Raanan Eichler – draft – September 2018 – do not copy or distribute 1 The Tree-Hugger Who Went on a Date: The Meaning of sansan Raanan Eichler In Song of Songs 7:9(8), the male lover, after comparing his beloved’s stature or bearing to a date palm, says: ʥʩ֑ ʕ נּʑʱʍʰ ʔʱ ʍˎ ʤ֖ ʕʦʏʧ ֽ ʠ ʸ ֔ ʕʮ ʕʺ ʍʡ ʤ֣ ʓʬʎ עʓʠ ֙ʩ ʑ תּʍʸ֙ʔʮˌ, “I thought I’d climb a date palm, I’d grasp its sansinnîm. 1 The form ʥʩʕ נּʑʱʍʰ ʔʱ, 2 “its sansinnim”, is a difficult hapax legomenon. 3 While the context suggests that the word denotes a part of the date palm, readers have disagreed widely on which part. Survey of Interpretation The Septuagint translates the word with a plural form of ὕψος, “height, […] summit, crown”. 4 This is apparently a noncommittal guess, possibly influenced by the salient collocation ʩʕʰʩ ʑʱ ʸ ʔʤ, “Mount Sinai” (Exod 19:11; etc.). Aquila renders it as ελάτη, “the spathe of the date 1 This half-verse has likely been the most historically consequential of any text in the Song of Songs. In 1881, thousands of Yemenite Jews, encouraged by a numerological correspondence between that Hebrew year and the word ʕ ʮʕʺ ʍʡ ʸ that this would be a propitious time for such an undertaking, made Aliyah ( ʕ עʬ ) to the Land of Israel, establishing communities in Silwan in Jerusalem and in Kerem HaTeimanim near Jaffa, and thereby fulfilling the statement ˌ ʔʮ ʍʸ ʑ תּʩ ʓ ʬʎ עʓʠ ʕʮ ʕʺ ʍʡ ʤ ʸ . 2 The masculine plural suggests that the singular form of the lexeme would be ʯ ʔʱʍʰ ʔʱ, as, e.g.,ʬʔˏ ʍʬʔˏ (Ezek 10:2; etc.) – ʥʩʕ˘ ʑˏ ʍʬʔˏ (Isa 5:28; Jer 47:3); for the morphology of qalqal nouns, see Hans Bauer and Pontus Leander, Historische Grammatik der hebräischen Sprache des alten Testamentes (2 vols.; Halle: Niemeyer, 1918–1922), 1:481–482. The lexeme is registered as ʱ ʰ ʱ ʯ by Saadiah Gaon, in Nehemya Allony (ed.), Ha’Egron: Kitāb ’uṣūl al- shi‘r al-‘ibrānī by Rav Sĕ‘adya Ga’on (Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1969; Arabic and Hebrew), 374; Menahem ibn Saruq, in Angel Sáenz-Badillos (ed.), Mĕnaḥem ben Saruq: Maḥberet (Granada: University of Granada and Pontifical University of Salamanca, 1986, 267*; and DCH. However, HALOT registers it as ʤʕ נּʑʱʍʰ ʔʱ. Of the two forms, Mishnaic Hebrew attests only ʤʰʱʰʱ as a common noun (b. Sanhedrin 93a), although ʯʱʰʱ occurs as a personal name (Bereshit Rabbah 19:2). 3 Its closest relative is the unhelpful toponym ʤʕ נּʔʱ ʍʰ ʔʱ in Joshua 15:31, a town in the Negeb of Judah. 4 Definitions of Greek words herein are taken from LSJ.