StrongerBible

patil

פָּתִיל

HebrewH6616“cord, thread, ...”

Appears 11 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 38:18Gen 38:25Exo 28:28Exo 28:37Exo 39:3Exo 39:21Exo 39:31Num 15:38Num 19:15Jdg 16:9Ezk 40:3
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradepah-TEELnoun

What patil means

1

a twisted cord: a thin strand of spun or braided fiber, used to tie, carry, mark, or measure

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

The word names a small, deliberately made thing: fiber spun and twisted into a strand. The twisting is not a guess about the word's background but its actual sense, since the Hebrew form means "the thing that has been twisted." What holds the biblical uses together is therefore not size or material but manufacture. A strand of flax waste, a linen line, a length of dyed wool, even gold hammered thin and cut into strips can all be called by this word once they have been twisted into a strand.

The second constant is that the cord is almost never mentioned for its own sake. It is there because of what it holds:

  • a seal hung at Judah's neck, which served as his signature
  • the breastpiece and the gold rosette tied onto the high priest
  • a blue strand set on the corner of every Israelite's clothing
  • a surveyor's line in the hand of the man who measures the temple

Only once does the cord itself carry the point, in the mocking picture of Samson snapping fresh bowstrings the way a strand of flax waste snaps when it merely smells fire.

Among Hebrew's words for tying, this one sits at the thin end. A braided rope (עֲבֹת) is strong enough to bind a man, and a length of rope (חֶבֶל) hauls loads and measures out land, while this word stays close to a thread (חוּט): the sort of strand you pass through a ring, a drilled hole, or a hem.

Nuances

1athe cord that carries a personal seal, worn so that the seal is always to hand
Gen 38:18Gen 38:25
1bthe blue cord that fastens sacred gear onto the high priest
Exo 28:28Exo 28:37Exo 39:21Exo 39:31
1cthe blue cord placed on the tassel at the corner of an Israelite's garment
Num 15:38
1da strand of worked metal, cut so it can be woven into cloth
Exo 39:3
1ea plain cord named for the fiber it is spun from, in a picture of something that snaps at once
TranslatabilityDirect
Jdg 16:9
1fa linen cord used as a measuring line
Ezk 40:3
2

fastened tight: said of a covering sealed down onto a jar so that nothing can pass in or out

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested

This is the one place where the word may not name a cord at all. The instruction concerns vessels standing in a tent where someone has died: any open vessel without this covering on it becomes unclean. Because a clay pot in these laws picks up uncleanness through the air inside it, most scholars now read the phrase as naming an airtight closure, a lid pressed and sealed down so that nothing can get past it, rather than a lid held on by a string. The word still fits, since it means something that has been twisted, and here what is twisted tight is the seal itself.

The older reading has not vanished, and it is the simpler one: a covering of cord, a lid tied down. Everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible the word is a physical strand, and the ancient Greek translators rendered the phrase as a binding that has been tied down. Later Jewish law went the other way and turned the phrase into a fixed term for a sealed vessel, listing the materials that make a valid seal, clay and wax and tar among them, with no cord involved at all.

Num 19:15

What scholars say about patil

The lexica speak with one voice on the core sense and diverge only on nuance. BDB (836) glosses "cord, thread" with the qualifier "twisted" and sorts the eleven occurrences into functional groups (seal cord, simile cord, measuring line, the blue fastening cord, Num 19:15, the gold threads of Exod 39:3). HALOT gives the fuller range "cord, thread, string, wire; ribbon" and derives the noun from the root פתל on the passive-adjectival qatil pattern. DCH VI, 810 to 811, collects the widest set of glosses ("cord, thread, string, lace, wire, ribbon, tie") and extends the attestation beyond the Hebrew Bible to 1QM 5:6, 9, 14 and to fragmentary Ben Sira readings. Gesenius 18 renders "Schnur, Faden, Band, Kordel" and glosses the formation as "das Gedrehte," the twisted thing. The root is one of the more secure pan-Semitic items: Akkadian patalu "to twist" with the derived noun pitiltu "twisted cord" (CAD P, 275 to 277 and 438 to 439; AHw II, 847), Arabic fatala with the noun fatil (Lane VI, 2333), Aramaic and Syriac petila (Payne Smith, cols. 3316 to 3317; Sokoloff, DJPA 452), Ge'ez fatala (Leslau, 170 to 171), Sabaic ftl (Biella, 411), and a broken Ugaritic ptlt (DULAT). Only Hebrew develops the moral extension of the root, "crooked, crafty," at Job 5:13, Prov 8:8, and Deut 32:5. On Genesis 38 the commentators are uniform in reading the pledge triad as a portable identity kit with this noun as the cylinder seal's neck cord (Sarna, JPS Genesis, 268; Wenham, WBC 2, 366 to 368; Hamilton, NICOT, 442 to 446; Waltke, 505 to 506), supported by Collon, First Impressions, 100 and 113 to 119, and confirmed by the Septuagint's choice of hormiskos, a small necklace. On the priestly fastening cords see Childs, OTL, 521 to 539; Propp, AB 2A, 430 to 447; Houtman, HCOT III, 484 to 489; Cassuto, 379 to 384. On Numbers 15:38 Milgrom ("Of Hems and Tassels," 1983, and JPS Numbers, Excursus 38, 410 to 414) argues from Mari legal texts and Mesopotamian iconography that the ornate hem marked status, so that requiring a blue cord on every Israelite's garment enacts Exod 19:6 materially; Levine (AB 4, 400 to 404) endorses this, while Wenham and Ashley foreground the mnemonic function instead, and the status reading should be labeled a thesis resting on comparative iconography rather than an explicit claim of the text. On Ezekiel 40:3 Zimmerli (Hermeneia, 346 to 347) identifies the flax cord plus the six-cubit reed as the standard surveyor's kit, compares Gudea Statue B, and notes that the cord itself is never used in the measurements that follow; Block (NICOT, 513 to 517) adds Egyptian rope-stretcher parallels. On Judges 16:9 Boling (AB 6A, 246 to 248) and Webb (NICOT, 400 to 402) both stress the contrast between fresh bowstrings and flammable flax waste. The Septuagint's eight distinct renderings across the eleven occurrences (hormiskos, klosma, stremma, kekloismene hyakinthos, hyakinthinos, loma, spartion oikodomon, and the verbal periphrasis desmon katadedetai) show that the word had not yet frozen into a technical term; Mishnaic Hebrew then specializes it three ways, as a lamp wick (Shabbat 2), as the blue thread of the tassel (Menachot 4:1), and as the sealed-vessel category of the purity laws (Kelim 10:1 to 2), a development Bar-Asher treats as continuous with the biblical formation.

