handmaid

Where the authorities disagree

What amah adds. Three readings, two of them from the same word.

1. Nursemaid. Rabbi Avraham Bedersi HaPenini: amah is from eim, "mother," a maid who takes on motherly duties and nurses her master's children. He adduces it from Hagar, who is called shifchah throughout Bereishis 16, and amah from the birth of Yishmael onward (Bereishis 21, but see 25:12). The column likens the role to the English "nanny," engaged to help raise her employer's children as though she were their mother.
2. Housekeeper. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (Cheshek Shlomo), also from eim: a shifchah is put to menial work, an amah is more dignified and sees only to the ordinary running of the house. He derives the other senses from this one: the hand, which serves a man as the amah serves the household, and from the hand the cubit.
3. From aimah, fear. Rabbi Eliezer Reines (Maftechos HaDamesek): the Jewish handmaid is called amah because she is not yet mistress of the house, and the fear (aimah) of the real mistress is upon her.

The Bottom line follows Bedersi and Pappenheim together, since they agree that amah is the higher station and differ only on which duties define it; Hagar's usage is Bedersi's own proof. Reines is the outlier, on a different root.

The root of shifchah. Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg: the root, which he writes with a shin, sin or samech before peh and ches, denotes connection or addition, so a shifchah is joined to the mistress of the house, both expected to perform services for the master (compare Kesuvos 59b, that a woman who brings a hundred shefachos into her marriage still owes certain chores herself); mishpachah, a family, is otherwise separate individuals connected by familial relations. Others, including Rabbi Aharon Marcus and Rabbi Zev Hoberman: the root refers specifically to an extra appendage attached to something else, whence sapachas, a type of tzaraas (Vayikra 13:2), and sapach, an appendix; a mishpachah is the patriarch's children as secondary attachments ascribed to him, and a shifchah an adjunct attached to the otherwise complete faculty of a household. Nothing in translation turns on the choice.

Whether the Jewish/non-Jewish split is in the words themselves. Some argue shifchah inherently means a non-Jewish slave woman and amah a Jewish one. That may be true of rabbinic usage, but it is only a partial picture of Tanach: Vayikra 25:44 uses amah of female slaves taken from the non-Jewish population of the Holy Land, Avraham davened for Avimelech's wife and his amahos, whose wombs had been closed as a punishment (Bereishis 20:17), also non-Jewish, and Avigail calls herself Dovid's amah six times and his shifchah twice (Shmuel I 25), which suggests shifchah applies to a Jewish handmaid as amah does.