תֶּרֶד (teh-red) — spinach
Etymology
The word תֶּרֶד appears in rabbinic literature (e.g., Mishna Kilayim 1:3) but not in the received Masoretic text of the Bible — though it may once have appeared in an early version of Isaiah. The ancient Greek Septuagint translates a passage in Isaiah 51:20 with a phrase meaning "half-cooked beet" (σεῦτλον ἡμίεφθον), suggesting the Hebrew original seen by the translators may have had תֶּרֶד where the received text reads תּוֹא. This points to תֶּרֶד originally meaning "beet." Maimonides and Rashi both translated the Rabbinic word using the Arabic سلق (salaq), the Arabic word for chard or beet-leaf.
A competing view, advanced by Nathan of Rome in his influential 11th-century Talmudic dictionary "the Aruch," held that תֶּרֶד was not beet but rather orach (ירבוז מבריק), a leafy plant once popular as a vegetable. Support comes from the Tosefta (Kilayim 1:11), which warns against grafting תֶּרֶד onto ירבוז, implying the two are of the same botanical family. One proposed folk etymology connects the root י.ר.ד (to descend) to the underground beet root — the part that "goes down" into the earth — while the Aramaic סִילְקָא (from a root meaning "to rise") would denote the above-ground leaves. This elegant pairing remains speculative.
When modern Hebrew was being standardized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the word תֶּרֶד had no agreed referent for spinach. Yehiel Michal Pines (1886) used it as a loose synonym for spinach or beet. Ben-Yehuda coined קוֹצִית as a new Hebrew name for spinach. The confusion was resolved around 1903 when Yehuda Gur and Yosef Klausner, in their influential school dictionary, definitively assigned תֶּרֶד to spinach and סֶלֶק to beet — a division that has held ever since. Meanwhile, spinach itself had arrived in the wider world via Persian (ispanaj), into Arabic (سبانخ), and then into most European languages as "spinach" — but Hebrew struck its own path.
Key Quotes
"כלאים א׳, ג׳" — Mishna Kilayim, c. 200 CE (earliest Hebrew attestation of the word)
"תרדים או סלקא" — Yehiel Michal Pines, translation of "Agriculture in Syria," 1886 (treating the words as synonyms)
Timeline
- c. 500 CE: Spinach domesticated in Persia (genetic evidence)
- 647 CE: Spinach arrives in China from Nepal/Persia (Tang Huiyao)
- c. 200 CE: תֶּרֶד appears in the Mishna, likely meaning beet or a beet-like green
- c. 1000 CE: Nathan of Rome (the Aruch) identifies תֶּרֶד as orach, not beet
- 1886: Yehiel Michal Pines uses "תרדים או סלקא" for spinach
- c. 1903: Yehuda Gur and Yosef Klausner assign תֶּרֶד definitively to spinach in their pocket dictionary
Related Words
- סֶלֶק — beet; assigned as counterpart to תֶּרֶד in the 1903 normalization
- ירבוז — orach; the plant Nathan of Rome identified as תֶּרֶד
- מַנְגוֹלְד — chard; from Old German "leader" (possibly calquing the Arabic رأس البقول, "leader of vegetables")
- קוֹצִית — Ben-Yehuda's failed coinage for spinach