Swearing in Time and Place

“Yiḥrib beytak!” the Palestinian Authority’s president Mahmoud Abbas said to President Trump in a speech given in Ramallah on January 14, words that were correctly translated by the media as “May your house be destroyed!” President Abbas was not necessarily thinking of the White House. The common Arabic expression used by him might be less literally but more idiomatically rendered in English as “Go to hell!” or “Goddamn you!”

Swear words are curious things. Some, particularly those referring to the lower parts of the human body and their functions, are all but universal. Others, like yiḥrib beytak, are limited to one or a few languages. Although anyone knowing Hebrew would recognize yiḥrib beytak in its cognate form of yeḥerav beitkha, the latter is not a phrase that is used to swear with in Hebrew, and would indeed have to be understood, if applied to an American president, as referring to his Pennsylvania Avenue residence. By the same token, translated literally into Arabic or any other language, the Hebrew curse yimaḥ shimkha, “May your name be erased,” would be assumed to allude to one’s removal from some list or document rather than to mean (as it does) exactly what yiḥrib beytak means in Arabic.

These two expressions go back a long way. One’s shem or name in biblical Hebrew was one’s only hope for immortality—all all that was left of one, in the form of the reputation it called to mind and the descendants who bore it, after one’s death; its forgetting or “erasure,” in the language of Psalms 109:13, implied one’s complete extinction, and the idiom born of this verse has retained its power in Hebrew to this day. Similarly, the nomadic tent, the desert Bedouin’s beyt ash-sha’ar or “house of wool,” was the only home most Arabs had in ancient times; to be deprived of it was to be homeless wherever one went. Calling for the erasure of a shem or the destruction of a beyt was consigning a person to perdition no less than was damning him or her to hell in an age of the Christian belief in an afterlife.