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Why Cabbage and Cherub Sound Identical in Hebrew

7/16/2026 • 766 views

In modern Hebrew, the word for cabbage and the word for cherub are the same word: kruv. Same spelling, same pronunciation, entirely separate histories. The biblical kruv is the winged creature guarding the gate to Eden in Genesis 3, often connected by scholars to the Akkadian karibu, an intercessor figure in Mesopotamian religion (a derivation that is widely held but contested). The other kruv is the leafy vegetable. They are not related. Cabbage belongs to Brassica oleracea, a wild sea-cliff herb that humans bred into cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi. Greek sources knew it by the 6th century BCE as krambē. It reached the Land of Israel in the Hellenistic or Roman period, and by the time the Mishnah was compiled in the early third century CE, the rabbis called it kruv, a Hebrew adaptation of the Greek word, probably through Aramaic. Over time, its pronunciation converged with the biblical kruv, until the vegetable and the angel sounded identical. Then the vegetable word nearly disappeared. Arabic-speaking commentators like Saadia Gaon and Maimonides explained it through Arabic karnab; European Jews replaced it with Yiddish loans, and by the 19th century Mendele Moykher Sforim was using kruv to mean beet. Modern Hebrew put it back to work. In 1898 Ben-Yehuda built kruvit for cauliflower from Arabic karnabit; the Language Committee coined kruv nitzanim for brussels sprouts in 1938 and kruv ha-kelach for kohlrabi; kale later got the nickname kruv-al. An old Mishnaic word for cabbage, once nearly lost, became productive again, while quietly sharing its sound and spelling with a biblical angel.