marsh

Distinctions

Achu (אחו)

Pharaoh's cows graze ba'achu (Bereishis 41:2, 41:18).

• Rashi (there): achu means agam, and he supports it from Iyov 8:11, "can the gome shoot up without a bitzah, or the achu grow without water?"; he renders it in Old French maresc, marsh.
• Ramban (to Bereishis 41:2) objects: achu is not the marsh but a kind of grass or growth that comes up on a riverbank, and he suggests that the word relates to ach, brother, for the fellowship of the various plants that grow together along the water. Rav Hirsch says the same.
• Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim gives two turns on the same root: the brotherhood of the animals that gather in that fertile place to feed, or the fact that a stretch of ground lying beside the river looks like the river's brother.
• Rabbi Moshe ben Shem Tov Gabbai defends Rashi: achu names the marsh in which Ramban's vegetation often grows, and since that growth tends to appear in swampy ground, the word for the plant came to serve for the place, so that in practice achu and agam mean the same.
• Ibn Janach and Radak (Sefer HaShorashim) had already proposed that achu covers both, the grass (possibly papyrus) and the ground where it grows.

Agam (אגם)

The word in the makkos: "over their rivers, over their canals, over their agamim, and over every gathering of their water" (Shemos 7:19, and again at 8:1).

• Rashi (to Shemos 7:19) defines it as a standing body of water and renders it Old French estanc, a pond, which is not quite a marsh; elsewhere (to Taanis 22a, Yevamos 121a, Sanhedrin 5b) he renders agam and Aramaic agama as maresc, marsh.
• Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim traces agam to the two-letter ג-ם, spongy or absorbent matter: ground soaked and partly flooded, which must be sponge-like to hold that much water and stay wet. From the same root comes gome, the spongy reed of wetlands.
• Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer even says a marsh is called agam for the gome that grows in it.
• Shadal (to Shemos 2:3): gome is papyrus.

Bitzah (ביצה)

Three times in Tanach: Iyov 8:11 and 40:21, Yechezkel 47:11. Muddy, swampy ground, from botz, mud (Yirmiyahu 38:22).

• Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim takes both from the two-letter ב-ץ, matter of a mucus-like consistency, whose commonest derivative is beitzah, an egg, typically gooey inside (the singular beitzah never appears in Tanach, only the plural beitzim, as at Devarim 22:6). Mud fits: not pourable like water, not solid either. He also puts butz here (Esther 1:6, 8:15, Yechezkel 27:16), linen from flax grown in wet ground like a bitzah's.
• Rashi renders bitzah as maresc (to Yechezkel 47:11, Iyov 8:11, Bava Metzia 74a), and the Talmudic bitzaim / bitzaei mayim, spelled with an ayin, the same way (to Shevuos 16a, Sanhedrin 96a).

Suf (סוף)

Rashi (to Shemos 2:3 and 13:18) associates suf with agam. Rabbi Avraham Meir HaKohen Glanzer of Antwerp (Maayanei Agam) reads Rashi precisely: he does not say suf means agam, only that it is somehow associated with the agam; and Rashi's own laaz bears this out, since he renders suf as Old French roisel, the common reed. Suf is therefore the reed growing in the marsh, not the marsh. Hence Yam Suf is the Sea of Reeds.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Marshes, Marshes, Marshes," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 16 January 2021.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Marshes, Marshes, Marshes," What's in a Word? Synonyms in the Hebrew Language (book manuscript).

Cited in the essay: Bereishis 41:2 and 41:18 with Rashi and Ramban; Shemos 7:19 and 8:1 with Rashi; Shemos 2:3 and 13:18 with Rashi; Iyov 8:11 and 40:21; Yechezkel 47:11 and 27:16; Yirmiyahu 38:22; Esther 1:6 and 8:15; Devarim 22:6; Ibn Janach and Radak, Sefer HaShorashim; Rashi to Taanis 22a, Yevamos 121a, Sanhedrin 5b and 96a, Shevuos 16a, Bava Metzia 74a; Maayanei Agam; Shemos 2:3 with Shadal.