צִפֹּרֶן ṣipporen – nail, tip of angle-tint tool
Semantic Fields:
Utensils Craft
Author(s):
Konrad D. Jenner, Geert Jan Veldman
First published: 2025-03-07
Citation: Konrad D. Jenner, Geert Jan Veldman, צִפֹּרֶן ṣipporen – nail, tip of angle-tint tool,
Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database (sahd-online.com), 2025
(WORK IN PROGRESS)
Introduction
Grammatical type: n.m.
Occurrences: 2x HB (1/1/0); 0x Sir; 2x Qum; 0x Inscr. (Total: 4)
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Torah: Deut 21:12;
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Nebiim: Jer 17:1;
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Qumran: 11Q19 LI:4 (2x).
Ketiv/ Qere: none.
A.1 The word in 11Q19 LI:4 (= 11Q20 XIV:26) is spelled as צפורן. 11Q19 LXIII:12 (= Dt 21:12) has צפורניה (cf. the full reconstruction in 11Q20 XXVI:26). Occurrences of צפורן in the meaning of ‘bird’ are not taken into consideration.
A.2 In 4Q561 fr3:7 the word טפר, ‘fingernail’, is found.
1. Root and Comparative Material
A.1 Root. With regard to a root of צִפֹּרֶן, it might be argued that on the basis of the etymology one would expect the development *ẓupr, ‘nail’ > צוּפְרוֹן (BL, 499-500), ‘little nail’ > Hebrew צִפְרוֹן. The Masoretic vocalisation צִפֹּרֶן (Jer 17:1) may well represent folk-etymologising on the basis of צִפּוֹר, ‘bird’. Even though this is mistaken צִפֹּרֶן must be derived from a different root, √צפר, ‘to twitter, sing (birds)’, it betrays awareness of the meaning ‘bird’s claw’.
A.2 The root and several comparable derivatives are attested in many Semitic languages, and is reconstucted as *tipr (Semitic Etymological Database http://sed-online.ru/reconstructions/10); CEDHL, 55; CDG, 549; HSED, 120).
A.3 Akkadian. ṣipirtu B, ‘a shape of precious stones’ (CAD Ṣ, 202a); ṣipru, ‘crest, spike, beak, point’ (AHw, 1104; AEAD, 105); ṣupru A, ‘nail, fingernail, claw, talon, hoof’ (CAD Ṣ, 250b-253b; AHw, 1113). Possibly also ṣabāru B, ‘to slant’ (CAD Ṣ, 4; AHw, 1065-66), but not the ghost word ṣuppāru, cited by several Hebrew dictionaries.
A.4 Old and Imperial Aramaic. Egyptian Aramaic טפר, ‘toenail’ (ADE, 143).
A.5 Postbiblical Hebrew. Post-Biblical Hebrew: צִפּוֹרֶן or צִפֹּרֶן is attested as ‘nail (of finger or toe), talon (of a bird)’; ‘a digging tool, spade, mattock’; ‘onycha (unguis odoratus) a spice’ (Jastrow DTT, 1296).
A.6 Jewish Aramaic. טופרא, ‘fingernail, toenail, hoof, talon, claw’ (Sokoloff, DJBA, 498; Sokoloff, DJPA, 230); טיפרא, ‘hoof’ (Sokoloff, DJBA, 514).
A.7 Samaritan Aramaic. ṭfr, ‘nail, hoof’, but also ‘chisel’ (Tal, DSA, 323).
A.8 Syriac. ܛܦܪܐ (ṭeprā), ‘nail, hoof, claw, talon’, but also ‘a sharp instrument shaped like a finger-nail’ and ‘onyx-stone’ (Payne Smith, CSD, 181). The latter stone is too soft for engraving purposes, so the determination may be faulty and probably arose from a misunderstanding of the Hexaplaric tradition (see below, Ancient Versions).
A.9 Classical Arabic. ẓufr, ‘nail’, but also ‘spur’ (of a cock) (Lane, 1912-13). Also the verb ẓaffara, ‘to engrave, chisel’ (SDA, t. 2, 83).
A.10 Modern South Arabic. Soqotri ṭefer, ‘nail, claw’ (LSoq, 207); Mehri ẓefer, ‘nail of a finger or toe, claw’ (ML, 83).
