Saturday, October 18, 2008

BOOTHS, TABERNACLES, Tents and Huts: Naming the Sukkah. Philologos explains at The Forward:
A taberna in ancient Rome was a cottage, shop, inn or pub. (From the last of these meanings comes our English “tavern.”) Its diminutive form of tabernaculum (of which tabernaculorum is the genitive plural) meant a hut or, more often, a tent. Used more specifically, it referred to a tent erected in the Campus Martius or “Field of Mars,” the military drill grounds of ancient Rome, in which a priestly augur secluded himself prior to the convening of the comitia, the popular assembly of the Roman Republic. And because tabernaculum thus had a sacral connotation, it was also used by the Latin Bible to translate the Hebrew term ohel mo’ed, or “tent of convocation,” which served the Israelites as a portable religious shrine during their years of wandering in the desert.

How, then, did “tabernacle” also come to mean a monumental structure like that of the Mormons, which would occupy almost an entire football field? The answer is that in the late 18th and 19th centuries, “tabernacle” was adopted by various English dissenting sects, particularly the Congregationalists, to denote their churches, which were indeed small, simple buildings. And since the Mormons were America’s version of England’s dissenters, the one Christian church in the United States ever to have been persecuted by the political and religious establishment, it was natural for them to call the huge prayer hall they constructed in Salt Lake City in 1864 a “tabernacle,” too. This subsequently influenced the use of the word in American English, in which a tabernacle can now be big and ornate.

As for habetabitis (you shall live in) umbraculis, the Latin word umbraculum is also a diminutive, formed from umbra, shade or a shady place. (Think of an umbrella, which was originally designed to protect its holder against sun rather than rain.) In classical Latin an umbraculum is a parasol, but in the fourth-century C.E. Latin of Jerome’s Bible it means a tent or temporary shelter. Tyndale’s choice of “booth” and of the Hebrew sukkah was an excellent one, because a booth in his day was just that: a shelter against the sun roofed with green tree branches, a meaning that the word kept well into the 19th century.