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The Hebrew Word for Mail Comes From a Rabbi's Mistake

10/15/2026 • 3,771 views

Israel's postal service is called do'ar, and the word is there because an eleventh-century rabbi misread a line of Talmud. It starts with an old Persian word, datvar, a legal official, a bearer of the law. That word turns up in Aramaic, and the Talmud speaks of a bei datvar, meaning a gentile court of law. The passage at the end of the first chapter of Shabbat asks whether you may send a letter to a bei datvar on a Friday. Rabbi Nathan of Rome, compiling his Talmudic dictionary the Arukh in eleventh-century Italy, came to that line and did not know the phrase meant a courthouse. So he reasoned from the context: a place you send letters to must be some institution that receives and forwards mail. A post office. His entry glosses it as a known man to whom every letter is brought, who forwards each one on to whoever it was sent to. That reading spread through European Jewish scholarship, and do'ar came to mean the post. So the name on every post office in Israel goes back to a scholar who mistook a courthouse for a mailroom.