The tree-hugger who went on a date: The Meaning of sansan

The biblical hapax legomenon (Song 7:9) seems to denote a part of the date palm, but readers have disagreed widely on which part. Most scholars today follow Immanuel Löw, who concluded from Syriac and Akkadian cognates that the word denotes the spadices, which are the branched stalks that hold the clusters of flowers and fruit. Eran Viezel has recently argued on morphological grounds that it denotes a “fruit-laden cluster of dates”. It is proposed here that the word denotes the projecting leaf bases that line the trunk of the date palm and that it is cognate with the Arabic word sinsin, “edge of a spinal vertebra”, to which these leaf bases bear a close visual resemblance.