river

Distinctions

nahar (נהר)

Rashi (to Shemos 7:19): a river in the ordinary sense, as against the yeor that Aharon was also to stretch his staff over. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (Cheshek Shlomo) derives it from the two-letter ה-ר, which he reads as protruding or standing out, the core also behind har, a mountain, herayon, pregnancy, and yuharah, haughtiness: a nahar is the river into which smaller streams flow, which makes the bigger river stick out vis-a-vis those tributaries. Malbim (to Yirmiyahu 46:10): a nahar and a nachal alike keep their water within their banks, simply pushing it along a forward current and not past the banks, as against the yeor, which tends to overflow. In another discussion Malbim (to Yeshayahu 19:5) sizes the three: a nahar is shallow, short and narrow, a nachal is wider but also not deep, and a yeor denotes an even smaller stream. There Malbim again notes that the yeor differs from the other two in tending to overflow, so the two passages agree on that point. One further reading the article records anonymously: others explain that a nachal is a seasonal river caused by rainwater flowing down from the mountains, while a nahar is a river that continues to flow the entire year.

yeor (יאור)

Before the plague of blood Hashem tells Aharon to stretch his staff over the different bodies of water in Egypt, among them the neharos and the ye'orim (Shemos 7:19). Rashi there: a nahar is the sort of river we are familiar with, while a yeor is a man-made irrigation canal that brings water to faraway fields. This implies, the column reasons, that a yeor is man-made and a nahar naturally occurring. But that assumption is belied by the fact that the Nile is called a yeor and is one of the four rivers that flowed from Gan Eden (Bereishis 2:11), which cannot possibly be man-made. Rabbi Malkiel Tzvi Tannenbaum of Lomzha (1847-1910), author of the responsa Divrei Malkiel, proposes a resolution by context: on their own, nahar and yeor can each mean a man-made river or a natural one; used together, as at the plague of blood, each takes one specific meaning the other does not, nahar the natural river and yeor the artificial one. Malbim: the mark of a yeor is that it tends to overflow and flood the surrounding area, and most instances of yeor in Tanach refer specifically to the Nile, which behaved that way, though he concedes that in two or three places yeor refers to a different river. Rabbi Pappenheim takes yeor from the letter reish itself, which he reads as throwing or shooting: the waters of a yeor shoot downstream as though thrown by the forces of nature, so a yeor is a river whose waters flow with especially violent force, and in Tanach it is used only of the Nile and the Tigris. Pappenheim admits that a borrowed sense of yeor, which also appears in Tanach, is a man-made irrigation duct, which is not a river as such but the river's artificial tributaries. The column then bridges the two: in light of what Malbim wrote, we can explain that yeor recalls the fact that its waters tend to overflow past the banks, giving the illusion of the river itself shooting its waters outwards. (That bridge is the column's own, not Pappenheim's and not Malbim's.)

nachal (נחל)

Means both a river and a valley. The article gives two anonymous accounts of the connection: some explain that a nachal is the type of river that causes erosion, thereby creating a valley in the manner of the Grand Canyon, which in English we call a wadi, a word borrowed from Arabic; others explain that a nachal is the seasonal runoff from the mountains after rain, as against the year-round nahar. Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer (1866-1935) restricts the word further: nachal applies only to a river that flows into a sea, as it says, "All the nechalim go to the sea" (Koheles 1:7), and not to any type of river. Indeed, Rabbi Pappenheim in Yerios Shlomo gives the root as ח-ל, circular motion, which aptly describes that same cycle: the nachal empties into the ocean, and the waters of the ocean in turn flow back into the river.

Rendering guidance

• Nahar standing alone: "river." Nahar beside yeor (Shemos 7:19): "rivers and canals," following Rashi, and note that on Tannenbaum's proposal the pairing is what forces the split.
• Yeor of Egypt: "the Nile," or "the River" where the pasuk is being quoted and the name would be an intrusion. Only render "canal" where a second word for river is present in the same phrase.
• Nachal: "brook" for a small flowing stream, "wadi" where the dryness matters, "valley" where the topography is the subject (and say which you chose if the passage puns on the two).
• Trap: English "river" will absorb all three and erase the pesukim that list them together. A verse that names neharos and ye'orim and agamim is cataloguing kinds of water; give each a different English word.
• Second trap: "stream" is a poor default for nachal, because Malbim at Yeshayahu 19:5 makes nachal the widest of the three and the yeor the smallest stream of the three. Where you follow that passage, do not also call yeor a "great river."
• Where a source builds on Rabbi Pappenheim's nahar/har link (the river that stands out above its tributaries), the English has to keep "river" and let the note carry the derivation; no English word does both.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Down by the River," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 28 Teves 5779 (2019-01-05): sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/8076-down-by-the-river.md. Primary loci: Shemos 7:19 with Rashi; Bereishis 2:11; Yirmiyahu 46:10 and Yeshayahu 19:5 with Malbim; Koheles 1:7; Rabbi Malkiel Tzvi Tannenbaum of Lomzha, Divrei Malkiel; Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer; Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim of Breslau, Cheshek Shlomo (on nahar and on yeor) and Yerios Shlomo (on nachal). An earlier draft of this paragraph said the two Malbim passages disagree on the relative size of the three; they do not. Yirmiyahu 46:10 says nothing about size, and the article notes that at Yeshayahu 19:5 Malbim again makes the same overflow point, so the invented conflict has been removed and the size ranking (nachal widest, then nahar, then yeor) restored to the body, together with the article's Grand Canyon illustration for the nachal that carves a valley. The article dates Rabbi Pappenheim 1714-1814; that is a slip for 1740-1814, and this entry carries no dates for him rather than repeat it.