species

Distinctions

Min (מין)

Thirty appearances in the Chumash, a plurality of them in Shemini: the non-kosher birds "and its kind" (Vayikra 11:14-19, and Devarim 14:13-18), the kosher grasshoppers (Vayikra 11:22), the impure creeping things (Vayikra 11:29). It appears in Bereishis for the kinds of plants (1:11-12), animals (1:24-25) and creeping creatures (1:21, 1:25), and in the account of the Teivah (Bereishis 6-7). Outside the Chumash it occurs once (Yechezkel 47:10). Ibn Janach and Radak (Sefer HaShorashim): a min is a grouping of similar individuals sharing certain properties, so that they are said to be of one kind and classed together. Ibn Janach adds that man, the manna, is from min: a "type" of food they could not categorize, "for they did not know what it was" (Shemos 16:15).

• Shadal (Rabbi Shmuel David Luzzatto, 1800 to 1865, to Shemos 20:4) takes temunah, an image, from MEM-(VAV)-NUN, which he relates to the Arabic cognate mana, "lie, false": a temunah is a picture that pretends to mimic something but cannot be a perfect representation of it. A step further, min is a group of things that look alike enough but are not exactly the same, so that grouping them together is, in a way, something of a "falsehood." Shadal compares this to Latin species, from "seeing," borrowed for things that "appear" similar enough to be categorized together. Species descends from the Proto-Indo-European root spek-, ancestor of spectacle, special, aspect, suspect, scope and others. Shadal extends the sense to min, heretic: each heretic's belief differs slightly from the next, yet they all fall into one category.
• Rabbi Yeshayah of Trani takes a different approach, associating min in this sense with the pagan deity Meni (Yeshayahu 65:11).
• Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (1740 to 1814) takes the two-letter root מ-ן as "creating order out of causes and effects." One group of its derivatives is headed by moneh and minyan, counting, which creates mathematical order by quantifying a set of givens; min derives from it too, since it likewise determines what belongs in one grouping and what is excluded (in Rabbi Klein's colloquial gloss, what "counts" and what does not). Like Shadal, Pappenheim connects temunah to min, on his own reasoning: a temunah is a relatively vague picture that may show a certain species without being the image of any one individual in it, as a drawing shows a cow but not which cow. (See also Rav Hirsch to Shemos 20:4, who distinguishes pesel from temunah.)

Minnim at Tehillim 150:4, "praise Him with minnim and pipe," is the only appearance of the instrument, possibly a hapax legomenon, and it is contested.

• Rav Saadia Gaon (882 to 942) explains minnim as the same as minim, the plural of min, seemingly an ensemble of types of instrument creating one unified sound (see also Ibn Ezra, Sefas Yeser 95, and to Tehillim 150:4 and Daniel 3:5). Or, as Pappenheim prefers, a single instrument that somehow incorporates elements of all the types (percussion, string and wind).
• Donash Ibn Labrat (920 to 990) disagrees with Rav Saadia: the dagesh in the nun sets minnim apart from minim, making it the name of a specific instrument unrelated to min; this seems to be the approach of Machberes Menachem (entry on מ-ן), Ibn Janach and Radak (each in his Sefer HaShorashim) and Rashi (to Tehillim 150:4).
• Rabbi Yehoshua (Jeremy) Steinberg of the Veromemanu Foundation proposes that minnim is a metathesis of nimim, "hairs, strings," and so specifically a stringed instrument.

On whether the Torah's minim are today's species: Rabbi Klein notes that ancient ways of categorizing flora and fauna do not necessarily line up with the taxonomy of modern botanists and zoologists, and that the Torah might group things by different criteria. He illustrates from the Teivah, whose known dimensions could not hold every known species.

• Ramban (to Bereishis 6:19), the first to address the question, posits a miracle that let the Teivah house specimens of all those species.
• Rabbeinu Nissim of Gerona (to Bereishis 6:14) answers differently: the minim the Torah names there do not correspond to the species known today but are their ancestors from before they differentiated, so there were far fewer minim on the Teivah than one might think.

Zan (זן)

Three times in the Hebrew of Tanach (twice in Tehillim 144:13, once in Divrei HaYamim II 16:14) and four times in the Aramaic (Daniel 3:5, 3:7, 3:10, 3:15), where zenei zemara (Daniel 3:5) is glossed by Rashi as minei zemer, types of song or music. Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur (Meturgeman): every time min appears in Tanach, Targum renders it zan. The Aramaic zan clearly means "type" or "sort"; the Hebrew is more debatable.

• "Our storehouses full, producing from zan to zan" (Tehillim 144:13): Rav Hirsch (there) seems unsure whether the Hebrew zan is related to mazon, "sustenance," and means types of nourishing food, as Menachem and Rashi explain, or to the Aramaic zan, meaning more broadly types of food, as Ibn Janach explains.
• Radak in Sefer HaShorashim (s.v. זון) takes the first approach, but elsewhere (there s.v. פוק, and in his commentary to Tehillim 144:13) the second.
• "Spices and znim" burned in honor of King Asa at his death (Divrei HaYamim II 16:14): Machberes Menachem reads a specific kind of spice or fragrance, not "types," and pseudo-Rashi and Ralbag (there) adopt that.
• Ibn Janach (Sefer HaShorashim) and Radak (to Divrei HaYamim II 16:14) read types of incense.

