▪ ṢLW_1 ‘to pray’ ↗ṣallà, ‘places of worship’ ↗ṣalawāt ▪ ṢLW_2 ‘…’ ↗…♦ Semantic value spectrum in ClassAr (acc. to BAH2008): ‘the small of the back; the two bones surrounding the root of the tail of an animal, to hit a camel on that part; to come at the rear of; to bend, to bend in supplication, to pray, to perform prayers; to adhere to’
▪ Philologists classify ṣalāẗ with the meaning ‘synagogue’, which is a form borrowed from Hbr, under this root – BAH2008
▪ eC7 Of very frequent occurrence in the Q – Jeffery1938.
▪ … ▪ …
▪ Jeffery1938: »Besides the verb we find in the Qurʔān ṣalāẗ ‘prayer’, muṣalliⁿ ‘one who prays’, and muṣallàⁿ ‘place of prayer’. ṣallà, however, is denominative from ṣalāẗ, as Sprenger, Leben, iii, 527, n. 2, had noted,1
and ṣalāẗ itself seems to have been borrowed from an Aram source (Nöldeke, GdQ, 255, 281). The origin, of course, is from [Aram] ṣlwtʔ = [Syr] ṣlōṯā, as has been generally recognized,2
for the Eth [Gz] ṣalōt is from the same source (Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 36). It may have been from JudAram but more probably from Syr,3
for the common phrase [Ar] ʔaqāma ’l-ṣalāẗ, as Wensinck, Joden, 105, notes, is good Syr. It was an early borrowing (Horovitz, JPN, 185), used in the early poets and thus quite familiar in pre-Islamic days,4
and the substantive [SAr] ṣlw ‘preces’ is found in the SAr inscriptions (Rossini, Glossarium, 224).« ▪ …
▪ Jeffery1938: »Though the Commentators are not unanimous as to its meaning they are in general agreed that it means the synagogue of the Jews, and as such many of them admit that it is a borrowing from Hbr (Bayḍ. and Zam. on the passage:5
al-Ǧawālīqī, Muʕarrab, 95; al-Suyūṭī, Itq, 322; al-Ḫafāǧī, 123; al-Siǧistānī, 201). This idea that it is Hbr is derived, of course, from the notion that the word means synagogues. It could be from the Aram ṣlwtʔ which means ‘prayer’, but the theory of Ibn Ǧinnī in his Muḥtasab, quoted by al-Suyūṭī, Mutaw, 55, that it is Syr, is much more likely,6
for though ṣlwtʔ means ‘prayer’, the commonly used byt ṣlwtʔ means a ‘place of prayer’, i.e. proseuχḗ, which Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 7, n.,7
would take as the reference in the Qurʔānic passage. As we find [SAr] ṣlwt = ‘chapel’ in a SAr inscription,8
however, it is possible that the word first passed into SAr and thence into the northern language.«