1) NECHER
Usage generally emphasises the "strangeness", in the sense of something "unfamiliar", and therefore "foreign", though the Chaldean and Syriac equivalent "repudiates", "contemns" and even "pollutes" – so that the object in question is not simply strange, but always negatively so.
So the belief among many of us that racism stems from unfamiliarity applies here, with NECHER having the sense of "ignorant" - pure ignorance, the absence of knowledge, in Job 24.13. In Deuteronomy 32:27 for example, where ignorance breeds misunderstanding, or Job 21:29, where cultural differences lead to phobias: "ask now those that go by the way, and you will not be ignorant of their signs". Familiarity breeds knowledge breeds understanding breeds empathy, where ignorance through unfamiliarity breeds fear, and fear leads to push-back and rejection.
From these we can now see why the root of NECHER is the same that yields LEHAKIR, which means "to know", but specifically in the French sense of "connaître" rather than "savoir", "recognition" rather than "cognition". Dozens of uses of this verb, as physical recognition in Genesis 27:23, 31:32 and 37:33, or at the next level, of familiarity breeding deeper understanding, in Nehemiah 6:12.
Move the root into the passive (Niphal), and then use the reflexive as well, and Genesis 42:7, like 1 Kings 14:5/6, has dissimulation or feigning, deliberately making others mis-recognise – the pretense of being something you are not, which therefore makes you strange. This danger of facial mis-recognition is alerted in Isaiah 3:9, though Isaiah also makes a very precise distinction between LADA'AT (savoir) and LEHAKIR (connaître) at 63:16. Worth looking at Deuteronomy 1:17 and 16:19, and see my notes at each of them, for a very subtle further nuance about the corrupt misuse of facial recognition, our tendency, often unconscious, to favouritise those we know or recognise: family, celebrities, politicians.
LEHAKIR is the verb that Nechem-Yah uses in 13:24, to express his dismay and disappointment that his own people no longer know how to speak their own language: AYNAM MAKIYRIM; where Ezra, at exactly the same epoch, uses LADA'AT, the French "savoir", in 3:13 of his book, for people "knowing the difference between", which of course is a cognitive not a recognitive. So this is not a modern understanding being read into the texts; it is unequivocally there: knowable and recognisable.
So there are "strange" people and "strange" countries and "strange" gods (Deuteronomy 31:16 seems to intend all three!), because, like the past in J.P. Hartley's novel "The Go-Between", "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there". Things you have never encountered before, as in Isaiah 28:21. "Strange" people in Psalm 18:44/45 and Obadiah 1:11, "strange" gods in Genesis 35:2 and Jeremiah 5:19, or simply strange fates and destinies, as in Job 31:3; but especially strange people, which is the most common usage, as in Exodus 21:8, Ecclesiastes 6:2 and many others.
2) GOY
The root is GAVAH (גוה), but it is complicated by there being two roots that are identically spelled, a consequence of evolution in language – an American, for example, could tell you a story about a multi-story building, or try to curb your bad habit of stepping off the curb, but no Englishman could do either, because the second "story" is spelled "storey", and the second "curb" is spelled "kerb". Probably there was once GIYAH and GAVAH, the former having to do with "pride", and things being "exalted" or "elevated" in a manner that would engender pride (Job 22:29 and 33:17, Jeremiah 13:17, many others); the latter is the one we are examining here.
But our GAVAH appears to be complicated at a second level too, because it is used for things "coming together", or even, in the case of water, "flowing together", and this is precisely how it is used to this day in Arabic; and at the same time it means "a body" (see below). How can these two dissimilarities "come together" as a single meaning? And what does this have to do with "foreignness"? Ah, but of course, when people "come together" as a tribe or nation, they form a "body politic", and so we have GOY very much as the "Corpus Reipublicae" of Aristotle, and later of Cicero. So in Genesis 25:23 (which adds another layer to this, by introducing the word LE'UMI for "nation", from the root AM = "people"), Isaiah 1:4, Psalm 79:10, many others. And only in a later development does GOYIM come to mean "non-Jews" – logically enough, since all other nations followed other gods than the Jewsh god, so the totality of "others" "flowed together" into a single concept: non-Jews.