So at all three Hebrew appearances the meforshim debate whether it means what the Aramaic means.

Rabbi Pappenheim, whose way is to set aside Aramaic meanings as far as possible in favor of uniquely Hebrew explanations, ignores the possibility of a Hebrew zan equal to the Aramaic and derives both Hebrew forms from the two-letter ז-ן, sustenance and the fulfillment of needs: the first zan from mazon; the second as related to zenus, lust (a vice that comes from overindulging in sustenance), since it was a type of spice that served as an aphrodisiac (see Bava Kamma 16b).

• If zan and min do mean the same thing, Rabbi Klein suggests they are still not quite synonymous, because they come from different languages.
• From where in Tanach each word appears, Professor Avi Hurvitz argues that zan is simply the Late Biblical Hebrew equivalent of the Classical Biblical Hebrew min.
• Dr. Menachem Zvi Kaddari (1925 to 2011), in his dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, proposes that zan is a loanword from Old Persian zana, "type, class."
• Rabbi Shimon Lavie (Kesem Paz to the Zohar, Hakdamah 1a) seems to understand Bereishis Rabbah (28:8) as tying zan, species, to the idea that many kinds of plants were produced by deliberate crossing, as though the plants had been zonah, crossed outside their own kind.

Sug (סוג)

Not in Tanach in the sense of "type," "category," or "species"; a later neologism took on that meaning. In the Mishnah sug appears twice as a big container: produce bought in bulk from a wholesaler may not be tithed from one portion to exempt the whole load, even if it was all sold in one sug and is all one min (Demai 5:6), and a sug is listed among vessels susceptible to tumah (Keilim 16:3). Rabbi Klein's own proposal: perhaps a category is a conceptual container, an abstract vessel that includes what meets its criteria and excludes the rest; he therefore derives sug from biliteral ס-ג, "create a boundary, fence," which yields sugah (Shir HaShirim 7:3) and siyag (Avos 1:1). Its polar opposite, ג-ס, yields words for mixing, an army, the overly thick, and the familiar or intimate, all of them crossing a line in breaking down boundaries.

As a term of logic: Rabbi Moshe Ibn Tibbon's translation of Rambam's work on logic (Milos HaHigayon 10) explains min as a category that includes multiple like items and sug as the parent category (hypernym) that includes multiple like minim; the same understanding is evident in Rabbi Shmuel Ibn Tibbon's Peirush HaMilos HaZaros and the Ran's Derashos (Derush 12). In standard logical English, sug is the genus and min the species. Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, 1707 to 1746, Derech Tevunos 11:9) expands with an example: mankind is a min within the sug of living creatures, but compared with physical entities, living creatures becomes a min within that broader sug. So min and sug depend on context, while the relationship between them always remains that of parent and child.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Shemini: Types of Species," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 15 April 2023.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Types of Species," What's in a Word? Synonyms in the Hebrew Language (book manuscript).

Cited in the essay: Bereishis 1:11-12, 1:21, 1:24-25, 6:14 with the Ran, 6:19 with Ramban, and the Teivah narrative of Bereishis 6-7; Shemos 16:15, and 20:4 with Shadal and Rav Hirsch; Vayikra 11:14-19, 11:22, 11:29; Devarim 14:13-18; Yeshayahu 65:11; Yechezkel 47:10; Tehillim 144:13 with Rav Hirsch and Radak, and 150:4 with Ibn Ezra and Rashi; Shir HaShirim 7:3; Daniel 3:5 with Rashi and Ibn Ezra, 3:7, 3:10, 3:15; Divrei HaYamim II 16:14 with pseudo-Rashi, Ralbag and Radak; Mishnah Demai 5:6, Keilim 16:3, Avos 1:1; Bava Kamma 16b; Ibn Janach and Radak, Sefer HaShorashim (Radak s.v. זון and s.v. פוק); Menachem Ibn Saruk, Machberes Menachem; Donash Ibn Labrat; Rav Saadia Gaon; Ibn Ezra, Sefas Yeser 95; Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim; Rabbi Yehoshua (Jeremy) Steinberg; Rambam, Milos HaHigayon 10, in Rabbi Moshe Ibn Tibbon's translation; Rabbi Shmuel Ibn Tibbon, Peirush HaMilos HaZaros; Derashos HaRan 12; Ramchal, Derech Tevunos 11:9; Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur, Sefer HaTishbi and Meturgeman; Professor Avi Hurvitz; Dr. Menachem Zvi Kaddari's dictionary of Biblical Hebrew; Kesem Paz to the Zohar, Hakdamah 1a; Bereishis Rabbah 28:8.