The Holy and the Holey

The closest literal translation of ḥol ha-mo’ed, the Hebrew term for the intermediate days of Passover (and of Sukkot) that we now are in, would be something like “the non-holy time of the holiday.” The biblical mo’ed or “appointed time” of Passover, to use the Bible’s term for a special day or series of days in the year, has two mikra’ei kodesh or “sacred convocations,” one on its first day and one on its last; on them, special sacrifices are offered and no work is to be performed. Between them, the Bible mandates five other days of an indeterminate nature. Although they, too, are part of the holiday—“seven days thou shalt eat no leaven,” the Israelites are commanded by Moses—nothing is said about how, apart from that, they are to be observed.

These days have no name in the Bible. In the Mishnah, the earlier part of the Talmud, they are simply called mo’ed, while the brief tractate in which their rules are discussed is called Mo’ed Katan, “the lesser mo’ed.” But although the term ḥol ha-mo’ed is medieval and does not appear in talmudic literature, the grammatically variant form of ḥulo shel mo’ed, also meaning “the ḥol of the mo’ed,” is found in a number of places, and ḥol itself is a biblical word. It occurs, for example, in Leviticus 10:10, where the high priest Aaron and his sons are enjoined from entering the Tabernacle in a state of intoxication because there is a need to distinguish between the holy (ha-kodesh) and the non-holy or profane (ha-ḥol). (It might be noted in this context that our word “profane” comes from Latin profanus, which derives from pro fanum, “before [or outside of] a temple”—that is, that which is not on sacred grounds.)

What ḥol means in the Bible is clear enough, even if the rabbis had to labor to work out its implications. Why it means what it does, though, is something else. Like most Hebrew nouns, ḥol has a verbal root behind it and this root appears to be ḥalal. I say “appears to be” because an actual verb ḥalal is not found in Hebrew, neither in the Bible nor later on. Its existence has to be assumed from the many words that, taken as a group, could not have been formed from anything else—and although a single Hebrew verbal root can typically throw off a wide range of verbs and nouns, few are responsible for as dizzying a variety of them as is ḥalal. Consider the following list of such words: