Dear Rabbi Lapin,
On the Glenn Beck Show you stated that there is no word in Hebrew for "coincidence". A Jewish friend contacted her Isreali cousin who said there are two words: "Bemickre" or "bemazal" My friend wasn't sure if these are Hebrew words.
Can you tell me what they mean?
∼ Jeannean B.
Dear Jeannean,
Good for you for checking out things you hear instead of automatically accepting what someone says – even if it puts me on the hot seat.
Fortunately, I can cool the seat down rather easily. Your friend’s cousin is both correct and incorrect.
When I talk of a word not existing in Hebrew, I mean in the Torah, using the Hebrew that God gave us. Modern Hebrew has all sorts of words that God never used in Scripture .These tend to fall in to two categories.
There are words like televizia – or television – for modern inventions. Most of these words are derived from English. But there are other words which are based on Scriptural Hebrew words, but the meanings have taken on a modern tone. For example, you can find the word “chofesh” meaning ‘free,’ in the Bible, for example, in Deuteronomy 15:12. In Israel today, that is sadly used to mean an irreligious person – not God’s intention for the word.
‘Mikre’ (the ‘b’ in the front is a prefix) is used in Israel today to mean coincidence. It is based on a word found in Leviticus 26:27, among other places. It is one of the Bible’s more complex words, but has the implication of randomness and not seeing God’s Hand when one should. Which is exactly what many today think of as a coincidence, but we are intended to look for God’s Hand rather than dismissing it. The Torah has no word for something that happens when God isn’t paying attention.
‘Mazal’ is the part of the well-known phrase, ‘mazal tov’. This is frequently mistranslated as ‘good luck’. The root of this word in the Bible is related to the word for ‘flow’, as in Heavenly blessings flowing down to someone. It too, has no relationship to the word coincidence, implying something divorced from God. The word mazal does not appear in the five books of Moses and in the prophets is only seen as a word for the constellations.
So, yes, there is a way to say coincidence in modern Hebrew. However, there is not a way to say it when Hebrew is used as God’s language.
Your rabbi,
Daniel Lapin
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