בְּצִקְלֹנוֹ (b'tziklono) — in his fresh grain stalk

Etymology

The word בְּצִקְלֹנוֹ appears only once in the entire Hebrew Bible, in II Kings 4:42: a man from Baal-Shalisha brings the prophet Elisha twenty loaves of barley bread "and carmel b'tziklono." For over two thousand years, translators, rabbis, commentators, and philologists struggled to make sense of this solitary word.

Ancient translators were clearly at a loss. One version of the Greek Septuagint simply omits the word; another seems to have had a different manuscript reading entirely, transcribing something closer to bakellet. The Aramaic Targum Jonathan renders it bilvasheih ("in his clothing"), while the Syriac Peshitta gives "in his cloth wrap." Jerome's Latin Vulgate translated it as pera ("satchel"). Medieval and later interpreters, working with the assumption that the initial bet was a prepositional prefix rather than part of the root, extracted a noun צִקְלוֹן meaning some kind of bag or garment — and indeed the word צִקְלוֹן occasionally appears in medieval Hebrew literature with the meaning "bag," and still serves as a literary synonym in modern Hebrew.

The breakthrough came with one of the great archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. In the spring of 1928, a Syrian farmer named Ibrahim, plowing his field near Latakia on the Mediterranean coast, struck a large stone. Beneath it he found a chamber full of treasures — and ultimately, the ancient city of Ugarit. The cuneiform tablets found there, written in the closely related Ugaritic language, were gradually published and deciphered. In winter 1938, Prof. Moshe David Cassuto of the Hebrew University was teaching a course in Rome on a newly published Ugaritic text, "The Legend of Daniel and Aqhat." He and his students discovered that the Ugaritic word bṣql appears several times, in parallelism with the word for "ear of grain" (šiblet). Since בְּצִקְלֹנוֹ in the biblical passage also appears in the context of grain, Cassuto concluded this could not be coincidence: the initial bet was part of the root, not a preposition, making the underlying word בְּצִקְלוֹן meaning "fresh grain stalk."

Key Quotes

"וְאִישׁ בָּא מִבַּעַל שָׁלִשָׁה וַיָּבֵא לְאִישׁ הָאֱלֹהִים לֶחֶם בִּכּוּרִים עֶשְׂרִים לֶחֶם שְׂעֹרִים וְכַרְמֶל בְּצִקְלֹנוֹ" — II Kings 4:42 (biblical)

"התגליות האחרונות משרידי לשון אוגרית הוכיחו שלא צִקְלוֹן צורת המילה במקרא אלא בצקלון בבית שורשית" — נ.ה. טור-סיני, מילון בן-יהודה כרך י״א, 1945

"אביא על זה דוגמה אחת, שכבר עמדתי עליה לפני שבע שנים... ועכשיו עיין גם טורטשינר..." — מ.ד. קאסוטו, לשוננו, 1945

Timeline

• ~8th century BCE: Word appears in II Kings 4:42; ancient translators already unable to determine its meaning
• 3rd–2nd century BCE: Septuagint either omits or mistranscribes the word
• ~1st century CE: Targum Jonathan renders it as "in his clothing"
• 1928: Discovery of Ugarit by farmer Ibrahim near Latakia, Syria
• 1938: Cassuto teaches Ugaritic texts at University of Rome; identifies bṣql parallel
• 1939: Cassuto publishes his finding in the journal Orientalia (Vatican)
• 1945: Tor-Sinai publishes volume 11 of Ben-Yehuda Dictionary, reaching the same conclusion without attributing it to Cassuto
• 1945: Cassuto publishes his own article in Leshonenu, noting his prior discovery with a pointed footnote

Related Words

• צִקְלוֹן — the word previously extracted from this verse, meaning "bag/sack," still used as a literary synonym for bag in modern Hebrew
• כַּרְמֶל — fresh grain (in the same verse), also a rarely-used biblical term revived in modern Hebrew