There is no direct equivalent, but the common expression used for any situation where someone goes from a low point to great success is a paraphrase of a Talmudic expression:
מאיגרא רמא לבירא עמיקתא (mi’igra rama lebira amiqta)
Which is Aramaic for “from a high roof to a deep hole”.
So “rags to riches” would be the opposite: מבירא עמיקתא לאיגרא רמא (mi’bira amiqta le–igra rama).
“Rosh gadol” (“Large head”) is someone who, when charged with a task, does it as responsibly as they can, with all the commitment, and concern for the best outcome as someone in a more senior position.
“Rosh katan” (“small head”) is the opposite: someone who, when asked to do something, will pretend not to understand the full scope of what’s expected, and carry it out in the most perfunctory manner possible.
The two expressions originate in military slang, to describe the mindset of recruits, and have since entered general spoken language.
Because of the combination of two facts:
The typical pathway of word formation in Hebrew is root > noun/verb > adjective/adverb, so the adjective or adverb usually comes last in the queue.
Continue readingI was thinking of this some months ago, when a translation client of mine complained to me that she was not allowed by her publisher to use an excerpt from her own book for an article she is writing.
Continue readingIt means “Done and dusted”, i.e. “there’s nothing more to do—move on.”
It’s taken from the last two verses of Psalms 128, which describes the cherished vision of a future where the people of Israel are blessed, and all is good in the world—a kind of utopia, where we needn’t strive any more:
ה יברכך יהוה מציון: וראה בטוב ירושלים–כל ימי חייך.
ו וראה-בנים לבניך: שלום על-ישראל.
5 The Lord shall bless thee out of Zion: and thou shalt see the good of Jerusalem all the days of thy life.
6 Yea, thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace upon Israel.
Short answer: Yes.
Pronunciation is undoubtedly very different today—but then the same is true for English of Chaucer’s or even Shakespeare’s time and today. (Heck, these days I’m reading Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, and I’m having a hard time understanding the characters’ 1920s slang…).
Continue reading
I was about to dismiss this seemingly silly question with a flippant answer along the lines of “Yes, and Shakespeare’s writings were much better in the original German,” when it struck me that OP might be confusing “the Hebrew Torah” with the New Testament.
Continue readingThis is a good question, as it highlights how Hebrew, in its love of concision by cramming prepositions and possessive indicators into the prefixes and suffixes of verbs and nouns, can sometimes overload itself.
As you partly point out in your question:
Yes—quite a lot. The best illustration of this is the Hebrew of the first native speaker of modern Hebrew, Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the ‘father’ of modern Hebrew and compiler of its first dictionary.
I recently read his autobiography (החצוף הארצישראלי ‘The Cheeky Hebrew Boy’), and although much of his Hebrew is not much different from high-register academic Hebrew today, some of it seems almost comically affected (although it wasn’t—that’s just the Hebrew he was brought up with). Typical example (not from his autobio, but from another project of his):
זה לי ארבעים שנה פחות ארבע, שאני הוגה בכתב העברי יומם ולילה ממש. מעודי לא יכולתי להבין מדוע לעברים אל״ף-בית כה קשה ומסובך, ולנוכרים – כה קל ונעים לשימוש? יום אחד – ואני אז בן-עשר – פניתי לאבי ואשאלנו: …״
Rough English equivalent:
Continue reading’Tis four years shy of forty now that I have been contemplating the Hebrew script—yea, verily, day and night. Never have I been able to fathom why the Hebrews have such a difficult and convoluted alphabet, while the foreigners – [one] so easy and simple to use? One day – and I was but a lad of ten – I turned to my father and enquired of him:…
Notes by Autumn Light 