Where scholars disagree about patil

Whether the word at Numbers 19:15, in the phrase for a covered vessel, still names a literal cord (a lid tied down with string) or functions as a frozen term for a hermetically sealed cover, and so whether the entry needs a second, adjectival meaning at all.

  • majorityThe phrase names a tightly sealed cover, the noun carrying the passive-adjectival force of its formation, "twisted tight," rather than naming a cord. The ritual logic requires an airtight seal, since an earthenware vessel contracts corpse impurity through its inner airspace (Lev 11:33), and a cloth merely tied down with string would not block it. This is also the univocal rabbinic reading (Sifre Bemidbar 126; Mishnah Kelim 10:1 to 2, which enumerates plaster, tar, wax, mud, and clay as valid sealing materials).; Jacob Milgrom, Numbers, JPS Torah Commentary (1990), comm. ad loc. and Excursus 48; Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 1 to 20, AB 4 (1993), 466 to 468; Timothy R. Ashley, The Book of Numbers, NICOT (1993), ad loc.; Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, s.v. פָּתִיל
  • minorityThe phrase is an ordinary construct chain, "a fastening of cord," so the noun keeps the physical sense it has everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible; BDB, following Dillmann, additionally suspected the phrase of being a later gloss precisely because it strains the noun's ordinary semantics. The Vulgate (nec ligamentum desuper habuerit) and the Septuagint's periphrasis, desmon katadedetai, "a bond has been bound down," both point this way.; BDB, s.v. פָּתִיל, 836 (citing A. Dillmann); Martin Noth, Numbers: A Commentary, OTL, ET (1968), 141
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB, s.v. פָּתִיל, 836lexicon
  • HALOT, s.v. פָּתִילlexicon
  • DCH, ed. D. J. A. Clines, vol. VI (2007), s.v. פָּתִיל, 810 to 811lexicon
  • Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, 18th ed. (Meyer and Donner, 2013), s.v. פָּתִילlexicon
  • The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), vol. P (2005), s.v. patalu and pitiltulexicon
  • E. W. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, vol. 6 (1877), 2333, s.v. fatalalexicon
  • Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, s.v. פָּתִילlexicon
  • Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (1989), 268commentary
  • Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16 to 50, WBC 2 (1994), 366 to 368commentary
  • Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18 to 50, NICOT (1995), 442 to 446commentary
  • Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus, OTL (1974), 521 to 539commentary
  • William H. C. Propp, Exodus 19 to 40, AB 2A (2006), 430 to 447commentary
  • Cornelis Houtman, Exodus, vol. 3, HCOT (2000), 484 to 489commentary
  • Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus, ET (1967), 379 to 384commentary
  • Jacob Milgrom, Numbers, JPS Torah Commentary (1990), Excursus 38 (410 to 414) and Excursus 48commentary
  • Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 1 to 20, AB 4 (1993), 400 to 404 and 466 to 468commentary
  • Timothy R. Ashley, The Book of Numbers, NICOT (1993)commentary
  • Martin Noth, Numbers: A Commentary, OTL, ET (1968), 141commentary
  • Robert G. Boling, Judges, AB 6A (1975), 246 to 248commentary
  • Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges, NICOT (2012), 400 to 402commentary
  • Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2, Hermeneia, ET (1983), 346 to 347commentary
  • Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 25 to 48, NICOT (1998), 513 to 517commentary
  • Dominique Collon, First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East (British Museum Press, 1987), 100 and 113 to 119monograph
  • John William Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Numbers, SBLSCS 46 (1998)monograph
  • Elisha Qimron, The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, HSS 29 (1986)monograph
  • Moshe Bar-Asher, Morphology of Mishnaic Hebrew (Bialik, 2015)monograph
  • Wolf Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (1987), 170 to 171lexicon
  • Joan Copeland Biella, Dictionary of Old South Arabic: Sabaean Dialect, HSS 25 (1982), 411lexicon

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of פָּתִיל

m s construct

פְּתִיל

Exo 28:28, Exo 28:37, Exo 39:21, Exo 39:31, Num 15:38, Jdg 16:9, Ezk 40:3

m p absolute

פְּתִילִים, פְּתִילִם

Gen 38:25, Exo 39:3

m s absolute

פָּתִיל

Num 19:15

m s construct

פְתִילֶךָ

Gen 38:18