Barr James Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament 1987

COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AND THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT With Additions and Corrections BY

JAMES BARR

EISENBRAUNS W inona Lake, Indiana 1987

©1968 by Oxford University Press Postscript ©1987 by Eisenbrauns All rights reserved Reprinted 1987, with additions and corrections, by permission of Oxford University Press Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging‫־‬in‫־‬Publication Data Barr, James. Comparative philology and the text of the Old Testament. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Hebrew language—Grammar, Comparative—Semitic. 2. Semitic languages—Grammar, Comparative—Hebrew. 3. Bible. O.T.—Criticism, Textual. I. Title. PJ4564.B28 1987 221.415698‫׳‬4 87‫־‬ ISBN 0-9 3 1 4 6 4 1 ‫־‬33‫־‬

PREFACE T h e research for this book has been done over a number of years, but the basic information was gathered in the excellent facilities of the Speer Library at Princeton Theological Seminary. I owe thanks to the staff of this library, and to Mr. Terence Fretheim, who as a graduate student and departmental assistant worked on the collection of data. My first attempt to present the problem in public was at the meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association of the United States in the summer of 1964. During 1965 my research was greatly assisted by the generosity of the John Simon Guggen heim Memorial Fund, which enabled me to travel in the Near East and study certain relevant linguistic problems. Among scholars who have assisted me with advice and criticism I am particularly indebted to the Revd. John A. Emerton, Reader in Semitic Philology at Oxford and now Regius Professor-elect of Hebrew at Cambridge. I owe much to the opinions of colleagues at Manchester, especially Mr. P. R. Weis, Dr. Meir Wallenstein, Dr. P. Wernberg-Moller, Dr. J. D. Latham, Dr. T. L. Fenton, and the late Mr. Arie Rubinstein. Mr. W. G. Lambert of Birmingham favoured me with an opinion on a point of Accadian. I have been greatly helped by the excellent secretarial assistance provided by Manchester University, in the persons of Mrs. Rowena Scaife and her assistants. J. B. The University Manchester

CONTENTS I.

II.

TEXTUAL TREA TM ENT AND P H IL O L O G IC A L T R E A T M E N T S O M E E X A M P L E S IN G R E A T E R D E T A IL

(1)

‫כלם‬

‘speak*

(2)

‫טוב‬

‘speech*

(3)

‫יקל‬

‘be impudent, shameless*

(4)

‫ידע‬

not meaning ‘know*

(5)

‫דעה‬

‘call*

(6)

‫להקה‬

‘body of elders*

(7)

‫‘ בצ קלו‬fresh vegetables*

(8)

‫נשר‬

‘herald*

(9)

‫אדם‬

‘pleasant, delightful*and ‫‘ קול‬dig, bore’

(10)

‫זמר‬

‘protect* and ‫‘ עזי‬warrior*

26 29

(11) A Grammatical Example

(12) ‘Enclitic M em*

(13) Some General Statements

III. SO M E H IS T O R IC A L A S P E C T S

IV .

(1) T h e D isuse of H ebrew am ong the Jews

(2) L inguistic Elem ents in Jewish Interpretation

(3) Early Intra-linguistic Relations

(4) Aspects of the H istory of Jewish Gram m atical Studies

(5) M ore Recent T rends

A S P E C T S O F C O M P A R A T IV E P H IL O L O G IC A L M E T H O D

(1) H istory

(2) Sound

(3) M eaning

(4) G eneral

CONTENTS V.

P R E L IM IN A R Y Q U E S T IO N S IN PH ILO LO G ICA L TR EA TM EN TS (1) G eneral

(2) M etathesis and Dialect

V I.

VII.

VIII.

(3) Loan-w ords and W ords of non-Sem itic O rigin

101

(4) Area Preferences w ithin Com parative Philology

111

(5) Problems of the Lexicographical T radition

115

(6) ‘Aramaisms* and Similar T erm s

121

TH E D IS T R IB U T IO N OF H O M ON Y M S

125

(1) G eneral

125

(2) H om onym s and Com m unication

134

(3) T h e C ount of K now n H om onym s

145

(4) H om onym y and Style

151

TH E D IS T R IB U T IO N OF LEXICA L R E SO U R C E S IN T H E S E M IT IC LANGUAGES

156

(1) G eneral

156

(2) Biliteral T heories

166

(3) Semantic Fields

170

(4) W ords w ith Opposite M eanings (’Addad)

173

(5) Patterning of Roots and Com patibility o f Consonants

178

(6) W ords K now n T hrough Personal Names

181

(7) Lexicostatistics or G lottochronology

184

TH E M ASSORETES, V O C A LIZA TIO N AND

EM ENDATION

IX .

188

(1) G eneral

188

(2) Fallibility in the Consonantal T ex t

191

(3) T h e Im portance of the Vocalization

194

(4) Evidence for Pre-M assoretic Vocalization

207

(5) Conclusions

217

LATE

HEBREW

AND

VOCABULARY

THE

LOSS

OF 223

CONTENTS

X. THE

USE

EVIDENCE

FROM

THE

VERSIO N S (1) G eneral ( 2 )

X I.

T h e Q uestion of the H ebrew T ex t

245

(3) T h e Question of the Versional T e x t

247

(4) Im precise M ethods of T ranslation

249

(5) T h e U se of Favourite W ords

251

(6) Etymologizing

253

(7) Free Rew riting

255

(8) A dditional Points in the U se of the Versions

259

(9) U ncertainty about the M eaning of th e Version

262

(10) T h e Versions and the G ram m ar of the Original

265

(11) Conclusions

266

SOME PA R T IC U L A R L IN G U IS T IC , LITER -

ARY, AND CULTURAL PROBLEMS

XII.

238 238

273

(1) Onomatopoeia

273

(2) Some L inguistic-cultural Relations

276

(3) Parallelism

277

(4) Religious Factors

282

(5) T h e A rgum ent from A ctuality

285

SU M M ING -UP

288

A p p e n d ix : C o m p a r is o n o f S y r ia c a n d H e b r e w V er bs

305

ABBREV IA TIO N S

308

BIBLIOGRAPHY

310

INDEX OF EXAM PLES

320

INDEXES

338

POSTSCRIPT

355

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

362

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

388

LIMITATIONS OF ETYMOLOGY AS A LEXICOGRAPHICAL INSTRUMENT IN BIBLICAL HEBREW

412

TEXTUAL TREATMENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREATMENT Hebrew manuscript text of the Old Testament shows a high degree of uniformity. This characteristic constitutes a peculiarity of Old Testament textual criticism, and provides a considerable contrast with the situation found in many classical authors or in the New Testament. This uniformity, indeed, should not be exaggerated. Large col lections of variants were made by Kennicott and de Rossi. As all investigators have recognized, however, most of these variations are of a comparatively minor nature. While they undoubtedly merit attention and may form useful evidence for the history of the text, they are generally not such as to lead to, or provide the chief clues for, the resolution of the major difficulties which have been found in the reading of the Old Testament. It is true that, with the discovery of the Qumran scrolls, access has at last been gained to a Hebrew text which shows in some places a substantial variation from the text previously known to us. This qualification also, however, is limited in its effect. Only a smallish portion of the Old Testament text has as yet been found at Qumran and in the associated discoveries. Apart from the book of Isaiah, the amount of text where real alternative controls have been made available is still small. Moreover, the Qumran texts, being un vocalized, do not provide exactly the same kind of information as the Massoretic text does. Again, many of the fragments, like the later manuscripts, vary very little from the Massoretic text; and^ it is widely agreed that the text-type which we call the Massoretic in a broad sense was already in existence in the Qumran period, or the latter part of it. Therefore we are justified in reiterating that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament shows a striking uniformity in comparison with the text of some other types of ancient literature. For a very large proportion of the serious points of difficulty which the reader encounters, and where he might pause and wonder whether the T

TEXTU A L TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

text is in order, the Hebrew manuscripts provide him with no series of substantial alternatives from which to select. The reader of the Old Testament, indeed, is not dependent solely upon the Hebrew text of that literature. There are also the ancient translations, ‘versions* as they are called in the technical convention, in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and other languages. These translations were made at relatively early dates, in some cases before the Christian era. Thus the Massoretic manuscripts are antedated by several centuries by the origin of the versions, and even by some of the extant manuscripts of them. A version, once translated and in use, originated a line of transmission different from that of the Hebrew text. This difference does not always mean absolute separation; attempts were made to bring the Greek ver sion into line with the Hebrew text as it was in the post-Christian era. But in general the versions enjoyed some considerable inde pendence from the historical development of the Hebrew text. They have therefore always been highly valued in Old Testament studies, for they provide that choice between substantial alterna tives which is so often lacking in the Hebrew text itself. Nevertheless the scholar cannot use the ancient versions as if they were actual Hebrew texts. The translators may have mis understood the original Hebrew, so that their version is not a good, but a very bad, guide to what the original text said. Finding a difficult passage in Hebrew, they may have just guessed at the sense. They may not have translated literally, but have given a rough paraphrase of what was said. They may be literal at one place but paraphrastic at another; and in some versions, like the LXX, the translating techniques differed from book to book, and even between sections of books. For these and similar reasons, the very high importance which attaches to the ancient versions does not alter the fact that they are not Hebrew manuscripts. The effect they have upon our thinking is, in respect of directness and complexity, quite different from the effect of manuscript evidence in Hebrew. The attention we give to a reading in a version is usually proportionate to the degree of difficulty which we find in the Hebrew text itself. In general, therefore, the existence and the importance of the ancient versions do not really alter the peculiar aspect to which I have drawn attention, namely the relatively high uniformity of the Hebrew text in points of substantial effect on meaning.

TEXTUAL TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL T REA TM ENT

This leads to an important distinction. The starting-point of a textual discussion is different where the texts are divergent and where the texts are uniform. If the text of a book varies, the normal starting-point for a textual discussion will be the fact that different readings exist. Given this fact, it obviously becomes important to discuss which reading may have been the original, or to classify the readings or assess them in some other way. This discussion has to take place because the texts vary; its necessity is not removed if several, or indeed if all, of the readings appear to lend a satisfactory sense within the context. Where there is no substantial variation in the text, however, a textual discussion usually begins from a different starting-point, which we can name only vaguely as a ‘difficulty’. The reader finds ‘a difficulty’ in the text which he is reading. He feels that it ‘does not make sense’. The grammar is ‘wrong’, i.e. does not fit with usual patterns of usage. The use of words is anomalous. Or perhaps the text contradicts what is said elsewhere in the same literary work, so that it seems to ‘spoil the effect’ of the whole; or it may contradict something well known from altogether other sources. These are simple examples of what is a ‘difficulty’. Now so long as the reader is confident that the text is right, he has to resolve his difficulties through various linguistic and literary explanations: perhaps the grammar should be recognized as an anomaly; perhaps we have a case of poetic licence, an unusual meaning for a word, an ellipse of something usually expressed explicitly, a metaphor, or an allegory with a hidden meaning. Or, indeed, the reader may just give up, and decide that he does not know the meaning and cannot know it with the data he now pos sesses. The more sophisticated reader, however, will know that texts may be wrongly transmitted; and, after trying the expedients men tioned above, or even before trying them, he may begin to suspect an error in the text. If there is no manuscript reading to support his conclusions, what he produces will be a conjectural emendation, which he will support by arguing that it makes much better sense. Even a conjectural emendation, however, will point out some kind of relation between the reading conjectured and the text actually found. There may be some features in common; or it will be possible to show how the conjectured text, once misunderstood or miswritten, could naturally have led to the text actually found;

TEXTUAL TREATM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

or some other such relation will be suggested. In other words, even conjectural emendations are seldom purely conjectural in nature; they normally take departure from, or have some logical link with, some aspect of the existing text. I repeat, then, my generalization. With a non-uniform text we may find variant readings, and textual discussion begins from these variant readings, even if all of them ‘make sense’. With a text of high uniformity, however, textual discussion will more frequently begin from the feeling that there is a ‘difficulty’; the procedure will be more independent of the existence of variant readings, and conjectural emendation will take a larger place in the discussion. This may be illustrated vividly from the difference between Old and New Testaments. In the latter it is quite common to find a variant which differs substantially in meaning and yet each of the readings ‘makes sense’. It is quite uncommon to find that by the judgement of competent readers the passage does not ‘make sense’, to the degree that the extant texts must be despaired of and resort be made to a conjectural emendation found in none of them. Thus conjectural emendation has been used with considerable restraint in the New Testament. Metzger1 tells us that the apparatus of the twenty-fourth edition of Nestle’s Greek New Testament includes from various sources about 200 conjectures, 90 of which are identified by the name of the scholar who first suggested them. The average student, however, if we may hazard a guess, will find it hard to recall a single one of these conjectures, unless it be the addition at I Peter 3. 19 of the name ‘Enoch’ as the person who preached to the spirits in prison. Not only for the average student, but for the general current of New Testament scholarship, the procedure of conjecture is decidedly a marginal one, considerably more marginal than the recording of 200 examples would suggest. It is in fact extremely seldom that a scholar judges the text so desperately hopeless that a conjecture seems better than all the attested variants. In the Old Testament our average experience is just the oppo site. It is quite seldom that textual problems which are substantial in point of meaning arise because variant Hebrew readings exist. On the other hand it is quite normal experience to find that a read ing is almost unanimously supported by Hebrew manuscripts but 1 B. M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, p. 185.

TEXTU A L TREATM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

that scholars turn to emendation to find a text which seems to be viable. The well-known example at Ps. 2. 11-12 reads materially alike in all Hebrew manuscripts: . . . ‫ע ב ד ו א ת ״ י ה ו ה ב י ר א ה וגי לו ב ר ע ד ה נ ש קו ־ ב ר‬ This high unanimity of the manuscripts has been equalled, however, by the high degree to which scholars have preferred emendation. The text contains difficulties. If we take the AV and read: ‘Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son . . .’ the prima-facie difficulties are: (1)‫‘ ב ר‬son’ is not a Hebrew, but an Aramaic, word; (2) the sequence ‘rejoice with trembling’ seems to make poor sense. We need not here decide whether these considerations are final. Let us observe that in fact scholars have generally been inclined to favour such a rearrangement of the text as: : ‫ י ה ו ה ב י ר א ה ב ר ע ד ה נ שקו ב ר ג ל י ו‬- ‫ע ב ד ו א ת‬ ‘Serve the Lord in fear; in trembling kiss his feet.’ This removes both difficulties. It implies that corruption took place by a fairly simple loss of sequence for a few letters, which explains the corruption fairly well. It involves no very drastic rewriting of letters in the text beyond this. Finally, it produces good conformity to known types of expression in Hebrew. Thus the beginning of a textual discussion arises not primarily from the existence of variant readings but from the perception of difficulties in the Hebrew text. The solution just described does not even have direct support from any of the versions, though these differ from each other in their understanding of the text. The position is not materially changed, however, when active use is made of the versions. Thus far I have tried to establish a characteristic of the situation where a relatively uniform text exists, and to show that this is so in the Old Testament. Now in this situation there are in principle two quite different and indeed opposed methods which can be used for the achievement of understanding. One I shall call textual and the other I shall call philological. The distinction is of central importance for this book. A textual treatment works on the hypothesis that an error has

TEXTUAL TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

occurred in the graphic transmission. A scribe has misread some letters in the manuscript being copied, or has missed out some words and later added them in the wrong place, or inserted a mar ginal note as if it was part of the text. If variant readings exist, they probably imply such an error in the past; if there is no variation, but conjectural emendation is used, the same possibilities are implied as a hypothesis. A philological treatment does not suggest a differing original text, corrupted by graphic error; rather, it elucidates the meaning of the existing text through the application of linguistic evidence hitherto ignored. It thus justifies the existence of the rare or anom alous words which had constituted the original difficulty, and by removing the difficulty it undercuts the foundations of the textual treatment. The principal evidence used in a philological treatment is the linguistic usage of the cognate languages, and with it the usage of other stages of the same language, Hebrew. For a difficult form in the existing text the scholar will consider words in cognate languages which might be related. This consideration, if success ful, may suggest for the Hebrew form a meaning other than that which has normally been acknowledged, and this new-found mean ing now removes the original difficulty. Thus the philological treatment, compared with the textual, means a shift from problems of writing, of scripts, of scribes, to problems of meaning; it leads not to a text which has been copied wrongly, but to a meaning which has been obscured or interpreted wrongly. It does not rewrite the characters of the text but explains them in a new way. The limited scope of the Old Testament provides a reason in favour of the philological approach. It is a comparatively small body of literature; there is little direct external evidence for the Hebrew of biblical times, and the post-biblical language has some striking differences. Not surprisingly the Old Testament contains many rare or unique expressions, which are difficult because they are unexampled elsewhere in Hebrew. Is it not then natural to turn to the large resources of the cognate languages, such as Arabic? These may suggest words which in their form could be cognate with a Hebrew form and which by their known meaning could suggest a suitable sense for it. Isa. 44. 8 has the expression If the text is right, the verb is a hapax legomenon, so unexampled elsewhere that the

TEXTUAL TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

dictionaries are uncertain what verb it is in the first place; some register it as ‫ י ל ה‬, others as ‫ ל ה ה‬. Emendations have been suggested, such as that to ‫ ת ל א ו‬, from the familiar ‫‘ י ל א‬fear’, and that to ‫ ת ל ה ב ו‬, which would mean ‘be arrogant’. The Qumran reading ‫ ת י ל א ו‬, though almost identical with the former emendation, does not settle the matter, since it may have been caused by exactly the same motives which led modern scholars to suggest the emendation. The question remains: is there any reason to suppose that a form ‫ ת ל לו‬may have existed P1 If there is suitable evidence in the cognate languages, then our form, though unique in the Bible, may yet in some sense be explained or justified. This is done in dictionaries which quote an Arabic verb wariha, said to mean ‘be stupefied’ or the like.2 The argument tacitly runs as follows: if this word, known in Arabic, had a cognate in Hebrew, the latter would, in respect of form, come close to the form of the M T ; moreover, in respect of meaning, the sense known for the Arabic word, or a sense relatable to it by a reasonably probable analogy, fits the contextual setting of the Hebrew word. This being so, the Hebrew text has been both justified and explained; an account has been given of the form of MT, and a meaning has been suggested which appears to fit the passage well. The resources for this solution are supplied by comparative philology. Thus in principle the philological treatment, if right, cancels out textual treatment; the question is not one of exploring hypothetical scribal errors, but one of exploring the forms and meanings of words in cognate languages. Having established the difference between the two types of treatment, one must go on to say that these are not distinct in the sense that one must consistently follow one and ignore the other. A competent worker must understand both, and, as we shall see, it is very common for practice to mingle the two. At any one point, however, the distinctness between the two may be very marked. They move the scholar in exactly opposite directions. The textual approach leads towards the detection of a corruption in transmission and therefore, if the text is uniform, 1 Cf. below, pp. 166, 188, 231 f. 2 Freytag, iv. 459b; but does Freytag’s entry really justify this sense?

TEXTU A L TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

towards a conjectural emendation, with or without support from the versions. The philological approach suggests the rightness of the text (for without it there is no basis for a search in the cognate languages) and leads on towards an exploration of resources, hitherto neglected, in the other Semitic languages. Formally speak ing, the former should be registered in a critical apparatus to the text; the latter should mean a modification to the Hebrew lexicon. Thus, although the two methods are frequently mingled or their differences obscured in a number of ways, it is important to observe that at any one point they offer sharply distinct possibilities. This is a reason for the writing of this book. For the textual criticism of the Old Testament adequate guidance already exists in the standard works of Wurthwein and Roberts. But the whole weight of their work lies, and quite properly, on the textual kind of treatment, and the philological approach receives only the barest mention. Wurthwein devotes about a page (pp. 78 f.) to it, mentioning one example (Hab. 3. 6f.); he does not discuss the criteria or the ultimate implications of the method. The subject requires not only to be mentioned, but to be discussed in detail, with plentiful examples, and with consideration of the criteria by which it can be guided, of the further implications which it carries, and of the lines of new research which it appears to demand. In this book the existing studies of the textual approach will be com plemented with a general survey of the philological approach and of the interaction between the two. Modern textual criticism, even when it adopts an ‘eclectic’ policy in its decision about readings, does not work atomistically, but depends on a general survey of the history of the manuscript tradition and the modes by which alterations may occur. For philological treatments, however, such a general discussion has hitherto been lacking. This is illustrated by the way in which the results of philological treatments have been made public. Very often this has been in the form of small and disparate notes, which are scattered throughout the technical journals and neglect to discuss the problem system atically. Even dictionaries and commentaries, which might be expected to gather together all that has been published in detailed notes, have frequently not done so in fact. Sometimes scholars proposing philological treatments seem to have paid little attention to the proposals of other scholars on the same passages.

TEXTUAL TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

If this breakdown in communication and discussion is a difficulty for the scholar, it is a very much more serious one for the student, who is much less able to judge for himself. He may be so much in awe of the linguistic erudition of suggestions that he hesitates to use his intellect critically upon them. This book is intended to provide him with the necessary critical equipment. Moreover, the discrimination of students is often hindered rather than fostered by works devoted to the ‘flood of light’ (or some such cliché) shed upon the Old Testament by modern dis covery. Such works often spend more time in admiring the advance of knowledge about the cognate languages than in examining the difficulties which attend the application of this knowledge. They give the impression that, so long as advance in the knowledge of Semitic languages is being made, one can somehow rest assured that the elucidation of Old Testament passages formerly obscure will follow. To suppose this, as we shall see, is to ignore some awkward problems. The fact that many attempts at philological treatment are to be found only in scattered notes in the journals is one reason why this present work was undertaken in the first place. I found it necessary for my own information to gather these suggestions together ; this I did simply by card-indexing. The mere existence of an index, however, was itself an invitation to survey the principles and problems involved. The juxtaposition of so many attempts could not fail to raise questions which might be missed so long as one looked at each suggestion individually. For it should be observed that the number of philological treat ments has become very large. The question I raise is not a marginal or an occasional one. In recent years interest in the philological approach has so expanded that a competence in it may possibly have become more important than the traditional training in the textual approach. The passages so treated number many hundreds, if not thousands, even if one discounts obviously incompetent or fantastic solutions. It is not uncommon for a scholar in a brief article to publish notes which claim to add to the Hebrew vocabulary a score of words not previously recognized. One article of 34 pages by Eitan has provided my index with over 40 suggested new words, most of them otherwise quite unrecognized, from the book of Isaiah alone.1 1 T he article is H U C A xii-xiii (1937-8) 5 5 8 8 ‫ ־‬.

TEXTUAL TREATM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREATM ENT

It remains for this introductory chapter to say something about the limitations which will be observed in this work. Our subject is the application of philological means to elucidate Old Testament passages which would otherwise be regarded as obscure or corrupt. This book is not intended to be an introduction to comparative philology itself. Certain aspects of this discipline, however, call for special remark, and for this reason some discussion of Semitic comparative philology will be given. This discussion is not intended, however, to be a substitute for the actual study of comparative philology. Again, this book will not discuss the problems involved in the wider study which might be called comparative literature. For example, there are relations between Babylonian and Hebrew creation stories. It is possible that this study of the larger literary complexes, their content, themes, and styles is the most fruitful way in which the Semitic background can be made to illustrate the Old Testament. Nevertheless this form of research will not be discussed here; we shall work not on the macrocosmic scale of the literary forms, but on the microcosmic scale of the lexical forms. Moreover, within the study of lexical forms, there are a number of ways in which comparative data may be used. Sometimes comparative data may enrich with additional nuances our appreciation of a word the basic sense of which is already known. Examples of this, however, will not generally be discussed here. Again, sometimes a Hebrew word is quite familiar but comparative studies have been invoked in order to identify more exactly the referent to which the word is applied—for example, animal names like ‫ר א ם‬ or ‫נ ש ל‬. This also will not be discussed in this book. In such cases, although an important service is rendered if the meaning of the word can be more closely identified, the word was not in the first place of such obscurity as to constitute for the reader a source of doubt about his text; he knows that ‫ ר א ם‬is some sort of strong animal and ‫ נ שר‬some kind of bird. In general, then, this book concentrates mainly on the situation where the use of comparative study is most critical, because without it the reader would be likely to question his text. It does not attempt to give equal attention to all the various kinds of contribution that comparative philology can make. Readers should observe that some of the words and meanings mentioned in this book have a somewhat hypothetical character.

TEXTUAL TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

This follows from the nature of the enterprise; we are discussing suggestions which have been put forward rather than facts which are certainly known. If I mention that an Arabic word with a cer tain meaning has been cited in the course of a scholarly suggestion, the reader should not conclude that I guarantee the accuracy of the information cited. I have not intentionally left unremarked, how ever, anything which seems to me to be misleading. Nor have I, except in special cases, used the asterisk which is conventional for hypothetical or reconstructed forms. For my purpose it has not been particularly important to trace the scholar who first made a particular suggestion. Our question is of the logical status, rather than the historical priority, of philological treatments. I have not, therefore, made any great effort to discover the first author of a suggestion, especially since, as I have found, later workers often remained ignorant of earlier suggestions in any case. Conversely, a treatment cited may sometimes later have been abandoned by its author; but this makes no difference to its logical status. I have cited treatments, where possible, in modern sources of suitable form and accessibility.1 I apologize in advance if I seem to have failed to give credit where it is due. This book does not contain many philological treatments of my own suggestion. The positive need of the present time is not the production of larger numbers of such treatments, but the elucida tion of the criteria by which they can be sifted and evaluated. The examples cited below are, I believe, a fair example of the contribu tion which philological study has made; but it may be more impor tant that we use facts critically than that we store facts themselves, and more valuable that we should learn to appraise suggestions than that we should produce them. The thoughtful restudy of past scholarship is not criticism for the sake of criticism, but an attempt to elucidate the principles involved in the discovery of truth. In doing this, however, it is right that we express our gratitude and respect to those whose work is being used and restudied, and with out whose pioneering zeal and daring the present evaluation could not have been attempted. Various chapters of this book discuss different criteria, which 1 Thus the idea that at Num. 23. 10 means ‘dust’ (Index, nos. 294-5) can be found in a much earlier form in Jacob, Z A W xxii (1902) 111; but the circumstances of the modem treatments are lacking, even if the suggestion has the same result.

