Word Prompt – CANDLES – David Curwin

The Hebrew word for “candle” has a long and illuminating history. In Numbers 8:2, Aharon is commanded to light the menorah, the seven-branched lampstand of the mishkan: “When you mount the lamps (nerot), let the seven lamps give light.” Both menorah and ner come from the root nur, meaning “fire” or “light.” In biblical Hebrew, ner referred to an oil lamp, not a wax candle.

With the arrival of electricity, meanings evolved. Menorah came to mean any lamp or light fixture, while nurah, a modern coinage, was adopted for “light bulb.” That shift left ner to take on its modern meaning: candle. Thus, when Israelis today speak of lighting nerot on Shabbat or Chanukah, they use a word that once meant a clay lamp burning oil.

To distinguish the Temple’s seven-branched menorah from the eight (plus one) lights of Chanukah, the latter came to be called menorat chanukah or, in Sephardic and later modern Hebrew usage, chanukiah – a term promoted by Hemda Ben-Yehuda, wife of the pioneer of Modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

The root nur also produced unexpected descendants. The verb sanver (“to blind”) likely comes from sanverim, “blindness,” perhaps originally meaning “dazzled by light.” A related root, nahar, meaning “to shine,” gave rise to the Aramaic euphemism sagi nahor – literally “plenty of light” – for a blind person.

Even beyond Hebrew, the root’s meaning spread: menorah is cognate with minaret, coming from Arabic manara, originally meaning “lampstand” or “place of light.”