In Part 1 of this essay, we looked at the words pitaron and pesher as ways of “explaining/interpreting” an enigmatic text or statement. We left off last week’s essay with the possibility that the word pesher is actually a metathesized form of the term peirush (often mispronounced as pirush), meaning if you rearrange the consonants in pesher you get peirush (which also means “interpretation/explanation/commentary”). In this essay, we will further explore the word peirush to better understand its etymology and how its usage parallels that of pesher. We will also address two apparent synonyms to peirush, namely beiur (often mispronounced biur) and hesber.

The word peirush has many close relatives that also derived from the triliteral root PEH-REISH-SHIN. These words include parashah (“topic/matter”), prisha (“separation”), parush (“ascetic,” who separates himself from the rest by abstaining from worldly pleasures), parash (“horse-rider”), and peresh (“excrement”). The way some of these words connect to peirush are fairly intuitive, but some of them require more explication. Interestingly, the term perushim (“Pharisees”) in the Mishnah (Yadayim 4:6-8, as in other works like Josephus and the Christian Bible) refers to orthodox Jews, as opposed to the antinomian Tzadokim (“Sadducees”). Nowadays, the term perushim refers to a community of non-Hassidic ultra-Orthodox Jerusalemites associated with the Old Yishuv. [My friend Mitchell First, an attorney and scholar of Jewish history, once penned an entire article dedicated to exploring the different reasons as to why the Pharisees were called such, but that is beyond the scope of our discussion here.]

Rabbi Shmuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865), also known as Shadal, explains that peirush refers to the means of making known that which had been previously unknown. He sees the triliteral root of peirush, PEH-REISH-SHIN, as actually related to the triliteral root PEH-REISH-SIN (via the interchangeability of SHIN and SIN), which means “spreading,” because when one presents new information, one figuratively “spreads” out the previously-enigmatic topic in a way that it is now accessible.

Case in point: After committing their respective sins, the blasphemer (Lev. 24:12) and the Shabbat desecrator (Num. 15:34) were held in detention until their final judgement could be decided. In both cases, the Bible stresses that their final sentence was yet-unknown because Hashem had not “rendered/explained” (porash) what their verdict ought to be. The word porash is a Biblical Hebrew verb inflection of the word peirush. According to Shadal, this verse means that Hashem had hitherto not yet made known what these sinners’ fate should be, so He can be said to have not provided a peirush.

Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (1740–1814) explains it somewhat differently. He defines the root PEH-REISH-SHIN as referring to “separating.” As a result, in the case of the two sinners who were eventually put to death, the Biblical passages in question refer to waiting for their final verdict to be “separated” out from all the various possible outcomes.

In line with this, Rabbi Pappenheim also explains how the word meforash (“explicitly/expressly”) relates back to the triliteral root in question: when a statement is vague and ambiguous, it can support all sorts of various ways of interpreting it, some of which are true and some of which are not. Accordingly, when a person says something “explicitly,” he unambiguously separates out the “true” explanations of the otherwise vague statement from all the other possible interpretations.

Additionally, Rabbi Pappenheim writes that parash refers to “cavalry,” because such mounted troops are typically considered separate from the rest of the military apparatus that largely consists of foot-soldiers/infantry. He also notes that peresh (“excrement” or “dung”) refers to those bodily wastes which were separated from one’s person [For more about words for “excrement,” see my earlier........

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