It would appear that GAVAH as "body politic" came first, and from there the root came to be used for the body itself, the root even extended to yield GEVIYAH - Nechem-Yah uses it in 9:37, and it can be seen at Genesis 47:18, Ezekiel 1:11 and 23, Daniel 10:6, with the corpus becoming a corpse, a dead body, in 1 Samuel 31:10 and 12, Nachum 3:3, Judges 14:8 and 9. (And yes, the development could have been the other way around, the body coming before the body politic, but the grammatical form of Geviyah is late Yehudit, and then see my note on Geb below).
Which leads me to wonder if a second linguistic merging might not have taken place, because that corpse is likely to be laid to rest in a burial mound, a tumulus (click the link, but also go back to Judges 14:8 and follow it through to my page on Devorah and the bee-hive tombs), and in Biblical Kena'an that burial mound could well have been named for the Egyptian god of the Underworld, Geb – as in Gev'a and Giv-On and Giv'ah. But they are all spelled with a Vet, not a Vav. Perhaps, in a pre-literate world, or in the same way as the American variations, which are dialect-based, the homophone became a homonym, just as GIYAH and GAVAH had done previously.
3) GER
From the root that yields the verb LAGUR, "to live" in the sense of "dwelling" or "inhabiting" (life itself is either LEHIYOT for "being", as in YAH and YHVH, or LECHIYOT for "existing", as in CHAVAH). So "GERCHA ASHER BI SH'EAREYCHA" of Exodus 20:10 is really "the person who happens to be dwelling within your gates at that moment", your gates meaning your house, or your city; and this could be any person, Jew or non-Jew, some temporary passer-through with or without a visa, a foreign worker, a trader or tourist; and regardless of whether he or she is NACHRI or GOY. Quite simply: anyone who "is dwelling" there at that moment.
Which leads me to wonder if a second linguistic merging might not have taken place, because that corpse is likely to be laid to rest in a burial mound, a tumulus (click the link, but also go back to Judges 14:8 and follow it through to my page on Devorah and the bee-hive tombs), and in Biblical Kena'an that burial mound could well have been named for the Egyptian god of the Underworld, Geb – as in Gev'a and Giv-On and Giv'ah. But they are all spelled with a Vet, not a Vav. Perhaps, in a pre-literate world, or in the same way as the American variations, which are dialect-based, the homophone became a homonym, just as GIYAH and GAVAH had done previously.
3) GER
From the root that yields the verb LAGUR, "to live" in the sense of "dwelling" or "inhabiting" (life itself is either LEHIYOT for "being", as in YAH and YHVH, or LECHIYOT for "existing", as in CHAVAH). So "GERCHA ASHER BI SH'EAREYCHA" of Exodus 20:10 is really "the person who happens to be dwelling within your gates at that moment", your gates meaning your house, or your city; and this could be any person, Jew or non-Jew, some temporary passer-through with or without a visa, a foreign worker, a trader or tourist; and regardless of whether he or she is NACHRI or GOY. Quite simply: anyone who "is dwelling" there at that moment.
And yet it has come to mean "foreigner", "stranger", "ex-patriate" – cf Genesis 15:13, Exodus 2:22 and 18:3 - despite the fact that there is a very specific phrase used elsewhere to denote that distinction – TOSHAV in Genesis 23:4, as opposed to EZRACH in Exodus 12:19.
TOSHAV is really the key to understanding this, because LASHEVET means "to sit" or "to settle", which is why Jews in the Diaspora have always referred to Israel as the "Yishuv", “the place where we were settled”. A Yishuv is a homeland, a fixed and staying-there place, where one expects to live one's whole life (not counting holidays and occasional jobs abroad), and raise one's children, and establish roots, but when you take that holiday, when you spend a year on an archaeological dig, or three months of your GAP-year in a school, that is LAGUR, just as it is on your diplomatic posting to the Embassy, or your secondment to company HQ for a short period. GER is temporary; TOSHAV, like EZRACH (citizenship) is permanent. A TOSHEV ARA'I, in contemporary Israel, is a person who has been granted "permanent resident" status, but not yet citizenship; something like the Green Card in the USA.
Isaiah 5:17 adds an endorsement to this explanation, having GERIM for the Bedou, the nomadic shepherds who never inhabited or dwelled anywhere for longer than a lambing season or a period of good grazing. To be a Bedou is to be permanently passing through.
Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
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