Bibliotheca Polyglotta

The word is most probably a loan from Ethiopic that dates from the so-called First Hijra (615-628 CE), when the Christian King of Aksum gave the Muslim refugees asylum. Many loans were made during this period, remarkably religious terms. The Gz term ḥawāryā ‘traveler, messenger, apostle’ is related to Gz ḥora ‘to go’, which is cognate to Ar ↗ḥāra ‘to (re)turn’.

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▪ eC7 (disciples of Christ) Q 61:14 kamā qāla ʕīsà 'bnu maryama lil-ḥawāriyyīna man ʔanṣārī ʔilà ’ḷḷāhi qāla ’l-ḥawāriyyūna naḥnu ʔanṣāru ’ḷḷāhi ‘as Jesus, son of Mary, said to the disciples, “Who will come with me to help God?”, the disciples said, “We shall be God’s helpers”’. – Cf. also Q 3:52; 5:111, 112.

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▪ DRS 9 (2010)#ḤWR 3: Ar ḥāra ‘revenir, retourner’, ʔaḥāra ‘répondre’, Tham ḥr ‘retourner, revenir’, Ar ḥawāriyy ‘apôtre’; Gz ḥora, Tña ḥorä, Gaf (a)horä, Har ḥāra, Gur wärä ‘aller’; Gz ḥawāryā ‘voyageur, messager, apôtre’; Ar ḥāraẗ ‘quartier (d’une ville)’, ? SudAr ḥōr ‘mur circulaire non couvert’; Sab Qat ḥwr ‘établir, s’établier (dans une ville)’, ḥwr ‘résident, habitant, immigrant (dans une ville)’; Qat ‘ordonner, décréter’, Sab Min ḥwr ‘être mis en vigeur, être publié’, hḥr ‘décréter, ordonner’.

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▪ Jeffery1938, 115-16: »It is used only of the disciples of Jesus and only in late Madinan passages. – as-Suyūṭī, Itq, 320, includes it in his list of foreign words, but in this he is quite exceptional.¹ He says, “Ibn Abī Ḥātim quoted from al-Ḍaḥḥāk that ḥawāriyyūn means ‘washermen’ in Nabataean.”² – Most of the Muslim authorities take it as a genuine Ar word either from √ḤWR [i.e. ↗ḥāra yaḥūru ] ‘to return’, or from ḥawira ‘to be glistening white’ [↗ḥawar ]. From the first derivation they get the meaning ‘disciples’ by saying that a disciple means a helper, and so ḥawāriyy means ‘one to whom one turns for help’ (cf. al-Thaʕlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 273). The other, however, is the more popular explanation, and the disciples are said to have been called ḥawāriyyūn because they were fullers whose profession was to clean clothes, or because they wore white clothing, or because of the purity of their inward life (cf. Baiḍ. on iii, 45; TA, iii, 161; LA, v, 299).³ – It was probably in this connection that there grew up the idea that the word was Aramaic, for [Aram] ḥăwar like Syr ḥəwar means ‘to become white’, both in a material and a spiritual sense. There can be no reasonable doubt, however, that the word is a borrowing from Abyssinia. The Eth [Gz] ḥawārəyā is the usual Eth translation of [Grk] apóstolos (cf. Mk. vi, 30). It is used for ‘messenger’ as early as the Aksum inscription (Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 48), and as early as Ludolf it was recognized as the origin of the Ar word.⁴ Dvořák, Fremdw, 64, thinks that it was one of the words that was learned by Muḥammad from the emigrants who returned from Abyssinia, but it is very possible that the word was current in Arabia before his day, for it occurs in a verse of al-Ḍābiʔ b. al-Ḥārith (Aṣmaʕīyāt, ed. Ahlwardt, p. 57) referring to the disciples of Christ.«
▪ Besides the association, mentioned by Jeffery, of the apostles with ‘fullers, white-washers’, ClassAr dictionaries sometimes also relate the ḥawāriyyīn in yet another way to ‘white’ (↗ḥawar), namely in the metaphorical sense of ‘those having a pure character, the virtuous ones, those who are free from vices’. Another common etymology is that the word is taken from ↗ḥāwara ‘to discuss’ (*‘those who discuss, debate’), and hence, or directly, from ↗ḥāra ‘to return’ (*‘those who come back to you with a reply’). BAH2008, who derive the word from the meaning ‘(to en)circle’ attached to ↗ḤWR, can regard the apostles as ‘entourage’ (the circle round Jesus, later also others’ entourage); so also Gabal2012: 405 who thinks that the ‘disciples’ most probably are called ḥawāriyyūn because they form a ‘circle’ around their master.⁵ But cf. DRS (s.v. #ḤWR-3), along the lines of Jeffery: »En guèze [Gz], ḥawāryā est le mot ordinaire désignant le ‘messager’, l’‘envoyé’. Il apparaît déjà dans les inscriptions d’Axoum 2/11 et a désigné plus tard les ‘apôtres’ du Christ. Il est en relation avec le verbe [Gz] ḥora ‘aller’. Le verbe correspondant en arabe, [Ar] ḥāra, ne signifie pas ‘aller’ mais ‘revenir’. Nöldeke […] souligne cette différence, qui conduit à rattacher l’arabe ḥawāriyyūna ‘apôtres’ comme le faisait Ludolf […] à l’éthiopien. Une forme Sab hwry (avec h !) ‘? annoncer, proclamer’ […] semble devoir être rattachée à WRY«.
▪ EALL (Weninger, »Ethiopic Loanwords«) confirms: Ar ḥawāriyyūn ‘apostles’ was loaned from Gz ḥawārəyā ‘traveler, messenger, apostle’, during the First Hijra.
▪ Gabal2012 explicitly underlines that a foreign origin of this item cannot be supported. He also repeats the ClassAr theories that the name may derive from the ‘whiteness’ (↗ḥawar), i.e., purity, of the disciples’ heart. an idea that he dismisses since reports in the Bible describe them as fishermen, hunters, and doctors.

1. Also Mutaw, 59, and given by al-Khafājī in his supercommentary to Baiḍ. on iii, 45. 2. al-Alūsī, iii, 155, quotes the Nab. form as huwwārā. 3. Fraenkel1886:xxi, too, identifies Ar ḥawwārīn with Syr ḥWrīn, the ‘washers’. 4. So Fraenkel, Vocab, 24; Wellhausen, Reste, 232; Pautz, Offenbarung, 255, n.; Dvořák, Fremdw, 58; Wensinck, EI, ii, 292; Cheikho, Naṣrāniya, 189; Horovitz, KU, 108; Vollers, ZDMG, li, 293; Sacco, Credenze, 42. 5. The author assumes a basic value of ‘*hollowness together with roundness’ for the root, see ↗ḤWR.

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