ahavah

Etymology

Verbal noun of the root א־ה־ב (ʾ-h-b), “to love.” The root is well attested in Biblical Hebrew and appears in Ugaritic as ảhb. A relationship to Arabic ḥ-b-b (ḥubb, maḥabba) is often suggested and is not straightforward: the first radical differs (ʾaleph versus ḥāʾ). They may be distant Semitic kin, or they may be separate roots that later cultures heard as echoes of one another. Either way, ahavah is not “the Hebrew word for agape.”

The verb אָהֵב (ʾahēv) takes a direct object. One loves someone, or something. The grammar already refuses the idea of a purely intransitive glow.

Historical use

Biblical ahavah is stubbornly broad. Isaac loves savory food. Shechem loves Dinah (a love the story does not redeem). Jonathan loves David. YHWH loves Israel. Israel is commanded to love YHWH “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and to love the neighbor and the stranger. Commanded love is already a problem for any theory that love must be a spontaneous feeling.

The Song of Songs uses ahavah as a power: “love is strong as death” (8:6). It also uses dodim (loves, caresses) and the vocative “my beloved.” Rabbinic tradition reads the Song as the love between God and Israel; the plain sense of the Hebrew is a woman’s and a man’s desire. The archive does not have to choose one reading as the only adult one. It does have to admit both are historical.

Later Hebrew (piyyut, medieval poetry in Spain, modern Israeli speech) keeps ahavah as the general word. It never needed a tetrad of Greek imports to function.

Semantic range

• Love of persons: spouse, friend, kin, the stranger.
• Love of God, and God’s love.
• Love of things: land, food, splendor.
• The phenomenon of love itself, as in the Song’s oaths and warnings.

Semantic change

English Bibles render ʾahavah as “love” almost uniformly, which hides the places where the same English word is also covering ḥesed, rēaʿ, dōd, and ḥashaq. The Septuagint’s choice of ἀγάπη for ʾahavah then taught Greek-reading Judaism and Christianity to hear ahavah through agape, a productive misunderstanding.