Let’s talk ancient Hebrew grammar. I love this stuff. The term for wedding rings in Hebrew is taba’ot nisuin. The term for ring is taba’at. The root t.b.a. has many meanings in Hebrew. One is nature. Comparing wedding rings to nature, then, is pretty natural, in that the first commandment to mankind in the Bible is to be fruitful and multiply, nature’s most basic instinct. Mankind does that by marriage, the symbol of which is the wedding ring.
Here’s another. Litbo’a, also t.b.a., means to drown. The connection between drowning and wedding rings is quite obvious. Get married, and either you are willing to drown yourself in the obligations of married life, or your marriage won’t succeed. Though drowning has a sort of negative connotation to it, you can more positively see it as a form of unification and surroundingness. When you sink, water surrounds you and you enter a different reality. When you place a wedding ring around your wife’s finger, the wedding ring surrounds the finger and you become unified and part of a completely new atmosphere. The good part is, what follows a wedding ring is survivable. Drowning is not.
A third: Litbo’a also means to coin, to imprint, to mint. This is perhaps the easiest to associate with a wedding ring. Not only are wedding rings themselves minted like coins and forged, but after a wedding ring is given and accepted, both partners are minted and forged into a new reality.
The question now is, wedding rings aside, what does drowning, nature, and minting have to do with one another? These Hebrew games are always hard to guess at, but here’s a shot. All three have to do with an all-encompassing unity. When sinking, the one who sinks becomes wholly part of his surroundings, unifying with them, for good or for bad. When a coin is minted, a pattern is sunk into it and becomes unified with it. Nature itself, in the largest sense, is God’s imprint on the planet. The way that man can take part in this unification is through wedding rings. By surrounding yourself with and unifying with and imprinting another person, we are mimicking what God did in the creation, imprinting himself on the physical world and trying to make that world unite with Him.
No wonder a wedding ring is called a taba’at in the holy tongue of Hebrew, the language with which the world was created.
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