A.11 Ethiopic. ṣefr, ‘fingernail, claw’, but also an iron ‘hook’ (LLAe, 1319; CDG, 549).
B.1 The unattested Hebrew form צפר* is mentioned by Waldman 1972: 221-23 (223) in his discussion of the Mishnaic Hebrew ספר, ‘cut the hair, shear, shave’ (Jastrow, DTT, 1017), according to Waldman ספר might be a loanword from Akkadian ṣepēru, ‘to strand, dress the hair, trim’. He connects this with the suggestion of R.C. Thompson (mentioned in CAD Ṣ, 132-34, see Textual Evidence) that ṣepēru has a cognate in Arabic ḍafara, ‘to braid a woman’s hair, a rope’ (cf. Textual Evidence, A.3).
2. Formal Characteristics
A.1 צפרן, a qittal is derived from Proto-Sem. *qitl (Fox 1998: 22), and the noun pattern appears to be: quttul > qittul > qittōl with an uncommon afformative ן- (cf. Zhakevich 2020: 130). Some consider the sufformative -n as a mere helping vowel (cf. GK, §54u). The word might even stem from a noun which as is mentioned above could be reconstructed from the unattested *ẓupr (see Root and Comparative Material, A.1).
3. Syntagmatics
A.1 צפרן is found as צפרן in the construct state (Jer 17:1), and as צִפָּרְנֶֽיהָ in a plural state with a female 3rd person suffix (Deut 21:12).
A.2 צפרן occurs as nomen regens of שָׁמִ֑יר, ‘diamond’, Jer 17:1 (see Figurative Use, A.2).
A.3 צפרן is object of עשׂה qal, ‘to do’ (Deut 21:12; 11Q19 LXIII:12), and נשׂא qal, ‘to carry’ (11Q19 LI:4).
A.4 In Jer 17:1 צפרן is preceded by the preposition בְּ , which introduces the instrument with which the action is performed; כתב qal part pass, ‘written’.
4. Ancient Versions
a. Septuagint (LXX) and other Greek versions:
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περιονυχιεῖς, ‘pare her nails’:1 Deut 21:12;
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ὲν ὄνυχι ἀδαμαντίνῳ, ‘with a steel claw (nail)’:2 Jer 17:1 (Hexaplaric tradition)3 (cf. Figurative Use, A.2);
b. Peshitta (Pesh):
- ܛܦܪܐ (ṭeprā), ‘nail’:4 Deut 21:21; Jer 17:1.
c. Targumim (Tg):
- טפר, ‘fingernail, claw, hoof’:5 Deut 21:12; Jer 17:1.
d. Vulgate (Vg):
- unguis, ‘nail’:6 Deut 21:12; Jer 17:1.
A.1 In LXX verse Jer 17:1 is wanting entirely.
A.2 In Deut 21:12 Peshitta has ܛܦܪ̈ܝܗ̇ (ṭepreh, ‘her nails’). Like Tg, Pesh chooses the same word in Jer 17:1, but one cannot exclude the possibility that it intended one of the derived meanings cited here: Root and Comparative Material, A.8.
A.3 Like Tg and Pesh, Vg has the same word in both cases. Deut 21:12 et circumcidet ungues, ‘she shall pare her nails’, and Jer 17:1 in ungue adamantino, ‘with an iron nail’. However, in this case too, unguis might have a meaning like ‘hook’ (Lewis & Short, LD, 1932).
5. Lexical/Semantic Fields
A.1 Twice, in Deut 21:12 and in 11Q19 LI:4, the word צִפֹּרֶן clearly denotes a part of the body: ‘nail’ or ‘claw’. In the first instance a warrior is ordered to let a female prisoner to shave her hair and pare her nails before he is allowed to take her as wife. In 11Q19 LI:4 a person is unclean for a short period after having been in contact with specified bodyparts (מעצמותמה), among others the ‘nails’ of a dead reptile (or any of כול שרץ הארץ). In Jer 17:1 צִפֹּרֶן is made out of the hard substance שָׁמִ֑יר (see Figurative Use) to engrave the tablet of their (i.e. Judah’s) hearts, here the word is to be seen as a synonym of → עֵט.
