The Proof of the Exodus Hidden in the Ancient Word Sha’atnez

“You shall not wear sha’atnez, wool and linen together,” is how Robert Alter translates Deuteronomy 22:11, a verse found in this coming Shabbat’s Torah reading of Ki Tetsey, and the source of the halakhic prohibition on wearing clothing in which these two fibers are mixed. Leaving a word untranslated, as Alter does here, is generally an admission of not knowing its exact meaning, and he writes in a note to this verse: “This term seems to be a foreign loanword, perhaps from the Egyptian, and so lest its sense be obscure, the rest of the verse is a gloss on its meaning.”

That sha’atnez is a non-Hebraic word can be told from a glance at its five consonants. A Hebrew noun can have five consonants too, but never more than four that belong to its root and are not added suffixes or prefixes. However, none of the five consonants of שעטנז, to give the word its Hebrew spelling, are additions of this sort. This clearly points to a borrowing, even though the ancient rabbis tried not very convincingly to explain the word as an acronym of three other Hebrew words.

Egyptian, Aramaic, and Persian are the principal providers of loanwords in the Bible, and since Aramaic is a sister Semitic language with a three- or four-consonant root structure like Hebrew’s, and Persian is an influence only in the Bible’s historically late books, Egyptian is indeed the leading candidate in this case. The eminent Bible scholar William Albright even ventured to identify the Egyptian expression behind sha’atnez. The word, he conjectured, came from ancient Egyptian sht (Egyptologists are not sure how the language was vocalized), “weave” or “fabric,” and n’dz, “false” (in Egyptian, adjectives always followed their nouns).