• uncertainty@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    Well, not really. That though the words are related, from the link:

    There is a huge gulf between the nomadic Hebrew tribes of the Bronze Age and ancient Rome, and one cannot take a vague allusion in the Hebrew Bible and apply it to a civilization a millennium and more than a thousand miles distant.

    The myth may have arisen in the minds of medieval readers. A number of ancient Roman writers engaged in wordplay and puns about male genitalia and testimony—the similarity between the words was not lost on them—and medieval readers may also have conflated the biblical readings with Roman practice. In any case, it’s not the origin of the Latin or English word.