TEXTUAL TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREATM ENT

may be applicable to the various examples cited. For many exam ples I have not been able to give a final decision at the point where each is considered, because this would involve other criteria than the one at present under discussion and would thus immensely complicate the presentation. In order to avoid the impression that a decision is being evaded, however, I have sometimes offered a summary decision, even if I have not been able to state the grounds for it in full. In any case the logical structure of the argu ment does not lie in the rightness or wrongness of individual examples, each to be decided on its own merits, but in the elucida tion of the criteria. Earlier in this chapter attention was drawn to a difference be tween scholarship in the field of the Greek classics or of the New Testament and scholarship in the Old Testament field. To this another difference may be added. It is the relative prominence of languages other than the language in which the texts were written. The Old Testament is a relatively restricted amount of text for use as a sample for the language of the ancient Israelites. In classical or Hellenistic Greek the bulk of text available is very much greater. Interpretative discussion of specific points will usually appeal to evidence observable elsewhere in extant Greek literature; a scholar does not very often explain a word as one not elsewhere extant in Greek, the existence of which may, however, reasonably be postulated from a similar word in Sanskrit or Lithuanian or Gothic. Only on the margins of Greek textual scholarship are such explanations likely to occur, and the propor tion of them is surely infinitesimal in relation to the whole. In Hebrew scholarship, however, such forms of explanation are quite normal. Probably no body of ancient literature has benefited (or suffered ?) so much as the Old Testament from explanations based upon languages other than that in which it is written. The only exceptions are literatures which have had no form of continuous literary transmission from the ancient world into the modern, and which, being discovered only by modern archaeological research, have had to be deciphered anew wholly on the basis of comparative data. Ugaritic is the prime example. The decipherment and inter pretation of the Ugaritic texts and others of the same kind are indeed a triumph of scholarship. But the growing emphasis on this kind of scholarship has affected our relationship to a language

TEXTUAL TREA TM ENT AND PHILOLOGICAL TREA TM ENT

like Hebrew, in which we do have a transmission of meaning by tradition from the past to the present. The increasing prominence of other languages than Hebrew and the increasing dominance of comparative methods have had effects upon the study of the Old Testament which have not yet been fully investigated. So far this subject has been considered with some generality. Only one or two examples have been given. Our next step will be to look in much greater detail at a number of examples, in order to consider the methods and the logic by which they operate, and to bring to light some of the questions which emerge from them.

II SOME EXAMPLES IN GREATER DETAIL T h is chapter will be devoted to the setting out of some examples of philological treatment of the Old Testament text. The examples have been chosen to illustrate the various kinds of problems which may arise and the various kinds of evidence which may be adduced. In these respects they form a representative cross-section of the suggestions which philological work has produced. Some of them are, in my opinion, very convincing, while some others are doubtful or improbable. At this stage, however, I have tried to hold back my own judgement, and simply to present the arguments implied in the treatment under review. (1)

‫‘ כ ל ם‬speak‫׳‬

Judges 18. 7 has long been considered difficult. Five scouts of the Danites came to Laish. They found the people living quietly, with a sense of security; and then the text goes on: ‫־ו אי ך ס ? לי ם ד ב ר ב א ל ץ‬ Moore translated ‘there was no one to put them to shame (or, insult them) in anything’; but he pronounced this to be ‘wholly irrelevant’.1 Many scholars have emended the text to read: ‫ו אין מלזסור כ ל ־ ד ב ר ב א ר ץ‬ —a phrase the strength of which lies in the very similar locution a few verses later (18. 10). The meaning would then be: ‘there was no lack of anything in the land’. Moore himself preferred to emend to ‫ מ כ ל א‬, giving the sense ‘there is no one to restrain (us) from anything in the land’. This discussion has thus far assumed for ‫ כ ל ם‬the sense ‘humiliate, insult, reproach’ which is normal in Hebrew. If, however, the difficulty causes us to look for help in the cognate languages, we 1 Moore, Judges (ICC), p. 392.

‫‘ כ ל ם‬SPEAK*

at once think of the very common Arabic verb kallama ‘speak‫ ״‬and the noun kalam ‘speech, word‫״‬. This Arabic sense, when applied to the passage, gives what appears to be a good sense, ‘no,one uttering a word in the land’. This fits well with the quiet security of life at Laish. The removal of the difficulty thus abolishes the original ground for emendation. I do not know which scholar first proposed this interpretation; it is already known to Reider, who in 1954 uses the same evidence for another difficult passage. The testimony of the ancient versions may be added. Moore stated baldly that ‘the versions give no help‫״‬. But in Judges the LXX has two different versions. The B text has καταισχύνων, which confirms the M T ‫ מ כ ל י ם‬by translating it with its usual sense ‘make ashamed‫״‬. The A text, however, has και μη δυναμένους λαλησαι ρήμα, and the λαλήσαι ‘to speak’ appears at first sight to confirm the interpretation made from Arabic.1 This is not argued, however, by Reider himself. Reider applied this result to Mic. 2. 6. A prohibition, usually taken to mean ‘do not preach‫״‬, is followed by the words: 1‫י ס‬ ‫ני ל מו ת‬. Reider not only finds here ‫‘ כ ל ם‬speech‫ ;״‬he holds the entire phrase to be ‘really an Arabism‫״‬, corresponding to nasaja l-kalam ‘he forged speech‫״‬. The sense is ‘they shall not forge speeches‫״‬, and is parallel to the earlier prohibition of preaching. Reider thus identifies also a verb 102 ‘forge‫ ״‬in Hebrew. Previous scholarship had some considerable uncertainty about the meaning, and emendation has been tried. We shall not decide whether Reider‫״‬s suggestion is right; we note only some general characteristics of the method: (a) The existence of a difficulty, with a previous resort to emendation. (b) A dependence on the text, and, accordingly, a rejection of extensive emendation, as a starting-point for the philological treatment. (c) A use of the ancient versions as a source which may show that a sense, now disclosed to us only through comparative philological methods, was already known in antiquity. 1 Further examination, however, shows that the A text should not be interpreted in this way; it is not λαλησαι, but δνναμενονς, that comes from ‫ מ כ ל י ם‬. The form in the Hebrew, whether identical with M T or not, was taken as from ‫ י כ ל‬.

SOM E EX A M PLES IN G R E A T ER D E T A IL

(2)

‫* טו ב‬speech’

Anyone who knows any Hebrew knows the familiar word ‫ ב‬1‫ט‬ *good’. There are certain places where this word appears not to make very good sense. Hos. 14. 3 (EV 14. 2), a passage difficult also in other respects, seems to suggest that the repentant man should address God with the phrase ‫* ק ח ~ טו ב‬accept that which is good’ (so RSV). There seems to be something unsuitably condescending in the idea that repentant sinners should ask God to accept that which is good, and especially so in the teaching of Hosea. Moreover, the beginning of the same verse has the phrase ‫ ד ב ר י ם‬DD/3V ‫ק חו‬ which would seem to address the repentant with the command ‘take with you words’ in their returning to the Lord. It is thus no surprise that Gordis holds ‫ ב‬1‫ ט‬here to mean *speech’. He writes: The biblical and rabbinic root ‫‘ ל ב ב‬speak’ (Cant. 7. 10), from which ‫‘ ל ב ה‬report, evil report’ (Gen. 37. 2, Num. 14. 37) is derived (cf. Accadian dababu ‘speak, charge’), apparently has a cognate ‫ ב‬1‫ט‬, ‫ ט ב ב‬. Thus ‫ ל ב ה‬is rendered as ‫ ט י ב א‬by Onqelos and as tbhzvn by Peshitta in Gen. 37. 2, and by ‫ ט א ב א‬by the Targum on Prov. 10. 18. For these reasons, along with other aspects of the context into which we shall not enter, Gordis concludes that the meaning is ‘accept our speech’. This interpretation appears to overcome certain of the difficulties of the context; and it furnishes a close parallelism between ‫ ב‬1‫ ט‬and ‫ ד ב ר י ם‬, both of which mean *speech’ or ‘words’. Not only this; for Gordis goes on to cite other places, e.g. Neh. 6. 19: : ‫גם טו ב תיו דייו א מ רי ם ל פ ני ו ך ^ו־י ז^יר מו צי אי ם ל ו‬ He renders: ‘His utterances they were wont to repeat to me, and my words they would bring to him.’ Here ‫ טו ב תי ל‬is represented in the LXX (II Esdras 16. 19) by το ύ ς λό γο υ ς α ύ τ ο ΰ : κ α ι το υ ς λ ό γο υς α ύ το ΰ η σαν λ εγ ο ν τε ς ττρός μ ε κ α ι λό γο υ ς μ ο υ ησ α ν εκ φ ερο ντες α ύτω .

Previous scholars (Geiger, Low) had proposed an emendation to ‫ ; ט ב ת י ו‬this is favoured by Rudolph in his commentary,1 and is 1 Esra und Nehemia (1949), p. 137.

‫* ט ו ב‬s p e e c

17 incorporated in KB.1 It implies that the Aramaic word ‫ ט ב א‬or ‫‘ ט ב ה‬rumour, report’ existed in the Hebrew of Nehemiah, and this in itself is of course possible. The proposal of Gordis, however, seems to suggest that the meaning ‘speech’ is present {a) without any emendation and (b) without reliance on an Aramaic loan-word in Hebrew. A third case quoted by Gordis is Ps. 39. 3 (EV 39. 2), where ‫ נ א ל מ תי דו מי ה ה ח שי תי פ!טוב‬might then mean2 ‘I was dumb and silent; I refrained from speech’. To the three points of general interest raised by our previous example the following further characteristics may now be added: (d) Multiple exemplification of the same solution, once it has first been found. There exists not only one case where ‫ט ו ב‬ ‘speech’ is identified, but several; and these several, after the first identification is made, appear to support and confirm one another. Gordis indeed identified yet other instances at Job 34. 4 and Hos. 3. 5, but he was less sure about them. (1e) The identification of a new homonym. In addition to the familiar ‫ ב‬1‫‘ ט‬good’ there is another ‫ ב‬1‫‘ ט‬speech’ which is hornonymous with it. This is not all, for wide recognition has been given to yet another ‫ ב‬1‫‘ ט‬perfume’, related to the Arabic fib with that sense and identified at Isa. 39. 2, Jer. 6. 20, Cant. 7. 10 in senses like ‘the perfumed oil’ ( ‫) ה ש מן ה ט ו ב‬, ‘the perfume stalks’ (‫ק נ ה‬ ‫) ה ט ו ב‬, and ‘the perfumed wine’ (‫) יי ] ה טו ב‬. Another ‫ ט ו ב‬is a place-name. For yet other homonyms which have been suggested, see Index, nos. 147 8 ‫ ־‬. (3)

*be impudent, shameless’

The story of Korah’s rebellion begins in Num. 16. 1 with the words ‫ ו י ק ה ק ר ח‬. If this was the familiar verb ‫‘ ל ק ח‬take’ one would expect an object. AV, following Ibn Ezra, supplies one, namely ‘men’, and RSV follows this also. The 1962 Jewish American version translates ‘betook himself’, but in a note says the word is literally ‘took’ and adds ‘Heb. obscure’. Gray in the ICC (1912, p. 189) did not try to make anything of it, being sure that part of the text had 1 KB, p. 346a. 2 There is a complication in Gordis ,s own treatment, for he takes ‫ דו מי ה‬also to mean *speech*, though it is usually taken to mean ‘silence’; I leave this aside at present for simplicity’s sake.

SOM E E X A M PL E S IN G R E A T E R D E T A IL

become entirely lost. B H 3 offers us as a probable emendation the too facile ‫‘ וי ק ם‬and he rose u p \ The early versions present a varied picture. LXX says ελάλησ€ *he spoke’; the Targum and Syriac say 4he split off, broke away’ or the like (Tg. ‫ ;) א ת פ ל י ג‬the Vulgate, which begins ecce autem Core followed by a list of Korah’s assistants, has no verb at all (could ecce be from a transliteration?). Eitan argued that this is a Hebrew word corresponding to Arabic waqiha ‘be impudent, shameless’. This might be supported by a piece of evidence which Eitan himself did not use, but which B H 3 cites: the Hexaplaric note that d Ε β ρ α ίο ς has ύπερηφανβύθη ‘was insolent’.1 Two things should be noted about this interpretation which have not been exactly exemplified in the previous instances. (а) If this explanation is correct, it is probable that the similarity of the (presumably uncommon) verb ‫ י ק ח‬to certain comparable parts of the familiar verb ‫‘ ל ק ח‬take’ was itself an actual cause which contributed to the loss of understanding of the meaning, and even of the existence, of the former. The familiar verb overshadowed the less familiar until the philological treatment restored it to our sight. This in turn depends on the accident that the verb ‫ י ק ח‬is found only in the imperfect; a perfect foim, which in the 1st singular would be *‫ י ק ח תי‬, would be much less liable to confusion with ‫ ל ק ח‬. (б) In many cases of this type the new identification will probably require a change of vocalization. Thus for a verb cognate with Arabic waqiha we would expect an imperfect qal form like ‫יי ק ח‬. or ‫לקח‬., without the daghesh which we find in the M T of Num. 16. 1 and which gives a form identical with that from ‫‘ ל ק ח‬take’. Or, conversely, the mistaking of the form for one from the verb ‫ל ק ח‬ ‘take’ carried with it the wrong pointing of the form. Neither of these arguments is actually made by Eitan at this point; but they are very frequently implied in philological treatments. Eitan finds another case of this verb at Job 15.12, where the M T reads: : ‫מ ה ־י קן ס ף ל ן ף ו מ ה ־י ך ץ מון עיגי ף‬ 1 Cf. again below, p. 271.

‫‘ י ק ח‬BE I M P U D E N T , S H A M E L E S S *

Eitan’s translation is: *What does your heart dare, and why are your eyes lifted up ?* Concerning this interpretation some brief remarks may be made. (a) One reason why a scholar may favour such an explanation as this is a doubt whether ‫* ל ק ח‬take’ can really be used, in the words of BDB, *figuratively, of passion carrying one away’.1 (b) Though Eitan does not say so at this point, one might wonder whether his interpretation is not supported by the LXX: r t €τόλμησ€ν ή καρδία σου‫י‬ η τ ί έπ ή νβ γκα ν ο ΐ οφ θ α λμ οί σου ;

(c) Eitan uses a philological treatment for the first verb in the verse, but for the second he resorts to textual treatment by conjeetural emendation, reading ]‫ י רו מו‬from the verb ‫* לו ם‬be high’. (4)

‫ י ד ע‬not meaning ‘know’

The standard dictionaries GB, BDB, and KB recognize and register only one verb ‫ י ד ע‬, the familiar and extremely frequent one meaning *know\ There are, however, a number of places where this does not appear to give satisfactory sense, and in some of these scholars have proposed other meanings supported by the existence of words in the cognate languages, especially Arabic. This example is of special interest because of two things: (a) the familiarity of the word ‫* י ד ע‬know’, and (b) the large number of passages in which philological treatments have claimed to identify a different word. Several different such identifications, indeed, have been proposed. (1) the most important of these is a sense *make quiet, make submissive, subject to discipline or humiliation’, which has been explored particularly by Winton Thomas. The clearest case perhaps is at Judges 8. 16, where Gideon obtained certain instruments and : ‫ר ד ע ב ה ם א ת אנ שי ס כו ת‬ If the verb is related to Arabic wada*a, this might mean: *With them (i.e. the instruments) he made submissive the men of Succoth.’ 1 BDB, p. 542b; the sense ‘carry away* appears also in translations like AV RSV, and in the work of scholars like Dhorme (Job, p. 193).

S O M E E X A M P L E S IN G R E A T E R D E T A IL

The sense 'teach’, represented by AV and RSV, is drawn of course from the usual ‫' י ל ע‬know’; but it is doubtful if this is used without an object stating what is 'known’. The favourite treatment has been by emendation to giving the sense ‘and he threshed with them the men of Succoth’. The philological treatment removes both the anomaly and the need for emendation. If this line of thought is sound, one can extend it to quite a large number of other passages. At some of these, while an understanding based on the sense ‘know’ for ‫ י ל ע‬may be more plausible than at Judges 8. 16, nevertheless the success of the other approach at this text may encourage one to try again the sense which was helpful there. At Isa. 53. 3 the well-known ‫ ע ל ל י‬1‫ י ל‬may mean not ‘acquainted with grief’ or ‘knowing sickness’ (these do not, in the opinion of some scholars, explain why the passive participle is used; and this is the only case where the passive participle of ‫ י ל ע‬is used in such a context; Deut. 1. 13, 15 are not parallel). The meaning may be rather 'humbled, afflicted by sickness’, which fits well with the context as a whole. At 53. 11, similarly, it may be argued that ‫ ב ל ע ת ו‬means 'by his chastisement’; it is by his chastisement, rather than by his knowledge, that the servant brings justification to others. At Qoh. 10. 20 we have the word ‫ מ ל ע‬. AV and RSV take this as ‘thought’, implying that the word belongs with the verb ‫י ל ע‬ ‘know’.1 The text reads: : ‫גם ב מ ד ע ך מ ל ך א ל ת ק ל ל ו ב ח ד ר י מ ש כ ב ך א ל ת ק ל ל ע שי ר‬ Here the parallelism with the clear words ‘in your bedchamber’ has suggested that ‫ מ ל ע‬means not ‘thought’ but ‘repose’ or even ‘bedroom’. This sense, or one like it, indeed, can be reached by another route, which is tried by KB; it attaches it to ‫ י ל ע‬in its sexual sense. KB itself is uncertain of this explanation, which indeed seems unlikely; but it is sure that ‘bedroom’ rather than ‘thought’ is in general the right kind of meaning.2 It prefers, however, the emendation ‫ ב מ צ ע ף‬, with the word ‫‘ מ צ ע‬couch’ (from the root ‫) י צ ע‬, found also in Isa. 28. 20. The suggestion of the 1 So, for example, BDB, p. 396a. 2 KB, p. 497b. Semantically, it is one thing to say that *know’ can have a sexual sense, and quite another to suggest that a word like *knowing-place* would thereupon be coined for a bedroom!

‫ י ד ע‬N O T M E A N IN G ‘K N O W ’

sense ‘repose’ related to Arabic wada'a makes it unnecessary either to emend or to appeal to the sexual sense of ‫‘ י ד ע‬know’. Another example: Prov. 14. 33 reads in the M T : ‫ב ל ב נ בון תנו ח ח כ מ ה ו ב ק ר ב כ ס י ל י ם ת ו ל ע‬ The RSV, to avoid declaring that wisdom is known in the heart of fools, took the fairly drastic step of supplying the word ‘not’, which, as its note ingenuously says, is lacking in the Hebrew, though present in the Greek and Syriac. It is possible that this difficulty would be overcome if the sense were as in the other examples just cited, giving a rendering like: ‘Wisdom rests in an understanding mind but in the heart of fools it is laid low.’ If this interpretation is right, it means that the ‘not’ of the Greek and Syriac versions is not evidence of a superior text; rather, it suggests that these ancient authorities were going through exactly the same condition of puzzlement, resolved by guessing, which the RSV translators suffered many centuries later. These are by no means the only cases where senses such as ‘make submissive’, ‘humiliate’ and ‘chastise’ have been found for ‫ י ל ע‬. Without setting out the evidence, I shall mention also Prov. 10. 9, Jer. 31. 19, Job. 20. 20, and the variant ‫ ת ד ע‬at Sir. 7. 20. Another impressive case is Judges 16. 9, where it is said of Samson ‫ ו ל א נ ו ד ע כ ח ו‬. *So his strength was not known’, renders the AV. But this is difficult, for his strength was known very well. RSV gets over this by saying that ‘the secret of’ his strength was not known. But one can also follow Winton Thomas and consider ‘and his strength was not brought to submission’, ‘laid low’, which fits the context well.1 Thus perhaps about ten cases can be quoted where this treatment of passages with the verb ‫ י ל ע‬has been suggested. (2) At least one prominent example has been treated as meaning ‘take leave of, dismiss’. This is I Sam. 21. 3 (EV 21. 2): : ‫ו א ת ־ ה נ ע ר י ם י ו ל ע ת י א ל ־ מ ק ו ם פ ל ני א ל מ ו ני‬ If the verb were from ‫‘ י ל ע‬know’, this would have to be 1 In the end, however, my own opinion would be that the sense ‘know* is more probable, for the repeated asking of Delilah implies that knowing or understanding the source or nature of Samson’s strength is the real issue at stake; cf. the repeated question ‫( ב מ ה כ ח ך ג דו ל‬vv. 5, 6, 15, cf. 10, 13).

SOME EXAM PLES IN G R EA TER D E T A IL

explained as ‘I have caused to know, i.e. I have directed’; so BDB, but BDB itself prefers to emend to a form from the verb ‫‘ י ע ל‬appoint’, and so also BH 3. If it is from ‫‘ י ל ע‬know’, this is the only case found of this theme, the poel. Eitan says that this exceptional form has in Arabic a parallel which is quite usual; it is wadaa (III theme, corresponding to Hebrew poel), and means ‘say farewell, take leave of, abandon, leave’. Thus the sense of the sentence is ‘I sent (or, dismissed) the young men to the place of so and so.’ The verb ‫ י ל ע‬in its usual sense ‘know’ appears in the very same verse. (3) Several cases have been interpreted as meaning ‘care for, keep in mind’. Of these the most prominent is Exod. 2. 25: : ‫וי ר א א ל ה י ם א ת ־ ב נ י י ש ר א ל ו י ד ע א ל ה י ם‬ It is peculiar to find ‫‘ י ל ע‬know’ used absolutely without object in a context like this, and this has led to emendation. If the sense could be ‘and God cared’, evidenced from Arabic wadi a in this sense, the difficulty might be removed. Winton Thomas argued that this is the meaning of y-d- in ESA theophoric names, giving a sense such as ‘cared for by II’ and the like. If this is sound, then there is a case for seeing the same meaning in an example like Job 9. 21: :‫ת ם ־ א נ י ל א ־ א ז ־ ע נ פ שי א מ א ס חיי‬ which might be rendered: ‘I am blameless; I care not for myself; I reject my own life.’ This example illustrates how the result achieved by a philological treatment may be so close to one achieved through the traditional understanding that only a narrow partition separates them; for ‘I do not know about myself’ (from traditional Hebrew ‫‘ י ל ע‬know’) is not really distant semantically from ‘I care not for myself’. (4) At Hos. 7. 9 it has just been said that Ephraim is a cake, and then it is twice added ‫ ו ה ו א ל א י ל ע‬. The more traditional understanding of this would be ‘and he did not know’; but Hirschberg argues that the sense is rather ‘and he did not wrap it up’, quoting wada'a meaning to wrap up an article so as to preserve it. This interpretation, being connected with a very special metaphor, not surprisingly does not recur again, so far as I know.

‫ י ד ע‬N O T M E A N I N G ‘K N O W ’

(5) It has also been argued that, while the normal Hebrew form meaning ‘sweat’ is ‫ י ז ע‬, a dialect form ‫ י ל ע‬also exists. This explanation was tried by Noeldeke in some of the passages mentioned above, most prominently in Isa. 53. 11, where ‫ ב ל ע ת ו‬is taken to give the sense ‘by his sweat he shall justify’, and also in Prov. 10. 9, 32, 14. 33. Dahood more recently has followed this line further. Such, then, are some suggestions relating to the verb ‫ י ל ע‬. Still others could be added. For instance, the word ‫ מ ל ע‬at Qoh. 10. 20, which we above saw interpreted as ‘bedroom’, has also been interpreted by Dahood as ‘messenger’. More than one of these suggestions may be right, but they cannot all be right. Thus once again we observe how homonyms are multiplied in many kinds of philological treatment. Even if we regard cases (4) and (5) as improbable, as I should be inclined to do, we have suggestions for three meanings which are, or seem to be, substantially distinct from the familiar sense ‘know’. It will doubtless occur to the reader at this point that these meanings might, if all the facts were known, be seen to be related in some way.1The implications of this will be fully discussed later.2 For the present we observe only that the discovery of new meanings has, for our purpose, practically the same effect whether or not later research classifies the words as cases of homonymy (‘different words’ which are formally identical) or polysemy (different senses of ‘the same word’). The distinction does not make great difference to the problems now in hand. The complexity of the situation raised by multiple philological treatments is not lessened when we consider the next case, the suggestion of the existence of a verb ‫‘ ל ע ל‬call’. (5) ,‫‘ ל ע ל‬call’ The standard dictionaries do not recognize a verb ‫ ל ע ל‬, though they do take it into account for the personal name ‫ א ל ל ע ל‬. Philological treatments, however, have identified such a verb, corresponding to the familiar Arabic da a ‘call’. The Hebrew meaning is usually stated rather as ‘ask, desire’. If a verb ‫ ל ע ל‬exists in Hebrew, it is not homonymous with 1 e.g. M. D. Goldman, A B R iii (1953) 46, who argues that Hebrew ‫י ל ע‬ ‘know* originally had the sense ‘put* or ‘lay down’, and that the Israelite thus knew what was ‘laid down’ before him—a dubious enough argument, indeed. 2 See below, pp. 142 ff.

SOM E EX A M PL E S IN G R E A T E R D E T A IL

‫‘ י ד ע‬know’ in the entirety of its paradigm; but in part of that paradigm, and especially so if we consider the vocalization to be uncertain, there will be a homonymy, or at least a homography within the unvocalized writing system. If the existence of a ‫ד ע ה‬ ‘ask, desire’ has been concealed from us until now, this has been because its forms were classified as forms of ‫ י ד ע‬and its sense correspondingly confused with the sense ‘know’. The most impressive instance is Prov. 24. 14: : ‫כ ן ד ע ה ח כ מ ה לנ פ ש ך‬ By the philological treatment, this might mean: ‘So ask for (seek) wisdom for thy soul’ —a sense which fits well with the following clause ‘if you find it’. The sense ‘know’ is not very easy, and one may doubt whether RSV is successful with its ‘Know that wisdom is such to your soul’. The difficulty of understanding the word as ‫‘ י ד ע‬know’ is indicated by the crop of suggested emendations. The vocalization of the M T is anomalous for the imperative of ‫ ; י ד ע‬hence the suggestion to vocalize as ‫ זי ע ה‬and to suppose that some words have fallen out.1 Other passages may be mentioned briefly. Hos. 6. 3 ‫ ונ ך ע ה נ ך ך פ ה ל ד ע ת א ת ־ י ה ו ה‬: might mean ‘let us desire, and pursue, the knowledge of God’; and Prov. 29. 7 ‫י ד ע צ די ק דין ד לי ם ר שע ל א ־י ב ץ ד ע ת‬ might mean: ‘the righteous knows the right of the poor the wicked does not understand (his) suit (claim)’. These examples would then include in the same verse both the word ‫ ד ע ה‬and the familiar ‫‘ י ד ע‬know’. At Prov. 10. 32: ‫ש פ תי צ ד י ק י ך עון ר צון‬ one might understand as: ‘the lips of the righteous desire (call for) what is acceptable’, perhaps vocalizing the verb as ] ‫י ך ע ו‬.. 1 The anomalous form is discussed by GK § 48 1; see Gemser, Sprüche, p. 89.