6. Exegesis
6.1 Textual Evidence
A.1 צִפֹּרֶן is rendered as ‘nail’ and ‘nail-mark’ (Tawil, ALCBH, 328: ‘1. nail; 2. nail-mark’, the first option in BDB, 862: ‘finger-nail, ...’, HAHAT, 1135: ‘Finger- u. Zehennagel’, GB, 693: ‘Nagel am Finger ...’, HAWAT, ‘Fingernagel ...’, DCH, vol. 7, 153: ‘nail, ...’, FHAWAT, 239: ‘Nagel, (Finger, Zehe); ...’, HALAT, 983: ‘Nagel (Finger, Zehe) ...’, HCHAT, Bd. 2, 287: ‘Nagel ...’, HWAT, 635: ‘der Nagel (der Finger u. Zehen) ...’, KBL, 814: ‘Nagel (finger, Zehe) ...’, LHA, 701: ‘unguis digitorum ...’, and Gesenius & Roediger, TPC, 1184: ‘unguis digiti ...’; MHH, 923: 1. החלק הקרני בקצה האצבע ‘the part made out of horn at the fingertip’. As second meaning MHH gives: (בהשאלה) הוד ‘splendour’.
Other interpretations are based on Jer 17:1: ‘pen, stylus’, DCH, vol. 7, 153: ‘... stylus point’, FHAWAT, 239: ‘... ; Griffelspitze’, HALAT, 983: ‘... diamantene (?) Spitze ... (an einem Griffel od. Meissel aus Eisen)’, HWAT, 635: ‘... die Spitze (des Griffels)’, LHA, 701: ‘... cuspis acuta stili scriptorii’, or as ‘point of diamond’ (found as second interpretation in BDB, 862: ‘... point of diamond’; HAWAT, ‘... metaph. Spitze’; Gesenius & Roediger, TPC, 1184: ‘... cuspis stili adamantina, qua stilus munitus est, ut digitus ungue’); also ‘stylus with a diamond point’ in some dictionaries and commentaries: (HAHAT, 1135: ‘... ([?] diamantene) Spitze eines Griffels’; GB, 693: ‘... die (diamantene) Spitze des Griffels’; HCHAT, Bd. 2, 287: ‘... übertr. Spitze eines Griffels, Diamantstift, zum Eingraben’; KBL, 814: ‘... Diamantnagel, = -stift (z. Schreiben)’. Alonso Schökel, DBHE, 619 only has ‘uña ... punta’.
A.2 In Rabbinical literature the word is found denoting the ‘finger nail’, strictly as body part: Mishnah mShabbat 10:6; mTohorot 1:2, 3; Tosefta tShabbat 15:7; tMoed Qatan 2:2; tSotah 3:4; tKelim Bava Qamma 3:13; tZavim 5:2.
A.3 In Deut 21:12 a female prisoner of war ought, among other requirements, pare (lit. ‘do’) her nails before an Israelite warrior could take her as wife. In this case the word in question refers to the nails of fingers and toes. The meaning of the act is disputed, but might signify that the woman had to shed her former life, or even her former self (Tigay 1996: 194). This was necessary because she would no longer be a slave, the normal status of a captive, but would become a free woman (Marsman 2003: 453).
B.1 The possibly related words in Arabic ḍafara, ‘to braid a woman’s hair, a rope’ and Akkadian ṣepēru, ‘to stand, trim hair’, see Root and Comparative Material, B.1, must be mentioned because of the context of Deut 21:12b וְגִלְּחָה אֶת־רֹאשָׁ֔הּ, ‘she shall shave her head’. A near parallel might be proposed in a divergent rendering of Deut 21:12c וְעָשְׂתָה אֶת־צִפָּרְנֶֽיהָ, ‘she shall do her braids’. This might at the most be a homophonic play, a parallelism seems unlikely because the loan of the Akkadian is ספר, and seems only to be found in Rabbinic Hebrew (see Waldman, 1972: 221).
