This page was originally written in April 2017.
Today let’s look at the Hebrew word pdt/pdwt (the vowel u can either be represented by a w or not represented at all). But first, a little background. This background can serve as a quick-and-dirty introduction to the problems of little-used Hebrew words. That’s what the post is really about; pedut is just a prop to illustrate.
A Lot of Background
In day to day life, one way to figure out what a word means is to look it up in a dictionary. This is a practical solution to the problem, “How do I know what a word means?” But it doesn’t solve the problem. It just outsources it to the person who writes the dictionary. How do they know what a word means?
The answer, of course, is the same as the way we acquire most of our vocabulary. You see a word in enough different uses that you can narrow down what it must mean. Meaning is derived from usage. Usage is the only reliable guide to meaning.
Of course, there are extra complication. A word might have several meanings.
For example, take put. If you’re six years old, you know that if you take a piece of bread in your hand, and then use your hand to move that bread to the floor, and then you let go of the bread, you have put the bread on the floor.
As you get older, you’ll hear anomalous uses of the word that don’t quite fit this meaning. Some of the meanings will be kind of like the first meaning, and some won’t be at all. By hearing lots and lots of uses of put, you’ll eventually know what people are talking about when you hear “put things in order,” “put up with him,” “put out,” “put in for a job” and so on.
A popular website lists 47 numbered definitions of put, some split into sub-definitions. How do we know that all 47 meanings exist? Usage. To demonstrate that “put up with” means “tolerate,” for example, we have to find several examples of people using it that way, examples that narrow down the meaning of the phrase to “tolerate” and exclude other possible meanings.
Needless to say, learning of the existence of all 47 meanings would require hundreds or thousands of examples of the word put. The word put is an exceptionally tricky one. A more common word would be one like fork. There’s the implement for eating, a variety of implements and other things that kind of look like the eating fork in a way (tuning fork, fork in the road), and a chess situation that kind of vaguely reminds us of a fork. Working all this out would require somewhat fewer examples than examples of the word put, but still a reasonable number.
Or take the word marmot. There’s (almost) just one definition of marmot. It’s a groundhog. Or, if we want to be more technical, the word is used to refer to the genus Marmota along with some other critters that look similar to members of genus Marmota. It would take literally one well-placed example to work out the basic meaning of marmot. As a child, I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio say that the famous groundhog of groundhog’s day was “actually a marmot.” At that point I knew (roughly) what the word meant. On the other hand, if I wanted to get real technical, I’d probably have to interview some biologists to figure out what all species get called marmots. Then I could learn, are all groundhogs marmots? Are all marmots groundhogs? Are prairie dogs marmots?
A tremendous advantage we have in English is that there are about 2 million different book titles currently in print, and likely 2 billion or more web pages. We have tremendous usage data.
The Problem with Biblical Hebrew
Unfortunately, when it comes to biblical Hebrew, there’s only about a thousand pages of available information. The usage data is much smaller. About 4/5 of our available classical Hebrew (pre-Mishnaic, before c. 200 AD) is just the Bible. The other 1/5 is the various bits and pieces of ancient Hebrew that have survived. We can say for certain that many ancient Hebrew words never got recorded in print at all. And of those that are recorded, many are relatively rare.
Let’s assume that this PDF is basically accurate. It’s from John Watts at BRILL, so it should be. It lists verbs and nouns from most attested to least. Let’s stick with nouns because verbs get complicated by issues with the various binyanim. On this list, there’s only about 350 nouns that appear 50 or more times. So for a biblical Hebrew equivalent of fork, we will likely never stumble across a rare meaning like the specialized chess meaning. For a biblical critter like the equivalent of a marmot, we will certainly never be able to nail down exactly what species get called a marmot.
The very “worst” cases, if your goal is to know the precise meanings of words, are the hapax legomena. Due to various complications, there’s isn’t even precise agreement on exactly how many hapaxes there are in the Hebrew Bible. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (an old work but one I’d trust for this stat), there are 1500 words in the Hebrew Bible that occur only once. About 1100 of these seem to be close enough to other words that you can get a pretty decent fix on their meaning (like a noun that’s very similar to a known verb, for example). But 400 are “strict” hapaxes — they’re just a word that occurs once, and isn’t obviously related to another word.
For a strict hapax, you might as well just have a question mark there in the Hebrew text. There’s various ways to guess at the meaning, but usually you can’t narrow it down. All you can do is look at the nearby words and guess what the hapax means. You can also look at early translations like the Septuagint or Vulgate, but for all you know they might just be guessing as well.
And the basic hapax problem applies not just to hapaxes. Let’s go back to put. Imagine that the internet disappeared, and most books disappeared, and all we had of English was one person’s personal library. We’re historians, and we’re trying to learn what we can from a couple hundred books. This would put us well ahead of a biblical scholar, who has to work essentially from one big book.
