🧵 THREAD: Think English spelling is chaos? Hebrew says "hold my beer" with 22 letters, zero vowels, and pure linguistic anarchy.
Let me introduce you to the most unhinged writing system ever created... 1/12 2/ Meet Alef (א): the ultimate shapeshifter. In ani (אני), it's "a." In eretz (ארץ), "e." In eem (אם), "ee." In rosh, somehow "o." And in or (אור)? Dead silent. One letter, five personalities, zero consistency.

1/12 🧵 Epic travel day—three flights across four countries with my wife and kids. So naturally, here’s the etymology of the Hebrew word for airplane ✈️ 2/12 December 17th, 1903. Two bicycle mechanics from Ohio achieve the impossible—human flight. But they have no word for what they’ve just invented. They simply call it “The Machine.”

1/12 🕯️ Jews pray three times daily for a messiah to come. But here's the twist: the Torah never mentions this idea. At all.
So how did Jews go from having no messiah to obsessing over one? 🧵 2/12 The word "messiah" DOES appear in the Torah, but it just means "anointed priest"—nothing cosmic, nothing world-changing.
The answer to this transformation is heartbreak.

1/12 ✈️ How did Israeli flight attendants get their name? It took a lexicographer, an author, and a politician to give Israeli stewardesses the word "dayelet."
This is that wild story. 🧵 2/12 Let's start with the lexicographer: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Early 1900s, he's reviving Hebrew and needs a word for "waiter."

1/12 🎸 A 17-year-old Greek kid follows a girl to Israel. She's engaged. He stays anyway—and accidentally invents Israeli rock music.
This is the wild true story of Aris San. 2/12 1957. Aristidis Saïsanás is busking in Turkish tavernas when he meets an Israeli girl—and falls hard. She sails home. He follows on the next boat. No plan. No Hebrew. Just love.

🧵 Thread: The biblical word that stumped humanity for 2,000 years—and it's probably in your living room right now. 1/8 Meet agartal (אגרטל)—a Hebrew word that appears exactly ONCE in the entire Bible. In Ezra 1:9, it's listed among temple treasures: "Thirty gold agartalim, a thousand silver agartalim..."
But what ARE agartalim? 🤔

🧵 THREAD: The Hidden Meaning Behind Israel's Operation Name
You've probably heard the name: "Operation Rising Lion." But that's not what it's called in Hebrew.
The real name is עַם כְּלָבִיא – Am KeLavi — "A people like a lion." 1/7 It comes from the Book of Numbers. Balaam, the prophet hired to curse the Israelites, ends up saying: "Behold, a people rises like a lion…"
The curse becomes a blessing. They meant to harm us — and we rose. It's a name with teeth. 2/7

🧵 THREAD: The Arabic word that secretly names every magazine you read
You pick up a magazine. You load bullets into a machsanit (Hebrew). You think these are unrelated words. You're wrong. They're the EXACT same word. Here's the incredible story... 1/8 Both words trace back to Arabic "makhzan"—meaning storehouse. Renaissance Italian merchants trading with Arabs brought it back as "magazzino." It traveled to France as "magasin," then England as "magazine." 2/8

1/12 🧵 You know this symbol: @
In English, we call it the "at sign." But around the world? It's a zoo, a menu, and sometimes... a nipple.
Here's how one symbol became a thousand different things 👇 2/12The @ first appeared in 1536 in a Spanish merchant's letter as shorthand for "arroba"—a weight unit from Arabic.
French merchants used it for "at the price of." English just called it "at."
Then 1971 happened, and everything changed.

1/ Why is the jacaranda tree in Hebrew called sigalon?
The story is more poetic—and political—than you’d expect. 🌳🧵
#Hebrew #Etymology #Jacaranda 2/ The jacaranda isn’t native to Israel—it’s from Brazil. The name yakaranda comes from the Tupi-Guarani word for “fragrant.”

1/7 FASCINATING LANGUAGE FACT: How Modern Hebrew created its own version of the English "-able" suffix through a brilliant linguistic pivot that nobody planned. 2/7 While English simply adds "-able" to verbs (readable, breakable), Hebrew repurposed an ancient pattern—qatíl—that originally meant completely different things! "ʿashír" meant "rich," not "enrichable."

