אפשרות (efsharut) — possibility

Etymology

The word אֶפְשָׁר is an etymological puzzle. It is absent from the Bible and from the Dead Sea Scrolls, appearing for the first time in the Mishnah (early 3rd century CE) as a halakhic term. Where it came from has puzzled scholars for centuries.

The 19th-century lexicographers Jacob Levy, Marcus Jastrow, and Samuel Krauss proposed that אפשר derives from the root פ.ש.ר with a prosthetic aleph, analogous to the biblical word אֶזְרָח. Theodor Nöldeke thought he had found a Persian source-word. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda rejected both in 1908 as too distant in meaning. Abraham Even-Shoshan's 1947 dictionary wrote cautiously "perhaps from פשר," while Ernst Klein's 1967 lexicon declared the word "of unknown origin."

The picture became more complex once 20th-century scholars learned to work from manuscript traditions rather than printed editions. The Kaufmann manuscript of the Mishnah — a 10th–11th century Italian codex representing the Palestinian transmission — preserves cases where אפשר appears in contexts that logically require the negative "impossible." A later vowelizer corrected 14 of these to "אי אפשר." Scholars debated whether these were haplographic scribal errors, or evidence of an original word with dual meanings. The Babylonian Talmud itself (Bava Metzia 94a) reads אפשר in a legal passage where the sense demands "impossible," suggesting that in Babylon too, the word could carry a negative meaning in early times.

The most elegant proposed solution is that there were originally two closely similar words: אֶפְשָׁר (possible), with a prosthetic aleph, and אִיפְשָׁר (impossible), a compound of the negating particle אי and the word פְּשָׁר meaning "permitted/possible." The underlying root פ.ש.ר is Aramaic meaning "to loosen a bond" — semantically parallel to Hebrew מֻתָּר (permitted), from the root נ.ת.ר, also meaning "to untie." A lone manuscript attestation (Munich Talmud, Yevamot 106a) preserves what may be the word פְּשָׁר standing alone, meaning "permitted."

Key Quotes

"וכל שאפשר לו לקיימו בסופו והיתנה עליו מתחילתו תניו קיים" — Mishnah, Bava Metzia 7:11 (where context requires reading אפשר as "impossible")

Timeline

• Early 3rd century CE: אפשר first attested in the Mishnah
• 10th–11th century: Kaufmann manuscript preserves Palestinian tradition where אפשר sometimes means "impossible"
• 1908: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda rejects existing etymologies; problem left unsolved
• 1947: Abraham Even-Shoshan proposes "perhaps from פשר" tentatively
• 1967: Ernst Klein declares origin "unknown"
• 1995–2009: Nissim Berggreen and Moshe Bar-Asher propose haplology rather than scribal error to explain the anomalous forms
• Modern Hebrew: אפשרות (the abstract noun) used freely for "possibility, option"

Related Words

• אי-אפשר — impossible (negation of אפשר)
• פְּשָׁרָה — compromise (from same root פ.ש.ר)
• מֻתָּר — permitted (semantically parallel, from root נ.ת.ר, "to untie")