Even so, suppose we worked out a dozen meanings of put with a fair amount of confidence. Then we find just one single book that mentions a person putting a golf ball. Imagine we’ve even worked out that golf appears to be a leisure sport (though we don’t know the rules in any detail). For all practical purposes, this usage of put is a hapax. In fact, it’s even pronounced differently in the vowel, but we don’t know that.
We might never figure out what is happening when we read that “Tiger Woods adjusted his putting stroke.” The word stroke has several meanings, after all, and even if we figured it out we might not know what’s going on. We might come up with a false guess, in which we mispronounce the word put and derive some idea from the more normal meanings of put. But we won’t realize that putting in this case refers to a particular way of just sort of tapping the little white ball, generally done when you’re close to putting the ball in the little hole on the manicured part of the green (and of we’ll likely mess up what “the green” is as well if we come across it).
If we come away thinking that we understand putting, we’re wrong. If we produce a “dictionary of American English” on the basis of our guess, it will be wrong. And if we “translate” these passages into our future-language, we’ll translate it wrong.
Something like this has to be the case with the Bible. There’s no way around it. The entire corpus of ancient Hebrew contains about 539,069 words [1], meaning that the entire preserved collection of ancient Hebrew is smaller than Tolstoy’s single novel War and Peace [2]. If you tried to reconstruct the English language from a single copy of War and Peace, of course you wouldn’t figure everything out.
[1] See page 63 of Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew: Steps Toward an Integrated Approach, by Robert Rezetko and Ian Young. [2] 561,304 words.
PDWT: Four Verses
That said, let’s look at pd(w)t. As a wise man once said, when dealing with biblical Hebrew, go first to the concordance and only later to the dictionary. The dictionaries, after all, are based on people who look through concordances and try to figure out the words from their usage anyhow. The word appears in four places:
So what does pdwt mean? Well, for one thing, based on its form, with the ending -wt, it looks like an abstract noun. Examples 3 and 4 set it next to words for rescuing or liberation (natsal in Isaiah, padah in Psalm 130:6), so those are likely synonyms. In all four examples, pdwt is something God does. In the first three examples, it is clearly something God does for the good of Israel. I think it’s fair to say that the context of 1, 2, 4 all include or allude to the idea of God judging his enemies, and the same idea could well be at play in Psalm 130, although Psalm 130 seems more concerned with deliverance from guilt or punishment. Examples 1 and 3 have some (at least metaphorical) physical aspect: God places pdwt (or place a pdwt) in 1, and God uses his arm for pdwt in 4.
Just based on usage, I think a first good guess would be something like “liberation”, at least for 2, 3, 4. Although etymology doesn’t prove meaning, it can be suggestive. Abstract -wt nouns tend to be formed from other words, and the padah “rescue/liberation” of Psalm 130 looks like a good candidate, perhaps with the connotation of liberation from some enemy or threat. If you formed an abstract -wt noun from the verbal root pdh, pedut is exactly the form you would expect (the final h disappears in situations like this).
Now, different languages have different sorts of idioms, but in the last three cases, rescue/liberation all seem to work pretty well in English. If you look up those uses in the King James Bible, you’ll find redemption or redeem in all three cases, which is similar but more theologically loaded.
But the odd verse out is Exodus 8:19. Can you say, I will place redemption between my people and your people? I don’t think do. One might rescue the Israelites from the Egyptians, but one would not “place redemption” between them. Other commentators over the centuries have noticed this problem as well.[2]
[3] See A. A. Macintosh, Exodus VIII 19, Distinct Redemption and the Hebrew Roots פדה and פדד, in Vetus Testamentum, December 1971, pp. 548-555.
Something’s Wrong Here
Because we’re trying to reconstruct meanings from a small corpus, we will often be faced with situations where we look and say, Something’s wrong here. What I know about pdwt doesn’t seem to fit this case. As James Barr noted, there’s two possibilities in cases like this.
One possibility is that there’s more to learn about pdwt, maybe an additional meaning that is attested nowhere else in Hebrew. The problem here is that it will be very difficult to prove that this new, unique meaning that appears once is correct. In fact, it will be very hard to even convince most biblical scholars that a newly proposed possibility is even likely to be correct. But while it’s hard to “solve” any particular case (like Exodus 8:23), it must still be in general true that some of the verses in the Bible must contain additional poorly-attested meanings of words, even if we can’t confidently work them out. Call this the “philological” option.
The other possibility is that something has gone wrong in the transmission of the text. If you compare the Masoretic Text, the de facto “standard” text of the Bible, with the Dead Sea Scrolls, you’ll find that about every five or ten words there’s a difference between the Masoretic Text and whichever Dead Sea scroll you’re looking at. So it’s clear that there hasn’t been a word-for-word accuracy in copying the Bible through the centuries. Comparing the Septuagint to the Masoretic Text will also show signs of copying issues. If we choose this option, then, we try and figure out what the text might have originally said before a miscopying produced pdwt. Call this the “text-critical” option.
