mixing

Distinctions

iruv (עירוב)

Root ע-ר-ב, one of the most polysemous in the language. In this sense it serves in Tanach (Mishlei 14:10, 20:19, 24:21; Tehillim 106:35; Ezra 9:2) and in Biblical Aramaic (Daniel 2:41, 2:43): Ezra's hisarvu, of Jewish seed mixed with the seed of the nations, and Tehillim's vayisarvu, of Jews mingling with the gentiles and learning their ways. Declensions: taarovess and irbuv (mixtures), eiruv. Rabbi Shimon Dov Ber Analak of Shidlitz: iruv is the mixing up of dry objects, which is why it serves for people intermingling.

mizug (מזיגה)

Apparently from מ-ז-ג, a root that surfaces in Tanach exactly once, in the noun mezeg of mixed wine (Shir HaShirim 7:3). In Mishnaic Hebrew it is the ordinary word for mixing a cup, which then meant diluting strong wine with water: mazgu lo for each of the Four Cups (Pesachim 10:2, 10:4, 10:7), also Nazir 2:3 and Demai 7:2, with mezigah (Shabbos 8:1), mozeg (Avodah Zarah 5:5), mozgin (Berachos 8:2), mazug (Negaim 1:2, Niddah 2:6-7) and limzog (Pesachim 7:13, Sukkah 2:9); two original modern uses are mezeg avir (weather, literally the mixing of air) and mazgan (air conditioner). As early as Menachem Ibn Saruk, a thousand years ago, it has been suggested that the root is really the two-letter ז-ג, the mem not belonging to it; zag is the seed or skin of a grape (Nazir 6:2), though how that connects to mizug is not so clear. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim accounts for the connection: mizug is the mixing that pours a drink from one vessel into another, and when a juice such as wine is stored in a receptacle that vessel stands in for the natural skin of the fruit the juice was drawn from, so the mizug takes the place of the zag. Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh of Carpentras (Aholei Yehudah) makes a similar point: mizug preserves the wine's taste as the zag naturally does. Analak: mizug is for liquid ingredients, wine mixed with water.

dimua (דימוע)

Root ד-מ-ע. The Mishnaic term for terumah mixed into chullin (Terumos 1:4, 3:1, 3:9, 4:7, 5:5-6, 9:4; Challah 1:4, 3:2; Orlah 2:4, 2:6; Demai 1:3; Shabbos 21:1; Chagigah 3:4; Gittin 5:4; Avodah Zarah 3:4, 4:7; Ohalos 16:4; Taharos 3:4). In Tanach it is essentially absent, with one contested exception: the warning not to delay one's dimah (Shemos 22:28), which Temurah 4a and the Mechilta read as terumah. Rashi there says outright that he does not know why terumah should be called dimah; to Temurah 4a he explains that terumah is nullified only at one in a hundred rather than the usual one in two or sixty, so the name invokes its special mixture-rule. Tosafos there object that this ratio is only a rabbinic stringency and cannot explain a name the Torah itself uses; they read dimah as implying something wet, terumah being the one tithe that may be taken from produce already in liquid form. Rabbi Meir Posner (Beis Meir to Even HaEzer §67) defends Rashi: the Torah may name a thing in anticipation of a later enactment, as Kesubos 10b reads almanah against the manah of a widow's kesubah; and Rashi to Pesachim 44a treats the one-in-a-hundred rule as Biblical anyway.

dimah (דמעה), tear

Root ד-מ-ע again, eleven times in Tanach as the noun and twice as a verb (Yirmiyahu 13:17), and in Mishnaic Hebrew too (Sotah 7:8, of Agrippa weeping at the pasuk barring a foreign king, Devarim 17:15). Rabbeinu Yonah ibn Janach (Sefer HaShorashim): the two senses are unrelated meanings of one root. Menachem Ibn Saruk (Machberes Menachem): as tears are pristine liquid from the eye, so dimah is pristine liquid produce, wine or oil without sediment. Ibn Ezra and Radak (Sefer HaShorashim): pressed wine and oil emerge drop by drop, like tears. Ramban also suggests that perhaps the agricultural sense is borrowed from the tear, or that neither is borrowed and dimah means tear-like droplets of any kind. Maharal (Gur Aryeh): terumah is dimah because it applies once the wine or oil has separated from the fruit, as a tear separates from the eye. Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg (HaKesav VeHaKabbalah) runs it the other way: mixture is the core sense, as it more commonly is in Mishnaic Hebrew, and tears show outwardly how mixed up a man's feelings are.

Rav Hirsch (to Shemos 22:28) takes a different tack: the obligation of terumah begins only once produce has been fully worked by man, unlike bikkurim, which begins once the fruit ripens on its own, so dimah as tithable produce points to the manmade character of wine and oil, which have to be pressed out of the grape and the olive rather than occurring naturally. He notes that wine is called poetically the blood (dam) of grapes (Bereishis 49:11; Devarim 32:14), pressing being a sort of violence done to the fruit. The column reports itself unsure whether Rav Hirsch meant this as an etymology at all, and, if he did, whether he held dimah, with an ayin, to be etymologically related to dam, without one. Elsewhere (Vayikra 7:19, 11:43; Bamidbar 18:29) Rav Hirsch compares ד-מ-ע with the phonetically near roots ט-מ-ע (mixing, assimilating), ט-מ-א (impure), ט-מ-ה (lost, assimilated, destroyed) and ד-מ-ה (resemble, be quiet), on the interchange of dalet with tes and of ayin, aleph and hei, and suggests that they share a fundamental sense of loss of identity through absorption into something else, sometimes to the point of total obliteration (tamyon): a thing that "resembles" another, or that is silenced, is likewise losing something of what is its own.

