Yegar Sahaduta


יגר שהדותה


Genesis 31:47 names it, in 
Aramaic, as the stone pillar set up by Ya'akov as a cairn of witness for his contract with Lavan; Ya'akov called the place Gal-Ed (גלד), which may or may not be the same place as Gil'ad; but Lavan called it Yegar-Sahaduta, which opens up a question about which languages did the different parts of the Abrahamic family speak; not a question that is ever raised in Tanach studies, commentaries or discussions, nor even overtly inferred; yet this verse tacitly infers it.

"Yagar" means "a hill: or "heap of stones: more likely a cromlech than a cairn; the latter a stone-based burial mound; the former a sacred mound or pillar, as in this case. Both of the links that I have given here will inform you, correctly, that the words "cromlech" and "cairn" are Celtic; what neither will tell you is that the same occurrences, by their own local names, can be found throughout the world, from Mali to Guatemala, from Brittany to Yegar-Sahaduta, whether like the one in Graubünden, Switzerland in the illustration above, or the Observatory in Colombia in the illustration below.



Gal-Ed likewise means "stone of witness"; Gal appears in 
Gil-Gal, the stone circles in the same manner as at Stonehenge (and the "Observatory", just north of Bogota in Colombia, which is why I have chosen the second illustration) that were erected as temples by the neolithic megalith cultures (Galgal = "wheel"; whence Golgolet = skull, which gives us the Golgotha, or more correctly Golgot-Yah, of Matthew 27:33).

Yagor came to mean "to fear" in later Yehudit, presumably from the notion of fear as reverence for a sacred place. Cf Job 3:25 and 9:28; Psalm 119:39. Also Deuteronomy 9:19 and 28:60; Jeremiah 22:25 and 39:17. To the best of my knowledge, no one uses this verb in contemporary Ivrit, preferring the root Pachad (פַּחַד).

Google Translate actually offers several words for "fear", with Yagor coming last on the list, and rendered incorrectly as a variant of the verb LAGUR = "to live", presenting it as a verb because it is presumably unable to find the connecting root (there isn't one because it wasn't originally Yehudit), and treating it as though it were Yehudit and not Aramaic. The others are: פַּחַד (pachad) = fear, fright, dismay, dread, terror, consternation; חֲשָׁשׁ (chashash) = fear, apprehension, anxiety, misgiving; אֵימָה (eymah) = terror, fear, dread, alarm, luridness, menace; בְּעָתָה (be'atah) = horror, panic, fear, consternation; מוֹרָא (mor'a) = fear, awe, reverence, fright, respect; דְחִילָה (dechilah - also an unused Aramaic root) = awe, fear, anxiety; דְאָגָה (de'agah) = concern, worry, care, anxiety, fear, solicitude; מְגוֹרָה; fear, fright, terror; יִראָה (yirah) = fear, awe, dread; לָגוּר (lagur) = to live, to dwell, to reside, to inhabit, to sojourn, to fear - and note that the word "fear" comes last in this list too, because the others are the correct meaning.
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