outer garment

Distinctions

aderes (אדרת)

Eleven occurrences in Tanach. It is a furry article of clothing, and the column notes it has been rendered variously "robe," "cloak," "cape," "gown," "coat" and "mantle." Eisav is born "ruddy, entirely like a hairy aderes" (Bereishis 25:25). Achan steals a Babylonian aderes from the consecrated spoil of Yericho (Yehoshua 7:21, 7:24). It is above all Eliyahu HaNavi's garment: he hides his face in it at the mountain (Melachim I 19:13), he is called a hairy man, which the column says is probably a reference to the aderes (Melachim II 1:8; the article prints 2:8), he splits the Yarden with it (Melachim II 2:8), and Elisha takes up the aderes that fell from him as the sign of the succession (Melachim II 2:13-14).

Rashi (Zechariah 13:4) and Ibn Janach and Radak in their respective Sifrei HaShorashim define aderes as a tallis, a shawl. Radak ties it to the root aleph-dalet-reish, adir, greatness and power: the aderes displays its wearer's importance. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim treats the opening aleph and closing tav as accretions and traces the word to the two-letter element dalet-reish, freedom from restraint, whose family he gives as dror (emancipation), dardar (a thorn growing wild on ownerless ground), dirah (a home, where a man may act as he wishes), dor (a generation, the span of one's residence in this world), medurah (a bonfire spreading unchecked), doher (a horse's neighing when let out to roam), neder (an obligation freely self-imposed), and adir (unrestrained power). He offers two ways to fit the aderes into this: either it hangs loosely on the body, unlike fitted clothing, or only the adirim wear it.

Targum Onkelos renders aderes at Bereishis 25:25 as gelem, cognate to glima; Targum Yonasan at Yehoshua 7:21 and 7:24 renders it itztala.

glima (גלימא)

Frequent in the Gemara for an outer garment, often formal. It stands in the kesubah, where the husband pledges even "the glima on my shoulders," and it names the gold coat of the Rishon LeTzion today (on which garments qualify, see Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad, Torah Lishmah 327). The root is the biblical gimmel-lamed-mem, which occurs three times (Melachim II 2:8; Tehillim 139:16; Yechezkel 27:24) in the sense of wrapping or of unformed matter, and which gives golem, the Mishnah's opposite of the chacham (Avos 5:7), a man not yet formed; the famous legend of the Golem is of a soulless man with the outer trappings of a human being and no intellect from a soul.

Shabbos 77b expounds glima as "made like a golem." Rashi there: a garment not cut to the shape of the limbs but essentially a flat sheet covering the whole body, unfitted and therefore shapeless beside tailored clothing. Rabbi Nosson of Rome (Sefer HeAruch) reads it the other way: a man wrapped up in a glima is fixed in place and unable to move freely, and so resembles a golem.

Rashi's own glosses vary. Once he defines glima as aderes (Shabbos 10a), once as sudar (Bava Metzia 47a), once as tachrichin, where the sugya concerns a corpse's clothing (Shabbos 150b), but in the great majority of places as tallis (Shabbos 110b, 138b; Eruvin 94a, 96b, 102b; Kesubos 79b; Bava Kama 119b; Bava Metzia 28a, 114b; Bava Basra 128a; Sanhedrin 7a; Chullin 127a).

Rabbi David Golumb (Targumna to Bereishis 49:26) and Rav Hirsch (Vayikra 13:59; Tehillim 139:16) connect glima to klimah, humiliation, through the interchange of gimmel and kaf: as a golem lacks shape, so the humiliated man feels stripped of his form, part of his humanity taken from him. Rabbi Golumb notes the parallel to Chazal's reading of levush as lo bushah, no shame.

On the word's outside origins the column gives two views. Dr. Michael Sokoloff, in his dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, relates glima to an apparent Akkadian cognate gulenu, "coat"; Dr. Alexander Kohut takes it as Persian, "as he often does."

itztala (איצטלא)

An outer garment worn as a mark of status. Targum renders Achan's Babylonian aderes by it, and Rav (Sanhedrin 44a) specifies that what Achan coveted was a silk itztala; Rashi there (and at Bechoros 34b) glosses it tallis. It appears in the Mishnah at Gittin 6:5 as something a husband might demand as the condition of a get. In the Gemara it is nearly always a status garment: a silk itztala written into a woman's kesubah (Yevamos 66b; Bava Metzia 17a), and the rule that where one litigant stands in rags and the other in a costly itztala, the court tells the wealthy one either to dress like his opponent or to clothe his opponent like himself (Shevuos 31a). Hence the idiom itztala d'rabbanan, the cloak of the sages, standing for the honor of rabbinic authority.

