tzav

1. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2. Command Aaron and his sons, saying, This is the law of the burnt offering: That is the burnt offering which burns on the altar all night until morning, and the fire of the altar shall burn with it. 3. And the kohen shall don his linen tunic, and he shall don his linen trousers on his flesh. And he shall lift out the ashes into which the fire has consumed the burnt offering upon the altar, and put them down next to the altar. 4. He shall then take off his garments and put on other garments, and he shall take out the ashes to a clean place outside the camp. 5. And the fire on the altar shall burn on it; it shall not go out. The kohen shall kindle wood upon it every morning, and upon it, he shall arrange the burnt offering and cause the fats of the peace offerings to [go up in] smoke upon it. 6. A continuous fire shall burn upon the altar; it shall not go out. 7. And this is the law of the meal offering: that Aaron's sons shall bring it before the Lord, to the front of the altar. 8. And he shall lift out of it in his fist, from the fine flour of the meal offering and from its oil and all the frankincense that is on the meal offering, and he shall cause its reminder to [go up in] smoke on the altar as a pleasing fragrance to the Lord. 9. And Aaron and his sons shall eat whatever is left over from it. It shall be eaten as unleavened bread in a holy place; they shall eat it in the courtyard of the Tent of Meeting. 10. It shall not be baked leavened. [As] their portion, I have given it to them from My fire offerings. It is a holy of holies, like the sin offering and like the guilt offering. 11. Any male among Aaron's sons may eat it. [This is] an eternal statute for your generations from the fire offerings of the Lord. Anything that touches them shall become holy.

tarnegol

cently found a post on a Hebrew blog that connected a few words that I had thought of writing about separately.

The blogger Ilan here writes about heichal היכל, adrichal אדריכל and tarnegol תרנגול. What do these words have in common? They all derive from the ancient language Sumerian and share a common root.

Let's take a look at each of the words.

Heichal appears numerous times in the Bible, where it refers to either a palace or the Temple. Klein gives the following etymology:

Probably a loan word from Akkadian ekallu ( = palace), whence also Phoenician הכל, Biblical Aramaic and Aramaic היכלא, Syriac היכלא, Mandaic היכלא, Ugaritic hkl ( = palace, temple). Arabic haykal ( = church) is probably an Aramaic loan word. Akkadian ekallu is probably a loan word from Sumerian e-gal ( = great house).

Adrichal in Modern Hebrew means "architect", and first appears in the Talmudic literature. However, it also appears there as ardichal ארדיכל, and most sources say that is the original form. The etymology of this form, according to Even-Shoshan is from the Akkadian erad-ekaly. This means "worker of the heichal" - and as we just noted, heichal is originally Sumerian. Ilan points out that originally the adrichal was the builder, not the architect. Erad here is related to the Akkadian word aradu - "to serve" and ardu - "slave". This appears to be cognate with the Hebrew root ירד - "to descend", and relates to the lower, subjugated status of the slave.

And lastly we have tarnegol - "rooster". Klein writes that the word is "borrowed from Akkadian tar lugallu" which is in turn borrowed from "Sumerian tar lugal (=bird of the king)." Lugal meant king in Sumerian, and it was made up of two parts - lu (man) and gal (great, as we saw in heichal).