Berachos 55b keeps the sense, with its twenty-four posrei chalomos in Yerushalayim. The Gemara sometimes stretches poser to reinterpreting a teaching that has nothing to do with dreams (Eruvin 32b, Kesubos 107b), and Menachem Ibn Saruk (Machberes Menachem) often calls a word's definition its pitaron, a usage taken up by his interlocutor Donash Ibn Labrat and later by Rashi and his grandsons Rashbam and Rabbeinu Tam; in Modern Hebrew a pitaron is a solution to anything at all.

Chazal even read the place-name Pesor as dream interpretation. Balak sent messengers to Pesor for Bilam (Bamidbar 22:5), and the Midrash (Bamidbar Rabbah 20:7, Tanchuma Balak 4, see Rashi there) offers two readings: either Pesor, or Pesorah, was the name of Bilam's town in Aram, or it points to his original trade as a professional dream interpreter (poser) before he turned to sorcery. The Maharal (Gur Aryeh to Bamidbar 22:5) synthesizes the two: the town came to be called Pesor for the fame it won through its own resident, once he was a world-renowned dream interpreter. (Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Ferber of London identifies the place with the ancient Patru on the west bank of the Euphrates, just south of Carchemish; Chullin 54b has an Amora named Rav Chana of Pesor.) Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein wonders further whether the root's turning up specifically in Yosef's Egyptian story has something to do with Patros, a name for Egypt made of those three letters plus a final samech.

On the etymology of poser, the classical lexicographers take the triliteral פ-ת-ר.

• Shadal reads poser instead as a contraction of posei'ach ohr, "he opens light," one who sheds light on what perplexes others.
• Rav Hirsch (to Shemos 13:2) connects poser with a tav to peter with a tes, both expressions of opening and revealing, since a peter rechem is the firstborn who opens the mother's womb and reveals her motherhood realized, and a pitaron likewise opens a closed communication to reveal its inner meaning; and he conjectures (to Shemos 25:39) that kaftor, a button, may be a portmanteau of kafut, tied up, and pitaron/poser, opened, since buttons are made to open and close.
• Rabbi Avraham Bedersi (Chosam Tochnis) takes the trouble to clarify that poser is not a synonym of the Aramaic-Persian patshegen (Esther 3:14, 4:8, 8:13): a poser gives the explanation of a text, a patshegen is its copy or wording, a different concept altogether.
• Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh of Carpentras (Ohalei Yehuda), by contrast, holds that patshegen derives from poser plus ken, "so," the kaf of ken turning into a gimmel, though he does not quite account for how the reish of poser became a shin.

Pesher appears only once in the Hebrew of Tanach, "who knows the pesher of a matter" (Koheles 8:1), where Rashi takes the wise man to be Moshe, who knew how to mediate between Hashem and Klal Yisrael and so reached the psharah that stopped the destruction after the Eigel. Its Aramaic cognate p'shar runs thirty-three times through Daniel, in connection with dream interpretation, and, ironically, Targum in the Yosef narrative consistently renders the seemingly-Aramaic poser/pitaron by inflections of the seemingly-Hebrew pesher. Ibn Saruk defines each of pesher and pitaron by the other; Ibn Janach defines pitaron as peirush and Radak as peirush and beiur, while both follow Ibn Saruk in defining pesher as pitaron. The Dead Sea Scrolls include works called pesharim, interpretations of parts of Tanach along that sect's lines, on Yeshayahu, Tehillim, Hoshea, Michah, Tzefaniah, Nachum and Chavakuk, much as Chazal used midrash; and the Judeo-Arabic tafsir, Rav Saadia Gaon's rendering of the Torah, seems to derive from pesher, the shin becoming a sin or samech as often happens in moving from Hebrew to Arabic.

Beyond the classical triliteral reading, other grammarians account for pesher otherwise.

