Facing Death – mitah, niftar |
The Torah introduces the laws of the sacrificial services of Yom Kippur by noting that Hashem relayed them to Moses after the deaths (acharei mot) of Aharon’s two sons (Lev. 16:1). The Torah then continues to discuss various other topics, running the gamut from sacrifices outside of the temple, the prohibition of eating blood, forbidden relationships, and various interpersonal and agricultural laws (Lev. 16–20). All in all, the theme of death underlies all of these passages and, in fact, declensions of the Hebrew words mavet/mitah (“death”) appear twenty-four times in Parshiot Acharei Mot and Kedoshim — more than any other two consecutive Parshiot in the Torah. The Hebrew term colloquially used when referring to someone who died, or “passed away”, is nifter and the noun for death is known as petirah. In what way is the Hebrew word nifter different from the seemingly synonymous word meit?
The word mavet is actually a good test case for the ways that Hebrew lexicographers identified the etymological roots of Hebrew words. Those scholars who were of the opinion that Hebrew roots typically consist of three letters (known as triliteral roots) trace this word to the three-letter root MEM-VAV-TAV. These scholars include early grammarians like Rabbi Yehuda Chayyuj (945–1000), Rabbi Yonah Ibn Janach (990–1055), Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Parchon (12th century), and Radak (1160–1235). However, Menachem Ibn Saruk (920–970) in Machberet Menachem and Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (1740–1814) in Yeriot Shlomo and Cheshek Shlomo go with the biliteralist approach, leading them to see the root of mavet as simply MEM-TAV. Cognates of these roots appear close to one-thousand times in the Bible (according to Even Shoshan’s concordance on the roots MEM-TAV and MEM-VAV-TAV).
Either way, it is interesting that in the ancient Canaanite cultures that surrounded the Holy Land, the concept of “death” was personified and deified into the name of the god Mot (sometimes spelled Mawet or Motu). In other words, those pagan cultures tended to view death as an independent entity that was on par with and sometimes competed with the other gods. For........