Confusion about Hebrew

Adam isn't just related to earth; the name is also related to blood (the first plague, in Hebrew, is Dahm, or blood in the Nile).

I was just wondering does anybody know what "Shadow of God" would translate into?

It's just my attempts to find a translation have gone south. I found one site stating that Malak means Shadow of God, but several others saying that it means Messenger.

And Tzelel just sounds wrong...

The word "earth" in Hebrew is "eretz". The problem is that when you transliterate from one alphabet to another, you sometimes get a confusing number of transliterations.

I always thought eretz was land, as in nation or country. You know, eretz Yisroel is the land of Israel, and eretz Mitzrayim is the land of Egypt (or, more accurately, the land of the Egyptians). Earth in the sense of dirt, e. g. what you farm is adamah, because if you change the last word of the prayer over wine ("has commanded us to eat of the fruit of the vine"), you get b'ray p'ree ha adamah (instead of b'ray p'ree ha gofen) which changes the meaning to "has commanded us to eat of the fruit of the earth", e. g. vegetables. That prayer is used at Passover before you eat the celery or whatever you've just dipped into salt water.

Malak or Malachi is messenger.

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0101.htm



Jes- Can you read Hebrew?

Freely transliterated, that quote reads, "B'rashes barah elohim es ha shamayim vies haeretz."

Therefore that other site I went to must have people talking out of their rear ends. So what would Shadow of God be in Hebrew?

And don't get me started on the transliteration. The same goes for Chinese too. It doesn't help that ancient Hebrew doesn't have set vowels.

I'm semi-functionally literate in Hebrew, in that I can sound it out and I know some words but I really don't know enough to carry on any sort of a conversation beyond Todah Rabah (Good Morning). It's very possible that aretz or eretz is also used to refer to the entire earth and not just individual countries. Hmmm.

Oh yeah and the vowels. Oof. Very annoying.

Yeah. And Sephardic pronunciation always sounds to me like Hebrew spoken with a southern accent!

I see... so you wouldn't know what the Hebrew for Shadow, is then.

Sorry, can't help you with that one.

I forgot about the one I'm having the most difficulties with.

Tears.

That's the one where I can't even get close to a decent translation.

Can anybody help me with translation of these two words?

Shadow
Tears

Well, I speak Hebrew so I can probably help you. But you must remember that Hebrew is a Semitic language (i.e. Afro-Asiatic) and so it's considerably different from Western languages. One important idiosyncrasy is that literary Hebrew contains no letters representing vowels.

One more thing, when I transliterate Hebrew words into the Latin alphabet, the [ ' ] sign means that you have to stop after you pronounce the letter preceding the sign, and then continue pronouncing the rest of the word (but it is not the same sound as the deep glottal sound in Arabic). And one last thing, let's set a rule for an important diphthong: [tz] will have the same sound as [zz] in pizza

Tear (singular): dim'a
Tears (plural): dmaot

Shadow (singular): tzel
Shadow (plural): tzlalim

Earth: adama / eretz / karka (ground) / afar (also: ash)

Rock: even (stone) / sela

Red: adom

Shadow of God: tzel elohim / tzel el

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. :wink:

No, that helps a lot. I understand why some people say Adam means red and not earth now.

Dmaot looks difficult to pronounce and I speak Cantonese, which has an insanely large number of different intonations.

Thanks so much, Zauberin, and welcome to Able2know.

Interesting how man, red, earth, blood, Adam and land all kind of come together.

I was wondering, what is the Hebrew for Heaven and is it different for the Hebrew for Paradise?