Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Recounting a Tale of Counting and Telling
In the wake of my December 13, 2013, column on gematria, the rabbinic art of finding significance in the numerical value of the letters of Hebrew words, Rabbi Carl M. Perkins has sent me an article of his about the existence of gematria already in the Bible. In it, the Dutch Bible scholar Casper Labuschagne…
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Culture A Good Season To Live High on the ‘Khoge’
Just in time for the last week of December, Beth Kissileff has a query about the Yiddish word khoge, which denotes a non-Jewish holiday. Does it, she asks, refer only to a religious holiday like Christmas, or does it also include “civic holidays” like Thanksgiving and New Year’s? Since civic holidays did not exist in…
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Culture How ‘Shalom Aleykhem’ Originated and Why It Doesn’t Appear in the Bible
Samuel Sislen of Washington, D.C., writes: “Jews have traditionally greeted one another ‘Shalom aleykhem’ and responded with the words inverted. Arabic speakers greet each other, ‘Salaam aleykum’ and also respond with the words reversed. And I have been told that some Christian services begin with the leader saying, ‘Peace be unto you,’ and the congregation…
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Culture Why Israel Is the Place Where Everyone Knows Your Nickname
Israel, we are told by a recent Associated Press article, is a “notoriously close-knit, informal” society, in which “personal boundaries are thin and everyone seems to meddle in everyone’s business.” One thing that proves this, the article states, is the nicknames by which many Israeli politicians are and have been known to their fellow countrymen….
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Culture Your Days Are Numbered… and So Is Just About Everything Else
Emily Koenders writes that she is working on a paper on gematria in rabbinic literature and wonders if I can help her locate the talmudic sources of three examples of it. Gematria (pronounced with a hard “g”) is the rabbinic term for finding significance in the numerical value of the letters of Hebrew words. In…
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Culture Why Thanksgivukkah Is a Portmanteau — and What That Means
Given all the hoopla surrounding it, it’s surprising that only one reader has written in about “Thanksgivukkah,” the word coined for this year’s coinciding of Thanksgiving dinner with the first night of Hanukkah. The reader is Amy Mintz of Sugar Hill, N.H., who complains: “This is such an assimilated-sounding combination! And it’s hardly a combination….
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Culture How an Affront to Judaism Came To Memorialize Israel’s War Dead
Charles Krauthamer writes from Teaneck, N.J.: “While reading a spy novel set in Salonika, I came across the word andarta as a term for Greek highlanders who fought as guerrillas against the Turks [in Greece’s early-19th-century War of Independence]. And while in Israel, I saw many monuments commemorating fallen soldiers, each called an andarta, too….
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Culture Did Adam and Eve Speak Hebrew in the Garden of Eden?
An article recently posted in the online Jewish magazine Tablet is titled “Examining Edenics, the Theory That English (and Every Other Language) Came From Hebrew”; it bears the subtitle “An eccentric Jerusalem-based researcher believes he’s found the key to the origin of tongues — in the Bible.” The “guru of Edenics,” as the Tablet article…
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