What’s in a Word?

body

plague

דבר · מגפה · נגף · צפרדע · דבורה

Bottom line

Dever is pestilence, a lethal contagious disease. Mageifah is the wider word for a plague or blow, from a root that means striking, and by Rashi's reading it does not by itself mean anything fatal. Negef, which the column calls mageifah's first cousin, is the exception: Malbim reads it as a plague that does kill, and Rashi glosses it as dever. The one thing not to get wrong: mageifah names the striking, dever names the disease. On the column's own summary a mageifah is just a plague while a dever is an especially deadly one; but the difference is not one of scale, as Rabbi Yair Chaim Bachrach shows against the sage who made mageifah the deadlier of the two.

Distinctions

dever (דבר)

The fifth makkah, the sudden death of Egypt's horses, donkeys, camels, cattle and sheep, and the word Moshe uses twice in warning about the tenth (Shemos 5:3, 9:14). That dever denotes a plague bringing death the column supports from the cognate languages, noting that in other Semitic languages words spelled DBR mean "death." Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim of Breslau (1740-1814) links dever to devorah ("bee"), because dever raises lesions on the body before it kills, and those lesions somewhat resemble the inflammation of an allergic reaction to a bee sting; his understanding, the column adds, seems consistent with descriptions of the bubonic plague, which is held responsible for the death of about half of Europe's population in the fourteenth-century outbreak known as the Black Death, and which turns inflamed lymph nodes into black, blister-like buboes. Rabbi Yair Chaim Bachrach (1639-1702, Chavos Yair): dever is any deadly sickness that is contagious and passes easily from person to person or family to family. He grounds this in the Mishnah (Taanis 3:4), which calls for fasts when there is dever in a city and defines it as three deaths in three days in a city of five hundred adult men, on the assumption that so many deaths in so short a span must mean an infectious disease (the column contrasts the world death rate per day reported by the Ecology Global Network, eight per thousand people); and in the Gemara (Bava Kama 60b), which advises staying indoors when there is dever in the city. On his reading, dever is the sudden death by pestilence that leaves no visible wound on any one part of the body.

mageifah (מגפה)

Root ג-פ-ה (the strong letters are gimmel and peh). Rashi (to Shemos 7:27): mageifah does not denote death at all but striking, smiting, pushing; he says the same to Shemos 21:22 and 21:35 and at Bava Kama 2b. This is how he answers why tzfardea counts as a mageifah when frogs do not kill: the word never required death in the first place. Abarbanel rejects that premise, holds that mageifah is inherently lethal, and is therefore driven to Rabbeinu Chananel's reading that tzfardea are crocodiles rather than frogs. On Rashi's line, mageifah is the general term for any striking of an opponent, and describes what the striker does rather than what the victim contracts. Rabbi Yair Chaim Bachrach gives it a narrower sense: an infected wound that can spread like venom through the limbs and the bloodstream, which fits the ג-פ-ה family of words for striking one particular part of the body and letting the harm travel from there.

negef (נגף)

The exception inside the ג-פ-ה family. Malbim: negef does denote a plague that brings certain death. Rashi (to Shemos 30:12) defines negef as dever, and Rabbi Menachem ibn Saruk runs the definition the other way, defining dever as negef. So the two words are close to interchangeable in the sources, and neither is the neutral "striking" that mageifah is for Rashi.

The rejected view

Rabbi Yair Chaim Bachrach cites an anonymous sage who held that dever and mageifah name the same kind of fatal plague, with mageifah the deadlier of the two, adducing the twenty-four thousand who fell in the mageifah after Baal Peor (Bamidbar 25:9). He writes that he disproved it from elsewhere: the plague that followed Dovid HaMelech's illegal and unnecessary census killed seventy thousand and is called a dever (Shmuel II 24:15), which shows that a dever can yield more deaths than a mageifah, so the difference between the words cannot lie in the extent of their impact.

Rendering guidance

  • דבר: "pestilence." Keep it, even where "plague" reads more naturally; it is the word that carries contagion and certain death.
  • מגפה: "plague" in a narrative, "blow" or "striking" where Rashi's sense is the point (Shemos 21:22, a blow to a pregnant woman, is not a plague at all).
  • נגף: "plague" too, but if negef and mageifah stand together, render negef "deadly plague" and mageifah "affliction" so Malbim's distinction survives.
  • Trap: English "plague" absorbs all three. Shemos 9:14 puts mageifos and dever in one pasuk ("all My plagues... stricken you with dever"); render the first "plagues" and the second "pestilence," or the pasuk collapses into a tautology.
  • Trap: do not translate mageifah as though it reports a death toll. It reports what the striker did; the toll, if any, is elsewhere in the pasuk.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Plague of Plagues," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 26 Teves 5778 (2018-01-13): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/7579-plague-of-plagues.md. Primary loci cited: Shemos 5:3, 7:27, 9:14, 21:22, 21:35, 30:12; Bamidbar 25:9; Shmuel II 24:15; Mishnah Taanis 3:4; Bava Kama 2b and 60b; Rashi to Shemos 7:27 and 30:12; Abarbanel and Rabbeinu Chananel on tzfardea; Rabbi Yair Chaim Bachrach, Chavos Yair. The column's comparative-Semitic remark that words spelled DBR mean "death" in other Semitic languages, its bubonic-plague comparison, and its contrasting mortality figure from the Ecology Global Network are reported here as the column gives them.