Category: techno

As part of our new single sign-on authentication in our organization there’s an automated security check that takes place between one system and another.

When users click the link for the second system, they’re presented a screen that says, “Shibboleth Authentication Request.”

That sounds like a really suspicious name (and it’s freaked a couple users out) but it’s actually an ancient Jewish term being used in a new way for the 21st century.

The Hebrew term literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain​ but it was used to determine who the “true” Israelites were in Judges 12.

Gilead captured the fords of the Jordan at the crossing to Ephraim. If an Ephraimite fugitive said, “Let me cross,” the men of Gilead would ask, “Are you an Ephraimite?” and he would say, “No.” And they would say, “Say, ‘Shibboleth.’” But he would always say, “Sibboleth”—he couldn’t say it right. Then they would grab him and kill him there at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two Ephraimite divisions were killed on that occasion. (Judges 12:5-6 MSG)

Other groups have also used the idea of a shibboleth for their own culture or country.

Wikipedia reports​:

Shibboleths have been used by different subcultures throughout the world at different times. Regional differences, level of expertise and computer coding techniques are several forms that shibboleths have taken.

During the Battle of the Bulge, American soldiers used knowledge of baseball to determine if others were fellow Americans or if they were German infiltrators in American uniforms. The Dutch used the name of the seaside town of Scheveningen as a shibboleth to tell Germans from the Dutch (“Sch” in Dutch is analyzed as the letter “s” and the digraph “ch”, producing the consonant cluster [sx], while in German it is analyzed as the trigraph “sch,” pronounced [ʃ]).

During World War II, some United States soldiers in the Pacific theater used the word lollapalooza as a shibboleth to challenge unidentified persons, on the premise that Japanese people often pronounce the letter L as R or confuse Rs with Ls; the word is also an American colloquialism that even a foreign person fairly well-versed in American English would probably mispronounce or be unfamiliar with.

In George Stimpson’s A Book about a Thousand Things, the author notes that, in the war, Japanese spies would often approach checkpoints posing as American or Filipino military personnel. A shibboleth such as “lollapalooza” would be used by the sentry, who, if the first two syllables come back as rorra, would “open fire without waiting to hear the remainder”.

And the phrase was used as the title of an episode on The West Wing, Season 2.

So now you know…