love

Distinctions

Ahavah (אהבה)

Root א-ה-ב for the classical lexicographers (Menachem, Chayyuj, Ibn Janach, Ibn Parchon, Radak).

• Rav Hirsch (Bereishis 22:2, 37:4; Vayikra 19:18; Devarim 6:5) reads the core as ה-ב, hav, to give (a biliteral that appears over thirty times in Tanach, and is cognate with the Biblical Aramaic yahav): ahavah is giving oneself over to another and striving to bring him as close as can be. Hirsch sets it against its antonym sinah, hatred, which he ties to sneh, a thorn: the hater wants to be a thing people keep away from, while for ahavah the other party's very existence is a necessity. Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian (Lev Eliyahu vol. 1 p. 110) teaches the same from the mussar side: most people take love for the pleasant feeling one has in the beloved's company, which is self-love through another ("I love fish"); true love is what rouses a person to give to and provide for the beloved. On that understanding of love, Yaakov's seven years were "like a few days in his love for her" (Bereishis 29:20): every day of work was giving to her. Rav Dessler (Michtav MeEliyahu vol. 1 pp. 32-36) says likewise. Orchos Tzadikim (Shaar HaAhavah): one brings himself to love another by helping him and spending on him (Rabbi Avraham Erlanger: the basis of Rav Hirsch's reading). Rabbi Yehoshua Steinberg adds Kiddushin 30b, which ties vaheiv (Bamidbar 21:14) to ahavah.
• Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (Cheshek Shlomo) weighs hav and rejects it, reading the root as א-ב, "primary cause," as in av and avah (to desire): ahavah is the awakening of desire in a positive direction, its antonym eivah (with oyev, "enemy") the same desire turned negative. Professor Saul Levin adds that perhaps oyev is itself a cognate of ahavah, both words being ways of dealing passionately with an outsider, the one romantically and the other bellicosely.
• Rabbi Yitzchak of Zeldin (Shoresh Yesha) offers both: hav as the smitten lover's "give, give" (Mishlei 30:15, the leech), or a metathesis of avah.
• Sefer HaBris (Rabbi Pinchas Eliyahu Horowitz): love is the expansion of the soul and its joy in what pleases it, desired above all else.
• Rabbi Meir Ibn Gabbai: ahavah and echad are both thirteen in gematria; love is the longing of two to become one.

Sefer HaBris also treats ahavah at length, sorting its kinds and its interplay with yirah, and dwelling on the Mishnah's distinction (Avos 5:16) between love that depends on a matter and love that does not; he applies his definition both to loving Hashem (Devarim 6:5) and to loving a fellow Jew (Vayikra 19:18).

The root appears close to 250 times in Tanach, in most cases for the verb or the abstract noun. In three cases the plural ahavim means concrete expressions of love, verbal or physical (Mishlei 5:19, 7:18; Hoshea 8:9). One passage fits none of these: Shir HaShirim 3:10 describes the apiryon as ratzuf ahavah, "paved with ahavah," where the word seems to name a material rather than an emotion.

• HALOT (Koehler and Baumgartner) argues that in this context ahavah is cognate with the Arabic ihab, "leather, skin," and Rabbi Klein leaves it to the reader to work out what that would have to do with love.
• Rabbi Yosef Kara reads the word there as the emotional motivations of those who built the apiryon, not the material they used.

An approach first suggested by the German philologist Wilhelm Gesenius and later partly adopted by HALOT ties ahavah to the Arabic habba, "to breathe heavily" or "to be excited"; on that basis Gesenius connects ahavah, hav, avah, chibah and hevel, implying that all are onomatopoeic renderings of heavy breathing.

Chibah (חיבה) and chaviv (חביב)

Root ח-ב-ה. Cognates are already in Tanach: Hashem calls the Jews chovev amim, "beloved of the nations" (Devarim 33:3), and one of the names of Moshe's father-in-law Yisro was Chovav, likewise related to chibah. The Targum to Tehillim 18:2, rendering erchamcha, uses a cognate of chibah.

