As we approach Thanksgiving, when families are gathered along with close friends and guests, when the spirit of this special holiday is filling us with relaxation and with sentiments of joy and love, we’ll introduce in this coming month words and phrases that concur with these fine sentiments of kindness, joy and love as we received requests to present such words for some time.
Today we’ll learn the words woman and ‘wife’ and how a man introduces his wife to others.
The Hebrew word for ‘woman’ is ‘ee•sha’. This name came from the word ‘man’ ‘eesh’. You may remember that this name was coined by Adam:
‘And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man’
‘Eesha’ is also ‘wife’ and you can only distinguish between the two by context.
Unlike father and mother, wife ‘ee•sha’ is the same word both in modern and biblical Hebrew. The word ‘eesh•ti’, ‘my wife’, is the word ‘ee•sha’ connected to the pronominal suffix ‘ee’ (or ‘i’) which means my. Therefore ‘eesh•ti’ means ‘my wife’. Note that this possession word receives a major sound change because of a grammatical reason we cannot cover here.
Old Testament example of ‘eesh•ti’:
‘And the men of the place asked him about his wife; and he said, She is my sister; for he feared to say, She is my wife; lest, said he, the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah; because she was pretty to look upon’
‘Na le•ha•kir’ literally means ‘please meet’, and after saying this you pause, present your wife before the people who are present, and then say: ‘‘eesh•ti’, ‘my wife’.
The reply to this, and to any other introduction is: ‘na•eem me•od’, ‘nice to meet you’.
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