• Rabbi Moshe Tedeschi-Ashkenazi (Otzar Nirdafim) derives it from the biliteral ש-ר, untie or open, as in the Aramaic um'shareh kitrin, "and untying knots" (Daniel 5:12; see also 5:6, 3:25), kin to the Talmudic sharei, permitted, and parallel to the Hebrew matir: interpreting a dream, or any enigma, is untying a knot. On his account pesher and pitaron are cognates, with pesher, which he holds to be the Aramaic word, the etymon of the later Hebrew pitaron.
• Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur (Sefer HaTishbi, and in his glosses to Radak's Sefer HaShorashim) relates pesher to poser by the interchange of shin and tav, a Hebrew shin often becoming an Aramaic tav (shemonah/tamnei, shor/tor, yeshivah/metivta), which seems to point the opposite way, making pesher Hebrew and pitaron Aramaic. Bachur alternatively suggests that pesher is peirush metathesized, shin and reish trading places, an explanation offered as well by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Melech (Michlal Yofi to Koheles 8:1) and by Bedersi.
• Ohalei Yehuda instead makes pesher a portmanteau of peh, mouth, and yashar, straight, perhaps alluding to the part spoken mediation plays both in reaching correct interpretations and in reaching compromises.

The root's apparent rabbinic offshoots: psharah, compromise, a conflict-resolution in which neither side wins outright and each gives something up to reach a happy medium (Rambam's commentary to Kesubos 10:6); and efshar, possible, on the assumption that its opening aleph is extraneous to the root.

• Rabbi Avraham Vilner (Tirgem Avraham to Bereishis 4:14) ties efshar to pesher, since a pesher solves a conundrum and what is merely "possible" is itself something of a conundrum, lying between the necessary and the impossible.
• Dr. Alexander Kohut (Aruch HaShalem) likewise derives efshar from pitaron or pesher, as does Rabbi Chaim Gelernter of Kitov in his glosses to Raglei Mivaser on Sefer HaTishbi.
• Rabbi Dr. Ernest Klein rejects the etymology.

Rabbi Vilner further gathers in poshrim, lukewarm water (Shabbos 20:3, Menachos 5:2, Parah 8:9, Niddah 7:1), and posher, dissolving or melting (Targum Onkelos to Shemos 16:21), as middle states, neither hot nor cold and neither wholly solid nor wholly liquid, and the Aramaic pashra, an animal's cud (Targum Onkelos to Vayikra 11:3), as the middle stage between food eaten and food digested, though Rashi there ties pashra more directly to posher, dissolving and melting the food.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Miketz: Say it Clear (Part 1/2)," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 16 December 2023.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Vayigash: Say it Clear (Part 2/2)," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 23 December 2023.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Mishpatim: Boorish Animals," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 18 February 2023.

Cited in the essay: Radak, Sefer HaShorashim s.v. פתר, פשר, באר, שבר; Malbim, Yair Ohr; Bereishis 4:14, 13:6, 40-41; Berachos 55b; Eruvin 32b; Kesubos 107b; Chullin 54b; Bamidbar 22:5 with Bamidbar Rabbah 20:7, Tanchuma Balak 4, Rashi, and Gur Aryeh; Koheles 8:1 with Rashi and Michlal Yofi; Daniel 3:25, 5:6, 5:12, 7:25; Esther 3:14, 4:8, 8:13, 9:1; Devarim 1:5, 22:17, 27:8 with Rashi; Vayikra 11:3 and 24:12 with Targum Onkelos; Bamidbar 11:12, 15:34; Shemos 13:2, 16:21, 25:39; Yeshayahu 40:11, 63:9; Chavakuk 2:2; Tehillim 104:27, 119:166, 145:15, 146:5; Mishnah Yadayim 4:6 to 8, Shabbos 20:3, Menachos 5:2, Parah 8:9, Niddah 7:1, Kesubos 10:6 with Rambam's commentary; Rav Hirsch to Shemos 13:2, 25:39 and Tehillim 145:15; Avos 1:15 with Meiri; Otzar Nirdafim; Sefer HaTishbi with Raglei Mivaser; Chosam Tochnis; Ohalei Yehuda; Tirgem Avraham; Aruch HaShalem; Rabbi Dr. Ernest Klein; Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Ferber; Rabbi Dr. Asher Weiser, Mikra V'Lashon (עמ' 225).