nature
sun and moon
שמש · חמה · חרס · ירח · לבנה · סהר
Bottom line
Three words each, and each names its luminary by a different aspect. Shemesh is the sun as servant, doing its assigned work; chamah the sun as the hot one; cheres the sun as the baker of pottery, or the pottery-colored one at sunrise and sunset. Yareach is the moon as the traveler on its path; levanah the moon as the white one; sahar the crescent, the moon by its shape. All six are Rabbi Aharon Marcus's account. In ordinary translation all three suns are "the sun" and all three moons "the moon"; surface the aspect only where the passage turns on it.
At a glance
| Hebrew | translit | English | what sets it apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| שמש | shemesh | sun | the servant, subservient to Hashem (Rabbi Aharon Marcus) |
| חמה | chamah | sun | the hot one, named for its heat |
| חרס | cheres | sun | pottery: it bakes pottery, or it is pottery-colored at dawn and dusk |
| ירח | yareach | moon | from orach, path: its orbital course |
| לבנה | levanah | moon | the white one, named for its color |
| סהר | sahar | crescent moon | named for its shape; possibly an Aramaic loanword |
Where the authorities disagree
Why the sun is called cheres. Rabbi Aharon Marcus: because the sun's heat bakes pottery, and pottery was a mainstay of ancient civilization, so the sun is named for what it makes possible. Others: because the sun takes on a reddish, pottery-like hue at sunrise and at sunset, so it is named for how it looks. The Bottom line carries both, since the article gives no ground for choosing and each reading fits a different kind of pasuk.
Whether sahar is Hebrew. Rabbi Aharon Marcus counts it as the third Hebrew word for the moon, the one that names it by its shape. Others hold sahar is not really Hebrew but an Aramaic loanword taken up for the moon. Either way it means the crescent, so the rendering is unaffected; the argument matters only where somebody builds on its being native.
Whether the staged history is admissible. Rabbi Aharon Marcus reads the six words as successive coinages, and some would reject that historical frame outright, since it sits badly with the Divine origin of Lashon HaKodesh: words of the holy tongue are not invented by early monotheists in response to circumstance. The article concedes the objection and answers that the basic argument survives it. Whatever one holds about the history, the six words do distribute themselves over different aspects of the sun and the moon, and that is the part a translator needs.
Distinctions
The luminaries are unnamed at first
In the account of creation (Bereishis 1) neither shemesh nor yareach appears. The Torah calls them only the great luminary and the small luminary, as if to say that their whole purpose is to give light and that they carry no importance of their own. On Rabbi Aharon Marcus's reading, that is the point: at first the sun and the moon had no names at all.
shemesh (שמש) and yareach (ירח)
The first pair coined, and coined against idolatry. When people began to worship the sun and the moon under the names Baal, master, and Asherah, the two luminaries were given names that keep them in their place: shemesh, the servant, subject to Hashem, and yareach, from orach, a path, the one that runs its appointed course through the heavens. Neither name grants the thing named any standing of its own. Both names were in time taken up by the sun-cult and the moon-cult themselves, which is what forced the coining of the next pair. Two place-names in Eretz Yisrael preserve the old cults: Beis Shemesh, the house of the sun, and Yericho, tied to yareach.
chamah (חמה), cheres (חרס), levanah (לבנה) and sahar (סהר)
The second layer, and each of the four names its luminary by an observable property rather than by a role: heat and pottery for the sun, whiteness and crescent shape for the moon. In time these too were drawn into the worship of the heavenly bodies by way of ritual objects. The Torah forbids the chaman (Vayikra 26:30), an idol set up on a roof for the worship of the sun, and Yeshayahu rebukes the daughters of Tziyon for wearing saharonim (Yeshayahu 3:18), moon-shaped amulets on a necklace.
Rendering guidance
- Default: "the sun" and "the moon" for all six. The aspects are etymological, and forcing them into every rendering makes the English strange.
- Trap: English has one word for the sun and one for the moon, so a pasuk that pairs two of the Hebrew words will collapse. Yeshayahu 24:23 sets levanah against chamah in one clause, "the white one will be mortified and the hot one ashamed"; rendering both "the sun and the moon" loses the pairing outright, so name the aspects there. (For the pair of shame-words in that same pasuk see
shame-bushah-klimah-cherpah.md.) - Sahar is "crescent" or "crescent moon", never simply "moon", since shape is the whole of what the word contributes.
- Watch the homographs. Cheres spelled the same way is the skin affliction of Devarim 28:27, treated in
boils-shechin-garav-cheres.md, and in Mishnaic Hebrew cheres is an earthenware shard in the ordinary sense. Yerach, the month, is the same root as yareach and is treated inmonth-chodesh-yerach.md; for lavan, white, seewhite-lavan-chivar-tzochar.md, and for the place-name,jericho-yereicho-yericho.md.
Sources
Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "My Three Suns (and Moons)," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 30 Av 5776 (2016-09-03): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/6916-my-three-suns-and-moons.md. The whole treatment is Rabbi Aharon Marcus, the Chasid from Hamburg. Loci the article cites: Bereishis 1, for the two unnamed luminaries; Vayikra 26:30, the chaman; Yeshayahu 3:18, the saharonim. Yeshayahu 24:23, cited above for the chamah/levanah pair, is not among them. The article's supporting appeal to the archaeological attestation of sun and moon cults in Canaan and Mesopotamia is comparative Semitics and is left out here under house rule 9; the objection from the Divine origin of Lashon HaKodesh, which the article itself records, is kept.