What’s in a Word?

time

now

עתה · נא · עכשיו · כען · כדון · השתא

Bottom line

Atah is the ordinary biblical now, over four hundred times, and it carries eis, time, in its own letters. Na also means now, and only secondarily "please" or "raw." Achshav is now in the language of Chazal and in Modern Hebrew, and never occurs in Tanach; do not use it to render a pasuk. In Aramaic, ke'an is the biblical form and the Targum's regular rendering of both atah and na; ke'don, hashta, and ha'idna are its later companions. The one thing not to get wrong is the stratum: atah and na for Tanach, achshav and hashta for Chazal.

Distinctions

atah (עתה)

The default. More than four hundred and thirty times in Tanach, far ahead of any rival. Its first two letters spell eis, time, which ties the word to the vocabulary of time rather than to a mere adverb of sequence.

na (נא)

Spelled nun-aleph. The second most common word for "now" in Tanach. The same letters also carry "please" and "raw," and the raw sense follows directly from the temporal one: food eaten now, before it has had time to cook, is eaten raw. The column adds that the English "now" possibly comes from the similar-sounding na.

achshav (עכשיו)

Not in Tanach at all; common in the writings of Chazal, and the word Modern Hebrew has adopted as its principal "now." The column notes that the earliest documented instance of achshav is in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the scroll designated 4Q225. Dr. Marcus Jastrow proposed that achshav is a contraction of atah kemo shehu, "now, as it is," which, if so, would make it not quite a synonym of atah but a word built on atah and saying slightly more. Parenthetically, Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur writes that he has seen some spell the word with a yod as the penultimate letter, and deems the yod unnecessary.

ke'an (כען) and ke'don (כדון)

Ke'an is the only Aramaic word for "now" that appears in Tanach, in the Aramaic sections of Daniel and Ezra, and it is what the Targumim regularly use to render both atah and na. Jastrow argues, as he does for achshav, that ke'an too is a contraction or abbreviation, here of the Aramaic ke'idana, "according to this time," and that the related ke'don is the same.

hashta (השתא)

Reading the words for "now" as contractions is not Jastrow's innovation. Rabbi Wolf Heidenheim had already offered a similar idea in his Roedelheim Machzor, where he reads hashta as a contraction of the two-word Aramaic ha shaata, "this hour," which conceptually comes to the same thing as "now." The Haggadah's Aramaic line, "now we are here, next year in Eretz Yisrael," is the practical consequence: a disagreement arose between authorities over whether the word for "now" there should be hashta or ha shaata.

ha'idna (האידנא)

Earlier still than Rabbi Heidenheim, Rabbi Binyamin Mussafia read ha'idna as a portmanteau of ha idana, "this time," which is more or less what "now" means. One difficulty is left standing: Aramaic idan and idana begin with an ayin, while ha'idna is written with an aleph.

Rendering guidance

  • Atah in a pasuk: "now." Where it opens a clause after an argument (ve'atah), "and now" is right and should not be upgraded to "therefore," which decides the logic for the reader.
  • Na: "now" where the pasuk is temporal, "please" only where the context is a request. If a source is reading the temporal sense into a place usually taken as "please," keep "now" and note the usual rendering.
  • Hashta in the Haggadah: "now." Where an edition prints ha shaata as two words, the English is unchanged; the dispute is over the text, not the sense.
  • Trap: English "now" absorbs every word on this list. Where a passage sets two of them against each other, keep the Hebrew and gloss it rather than inventing an English contrast; the column does not distinguish the four Aramaic words from one another in sense, only in etymology.
  • Second trap: never render a pasuk's atah with achshav in a Hebrew paraphrase, or a mishnah's achshav with atah. The stratum is itself information.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Elul 2: Now!", What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 18 Elul 5777 (2017-09-09): sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/7409-elul-2-now.md. Primary loci and authorities: the Aramaic portions of Daniel and Ezra for ke'an; the Targumim's rendering of atah and na; Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur on the spelling of achshav; Rabbi Wolf Heidenheim, Roedelheim Machzor, on hashta; Rabbi Binyamin Mussafia on ha'idna; the Haggadah's Ha Lachma Anya for the hashta / ha shaata dispute; Dr. Marcus Jastrow on the achshav and ke'an contractions.

The attributions of the achshav and ke'an contractions to Marcus Jastrow, the note on the earliest attestation of achshav in the Qumran scroll 4Q225, and the suggestion that English "now" comes from na had been dropped from an earlier version of this entry under a mistaken sources rule. They are restored above; without Jastrow the achshav etymology the entry keeps had no author at all.

Two claims have been cut from the rendering guidance as not traceable to the article: that hashta in a Gemara introduces a rhetorical turn, and that ha'idna means "nowadays" and contrasts the present era with an earlier one. The article says only that ha'idna is ha idana, "this time," which is more or less "now."