סוֹלְלָה (sollah) — battery; siege ramp

Etymology

The word sollah appears eleven times in the Hebrew Bible, almost always in military contexts. The consensus among traditional and modern commentators is that it refers to a heaped-up earthen ramp built during a siege to allow attackers to scale walls or bring engines close to a fortification. The root ס-ל-ל means "to heap up" or "to mound" — the same root that gives Hebrew mesila (מְסִלָּה), a raised road or railway line.

An alternative reading was possible, however. Jeremiah 32:24 says: "Look, the siege sollot have come to the city to capture it." The verb "have come" suggests movement rather than a fixed earthwork, and this led the anonymous compiler of Sefer Yosippon — a Hebrew historical narrative written in southern Italy in the 10th century — to understand sollah as a mobile siege weapon: a catapult or ballista. He writes that attackers "began to strike the city with an iron ram and with stones from a sollah." Rashi (11th century) rejected this reading entirely. But later commentators, including Ralbag (14th century) and Abarbanel (15th century), accepted it, and the popularity of Yosippon ensured the artillery interpretation survived.

When cannons appeared in Italy in the early modern period, Hebrew writers drew on the Yosippon tradition and applied sollah to the new weapon. Two Italian Hebrew historical works from around the same decade use it in this sense: the physician Abraham Portaleone in Shiltei HaGiborim (Mantua, 1606–1611), and the anonymous continuator of Joseph HaCohen's Emek HaBakha, who describes the Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565 using the phrase "they cast sollah" upon the city.

In the 19th century, Haskalah writers navigated a divided usage: some used sollah for earthen siege mounds and the coinage kli-totah (later shortened to totah, תּוֹתָח) for the cannon; others used sollah for the cannon and the biblical word dayyak (דַּיֵּק) for the mound. Over time totah won out for the individual cannon, sollah prevailed for the mound, and dayyak disappeared. During World War II, Hebrew writers began using sollah for an artillery company or battery, and this usage was adopted by the IDF's artillery corps.

The electrical battery sense has a more precise origin. The English word battery derives from Old French batterie (beating, striking). It entered English by 1531, was recorded in the sense of an artillery salvo by 1548, and then as a battery position by 1555. In 1748, Benjamin Franklin was conducting experiments with early capacitors — Leyden jars, glass vessels lined with metal and containing water, with a metal conductor descending into the liquid. He linked eleven such jars in series so that a single action could close all their circuits simultaneously. In a letter to the botanist Peter Collinson, Franklin described the apparatus and called it an "Electric Battery," explicitly comparing the coordinated discharge of his row of jars to the coordinated fire of a row of cannons. At the end of the letter, he mentioned his plan to use the device to electrocute a turkey for a dinner party. This letter is the first documented use of the term "electric battery."

In 1860, the Hebrew writer and publisher Hayyim Zelig Slonimski described what he called the elektrische Batterie in the Hebrew newspaper HaKarmel and coined the Hebrew equivalent sollah elektriti (סוֹלְלָה אֶלֶקְטְרִית) as a direct loan-translation. The qualifier elektriti was later updated to hashmalit (electrical) and eventually dropped entirely, leaving sollah as the standard Hebrew word for any battery.

Key Quotes

"הִנֵּה הַסֹּלְלוֹת בָּאוּ הָעִיר לְלָכְדָהּ" — ירמיהו ל"ב, כ"ד

"ויחל להכות את העיר באיל הברזל ובאבני סוללה" — ספר יוספון, המאה ה-10

Timeline

• Biblical period: sollah used 11 times as a siege earthwork/mound (root ס-ל-ל)
• 10th century CE: Sefer Yosippon (Italy) reinterprets sollah as a catapult/ballista
• 14th–15th century: Ralbag and Abarbanel accept the Yosippon reading
• 1606–1611: Abraham Portaleone uses sollah for cannon in Shiltei HaGiborim (Mantua)
• ~1605: Anonymous continuator of Emek HaBakha uses sollah for Ottoman cannons at Malta
• 1808: Yehuda Leib Ben-Ze'ev coins kli-totah for cannon; eventually shortened to totah
• 1748: Benjamin Franklin coins "Electric Battery" in letter to Peter Collinson
• 1860: Slonimski coins sollah elektriti (loan-translation of Franklin) in HaKarmel
• WWII era: sollah adopted in Hebrew for an artillery company/battery
• IDF adoption: sollah becomes standard term for an artillery battery unit
• Modern: sollah = electrical battery (dominant sense); also artillery unit; sollah adama = earthwork

Related Words

• תּוֹתָח — cannon (shortened from kli-totah, coined 1808 by Yehuda Leib Ben-Ze'ev)
• מְסִלָּה — road, railway line (from same root ס-ל-ל, "heaping up" → a raised way)
• בָּטֶרְיָה — battery (the parallel loanword; still used in some electrical contexts)
• דַּיֵּק — earthwork, siege ramp (a competing biblical term that sollah displaced)