navoch (נבוך) and bocheh (בוכה)

Pharaoh, chasing after the Jews, took heart from their seeming lost: nevuchim hem ba'aretz (Shemos 14:3). The Mechilta there explicates nevuchim as an expression of mixture, Pharaoh thinking they were confused and mixed up about where they were headed; alternatively it reads nevuchim as related to bocheh, weeping, Pharaoh foreseeing that they were destined to cry in the wilderness (Bamidbar 14:1). The column holds there is reason to think the two explanations are actually related. Rabbi Yisroel Yaakov Algazi (Kehillas Yaakov) explains navochah of Shushan (Esther 3:15) the same way: on the simple level the Jews were confused as to what the future held, and Algazi adds that navochah also bears on bocheh, one of the last avenues left them being to cry out to Hashem to save them. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim of Breslau (Cheshek Shlomo) likewise traces both bocheh and navoch to the biliteral ב-כ, whose core sense he sees as confusion and perplexity, weeping being the involuntary outward reflex of confused feelings (cited too in HaKesav VeHaKabbalah to Bereishis 50:3). Rabbi Eliyahu Menachem Margulies (Emunas Eliezer) develops the point that crying comes of a man's being unclear about what the future holds: as tears blur a man's sight, so he cries precisely because his view of the future is blurred, and this is hinted at in the tie of dimah to dimua, since it is the mixture of possibilities before him that brings him to tears. He sees a further allusion in bocheh being related to the root of navoch, perplexed, as in the Rambam's Moreh Nevuchim; and since the tzaddik can live through the uncertainty by relying on Hashem to set everything right in the end, the pasuk says hazorim b'dimah b'rinah yiktzoru, those who sow in tears will reap in joy (Tehillim 126:5). Rabbi Moshe Shapiro: the antidote to crying is nechamah, which per Rashi (Bereishis 5:29, 6:6, 27:42; Shemos 32:12) is not only comfort but a shift in thinking, the word used even of Hashem's "regretting" (so to speak) the making of man (Bereishis 6:6); it is the clear view of the future that removes the need to cry, and just such a clear view is what Yeshayahu opens with, nachamu nachamu ami (Yeshayahu 40:1).

Rendering guidance

• Choose by state of matter: people, seed and populations intermingling take iruv ("mixed in with," "intermingled"); wine and water take mizug.
• A cup at the Seder: "they mixed him a cup," not "poured." The Mishnah's verb is about dilution, and "poured" loses it.
• Dimua in a halachic context: keep it, "the mixture became meduma," and gloss once. English "mixed" will not carry the terumah-specific rule.
• Trap: English "mix" absorbs all three at once. Where a source lines them up, fix the renderings (intermingle / dilute / commingle) before translating.
• Trap: dimah is both "tear" and the terumah-tithe. Shemos 22:28 is not about tears; render by the tithe and footnote the tear sense if a drashah needs it.
• Where ד-מ-ע means tear and mixture at once (Bava Basra 15a, where one view is that Yehoshua wrote the last eight pesukim of the Torah and another that Moshe wrote them b'dema), name the reading you follow: "with tears," that is, while crying, the classical understanding, so Ritva and Sheilas Yaavetz vol. 1 §13; in tears instead of ink, so Rashba and Maharsha, and Rabbi Dovid Tzvi Hoffmann prefers this since the Gemara said b'dema and not b'dima'os; or letters written mixed up and unreadable until after his death, so the Vilna Gaon (HaKesav VeHaKabbalah to Devarim 34:5; Kol Eliyahu), with Rabbi Kalonymos Kalman Shapira reading dema as Moshe's own mind clouded as at no other prophecy.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Devarim: All Mixed Up," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 6 Av 5784 (2024-08-10): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11480-devarim-all-mixed-up.md. Primary loci cited: Mishlei 14:10, 20:19, 24:21; Tehillim 106:35, 126:5; Ezra 9:2; Daniel 2:41, 2:43; Shir HaShirim 7:3; Pesachim 10:2, 10:4, 10:7, 44a; Nazir 2:3, 6:2; Demai 7:2; Shemos 22:28 with Temurah 4a, the Mechilta, Rashi, Tosafos, Ibn Ezra, Radak, Ramban, Gur Aryeh, HaKesav VeHaKabbalah and Rav Hirsch; Yirmiyahu 13:17; Sotah 7:8 on Devarim 17:15; Kesubos 10b; Bava Basra 15a with Ritva, Rashba and Maharsha, and Sheilas Yaavetz vol. 1 §13; Bereishis 49:11 and Devarim 32:14 (Rav Hirsch on the blood of grapes); Shemos 14:3 with the Mechilta; Bamidbar 14:1; Esther 3:15; Bereishis 50:3; Bereishis 5:29, 6:6, 27:42; Shemos 32:12; Yeshayahu 40:1. Rav Hirsch's further root comparisons are at Vayikra 7:19, 11:43 and Bamidbar 18:29.