Charles Lindbergh testifying in the 1935 trial of Bruno Hauptmann, his son’s kidnapper and murderer. Hauptmann is in profile on the right. Black and white photograph of a man sitting on a chair on a courtroom’s witness stand, surrounded by court clerks, lawyers, jurors, and onlookers.
6 May 2022
[Updated 7 May 2022, adding PIE root.]
Testify is a word with a straightforward etymology but one with a myth attached. The verb is a late fourteenth-century borrowing from the medieval Latin testificare, a later variant on the classical testificor. The Proto-Indo-European root is *trei, with a base meaning of three, and testify and related words come from the compound root *tri-st-i, meaning something like third person standing by, in other words a witness to the fact or truth.
One of its earliest English-language appearances is in William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, written c.1387. In this passage Patience is speaking to Will about the hypocritical Master of Divinity, who is gorging himself before giving a theological lesson on penance:
Pacience parceyved what I thoughte, and [preynte] on me to be stille,
And seide, "Thow shalt see thus soone, whan he may na moore
He shal have a penaunce in his paunche and puffe at ech a worde,
And thanne shullen his guttes gothele, and he shal galpen after;
For now he hath dronken so depe he wole devyne soone
And preven it by hir Pocalips and passion of Seint Avereys
That neither bacon ne braun ne blancmanger ne mortrews
Is neither fissh ne flessh but fode for a penaunt.
And thanne shal he testifie of a trinite, and take his felawe to witnesse
What he fond in a f[or]el after a freres lyvyng;
And but the first leef be lesyng, leve me nevere after!(Patience perceived what I thought, and winked at me to be still,
And said, “You shall see this soon; when he can [eat] no more
He shall have a penance in his paunch and belch at every word,
And than shall his guts rumble, and he shall yawn afterward;
For now he has drunk so deep that he will soon expound
And prove it by the revelation [apocalypse] and passion of Saint Avarice
That neither bacon nor flesh nor blancmange nor stew
Is neither fish nor flesh but food for a penitent,
And then he shall testify of a trinity, and take his fellow to witness
What he found in a box about a friar’s means of support;
And if the first page be a pack of lies, never again believe me!”
Other words from the testi- root follow, such as testimony and testament.
The aforementioned myth is that the Latin word comes from a purported Roman practice of men grabbing each other’s or their own testicles when swearing an oath. The myth dates to the medieval period and is simply not true. We have many accounts of Romans swearing oaths, and not one involves touching anyone’s testicles. The myth, in fact, has the etymological flow reversed. The Latin testis, and therefore the English testicle, come from the metaphor of the testicles being a testament to a man’s virility.
But while the etymology of testify and testificare has nothing to do with it, the notion of swearing on someone’s testicles does possess a grain of truth. The practice is famously alluded to in two passages from Genesis.
The first is Genesis 24:2–4, in which Abraham has a servant swear an oath by placing his hand under his “thigh”:
And Abraham said unto his servant, the elder of his house, that ruled over all that he had: “Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh. And I will make thee swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife for my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell. But thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son, even for Isaac.”
The second is similar, in Genesis 47:29, where Joseph swears an oath to his father Jacob’s (Israel’s):
And the time drew near that Israel must die; and he called his son Joseph, and said unto him: “If now I have found favour in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt.”
The key Hebrew word in these passages is יְרֵכִ֑י (my thigh). The Hebrew text is using a euphemism that is repeated in later translations. The Vulgate Latin uses femore (thigh), and most English translations use thigh.
It’s clear that thigh here is a euphemism for the genitals, but the significance of the gesture is unclear and a matter of scholarly debate. It could be a call to his descendants to ensure the oath-taker keeps his word. Or it may be a form of curse, preventing the oath-taker from siring children should he break his word. 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.
Sources:
Thanks to my brother the Rev. Dr. Carlos Wilton for help on the Hebrew references.
American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots Appendix, s.v. trei.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. testificare, v. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Katz, Joshua T. “Tesimonia Ritus Italici: Male Genitalia, Solemn Declarations, and a New Latin Sound Law.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 98, 1998, 183–217. JSTOR.
Langland, William. Piers Plowman (B-text), c. 1387, 13.85–95. The Vision of Piers Plowman. A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. London: J.M. Dent and E.P. Dutton, 1978. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.
Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. testificor, v. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. testifien, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. testify, v.
Reyburn, William D. and Euan McG. Fry. A Handbook on Genesis. UBS Handbook Series. New York: United Bible Societies, 1997, 521–22.
Photo credit: New York World-Telegram, 1935. Library of Congress. Public domain image.