{"id":73178,"date":"2020-04-10T14:04:41","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T11:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=73178"},"modified":"2020-04-10T14:04:41","modified_gmt":"2020-04-10T11:04:41","slug":"kusemet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/kusemet\/","title":{"rendered":"Kusemet!"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"73178","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":64450,"related_cahpter":"456","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Now how is that spelt?\r\n\r\n","content":"

In chapter 4, Ezekiel is commanded to take symbolic action to mirror the siege on Jerusalem. He is told to lie on his side for 390 days, and to eat bread made up of six different grains. This type of bread would echo the way people under siege would bake with whatever ingredients they could find.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Looking at the verse we find an interesting view into the grains that were used at that time:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFurther, take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and emmer. Put them into one vessel and bake them into bread. Eat it as many days as you lie on your side: three hundred and ninety.\u201d (Ezekiel 4:9)<\/span><\/p>\n

The last grain mentioned is <\/span>kusmim<\/span><\/em>\u00a0\u2013 <\/span>kusemet<\/span><\/em>\u00a0in the singular (as in Exodus 9:32). The translation above renders it as \u201cemmer.\u201d Emmer is a kind of wheat and was one of the first crops to be domesticated in the ancient Near East. However, in the Middle Ages, the rabbis (such as Rashi on Ezekiel 4:9) began to identify it with spelt, a grain not found in Israel or Egypt in biblical times.\u00a0 And in Modern Hebrew, spelt is known by the Talmudic form of its plural: <\/span>kusmin<\/span><\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the singular form <\/span>kusemet<\/span><\/em>\u00a0refers to a different grain in Hebrew: buckwheat. Since buckwheat is not a grass, not only is not related to wheat, it\u2019s not even a grain. It is a fruit seed, which originated in China, and only arrived in Europe about 500 years ago. So how did it come to be identified with the grain that Ezekiel was ordered to eat?<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no clear answer to this question. One clue, however, is that the European translations of the Bible that first began translating <\/span>kusemet<\/span><\/em> as buckwheat were in the Low German language, which was spoken in Northern Germany and Holland. And Holland had two popular legends at the time about buckwheat. One was that it was brought to Europe from the Holy Land, and the other was that the Dutch form, “<\/span>boek weit”<\/span><\/i>, was so named to honor its origin in the Bible (i.e. they understood it as \u201cbook wheat\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

Neither of those legends were true. It was called buckwheat because it looked similar to the seeds of beech trees, and while it may have been brought to Europe by Arabs and Turks, it did not grow in the Land of Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

But legends have a strength of their own, and if people believed that buckwheat was a biblical grain from Israel, then it wasn\u2019t too long before they began translating <\/span>kusemet<\/span><\/em>\u00a0as buckwheat. Eventually this association spread to the Jews of Europe as well, and we arrived at the unusual situation where in Modern Hebrew <\/span>kusemet<\/span><\/em>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>means \u201cbuckwheat\u201d, <\/span>kusmin<\/span><\/em>\u00a0means \u201cspelt,\u201d and neither refer to the grain Ezekiel ate: emmer wheat.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":73179,"id":73179,"title":"emmer - spelt","filename":"emmer-spelt.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/kusemet\/emmer-spelt\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"emmer-spelt","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":73178,"date":"2020-04-10 11:03:18","modified":"2020-04-10 11:03:30","menu_order":0,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","type":"image","subtype":"jpeg","icon":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-includes\/images\/media\/default.png","width":1280,"height":375,"sizes":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt-150x150.jpg","thumbnail-width":150,"thumbnail-height":150,"medium":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt-300x88.jpg","medium-width":300,"medium-height":88,"medium_large":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt-768x225.jpg","medium_large-width":768,"medium_large-height":225,"large":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt-1024x300.jpg","large-width":1024,"large-height":300,"1536x1536":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt.jpg","1536x1536-width":1280,"1536x1536-height":375,"2048x2048":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt.jpg","2048x2048-width":1280,"2048x2048-height":375,"post_full_size":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt-1200x352.jpg","post_full_size-width":1200,"post_full_size-height":352,"home_baner":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/emmer-spelt.jpg","home_baner-width":1280,"home_baner-height":375}},"embedded_video":"","video_duration":"","show_fb_comments":true,"credit_media":""},"tile":{"top_caption":"","main_caption":"Kusemet!","main_caption_size":"1","sub_caption":"Now how is that spelt?","preview_embedded":"","preview_image":{"ID":73179,"id":73179,"title":"emmer - 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