Mapa:
cloth and map.

In Pesahim, Rav Yehuda reports Shmuel's ruling about a meal and kiddush:

ᴏʀɪɢɪɴᴀʟ:

פּוֹרֵס מַפָּה וּמְקַדֵּשׁ²

ᴛʀᴀɴꜱʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴ:

spreads a cloth and recites kiddush³

Here the surrounding discussion identifies a cloth used in the meal. A geographical meaning would obscure the action being described. The passage is evidence for rabbinic usage, rather than an explanation of how the word originated.

Klein's entry groups together:

napkin, flag, tablecloth.⁴

It separately records a wrapper around a scroll and the modern geographical sense. These meanings show how one familiar word appears in several textual practices and settings in the daily life of יהודים YEHUDIM.⁵

Klein derives the Hebrew noun from a contracted form of menafah, a moving cloth or banner, and connects it with the root for moving to and fro. He describes Latin mappa as a borrowing from Hebrew-Punic. This is his etymological reconstruction; the attested meanings alone do not demonstrate the direction of borrowing.⁶

A 2010 Philologos column in the Forward traces the relationship among cloth, Latin mappa and geographical maps. It also questions whether Quintilian's report of a Punic claim to the word establishes which language borrowed from which. The column treats the borrowing direction as unresolved, rather than allowing resemblance to settle it.⁷

The lexical evidence therefore supports a clear distinction: the cloth meaning in the rabbinic passage can be read directly in context, while the deeper history remains a matter of linguistic argument.

• How does the meal described in Pesahim determine what mapa means there?
• What evidence would establish the direction of borrowing between two languages that share a similar word?