A shibboleth ( SHIB-əl-eth, -ith;) is any custom or tradition—usually a choice of phrasing or single word—that distinguishes one group of people from another. Historically, shibboleths have been used as passwords, ways of self-identification, signals of loyalty and affinity, ways of maintaining traditional segregation, or protection from threats. It has also come to mean a moral formula held tenaciously and unreflectingly.
Origin The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbóleth (שִׁבֹּלֶת pronounced [ʃiˈbolet] in Modern Hebrew), which means the part of a plant containing grain, such as the ear of a stalk of wheat or rye; or less commonly (but arguably more appropriately) 'flood, torrent'.
Biblical account The modern use derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect used a different first consonant. The difference concerns the Hebrew letter shin, which is now pronounced as /ʃ/ (as in shoe). In the Book of Judges chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead under the command of Jephthah inflicted a military defeat upon the invading tribe of Ephraim (around 1370–1070 BC), the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the river Jordan back into their home territory, but the Gileadites secured the river's fords to stop them. To identify and kill these Ephraimites, the Gileadites told each suspected survivor to say the word shibboleth. The Ephraimite dialect resulted in a pronunciation that, to Gileadites, sounded like sibboleth. In Judges 12:5–6 in the King James Bible, the anecdote appears thus (with the word already in its current English spelling):
Phonetics of the biblical test Shibboleth has been described as the first "password" in Western literature, but exactly how it worked is not known; it has long been debated by scholars of Semitic languages. It may have been quite subtle: the men of Ephraim were unlikely to be "caught totally napping by any test that involved some gross and readily detectable difference of pronunciation"; On a superficial reading, the fleeing Ephraimites were betrayed by their dialect: they said sibbōlet. Questions have been raised about why the Ephraimites did not simply repeat what the Gileadite sentries told them to say, since peoples in the region could say both "sh" and "s". Regarding this issue, Assyriologist Ephraim Avigdor Speiser has perpended, "We have yet to learn how the suspects were caught by the catchword… [the Ephraimites] surely would have used the required sound to save their necks " A related problem (akin to false positives) is how the test spared neutral tribes with whom the Gileadite guards had no quarrel, yet pinpointed the Ephraimite enemy.
Ephraim Avigdor Speiser therefore proposed that the test involved a more challenging sound than could be written down in the later biblical Hebrew narrative, namely the phoneme /θ/ (≈ English "th"). Present in archaic Hebrew (said Speiser) but later merged with sh (š) in Canaanite Semitic dialects, the Gileadites, who lived across a dialect boundary (the river Jordan), had retained it in theirs. Thus, what the Gileadite guards would have demanded was the password thibbōlet. The phoneme is difficult for naive users; to this day, wrote Speiser, most non-Arab Muslims cannot pronounce the classical Arabic equivalent. Hence, the best the Ephraimite refugees could manage was sibbōlet. Speiser's solution has had a mixed reception, but has been revived by Gary A. Rendsburg. John Emerton argued that, "Perhaps [the Ephraimites] could pronounce š, but they articulated the consonant in a different way from the Gileadites, and their pronunciation sounded to the men of Gilead like s." There is a range of ways of pronouncing the two phonemes. "An old clergyman of my acquaintance used to say 'O Lord, save the Queen' in such a way that it sounded [to me] like 'O Lord, shave the Queen'," and analogies could be found amongst Hebrew users in modern Lithuania and Morocco. Berkeley scholar Ronald Hendel agreed, saying the theory was supported by a document recently dug up near modern Amman. It tended to show that, across the Jordan, the pronunciation of the phoneme "sh" was heard as "s" by Hebrew speakers from the opposite side of the river. Hendel explained, "This is why Gileadite šibbōlet is repeated by the Ephraimites as sibbōlet: they simply repeated the word as they heard it." Other solutions have been proposed. David Marcus has contended that linguistic scholars have missed the point of the biblical anecdote: the purpose of the later Judean narrator was not to record some phonetic detail, but to satirise the incompetence of "the high and mighty northern Ephraimites". Marcus clarified how "the shibboleth episode ridicules the Ephraimites who are portrayed as incompetent nincompoops who cannot even repeat a test-word spoken by the Gileadite guards."
Modern use In modern English, a shibboleth can have a sociological meaning, referring to any in-group word or phrase that can distinguish members from outsiders. It is also sometimes used in a broader sense to mean jargon, the proper use of which identifies speakers as members of a particular group or subculture. In information technology, Shibboleth is a community-wide password that enables members of that community to access an online resource without revealing their individual identities. The origin server can vouch for the identity of the individual user without giving the target server any further identifying information. Hence, the individual user does not know the password that is actually employed—as it is generated internally by the origin server—and so it cannot be betrayed to outsiders. The term can also be used pejoratively, suggesting that the original meaning of a symbol has in effect been lost, and that the symbol now serves merely to identify allegiance, being described as "nothing more than a shibboleth". In 1956, economist Paul Samuelson applied the term shibboleth in works, including Foundations of Economic Analysis, to mean an idea for which "the means becomes the end, and the letter of the law takes precedence over the spirit". Samuelson admitted that shibboleth is an imperfect term for this phenomenon.
Examples
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