מֶחְדָּל (mehdal) — omission; serious failure, debacle
Etymology
The word מֶחְדָּל is a modern coinage built on a biblical root, with a narrow legal origin that expanded dramatically in popular use. The root חד"ל appears frequently in the Bible, primarily meaning "to cease" or "to stop" — as in the Akkadian cognate ḫadālu and the Ge'ez ḥadala, both meaning "cessation." In Arabic, the cognate root ḥadhala means "to abandon." The Bible also contains the rare adjective חָדֵל in Isaiah 53:3 ("despised and rejected of men"), which may carry the sense of "abandoned by all men."
Crucially for this word, some biblical uses of the root imply not active cessation but the failure to act at all. The clearest example is Exodus 23:5: "וְחָדַלְתָּ מֵעֲזֹב לוֹ עָזֹב תַּעֲזֹב עִמּוֹ" — the text does not mean "stop abandoning your enemy's ox under its burden" but rather "do not abandon it." This sense of non-action — of not doing what ought to be done — is what the Ministry of Justice exploited when it coined מֶחְדָּל in the early 1950s.
The coinage was prompted by the needs of Israeli law, which is founded on British common law. In British legal tradition, a person can be liable not only for doing something illegal but for failing to do something they were required to do — an "omission." Hebrew had no specific legal term for this concept. The Ministry of Justice coined מֶחְדָּל and it appeared in draft legislation debated (but not enacted) in 1953. The term was formalized in the Penal Code: "refraining from an act that is a duty under any law or contract" (section 18c). The word then escaped the legal domain and entered popular speech, where users did not observe its narrow definition. By the 1960s it was used colloquially for any serious failure or grave lapse — not necessarily a legal omission. In the 1980s, the word acquired a second new life: בְּרֵרַת מֶחְדָּל (literally "the omission option") became the standard Hebrew translation of "default" in computing contexts.
Key Quotes
"נִבְזֶה וַחֲדַל אִישִׁים אִישׁ מַכְאֹבוֹת וִידוּעַ חֹלִי" — ישעיהו נ״ג, ג׳
"הימנעות מעשייה שהיא חובה לפי כל דין או חוזה" — חוק העונשין, סעיף 18ג
Timeline
- Biblical era: Root חד"ל used for "cessation" and "refraining from action"
- 1953: Ministry of Justice coins מֶחְדָּל as a legal term for "omission"; appears in draft legislation
- 1960s: מֶחְדָּל enters popular usage as "serious failure" beyond its strict legal meaning
- 1973: Yom Kippur War intensifies the word's association with catastrophic institutional failure
- 1980s: בְּרֵרַת מֶחְדָּל introduced as Hebrew for "default" (computing/legal)
Related Words
- כִּשָּׁלוֹן — failure; the common general word for failure
- כֶּשֶׁל — malfunction, specific failure of a mechanism
- מַפָּלָה — defeat, downfall (from root נפ"ל)
- בְּרֵרַת מֶחְדָּל — default setting (computing)
- חָדֵל — biblical adjective, "abandoned, forsaken"