‫* ד ע ה‬c

’

25 In addition there have been suggestions of a sense ‘pull down, destroy’ for !157*7, cognate with Arabic da'a III ‘destroy’ (of a wall). (Index, no. 98.) In examples of this kind it is suggested that a word or words, knowable to us from the cognate languages, existed in biblical Hebrew, but became obscured, so that such traces as were left were interpreted as forms from the paradigms of other words. The next example illustrates a very different situation. The form is quite distinctive from any other known Hebrew word. Its very rarity has caused it to be taken as a corruption of some kind, until compara tive philology succeeded in showing that there was reason to believe in the existence in Hebrew of the form found, and with a meaning which fits the text. (6)

a ll

‫‘ ל ה ק ה‬body of elders’

At I Sam. 19. 20 Saul sent messengers to apprehend David, and they found, as M T has it, ‫א ת ־ ל ס ק ת ה ? בי אי ם נ ^ אי ם‬ with Samuel at their head. What is this word ‫ ? ל ה ק ה‬b d b pronounced it dubious. It has generally been held that the reference is to a ‘band’ or ‘company’, which fits the fact that many prophets of this time lived and worked in groups; so for example AV with its ‘company’, and RSV likewise. The question would then be: how did this sense come to be represented by this word ? There are two obvious ways. Firstly, it could be taken as an historical linguistic metathesis of the familiar stem ‫ ק ה ל‬, in which case the text may be right but a very peculiar dialect feature is postulated, with vocalization also peculiarly altered. This approach is, rather doubtfully, favoured by BDB (p. 530a). Secondly, it could be a textual error. The original text was ‫ ק ה ל ת‬, and by some strange accident, which had nothing to do with dialects or phonology, this familiar word was changed by the scribes in the course of written transmission into the totally unfamiliar (and indeed nonsensical) ‫ ל ה ק ת‬. This process is implied by those who emend to ‫ ק ה ל ת‬, as B H 3 advises.1 But a stem l-h-q is familiar to anyone with some knowledge of Ethiopic; it is known especially in the word bhiq ‘old man, elder’ 1 Cf. below, pp. 231 f., 26711., 270 f.

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and a solution along these lines has been propounded not only by Driver (1928), Winton Thomas (1941), and Ullendorff (1956), but even some centuries earlier by Ludolf in his dictionary of Ethiopic, cited recently by Ullendorff. If this interpretation is right, the word is probably a collective of feminine form and means something like ‘group of elders* among the prophets (senatus prophetarum, said Ludolf); and the word, though a hapax legomenon in Hebrew, seems to be deserving of acceptance. (7 )‫‘ ב צ ק ל ן‬fresh vegetables’ II Kings 4. 42 relates that a certain man brought Elisha a variety of presents, including ‫ כ ר מ ל ב צ ק ל נ ו‬. The word ‫ כ ר מ ל‬occurs elsewhere, and most scholars take it to refer to ripe corn or produce. The following ‫ ב‬has often, not unnaturally, been taken to be the preposition ‘in’, and this has left a strange word ‫ )?( צ קן ל ן‬to be interpreted as ‘garment’ or ‘wallet’ (BDB), ‘sack’ (RSV), or ‘husk’ (AY). The reading ‫ ב ק ל ע ת ו‬, a fairly drastic emendation based on the Arabic word gala a, said to mean ‘wallet’ or ‘bread-bag’, is preferred by BDB (p. 862b) and KB (p. 841b); this suggestion is traced to Lagarde. A Ugaritic text, however, shows Danel praying for the chance to see bsql growing in his dry land, and the word is repeated several times.1 Driver translates ‘green corn’; he attributes the identification to Cassuto. If this text may be taken as guidance, and the suggestion seems a very probable one, we may assume that the letter ‫ ב‬of the biblical text is not the preposition ‘in’, but rather part of a Hebrew word, pointed perhaps ‫ ב צ קן לון‬in the absolute state, meaning ‘fresh vegetables’ or ‘green plants’ or, perhaps most likely, in view of the termination /-on/ which is lacking in the Ugaritic word, ‘garden’ or ‘plot’ where such plants are grown. Thus the discovery of a text in a hitherto unknown language serves in a remarkable way to sustain the reading of a Hebrew text which had long been taken to be obscure or corrupt. (8) ‫‘ נ^זר‬herald’ The beginning of Hos. 8. 1 reads: ‫ ר ע ל ־ ב י ת י הו ה‬# ‫ ן‬3 ‫א ל ־ ח פ ף ש פ ר‬ 1 The text is Aqhat 1 ii 13 ff.; Driver, C M L, pp. 60,164; Gordon, UHt p. 180, lines 62 if.

27 This extremely difficult passage has begotten numerous emendations and some artificial explanations. Taken literally as it stands, the text would seem to mean: *To your palate the trumpet, like the eagle upon the house of the Lord . . .’ ‫* ג ש ר‬h

erald

We may think that *palate’ here must mean gums or lips, so BDB, p. 335a; we may think that the bird is not an eagle but a vulture, though it is not clear what difference this will make to the present problem. AV supplied the words ‘he shall come’ before *like an eagle’, which makes good sense except that the words ‘he shall come’ are just not there. RSV says: *Set the trumpet to your lips, for a vulture is over the house of the Lord’; and this is a fairly simple emendation, i.e. to read ‫* כי‬for’ instead of the preposition ‫* כ‬like’. B H 3 doubtfully considers an emendation which would eliminate the difficult bird; it reads ‫ נ צ ר‬, which would mean *watchman over the house of the Lord’ and would be addressed to the trumpet-blower. A possible philological treatment has been proposed by TurSinai. On the basis of an Arabic naSSar meaning ‘herald’, who is thus the one who blows the trumpet, he reads a Hebrew 3^ ‫ ר‬or ‫( נשל‬the former would be the more normal correspondence, if the word was of direct descent from proto-Semitic in both languages, but Tur-Sinai seems to prefer the latter). The passage would then mean: ‘Set the trumpet to thy mouth, as a herald . . .’ This gives good sense, with no emendation except for the punctuation. Tur-Sinai tries the same solution on another passage, Job 39. 25. In the description of a battle-scene, the war-horse hears something which in M T is: ‫ע ה‬T‫ת רו‬: ‫ש·רי ם ו‬T ‫־ר ־ע ם‬ perhaps *the thunder of officers and the war-cry’. Finding this phrase puzzling, he reads it as ‫ר ע נ שרי ם ו ה ר ו ע ה‬ ‘the noise and shouting of the heralds’.

S O M E E X A M P L E S IN G R E A T E R D E T A IL

In this case, however, an emendation of the consonantal text is required; moreover, it is doubtful whether the original difficulty was very great, or whether the new solution is very good. This may be another instance of a solution which, proposed with some reason for a really desperate text, goes on to generate similar solu tions for passages for which a better explanation was already in existence. (9)

‫‘ א ד ם‬pleasant, delightful’ ‫‘ ק ו ר‬dig, bore’

The reader will by now have realized that, if philological treatments are numerous, there may be a good number of words in the Old Testament of which he previously did not know. The consequent sense of surprise or dismay may be savoured by studying a more complex example, involving several words in a brief text. At Prov. 12. 27 M T reads:

‫ןהון־אידם;זקר ייריץ‬ AV renders: ‘but the substance of a diligent man is precious’. This might indeed be the right sense; but it fails to indicate one essential point, namely that this sense cannot be obtained from the text with the word order as it now is. The usual treatment is to transpose two of the words, which can give u s: ‫ו הון י ק ר א ד ם ח רו ץ‬ ‘A valuable treasure is a man who is diligent’ (Gemser, p. 60). Or, with a different transposition: ‫ו הון א ד ם ח רו ץ י ק ר‬ ‘The wealth of the diligent man is much’ (Driver). Or, with transposition plus the preposition : ‫ל‬ ‫ו הון י ק ר ל א ד ם ח רו ץ‬ ‘The diligent man will get precious wealth’ (BH3, and so RSV also). A treatment, proposed by Eitan, is both textual and philological. He reads ‫ י ק ר‬as ‫ י קו ר‬. This change of vocalization makes the form into part of the verb ‫‘ ק ו ר‬dig, bore’, found at Isa. 37. 25 and more familiar from the noun ‫‘ מ קו ר‬spring, source’. He then takes the

‫* א ד ם‬PLEASANT, D E L I G H T F U L * A N D T i p *DIG, BORE*

word ‫ א ל ם‬to be not the familiar word for ‘man’, but an adjective meaning ‘delightful’, following a sense known from Ethiopic. Thus the phrase ‫א ד ם‬ is equivalent to the ‫ א ו צ ר נ ח מ ד‬of Prov. 21. 20, and the sense of our verse is: ‘The diligent (man) digs out a delightful treasure.’ The effect of this on the reader is considerable. He knows indeed that the sentence as it stands has its difficulties. But in his uncertainty there seems to be some firm ground in the two very familiar Hebrew words ‫‘ א ד ם‬man’ and ‫‘ ילןל‬precious’. Both of these certainties are now removed. Of four words in the sentence, two mean something quite other than what would at first occur to the Hebrew reader; and in one of these two the meaning now suggested is not evidenced from within Hebrew at all. It is indeed possible to argue that a connexion between the senses ‘man’, ‘red’, and ‘pleasurable’ did exist in the historical development of the Semitic languages;1 or one can point to places where that which is ‫‘ א ד ם‬red’ is in fact delightful or is so regarded. It is another thing to say that anything of this is the actual meaning of ‫ א ד ם‬in Hebrew. (10)

‫‘ ! מ ר‬protect’ and ‫‘ ע ז י‬warrior’

Exod. 15. 2, M T ‫ ז מ ך ת י ה‬1 ‫ ע זי‬, is familiar in English as ‘the Lord is my strength and my song’. Each of the two nouns, however, has been interpreted otherwise. The sense of ‫ ז מ ר‬, it has been argued, is not ‘sing’ but ‘protect’ (cognate with Arabic datnara, and much used in theophoric names in ESA). Arabic words cognate with ‘make music’ have the first consonant /z/, not /d/. Meanwhile ‫ ע זי‬is interpreted as related to Arabicgdzi ‘warrior’, gaza ‘go forth to war’. The total sense is then: ‘Warrior and protector is Yah.’ Thus in a short phrase of three words (one of which occurs only thrice in the Bible elsewhere), two are given novel interpretations. On the other hand, the words are not such familiar ones as ‫ א ד ם‬and ‫ י ק ר‬, and the archaic style of the poem may lead the reader to expect unusual words. For example, Ullendorff in V T vi (1956) 191 f.

S O M E E X A M P L E S IN G R E A T E R D E T A IL

In favour of this interpretation the LXX may be quoted: βοηθάς καί σκεπαστής *a helper and a shelterer’. Neither the Targum (‫ ) ת ו ק פ י ו תו ש ב ח תי ד ח י ל א ירי‬nor the Vulgate (fortitudo mea et laus mea Dominus) support the LXX in this at Exod. 15. 2, while it itself renders the same Hebrew at Isa. 12. 2 as ‫ )ל‬δόξα μου καί ή αιν^σίς μου and at Ps. 118 (117). 14 as Ισχνς μου καί ΰμνησίς μου, following the sense ‘make music, praise’. Yet other philological treatments have been proposed. KB, also alleging support in ESA, holds that ‫ ז מ ר ה‬means ‘strength’, cf. the phrase ‫ ? מ ר ת ה א ר ץ‬of Gen. 43. 11, which might mean ‘the strength, i.e. the best products, of the earth’. If ‫ ע ז י‬were taken as from ‫‘ עז‬strength’, this would give a good parallelism. Rabin, on the other hand, associates ‫ ע ז י‬with Arabic cazc? ‘patience, consolation’, and holds that a Hebrew cognate is found in the personal names ‫ י ע ז י ה ו‬and ‫ י ע ז י א ל‬. (11) A grammatical example The examples cited up to now have been mainly lexical in character. It is by the new identification of a lexical item that cognate languages have been used to clear up a difficulty in meaning. Problems of grammar, however, can be dealt with in the same way, and sometimes the two are interlinked. Semitic verbs may in some forms indicate gender. In normal Hebrew, however, this is not so in the 3rd plural of the perfect tense, where the form ‫ ק ט ל ו‬.is used for both masculine and feminine. In classical Ethiopic, however, there is a distinction here, with the vowel /u/ used for the masculine and /a/ for the feminine. There is reason to believe that this is the older Semitic state. Now consider these three passages: 1.1 Sam. 4 .1 5 : ‫ו עיניו ק מ ה‬ ‘his eyes had grown dim’ (B H 3 emends to ‫ ק מ ו‬, with the Oriental Qere). 2. Neh. 1 3 .1 0 : ‫מניו ת ה לוי ם ל א נ תנ ה‬ ‘the gifts of the Levites had not been given’ (B H 3 emends analogously to ‫)נתנו‬.

3. Gen. 4 9 .2 2 : ‫בנו ת צ ע ד ה ע לי׳־ עזו ר‬ perhaps ‘daughters (i.e. branches) run up over the wall’

A G R A M M A T IC A L E X A M P L E

3i (BH3 emends; Skinner, Genesis, p. 530, says the discord of number is harsh, in spite of GK § 145k, which tried to argue for a feminine singular verb with plural subject; Skinner himself thought the pas sage defied explanation altogether.) Clearly, if it can be maintained that this is an isolated survival of the distinctive feminine termination in /a/ for the 3rd plural (which appears, incidentally, in certain readings in the Aramaic sections of the Old Testament), then the need for emendation is removed. This possibility is discussed in GK § 145k and § 44m but rejected; Brockelmann in his Grundriss stated that the distinctive feminine in this part of the verb had completely disappeared in Hebrew.1 But in his recent work on syntax he takes the contrary view, citing two of our three passages explicitly, and saying that though the ending was no longer recognized by the Massoretes it was preserved by them because they understood it as a singular.2 It is evident that the choice between a textual and a philological treatment may be present in grammatical matters of this kind just as it may be present in matters of vocabulary. (12) ‘Enclitic mem’ This is another grammatical example. The Ugaritic poems con tain a number of examples of /m/ added after a word; there is no certainty what the vocalization might be. This phenomenon has been called ‘enclitic’, which seems to mean little more than that it is written at the end of a word and as part of it, not having the word-divider between· There has been some discussion whether the enclitic means anything, i.e. whether its presence or absence makes any difference, and if so what kind of difference. Into this I shall not enter, except to say that philological treatments which have identified an enclitic mem in Hebrew appear for the most part to have treated it as if it had no distinct meaning. It may be added briefly that there are in a number of Semitic languages particles which appear at the end of words and include /m/; of these per haps the most noticeable is the final ma of Accadian, which is fully discussed in the grammars of that language. Now, if such a phenomenon was present in ancient Hebrew, and if it later ceased to be recognized or understood, it would not be 1 Grundriss, § 262g, p. 575. 2 Hebraische Syntax (1956), § 50a, p. 50.

SOM E EX A M PLES IN G R E A T ER D E T A IL

surprising if it had left traces which to later scholars would constitute a difficulty, leading not improbably to emendation to remove the unwanted mems. Philological treatment, by exposing the mems for what they are, would remove the difficulty. An example where this has been tried is Ps. 29. 6: ‫ד ך ק י ל ם גי מו ־ ע ג ל ל בנון‬ : ‫ ךין )י מו ב ן ־ ך א מ י ם‬$ ‫ף‬ This text, by the traditional grammar, should mean: ‘And he made them dance like the calf of Lebanon, and (made) Sirion (dance) like the young wild ox/ The difficulty is that one would expect Lebanon and Sirion to be parallel, and the two animals to be parallel, so that the text would be rather like this: ‘And he made Lebanon to skip like a calf, and Sirion (to skip) like the young wild ox/ This happy result can be produced in more than one way. One possibility is emendation; one can follow the suggestion of B H 3and emend the verb to ‫ ד ל ק ל‬, thus simply removing the mem which here, with its vowels, forms the suffix /em/ and gives the verb an object ‘them’; once this is removed, Lebanon becomes the object. Alternatively, one can explain it as the enclitic mem. Since this had slight or no effect on the meaning, it implies that the verb had no object suffix and has the same syntactic function as if it were ‫ ו י ר ק ד‬without/m/. Thus the philological explanation has the same effect as the emendation but involves no change of text. The question also depends on the location of the caesura. The division of the verse as it is cited above follows that printed in BH 3. But the Massoretic division, marked with the athnach> fell before the word ‘Lebanon’, so that the sense is: ‘And he made them skip like the calf, Lebanon and Sirion like the young wild ox/ This is the division followed, for example, by AV. This division makes sense of the mem, which is here the object suffix of the verb, and this object ‘them’ balances with the other object ‘Lebanon and ‘Sirion’ in the other half-verse. On the other hand it makes the first half-verse much shorter than the second and thus appears to spoil the parallelism in that way. In any case it is of interest to note how

E N C L IT IC M E M

the emergence of a difficulty in the eyes of scholars is related to a loss of confidence in the Massoretic accentuation. The example which has just been described was one of the first where the existence of enclitic mem in the Bible was suggested, in fact by Ginsberg. Another good example is a suggestion of Reider1 at Nah. i. 10, where the phrase: □‘,KIDD □KDDDI has been a source of difficulty. If the first mem can be treated as enclitic, the text may be understood as ‘and as the drunken are getting drunk’. No grammatical philological treatment has been pressed harder than enclitic mem. Hummel’s article in 1957, often taken as an exemplary discussion, listed thirty-one instances already dis covered, and went on to suggest seventy-six others which seemed probable.2 Though he admitted that some of these might be ex plained otherwise, Hummel was confident that this loss would be balanced with the discovery of many others still unnoticed. The large numbers cited appeared to put the phenomenon beyond reasonable doubt. It therefore seemed a remarkable scepticism that Driver, himself an enthusiast for the philological approach if ever there was one, should doubt the existence of enclitic mem in Hebrew.3 Moran wrote :4 After H. D. Hummel’s completely convincing study on the subject, a scepticism which prefers to suspect the text rather than accept a linguistic feature attested in Amorite, Ugaritic and Amarna (Jerusalem!) should be virtually impossible. We shall later consider some issues of principle raised by this kind of argument. Meanwhile one only will be stated: the issue is not only the presence of enclitic mem, but the scale or frequency of its occurrence, once this argument is granted. Very many Hebrew words end with D; it is common as a plural ending and in pronoun suffixes. If in every such case it is likely to be suspected to be an enclitic of no meaning, a very large field of variability is laid open. Hummel’s 107 instances are quite good if we first assume that enclitic mem was a frequent phenomenon; as a proof of its existence, if the latter is in doubt, the list is not very strong. 1 m iii (1952) 79 · 2 JBL lxxvi (1957) 85-107. 3 CML, pp. 129 n., 130 n .; JSS x (1965) 116. 4 In Wright, The Bible and the Ancient Near East, p. 60.

S O M E E X A M P L E S IN G R E A T E R D E T A I L

(13) Some general statements I have now given enough examples to indicate some charac teristics of the philological treatment. It remains to consider some general principles which have been stated in justification of the philological approach. Though the publication of strings of short notes has often left rather vague the general logic of the method, there are certain points of principle which frequently find utterance. The first of these is the hostility to emendation as the way out of difficulties. Driver wrote in 1927 :l The time has come to lay down the rule that no word> and especially no verb, in the Hebrew Bible, if only it presents a truly Semitic form, may be emended. Many, if not most, such words will find an explanation some day in the cognate languages, while there will generally be no reason to suppose that those which cannot be so explained have been incorrectly handed down although their meaning remains hidden to us. Or let us hear Professor Winton Thomas:2 It must be regarded as the first business of the Old Testament linguist to explain by comparative philology the forms he finds in Hebrew, and not, save in the last resort, to emend. Emendation is based upon the false assumption that all that can be known of Hebrew is known—it perpetuates the known as the norm by which language is gauged. Comparative philology, however, adventures into the unknown, and discovers new criteria by which language can be adjudged possible or impossible. . .. This revolt against emendation of the Hebrew text has restored the reputation of the MT. That emendation was based on a false assumption of knowledge has also been suggested by Albright, who refers to: our ignorance of Hebrew poetic vocabulary, which has led in recent decades to innumerable erroneous emendations.* Sometimes the hostility to emendation has become almost hysterical. Guillaume writes: Inasmuch as the text of Job has been subject to *emendation’, i.e. deliberate falsification of the evidence, to an appalling degree . . . I determined to read it as though it were an Arabic work.4 1 JTS xxviii (1927) 287. 2 In Record and Revelation, p. 401. 3 Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, 2nd edn., 1962, p. 62.

4 In the Hooke Festschrift (1964), p. 108.

SOM E G EN ER A L S T A T E M E N T S

It is hard to see how such a phrase as ‘deliberate falsification of the evidence’ is justified. Emendations do not in any way falsify the evidence. The emendation is not inserted in the text, but only suggested in the appendix. Translations such as the RSV, when their renderings depend on an implied emendation, usually make this plain by a note in the bottom margin. The evidence remains intact for anyone who knows better. Nor can one see what is the basis for the term ‘deliberate’ ; this could be responsibly said only if the authors of textual emendations actually knew perfectly well what the existing text meant, which clearly is not the case. Guil laume’s statement shows no understanding or sympathy for the difficulties and uncertainties which led to the use of emendation. In any case our purpose at this point is only to note that hostility, sometimes intemperate, to textual emendation is common in the literature of philological treatments ; yet, as we have shown and will show further, many of those who have used philological treatments have also used emendation quite lavishly. The second important point of principle is that this devotion to the text, and hostility to any conjectural alteration of it, apply only to the consonants of the text, and not to the vowel signs or other aspects of the Massoretic punctuation. Sweeping and farreaching rewritings of the punctuation are a frequent, though not quite a universal, feature of philological treatments. This can be found stated as a general principle. Thus Driver writes: The solutions of difficult words and phrases here put forward are based on the assumption that alteration of the consonantal text must wherever possible be avoided but that the vowel-points are only of secondary importance and may be emended with considerable freedom.1 Or again: On ne tient pas compte des voyelles, qui n’ont de valeur que celle d’un commentaire, presque médiéval.2 Such judgements seem indeed to be implied by the wide prac tice of philological treatments. The question then is whether it is ultimately consistent to look with such deep veneration on the Jewish transmission of the consonants of the Bible while holding such deep scepticism towards the Jewish transmission of the vowels. Also we may ask whether an approach to Hebrew which considers 1 VT i (1951) 250.

2 ETL xxvi (195°) 34 &n. 7.

S O M E E X A M P L E S IN G R E A T E R D E T A IL

the vocalization with such doubt does not thereby logically deprive us of a great deal of our existing knowledge of Hebrew. Does not the organization of Hebrew into a coherent body of knowledge depend on the vocalization system, which forms the logical basis for our analysis of the grammar ? May not the philological treat ment, starting out by claiming to extend our limited knowledge of the vocabulary and usage of Hebrew, logically end up by placing us in a thorough scepticism of even such knowledge as we have ? Thirdly, it is implied or stated that, where a difficulty is found in Hebrew, almost anything from anywhere in the Semitic languages can conceivably be invoked as a guide to the restoration of the right meaning. It is true that Semitic languages have not all been drawn upon equally; for the main body of philological treatments has depended on a central group of sources, represented especially by Aramaic, classical Syriac, Accadian, Ugaritic, and classical Arabic. Nevertheless it does seem to be implied that any linguistic phenomenon in any one, or in any group, of these languages, if it appears to fit the needs for the healing of a difficulty found in the Old Testament, and if no obstacle or impediment is at once obvious, may be likely to have existed also in Hebrew. Existence in a cognate language is taken to constitute prima facie evidence for existence in Hebrew. We have just quoted Moran’s argument1 that if a pheno menon exists in Amorite, Accadian, and Ugaritic it is unwarranted scepticism to doubt its existence in Hebrew. The implication is that there was a very close sharing of lin guistic phenomena, and in particular of lexical items, between the Semitic languages. The picture is one of a group in which very great community of features existed. Driver wrote: These languages stand far more closely together than, for instance, French, Spanish and Italian; but Ethiopic, like Rumanian, is in many respects farthest removed from the common type.2 And again: The further back the enquiry is pushed the closer the resemblance between the various languages becomes. In fact, early inscriptions show Phoenician and Hebrew and Aramaic and even Arabic in a stage of development in which they stand in almost the same relation as 1 See above, p. 33. 2 In The People and the Book (1925), p. 75. But Driver goes directly on to argue that nevertheless great caution must be used in explaining an unknown word in one language from a cognate word in another.

SOM E G EN ER A L S T A T E M E N T S

Babylonian and Assyrian to each other and must indeed not so very far behind this stage have been a single language.1 We have now sufficiently illustrated the procedure of philological treatments and initiated some discussion of the principles involved. Before we study these more closely, something should be said about the history of the understanding of Hebrew. This will be done in the next chapter. 1 Analecta Orientalia xii (1935) 70. Cf. the discussion below, pp. 184-7.

Ill

SOME HISTORICAL ASPECTS T h is chapter will provide a brief survey of certain historical matters which are of importance for our subject. We are not con cerned primarily with the history of the text or the history of the Hebrew language, or, again, with the history of exegesis and theo logical interpretation, though all of these are connected with our main theme. That main theme itself, however, is the history of basic linguistic understanding. How well did people at various times know what Hebrew sentences and words meant ? If they were un certain, where did they look for guidance ?

(i) The Disuse of Hebrew among the Jews Philological treatments generally imply that the meaning of a rare word came to be lost in the Jewish tradition, and for this reason has to be recovered by research in the cognate languages. We have therefore to consider the fact that Hebrew in the course of time ceased to be the normal daily speech of Jewish communities, and along with this the date and the manner of this disuse of Hebrew. It is commonly held that before the time of Christ Hebrew had ceased to be a ‘popular' language, and had been replaced among the Palestinian Jews by Aramaic. The language spoken by Jesus, which has been the centre of Christian discussion of the matter, is believed to have been Aramaic, though this view does not exclude the possi bility that in discussion with Jewish scholars Jesus may have spoken Hebrew. It is commonly held also that the Hebrew of the Mishnah was an ‘artificial’ language of the schools, comparable with ecclesi astical Latin, and that it is in any case a strongly Aramaized form of Hebrew. Where such views are held, they may naturally encour age an emphasis on the early and cognate materials (such as Ugaritic), rather than on the literature of post-biblical Judaism, as the place to look for the true sense of biblical words.