So, if we go with the philological option, we more or less have to guess, although we can look at similar words in related languages to give our guess some (inconclusive but still useful) support. Traditionally, in various ancient Jewish commentaries, and in the King James Version, the guess has been that pedut here as the sense of “distinction.” God promises to “make a distinction” by having the plague hit the Egyptians but not the Israelites. Macintosh provides one argument for this guess.
If we go with the text-critical option, then we have to try and find what the verse might originally have read. Instead of pdt (pedut, liberation) we could read plt (pelut, which could mean “distinction”). On the other hand, plt “distinction” inconveniently never actually occurs in the Hebrew Bible, although it could easily be derived from the verb plh, “_to distinguish.” Or maybe _pdt is a miscopy of prdt, another hypothetical noun we’d have to construct from prd, “to separate,” as suggested by G. I. Davies [4].
[4] Davies, G. I. “The Hebrew Text of Exodus VIII 19 (Evv. 23) an Emendation.” Vetus Testamentum, vol. 24, no. 4, 1974, pp. 489–492., http://www.jstor.org/stable/1517181.
Conclusion about Pedut
Barring the discovery of a massive ancient Hebrew library, certainly much larger than the Dead Sea Scrolls, there’s no way to know with any confidence what’s going on with pedut.
I have a dream, that one day there will be a translation of the Bible that marks all these uncertain places with question marks. Unfortunately, the Bibles currently available to regular readers usually don’t mark these sorts of spots. A good exception is the NET, which does have very extensive textual notes, but still not quite as extensive as I hope to one day see. But in general, the average reader of the Bible gets the impression that translators know the meanings of the verses with a good deal more confidence than they really do.
People who are one step ahead of the average reader can still be mislead by the reference works they consult. Many of the sorts of reference works in print and on the internet the people consult tend to leave out a lot of uncertainty.
The Dictionary
As a final exercise, let’s look at some of the dictionaries of Hebrew available to English readers who are looking things up online. And, like it or not, “looking it up online” is now the dominant way of looking things up. If it’s not online, it does not exist as far as the non-scholar is concerned.
Here’s Strong’s definition, an outdated and terrible dictionary of Hebrew that seems to be the most commonly cited one by lay people:
“פְּדוּת peduwth, ped-ooth’; or פְּדֻת peduth; from H6929; distinction; also deliverance: — division, redeem, redemption.”
Let’s count the ways this goes wrong. First, there’s the weird transliteration that seems to imply both an u vowel and a w in the word. There’s no w in the pronunciation; just an u, no matter how you spell it. Strong’s idiosyncratic transliterations do provide one valuable service, though. They help you quickly spot people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Someone who writes pedut or peduth or p’duth just might know what they’re talking about. Someone who writes peduwth almost certainly does not.
Second, the idea that “distinction” is the primary meaning, but that the word can “also” mean deliverance is silly. We know the word means something like deliverance. We’re not sure if it ever means distinction. Then there’s the list of three words at the end. These are the words the KJV uses to translate the word. Notice that “redeem” gets put in there. Instead of being literal “Is my arm too shortened for redemption?” the KJV paraphrases “Is my arm shortened at all, that it cannot redeem?” Fine. But the reader should know that, in Hebrew, the word is always a noun, never a verb.
Gesenius is better than Strong. Gesenius gives some additional information, shows where the word occurs, and even gives a reference to another work where you can read more. But still, in his pdwt entry, Gesenius gives two meanings (“(1) division, distinction . . . (2) liberation”) without indicating to the reader that there’s room for doubt about (1).
Brown-Driver-Briggs does even better. If you use just one online dictionary of biblical Hebrew, use BDB. Though it’s filled with abbreviations, I’ll transliterate the foreign text and expand the abbreviations, yielding this entry:
“pdwt. feminine noun, ransom; spelled with the w Psalm 111:9 and two other times; pdt in Exodus 8:19; — ransom from exile, Isaiah 50:2; from iniquities Psalm 130:7; in general Psalm 111:9, samti pedut bein ammi uvein ammekha Exodus 8:19 I will set a ransom (distinguishing) between my people and thy people according to the Targum, but this is improbable and the text doubtful; Septuagint, Syriac, Vulgate set a distinction (reading what?).”
Notice the question mark. Bibles and reference materials should have more of those.
Conclusion about Hebrew
Finding the meaning of biblical Hebrew words is tricky. If you don’t want to be mislead, consult a concordance before you consult a dictionary. If you consult a dictionary, BDB is better than Gesenius or Strong’s.