placing

Distinctions

natan (נתן)

Root ת-ן, "giving," in Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim's system. The most haphazard way of simply placing something somewhere. He notes that natan and sam are often interchangeable, since both at bottom just mean putting a thing in a spot.

sam (שם)

Placing into a spot specifically designated for it, deliberately, as part of a larger plan or system, but with no implication about how long it stays. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim traces it to the biliteral ס-ם (sin and samech interchange), whose core sense is putting a thing in its place. From the same root he derives samim (potions and elixirs, kept in designated places), bosem and besamim (fragrances, commonly made from samim, though the beis is normally a radical in his system), and osem (Devarim 28:8, Mishlei 3:10), the storehouse where samim are kept. He also derives the Mishnaic siman ("sign") from it, a sign being the means of placing things in their proper category (compare Yeshayahu 28:25); others, the column notes, derive siman instead from the Greek semeion ("sign, mark"), which is the etymon of the English "semantics" and "semiotics."

shat (שת)

Placing into a system, like sam, but meant to remain in place for an indefinitely long time. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim's cognates: shesos, the foundations of a building, laid to stay and to carry what is built on them (Tehillim 11:3), and sheti, the warp, the vertical axis of a weave (against erev, the woof), the threads deliberately set within a larger structure. In Cheshek Shlomo he treats ש-ת as a standalone biliteral; in Yerios Shlomo he derives it from ש-א. The first shat in the Torah is Hashem's sentence on the snake, "I will place enmity between you and the woman" (Bereishis 3:15): had the pasuk said sam, the enmity would have been temporary; shat makes it lasting, and it lasts still. Sheis, Adam's youngest son, is named for shat (Bereishis 4:25), Hashem having set mankind going again for the long term. After the Aron was hidden away, the Mishnah relates, the focus of the Kodesh HaKodashim was the stone called the Even Shesiyah (Yoma 5:2), which the Gemara (Yoma 54b) explains is the foundation stone from which the world was built.

The three together

Shemos 40:18, erecting the Mishkan: he placed (natan) its sockets, placed (sam) its beams, placed (natan) its bars. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim: it did not matter which socket or bar went where, so natan; the beams were lettered so each would go in its own spot (Shabbos 103a), so sam.

Shemos 10:1-2 uses shat of the signs Hashem set in Paroh and his servants, and sam of the signs recounted to sons and grandsons. Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg builds on Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim: for those who lived through the makkos the memory is etched permanently, hence shat; for later generations, who have only a received tradition, the placement is less fixed, hence sam.

Where the distinction seems to fail

Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim himself concludes by noting several cases where Tanach seems to use the two words indiscriminately. Yosef advises Paroh to shat an overseer (Bereishis 41:33) but later says he was sam as lord over Egypt (Bereishis 45:9); Yaakov shat his right hand on Ephraim (Bereishis 48:14, 48:17) while Yosef asks him to sam it on Menashe (48:18); Paroh lo shat libo to the plague of blood (Shemos 7:22) while the Egyptians who ignored the hail lo sam libo (Shemos 9:21). Rabbi Moshe Zuriel answers all three from Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim's own rule: Yosef proposed a long-term post but Paroh, in his jealous stinginess, gave him a short-term appointment whose mandate he kept renewing; Yaakov's hand enacted the standing reality that Ephraim would play a more prominent role than Menashe through the generations, while Yosef thought his father had laid the hand down haphazardly; and Paroh sought to strengthen his refusal for the long term, holding out even after the Jews had left Egypt, while the Egyptians who ignored the hail acted out of no strong conviction and simply failed to take the threat seriously.

A separate reading: Rabbi Avraham Shick of Slonim (d. 1820) writes in Eshed HaNechalim (to Shemos Rabbah 32:2) that most times shat appears in Tanach it is in a negative context, the snake's curse being the first, while sam more often carries a positive or even neutral connotation. Whether that accounts for every instance of the two words, the column says, remains to be seen.

Rendering guidance

• נתן: "put." Keep the plainest English verb for the plainest Hebrew one.
• שם: "place" or "set in place."
• שת: "set" or "lay," and where the permanence is the chiddush, "set for all time" or "established."
• Trap: "put" will swallow all three. Shemos 40:18 alternates natan, sam, natan in one pasuk; three "put"s destroy the reason the Torah alternated.
• Trap: לא שת לבו and לא שם לבו both come out "he did not take it to heart." Where both appear in a chapter (Shemos 7:22 against 9:21), distinguish them: "would not set his heart to it" against "did not give it a thought."
• Trap: do not upgrade sam to permanence. It says a designated place, not a lasting one; the duration is what shat adds.
• Frequency, as a check on how marked shat is: by Even-Shoshan's concordance, cognates of shat appear some 85 times in Tanach, and cognates of sam five hundred times more than that.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Put in Place," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 6 Shvat 5782 (2022-01-08): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/9523-put-in-place.md. Primary loci cited: Shemos 10:1-2, 7:22, 9:21, 40:18; Bereishis 3:15, 4:25, 41:33, 45:9, 48:14, 48:17, 48:18; Devarim 28:8; Mishlei 3:10; Tehillim 11:3; Yeshayahu 28:25; Shabbos 103a; Yoma 5:2 and 54b; Shemos Rabbah 32:2; Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim, Cheshek Shlomo and Yerios Shlomo. The column's rival Greek derivation of siman and its frequency counts from Even-Shoshan's concordance are reported here as the column gives them.