T H E D IS U S E O F H E B R E W A M O N G T H E JE W S

The following considerations appear to be relevant: {a) The view that the general language of Palestine in the first century a .d . was Aramaic, and accordingly that this was the lan guage of Jesus, has come to be challenged in recent years; Birkeland has even tried to prove that Jesus spoke Hebrew.1 Perhaps these newer theories will not in the end find acceptance, and the Aramaic theory will maintain its ground; even so it would seem that the older certainty about the dominance of Aramaic no longer holds good, and that fresh thinking about the matter is needed. This present book, however, is not concerned with the language of Jesus, and I mention it only as a striking example of the issue. (b) It seems rather too obvious and simple to ascribe the disuse of Hebrew to the Babylonian Exile. It is true that some scriptural passages in Aramaic appear from the time of the Return, and the Jews of Elephantine used only Aramaic. It does not follow that this can be generalized completely and made to mean that Hebrew was universally in decline. If Aramaic had been generally accepted in Nehemiah’s time, that statesman could not well have been shocked by the existence of children (obviously a minority of children) who could not speak Hebrew. Moreover, the wrath of Nehemiah may have had some success in reviving Hebrew, or may have been part of a wider reaction in favour of Hebrew than is indicated in the one saying of Neh. 13.24 f. As for the passage Neh. 8. 2-8, where inter preters make plain the sense of the law, in spite of the ancient tra dition which makes this the origin of the Targum and in spite of modern arguments to the same effect, the passage may be better construed otherwise: it is a reference to explanation, rather than to translation into a different language. Late books of the Old Testament, including the great literary complex of the P Document, continue to use Hebrew, and certain linguistic changes (visible, for instance, in Chronicles or Esther) show relations with the later Mishnaic language. Sirach wrote in Hebrew, and in Daniel it is the parts more definitely connected with the time of Antiochus Epiphanes which use Hebrew. Of the Qumran documents, a larger body are in Hebrew than in Aramaic. 1 Birkeland, The Language of Jesus; for further references and a summary of the issues see Emerton in J T S ns xii (1961) 189-202; extensive references in

Fitzmyer, The Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran, p. 20 n .; recently Rabinowitz in Z N W liii (1962) 229-38, holding the New Testament word fycfxida to be Hebrew.

S O M E H IS T O R I C A L A S P E C T S

Thus a widespread loss or disuse of Hebrew cannot be simply ascribed to the exilic period. It would appear rather that the disuse of Hebrew proceeded very gradually, or, indeed, that some initial decline of Hebrew in the exilic period was later compensated for by a certain revival, so that Hebrew actually increased in influence before it later began to decrease again. As late as the war of a .d . i 32-4, when Simon son of Kosba wrote letters to his officers, he wrote them in Hebrew. It can indeed be argued that the preference for Hebrew was a product of the nationalistic upsurge of the time; and this might be true, just as the inscriptions on Jewish coins were in Hebrew. But even if this argument is right, it does not diminish the reality of the continued use of Hebrew; it rather furnishes one reason for that reality, and a reason not unsupported by Nehemiah’s similar motives centuries earlier. (c) It has indeed been argued that the Hebrew literature of Qumran (and equally of Sirach or of Daniel) uses an archaizing style. This could be so without implying the disuse of the Hebrew lan guage. Hellenistic poets like Apollonius Rhodius were passionate archaizers, but this does not cast doubt upon the vitality and influence of Greek as a means of communication in their time. If Sirach or Daniel or the Manual of Discipline archaized in style, this means only that they chose to express stylistically their continuity with the earlier sacred literature. It does not mean, or even sug gest, that the archaizing took place because Hebrew was no longer in use in any other form than that of a past literature. Moreover, as is commonly the case, attempts at archaizing were accompanied by clear evidences that the language was in fact in process of change. (d) Mishnaic Hebrew is not an Aramaized Hebrew.1 There are indeed words adopted from Aramaic, as was the case already in the Bible; but there are also many words, especially nouns, adopted from Greek. Especially striking is the fact that, in the stock of verbs, a significant group which was held in common by biblical Hebrew and by Aramaic is not used in Mishnaic Hebrew, while of the 300 verbs occurring in Mishnaic which do not appear in the Bible only a fairly small proportion are adoptions from Aramaic.2 Typical Aramaic devices like the emphatic state were not generally adopted into Hebrew, and, of the lexical items which charac teristically differentiate Aramaic from biblical Hebrew, most are 1 See Segal, A Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew, esp. pp. 1-20, 46-57, 98 f. 2 Ibid., pp. 46 if.

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4i not found in the Hebrew of the Mishnah. Many features which appear similar, such as the particle tP, are nevertheless not deriva tions from Aramaic, though they might be conceived as Hebrew developments which have been encouraged or fostered by the presence of analogy in Aramaic. One has the impression that, though there was clearly much bilingualism, the separateness of the two idioms was in general well maintained; elements from the one were found in the other, but speakers knew whether it was Hebrew or Aramaic that was in use. (e) The late Hebrew of Mishnah and Midrash is not an ‘artificial’ or an ‘unnatural’ language; it was formed by processes of growth and change such as are general in linguistic history. If it is true that its growth took place in particular geographic areas or in particular social or professional strata, this only means that these are the par ticular conditions for a linguistic development under normal processes. One suspects that the ‘artificiality’ often felt by the Western or Christian scholar lies less in the language system than in the content and style. The style fits the content, and expresses the conventions of a peculiarly stylized approach to the problems of Judaism at that time. This provides no ground for the idea that the language itself was artificial, as if it were a contrivance remote from the actual functioning of languages yet illegitimately pretending to the status of one. (/) It is often said that Mishnaic Hebrew was not a ‘popular’ language or a ‘vernacular’, but only a specialized language of the schools. But the spread of its vocabulary is not such as to suggest use only in learned contexts. Its stock of words for such unlearned matters as shopping or cooking is much greater than that of biblical Hebrew. Similarly, in the Qumran period we find contracts for land transactions sometimes in Hebrew and sometimes in Aramaic. The terms ‘vernacular’ and ‘colloquial’ have lately come to be used once again for Mishnaic Hebrew (‘vernacular’ here not necessarily in the sense of the only vernacular or universal language of an area, but in that of a language having some general use apart from purely learned application).1 1 See Rabin, Qumran Studies, p. 67 n., and in general his stimulating article in ScrH iv (1958) 144-61; also Greenfield in H U CA xxix (1958) 204, who refers to Mishnaic Hebrew as ‘a vernacular raised to a literary language* and again ‘a language with roots in the daily preoccupations of its speakers—agriculture, the handicrafts, animal husbandry*.

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(g) The model of the ‘vernacular’, often openly illustrated by the example of ecclesiastical Latin among the medieval vernaculars, fails to recognize the distinctive sociology of the Jews. Jews were not like medieval Germans or Englishmen. On the one hand the Jewish scholar was socially closer than the medieval cleric to the occupations which in Christendom were ‘lay’; on the other hand the relation of the ‘lay’ Jew to Hebrew texts as used in study, in prayer, and in the synagogue service, was infinitely closer than the relation of the medieval Christian to Latin texts. The respective places of study and of ‘lay’ vocation were very different. Linguistically the model we have to consider is rather that of bilingualism, a situation quite different from the relation of Latin to the monolingual vernacular speakers of medieval Europe.1 (h) In any case, the question of the ‘vernacular’ status of Hebrew is not the decisive one for our purpose. It is relevant to our study to know how widespread the living use of Hebrew was, but in itself it is not decisive. Our question is not about numbers but about quality; it is about the mode and the precision of the transmission of Hebrew meanings. If Hebrew was not widely spoken, then the transmission of meanings was not accompanied by a continuing productive corpus of non-scholarly usage. This, if true, narrows down in an interesting way the field in which we conceive the mode of transmission to lie; but it in no way decides the question of the reliability or the perceptiveness of that transmission. Therefore in arguing, as I have done, against an excessively early date for the general disuse of Hebrew, and against too categorical a denial of ‘vernacular’ status for late Hebrew, I by no means imply that those conceptions of the meaning of biblical words which were current in late times were therefore ‘right’. Since Hebrew changed as all languages do, the survival of Hebrew in popular usage would not have universally favoured the correct transmission of the meaning of biblical words. Since the words which we shall discuss are ex hypothesi difficult or obscure ones in any case, it is possible that late colloquial Hebrew would furnish no guide to understanding, and may even have positively obscured it through the development of new forms and new senses. Thus the continuity of Hebrew from 1 Such bilingualism is asserted by Kutscher, ‫ הלשל] ו ה ר ק ע‬, p. 10; while Rabin in ScrH iv (1958) 152 speaks of a ‘trilingual’ situation in the Persian period, and Goshen-Gottstein, op. cit., p. 135, speaks of a ‘quasi-trilingual’ situation in the Qumran period. For modern studies of bilingualism see U. Weinreich, Languages in Contact; von Weiss, Zweisprachigkeit, and literature there cited.

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the biblical down to the Mishnaic period does not in itself provide a clear basis for the preservation of the meanings of rare words in biblical texts. It does, however, make a significant difference to the perspective in which we approach the whole problem. (j) If it is true that the Jewish transmission of meanings was of a scholarly rather than a ‘popular’ kind, this is not as unnatural or artificial as it has often seemed. On the contrary, the fact of histori cal linguistic change made natural and necessary a scholarly struc ture for the transmission and interpretation of meanings belonging to the older stages. The social preference for that which seems to belong to ‘the people’ and ‘real life’ should not be allowed to dominate our assessment of linguistic evidence. Even if it is true that the main burden of the transmission of Hebrew meanings was borne by a scholastic tradition, this does not prove anything about the accuracy of that transmission. That scholars should retain valuable knowledge of a language long out of popular use is not so very surprising a thing. Western Europe learned classical Greek from scholars whose life was lived in a milieu in which classical Greek, and even Hellenistic Greek, had not been popular usage for centuries. It is rather ironic that modern scholars, whose own ex perience of Hebrew is often formed exclusively through scholarly reading, should regard the transmission of meaning through scholars in ancient times as a ground for scepticism. On the other hand, late Jewish scholarship was never of a purely linguistic type; its linguistic memories were maintained within the context of religious and legal interpretation, and this in turn may have reacted upon the senses ascribed to words in the biblical texts. We shall later examine some instances of this. Moreover, finally, there was a change not only in the linguistic medium of Palestinian daily life; there was also one in the medium of scholarly conversa tion, with the transition from the Tannaitic to the Amoraic period. It is possible that this scholarly move to Aramaic may have been, for the transmission of meanings, as important as the popular move to Aramaic which occurred earlier. These, then, are some ways in which the situation of late Hebrew may be relevant for our study. These considerations do not in any way decide the importance or the place of late Hebrew; at least, however, they may clarify the perspective in which we regard it, and open some questions which have too often been taken to be closed.

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(2) Linguistic Elements in Jewish Interpretation Certain tendencies in Jewish biblical interpretation, though they did not depend upon ignorance of Hebrew or loss of command of Hebrew in the religious community, may perhaps have produced a climate in which it was factually easier for linguistic information to become confused, diffuse, or apparently immaterial. Ancient Rabbinic interpretation differs from the modern philo logical approach. Firstly, there was a certain striving for the pro duction of multiple meanings. The modern philological approach has on the whole looked for one ‘correct’ meaning, that which is justifiable on the basis of linguistic evidence. The production of multiple meanings seems to work in the opposite direction, and reduces the emphasis on linguistic evidence as the source of precise discrimination between interpretations. Discrimination is exercised rather through an evaluation of the results of interpretation (meas ured against the prevalent religious structure), and through com parison with other passages in the authoritative Scripture. The accuracy of the linguistic basis is not a supreme criterion. Secondly, interpretation might not only fasten on to the literal form of the text but might attach meaning to segments of it which are, from our point of view, at a sub-meaningful level. Religious interpretation could be attached not only to words as a whole but to segments of words; it could be attached to letters of unusual shape or position; it could build on senses which the words have elsewhere, or on the senses of similar words or words associated in other passages; and it could build on senses excluded by the present context just as well as it could build on those favoured by the con text. Thus, while the acceptance of multiple meanings diminished the centrality of a clear procedure from linguistic evidence, the finding of meaning in sub-meaningful elements enabled interpre tation also to be closely literal. This ‘linguistic-form allegory’,1 both literal and allegorical at the same time, favoured the multipli city of meanings. This style of interpretation, which in the later Jewish way we may characterize as the derashy by no means in itself directly occa sioned a loss of command of Hebrew; nor was it logically dependent on such a loss of command on the part of the community. The 1 For this phrase see my Old and New in Interpretation (London, 1966), pp. 114 f., 117.

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multiplicity of meanings meant that interpreters could produce extremely artificial senses while at the same time they knew perfectly well what we would now call the real meaning. The procedure did, however, make it less important and decisive that the meanings of words, as normal linguistic usage indicated them, should be kept in mind. Several particularly relevant types of rabbinic interpretation should be specially mentioned. Firstly, there is the finding of meaning by arbitrary analysis of strange words. B. Ber. 54b displays such an analysis of the words ‫‘ א ב נ י א ל ג בי ש‬hailstones’ to mean ‘stones’ (‫ ) א ב נ י ם‬which ‘stood’ or remained suspended ‘on the back of’ or ‘for the sake of’ a man (‫ ) ע ל ג ב אי ש‬and came down for the sake of a man; the first ‘man’ was Moses, the second Joshua. The unusual word ‫ת ל פ י ו ת‬ similarly figures in B. Ber. 30a in an interpretation where the word is taken as the ‘hill’ (‫ ) ת ל‬to which all ‘mouths’ (‫ ת‬1‫ ) פ י‬turn—thus furnishing scriptural evidence for the practice of turning towards Jerusalem in prayer: for Cant. 4. 4 says that ‘Thy neck is like the tower of David builded with ‫ ת‬1‫’ ת ל פ י‬. Secondly, it is hard to separate this from the ‘etymological’ interpretation of words. Why, for instance, Genesis Rabba asks with reference to Gen. 1.10, did God call the dry land ‫ ? א ל ץ‬The answer is: because she ‘conformed’ (‫ ) ר צ ת ה‬to his ‘will’ (]‫) ר צ ו‬. Etymologizing interpretation of this kind, though found particularly in connexion with personal names, is to be found in all sorts of other connexions also. Pseudo-etymological connexions with similar words constitute one way in which multiplicity of meaning is achieved. In B. Ber. 29b the Mishnah speaks of a ‘time of crisis’ ( ‫)> פ ך ש ת ע ב ו ר‬. What does this phrase mean ? One speaker says that it applies to the time when God is filled with ‘wrath’ (‫ ) ע ב ר ה‬against enemies, like a ‘pregnant woman’ ( ‫) א ש ה ע ו ב ר ת‬. Another opinion refers it to the time when people ‘transgress’ (‫ ) עו ב רי ם‬the words of the Torah. Thus the discussion gathers together the similar forms ,‫ע ב ו ר‬ ‫ ע ב ר ה‬, ‫ ע ו ב ר ת‬, and ‫ ע ו ב ר י ם‬and provides from this connexion a multiple network of possible meaning. One interesting variation, when exegesis of a biblical text is being attempted, is the al-tiqre (‫ ) א ל ~ ת ק ר י‬interpretation.1 At B. Ber. 1 See H. Torczyner in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ii. 74-87. Also Gordis, Biblical

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64a, for example, a biblical passage (Isa. 54. 13), is quoted, which reads:

:‫וכל־ןיגיןד למודי יהוה‬

R. Eleazar says: ‘Do not read “thy children” but “thy builders” ’ (‫) בוני ך‬. This enables a connexion to be made with a series of other texts concerning building and houses. Again, at B. Ber. 57a, we read: If one dreams he has intercourse with a betrothed maiden, he may expect to obtain knowledge of Torah, since it says: Moses commanded us a Torah, an inheritance (‫ ) מו ר ש ה‬of the congregation of Jacob. Do not read ‘inheritance’ (HtZH^) but ‘one betrothed’ (‫ ך ש ה‬1‫) מ א‬. It should not be supposed that these adjunctions ‘not to read’ such and such imply that the text is still in a fluid state. On the contrary, they are if anything an evidence that the text was already largely fixed, even though the vocalization signs were not yet written. The text from which departure is made is the Massoretic text; it is it that is ‘not’ to be read. Secondly, these interpretations are not confined to difficult vocabulary elements. Nor do they imply that the real meaning has been lost. The interpreter may know perfectly well the general usage and reference of a word at the same time as he is producing an artificial analysis of it in quite another sense. These are devices of the derash, and are by no means to be taken at quite their face value. Similarly, legends can be generated by linguistic peculiarities in the text. Num. 21. 14 has a phrase which in the AV margin is ‘Vaheb in Suphah’. The Hebrew is ‫ א ת ~ו ה ב‬. There is a certain linguistic anomaly in the word ‫ ב‬HI, for very few Hebrew words begin with /w/. A Tannaitic story, retold in B. Ber. 54a, resolves the terms into a sense ‘Eth and Heb in the rear’ and explains that Eth and Heb were two lepers who followed in the ‘rear* (HD1D) of the camp of Israel and later saw the discomfiture of the Amorites. These interpretative devices, then, do not by any means imply that meanings have become unknown; they are, very frequently, Text, pp. 78 f. For a recent consideration of the relation with the New Testament, P. Borgen, Bread from Heaven (Leiden, 1965), esp. pp. 62-67. See also further below, pp. 212 and 214.

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additions to the plain meaning rather than replacements of it. Nevertheless, in a general atmosphere in which such methods were not only possible but popular and attractive, it is understandable that certain useful and valid linguistic information, grounded in actual usage, would escape notice and come to be lost. The etymologizing treatment of words has its roots far back in the history of Semitic literature. This popular etymology had no historical reference, and all the etymologizing of antiquity was alike in this.1 It was a literary device used in the development of narrative or poetic effect, an interpretative device by which special meanings were extracted, and (as with Aquila) a translation technique by which features in the original text which must, because it is a sacred text, be pregnant with meaning, are reproduced, so far as is possible, in the translation. The Bible itself has a number of examples of popular etymology, especially in personal names. The name Eve, Hebrew ΓΠΠ, was etymologized in Gen. 3. 20: Adam called her by this name because she was ‫ א ם כ ל ־ חי‬, ‘the mother of all living’. Here the LXX rose remarkably well to the occasion, saying that her name was Zoe, life: Ζωή, o n αϋτη μήτηρ πάντων των ζώντων. Such etymological plays are beloved of the early story-tellers, and form part of the dramatic colour, especially at the birth of a child, but also when a name is changed or some other significant turn in the course of events occurs. Etymologizing seemed very natural because most Hebrew names were phrases which had meaning as other phrases of the language had. Some were prayers, like ‫‘( י ח ז ק א ל‬may God strengthen’) ; some were declarations, like ‫‘( ע ו ב ד י ה ו‬servant of the Lord’); some were statements of events, like ‫‘( א ל נ ת ן‬God gave’). The names etymologized in the old traditions, however, were for the most part not names of the normal Hebrew type. The explanations of names like Cain or Noah or Naphtali had an artificiality which did not attach to the understanding of actual Israelite names. To us, indeed, it is clear that some of the etymologies do not fit. The name ‘Noah’, in spite of Gen. 5. 29, does not come from 0 Π2 ‘comfort’; and in spite of I Sam. 1. 20 the name ‘Samuel’ is not 1 For an article on another ancient literature comparable with the biblical see J. Gonda, ‘The Etymologies in the Ancient Indian Brâhmanas’, Lingua v ( 1955‫ ־‬6) 61-85 .

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connected with ‫‘ ש א ל‬ask, borrow’.1 This latter discrepancy has sometimes been taken to show that the story is really about the birth of Saul, for the explanation would really fit that name. But this is being too logical; the etymologies did not depend on having the right ‘root’, as we should call it. The phenomenon of popular etymology cannot be strictly separated from a whole series of other stylistic devices, such as assonance or paronomasia. To quote two familiar examples:

Ps. 137.5::‫ימיני‬.‫אם־אקקחך ירושלם תקפח‬ Tf I forget you, o Jerusalem, let my right hand wither’ (RSV). This is, in respect of the meaning of the second verb, usually esteemed to be a better translation than the Tf I forget thee, o Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’ of AV. AV had to supply (from a supposed ellipse) an object for the second verb; but its rendering at least conveyed that there was an assonance, and thus caught something for which the writer was striving; for the point is that the verb in each case is ‫ ש כ ח‬. In Isa. 5. 7, on the other hand, though the consonants are not the same, a striking effect is produced by the partial similarity of the words:

:‫י_קו למקפט והנה מקפח לפךזקה!־לונה צעזקה‬:‫_ו‬ ‘He looked for order, what he saw was murder; he looked for right, what he heard was the cry of fright.’ (The writer’s translation.) Such literary devices attracted attention to the way in which words are made up and to the effect of their use in combination with other words containing the same elements. The use by prophets of a keyword, as the divinatory guidance conveyed by the seeing of an object, probably also had an effect. Two famous cases are at Amos 8. 2, where the prophet sees a basket of summer fruit, ‫קיץ‬., and on this basis God tells him that 1 Sometimes a modern philological treatment can give a much more satisfying interpretation of these names. Cain is usually understood after Arabic qain *smith’, and this fits well with certain characteristics of the Kenites. For the name Noah we have the very attractive suggestion of Driver in E T L xxvi (1950) 350, after Eth. nofyd ‘be long’, that Noah’s name meant something like ‘long (in life)’. This would seem to fit with Oriental traditions of the relation between the Deluge and the quest for immortality, and accords with the Sumerian name ZI.UD.SUD.RA. These meanings, even if correct, had probably disappeared from consciousness by the time the biblical stories were written.

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the end, ‫ ק ץ‬, has come upon Israel; and at Jer. 1. 11, where the prophet sees a rod of almond, ‫ ש ק ל‬, and indeed God is watching, ‫ ש ק ל‬, over his word to perform it. In Dan. 5. 26-28 the words ‘Mene, Tekel, Peres’ are already written; the situation is closer to that of interpreting an authoritative but mysterious written document. Its elements have a double or triple meaning, depending on words which have the same root or at least look similar. Thus, by a common interpretation, mene is the coin ‘mina’ but also the verb ‘is counted’; tekel is the coin ‘shekel’, but also the verb ‘is weighed’; and peres or parsin is the two small half-units, but also secondly the verb ‘divided’, and thirdly the name of the Persians, one of the two nations to whom Belshazzar’s kingdom will be divided and given. In late times, then, etymologizing interpretation is on the increase. A certain amount is found in the New Testament, related to personal names, like Melchizedek in Heb. 7. 2; and here there is also an etymologizationof the place-name Salem as ‘peace’. Hebrews, however, does not venture far into the etymological wilderness; both of these are simple cases, and the writer does not try us with a similar treatment of (say) Levi, or Aaron, or Phinehas. A more systematic etymologization of names, both of persons and of places, can be seen in Philo and in Christian commentators; it was, after all, a way of finding sense in lists of names, such as the bare lists of places where the Israelites stopped on their way from Egypt to Canaan. The symbolical use of place-names was on the increase, whether with or without etymologization; the symbolical interpretation of ‘Lebanon’, for instance, goes back as far as the history of post-biblical tradition can be traced at all.1 In such cases, if an etymological slant was obvious, it was utilized; if not, no matter, the results could be reached without it. The explanations are usually based, more or less obviously, on Hebrew; they rest also in part upon the Stoic etymological tradition, but Palestinian Judaism fostered the process independently. We may then sum up this point by saying that the growth of etymologizing interpretation was favoured by certain genuine elements in the nature of Hebrew language and literature; but that on the other hand the major cause of that growth was a loss of appreciation of the ancient literary styles for what they were, and 1 Vermes, Scripture and Tradition} p. 36, and pp. 26-39 generally.

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the passage to a more scholastic method of study. This newer method of study was connected with the status of the literature as a holy scripture and the corresponding expectations of the kinds of meaning to be derived from such a scripture, in whole and in its smallest parts. With the loss of sense for the original communi cative literary forms, meaningful stress comes to be put upon elements which do indeed occur in the text but do not carry substantial independent meaning within it. The great etymologizers were also the great allegorizers. There grows up a selfconscious, undiscriminating emphasis on formal linguistic features, while the overall continuity of resultant interpretation is provided by legal and dogmatic systems.1 It is not hard to see how some loss of awareness of exact linguistic meanings could have occurred in such circumstances. Moreover, as we shall see shortly, the charac teristics which thus arose within Hebrew interpretation also affected the understanding of Hebrew words and texts on the part of translators who tried to put them into Greek and other languages. (3) Early Intra-Linguistic Relations The science of comparative philology as we know it is a modern creation. But the idea that Hebrew is related to other languages is very ancient. There is a considerable period during which Hebrew and Aramaic lay together in the consciousness of many Jews. There is a lack of direct evidence in the form of actual statements about the relation between languages.2 But some relations between the vocabulary of one language and that of the other must have been evident to those who knew something of both. Four categories in lexical similarity or difference between the two languages seem obvious: Firstly, there exists a long series of words in which a similarity between the two languages in form and meaning is fairly plain, for example: king Aram. Hebr. *j1?» heaven n 'm vcm hear v im v im say *‫־‬m “iax 1 On this generally see my Old and New in Interpretation, pp. 107 ff., etc. 2 We can quote St. Jerome, however: vicina est Chaldaeorum lingua sermoni Hebraico: PL xxix. 25 f.

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A perception of these similarities would probably be very natural. Secondly, there are words in which one consonant differs but the similarity of the word as a whole and of its meaning may have made the correspondence fairly evident. The obvious instances are where Aramaic *7, D, 57, and D correspond to Hebrew T, X, X, and 2?. These are found in familiar words such as: gold Aram.‫ד ה ב א‬ Hebr. ‫ז ה ב‬ run ‫רהט‬ ‫רו ץ‬ land ‫ארעא‬ ‫ארץ‬ sit, dweii ‫יתב‬ ‫ישב‬ This series would not always be as evident as it is to the modern philologist. The relation between the Aramaic ‫ מ ט א‬and the Hebrew ‫ מ צ א‬might not be apparent, since the meanings differ, the Aramaic word meaning ‘come’ (Hebrew mostly ‫ א‬1‫ ) ב‬and the Hebrew meaning ‘find’; and while in Aramaic ‘find’ is ‫ א ש כ ח‬, Hebrew ‫ ש כ ח‬is normally ‘forget’. Thus a person who knew both Hebrew and Aramaic would be in a position to notice a long series of correspondences in form and meaning and also to be warned against generalizing such correspondences. A third category is composed of words which exist in the one language but are very much more frequent in the other, though meaning more or less the same in both. The Hebrew ‫‘ א ת ה‬come’ is poetical and infrequent, but the Aramaic ‫ א ת א‬is frequent and standard. In biblical Hebrew the verb ‫‘ י ה ב‬give’ is found only in the imperative, but in Aramaic it is the usual word for ‘give’, which in Hebrew of course is 1‫ת ן‬ A fourth category is the number of important and frequent words which are completely different between the two languages.1 For example: go up Aram. ‫ס ל ק‬ H ebr.‫ע ל ה‬ go down ‫נחת‬ ‫ירד‬ go in ( ‫בו א ) נ כ נ ס‬ ‫על‬ 1 There are indeed very occasional cases in which the *Aramaic* word is found in Hebrew, e.g. ‫ א ס ק‬in Ps. 139. 8 and a number of cases of Jim and ‫ ש ב ח‬. I am not trying to argue that Hebrew and Aramaic are completely exclusive in this regard. The contrast is not between Hebrew and Aramaic, between which certain overlaps occurred, but between normal words which were closely similar in the two languages and normal words which were very different, even if sporadic overlaps bridged the gap.