Sefer HeAruch notes that the word is also spelled with a samech, istala; so Targum to Esther 7:6, where Esther charges Haman with wanting to wear the king's istala, and Targum to Bereishis 45:22, where Yosef's gifts to his brothers are istalvan. Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur (Meturgeman) already noted the inconsistency, which follows from the word being a loanword rather than native. On the column's reading, itztala comes from Latin stola and Greek στολή (stolē), words for a garment or equipment, which The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots traces to the root stel-, "standing, putting," behind English still, apostle, epistle, install, pedestal, gestalt and more; the closest English cognate is stole, the long narrow scarf-like garment worn by Christian clergy as a sign of the duties of the ministry, which the column compares to Eliyahu's aderes. On the spelling, the column reports that a cursory look at the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project suggests to it that the samech spelling belongs to Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, while Jewish Babylonian Aramaic writes the word either way.

The column takes itztala as the word that acquired the figurative sense of English "mantle," as in "to assume the mantle," the outer garment standing for the duties of the role; it lists as further English parallels investiture (with vest and vestment), "stepping into the shoes," and defrocking (from frock).

tachrich (תכריך)

Mordechai is dressed in a tachrich of butz and argaman (Esther 8:15). The root kaf-reish-kaf means to wrap or surround, and gives Rabbinic krach, a walled city, and Modern Hebrew karich, a wrap. Targum to Esther 8:15 renders tachrich as glima, another garment one wraps around oneself. In Rabbinic Hebrew the plural tachrichin is the standing term for burial shrouds.

Rendering guidance

• Trap: "cloak" or "robe" will absorb aderes, glima, and itztala at once, and Rashi's tallis gloss makes the collapse tempting. Where a passage contrasts them, use "mantle" for aderes, "robe" for glima, and "cloak of office" or "ceremonial cloak" for itztala.
• Aderes in the Eliyahu narratives is "mantle." The column attaches the English idiom "assume the mantle" to itztala, not to aderes; that it fits Elisha taking up the fallen aderes at Melachim II 2:13-14 is ours, not the column's. "Coat" is on the column's own list of accepted renderings, so it is not wrong, only flatter.
• Itztala d'rabbanan is figurative. Render it "the mantle of the sages" or leave it transliterated and gloss it; "the sages' robe" reads as a literal garment and loses the point.
• Tachrich singular is "wrap" (Esther 8:15); tachrichin is "shrouds." Never carry the shroud sense back into the Esther pasuk.
• Where glima and golem appear in the same sugya (Shabbos 77b), keep the wordplay: "a glima is made like a golem," with a gloss on the unformed sense, rather than translating both away.
• Aderes rendered tallis by the rishonim is a definition, not a translation for a modern reader; writing "prayer shawl" for Eliyahu's aderes is an anachronism.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Toldot: Noble Clothes," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 29 Cheshvan 5785 (2024-11-30): https://articles.ohr.edu/articles/toldot-noble-clothes; raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11594-toldot-noble-clothes.md. Primary loci cited: Bereishis 25:25, 45:22, 49:26; Vayikra 13:59; Yehoshua 7:21, 7:24; Melachim I 19:13; Melachim II 1:8 and 2:8, 2:13-14; Yechezkel 27:24; Zechariah 13:4; Tehillim 139:16; Esther 7:6, 8:15; Avos 5:7; Gittin 6:5; Shabbos 10a, 77b, 110b, 138b, 150b; Eruvin 94a, 96b, 102b; Yevamos 66b; Kesubos 79b; Bava Kama 119b; Bava Metzia 17a, 28a, 47a, 114b; Bava Basra 128a; Sanhedrin 7a, 44a; Shevuos 31a; Bechoros 34b; Chullin 127a; Ibn Janach and Radak, Sifrei HaShorashim; Sefer HeAruch; Meturgeman; Torah Lishmah 327. The Akkadian, Persian, Greek and Indo-European derivations offered in the original (Dr. Michael Sokoloff, Dr. Alexander Kohut, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project) were previously dropped from this entry and have been restored to the body.