How a Hebrew Cooking Pot Ended Up in Your Hip

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]On May 20th, 1942, four doctors sat down at the Hebrew Language Committee in Jerusalem to decide what to call the hip socket. They picked mah khesh et, a word that for 3,000 years had meant some kind of cooking vessel. Nobody knows exactly which kind. That's why it was available.

[00:00:16]The word first shows up in Leviticus chapter 2. Moses lays out the rules for grain offerings at the temple. Two types get their own vessel. One made al hamakhvat, on the makhvat, and one called minchat mah khesh et, the mah khesh et offering. Two words, two objects, one problem. By the time anyone tried to define them, both objects had already disappeared. The earliest translation attempt is the Septuagint, the Greek Bible, produced in Alexandria around the 3rd century BCE. The translators rendered makhvat as teganon, a shallow clay cooking vessel with a short handle. The Greek word went everywhere. It gave Hebrews a verb letagen, to fry. It crossed into North Africa and became tajine, the conical clay pot and the slow-cooked stew inside it. Some linguists trace the Greek itself back to the Semitic word agan, meaning basin. A word bouncing between languages for millennia, and people are still eating from it. Mah khesh et got a worse deal. The Septuagint translated it as eskhara, a Greek word with too many meanings: hearth, coal pot, grill, torch, base. When your translation is five things at once, it's nothing. By the Mishna, around 200 CE, the rabbis already didn't know. Tractate Menachot chapter 5 asks the question directly: What is the difference between a makhvat and a mah khesh et? Rabbi Yossi Ha Gelili says the makhvat has no lid. The mah khesh et does. Rabbi Nechemia ben Gamliel disagrees. The mah khesh et is deep and its contents bubble, or khashin. The makhvat is flat and its contents are hard. Two rabbis, two answers. The debate itself is the evidence. If they had the object in front of them, they wouldn't need to argue. This was after the temple's destruction. The vessels were gone. Only words remained. Medieval rabbis settled on a consensus. Machvat was flat for baking dough. Machshefet was deep for frying batter in oil. But Christians read the text differently and they may have been right. Look at the Hebrew.

[00:02:13]Leviticus says the offering is made al hamachvat, on the machvat. You put something on it. It's a surface. But the machshefet offering is just minchat machshefet, not al hamachshefet, not ba'machshefet, no on, no in. Maybe machshefet isn't a vessel at all. Jerome translating the Bible into Latin around 400 CE rendered it as caticula, a grill.

[00:02:37]Many modern translations follow him. The King James version went the other way.

[00:02:42]Machshefet became frying pan, machvat became pan, closer to Jewish tradition.

[00:02:47]The object is gone. Only the arguments survive. In the 19th century, the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, revived Hebrew as a spoken language.

[00:02:55]Writers needed words for modern kitchen tools and pressed both machvat and machshefet back into service. Both describe something like a frying pan.

[00:03:04]Ma'aseh machshefet meant the act of frying. For a while, the two words shared a kitchen. Then Eliezer ben Yehuda tried to impose order. In his dictionary, he assigned machvat to a shallow-sided pan and machshefet to a deep-sided one. It didn't stick.

[00:03:18]Speakers chose machvat and let machshefet drift. By the early 20th century, the word was homeless. Expelled from the kitchen with nowhere to go.

[00:03:27]Until the hip socket. In 1935, a physician and historian named Zisman Montner needed a Hebrew term for the acetabulum, the cup-shaped socket in the pelvis where the femur sits. The Latin acetabulum literally means vinegar vessel. The Romans named it after a small dish because of its shape. In German, it's Haufgelenkspfanne.

[00:03:49]Hip joint pan. And Pfanne means both socket and frying pan. Montnail proposed two options, makheshat haklitit and makhvat haklitit, the pan of the pelvis.

[00:04:01]Seven years later in an anatomy terminology session, first item on the agenda, acetabulum.

[00:04:07]They chose makheshat and noted specifically not makhvat, a word that spent 3,000 years failing to be clearly defined, pan, pot, grill, deep fryer, or possibly nothing, found its permanent home inside the human body. Now you know.