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serve fear witness praise

‫פלח‬ ‫דחל‬ ‫שהד‬ ‫שבח‬

‫עבד‬ ‫ירא‬ ‫עו ד‬ ‫הלל‬

Though the modern philologist may sometimes see contacts between the word in one language and some cognate in the other, in the ancient world the words would usually seem to be totally different. Thus there was a basis upon which certain comparative insights could develop; but they would also be limited by other aspects of the material. The knowledge of Aramaic might confuse the tradition of the meaning of Hebrew; it might also assist the preservation of that tradition. Though the similarities between Hebrew and Aramaic can hardly have escaped the Targumists, the differences were suffi‫־‬ ciently frequent and obvious to save them from the temptation to read Hebrew as if it was Aramaic, even where a Hebrew word had the same consonants as those of an Aramaic word. The Targumists were in general too experienced to fall into the obvious mistake of writing the same root in Aramaic as they found present in Hebrew. For example, ‫ ר ח ץ‬means ‘wash’ in Hebrew but ‘trust’ in Aramaic, and no sense could be got out of the frequent references to washing in the book of Leviticus if they were translated by ‫ ל ח ץ‬in the Targum.1 In fact a survey of the Targums suggests that the cases where the Hebrew word is translated by an Aramaic cognate word, and where the meaning is also different, are not numerous. In other words, the Targumists did not generally pursue that etymological fancy in translating which might have led to a preference for a word like the Hebrew where such could be found. There was an additional reason why such close adherence to the very forms of the original Hebrew was not pursued by the Targumists. Their translation is, more than most translations are, of the character of a paraphrase. Quite substantial interpretative additions are made. For those who are not accustomed to the characteristics of Targums, an example may be given from Isa. 40. 1-3. Here is the Targum text as translated by Stenning; and 1 Cf., however, the Greek example below, p. 54.

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in it we italicize all those elements which are substantial additions to the Hebrew: O ye prophets, prophesy consolations concerning my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and prophesy concerning her, that she is about to be filled with the people of her exiles, that her transgressions have been forgiven her, for that she has received the cup of consolations from before the Lord, as if she had been smitten twice for all her sins. The voice of one that crieth, Prepare ye a way in the wilderness before the people of the Lord, tread down paths in the desert before the congregation of our God. Where there is no hesitation to insert either renderings which make precisions far beyond those required by the Hebrew or phrases which are pure quantitative additions to the Hebrew, it is unlikely that an attempt to represent the sheer outward form of the Hebrew text will be a normal procedure. It would have been quite possible for the Targum to exploit the Hebrew word ‫‘( צ ב א ה‬her period of service’) and treat it as suggesting the Aramaic ‫צ ב א‬ ‘goodwill’. This could have given a good sense: ‘goodwill for her is fulfilled’. The Targum has rather followed the normal Hebrew sense, namely ‘army, host’, and expanded this with its comment ‘the people of her exiles’. The tendency to expand and paraphrase has linguistic effects opposite to those produced by a painful concern for the formal and quantitative aspect of the Hebrew. Sometimes, however, the same source may use both approaches. The LXX does not, like the Targum, generally introduce large amounts of matter quite unrepresented in the Hebrew; its tendency is often rather to abbreviate, as is evident especially in Jeremiah and Job. To take a simple example, χριστός ‘anointed one’ occurs in the Greek Psalms and Isaiah in exactly the same places (ten and one in number respectively) where the M T has ‫ ; מ ש י ח‬but the Targum has several cases of ‫ מ שי ח א‬which are pure additions to the Hebrew. Similarly, it writes ‫ מ שי ח א‬for the ‫‘ ש ב ט‬sceptre (comet?)’ of Num. 24. 17. There are, however, cases where the other procedure seems to have been followed and the Targum uses the same root as the Hebrew.1At Amos 2. 13 there is a word ‫ מ עי ק‬which the Targum renders by ‫(‘ מי תי ע ק א‬I am) bringing distress’. In so doing it associates the rare Hebrew verb ‫עולן‬, which in fact occurs only 1 For some illustrations of the problems this may cause in the understanding of the Targum and the Syriac see below, pp. 263 if.

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here and has remained a point of uncertainty to the present day, with the Aramaic ‫ ע ק א‬. This is quite a common word, and is used quite frequently to translate Hebrew words like ‫‘ צ ר ר‬to distress’. The influence of Aramaic may be seen not only in the Targums, but also at times in other translations, and also in general Jewish comment and interpretation. It has often been held that the LXX shows Aramaic influence in certain of its renderings. Aramaic usage seems to have affected the translators’ understanding of Hebrew. This would not be surprising, since some Jews in Egypt had certainly spoken Aramaic, and one may surmise that most contacts with international Jewry were made in Aramaic. Two examples will be quoted: At Isa. 53. 10 the Hebrew ‫ ד כ א ו‬means ‘to crush him’, but the Greek says καθαρίσαι αυτόν ‘to purify him’. This seems to be well explained if the LXX translator had in mind the common Aramaic word ‫‘ ד כ א‬purify’; this differs from the cognate Hebrew verb by the normal correspondences. We cannot, however, be quite sure of this explanation. The translator could simply have misread the ‫ ד כ א ו‬of the text, or, looking at it cursorily, have been sufficiently impressed by the similarity to the Hebrew verb ΓΟΤ, which would give the sense ‘purify’. The explanation based on Aramaic, therefore, is not entirely necessary. It is, however, somewhat strengthened by the fact that the Targum takes the same line here, translating by ‫ל מ צ ר ף ו ל ד כ א ה י ת ש א ר א ד ע מ י ה ב ד י ל ל נ ק א ה מ חו בין‬ :‫נ פ ש הון‬ ‘To refine and purify the remnant of his people, in order to cleanse their soul from sin’. Another striking case, perhaps the most striking in the Greek Bible, occurs at Ps.60 (59). 10 and again at 108 (107). 10. M T reads: ‫מו א ב סי ר ר ח צ י‬ ‘Moab is my wash-bowl’. LXX has: Μωαβ λββης της ελπίδος μου

‘Moab the bowl of my hope.’

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This seems to depend upon the Aramaic ‫ ר ח ץ‬, which has already been mentioned above. However, the Targum itself does not follow this interpretation, but reads at 60. 10: ‫ב ע טיי ת מו א ב אי‬ T trod down the Moabites’, and at 108. io: ‫דו שי שי ת מו א ב אי‬ ‘I trampled down the Moabites’, both of which, of course, are very rough paraphrases. The LXX renderings, though they seem to depend on a mental reference to Aramaic, are not the effect of the actual Targum, or not at any rate of the Targum which we now have. Quite considerable lists of cases showing dependence by the LXX on the Aramaic rather than the Hebrew meaning of occasional words can be collected from the works of scholars.1Not all of the suggestions which have been made can be accepted, however, for sometimes other explanations are possible. The Aramaic language continued to affect the understanding of the Bible long after it had itself fallen into practical disuse. Examples of renderings which depend upon Aramaic can be found in the AV. At Judges 7. 3 M T reads ‫ ה ג ל ע ד‬T O T O ‫־‬:‫}־‬. Now the verb ‫ צ פ ר‬is a hapax legomenon of very uncertain meaning. Aramaic had a familiar word of this root, ‫ צ פ ר א‬, which means ‘morning’. The later Jewish commentators, such as Rashi and Kimchi, took this into account in dealing with the passage; and AV, when it translates ‘depart early from mount Gilead’, is following this.2 Interestingly enough, the Targum itself did not take this line; its translation is ‫ י ת ב ח ר‬, which has no apparent connexions with Aramaic words of the root ‫ צ פ ר‬. Again, the translation of the obscure ‫( מ ך ה ב ה‬Isa. 14. 4) as ‘the golden city’ in AV follows Kimchi and depends on the connexion with the Aramaic ‫ל ה ב א‬ ‘gold’. 1 For a considerable list, some of them very dubious, see Wutz, pp. 150 if. A few are quoted by Swete, p. 319 n., from Nestle; see also I. L. Seeligmann, pp. 49 f. Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that Aramaic rather than Hebrew was the Semitic language truly known to the translators; see Vollers in Z A W iii (1883) 224 f.; also Flashar in Z A W xxxii (1912) 251, etc. 2 See G. F. Moore, Judges, p. 203.

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The Targum was productive in this way in the Middle Ages, in areas where Aramaic had not been spoken anyway, because it was studied by the commentators and its interpretations were often taken up by them. Many of these interpretations do not depend on the similarity between Hebrew and Aramaic words, but rather the opposite: the Hebrew being difficult or controversial, the Targum rendering may be free from these particular uncertainties and thus be taken up into the commentary. This continuing general esteem of the Targum, which had now become a sort of additional sacred text supplementing the Hebrew text, is a basis from which there could always spring interpretations depending upon particular linguistic phenomena of Aramaic. In sum, then, the existence of the Targum, and the wide use of Aramaic in Jewry, formed a kind of practical introduction to problems of relating Hebrew to another cognate language, and thus occasionally introduced a kind of primitive linguistic comparison. The influence of Aramaic and other languages on the understanding of Hebrew can not only be traced through indirect evidence from translations; Rabbinic sources sometimes give direct statements purporting to rest on the knowledge of other languages. An introductory phrase sometimes found is 11‫ל א ה‬ ‫‘ י ד ע י ר ב נ ן מ אי‬our teachers did not know the meaning o f . . . u n til.. .’, followed by the circumstances in which the sense came to be known.1 A famous instance is 1‫ ט א ט א ת י ה‬, of which the meaning was unknown until the maid of Rabbi was heard to say: ‫ש קו לי ט א טי ת א ו ט א טי בי ת א‬ ‘take up the broom and sweep the house’. Other examples cite languages heard when travelling in foreign parts. Rabbi d. Bar Hana tells that he had not known the sense of ‫ י ה ב‬in the verse Ps. 55. 23 ‫יהבף‬. ‫ ה‬1‫ ה ש ל ך ע ל ~ י ה‬until one day when he was carrying a heavy burden and an Arab said to him ‫ ש די א ג מ ל אי‬1 ‫ ל י ה ב ך‬1‫ש ק‬ ‘lift up your yehab and throw it on my camel’. Again, we hear that ‘Rabbi says that in coastal cities ( ‫) כ ר כ י הי ם‬ 1 See B. Rosh ha-Shanah 26a-b; also B. Meg. 18a. For a discussion of the relation to Arabic of these passages see S. Krauss in ZDM G lxx (1916) 321-53, esp. pp. 338‫ ־‬49‫״‬

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selling was called ‫ ; י כ י ר ה‬and this piece of philological information was supposed to be useful for the understanding of Gen. 50. 5: ‫ ב ק ב רי א שר כ רי תי לי‬. Again, a tradition reports: ‘R. Simeon b. Laqish said: When I was in the province ‫ ק ] נ ש ריי א‬, one called the bride ‫ נ י נ פ י‬and the hen ‫ ש כוי‬.‫ ני נ פ י ׳‬is applied to Ps. 4 8 .3 : ‫י פ ה נו ף מ שו ש כ ל ־‬ ‫ ה א ר ץ‬, and the word ‫ נו ף‬is thus associated with the distantly similar Greek vviujyq. Similarly, the interpretation of ‫ ש כוי‬is applied to Job 38. 36, a passage the obscurity of which often excited the interest of the older scholars. Appeals of this kind to foreign languages are sometimes made at points where the Hebrew is intrinsically difficult or obscure; but sometimes also they provide an additional or midrashic explanation to a text where the normal sense must have been quite well known. An instance of the former is found at Gen. 49. 5: !‫ש ס עון ן לוי א חי ם ? ל י ח מ ס ?; כ ר תי ה ם‬ In Gen. R . the last word is declared to be the Greek /xa^atpa ‘sword’, which of course gives a seemingly fitting sense. The word has long been considered difficult. BDB, p. 468b, registers it under ‫ כ ו ר‬, but seems doubtful; GB, p. 423a, is also at a loss, and KB, p. 523a, states only that the word is ‘unexplained’. A very attractive philological treatment is to take it as cognate with the Ethiopic mkr ‘advise’ (in the theme II. 1, ‫י‬amkard, ‘consilium dare, suadere’, Dillmann, col. 199; cf. also III. 3); Ullendorff1mentions this connexion, already seen by Ludolf. The sense would then be: ‘Weapons of violence are their counsels.’ The appeal to a foreign word in the Midrash is related to an acknowledged obscurity in the Hebrew itself. The position is quite different in the following example from Pesikta de-R. Kahana, xl.: the words spoken in leading up to the sacrifice of Isaac, ‫‘ שה ל ע ל ה‬a lamb for a burnt-offering’ (Gen. 22. 7 f.), are interpreted with the statement that this is a Greek word, i.e. 06‫‘ ־‬thee’; thus the sense of ‫ ש ה ל ע ל ה‬is ‫א ת ה הו א‬ ‫‘ ה ק ר ב ן‬thou art the sacrifice’.2 There was, of course, no difficulty 1 Index, no. 200; the discussion in Skinner’s Genesis, pp. 516 f., shows the uncertainty of the older interpreters. None of the versions seems to have known the sense, cf. my remarks below, p. 270. 2 See A. Briill, Fremdsprachliche Redensarten (Leipzig, 1869), p. 26; this work gives many relevant examples.

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in the word ΠΦ for the interpreter; but, by suggesting that it was a Greek word here, he was able to give apparently literal evidence for what was indeed, as every reader knew, the situation in the incident described. The introduction of a suggestion of a foreign word may thus be a means to a midrashic interpretation, and not connected with any intrinsic difficulty in the text. These scraps of ‘philological· information can of course by no means be solemnly taken at their face value. They do not necessarily represent the mode by which an interpretation was reached. Even when a tradition records that T did not know the meaning of word x until. . .’ it is by no means certain that this is absolutely true even for the Rabbi concerned, and his interpretation might use the information from foreign sources only for one exegesis among others of a relevant text. Needless to say, there was no systematic approach to philological study and no attempt to distinguish between languages which are cognate with Hebrew (such as Arabic) and those which are not (such as Greek). The examples are nevertheless significant, in that they may show u s: (a) that some uncertainty about the sense of unfamiliar words was admitted, (b) that the legitimacy of appeal to other languages than Hebrew was already accepted, though in a very confused form, in the Talmudic period; and this held open the possibility of something which the medieval lexicographers used to much greater effect. In general Greek lacked the obvious similarities to Hebrew which Aramaic had, and it did not provide, as Aramaic did, a potential entry into a rudimentary comparative philology. Nevertheless, the practice of Greek translators sometimes provides further illustrations of the tendencies we have been describing. Occasionally they seem to have chosen Greek words which had some similarity to the Hebrew words being rendered. The rendering ήχου for ‫ א חי ם‬at Isa. 13. 21 is a probable example;1 and at Isa. 51.8, where the Hebrew has the two nouns ‫ ע ש‬and DO, both meaning ‘moth’, σης is used for the rendering of the latter, though it usually renders the former; this may well be attributed to the verbal similarity. Stock examples from the later Greek translators are αυλών for ‫ ן‬1‫ א ל‬at Deut. 11. 30 and 0e/)a7r€1a for ‫ ת ר פ י ם‬at I Sam. 15. 23 (if this text is reliable).2 1 On this passage cf. below, pp. 243, 250. 2 See Swete, Introduction, p. 41, and Fields note 34 on I Sam. 15. 23.

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Again, Greek translators sometimes put into practice in Greek the tendencies of arbitrary analysis and etymologization which we have already traced in Hebrew and Aramaic sources. The use of Ικανός for the divine name ‫ ש לי‬depends on a resolution into ‫ש‬ ‘which’ and ‫‘ ל י‬sufficient’. For the enigmatic ‫ א ש ל ת‬of Deut. 33. 2, the Vulgate’s ignea lex and later the AV’s ‘a fiery law’ imply a resolution into ‫‘ א ש‬fire’ and ‫‘ ל ת‬law, religion’. These methods continued throughout the Middle Ages, as in the resolution of □‫‘ ש מי‬heaven’ into phrases like ‫‘ ש ם מי ם‬water is there’ or + ‫א ש‬ ‫‘ מי ם‬fire and water’, mentioned by Rashi on Gen. 1. 1. Such devices are an attempt to display or exploit in translation something of the formal characteristics of the original; it is easy for us to see how such an emphasis could damage the consciousness of linguistic meaning, though the intention was doubtless quite different. The literalizing emphasis on the formal and quantitative was pressed hardest of all by Aquila, and accompanied by extensive etymologizing.1 Up to the sixth century or so it seems fair to say that the main mental effort of Judaism took a form which favoured such methods. The elaboration of the halachic law implied a concentration on legal distinctions; while the Midrash, which followed the actual contours of the biblical material more closely, also included wide freedom for legendary expansion and, because of its fanciful and often more humorous style, allowed the plain sense of the text to be submerged under highly imaginative plays upon words and phrases. These conditions could have been detrimental to the maintenance of a good and sober awareness of meanings in biblical Hebrew. An important change of direction is signalled by Qaraism. In spite of the compromises and uncertainties of the Qaraitic movement, it does seem to restore an emphasis on the commentary form and an appeal to the scripture. By this time (Qaraism takes its rise in the eighth century) there are several other changes of position to mention. The work upon the text of the Bible, which we associate with the name of the Massoretes, was under way. Codices were copied by the families of Massoretes and provided with vocalization and accent signs under a number of systems of increasing refinement. Systems of vocalization were being devised also for the Quran in Islam and for the texts of the Syriac-speaking Christians. It is not necessary for our purpose to fix the exact dates and 1 For an introduction to Aquila,s methods see Swete, Introduction, pp. 31-42.

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priorities of these operations. In a later chapter we shall return to the Massoretes and the nature of their work. In the Islamic period Jews were able to enjoy an expansion of their philosophical and scientific horizons. Grammatical studies began and expanded. The first considerable name in the history of Hebrew linguistic studies, Saadia Gaon (892-942), was also a con siderable commentator on books of the Bible, and a philosopher of note. Meanwhile Arabic quickly took over from Aramaic the place of prominence as the language with which Hebrew might usefully be compared. Many of the great Jewish thinkers normally used Arabic. Maimonides wrote his Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic, and it was Ibn Tibbon who translated it into Hebrew. The pious Jewish scholar still read his Targum in Aramaic and his Talmud which is mainly in Aramaic; but the linguistic medium for the most active Jewish thinking had come to be Arabic. In contrast with the earlier Judaistic development, in which the tendency to derash had so been fostered, the period of the Massoretic development and of the rise of Jewish grammatical studies can be characterized as the time of the peshat. It is reasonable to consider that a major stimulus towards this emphasis on the plain sense came from the confrontation with Qaraism within Judaism, and with Christianity and Islam without.1 The religious values of the derash were by no means abandoned or forgotten; but for the questions which now became foremost in scholarship it seems no longer to have been supposed that answers would be found in a mere appeal to the tradition of derash. The new lexical and gram matical studies, rudimentary as they were, represented an attempt to find guidance in linguistic evidence rather than in traditional religious interpretations. (4) Aspects of the History of Jewish Grammatical Studies This section will provide some elementary introduction to a sub ject which has been widely neglected but is relevant to the histori cal understanding of our general theme. Scholars will perceive the extent to which I depend on the learned expositions of Bacher. Amid the complicated and varied work of the medieval Jewish 1 For a simple presentation of this view see E. I. J. Rosenthal, *Medieval Jewish Exegesis: Its Character and Significance*, J S S ix (1964) 265-81.

H IS T O R Y O F JE W IS H G R A M M A T IC A L S T U D I E S

grammarians I have picked out elements which concern us here. They help to illustrate, among other things, (a) the continuing presence of comparative methods, (b) the methods of analysis used on biblical words in medieval times, and (c) the nature of the Massorah, which will concern us again later. ‘The Massorah is the real cradle of Hebrew grammar’, writes Bacher.1 It provided a careful registration of the written form of the Bible, and was a kind of school in which the mind was trained to recognize with painstaking care the detailed points which might discriminate between right and wrong reading. The Massoretes thus come to the verge of grammatical study. Their notes occasion ally take cognizance of such distinctions as masculine and feminine, or the difference between final and penultimate stress. Yet Massorah is not grammar, and the use of grammatical cate gories is not general or predominant in it. Its purpose is to assure the correct writing and reading of the text. Semantic problems are not generally discussed. This is not to be despised as a fault. The value of the Massoretic registration is its careful fixation of the formal characteristics of the text at a time when interpretative methods had long been too fluid to permit any simple perception of the relation between form and meaning. Only late in the course of the Massoretic activity, with Aaron ben Moshe ben Asher in the early tenth century (a time therefore to which certain important Hebrew manuscripts still extant go back), does a combination of grammatical discussion with Massoretic activity appear to be found. Even then it is not an independent linguistic description, but rather a setting forth of the rules implied in Massoretic work, under some influence from Arabic grammatical science. It was either ben Asher or his greater contemporary Saadia who took the important step of first noticing and formulating the dis tinction between what would now be called root and afformatives.2 The importance of this is to us so great (our Hebrew grammar having been developed upon the basis of this distinction) that it is surprising to realize how late in the history of Hebrew it was recog nized. Saadia also concerned himself with the rare words of the Bible, mostly hapax legomena, and wrote a treatise on ninety of them. In his translations into Arabic, and in the commentary related to them, he made much use of Arabic material in the explaining of Hebrew 1 ZDM G xlix (1895) 8. 2 See the discussion by Bacher, ZD M G , p. 48.

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words. He was deeply indebted to Arabic grammatical ideas, and followed an Arabic example in conceiving his task as the prescriptive one of teaching correctness to Jews who had not the slightest idea of what was correct Hebrew. About the same time as Saadia, we find Yehuda ibn Koreish, shocked to hear that the Jews of Fez had discontinued the reading of the Targum, arguing for a kind of interdependence of the knowledge of the three great languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Did not the Scripture itself make it clear that the Hebrew, Aramaean, and Arab peoples were genetically related through Terah, Abraham, Laban, and Ishmael ? Aramaic words could be found in the Bible itself; indeed, the Bible contained words not only of Arabic, but of Romance and of Berber origin. There is, he argued, even a Greek word in the Old Testament, for the ‫ ל ?ן ל ס‬of Ezek. 16. 31, which a millennium later was still troubling the editors of 2?£f3, is from the Greek word καλώς. Thus Yehuda ibn Koreish represents a strong if rudimentary comparativist position. He wrote a long list of word-comparisons to illustrate these principles. Menahem ben Saruk (about 960), on the other hand, paid little attention to Arabic and departed from the Arab theoretical basis which earlier workers had adopted. He cited Aramaic and Mishnaic Hebrew more frequently. The emphasis of his work was lexical rather than grammatical; his dictionary is the first full dietionary of biblical language in Hebrew. Following a principle of explaining words from the context in which they are found, he was led to a heavy stress on the stylistic form of parallelism. O ne half of a verse teaches about the other.’ A particular emphasis is placed upon the strict separation of the various roots. Yet the carrying out of this was still under serious limitations, for the triliterality of roots was not yet an accepted principle. Menahem’s dictionary had an entry on ‘the root ‫’ צ‬, which had seven sections. To these belonged (1) words meaning ‘fly’, like 2) ,‫נ צ א‬, ‫ ) צ י ץ‬words meaning ‘bloom’, like | ‫נ צ‬, ‫ צ י ץ‬, (3) words meaning ‘quarrel’, like 4) ,‫ מ צ ה‬, ‫ ) נ צ ה‬the word ‫צ י‬ ‘ship’, (5) the word ‘drought’, 6) ,‫ ) צ י ה‬a kind of animal, ‫ צ י י ם‬, (7) the word ]‫ צי ל‬, taken to mean ‘monument’, ‘mark’. Schooled by a long tradition to analyse by looking for a triliteral root, we find it hard to understand that in the tenth century this was still not an established procedure. Menahem’s work was bitterly criticized by Dimash ibn Labrat,

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who in particular was able to refine and improve the identification and discrimination of roots, and to emphasize the predominance of the triliteral against other explanations. He emphasized once again the value of explanations from Arabic and gave a list of about 170 words as examples of how explanation from the Arabic could be correct and necessary. Yehuda ben David Hayyug (early eleventh century) was after wards remembered as the founder of a great advance in Hebrew grammar. His study laid particular emphasis upon the verbs with ‘weak’ radicals, i.e. consonants like y or w which appear only in some forms and disappear in others. Until this was clear, the tri literal principle could not be carried through consistently. By making it into a consistent one, he used this principle to sort out the verb into regularity and classify the behaviour of the various weak consonants. The performing of this work, needless to say, involved a careful study of the vocalization; for it is by the vocal ization that discrimination can generally be reached between uncertain possibilities of weak consonants. Appeals to the vocal ization had already been made by workers like Dunash in criticism of earlier suggestions; in the handling of the problem of weak consonants this appeal becomes more intensive and more exact. Abulwalid Merwan ibn Janah produced, also in the eleventh century, a systematic approach to the grammar, including the parts of speech, the possible combinations of vowels, the principles of noun-formation, and (a particularly interesting departure) a discussion of the use of tropes, i.e. cases where a word is used (or, in the case of ellipse, omitted) for stylistic or rhetorical effect in places where another would have been more normal. The question how far a difficulty in the biblical text can be explained by appealing to an anomalous usage for the sake of effect is obviously one which runs through all of our present discussion. Later, for instance, the AV got itself out of all sorts of trouble by an implicit appeal to ellipse, which in the English it acknowledged by supply ing the omitted elements in italic type. Most of these latter advances took place in the Muslim lands, including Spain; and it was Abraham ibn Ezra (1092-1167) who brought these achievements most fully into the lands of Christen dom. His works were written in Hebrew, and not in the Arabic which for northern Jewry had been an obstacle to the understanding of many grammatical researches. It was in southern France that

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the Kimchi family lived—first Joseph, and then his sons Moses and David. David Kimchi (1160-1235) wrote a grammar usually called the Michlol (‘completeness, compendium’) and a dictionary known as the ‘Book of Roots’. In this latter he added further etymological comparisons, taken from late Hebrew and Aramaic, to the many which had come down from the earlier scholars. The systematic study of Hebrew vocabulary, which is implied in the production of dictionaries, poses the question of synonyms, words which are different in form but identical or closely similar in meaning, and also that of homonyms, words identical in form but different in meaning. Whole books were devoted to the collection and analysis of synonyms; we may mention in particular the Hotem Tokhnit of Abraham Bedarshi (later thirteenth century). Homonyms were handled by Isaac Ha-levi ben Eleazar in his work Ha-Riqmah. Let us summarize a few salient aspects of this rise of grammatical study. Firstly, the development of grammatical science began, in spite of its careful attention to many details, with what would seem to us now a very poor analysis of Hebrew grammar, so that it was an achievement to recognize and formulate the triliteral root and the difference between radicals and afformatives. By the end of the development, on the other hand, a position had been reached which shows remarkable similarity to the grammar generally taught in modern times. Secondly, comparative elements, with a stress on Arabic and Aramaic, were prominent; although scholars varied in the degree of their reliance on comparative study, the possibility of it was present throughout the discussion. Even those who did not speak Arabic, which was the living language of the southern grammarians, had a strong basis for comparative linguistic consciousness in the Targum. Comparative studies were hindered, however, b the unsatisfactory degree of clarity then attainable about the phono* logical correspondences. It is not that no correct correspondences were known. Important correspondences such as that of Hebrew ‫ ש‬to Arabic /§/, or of Hebrew ‫ ש‬to Arabic /t/ (e.g. ‫ = שלג‬talj ‘snow’), were perfectly well known. But alongside these wellfounded correspondences there were many of more dubious character.1 1 For many examples in a recent publication see Wechter, Ibn Barun, pp. 54-60 and related notes.

