holocaust

The Greek compound holokauston was formed from holos (whole) and kaustos (burnt), the latter from the verb kaiein (to burn). It named a specific type of sacrificial offering in ancient Mediterranean religion: the animal was consumed entirely by fire, nothing kept back for the priests. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced in Alexandria between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, used holokauston to render the Hebrew olah, the ascending offering. The smoke was for God alone.

Latin borrowed the word as holocaustum, and it passed through Old French into English by the 13th century. For centuries, holocaust meant a burnt offering or, by extension, any destruction of large numbers of people or animals by fire. Thomas Browne used it in 1646 to describe animal sacrifices; John Milton used it in 1671 in Paradise Regained to describe a burnt offering at the Temple. The word sat quietly in theological dictionaries, specific and bounded.

The 17th and 18th centuries stretched the word toward secular catastrophe. Writers applied holocaust to the destruction of cities, to massacres, to famines. The shift from sacred to secular horror happened gradually, with no single recorded turning point. By the 19th century, holocaust could describe any event of massive fiery destruction or mass death, and some historians applied it retrospectively to earlier atrocities.

After 1945, the word began its irreversible narrowing. Journalists and survivors used holocaust to describe the Nazi systematic murder of six million Jews, and the capitalized form Holocaust became the standard English term for the Shoah by the 1950s. Elie Wiesel, writing in French and English across decades of testimony, helped fix the word's meaning in public consciousness. The United Nations adopted Holocaust as the official designation. The Greek word for a complete burnt offering had found its most terrible referent.