• Pappenheim (Yerios Shlomo, Cheshek Shlomo): from ח-ב, hidden (as in mischabeh); one who is chaviv is embedded in the memory and in the depths of the heart, as if hidden inside the one who dotes on him. He puts under the same root chov (a debt, since the debtor may try to hide from the creditor, or since the lender could be said to hide his assets by handing them over for a time), machavas (a frying pan, deep enough to hide what is in it) and chavis (a barrel, closed on every side).
• Rabbi Benzion Chaim Lubetzky (Midrash Safah Echas): chibah is love kept inside and not necessarily expressed outwardly. Rabbi Klein notes that this seems to differ from ahavah, which tends to outward expression.
• Rabbi Yosef Zechariah Stern (via Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon-Fishman): chibah is love of a person's positive aspects only; ahavah embraces the whole person, shortcomings included. Hence the Mishnah (Berachos 9:5) derives from ואהבת that one blesses over the bad as over the good, and ואהבת לרעך means loving every Jew with his faults as one loves oneself with one's own; Rabbi Stern therefore called himself an ohev Tzion, not a chovev Tzion.
• Shadal (Devarim 33:3) ties chibah to chubi, bosom (Iyov 31:33), an expression of close intimacy, something one carries in one's bosom.

Against all of this Rabbi Klein enters his own counter-suggestion: one may argue that chibah is really no different from ahavah, and may even be etymologically the same word, since aleph, hei, ches and ayin are often taken as interchangeable, so that swapping the opening ches of ח-ב-ה for an aleph or hei and reordering the letters yields א-ה-ב. That is his own move, not any authority's, but it leaves the chibah-versus-ahavah distinction an open question.

Rechim (רחים)

Root ר-ח-ם. In Hebrew usually mercy (racheim, rachamim), the womb (rechem), or a bird (racham, Vayikra 11:18; Devarim 14:17). The one clear exception is ארחמך ה' (Tehillim 18:2), which the commentators, among them Ibn Janach, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Radak, and Ibn Ramoch, all render "I will love You." Rabbi Klein points to the vocalization: wherever the first-person verb of pitying occurs the vowel under the reish is a patach (aracheim, Shemos 33:19, Yirmiyahu 13:14, 30:18, Hoshea 1:6-7, 2:6; arachamenu, Yirmiyahu 31:20), and erchamcha alone is vocalized otherwise. In the Targumim rechim is the standard rendering of ahavah; hence dechilu u'rechimu, fear (dachal) and love, in the LeShem Yichud.

• Rabbi Yitzchak Avineri: it is not too astonishing that one root carries both senses, since love is the root of mercy, one having mercy only on whom he loves.
• Rav Hirsch (Shemos 13:2): the root's primary denotation is a mother's protectiveness, which joins rechem, where a mother shields her unborn child, to rachamim, the dominant trait of a protective mother.
• Rabbi Klein adds on his own account that the bird racham fits too, both because it heralds rain, which is close to mercy (Chullin 63a), and because that mother bird is understood to be especially merciful to its young (Peirush HaRokeach and Moshav Zekanim to Vayikra 11:18).

Agav (עגב)

Root ע-ג-ב. Ten occurrences, all in Yechezkel 23 and 33 except Yirmiyahu 4:30: a negative love, lust, used of Israel's lusting after idolatry. Plural agavim is expressions of lust, lewd songs (Yechezkel 33:31-32). Rabbi Yehuda Leib Edel: agav is marked by outward professions of love, lewd gestures and songs; that, Rabbi Klein notes, makes it the opposite of chibah as Lubetzky reads it. The same root gives the ugav, an unidentified musical instrument mentioned four times (Bereishis 4:21; Iyov 21:12, 30:31; Tehillim 150:4).