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Thirdly, the production and refinement of the grammatical analysis of Hebrew was related to the use of the Massorah. The grammarians found themselves required to refer to it with great care, for it afforded them means of discrimination within all the mass of originally undiscriminated material. The ability to distinguish, let us say, forms of the verb ‫ ח י ל‬from forms of the verb ‫ י ח ל‬, something that becomes particularly necessary once comparative information begins to press upon the possibilities of understanding one or the other, depends upon the careful collection and comparison of the vocalization in all relevant cases. For this reason it is important to realize that the basic fixation of the Massoretic pointing was already done before the rise of grammatical and lexical inquiries. Even the manuscript B 19a, from which the text of B H 3was taken, was written in 1008; the Cairo codex of the prophets was made in 895 by Moses ben Asher. The pointing was done from tradition, and did not depend on the results of the incipient scholarly inquiries. Conversely, the fact that a classification of the grammar was possible forms something of a witness to the value of the vocalization in general. Fourthly, on the lexical side it appears that for many words, especially out-of-the-way words, the Jewish scholars of this period did not attempt to rely on tradition for information about meaning. Whether they worked from comparative sources such as Arabic, or used the guidance of parallelisms and other elements of the Hebrew text, they did not make a simple appeal to tradition or to current usage. This does not necessarily mean that they were indifferent to either; perhaps it was rather that tradition would give contradictory answers. The emphasis on the peshat or plain sense made it impossible to accept the fanciful interpretations found in some currents of tradition. (5) More Recent Trends Only one or two remarks should be made about the general change of scene as we move into the modern period. Firstly, one notices a certain shift on the part of Christian opinion away from dependence on the Jews for deciding the meaning of Hebrew items. St. Jerome, in his reliance on the hebraica ueritas, had had to turn to Jewish informants for his linguistic guidance. The same situation is generally true in the Middle Ages, wherever

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study of Hebrew among Christians went on. A particularly strong influence was that of Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, of Troyes, i 030-1105), who was, and among Jews has remained, by far themost popular of the Jewish biblical commentators.1 By the mid-twelfth century Rashi’s works were being used in the school of Hugo of St. Victor, and Hugo’s notes include admonitions on the necessity of understanding the Hebrew—since, after all, ‘the Greek texts are truer than the Latin, and the Hebrew texts are truer than the Greek’. It was, however, Nicholas of Lyra, who died in 1349, who most fully brought the effect of Rashi’s exegesis into the currents of Christian thinking. After the sixteenth century, however, when the great Christian Hebraists like Reuchlin made Hebrew an integral part of Christian culture and education, there seems to be a lessening in the sense of dependence on Jewish opinion. The central Jewish authority in the sixteenth century, in respect of influence upon the Christians, was Elias Levita (1469-1549).2 But no equally central figure followed him in the respect of Christians, and the progressive current of discovery which had characterized Jewish biblical study through the Middle Ages seemed, once its fruits were passed on to the Christians, to have become somewhat torpid. The study of Hebrew was cultivated and passed on among the Christians, and the con ditions gradually came about in which it was possible for the Christians to become unaware of their debt to Jewish grammatical study and to forget that the Jews might be the ones who would know what Hebrew words meant. This, however, did not happen immediately. The Buxtorfs in their handling of the text showed very deep respect for the Rab binic tradition; and in 1620 the elder Buxtorf published his Tiberias sive commentarius masorethicus triplex, showing a close and lively interest in the Massorah, here following in the steps of Levita. In more recent times, however, there has come about a tendency to give little attention to the Massorah, and the way in which it func tioned for the clarification and classification of the language has been generally less well known. Another relevant historical matter is the dispute over the inspira tion of the vocalization signs. Against the tradition that the points were, like the consonants, given to Moses at Sinai, Ludwig Cap1 See particularly Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars. a See G. E. Weil, Site L&vita.

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pellus in 1624 published an argument showing that the points had been added after the fifth or sixth centuries a .d . The more traditional view, conversely, now extended the conception of biblical inspiration so as to include explicitly the divine inspiration of the vowel points. This debate led to renewed interest in textual criticism and to an increased awareness that existing texts could err. The remembrance of this debate has, on the other hand, left another and a less happy inheritance, in the form of a feeling that the vowel points are freely disposable at the pleasure of the critic. Actually, as we shall see, the vowel signs are historical evidence just as the consonants are, and while neither history nor dogma can affirm that they are certainly right, history does mean that they must be examined as evidence and not arbitrarily replaced. The seventeenth century is also notable for improved knowledge of the Semitic languages, especially Arabic. Several polyglot lexica were published, the best known being that of E. Castell, the Lexicon Heptaglotton (1669), which gave comparative registration of Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopic, and Arabic, along with separate listing for Persian.1 All this implies a departure from the older idea that Hebrew was in some way a divine or angelic speech, and leads towards a treatment of it as a human language; to this one had only to add that it was a derivative human language, and the movement of Hebrew study into a more historical realm was accomplished. Albert Schultens2 made this notably plain, for he regarded Arabic as the purest and clearest of the Semitic languages and attached Hebrew to the Semitic group as one dialect among many. His Dissertatio theologica-philologica de utilitate linguae arabicae in interpretanda sacra lingua3 argued that Arabic was in principle just as old as any other Semitic language and could therefore be applied to the understanding of Hebrew passages. That ‫ צ ל ה‬at I Sam. 1. 6 meant ‘co-wife* ( = Arab, darra), and that ‫ ל ע ש‬at I Sam. 14. 32 meant *bent, turned’,4 are points which Schultens affirmed (not without the support of earlier scholars like Jerome or Kimchi) and which have enjoyed reiteration in the twentieth 1 2 3 4

On this period see Kraus, pp. 70 ff. See in particular J. Flick, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, pp. 105 ff. Found in his Opera Minora (Leiden, 1769), pp. 487-510. For further comment on this example see below, pp. 69, 98, 246 f.

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century. Many of his other suggestions are less happy, and the discerning modern Arabist Flick speaks of his work as a ‘misuse of Arabic, driven to the farthest point’.1 Johann David Michaelis (1717-91) may be mentioned as one who, following in Schultens’s line, did even more to place the understanding of Hebrew within the framework of the philology of Arabic and other Semitic lan guages. But meanwhile a further change was under way, for Arabic studies were freeing themselves from the position of a servant to sacra philologia, i.e. the position of being consulted only when some obscurity in Hebrew required elucidation.2 In the nineteenth century the logic of textual emendation may be comparable with the logic of the source analysis which was equally dominant at the time. In source analysis scholars reacted against the artificial expedients by which the inconcinnities of nar ratives had been covered over. Such inconcinnities, they held, did not belong to the texts originally; rather, they had arisen by the careless compounding of different sources. The scholar could trust in his own sense of unity and sequence, and thus could analyse the material in a way which would remove the need for artificiality. Similarly, in the area of verbal difficulties, the scholar could rely on what he knew; if the text made no sense, one need no longer hide this fact, as the older exegesis had done, and one certainly need not try artificial explanations for the anomalies of the text. Rather let the text be emended to what it had been before careless scribes corrupted it, and the difficulties would be gone. In conjectural textual criticism the careless scribe plays a role somewhat analogous to the role of the clumsy redactor in source criticism. One does not need to press this parallel; but within limits it is true. Both at the level of the larger literary units (source criticism or ‘literary’ criti cism) and at the level of the smaller verbal or graphic groupings (textual criticism) we have an outburst of activity by the scholar who does not recognize that the text, in the form in which it now stands, and in the continuity in which it has been transmitted, is final. At any rate, in the highly productive scholarship of the later nineteenth century, it does seem that textual and literary criticism, rather than comparative philological operations, succeeded in oc cupying much of the time and energy of scholars. The great Wellhausen, who was later to achieve fame as an Arabist, in his textual 1 Fuck, p. 107.

2 Flick, p. 122.

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studies on the Old Testament seems to have concentrated almost entirely on the textual approach, emphasizing the LXX in particular. At I Sam. 14. 32, for example, he does not even mention the Arabic explanation suggested by Schultens, though more recent scholars have reiterated it.1 At Amos 7. 4, where the rendering ‘creation* or ‘creatures* for the obscure ‫ חל?ן‬is a fairly easy suggestion on the basis of familiar Arabic usage, Wellhausen as late as 1898 simply has nothing to suggest.2 S. R. Driver’s Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel, on which whole generations of English-speaking students were trained, also laid all its emphasis on textual and palaeographical, rather than on comparative philological, insights; though occasionally it noted the latter, as in the case of ‫‘ צ ר ה‬co-wife* at I Sam. 1. 6. The predominance of textual treatments can be best seen in the standard critical text which emerged from this period, namely B H 3. This text gave space to hundreds of emendations, but quoted rather few cases of philological treatment. In Hosea I find over 300 places where the editor has registered textual changes in the lower apparatus; of philological treatments, however, I find only one. This is at 7. 16, where the editor suggests the reading ‫ח ל ל עג ם‬ (itself assuming a conjectural rearrangement of the order of consonants, plus an assumed haplography); the suggested explanation is that this ‫ ז ל‬would be the Arabic zala ‘ceased*, or rather a Hebrew cognate thereof, which in BDB is not recognized except as the root of ‫‘ זו ל ת‬except*. In Job, on the other hand, B H 3 registers a much larger number of philological treatments. The editor, Beer, registers in the lower apparatus some fifteen cases where he explains the reading through reference to other languages than biblical Hebrew.3 In many of these, however, the philological treatment does not go with a retention of the M T but with an emendation. These are, of course, only a very small proportion of the philological treatments which have 1 J. Wellhausen, Der Text der Bücher Samuelis (Göttingen, 1871), p. 93. 2 J. Wellhausen, Die Kleinen Propheten (Berlin, 1898), pp. 7, 89. For a discussion of this possibility see below, pp. 260 f. 3 See 3. 14, Arab, haram ‘pyramid’; 15. 12, MH ‫‘ ל מז‬nod’; 15. 30, MH ‫נשר‬ ‘cut down’; 18. 3, MH ‫‘ ט מ ם‬make blunt, stupid’; 19. 26, Accad. and Targ. ‫חו ר‬ ‘look’; 20. 18, MH ‫* ל ע ס‬chew’; 21. 24, MH ‫* ע ט ם‬thigh’; 21. 27, Syr. ‫ה מ ס‬ *think’; 25. 3, MH ‫‘ בו ר‬boorish’: 33. 25, Accad. tapäsu ‘be sleek’; 36. 18, Aram. ‫* ח מ ה‬beware’; 36. 33, MH ‫* ע ל ע ו ל ה‬storm’; 37. 21, Syr. ‫‘ ב ה ר‬obscure’; 41. 18, Syr. ‫‘ ש לי ה‬spear’.

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been suggested for the book of Job; but it is interesting that they did find a place in this way in the apparatus of B H 3. It is also inter esting to see how many of these suggestions depend on late Hebrew, and how few are drawn from the Arabic and Accadian sources which have recently become considerably more prominent. In any case, in spite of the somewhat greater registration of philo logical treatments in Job and some other books, it remains true that B H 3 in its notes remains overwhelmingly a monument to the textual approach. Nevertheless the strength of the tendency towards textual treat ment did not pass without challenge. Sometimes this challenge came from scholars of a conservative tendency, whether Jewish or Christian, who found it hard to accept the judgements now fashionable among scholars and felt that these solutions were arbitrary. Such scholars felt that it was better to explain the text than to rewrite it by emendation or to analyse it by source-critical methods; and if it had to be explained, the use of other languages was one way to explain it. Moreover, some of the scholars of such a conservative tendency were men of formidable philological ability. Franz Delitzsch (1813-90) is the most obvious example, and, in a somewhat different category, we may mention Dillmann also; from various points of view, indeed, scholars who disagreed with the reigning hypotheses, or who worked on aspects which were not then in the centre of interest, contributed to keeping the scene of scholarship varied. The discovery of Accadian caused an important shift of emphasis in Old Testament study. We need not discuss the impact of the new knowledge about Accadian literature and religion. On the purely linguistic side the discovery greatly altered the perspective from which Hebrew could be seen, and in particular provided a very different angle of view from that which had been mainly informed by Arabic and Aramaic. Friedrich Delitzsch in his Prolegomena (1886) is thus found using some arguments which were to be re-echoed again and again 70 or 80 years later. It is dangerous, he argued, to remove unusual locutions or hapax legomena by emendation, since ancient Hebrew literature is very fragmentary. Emendation can thus simply remove the genuine from the text. Accadian comes as a providential saviour to the MT, and much reserve must be used in emendation (p. 69). The whole study of vocabulary reflects upon the reliability of the

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M T and thus upon all other text-critical questions (p. vii). Delitzsch’s work, not without its one-sided aspects, sets the tone for much later philological work. About the turn of the century we have two men who worked on the text and whose notes provided numerous examples of both textual and philological treatments, though with the emphasis rather on the former than on the latter. Felix Perles in his Analekten (1895, second series 1922) made many lexical suggestions; for example he identified at Job 40. 17 a verb ‫ ח פ ץ‬meaning ‘make straight, stretch out’, different from the usual ‫ ח פ ץ‬meaning ‘be pleased’. Arnold Ehrlich in his Randglossen provided a long series of textual and philological suggestions. Both of these writers seem to have been a stimulus to later workers on the philological side. In spite of these varying influences, however, the use of textual treatment remained generally dominant in the earlier twentieth century, and we have registered already its place in the apparatus of B H 3. In the twenties and thirties, however, we should take note of two points of view which stimulated discussion. The first is the work of the voluminous if erratic scholar Wutz. The main point of Wutz’s work, the transcription theory, i.e. the opinion that the LXX was translated from a Hebrew text which had already been written in Greek script, may fortunately be passed over here; it is fully reviewed in the standard works on textual criticism. It does concern us, however, that in quite a large number of cases Wutz, finding a Hebrew word to be translated in a surprising way by a Greek word, accounted for this, subject to the tortuous complications of the transcription theory, by explaining that the Hebrew word had a sense made evident to us today by a cognate Arabic or Aramaic or other Semitic word. For example, there are certain places where the familiar Hebrew ‫ ד ר ך‬, usually meaning ‘way’, is translated by words for ‘sin’ like α μ ά ρ τ η μ α . Wutz believed1 that the Hebrew word was actually an (otherwise non-existent) 7‫י ך ב‬, explained in his laconic notes as identical with (ar. darb vitiunC. That is to say, the original text had this word ‫ ד ר ב‬, which was quite rightly rendered by the LXX but in the transmission of the Hebrew text was mistakenly corrupted into the familiar ‫ ד ר ך‬. Such explanations, often thrown out 1 Transkriptionen, p. 462. The word αμάρτημα occurs in MS. B at Hos. 10.13, while αμαρτία is found at III Kingdoms 22. 53.

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without any attempt at full justification, are quite frequent in Wutz’s work. Like the rest of Wutz’s work this aspect has received some strong criticism. As for the ‘Arabic darV meaning ‘vice’, Nyberg1 flatly denied the existence of this word, as well as the necessity for such an interpretation. At the best the suggestions of Wutz are often poorly argued or substantiated; at the worst, they seem often to be simple mistakes. Nevertheless Wutz found an echo for his argument that LXX renderings might derive from real Hebrew meanings which are now recoverable only through appeal to the cognate languages. Driver in 1934 enunciated the ‘important rule’ that: The origin of the Greek rendering must be sought in the vocabularies of the cognate, especially the Aramaic-Syriac and the Arabic, languages before assuming that it represents a divergence from the Hebrew text.2 In saying this he made reference to Wutz’s arguments in Transkriptionen i. 150-2. So careful a scholar as Winton Thomas concedes that the writings of Wutz ‘contain a great deal of material which will repay study by the Hebrew lexicographer’.3 Thus the work of Wutz did something to stimulate the rise of philological treatments. Another, and a more important, criticism of the common use of textual treatments came (1934-5) from the Swedish scholar Ny berg. Nyberg was highly critical of the proneness to emendation in contemporary scholarship. The proud ich lese and the dogmatic legendum seemed to him to be not a demonstration, but a denial, of good scholarship. It was assumed that the extant text was tho roughly corrupt; but, Nyberg argued, if the text was really corrupt, so that it became somewhat like the verse of Aristophanes supposed to represent Persian (Acharnae 100), then the honest thing was not to emend but to abandon altogether the attempt at interpretation. Nyberg set out what he held to be the tacit assumptions of the current fashion, and against these he formulated counterpositions of his own. The following points are those most relevant to our subject. Firstly, the prevailing fashion, as Nyberg analysed it, assumed 1 Studien %um Hoseabuche, p. 81 n. Wutz, one may surmise, based himself on the plural ’adrab ‘vitium, corruptio* of Freytag, ii. 19a. 2 ZAW M i (1934) 308. 3 O T M S y p. 255·

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that ‘the understanding of the Old Testament books in the Jewish community came very early to an end\ Since the text was only half understood, the transcription was a mechanical one. This led to all sorts of errors: words, meanings, and constructions which never existed in the living language. If this is the case, then The punctuation is nothing but a quite late attempt to wring from this partially meaningless text a sense appropriate to a Rabbinic train of thought. Against all this Nyberg thought that the transmission, being live and oral, though it certainly involved changes and the evolution of new understandings, had never been mechanical and had never consisted in mere guesses at the sense of a text mechanically pre served in writing. Secondly, the fashion assumed that the Old Testament is written in a uniform language, with the exception of the Aramaic sections and the limited sections of ‘late’ Hebrew, such as Qoheleth and Esther. In thinking this, Nyberg held, scholars were deceived by the unitary punctuation system and the unitary grammar involved in it. There are, on the contrary, regionally and temporally distinct strata in the Old Testament. Thirdly, the fashion supposed that the M T was a late and poor form of the text, and that better and earlier guidance was to be found in the versions, and especially the LXX. Nyberg refused to give wholesale judgements on this kind of thing. He emphasized the need for careful study of the origin of every variant, of the meaning of the versions and their translation techniques, and of the history of each version. In places he was ready to decide that the consonan tal text behind the LXX was better than that of the M T.1 But in general the emphasis of Nyberg’s work was upon the reliability of the MT. The versions are derivative from M T ; that is, they generally represent poor departures from M T or a text close to it, rather than good independent bases. He ended with a strong call to the scholar to get back to the M T as the text which he had to interpret. Nyberg also held that the growth of the fashion for emendation had gone along with, and partly been a result of, an isolation of Old Testament scholarship from more general oriental philology.2 The 1 See the summary list, Hoseabuch, p. 114. 2 Nyberg, Z A W lii (1934) 243; Hoseabuch, pp. 6 f.

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Old Testament could not be isolated from what was known of the development of tradition in Islam, in Zoroastrianism, or in Mandaism. The use of these wider perspectives, he believed, would overcome the isolation in which the emending procedures had grown and flourished. Nyberg in his general remarks did not discuss the place of comparative philology in solving difficulties through appeal to the cognate languages. In his detailed work on Hosea, however, he uses this method quite frequently. Thus at Hos. 8. 9 he finds it impossible to make sense of the word ‫ פ ל א‬if it has the usual meaning ‘wild ass’; it means a ‘shoot’, following the Accadian^zV’z/.1 At 10. 10 he comments on the phrase 3 ‫ א ס ך ם‬. One would expect this to be ‘in their binding’, but this is meaningless. He argues therefore: The corresponding Arabic bi-asrihim is a comprehensive expression of totality and means ‘all without exception’. . . . If the Arabic expression has been able to undergo this development of meaning, why should the same be impossible for the Hebrew ‫ א ס ל‬which means exactly the same thing ?2 Thus the sentence is to be translated: ‘All the tribes without exception will assemble themselves against them.’ At Hos. 7.16 he says that ‫ ז ע ם‬obviously cannot have the normal sense, i.e. ‘wrath’. But, he goes on, ‘anyone who knows Arabic thinks naturally of zaKam\ The LXX and Syriac, with their renderings of ‘shamelessness, lack of discipline’, were at this point more or less correct.3 Though some appeal was thus made by Nyberg to comparative philology, it would be wrong to exaggerate his dependence on this source. To a rather greater degree his arguments depend upon showing the existence of unusual or unrecognized usages within Hebrew. Himself the author of a Hebrew grammar, he strove to do justice to the variety of possible expression in the language. Thus the difficult phrase ] ‫ כ ^ ל י ב י כ ל‬at Hos. 4. 4 is dealt with primarily through a syntactic treatment, the main appeal being to other examples in the Hebrew Bible, and only a secondary appeal being to Arabic and other Semitic languages.4 1 Hoseabuch, p. 64. 2 Ibid., p. 79. 3 Ibid., p. 60. Ar. zaam is approximately *claim’. 4 Ibid., p. 24.

M ORE R E C EN T TR E N D S

In general, then, the importance of Nyberg’s work for us lies (a) in its strong challenge to the fashion for emendation, and (6) in his insistence on raising important questions of principle, in particular about the relation between language and understanding. In recent decades the original production of emendations has decreased, and the tendency to resort to philological rather than textual treatments has been growing. But the degree of movement towards the philological approach has been very varied. In England very distinguished philological work came from Professor G. R. Driver of Oxford and Professor Winton Thomas of Cambridge. In America some considerable emphasis on philological treatments, based especially upon Ugaritic, has been seen in the work of some of Albright’s followers. Jewish scholars like Eitan and Tur-Sinai have also been extremely prominent. German Old Testament scholarship, on the other hand, seems to have been less prolific in philological treatments. Some of the post-war commentaries continue to show a marked acceptance of the guidance of B H 3 at points of textual difficulty. A detailed work like Kraus’s Psalms resists the zeal for emendation found in the older scholars like Duhm or Gunkel, but is not on the other hand very productive of new appeals to the cognate languages. While it discusses a number of those which have been made, the general tendency is a sober and moderate defence of the M T as Hebrew, rather than a fresh appeal to cognate material.

IV ASPECTS OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGICAL METHOD As we have seen, there had long existed a certain somewhat rudi mentary comparative approach to Hebrew, in which its words were related to similar words in Aramaic and Arabic. It was only in the nineteenth century, however, that comparative philology in its modern form grew up. The modern movement can be distinguished from the older in respect of {a) the degree to which it sought to state consistent or systematic relations, as distinct from more isolated examples; (b) the insistence on an historical approach. We shall dis cuss certain aspects of comparative philology as it is related (i) to history, (2) to sound, (3) to meaning. (1) History Comparative philologists would normally claim that their ap proach to language is an historical one. The comparative perspectives of medieval linguistic scholarship, even when accurate observations of similarities and differences were made, and even when certain historical data (like the difference between biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew) were known, did not assume an historical form. The com parative philology which developed in the nineteenth century, by contrast, was historical in method and outlook in the sense that the comparative relations which it observed were set within an historical framework of change and development. The more obvious aspect of this historical approach was the emphasis on the dating and the strict chronological control of the available written sources. In biblical Hebrew this was connected with the literary criticism which departed from the traditional dating of books and evolved theories of their composition from sources. New evidence, like inscriptions and the Amarna letters, was likewise set in relation with previous knowledge through care ful chronological ordering. It thus became possible to write a history of a language, provided that evidence over a sufficiently

H IS T O R Y

long period was available, as was very obviously so, for instance, with Greek or English. More important for our purpose, however, the comparative relations between two languages like Hebrew and Aramaic were now worked out as the result of historical development from a com mon ancestor, and the reconstruction of this common ancestor language, though not necessarily undertaken in detail, was implied or assumed in comparative work. The characteristic of comparative philology was not only historical organization of extant evidence but also the use of extrapolation to produce a picture of previous stages, themselves not directly evidenced, which would serve as a basis for an historical and developmental account of the stages which are directly known from evidence. It might indeed be supposed that there is a quite different task which is more properly ‘comparative’, that is, the study of the differences and similarities between languages which are not re lated in origin—Chinese and Hebrew, let us say, or Turkish and English. Comparisons of this kind, though not without their interest, are not what has usually been meant by the term ‘com parative philology’. This term has meant the comparative study of language groups within which signs of a common historical origin can be detected; ‘comparison’ is not a general discussion of simi larities and differences, but the construction of an historical common scheme within which the material of related languages can be placed. It is thus possible to say that ‘comparative’ was not quite the right word; Hoenigswald1 refers suggestively to ‘the process of triangulation known misleadingly as the comparative method’. Obviously the historical emphasis fits in easily with this emphasis on the study of languages related in origin. If we are interested in the differences between Chinese and Hebrew, we do not necessarily advance the subject at all by tracing each back to an earlier historical stage, for at that earlier stage they will be still equally unrelated. If we are discussing Hebrew and Aramaic, how ever, the extension back into an earlier stage may bring us closer to their common origin. Thus to be comparative, as comparative philologists have construed the term, means to be historical. Conversely, for certain early stages of development, it may seem that there is no way to be historical except by being comparative in one’s approach. The point of origin of the Romance languages is to 1 Hoenigswald, Language Change, p. 2.

