What is the connection between משל (parable) and מושל (ruler)?

QUESTION: Dear R’ Klein,

I hope all is going well with you. I’m wondering if you have seen anything about the word משל, parable, and particularly if there is any linguistic link to the word מושל, rulership or power.

Thanks for all your Torah, and have a freihlechen Adar!

Best,

Yehuda Fogel

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לייק

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yehoshua steinberg

22 בפבר׳ 2021

I happened to have been reading Jose Faur’s The Horizontal Society earlier today, and I saw that on Page 79 he writes:

The Hebrew mashal (root MShL) usually translated as ‘metaphor,’ and ‘proverb,’ is connected to moshel ‘ruler, legislator,’ because the ideal government, as per Ec 12:9, governs by issuing ‘aphorisms’ (including both the idea of ‘metaphor’ and ‘proverb’) to guide the people. In this sense mashal is an ‘analogy that governs,’ best understood in the light of Justice Cardozo’s remark, concerning the two forms of legal analogies, The Paradoxes of Legal Science, p. 8: The one searches for the analogy that is nearest in point of similarity, and adheres to it inflexibly. The other, in its choice of the analogy that shall govern, finds community of spirit more significant than resemblance of externality.