rose

Where the authorities disagree

How many petals a shoshanah has, and therefore what it is.

• Ibn Ezra (to Shir HaShirim 2:1) cites a tradition explaining the doubled shin as shesh, six, so the flower has six petals; Radak (Sefer HaShorashim) gives a similar explanation, and Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim traces the word to the biliteral ש-ש on that basis. Six petals would rule out a rose, since roses typically have five petals or multiples of five.
• The Zohar cuts across this: at Hakdamah 1a a shoshanah is ringed by thirteen petals, like Knesses Yisrael ringed by the thirteen middos of rachamim, and on the same page it has five "strong" petals, which is why the five fingers should encircle the kos shel berachah. Elsewhere (Vayechi 221a, Emor 105a) the Zohar says six.
• Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur (Sefer HaTishbi) records the white-six-petal-lily reading and rejects it: Shir HaShirim has the shoshanah growing among thorns (2:2), and lilies do not.

Whether chavatzeles and shoshanah are one flower. Radak (Sefer HaShorashim) defines chavatzeles outright as rosa, a rose, and explicitly links it to vered. Four positions.

1. The same. Rashi (to Shir HaShirim 2:1): chavatzeles means shoshanah. Rabbi Shlomo of Urbino (Ohel Moed) and Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer (Beiurei Shemos HaNirdafim) treat them as synonyms. Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein adds that the same understanding seems evident from the old translations, which do not distinguish the two words: the Peshitta, the early Syriac rendering, has shoshnat for both, the Septuagint has the Greek krinon for both, and the Vulgate has the Latin lilium, lily, for both. Some texts of Rashi read "a type of shoshanah," which makes chavatzeles a species under the genus rather than an equal.
2. The same flower at two ages. Shir HaShirim Rabbah 2:3: chavatzeles is the flower young, shoshanah grown. Rabbi Wertheimer builds on this and takes the final tav as a diminutive, a young rose whose bud has not opened. (Whether that tav is part of the root seems already to have been disputed in medieval times: Ibn Janach and Radak treat it as radical, Menachem Ibn Saruk as integral.) The Zohar (Vayechi 221a, Emor 105a) seems to say the same: chavatzeles is the young green plant, shoshanah the mature red and white one. Rabbi Daniel Frisch (Masok MiDvash) reads those colors kabbalistically rather than botanically, green as unmitigated din and red-and-white as din blended with rachamim.
3. The same flower in two places. The Vilna Gaon (Biur HaGra to Shir HaShirim 2:1): grown on the open Sharon plain in full sun the flower dries and yellows, and is called chavatzeles; grown in a valley it keeps its moisture and its natural whitish-reddish-pink, and is called shoshanah.
4. A different flower, the narkis. Targum (to Shir HaShirim 2:1), Ibn Janach in the name of Rav Yehudai Gaon, Rabbi Saadia Gaon's Tafsir, Kaftor VaFerach ch. 56 in the name of Rav Hai Gaon, Rabbi Shemaryah ben Elchanan of Cairo, and Ibn Ezra. Narkis is a Hebraicization of the Arabic narjis, which comes in turn from the Latin narcissus, itself from the Greek narkissos, and it is the flower English calls the daffodil. Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim 216:9) codifies chavatzeles as narkis and then cites the alternative, lirio, Spanish for lily, which is Rabbeinu Yonah's view (Berachos 31b in the Alfasi pagination). Rashi (to Berachos 43b) ties the Gemara's narkom, read narkis in Sefer HeAruch and others, back to the Biblical chavatzeles. The Latin name carries a Greek myth: Narcissus, a young man of extraordinary beauty and self-absorbed selfishness, caught sight of his own reflection, fell in love with it, and wasted away by the pool, and the narcissus flower bloomed where he died; a similar tale appears in rabbinic literature at Nedarim 9b. (The Windows Hebrew font Narkisim seems to be named for the flower.)

Peirush Chachmei Tzarfas explains chavatzeles as a white flower and shoshanah as a red one. (Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein remarks that for some odd reason all of this puts him in mind of the War of the Roses in England.)

Whether shoshanah and vered are the same. Rambam (Hilchos Berachos 9:6) lists shoshanah, narkis (chavatzeles), and vered separately, which led Rabbi Yosef Karo (Kesef Mishneh) to ask: if vered and shoshanah are not one, what is a shoshanah?

• Rabbi Massoud Chai Rokach (Maaseh Rokeach) answers that Rabbi Karo knew both are roses and one is red and the other white, and only wanted to know which is which (see Rambam to Mishnah Sheviis 7:6).
• Rabbi Yirmiyahu Low (Divrei Yirmiyahu) answers differently: vered is a general term that can take in various flowers and shoshanah the more specific term, the rose as a kind of vered, which is borne out by Vayikra Rabbah 23:3, "shoshanah achas shel vered."
• Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein offers a third possibility of his own, that vered is the whole plant and shoshanah specifically the flower.
• The Zohar (Ki Sisa 189b) appears to equate them outright, and the Targumim render shoshanah as vered.
• Ibn Ezra (to Shir HaShirim 2:1) cites some commentators who explain chavatzeles as vered and others who explain shoshanah as vered; taken together, Rabbi Klein suggests, this might echo the view that chavatzeles and shoshanah are one and the same.