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a considerable extent directly evidenced in the form of Latin. But for the languages of the ancient world the previous historical stages are not directly known. We have no direct evidence for Hebrew before the earliest written texts in Hebrew. If we wish to know something of Hebrew as it was before these earliest texts, we can have recourse to the comparative study of Arabic or Aramaic. Moreover, we can no longer rightly confine our study to one such related language: in principle the prehistory has to be worked out from the evidence of the whole group of related languages. Pre historic Hebrew was not related uniquely to Arabic or to Aramaic, but had its own history, for the reconstruction of which we may have to consider the evidence of Ethiopic or Mandaic or a modern South Arabian dialect. Comparative study therefore involves in principle the requirement that it should be the general comparative study of a language family. The reconstruction afforded when the other Semitic languages are taken into account may enable us to state probable conjectures of the nature of Hebrew before the time of the existing records. We may then perhaps conclude that Hebrew at an earlier stage had case-endings in its nouns, as classical Arabic still has. Again, observing that Hebrew appears to have three sibilants, D, ft?, and ft?, where Arabic has the two, /§/ and /s/, and that Hebrew /&/ (ft?) often corresponds to Arabic /§/ while Hebrew /§/ (ft?) corresponds to Arabic /s/, and combining this with similar observations apply ing to other Semitic languages, we may perhaps conclude that the ancestor language had a series of three, which we may represent as /s/, /s/, and /§/; and that these three have been reduced to two in Arabic in such a way that the Arabic resultant phonemes com monly appear to be opposite to the pair with which they are obviously comparable in Hebrew. The total reconstruction of an ancestor language like protoSemitic is, of course, understood to be extremely hypothetical. Indeed, for the purpose of the kind of philological treatment dis cussed in this book, no complete explicit reconstruction is required or assumed. Most treatments offer the particular evidence of a word with its meaning in two, three, or four of the known Semitic languages. Thus the very hazardous task of stating what the protoSemitic form and meaning were is not necessarily required. Never theless the potentiality of such a reconstruction, within the limits set by our information, is a background assumption of the whole

H IS T O R Y

procedure. Most work, no doubt, has been done on the basis of what Murtonen calls ‘the theory of the descent of all the Semitic languages from one single mother tongue structurally similar to them’.1 Such a theory may be right or wrong, and certain points in our study may be relevant to a judgement on such a theory; but for our practical purposes here we do not require to determine what proto-Semitic was like, but only to observe that the existence of such an entity was and is one of the assumptions in method made by comparative philology. The importance of the common ancestor of languages like Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew has not lain in our reconstruction of this language; rather, the reconstruction serves as a basis from which the extant languages can be described historically as the products of fairly consistent changes. How rigorous this consis tency must be is one of the questions which will have to be discussed shortly. Though comparative philology is thus historical in the sense that the relations it observes are set within a framework of historical change, there is another sense in which it is more ambiguously related to historical method. The construction of a common ancestor for extant languages is only a partially historical procedure, for no direct historical evidence of the common ancestor is available; the common ancestor is a hypothetical construction sufficient to ac count for later phenomena actually extant. Any addition to the evidence known (as, for example, the discovery of a language like Ugaritic) may mean that the picture of the common ancestor has to be revised. Conversely the discovery of a previously unknown language may provide confirmation of reconstructions which philo logists had previously made. This constructive character of the work of comparative philology is seen not only in the picture of ancestor languages like protoSemitic but also in other relations. When it is said that such and such a form ‘originally’ had a certain sense, or that a Hebrew meaning had developed from such and such a pre-Hebrew mean ing, these are constructions which rest upon evidence in the historically known languages but are not in themselves directly or empirically verifiable. This constructive character of the work of comparative philology is important for several aspects of the argument which will follow 1 JfSS xi Ci 966) 150 n.

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elsewhere in this book. Philologists have at times tended to speak rather apodeictically, as if their opinions rested on direct evidence. This is not always justified. To say this is not to question the validity of comparative philology; we are merely drawing attention to complications inherent in its methods. The construction of linguistic stages previous to those directly evidenced, though it is an important procedure of historical philology, is a complicated and precarious undertaking which may have to be subjected to constant revision. One reason for this is that, in the circumstances here obtaining, the law of economy of hypotheses does not apply: the simplest connexion between two phenomena need not be the best explanation, and much more complicated relations may be equally probable. This constructive character to which we have referred does not mean that comparative philology is unhistorical or without factual basis; but its operations are indirect rather than direct. It is true that the comparative method is not the only one available for the reconstruction of previous historical stages of a language. Something can also be achieved by what has been called ‘internal reconstruction*.1 In Hebrew, for instance, the evidence of the ‘segholate* nouns may suggest that the earlier form of ‫מ ל ך‬ was malk, while the earlier form of ‫ ס פ ר‬was sifr. This result is achieved primarily not through comparison with other cognate languages but through a consideration of phenomena within Hebrew, such as the suffixed forms ‫ מ ל כ ך‬and ‫ ס פ ר ך‬. Much of our information about the prehistory of Hebrew is attained in this way. Nevertheless a larger proportion of our historical reconstructions, and for our purpose a more important part, rests upon a comparative method using cognate sources. ‘Much better opportunities for reconstruction exist where the older stage can be triangulated from two or more independent later stages into which the speech community has separated/2 The possibilities offered by internal reconstruction are restricted if it cannot be accompanied and strengthened by the presence of comparative method. In summary, then, comparative philology has operated in the construction of a developmental scheme within which the material 1 For a brief review, wrapped in impenetrable technical terminology, see Hoenigswald, Linguistic Change, pp. 68 ff.; more simply, Lehmann, Historical Linguistics, pp. 99-106. 1 Hoenigswald, op. cit., p. 69. Cf. Thieme, in Hymes, pp. 585-97.

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of related or ‘cognate’ languages may be set and seen historically. For persons who, like Old Testament scholars, work at a point near to the earliest available historical evidence of the language involved, i.e. Hebrew, comparative methods seem to be a principal resource for the obtaining of a view of the earlier history. (2) Sound In considering the modes in which the evidence of extant texts is used in comparative philology, we may first give attention to the study of sound and sound-laws. As is well known, this played an important part in the rise of comparative philology, and Grimm’s law in the field of Germanic is particularly famous among the general public. Actually much of comparative philology has avoided a real con cern with sound in the strict sense, i.e. with phonetics and acoustics. Its work has, certainly in the Semitic field, been based for the most part on the written signs. Where work has been done on the modern languages and dialects, interest in phonetics has been more immediately necessary. For the older languages, however, where no direct phonetic information was available in any case, philology has often devoted its primary attention to correspon dences of the written signs, and has shown considerable naivety or vagueness when statements about sound going beyond this were attempted. When a philologist tells us that a correspondence exists between Hebrew jzj and Aramaic /d/, and that these represent different developments from proto-Semitic /d/, he to a large extent has in mind the letters T and *7 in the Hebrew or Aramaic script, along with the sounds generally associated with them in the various modern universities. He probably would not be able to give a description of the changes in voice production which are involved in his own statement, and the fact that his statement did not seem to be dependent on such a description is one main reason why a detailed philology, including assertions about ‘sound-laws’ and ‘phonology’, could grow up in the company of a very considerable ignoring of the description of sound. Philologists have known, nevertheless, that it was in the sound rather than in the writing that the changes they trace had occurred, and a very important place is given to the correspondences between the different languages of a cognate group. Any comparative

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grammar will furnish a table of the sounds of the (constructed) parent language, with the sounds into which each has developed in the later languages. Thus we may hear that proto-Semitic had ft/ {th)> Arabic /t/, Hebrew /§/, Aramaic /1/ and Ethiopic /s/. Hebrew /§/ then ‘corresponds’ to Aramaic /t/, as in ‫ שו ר‬or ‫ ר‬1‫‘ ת‬ox’. If Hebrew ‫ ש‬has a corresponding ‫ ש‬in Aramaic also, as in ‫‘ ק ד ש‬holy’, this goes back to proto-Semitic /s/ or is explained in some other way. An exhaustive statement of such correspondences is part of the structure of a comparative grammar. It has remained, however, a matter of some dispute how strictly the correspondences which are normal are to be taken also as certain and invariable. One school of nineteenth-century philologists maintained the position that ‘sound laws admit no exception\ Others, however, have thought it possible to treat the normal phonological correspondences more lightly. Meir Fraenkel, for example, tries to argue that the familiar Hebrew |jn ‘synagogue cantor’ is a ‘Hebrew variant’ of the Arabic haddäm ‘servant’. This at once involves a conflict with the usual correspondences, since a Hebrew /z/ corresponds to a /z/ or a /d/ in Arabic, but not to a /d/ in that language. Fraenkel goes on, however: However, sound rules are not sound laws. Lagarde and Nöldeke point out exceptions in the Semitic sound rules. . . . The ears and the mouth of men are not machines, which follow iron physical laws and are without exception. We know how the sound laws of Grimm have been criticized. . . . The tables of sound correspondences, which we find in Bauer and Leander or in Brockelmann, are correct in general, but we cannot admit that they are right without exception for all linguistic phenomena. These are not laws, but only tendencies of sound change.1 Obviously the question is of vital importance for our subject. We may consider separately two questions: (1) how far the sound changes, by which the correspondences between cognate languages have evolved, are regular; (2) how this applies to the situation of difficult passages in the Old Testament. As for the first of these questions the opinion of modern linguists seems to be distinctly in favour of the regularity of sound change. To argue this does not require, and indeed is not supported by, the use of the concept of ‘iron physical laws’, or indeed of ‘laws’ of any 1 H U CA xxxi (i960) 69.

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kind at all. Examination of the modes by which changes occur, including the statistical element and the fact that phonetic change is a social phenomenon, leads still to the assertion that ‘phonetic change is regular’ and that ‘whenever the proper conditions obtain, phonemic change occurs without exception’.1 The consideration of dialect adds additional complexity to this picture without altering it in principle. On detailed examination the total entities called ‘languages’ may be found to break down into local diversities, which may have differences from the correspon dences shown by the standard forms usually quoted. Thus, to take a well-known example, proto-Germanic /‫־‬k/ should become /-x/ (commonly spelt ch) over the whole High German area. Dialect geography, however, shows that the line between ik and ich is different from the line between maken and machen2 Thus ‘the various isoglosses in any bundle seldom coincide exactly’.3 The units examined in linguistics are not absolute and homogeneous entities which form separate ‘languages’; remarkable local diversity exists. This does not, however, in itself disprove the assertion that changes are regular under given conditions. It means that the state ment of the conditions is more complicated than can be achieved through the simple specification of the language concerned as a whole. It is thus always possible that the detailed situation in some area was more complicated than is suggested by a normal corre spondence such as that between Hebrew jzj and Aramaic /d/. The existence of dialect (which will be discussed further in the next chapter)4 and other complications does not, then, constitute a valid objection to the conception that sound changes are regular. This regularity is not only an important principle for compara tive philological operations in general; it is one of particular importance for philological treatments in the Hebrew Bible. The passages under discussion are, ex hypothesis obscure ones; the relations of meaning between them and known Hebrew words, and between them and suggested Semitic cognate words, are an open 1 Quotations are‫־‬from Gleason, pp. 3 9 4 7 ‫ ־‬. Cf. already Saussure, who insists that phonetic changes are *absolutely’ and ‘perfectly’ regular, Course, pp. 143 if., while this does not depend on the use of any simple concept of *law’, ibid., pp. 91-95. For another recent summary statement see Robins, pp. 311 f. 2 For a simple statement, with diagram, see Lehmann, pp. 124 f. 3 So Gleason, p. 401. 4 See below, pp. 98-101.

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question. Since this semantic relation is a very open one, it is desir able that the phonological relations should be very closely estab lished ; otherwise we have two loose probabilities or surmises, with no more coercive factor than the conviction that the result is a suitable meaning for the text. The looser the phonological corre spondences, the more the weight of proof must fall on the semantic suitability of suggestions offered; but semantic suitability, under these circumstances, is perhaps not much more than mere guessing. It is wrong that such guessing should be justified by the argument that phonological correspondences are not rigorously mandatory, and that the sense achieved ‘fits perfectly weir. An otherwise unexpected variation from the standard corre spondences can well be accepted as important evidence where there is no substantial doubt about the meaning of the terms in question (no one doubts that ik on one side of a German isogloss means the same as ich on the other side); but when the philological operation is being conducted in order to identify words previously unknown the matter is quite otherwise. The same is true of dialect; it is one thing to use evidence known to belong to a particular dialect, but quite another to call a form ‘dialectal’ when there is no evidence for its belonging to any particular dialect and no series of dialectal features into which to fit it; this latter procedure, in other words, is merely using the general idea of dialect irresponsibly in order to excuse an ignoring of the normal correspondences in a particular case. Many examples in the history of philology show how the deter mination to take phonological correspondences rigorously has led to the discovery of new rules and thus to the extension of know ledge. It was precisely because rules such as those of Grimm were taken to be strict and universal that scholars were forced to worry over them and through this worrying produced new refinements, such as Verner’s law relating stress to voicing. If the rules had not been taken as strict and universal in the first place, the phenomena would have been supposed to be haphazard and inexplicable, and no new results would have been forthcoming. Thus attention to strict phonological correspondence is one of the ways in which suggestions, which seem at first to be seman tically satisfying, can be further probed. The average person would be very likely to affirm the philo logical identity of English day and Latin dies. Yet this identity does

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not conform to the normal correspondences, and it appears that in fact the words are not cognate. If phonological correspondences were treated as a light matter, these scholarly doubts would have been swept aside by the impatient sense that the semantic agreement made it unnecessary to consider the problem of the phonological difference. Only strictness in the application of sound correspondences prevents the student from quick and easy conclusions based on semantic identity or similarity. In an article in 1956 Ullendorff, listing words held in common by Hebrew and ancient South Arabian, included the equivalence between Hebrew ‫‘ ש פ ת‬place, set’ and ESA sft ‘give’. This is semantically an easy equivalence, since a similar spread of meaning can be easily seen in the common verb ‫‘ נ תן‬give’. Beeston, however, in a later note, observes that this equivalence involves an irregular correspondence of sibilants, for the ESA /§/ usually corresponds to Hebrew ‫ש‬, as in ‫‘ ש ל ה‬field’, ESA sdw. This being so, Beeston is led to suggest a completely different etymology for the words in question.1 It is not necessary for us to argue between the suggestions advanced by these distinguished scholars. What is important is to observe that the desire to support the normal correspondence is the motive for further research into the matter. But for such a motive the semantic obviousness of the suggestion as formulated by Ullendorff would seem entirely satisfying. It is the desire to render justice to the normal correspondences that leads to a further examination of the question, and to the offering of solutions which are more out of the way. Conversely, one can say that where the rules of normal correspondence have been taken lightly, all sorts of vague guesses from cognate languages have been offered.2 The statement of the phonological correspondences, then, forms a kind of basic logic for the work of comparative philology. 1 Index, no. 310. 2 The results of an extremely cavalier treatment of the correspondences can be seen in the work of John Gray on Ugaritic. See examples quoted in the review of the 2nd edition of his The Legacy of Canaan by Pope in jf SSx i (1966) 228-41. Correspondences work in only one direction: when we have established that Hebrew x corresponds to Arabic y , this does not constitute a proof that Hebrew y corresponds equally well to Arabic x. The correspondences are reversed if Ugaritic and Hebrew rbs are related to Arabic rbq and Ugaritic 7m to Hebrew slm; see Pope, op. cit., p. 231. Pope writes: *Gray appears to operate on the assumption that it is permissible to reverse any process of permutation or substitute freely on either side of a phonological equation.’

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(3) Meaning Thirdly, we observe that the structure of comparative philology includes an irreducible semantic element. Even where correspondences in form are emphasized, this should not disguise the fact that in the setting up of these same correspondences a semantic element is involved. If we argue that Greek β in certain positions corresponds to Latin v, and if we exemplify this by comparing Greek βαίνω and Latin venio, we do this because we think that the Greek word and the Latin are semantically close enough to be good evidence. If we use as an example the relation between Hebrew ‫' ש ד ה‬field’ and Accadian sadu 'mountain, country’, we imply also that we can see some kind of possible semantic relationship between the meanings of the two words, even though this is a relation of greater dissimilarity than that between βαίνω and venio. Putting it conversely, it is doubtful whether we would accept words as illustrations of a phonological correspondence unless we could perceive a semantic relation, or a possibility of such relation, between them. It is true that a series of phonological correspondences can be set up without this dependence on semantic similarities. Elements such as inflexions, rather than words supposed to be of like meaning, may be taken as the basis for comparison. In early IndoEuropean philology it was the comparison of elements like verb endings that allowed scholars to avoid the traps involved in the use of words of like meaning.1 The same can be done in the Semitic field. The comparison of the Accadian series iprus, taprus, taprusi and the Hebrew series ‫ י ק ט ל‬, ‫ ת ק ט ל‬, ‫ ת ק ט ל י‬gives information about vowel and consonant correspondences, even though it is known that semantically the function of the Accadian tense is not the same as that of the Hebrew tense. It is thus to some degree possible for a series of phonological correspondences to be set up without major semantic decisions about the similarity or dissimilarity of the meaning of words. Nevertheless only a sketchy comparative phonology could be built up on this basis alone. Comparative philological works usually contain long strings of actual word comparisons. Thus Brockelmann2 gives a list of words all meaning 'beard’: Arabic daqan, Hebrew ]pT, Syriac daqna, Accadian ziqnu. No semantic 1 On this see Jespersen, Language, p. 38, with reference to the work of Rask. 2 Grundriß, i. 335.

87 difficulty is involved. But sometimes the semantic relations are more complicated. In Hebrew TftX means approximately ‘say’; but the Arabic ’amora is rather ‘command’, Accadian amd.ru is ‘see’, and Ethiopic ’amara, ’ammard is ‘know’ or ‘show’. This may be in vague terms ‘the same word’; but the relation between the meanings is much less simple and obvious than with the words for ‘beard’. A large number of the decisions involved in setting up a system of phonological correspondences contain, then, a semantic element. Where possible, philologists may try to use for their basic corre spondences examples where the semantic element is minimal (such as inflexional affixes and the like) or where it would be accepted as highly obvious (such as a series of words all meaning ‘beard’, as quoted above). Nevertheless almost all comparative grammars will use semantic criteria in setting up their lists of correspondences and providing illustrations. One reason for this is the statistical variation in the frequency of the different phonemes of a language. Where a phoneme occurs frequently and in a variety of contexts, it may be relatively easy to obtain evidence of series of cognate words in which it occurs. In other cases the evidence may be much more sparse, and therefore more ambiguous. In Indo-European, for instance, the incidence of the phoneme /bh/ was very much higher than that of /b/. It is correspondingly more difficult to produce a convincing multiple demonstration of the occurrence of realizations of jbj in the various languages. This rarity means that scholars will probably scan with greater caution the semantics of words purporting to illustrate the correspondence. In Hebrew the incidence of 2? is substantially lower than that of (say) 57, and this is one of the reasons why the phonological correspondences involving the sibilants are a matter of greater uncertainty; and since there is some uncertainty about the normal correspondences, greater weight must lie on the semantic convincingness of examples quoted. Moreover, Semitic languages use in inflexional affixes and the like only a very limited number of their stock of consonant phonemes, and 2? is not one of them. Thus all attempts to state correspon dences for 127 involve the semantics of individual words. In the research operations of comparative philology the scholar uses a list of basic correspondences which have been built up wherever possible with plentiful examples and with the use of words M E A N IN G

88 A SPE C T S OF CO M PA RA TIV E P H IL O L O G IC A L M E T H O D

(or grammatical elements), such as the words for ‘beard’ just cited, which do not present immediate semantic uncertainties. Only because this list is fairly stable can the more adventurous research into the highly doubtful words be undertaken with confidence. This, however, introduces us only to the elementary aspects of semantic problems in comparative philology. The meanings of words were not only used in order to construct a basic series of correspondences; study had also to be given to the various mean ings of cognate words in different languages, and to the historical change of meanings in temporal stages of the same language; and, as in our philological treatments of the Hebrew Bible, compara tive methods had to be harnessed to the task of discovering meanings. In the Semitic language field, one may assert without injustice, the classical discipline of comparative philology showed a much greater weakness in questions of semantics than in other aspects of its work. Its careful and meticulous erudition in the classification of forms and the tracing of their history was not matched by an equal sophistication in the semantic area. Here on the contrary a remark able degree of naivety and even some considerable guesswork is to be found, while purely quantitatively the work put into aspects like phonology and morphology was vastly greater than that put into semantics. In such respects one may say that semantics formed the Achilles’ heel of comparative philology. For this weakness on the semantic side it is not difficult to sug gest some reasons. Firstly, the generally empirical emphasis of comparative philology encouraged an emphasis on forms rather than on meanings. Forms are empirically attested in a way that meanings are not. This is true in spite of the constructive character which, as we have seen, attaches to the work of comparative philo logy. Even schemes which are highly creative and constructive can cite actual forms which are attested, being reducible to visible signs on paper or other mediums of writing. Such forms are the hard core of evidence on which philological constructions rely and to which they can in the last resort be referred. In contrast with forms, meanings are rather slippery to handle. What kind of empirical evidence is there for the meaning of a form at this time or that ? The evidence for what was written at such-andsuch a time, and, behind that, the evidence for what was audibly heard at such-and-such a time, appears to have a hard and tangible

M E A N IN G

character which does not apply to assertions about what was meant at the same time. The historical emphasis of comparative philology reinforced this failure to develop semantic doctrine. In the history of forms written evidence may enable us to know just when any particular form was in use. Even within the history of forms, we may note, it is a much more precarious matter to decide when a form came into use or fell out of use; for the empirical evidence, in the nature of the case, is normally only of use and not of non-use, so that for non-use one is dependent on one of the less desirable forms of argument from silence. It is a still more uncertain and complex operation when we move from forms to meanings and try to state just when and how and why one meaning changed and was replaced by another. Such historical semantic judgements are indeed possible where the development of a language and literature can be followed from a series of contemporary documents, as is the case in medieval French, or indeed, to some extent, in the Old Testament itself as we move from the older documents to the later. But historical philology has never been satisfied to follow the course of development documented by extant documents; it has also sought to reconstruct the history of the time before such documents existed. But for this period, naturally, no empirical evidence exists. This has damaged the study of semantic changes much more than it has damaged the study of form changes. Phonological development, as traced by comparative philology, seemed to show a remarkable unity. If the phoneme /t/ passed over into /t/, it seemed to do this by a more or less universal drift, which affected the language as a whole and was largely (though not necessarily entirely) independent of questions of meaning in particular words. Such a change could be historically fixed in relation to other changes, so that an historical account could be given in relative sequence, even if no exact chronological data were available. This kind of precision and logicality was not available for semantic change. Historical approaches did not succeed in making it fall neatly into sequence. For instance, we may suppose that the Hebrew ‫ מנ ח ה‬underwent a change of meaning from the more general ‘offering’ to the more particular ‘cereal offering’ which is its sense in Leviticus. This change of meaning, however, has nothing to do with general characteristics of words with the consonants jmj or /n/ or /h/, and the understanding of it cannot be

9o A SPE C T S O F C O M PA RA TIV E P H IL O L O G IC A L M E T H O D

reached by gathering evidence empirically discernible through the presence of certain consonants. The change is, indeed, something that can be well studied through considering other words in the same semantic field (such, for example, as the rise to prominence ‫ ״‬n r ® ; but the study of this involves us at once in a much more literary and less empirical type of analysis. The movement of word meanings is not easily statable in the general form which sound changes have, for it depends on forces operative within, and peculiar to, the particular semantic fields concerned.1Thus, though any semantic change may gradually have come to exert influence on the language more generally, semantic changes do not provide an easy means of setting up a relative linguistic chronology such as can be furnished on the basis of sound changes. The comparative emphasis, like the historical, tended to make an appreciation of semantic realities rather more difficult. We all know the type of philologist who, when asked the meaning of a word, answers by telling us the meaning of its cognates in other languages. This over-etymological approach is the result of excessive reliance on comparative thinking. The meaning of a word is its meaning in its own language, not its meaning in some other. To say this is not to deny that it is of considerable interest to know the meaning of cognate words in cognate languages. But the characteristic procedure of many scholars has been to start with comparative data; and the attempt to state the meaning in the actual language under study (in our case, Hebrew) has often been biased by a striving to fit this meaning into a possible derivative process starting from the comparative material. Thus the comparative emphasis, which has done so much to clarify fields like phonology and morphology, has often tended to confuse the field of semantics. One prominent semantic operation is the statement of analogies. There is a familiar Hebrew word ‫ ב ט ח‬which means ‘trust, feel safe’. This is commonly related to the Arabic bataha; but this latter means rather ‘prostrate, fall down, lie low’. Scholars have sometimes maintained that the latter sense exists in the Hebrew also. It has been identified at Jer. 12. 5: : ‫ו ב א ר ץ ש לו ם א ת ה ב ו ט ח ו אי ך ת ע ש ה בג און ה י ר ד ן‬ 1 C t below, pp. 170-3.

M E A N IN G

The more traditional type of rendering is: ‘and though in a land of peace thou art secure, yet how wilt thou do in the pride of Jordan ?’ (RV) Driver, however, offers: ‘If thou fallest flat on thy belly in a land of peace, how then wilt thou fare in the rising surge of the stream?’ (Cf. RSV ‘fall down’.)1 Again, at Job 40. 23, Driver argues that the text ‫ עי ח! ך דן‬-‫ ט ח כי‬3‫י‬ means that he (i.e. the crocodile) is lying flat on the mud. Such a relation between a sense of ‘trust’ and one of ‘fall’ or ‘lie down’ has been cited not only for this word but for others also. The Hebrew ‫‘ ש ק ט‬be quiet, be at rest’ has been compared to Arabic saqata ‘fall, drop’. Within Hebrew ‫ ^ ש ל כ תי‬literally means ‘I was thrown’ but in context seems to mean ‘I was made to depend or rely’. Blau, more remotely, compares Arabic ndma ‘sleep’, along with ndma ’ila ‘rely upon’.2 Again, it may be argued that there is a relationship between ‫י ח ל‬ ‘wait’, ‫ ח י ל‬or ‫ ל‬1‫‘ ח‬writhe’, and the root of ‫‘ חי ל‬strength’. If this is argued, it may also be supported by adducing the example of ‫‘ קרה‬hope’, which is said to be equivalent to Arabic qawiya ‘be strong’, while in Hebrew a cord is called 1‫ ק‬because it is twisted.3 The use of chains of semantic analogy in this way is characteristic of comparative philology. The chains may cover different meanings in one language, or may adduce examples from several. At times we find Semitic philologists also offering examples from outside the Semitic area. Thus meanings in the area ‘wind’ and ‘spirit, soul’ can be found for related or identical words not only in Semitic languages but also in Latin and Greek. The relation between Hebrew ‫‘ א מ ר‬say’ and Ethiopic ’ammara ‘show’ can be paralleled with that between Latin dicere and Greek SeiKvvfju* 1 But contrast Kohler’s example of a ‘verfeinerte Semantik’, in O T S viii (1950) 144 f., followed also in KB, p. 118b. 2 I n V T v i (1956) 244. 3 Cf. also ‫( מ תן‬Index, no. 208), and ‫‘ ה מ תין‬wait’. The problem with these chains of analogy is that they do not give direct historical information, and the process of development in one may be quite different from that in another which looks logically alike. 4 This example already in my Semantics, p. 118.

