Shibboleth

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The word thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. It is therefore useful to examine closely the inherited meaning of shibboleth as test-word. A relatively rare word, it figures powerfully at a crucial moment in William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and above all in poems by Paul Celan and in Jacques Derrida’s study of Celan. Subsequent chapters will read these texts carefully, together with the Biblical narrative.