• Shadal (Bereishis 4:21) surmises that ugav is a portmanteau of al and gav, "on the back," and does not connect it to agav in the sense of love.
• Rabbi Yitzchak of Zeldin (Shoresh Yesha) does connect them: the ugav produced sensuous, romantically appealing tones. Linguists in BDB cite the same idea. Zeldin likewise brings in agavos, "buttocks" in the Gemara (Berachos 24a, Sanhedrin 38b, Niddah 30b), since the movement of the thigh can awaken the desires of onlookers.
• Rabbi David Chaim Chelouche, the late Chief Rabbi of Netanya, takes a more prosaic route: the root names a shape, a half-oval, so the ugav is an instrument of that shape and the agavos protrude in that shape; he derives agav in the sense of licentious love from agavos but does not quite explain how, and Rabbi Klein's own guess is that this kind of "love" is a smokescreen for desire that may have been aroused by wrongly fixing on a person's physical qualities.

From the same root come the Modern Hebrew agevet, syphilis, and agvaniyah, tomato, which Yechiel Michel Pines coined after agav because European languages called the tomato a "love apple"; it is related that Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook would never say agvaniyah on account of that derivation.

• On the Greek side, Professor Saul Levin entertains the possibility that the Greek agape derives from א-ה-ב, since agape has no known cognate in any other Indo-European language, but he ultimately rejects it, there being no evidence that the Semitic hei was ever pronounced as a g in Greek. He suggests agav would be a likelier source, and concludes that ahavah, agav and agape are all probably from some earlier, unidentifiable language.
• The Hungarian linguist Dr. Oswald Szemerényi asserts that the Greek word is indeed borrowed from Hebrew or another Semitic language, and Rabbi Shaul Goldman adds that agape might instead be related to chibah / chaviv.

Names from these roots

Rabbi Klein knows of no use of ahavah as a personal name in Tanach or the Tannaic period, but the Gemara has several men named Ahavah, among them the father of Rabbi Adda bar Ahavah and the son of Rabbi Zeira (Rosh HaShanah 29a, Nedarim 32a, Eruvin 96b). Rabbi Shlomo Luria (Yam Shel Shlomo to Gittin 4:30) treats the confusion between the masculine names Ahuviyah and Ahuvyah, the latter apparently a calque of the German Gottlieb, as Rabbi Yaakov Margolis of Regensburg implies in Seder HaGet §21; the name Ahuv appears in the responsa HaMabit (vol. 1 §69). The feminine Ahuvah, linguists explain, is a relatively recent Hebrew calque of the Yiddish Leeba and not an original Hebrew name, though a bulla from the City of David bears the name ne'ehevet, of which Rabbi Klein says frankly that he is not convinced it must be a proper name at all. From ר-ח-ם there is one Racham in Tanach (Divrei HaYamim I 2:44) and men named Rav Rechumi or Ben-Rechumi in the Gemara (Pesachim 39a, Kesubos 62b, Nazir 13a, Zevachim 77a); whether these point to love, mercy, rain or something else remains unclear.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "True Love (Part 1/2)," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 11 November 2023.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "True Love (Part 2/2)," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 18 November 2023.

Cited in the essay: Rav Hirsch to Bereishis 22:2, 37:4, Vayikra 19:18, Devarim 6:5, and Shemos 13:2; Lev Eliyahu vol. 1 p. 110; Michtav MeEliyahu vol. 1 pp. 32-36; Orchos Tzadikim, Shaar HaAhavah; Kiddushin 30b on Bamidbar 21:14; Sefer HaBris; Cheshek Shlomo and Yerios Shlomo; Shoresh Yesha; Midrash Safah Echas; Berachos 9:5 (Mishnah); Tehillim 18:2 with Ibn Janach, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Radak, and Ibn Ramoch; Shadal to Devarim 33:3 and Bereishis 4:21; Yechezkel 23 and 33:31-32; Yirmiyahu 4:30; Mishlei 5:19, 7:18; Hoshea 8:9; Berachos 24a, Sanhedrin 38b, Niddah 30b; Chullin 63a; Avos 5:16; Gesenius; HALOT; BDB; Professor Saul Levin; Dr. Oswald Szemerényi.