Jewish learning Halal, Hillul, and the Shared Meanings of Hebrew and Arabic

Hebrew has been part of the DNA of Hebrew College since its founding. Today, when an important part of Hebrew College’s mission is the training of professional Jewish leaders, Hebrew continues to be an integral part of our curriculum. Almost all classical Jewish texts are composed in Hebrew (sometimes in combination with Aramaic); direct access to them, rather than in translation, affords much greater depth to our understanding of them. And occasionally, as in the case of the subject of this note, attention to Hebrew yields insights about linguistic and conceptual connections between Judaism and other faiths.

Halal is the term for food that is “kosher” under Islamic law—while its apparent Hebrew cognate, ḥillul (חִלּוּל), means “profanation.” Can they be connected?

The relationships between similar-sounding words (and in the case of the Semitic languages, similar roots) are sometimes straightforward and sometimes less so. And they are often intriguing and surprising.

The relationship between the Hebrew word shalom and the Arabic word salaam, for example, is clear. The words have nearly identical meanings and are phonetically similar; and the words’ phonetic differences can be explained by well-known phonological features of Hebrew and Arabic. The two words have descended from a common ancestor. Such words, when they are found in two languages, are referred to as “cognates.”

In other cases, similar sounding words, even ones with seemingly related meanings, are not actually etymologically related. Religious and sacrilegious, for example, are historically unrelated to one another. (Note the difference in the spelling of religious and [sac]rilegious.)

Then there are words that are phonetically similar but have meanings that seem contradictory. Cleave can mean either “adhere to” (as in “Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,” in the King James translation of Psalm 137:6) or to “separate” (as in “meat cleaver”). In this case, it turns out that we are dealing with two etymologically unrelated words that, over the course of time, developed identical pronunciations and spellings.

What might appear to be a similar case relates to the Arabic word that serves as the Islamic term for food that religiously fit for consumption: in its conventional English spelling, halal or halaal (حَلَال).

What is curious is that Hebrew has a verb whose root would appear to be a cognate of the root of this Arabic word, but whose meaning seems dramatically different. The verb, leḥallel (לְחַלֵּל), appears frequently in the Tanakh and means “to profane.”¹ (A form of this verb is found in the phrase ḥillul ha-shem (חִלּוּל ה׳), “profanation of the divine name.”) The phonetic similarity of the two words’ roots is strong. The Arabic consonant represented by h in halal corresponds to the Hebrew consonant, ḥ (ח); so the three consonants of halal correspond precisely to those of the Hebrew root ḥll (חלל), the root of the verb leḥallel (לְחַלֵּל).

But a closer look at the Hebrew root only seems to complicate the issue. Hebrew words based on the root ḥll (חלל) present a particularly wide array of meanings. In addition to the verb leḥallel (לְחַלֵּל), they include the words teḥillah (תְּחִלָּה, “a beginning”); ḥalilah (חָלִילָה, “far be it from [someone to do something”]); (ḥalal (חָלָל,“a slain person”); ḥallah (חַלָּה, a type of bread); ḥallon (חַלּוֹן, “a window”); and ḥalil (חָלִיל, “a flute”). None of these has an obvious relationship to food that is religiously fit for consumption; indeed, these Hebrew words bear little obvious relationship even to one another.

The key to understanding this widely ranging set of Hebrew words—and their relationship to halal—is the fact that there is not just one Hebrew root ḥll (חלל). There are actually two such roots. As in the case of “cleave,” what appears to be a single Hebrew root is the result of the phonetic convergence of two historically separate ones. This came about because the Hebrew consonant ḥ (ח) is the descendant of two earlier consonants, which were originally pronounced differently than one another but came to pronounced, over time, identically in Hebrew. Before this convergence in pronunciation occurred, there were two separate roots, each beginning with one of those two consonants, with very different meanings; for convenience, we may refer to those roots as ḥll₁ and ḥll₂. And when the pronunciation of the two consonants converged, these two separate roots became indistinguishable in pronunciation.