B.2 The difficult text of Deut 21:12 is not eluminated per se by an obsure Akkadian line in which the trimming of nails is compared to ‘expelling a naqimtu’ (CAD Ṣ, 132-34), a naqimtu is a woman having a bodily defect or suffering from a certain disease (CAD N1, 335-36). The line mentioned is found in the ‘Poem of the righteous sufferer’ (Ludlul bēl nēmeqi), tablet IV, line d: kīma naqimtu šūṣi ú-ṣap-pi-ra ṣu-pur-a-a, ‘He trimmed my nails as if expelling a tabooed woman’. The word used ṣuppuru, ‘to pare (vegetables and nails), to keep a ditch trim(?), to trim a branding iron’, is according to the editors of CAD Ṣ not a denominative of ṣupru and the suggestion by Thompson 1924: 11 n.1 is brought forward to compare ṣuppuru to ḍafara ‘to braid a woman’s hair, a rope’, but the editors do mention the complexity of the semantic and etymological background of the words listed (in CAD Ṣ, 132-34) and are reluctant to settle for a simple explanation.
6.2 Figurative Use
A.1 According to Jer 17:1 the sins of Judah are בְּצִפֹּרֶן שָׁמִיר חֲרוּשָׁה עַל־לוּחַ לִבָּם, ‘engraved with a צִפֹּרֶן of steel on the tablet of their heart’. The word שָׁמִיר does not mean ‘diamond’ (so KJV, NRSV, RSV, ASV, NJB and many other modern translations and Hebrew lexica, even HALAT, 1445-46), because diamond was unknown in biblical times (Bolman 1938: 81-85; AEMI, 87, 442; AMMI, 82). Proof to the contrary (lit. Lundbom 1999, 776) is unconvincing. Nor can it have been emery (so KBL, 988), because particles of this stone were mainly used as an abrasive (AMMI, 82; AEMT, 65). The rendering ‘steel’, advocated by Bolman 1938: 81-85, produces a nice climactic parallelism with the preceding בַּרְזֶל, ‘iron’, is supported by the ancient versions and is most likely if a special kind of burin was involved, the so-called angle-tint tool which has a slightly curved tip. With this instrument the sins of the Judaeans were engraved on the (hard) tablet of their hearts (cf. Ezek 11:19; 36:26) and in the (hard) horns of the altar. Thus the broader context points to figurative speech.
A.2 A different solution is proposed in ALCBH, 328, where it is assumed that ‘nail-mark’ is a (secondary) meaning. On a contract a nail-mark often substitutes for a seal impression. The parallelism with בְּעֵט בַּרְזֶל, ‘with an iron graver’, as well as the sequel ‘on the horns of their altars’ do not favour this idea.
6.3 Pictorial Material
A.1 Following Niditch 1996: 71 n. 63 where Niditch refers to Demsky 1971 (repr. Demsky 2007), it can be stated that in Israelite archaeology there are no depictions found of tools to be used to carve into stone (or a hard substance).
6.4 Archaeology
A.1 Not attested.
7. Conclusion
A.1 The literal meaning of צִפֹּרֶן occurs in Deut 21:12 where it is a ‘finger- and/or toe-nail’. In Jer 17:1 the context points to a figurative use of this term to describe the tip of a type of burin with a steel tip. On the basis of the cognates it may be assumed that the instrument had a slightly curved tip resembling a toenail of a bird. Some of the ancient versions support this interpretation. Nowadays such a graver’s instrument is called an angle-tint tool.
צִפֹּרֶן belongs to the small category of technical terms (→ חֶרֶט, → עֵט, → קֶסֶת, → שֶׂרֶד, → מְּחוּגָה), the basic function of which is either the essential shaping of artefacts or the writing of characters.
Bibliography
For the abbreviations see the List of Abbreviations.
Johan Bolman, De edelsteenen uit den Bijbel, Amsterdam: Paris.
Aaron Demsky, ‘Writing’, in Encyclopaedia Judaica 16: 654-72, second edition: 2007 21: 235-41.
Joshua Fox, ‘Isolated Nouns in the Semitic Languages’, ZAH XI/1, 1-31.
Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1-20 (AncB, 21A), New Haven: Yale University Press, 776.
Hennie J. Marsman, Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social and Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East (OTS, 49), Leiden: Brill.
Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Library of Ancient Israel), Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
R. Campbell Thompson ‘Assyrian Medical Texts’, in: Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 17 (Section of the History of Medicine), 1-34.
Jeffrey H. Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.
Nahum M. Waldman, Akkadian Loanwords and Parallels in Mishnaic Hebrew, Dropsie College Theses 16, Philadelphia.
Philip Zhakevich, Scribal Tools in Ancient Israel. A Study of Biblical Hebrew Terms for Writing Materials and Implements (History, archeology, and culture of the Levant, 9), Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, Eisenbrauns.