Most translations of Biblical names bear at least some resemblance to their original Hebrew forms. But what the heck is up with Eve? Her name in Hebrew is Chaya (from the root “life”). I googled it a little and couldn’t find anything.
I always heard Eve was really “Havva” or life-giver.
The Hebrew term from Eve is Chavah. Chaya is a form of the word meaning “life.”
Zev Steinhardt
Yeah. My notes (I can’t find my Hebrew Tanakh at the moment) say the name in Genesis is 'Hawwah which is derived from 'haya.
Depending on the tense and direction of a word, very often a yud can change into a vuv and vice versa. For example, the root for the words was, is and will be are all the same (from the root “to be.”) Was is hayah (hey-yud-hey) while is is hoveh (hey-vuv-hey).
Zev Steinhardt
One more note: Chavah and Chaya are two separate names. Both are fairly common among Orthodox Jews (my sister is a Chaya, and her sister-in-law is a Chava).
Zev Steinhardt
Well, golly. My memory’s terrible. That’ll learn me to post without double-checking first.
I still don’t see a real connection to Chava and Eve, though. I’m just curious about the history of the mutation of the name.
In Arabic, “Eve” is “Hawwah.” Not relevant, but interesting. I would assert that there is an equivalency between the Arabic “heh” and Hebrew “cheth.” After all, both are Semitic languages.
Remember that we get “Eve” from the Latin Vulgate. In Latin it would have been pronounced “Eh-veh.”
“Eh-veh” is not that far from “Cha-vah”, especially considering that this is going from one language to another. Many Hebrew Bible names in English translations are messed up. Example: in Hebrew it’s “'Amorah,” not “Gomorrha.”
WRS
The online Latin Vulgate I checked has “Havvam” for Eve.
You tell me, and we’ll both know . . .
Chaya, besides being the present-tense-female form of “alive” and a female name, is also the Hebrew word for “animal”. Unlike the first two meanings, however, in this third one the second vowel is emphasized (“chah-YAH”).
Nahum Sarna, in The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis says:
(Note: I have used “kh” where Sarna uses h with a dot underneath.)
Further, Abraham ibn Ezra commented that the word was derived from khayyah meaning “life”, but since khayyah means “animal”, it was not deemed an appropriate name for the first woman.
Sure it’s relevant. The cognate is evidence of a close linguistic relationship. However, in Arabic Eve is Hawwâ’, not Hawwah. It ends in hamzah, not h. The mark ’ stands for hamzah in transliteration.
There are two letters in both Arabic and Hebrew that correspond to h. One of them, heh in Hebrew and hâ’ in Arabic, is the same /h/ as in English. It is transliterated as plain h.
The other is Het in Hebrew and Hâ’ in Arabic, a pharyngeal fricative that is transliterated as h-with-a-dot-under-it. We can’t reproduce that in the fonts available to us online—well, maybe we could with Unicode, but I’m waiting until everybody’s systems are Unicode-compliant. Until then, the conventional substitute is an uppercase letter H.
I’m not comfortable with spelling it “ch”. That is a Germanism. I don’t see why we should imitate the Germans. To most Americans it looks like the sound at the beginning of chocolate.
Look how tomndebb transliterated 'Hawwah with an extra mark on the h. This is better, IMHO.
C K Dexter Haven chose “kh”, which does reflect the modern Ashkenazic pronunciation of the letter, a velar fricative, except that “kh” really ought to represent a different letter in Hebrew, the letter kaf (k) without the dagesh.
Separdic Jews whose native language is Arabic pronounce the dotted-H sound as it is in Arabic, a pharyngeal in the middle of the throat, which was probably the original ancient Hebrew pronunciation too. Modern Hebrew pronunciation has been influenced by the sounds in European languages, and the original sounds peculiar to Semitic languages have been lost, except among the Arabic-speaking Sephardim.
However, ancient Hebrew probably also had the velar fricative sound for dotted-H, as in the word aH ‘brother’, which has the letter khâ’ in the Arabic cognate akh. It seems the Hebrew Het was used for both sounds.
The Hebrew letter vav is often transliterated “w” although in modern Hebrew it’s pronounced [v]. The original ancient Hebrew pronunciation must have been [w], as it is in Arabic wâw to this day. The German influence changed it to a [v] sound. Of course, the Germans write “w” when they mean the [v] sound. Confusing, isn’t it?!?
This is why you might see the variant transliterations Havvah, Hawwah, Chavvah, Chawwah, which are all the same spelling in the Hebrew alphabet. Personally, I follow the Library of Congress standardized transliteration for Hebrew and Yiddish, in which Het is dotted-H and vav is v.
The Arabic cognate for ‘serpent’ is Hayyah. Interesting… Also, the name of John the Baptist in the Qur’ân is yaHyá, which is from the same root as Eve and means ‘he lives’. This is a different etymology from the actual name John, from Hebrew yoHanan meaning ‘God is gracious’.
In Arabic as in Hebrew, the letters y and w in a root can sometimes change into each other, or into a vowel, or sometimes just disappear. These are called “weak” roots because the letters are unstable. When the Hebrew letter yod (why do you call it “yud”?) is the first letter in a root, the Arabic cognate usually starts with w-. For example Hebrew yeled, Arabic walad ‘boy’.
In Latin it’s Eva, pronounced eh-vah.
Thanks guys. Every day I learn that I know less than I think.
WRS