The central meaning of ḥll₁ related to vacant space, while the central meaning of ḥll₂ related to being free. It is ḥll₁ that is reflected in the Hebrew words ḥalal (חָלָל)—someone whose body has been opened, or pierced, by a weapon; ḥallah (חַלָּה)—a type of bread with open space, perhaps in its shape or in its texture; ḥallon (חַלּוֹן)—an opening in a wall; and ḥalil (חָלִיל)—a hollow instrument.

But it is ḥll₂, the root that relates to releasing, that connects Hebrew with the Islamic term halal. It is ḥll₂ that gave us the Hebrew word for “a beginning,” teḥillah (תְּחִלָּה), reflecting the conception of “beginning” as the freeing of something into existence. (This root similarly gave us two related verbs for “to begin”: first, lehaḥel [לְהָחֵל] and later, lehatḥil [לְהַתְחִיל].) And it is ḥll₂ that gave us the verb leḥallel (לְחַלֵּל), meaning “to profane,” as profanation involves freeing something from a state of holiness into a state of profaneness. (Halilah (חָלִילָה) is thought to have originally meant, approximately, “toward that which is profane.”)

Now we are in a position to make the connection between these Hebrew words and halal. Halal actually has a broader meaning than food that may permissibly be consumed. It is a general term in Islamic law for that which is permitted, and it derives from an Arabic root that is cognate to Hebrew ḥll₂. Like the Hebrew root, the Arabic root has a central meaning of being free. That which is permitted by Islamic law, including food that meets the applicable religious requirements, has been freed for our practice and usage.²

So there is in fact a direct relationship between the term halal and the Hebrew word for profaning—one that I hope you find intriguing and surprising.

Postscript:

Not only can these Arabic and Hebrew roots be connected—but exactly the same semantic connection between “freeing” and “permitting” that we see in Arabic is found in Hebrew. The Hebrew adjective for that which is permitted under Jewish law is muttar (מֻתָּר)—a word whose literal meaning is “freed,” from, e.g., physical restraints. And the active counterpart of this word in Hebrew, meaning “permitting,” is the word mattir (מַתִּיר). This word occurs in the core Jewish prayer, the Amidah, in the phrase that describes God as mattir asurim (מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים); in that phrase, the word has its literal sense of “freeing”; the phrase means “who frees captives.” And to close the circle, the word used in the Amidah’s phrase, for “captive”—asur (אָסוּר)—is, logically and symmetrically, the word used in Jewish law to mean “prohibited”!

¹The same verbal form occurs occasionally with an entirely different meaning: “to play a flute.” See below for the relationship of “flute” to the root in question.
²Interestingly, when it comes to the Jewish legal requirement of reciting a blessing on eating food or any other pleasurable experience, the concept of release has a further dimension. The Talmud states, “Our Rabbis teach: ‘Anyone who profits from this world without [reciting] a blessing has misappropriated [that which is holy].’ . . . R. Judah says in the name of Samuel, ‘Anyone who profits from this world without [reciting] a blessing—it is as if he profits from things consecrated to heaven, as it is said, “The earth and its fullness are the Lord’s.”’” (b. Ber. 35a). The recitation of a blessing before consuming food in effect frees it from the exclusive domain of God.

Harvey Bock is Hebrew Language Coordinator for the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College. He is a graduate of the Yeshivah of Flatbush; Yale College, where he majored in linguistics; and Yale Law School. After more than 20 years of practicing law, with a specialty in banking regulation (most recently as general counsel of Discover Card), Bock embarked in 2001 upon a second career at Hebrew College as a teacher of Hebrew language and Aramaic, areas of study in which he has long maintained an intense interest. He has translated several books, articles, and poems from Hebrew into English, including Introduction to the Literature of the Hebrew Bible by Alexander Rofé, and has translated for PBS’s “Frontline”.

Meet Harvey and other faculty and students at one of our fall open houses, Ta Sh’ma (Come & Hear) November 18 (in-person) or online (Dec. 8). Learn more and register. 

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