פוך (pukh) — down (feathers) / kohl (biblical eye-paint)
Etymology
The word פוך exists in modern Hebrew primarily as the filling of down blankets and pillows — yet this meaning has nothing to do with the word's biblical origins. Open a biblical concordance and you find פוך several times, but in two entirely different senses that are themselves linked to the root פ.כ.כ, meaning "to grind" in Aramaic-Syriac and "to cut" in Arabic — suggesting a word for powder or crushed mineral substance.
The first biblical sense is as a building material or precious stone: "Afflicted, storm-tossed and not comforted, behold I will set your stones in pukh and your foundations in sapphires" (Isaiah 54:11), and similarly "stones of pukh" in 1 Chronicles 29:2. Rashi and other commentators linked this to the breastplate gem nofekh, the identity of which is also uncertain. This tradition of פוך as an unidentified gemstone was preserved in Hebrew liturgical poetry well into the medieval period — Rabbi Eleazar ben Killir used it in a 7th-century lamentation for Tisha B'Av.
The second and clearer biblical sense is cosmetic: eye makeup. "And Jezebel heard of it, and she painted her eyes with pukh and adorned her head and looked out through the window" (2 Kings 9:30), and "though you enlarge your eyes with pukh" (Jeremiah 4:30). Here the identification is certain: pukh is antimony powder used as eye-liner, what we would today call kohl or eyeliner. Given the root meaning of "to grind," פוך literally means "the ground-up stuff" — a powder. The stone-verses may likewise refer to some kind of powdered mineral used as mortar or cement rather than a gemstone.
The cosmetic meaning of פוך persisted in Hebrew across the centuries and into the 20th century, serving literary writers even as it was being displaced in everyday speech by foreign loanwords for makeup. The modern meaning of פוך as soft feather filling for blankets and pillows is a completely separate development — likely borrowed or calqued from European languages — and shares only the sound of the word with its biblical ancestor.
Key Quotes
"וַיָּבוֹא יֵהוּא יִזְרְעֶאלָה וְאִיזֶבֶל שָׁמְעָה וַתָּשֶׂם בַּפּוּךְ עֵינֶיהָ" — מלכים ב׳, ט', ל'
"הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי מַרְבִּיץ בַּפּוּךְ אֲבָנַיִךְ" — ישעיהו נ"ד, י"א
Timeline
- Biblical era: פוך appears in Isaiah 54:11 and 1 Chronicles 29:2 (mineral/stone sense) and in 2 Kings 9:30 and Jeremiah 4:30 (eye-paint sense)
- 7th century CE: Rabbi Eleazar ben Killir uses "avnei pukh" in a Tisha B'Av lamentation
- Medieval period: פוך used in poetry with the gemstone connotation
- 20th century: פוך as eye-makeup displaced by foreign loanwords; פוך as down-feather filling enters common use
Related Words
- נֹפֶךְ — a breastplate gem that Rashi connected to פוך (both unidentified)
- פוך (down) — modern usage: שמיכת פוך (down comforter), entirely unrelated etymologically