Meaning of "Ephete" in Seamus Heaney's "The Stations of the West"

Question

So far, the only definition I've managed to get is "a member of an ancient Athenian court that tried certain murder cases" (Merriam-Webster), but since the poem is about traveling to the Gaeltacht to rediscover the Irish language, this definition doesn't really make sense. By context, I assume it means something like "talk!/say!/speak!", but I would like to know the exact meaning and what language it comes from. I suspect it could be Irish, but given the religious undertones it could also be Classical Greek.

On my first night in the Gaeltacht the old woman
spoke to me in English: 'You will be all right.' I sat on a
twilit bedside listening through the wall to fluent
Irish, homesick for a speech I was to extirpate.
I had come west to inhale the absolute weather. The
visionaries breathed on my face a smell of soup-
kitchens, they mixed the dust of croppies' graves with
the fasting spittle of our creed and anointed my lips.
Ephete, they urged. I blushed but only managed a few
words.
Neither did any gift of tongues descend in my days
in that upper room when all around me seemed to
prophesy. But still I would recall the stations of the
west, white sand, hard rock, light ascending like its
definition over Rannafast and Errigal, Annaghry and
Kincasslagh: names portable as altar stones,
unleavened elements.

_{Heaney, Seamus. "The Stations of the West." 1975. New Selected Poems 1966–1987. London: Faber, 1990. Accessed at archive.org 22 March 2024. p. 47.}

Answer 1

The genius of that part of the poem really pivots on that word. It is of Greek origin. In very simple terms "Ephete" would be a magistrate of an Athenian court.

So here, Ephete means to critique or to judge, to judge the weather and imagery of food and culture that came before it. It can also mean to speak up, as in "Ephpheta" which is to open-up. So as to refer to coming out of Homesickness and introverted-ness and open up to the local residents.