Why Cabbage and Cherub Sound Identical in Hebrew

[00:00:00]In modern Hebrew, the word for cabbage and the word for cherub are the same word, kruv. Same spelling, same pronunciation, completely different histories. The biblical kind is the winged creature guarding the gate of Eden in Genesis 3. The other kind is the green leafy thing in your soup. They have nothing to do with each other. They came into Hebrew from completely different worlds separated by many centuries and they merged. Here is the story. Cabbage belongs to one of the strangest plant families humans ever domesticated, Brassica oleracea, a scraggly wild herb that grows on European sea cliffs. From that one plant, humans bred cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi. Same species, different body parts exaggerated by cultivation.

[00:00:49]By the 6th century BCE, Greek sources already knew cultivated cabbage. The Greeks called it krambe. It arrived in the land of Israel during the Hellenistic or Roman period. By the time the Mishna was being compiled in the early 3rd century CE, the rabbis already had a name for it, kruv, a Hebrew adaptation of the Greek krambe, probably rooted through Aramaic. That name has nothing to do with the biblical kruv.

[00:01:16]The biblical kruv is a winged angelic creature etymologically related to the Akkadian kalibu, an intercessor figure in Mesopotamian religion. Different origin, different world, different millennium, but in modern Hebrew pronunciation, the two words collapsed into each other. The Hebrew word for cabbage stayed locked in religious texts for centuries. In the Arabic-speaking world, rabbinic commentators like Saadia Gaon and Maimonides glossed the Mishnah's kruv through its Arabic cousin, karnab. Easy. In medieval Europe, Rashi and Rabbi Nathan of Rome assumed everyone knew what kruv meant and didn't bother to gloss it. Then European Jews stopped using the word.

[00:01:57]They started calling cabbage by Yiddish loans: Kohl, Kraut, Kompost, Strunk. By the 19th century, the Hebrew writer Mendele Mocher Sforim was using krov to mean beet. That's how completely the word had drifted from its original referent. Then, modern Hebrew had to put it all back together fast. In 1898, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda needed a Hebrew word for cauliflower. He took the Arabic kohlrabi and built kohlrabi. Beet. He The new word caught immediately. In 1938, the Hebrew Language Committee coined krov nitzanim, sprouts cabbage, for Brussels sprouts.

[00:02:35]That one stuck, too. Later came experiments: krov a kelah for kohlrabi and krov al, super cabbage, is the nickname for kale. The old Mishnaic cabbage word had become productive again. This is what happens to old words. A Greek vegetable enters rabbinic Hebrew as krov. A biblical angelic creature was already krov. Modern Hebrew makes them sound identical. The plant falls out of view, the word holds its place, and when modern Hebrew needs to name a family of vegetables it hasn't had names for in 2,000 years, it reaches for the same word and puts it back to work. A Hebrew word for cabbage that also meant cherub is not a coincidence.

[00:03:18]It's a record of every language Hebrew has had to absorb. Now you know.