Perizim

פרזים


Not to be confused, as many people do, with Parets (פָּרֶץ) - who is regulrly pronounced Pharets - the twin-brother of Zarach (זָרַח) - though it was probably Zerach - and the son of Yehudah (יְהוּדָה) and Tamar (תמר). The reason for the confusion? All Yehudit words that have a Tsade (צ - or ץ when it is the final letter in a word) are, for reasons that go back to Saint Jerome, are represented as if they were the letter Zayin (ז) in European translations. The correction would be easy to make in contemporary editions, but no one has seen fit to do so, not even the Jewish translators, who should surely know better (though the ambiguity over Parets and Pharets, and over Zerach and Zarach shows that we, the Jewish translators, really and truthfully do not know better).

The Perizim (if you are googling them, you might want to try it with "zz"), who are the subject here, and who definitely should not be confused with the Ba'al Perazim misnomered in English translations of 2 Samuel 5:20 (that too has a Tsade not a Zayin - בַּעַל פְּרָצִים - and should therefore be pronounced Ba'al Peratsim) derive from the eponymous Perez (פרז), about whom absolutely nothing whatsoever is known, except that the Beney Perez, called the Perizim in Genesis 13:7; 15:20 and 34:30, as well as in Exodus 3:8, 3:17 and 33:2, all state that they lived alongside the Beney Kena'an (Canaanites), as the principal inhabitants of the land, dwelling in the mountains of Yehudah; and that Yehoshu'a (Joshua) later overcame them (Joshua 11:3, 17:15), though not entirely, because Judges 1:4 has further warfare between them and the tribe of Yehudah, and King Shelomoh (Solomon) three hundred years later was still enforcing slavery on those that were left (1 Kings 9:20).

The meaning, and thereby the explanation of who they actually were, is not easy to extrapolate from the etymological evidence. Deuteronomy 3:5 has "Arey ha-perazi - עָרֵי הַפְּרָזִי", as a very clear distinction between fortified cities (Arim betsurot - עָרִים בְּצֻרֹת) and unwalled villages and towns. 1 Samuel 6:18 makes the same distinction in marginally different language, distinguishing the Ir mivtsar (עִיר מִבְצָר) from the Kopher ha-perazi (כֹּפֶר הַפְּרָזִי). Esther 9:19 makes a different distinction, between Ha Perazim (הַפְּרָזִ֗ים) for the villages, and Ha Perazot (הַפְּרָזוֹת֒) for the unwalled towns; the former employing the masculine, the latter the feminine.

What we can deduce then is that Perez was the original Biblical rustic, and those who came after him were villagers or country-dwellers in the sense of the Latin "pagan", which became the French "paysan", which in turn became the English "peasant", as distinguished from their urban equivalents, the "hoi poloi" in Greek, the "plebeians" in Latin, the proletariat in Marxist terminology today. But a general description of any-people, and not the name of a specific ethnic group.

As with the Esther above, Ezekiel 38:11 and Zechariah 2:8 (Zechariah 2:4 in some English translations) both have Perazot (פרזות), the feminine form giving "countryside" or "villages" as opposed to "fortified" or "walled towns". The Yehudit root of Kena'an (Canaan), from the Hurrian word Kinnahu, is Kanah (כנה), which is believed (but see below) to mean "low regions" or "plains", therefore also having the sense of countryside; probably, from what we have seen above, both were rural inhabitants, but not wandering Bedou, which is to say sedentary in small towns and villages, with the Beney Kena'an probably occupying the flat-lands and, if there was such a group, the Beney Perez the hills. This is likely as near as we are going to get.

There is then another layer of complication, because most of the above references are in fact from very late textual evidence, but the Perizites appear in Genesis which, though written down late, was an ancient part of the oral tradition. Did it then have an earlier meaning? Answer, possibly yes.
Perazon (פרזון) appears, once only in the Tanach, in Judges 5:7, where it means - and that is the problem, because we really don't know what it means. The phrase in full is "chadlu perazon be Yisra-el - חָדְלוּ פְרָזוֹן בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל", a prosaic rendering, if you like, of Yeats' famous description of Ireland, when "mere anarchy" was "loosed upon the world". Something fell apart anyway (the meaning of chadlu), and the centre could not hold, leading to that period of history in which men did "ke matsa chen be eyneyhem - as they found fit in their own eyes"; but what was it that collapsed? Rule from the centre, as some scholars suggest by translating Perazon as "rule" or "dominion"; or the vital village structure of clans and elders and chiefs, which encourages other translators to prefer "villages"? Certainly not BibleHub's translation of the phrase as "the peasantry ceased", without then stating what it was that they ceased from. There is, again, no definitive answer.

Habakkuk 3:14 then adds still one more layer to the difficulty, with "nakavta ve matav rosh perazar - נָקַבְתָּ בְמַטָּיו רֹאשׁ פְּרָזָו", which Mechon-Mamre renders unintelligibly as "Thou hast stricken through with his own rods the head of his rulers", while English Standard Version is simply inaccurate with "You pierced with his own arrows the heads of his warriors" and the New International Version makes the same error with "With his own spear you pierced his head".

The problem is that Rosh means "head" (though it has other meanings too, such as "source"), and Paraz (פרז) is being used here to mean "head" in the sense of "leader"; the problem of two heads being less easy to figure out than one...

There is also Paraz (פרז) = "to decide", which may be the root of the officer/leader/clan-chief/ruler of Judges, or more likely, since it is late texts that use it in this way, a meaning that evolved, as language does.

And on that subject, I said "see below" in reference to the meaning of Kinnahu. The distinction between the Beney Perez as hill-dwellers in contrast to the Beney Kena'an as plains-dwellers is probably correct geographically, but not etymologically. The Hurrian word "kinnahu" meant "purple", and was given to the southern area of land where the purple dyes were elicited from the murex sea snail; the northern area was also called "purple", but in the Phoenician not the Hurrian language - "phoinix". So originally Canaanites meant "workers in dye", and it happened that the industry was based in the lowlands and along the coast, and so the second meaning evolved with time.

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