When asked to write about the word “ram,” I first had to check if it was the English word for a male sheep, or Hebrew for “elevated, exalted.” After being told it was the former, I still needed to think twice – is the Hebrew word for ram pronounced “ayil” or “ayal.” It’s easy to get them confused, but an “AYil” is the ram, and an “ayAL” is a deer.
Why are those words so similar? Well, this isn’t unique to Hebrew. In Latin, the word “caprea” means both a “deer” and a “goat.” This might seem strange to us, but the science of taxonomy (dividing organisms into species, genus, etc.) only began in the 18th century. In ancient times, animals of a comparable build (or jumping ability) might be given a similar name even if they weren’t biologically related.
But that’s not the only Hebrew word for “ram.” In Yehoshua 6:4, we read of “shofarot hayovlim” – ram’s horns. Yovel originally meant “ram,” and then later more specifically meant a ram’s horn (shofar), as in Shemot 19:13. The word yovel then went through another transformation. Since the shofar was blown at the 50th year following seven Shemitta cycles, that year itself became known as a yovel. Eventually, yovel entered English as “jubilee,” but because of the similarity to the unrelated “jubilant,” it came to mean the celebration of an anniversary.
So, for me, ram, or actually yovel, is one of those great words that changes its meaning fascinatingly over time.
