מִשְׁתַּפֵּן (mishtapen) — to act cowardly, to chicken out
Etymology
The word שָׁפָן (hyrax) appears twice in the Hebrew Bible: in Proverbs 30:26 ("The hyraxes are a people not strong, yet they make their homes in the rocks") and in Leviticus 11:5 as an animal forbidden to eat. The hyrax (Procavia capensis) is a small rock-dwelling mammal more closely related to elephants than to rabbits or rodents, despite its appearance. Ancient translators, however, confused it with the hare. The Septuagint rendered שָׁפָן in an obscure Greek word found nowhere else; Jerome's Latin Vulgate translated it as lepusculus (little rabbit) in Proverbs while copying the Greek confusion in Leviticus. The Aramaic Targum translated it as ṭafaza, from the root "to jump" — consistent with a rabbit, not a hyrax, which does not hop.
This mistranslation persisted through the Middle Ages. In regions without hyraxes and without Arabic (which preserves the correct identification), rabbis debated: Nachmanides interpreted שָׁפָן as a rabbit, while Saadia Gaon maintained the original meaning. In Ashkenazic Europe, where no hyraxes existed, "shafan" solidified as meaning "rabbit." When Hebrew writers of the 19th century used the word, they universally meant rabbit — Mendele Mocher Sforim, Bialik, and others all wrote שָׁפָן to mean hare or rabbit.
The cowardly connotation entered Hebrew through a 1857 translation. Kalman Schulman translated Eugène Sue's French novel The Mysteries of Paris into Hebrew and wrote "Rudolph is timid and soft-hearted like a shafan" — although there is no rabbit at all in the original French. Schulman borrowed the comparison from German, where the phrase "feige wie ein Hase" (cowardly as a rabbit) was current. The idiom appears in numerous Aesop's Fables popular in that era, where the hare is depicted as the archetypal fearful animal (in "The Hares and the Frogs," the hares decide to drown themselves rather than live in constant fear).
From Schulman's novel onward, שָׁפָן served as a synonym for coward in Hebrew, and by the mid-20th century the verb לְהִשְׁתַּפֵּן had developed in colloquial speech. Its first attested written appearance is in Zecharia Hershman's 1961 play Yoav. Two idioms preserve the original mistranslation and have become fossilized: שָׁלַף שָׁפָן מהכובע ("pulled a rabbit out of a hat," from English) and שְׁפַן נִסְיוֹנוֹת (guinea pig, translated from German Versuchskaninchen, "experiment rabbit").
Key Quotes
"שְׁפַנִּים עַם לֹא עָצוּם וַיָּשִׂימוּ בַסֶּלַע בֵּיתָם" — משלי ל׳, כ״ו
"רודאלף הוא יָרֵא ורך לבב כשפן" — קלמן שולמן, מסתורי פריז, 1857
"ריק ימים אנוכי? וחובק ידים ומשתפן בגוב עצלות" — זכריה הרשמן, יואב, 1961
Timeline
- Biblical period: שָׁפָן (hyrax) mentioned in Proverbs and Leviticus
- Antiquity: Septuagint and Vulgate mistranslate שָׁפָן as rabbit/hare
- Medieval period: Rabbis debate the animal's identity; Ashkenazic tradition equates שָׁפָן with rabbit
- 1857: Kalman Schulman translates Mysteries of Paris; introduces "cowardly as a shafan" from German
- 19th century: Aesop's Fables popularize the hare as a symbol of cowardice
- Mid-20th century: The denominative verb לְהִשְׁתַּפֵּן develops in colloquial Hebrew
- 1961: First written attestation of לְהִשְׁתַּפֵּן in Hershman's play Yoav
- Modern: שָׁלַף שָׁפָן מהכובע and שְׁפַן נִסְיוֹנוֹת preserve the mistaken rabbit identification
Related Words
- שָׁפָן — hyrax (biblical); colloquially also rabbit (through mistranslation)
- אַרְנֶבֶת — hare/rabbit (the correct word, also biblical)
- שְׁפַן נִסְיוֹנוֹת — guinea pig (lit. "experiment shafan"; from German)
- פַּחְדָן — coward (standard Hebrew word)