1/ The Hebrew word for "ephemeral" has the most dramatic origin story you'll hear today, featuring divine intervention, a sulking prophet, and a mysteriously vanishing plant... 🧵 2/ In the Book of Jonah, after God spares Nineveh (making Jonah look like a false prophet), our dramatic hero storms off to a hill declaring he wants to die. Classic prophet behavior.

1/ Habemus Papam! While the world hails a new pope, Hebrew headlines call him אֲפִיפְיוֹר (afifyor). But this word isn't Latin at all—it's Aramaic and appears only once, in a Talmudic tale (Avodah Zarah 11a). 2/ The story features Onkelus bar Kelonimos, a brilliant Roman noble—nephew of the emperor, according to tradition—who decides to convert to Judaism. Furious, the emperor dispatches legionaries to drag him back.

1/ My great-grandfather, Wolf Gindsberg, was an insurance salesman in Leipzig, Germany, with his wife Fanny and two children—my grandfather Joseph and his sister Rahel. 2/ When the Nazis came to power, Wolf saw what many couldn't: This wasn't passing. It was catastrophic.

1/10 In the early centuries of Christianity, believers didn't agree on when to celebrate Easter. A fascinating story of calendars, power, and religious identity... 2/10 In Asia Minor and Jerusalem, Christians marked Easter on the 14th of Nisan—the date of Jewish Passover—regardless of the day of the week. They followed the tradition of apostles John and Philip.

1/11 Have you heard the story of the Four Who Entered Pardes? It's one of the most mysterious tales in the Talmud, exploring the dangers of mystical knowledge. 2/11 The Talmud simply states: "Four entered the Pardes: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher, and Rabbi Akiva."

1/9 You'll never believe which common Israeli slang word actually comes from ancient Rome! The fascinating journey of "awanta" (אוונטה) spans 2,000 years, multiple empires, and at least five languages! 🇮🇱 🇮🇹 🇹🇷 🗣️ 2/9 It all started with the Latin word 'abante' meaning 'before' - used by ordinary Romans as far back as the 3rd century. There's even an ancient inscription about a child "stolen abante his father's eyes by nymphs in a whirlpool." 🏛️

1/13 The recent film "The Brutalist" brought to mind the fascinating journey of the Hebrew word for "architect" – אַדְרִיכָל (adrichal). Its etymology reveals an astonishing linguistic voyage across millennia and civilizations. 2/13 Our story begins in ancient Sumer, one of humanity's earliest civilizations. In Sumerian, "É" meant "house" and "GAL" meant "big." These words combined to form "ÉGAL" – literally "big house" – their term for "palace" or temple.

1/7 The Book of Esther isn't just a holiday tale—it's actually a sophisticated piece of political writing designed to elevate a particular family line. The evidence? It's hidden in plain sight within the text itself. 2/7 Notice how carefully the author establishes Mordechai's royal lineage: "Mordecai...son of Jair, son of Shimei, son of Kish, a Benjamite" (Esther 2:5). This deliberately connects him to King Saul's family—Kish was Saul's father!

1/ Exciting news! 🎉 After years of work, the Tal-Florentin academic edition of the Samaritan Bible is now freely available online. This project has been a major part of my life, and today I want to share not just its publication, but what makes these texts so fascinating. 🧵 2/ Most people don’t realize there are two versions of the Torah. 📜 The Jewish version (Masoretic Text) is widely known, but the Samaritans preserved a different version—with thousands of variations, some minor, some major.

1/9 Most Israelis don't know the origins of the verbs "להתפלח" (lehitfaleakh) and "לפלח" (lefaleakh) – to sneak into and to pilfer respectively – though they use them quite a lot. I'm proud to say that I was the first to uncover their slippery etymologies. 2/9 Their story begins in the Talmud, with an account of Rav Ashi who was once presented with a fish that resembled a "צלופח" (tzlofakh) and asked if it was kosher. This is the ONLY occurrence of this word in all ancient Hebrew texts!