92 A SPE C T S O F CO M PA RA TIV E P H IL O L O G IC A L M E T H O D

(4) General Thus far we have spoken of comparative philology as a study which sought to provide comparative historical statements organ izing the data from the various languages of a group, in our case the Semitic family. But the period in which this work was at its height (the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) was also the period in which large numbers of new texts from ancient times became known. It was a time of discovery; inscriptions were found and published, new texts and indeed whole new languages became centres of scholarly awareness. Accadian and Ugaritic are the most prominent Semitic examples; in Indo-European a similar situation was formed by the discovery of Hittite and Tocharian. The importance of this is that philological scholarship had to deal not only with the organization of known linguistic evidence but also with the processing and interpretation of new material. In all this exploration comparative insights were of great importance. Comparative methods, indeed, were not the only ones used. Egyptian hieroglyphic was deciphered, and the grammar and lexicon of this language worked out, without any substantial body of comparative material to serve as a guide; such help as was pro vided came from bilingual texts, and from later stages (Coptic) of the same language. Some languages, Sumerian for example, came to be known, even though no comparative affiliations have been certainly discovered. Nevertheless comparative studies have often formed a very large part of the scholarly apparatus used in work on a new text or a new language. If a newly discovered Phoenician inscription contains a word not previously known, the scholar will at once start to look more widely around in the Semitic field. In the case of Ugaritic the meaning of the texts has been worked out through a network of comparative information which gradually became more refined. This network provided by comparative identification eventually fixes the contours of the poems sufficiently well for us to make good surmises of the sense of words for which no comparative explana tion can at present be given. The decipherment of entirely new texts thus gave a high prac tical importance to comparative philology; and the occupation of so many scholars with the study of new texts contributed to the great upsurge of philological, as against textual, treatments in

GENERAL

recent decades. Nevertheless this practical application of compara tive philology was not without its dangers to that subject itself. It meant that many scholars, when they used comparative perspec tives on a language like Ugaritic, were not comparative philologists in the strict sense, and did not make themselves responsible for the total task of synthetic organization of data from the Semitic field. The primary interest of the scholar was to find an interpretation of a new text. In the zeal and pressure of discovery, he might use comparative methods in a way which, if it had been part of a truly systematic comparative philology, would have been seen to be inviable. The use of abnormal phonological correspondences is a prime example. If these occurred so freely and so generally as is implied by the philological suggestions of some scholars (if taken cumulatively), then their effect would be no less than to shake the whole fabric of comparison which philologists themselves have carefully worked out. Thus a wide use of and appeal to comparative philology does not necessarily mean that philological methods and insights have been properly used or observed. Another aspect of comparative philology which calls for com ment is that it has, on the whole, been lacking in introspection into its own methods and has often failed to provide a satisfactory justification for each decision as it was reached. To some extent this is a natural effect of the working out of the method, and can be seen in classic works such as Brockelmann’s Grundriß. The logic by which comparative philological decisions are made includes the use of an extremely complicated series of examples, many of which present in themselves a series of different problems which demand different answers. The complication of providing a rigorous logical demonstration for every element in the structure of a comparative grammar would therefore be immense. One of the ways in which this difficulty has been met has been for the philologist to present his results rather than his argument: a kind of great hypothesis, which asks the reader to accept it as true if he finds that it covers the data. Within such a corpus we often look in vain for an argued justification of any particular section. The method as a whole is taken to be common ground, and its practical success in accommodating the evidence is the reason for accepting it. This may help to explain the apodeictic and assertive air of many philological treatments: it springs from the general mode of operation of comparative philology.

94 A SPE C T S O F C O M PA RA TIV E P H IL O L O G IC A L M E T H O D

In contrast with the historical and developmental emphasis of the older philology, modern linguistics has laid greater stress on the synchronic study of a language, as it operates at a particular time as the means of communication of a speech-community. This does not remove an interest also in the diachronic study of language. Indeed, it can be argued that language study can be truly historical only when it works with a picture of succeeding synchronic states of the language as a whole, and that in this respect the older philo logy with its emphasis on historical development, because it failed to see the languages as synchronically functioning systems, para doxically failed to be historical. By isolating the elements from the system within which they worked, it sometimes actually tended to damage historical appreciation.1 To sum up, then: an appreciation of philological treatments of the Hebrew Bible has to include a sympathetic but also critical under standing of the discipline of comparative philology from which they arose. On the one hand, the earlier forms of this discipline contained certain weaknesses, the effects of which later appeared in individual suggestions applicable to Hebrew. Some of these weaknesses can be mended if account is taken of more modern developments in the study of language. But my argument by no means depends on a kind of linguistics entirely different in scope from the older philology. The questions which we shall have to uncover and develop were already very plainly present in the older procedures. And, on the other hand, where philological treatments of the Bible have been faulty, this has often been not because of weaknesses in the basic philological discipline, but because the canons of that philological discipline itself were poorly observed by those who built upon it. 1 For an earlier criticism of ‘atomistic* study see Goshen-Gottstein in ScrH iv (1958) 101 ff.

V PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS IN PHILOLOGICAL TREATMENTS (1) General I f a word in the Hebrew Bible is to be identified, not as the Hebrew word which it has normally been taken to be, but as another word known from cognate sources elsewhere in Semitic, it is clear that an immense learning would be required for the proper handling of the matter. One would have to know not only that such-and-such a word exists in Arabic or Syriac or Ugaritic, but also where it is used, in what connexions, and with what frequency. One would have to consider yet other Semitic languages, since evidence in another such (possibly Accadian or South Arabian) might conceivably make it impossible to maintain the simple connexions conceivable if only Arabic or Syriac is taken into account. Many philological treatments do indeed rest upon such an encyclopedic scholarship and upon a refined judgement in the wide fields of the Semitic literatures. It must nevertheless be confessed that this required degree of erudition has not always been present. It is possible, though it is not desirable, to shortcircuit some of this learning. The instrument which permits such a short-circuiting is the dictionary. It is not a superhuman task to learn what the dictionaries of the various Semitic languages are, and to become familiar with their various scripts and their modes of ordering material. Once this is known, all that is required is to know the possible correspondences for any given Hebrew word and look them up one by one. The number of such correspondences will depend on which consonants are involved, and which languages. For a Hebrew ‫כ ת ב‬ the student would have to consider only one correspondence in the Arabic dictionary, namely k-t-b. For a Hebrew ‫ ע ז ב‬, on the other hand, he would have to consider more. The ‫ ע‬could normally correspond with either a /'/ or a /g/ in Arabic; and the T could

Q U E S T IO N S IN P H IL O L O G IC A L T R E A T M E N T S

correspond with either a /d/ or a /z/. There would be theoretically at least four possibilities. In the event there might well be less, for not all of the groups theoretically possible might be in use in Arabic. But where ‘weak’ letters such as /w/ are involved, the num1_ _ ‫״‬ O ci

‫ ״‬c — U i p U S b lL U I iU C Ö

__ _ JLilitJ

u 1‫״‬ ‫_____________ ״‬ t >_______ ‫ _____________ ״‬a . UC I c t i g C . J t u p c 111

i.e. ‫ כ‬plus ‫שבת‬.

138

T H E D IS T R IB U T IO N O F H O M O N Y M S

A classic case is English let. Alongside the common let meaning ‘permit’ there is a let meaning ‘prevent’. This is a homonym produced by convergence through sound changes; in Old English the words are respectively Idetan and l§ttan. Hamlet says: ‘I ’ll make a ghost of him that lets me’, and AV renders at Rom. i. 13: ‘I purposed to come unto you, (but was let hitherto)’. In the seventeenth century this use was already becoming archaic. But the corresponding noun let is still found in special contexts, like the legal let and hindrance. (Note that there is no noun form let meaning ‘permission’; though there is a let referring to house rental.)1 The existence of two homonyms with directly opposite senses within roughly the same semantic field may have led to the disuse of one of the homonyms. ‘After it had become homonymous with let “permit” , this word must have been singularly ineffective’, says Bloomfield.2 Thus, he goes on, ‘it is likely that homonymy plays more than an occasional part in the obsolescence of forms’. If we apply this to the Old Testament, two possibilities emerge. If the existence of a homonymy was such as grossly to damage the communicative efficiency of language, possibly we should regard a proposed new homonym as on that ground unproved. If, on the other hand, homonymy can be a factor in the obsolescence and disappearance of words, this may explain why a rare homonym became unknown, and thereby confirm the identification of one. A good illustration is the disappearance of words developed from Latin gallus ‘cock’ in south-western France, because the word would have become homonymous with the word for ‘cat’ (/gat/). This explanation was put forward by Gillieron.3 1 Even in the AV the grammatical context usually selects the sense: let (‘pre vent’) is absolute, with no following infinitive, and let in let me go could not mean ‘prevent’. 2 Language, pp. 398 f. 3 An exposition is conveniently available, with map, in Bloomfield, Language, pp. 396 ff. Other sources I have found helpful are Elise Richter, *Uber Homo nymie’, in the Kretschmer Festschrift (Vienna, 1926), pp. 167-201; Menner, op. cit. Another instance is that of queen and quean, which are different words, though connected by Ablaut, OE cwen ‘princess, queen’ and cwene ‘woman, servant, harlot’. Menner, p. 232, says that: ‘a survey of the distribution of quean in English dialects clearly corroborates the view that confusion with queen is the cause of its disappearance’. He also suggests that semantic interference may not develop to the point of excluding one homonym from the language but may result only in a limitation of meaning or a new division of meanings. This may have happened also in Hebrew.

HO M ON Y M S AND C O M M U N IC A T IO N

139 The view of Gillieron is still a matter of controversy; but the discussion remains suggestive for Hebrew. Here are some examples. The familiar word ‫ ע ז ר‬means 'help’. At Job 30. 13, however, Driver detected a homonymic ‫ ע ז ר‬meaning ‘hinder’ in the phrase ‫ ל א ע ז ר למל‬. Dillmann, followed by B H 3, had emended to ‫ ע צ ר‬, meaning ‘restrain, hold back’. This is the conjecture probably followed by RSV: ‘They break up my path, they promote my calamity; no one restrains them/ Driver, however, argued that the conjecture was unnecessary, for the Arabic '‫־‬z-r ‘reprove, hinder’ shows that the phrase means ‘not hindering them’ in any case, without emendation of the text. He added that the Accadian ezeru ‘scold’ attests the early diffusion of this root. The difficulty is the conflict between two homonyms, identical in all forms, of which one means ‘help’ and the other means ‘hinder’, so that they lie within approximately the same semantic field. We cannot argue that the word meaning ‘hinder’ is normal in Job and remove the difficulty in this way. Job 26. 2 ‫מ ה ע ז ר ת‬ ‫ כ ח‬- ‫ ל ל א‬is a clear case of ‘help’, while 29. 12, only one chapter before our example, has the phrase ‫וי תו ם ו ל א ־ ע ז ר לו‬ ‘an orphan with no one to help him’. This phrase, with its very close similarity to that at 30. 13, makes it difficult to suppose that the same writer would make such a change in so short a space. These considerations in themselves are far from final; but they do indicate the kind of problems involved in homonymy. These cannot easily be simplified, for yet another homonym, ‫‘ ע ז ר‬be valiant’, has been identified by Driver for three passages in Chronicles and one in Psalms; it is cognate with JJgar. gzr ‘hero, heroic might’.1 At I Chron. 12. 1 the sense of ‫ו ה מ ה ב ג בו ךי ם ע ז רי ה מ ל ח מ ה‬ 1 C M L t p. 142; Ullendorff in J S S vii (1962) 347 adds the comparison with Eth. *2rt taazra ‘impetum facere’ (Dillmann, col. 1003) and other comparative information. Dillmann himself, however, by no means accepts this sense. The application to Ps. 89. 20 is found also in Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine (1949), p. 233, but with the sense *youth’. Cf. further Index, no. 236.

140

T H E D IS T R IB U T IO N O F H O M O N Y M S

is ‘and these are among the mighty men, heroic in war’. Meanwhile for Zech. 1. 15 Eitan appealed to yet another Arabic word, gazura ‘be copious, abundant’. Arguing that the usual word ‘help’ cannot really be extended to mean ‘help forward, increase, further’ (cf. RSV here), he argued that the contrast was between God who was angry a little and the nations who were copious or abundant in the affliction. Again, the verb ‫ ע ז ב‬is familiar in the sense ‘leave, abandon’. At certain ])laces, however, Driver has identified a sense ‘help’, which is known for the Ethiopic fazzdba (Dillmann, cols. 1003-4). At Jer. 49. 25 the M T is difficult: : ‫ ב ה ע י ר ת ה ל ה‬-‫אי ך ל א־ ע ץ‬ Taken li:erally, this would seem to mean: Oh how the city of praise has not been abandoned!* Rudolph in B H 3 and in his commentary (p. 252) preferred to omit the word ‘not’ (which, indeed, is not represented by the Vulgate), He argued that the particle is an angry gloss by a reader who thought that the title ‘city of praise’ could not apply to Damascus, of which the oracle is speaking. The emission of the negative by the Vulgate is not so very powerful an argument when all the other versions have it. If we follow the Ethiopic word ‘help’, Driver argues, we have the good sense: ‘How helpless is the city of praise’. He then goes on to find another case in Jer. 49. i o - n , and an even more striking one in Exod. 23. 5. If one finds one’s enemy’s ass in trouble, the text says: : ‫ ־ע ז ב ע מו‬: ‫ע ז ב ־ת‬T ‫ ־ע ז ב לו‬: ·‫ת ׳מ‬T ‫ל‬: ‫ד‬- ‫ח‬T ‫ו‬: ‘and (if) you are reluctant to help him, (nevertheless) you must certainly help him.*1 RSV had already seen the advantage of a sense like ‘help’ and actually translated in this way; but since they note only that the Hebrew was ‘obscure’, they probably did not have a clear idea how their rendering could be justified. 1 The more traditional approach is to say the sense is ‘let loose, set free’ and make this a component in the usual sense ‘leave, forsake*.

H O M ON Y M S AND C O M M U N IC A T IO N

141

At job 9. 27, ‫ א ע ז ב ה פני ו א ב לי ג ה‬, Driver found yet another homonym, meaning ‘be cheerful, be agreeable’, with its cognate in the Arabic '-d-b. The sense therefore is T will look cheerful’. Once again, then, we have in addition to the familiar word ‘leave, abandon’ a homonym which means ‘be cheerful’ and one which means ‘help’. Of these two, the former presents less of a problem; it may be that the context of facial expression would suffice to select the right homonym. The latter, however, is a homonym which almost exactly contradicts another homonym within the same semantic field. In addition to these the standard dictionaries themselves recognize a homonym ‫ ע ז ב‬at Neh. 3. 8: : ‫! י ע ז ב ו י רו ש ל ם ע ד ה חו מ ה ה ר ח ב ה‬ and this is usually taken as ‘restored’ or ‘paved’; it is the only occurrence. Once again, then, we have a total of perhaps four verbs ‫ ע ז ב‬, all homonymic. In the case of the ‫‘ ע ז ב‬help’ suggested by Driver, we have, indeed, a philological difficulty of a more orthodox kind, in that there is some uncertainty about the existence of the Ethiopic usage cited as comparison. Dillmann cites only one case, with the careful qualifications lut videtur’ and Hncerta est haec significatio’. Leslau in his Contributions offers nothing on this root. A similar example can be seen in Driver’s treatments of ‫ ש מ ר‬. Even for the verb ‘keep’ he identifies a sense ‘tend, cultivate’ (Accadian summuru)> which, applied to Hos. 4. 10-11, with repointing, gives : ‫כ י ־ א ת ־ י ה ו ה ע ז ב ו ל ש מ ר ןנו ת‬ ‘For they have forsaken Yahweh to cultivate whoredom’. A second verb is ‫‘ ש מ ר‬rage’ (Accadian samaru). A third verb ‫ש מ ר‬ means ‘cast out, reject’. Hitherto recognized only in Syriac, it is now identified at Ps. 37. 28b : mt

: ‫ר ת‬τ ‫כ‬: ‫ש *עי ם ·נ‬τ ‫ר‬: ‫וז—ר ע‬: ‫מ רו‬τ ‫ש‬: ‫ל ם *נ‬T ‫ל ע ו‬:

Here many scholars, noting that from the acrostic form the half-verse should begin with ‫ ע‬, have exploited the άνομοι of the Greek to write a subject ‫ ; ע ו ל י ם‬and, since this makes the wicked into the subject of the first verb, either one must emend to ‫נ ש מ דו‬

142

TH E D IS T R IB U T IO N OF HOM ONYM S

or follow Driver and say that the ‫ נ ש מ רו‬of M T means ‘are cast out’.1 In any case, our example shows how the familiar ‫‘ ש מ ר‬keep’ is taken to have a homonym which is so sharply opposed in sense as to make confusion likely. A context in which persons are ‘preserved’ by God is a context in which we might also hear that they are ‘cast out, rejected’. A similar treatment by Tur-Sinai at Job 14. 16 gives the sense: mt ‫ט א •ת י‬T ‫עז מו ר ע ל ־ ־־ח‬ ‫ל א־ ת‬ : · ‘thou dost not overlook my sin’ (reading as piel, and with the Syriac-Mandean sense of not ‘watch’ but ‘release, absolve’; parallelism with ‘thou numberest my steps’).2 If this is right, conflict of homonyms is again likely.3 Having given these illustrations, we now have to consider another matter of general interest. It is rather difficult, and perhaps not absolutely necessary, to draw a clear line between homonyms, i.e. words which are alike in form but mean different things, and the phenomenon of polysemy, or the existence in the same word of a number of different senses. At least some linguists have held that there is no absolute distinction between the two assessments of a phenomenon. Bloomfield, for example, writes: ‘In many cases we hesitate whether to view the form as a single form with several meanings or as a set of homonyms.’4 In some of the illustrations I have given, as the discriminating reader will have noticed, it is possible to argue that the number of homonyms is less than I have represented, because two of the homonyms quoted are alternate senses of the same word. Thus, for instance, I cited ‫ טו ב‬meaning ‘good’ and ‫ טו ב‬meaning ‘perfume’ as two homonyms. The philologist whose mind is accustomed to 1 I myself think the M T to be right in its normal sense: ‘they [i.e. the saints, just mentioned] are preserved for ever, but the seed of the evil is cut off’. The acrostic sequence ignored the particle ‫ ; ל‬cf. 37. 39, where the ‫ ת‬verse begins with ‫ך‬. The Greek άνομου is from a variant or doublet. 2 Eitan treats the same passage in the opposite way, keeping ‫ ש מ ר‬as ‘keep, watch’ and holding that ‫ ח ט א ת‬is ‘step’ (Arab. Jjata, hatwa). 3 The verbs here discussed are of course additional to the II and III ‫ש מ ר‬ registered as the putative roots of ‫‘ ש מ רי ם‬dregs’ and ‫‘ שמ*ר‬adamant’. 4 Language, p. 150; cf. also p. 145. It may be that the decision between homonymy and polysemy can be reached through componential analysis, as outlined, for instance, by Nida, Science of Translating, pp. 90 ff.

H O M ON Y M S AND C O M M U N IC A T IO N

143

working on comparative, etymological, and historical lines may reply that these are actually ‘the same word’, and that the sense ‘good’ is derived from the sense ‘sweet-smelling’ of the same word, a relation made visible through the South Arabian tyb, a word for a kind of incense. One sense, accordingly, may be said to ‘derive’ from the other. Similarly, with ‫ ע ז ב‬, where we noted a homonymy between the word with sense ‘leave, abandon’ and the word with sense ‘help’, Driver himself, whose interpretation we have been considering, thought that a continuous semantic development could be seen from a sense ‘left’ through the passive sense of ‘left; let alone; was indulgent to’ to the active sense of ‘helped’. It seems to be wrong, however, to suppose that the difficulties and problems caused by the recognition of homonyms are in any way disposed of if we are able to see that an historical development has taken place from one example to another. This is a clarification only for the historically oriented philologist, not for the normal user of the language. Menner seems to be right in arguing: From the point of view of the speaker ignorant of origins, the embarrassment and confusion caused by multiplicity of meanings is likely to be as great when a form represents two or more etymologically distinct words as when it represents one. Most students of homonyms and most semanticists pay little attention to this fact, but Jespersen pertinently remarks that ‘the psychological effect of those cases of polysemy, where “one and the same word” has many meanings, is exactly the same as that of cases where two or three words of different origins have accidentally become homonyms/1 In other words, ‫ טו ב‬meaning ‘perfume’ may, for the etymologically oriented philologist, be ‘the same word as’ ‫‘ טו ב‬good’; but from the point of view of the communicative problems related to homonymy, it makes little difference. The Hebrew speaker did not know the history of the language; and, since there is a difference between ‘perfumed wine’ and ‘good wine’, nothing is achieved 1 Menner in Language xii (1936) 243 f. Cf. the procedure of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which provides a separate entry (marked by A and B, etc.) where meanings are sufficiently different, thus providing for clarity and distinctiveness even at the price of increasing the number of apparent homonyms. There is no striving to secure a clear distinction between polysemy and homonymy. See the statement in the preface of the first volume to be published, vol. vi (£[), p. v. In not striving for any absolute distinction between homonymy and polysemy, we appear to be in accord with the medieval Hebrew and Arabic approach. The medieval tendency was to treat the matter as one of varying senses of the same word. See Maimonides, in Efros, pp. 59 f.

144

TH E D IS T R IB U T IO N OF HOM ONYM S

to overcome the difficulty by saying that ‫ יי] ה טו ב‬historically may have meant both. Finally, an instance which shows how conflict of homonyms may, through the perplexity it caused, have produced a graphic confusion in the text. I Sam. 14. 25-26 uses the word ‫‘ י ע ל‬honeycomb’. The MT is difficult, and a clever restoration by Wellhausen1 suggests that the normal word ‫‘ ל ב ש‬honey’ was added as a gloss to ‫ ; י ע ל‬the gloss in turn rendered ‫ י ע ר‬itself unnecessary, so that it came to be understood in its other and commoner sense, i.e. ‘wood’. Meanwhile the gloss ‫ ל ב ש‬through its similarity caused a confusion and loss of a form of ‫‘ ל ב ל י ם‬bees’. Even if hardly quite certain, this reconstruction illustrates the interdependence of linguistic and textual transmission. Apart from the LXX, the versions follow the sense ‘wood’.2 In order to indicate succinctly the kind of problems involved in the suggestions which have been made, I attach now, without detailed discussion of each case, a list of some typical examples in which homonyms have been detected in recent philological treatments. The second column gives the homonym (or the sense) which is generally familiar; the third that which has been recently suggested. b. ‘leather’ a. ‘love’ 1. ‫אהבה‬ b. ‘splendour’ a. ‘covenant’ 2. ‫ברית‬ b. ‘refuter, opponent’ a. ‘messenger of good’ 3· ‫מבשר‬ b. ‘field, land’ a. ‘people’ 4. ‫גוי‬ b. ‘pursue’ a. ‘burn’ 5 · ‫ז־לק‬ a. ‘be extinguished’ b. ‘attack’ 6. ‫דעך‬ b. ‘be hidden, a. ‘be fat’ 7· ‫דעין‬ shrouded’ b. ‘magistrate’ a. ‘vision’ 8. ‫הזון‬ b. ‘step, walk’ a. ‘sin’ 9· ‫הטאת‬ c. ‘penury’ ‘wrath’ b. a. ‘excess’ 10. ‫עברה‬ b. ‘set in cement, lay a. ‘hoist, support’ 11. ‫עמס‬ bricks’ b. ‘pus, rottenness’ a. ‘moth’ 12. ‫עש‬ c. ‘bird’s nest’ 1 Set out in detail by S. R. Driver, Notes on Samuel, pp. 113 f. 2 Most do not, however, fail to recognize the feminine ‫( י ע ל ת‬which has no homonym) at 14. 27, or ‫ י צ ל‬itself at Cant. 5. 1 (but LXX there άρτον).

H O M ON Y M S AND C O M M U N IC A T IO N

13. ‫רוץ‬ 14. ‫רעזע‬ 15· ‫_ עזב‬ (participle) 16. ‫עזיר‬ !‫ל‬. ‫אתנן‬

a. ‘run’ a. ‘evil’ a. ‘returning’

b . ‘ample, rich’ b. ‘running about,

a. ‘sing’ a. ‘gift, price (of harlot)’

straying’ b. ‘travel’ b. ‘effigy’

145

b. ‘break in’ (a horse)

(3) The Count of.Known Homonyms In estimating the likelihood of any suggestion which involves the addition of a new homonym to the Hebrew lexical stock, it is obviously relevant to know how many homonyms we have already. Conceivably scholars may suppose that, since Hebrew has a large number of homonyms in any case, there is no valid reason for objecting to the addition of a few more. We may try, therefore, to estimate the number of ‘agreed* homonyms, that is, of homonyms the existence of which is generally recognized and which provide a base for measuring any increase of homonyms. I have not, however, found previous studies which have produced counts of homonyms on a basis of modern knowledge and in a form adapted to the questions I am seeking to answer. The obvious source is the registration in the standard dictionaries. The organization of these dictionaries is, however, far from well adapted to our question. One cannot simply go through them and count the number of places where words are distinguished as I ‫ ע ב ר‬, II ‫ ע ב ר‬, and so on. These inelude many cases where the root is identical but no actual overlaps in form occur. They use the same distinction for homonyms in the normal sense and for words of special kinds such as personal names and place-names. Moreover, the dictionaries vary between themselves in the way in which they organize the differentiation of various words. Nevertheless some approximate counts may be made on the basis of the existing dictionaries. Using as a criterion the formal one of enumeration under Roman figures such as I and II,1 BDB is found to list just over 500 homonymic nouns. A very large proportion of these, however, are proper names, which we may ignore for the purposes of this study. The proper name ‘Smith* is homonymic with the noun ‘smith*, but communication allows for this fact and it should not commonly 1 The figures are, very occasionally, inadvertently omitted by BDB.

146

TH E D IS T R IB U T IO N OF HOM ONYM S

stand as an example of interference with communication through homonymy. Once personal and place-names are removed, there are about 200 cases of homonymy involving nouns, counted from BDB’s entries. Among these, however, some are limited in their degree of overlap or of potential conflict. A few are instances of homonymy between a noun and a word of some other class. Thus the homonymy between ‫‘ א ו ל ם‬porch’ and ‫‘ א ו ל ם‬bu t’ is not a likely source of confusion. Sometimes the semantic fields are so completely distinct that overlapp ing is not significant. There is little serious overlap between ‫* ב ת‬daughter’ and ‫ ב ת‬meaning the measure ‘bath’. Moreover, these words are formally distinct in the plural, and may have been so in the suffixed forms also. Sometimes one noun belongs to a fairly general semantic field, while another is much more technical, being the name of an animal, an instrument, a measure, or the like. This applies to pairs like ‫‘ א נ ק ה‬crying’ and ‫‘ א נ ק ה‬ferret, shrew-mouse’; ‫‘ ד ר ו ר‬release’ and ‫‘ ד ר ו ר‬swallow’; and the two words ‫ ב ת‬, just quoted. Again, sometimes there may have been no homonymy within the same text, or the same period. It has often been argued in favour cf philological treatments that Hebrew is not a uniform mass but has variations according to place, time, and style. This same argument, however, may reduce the number of agreed homonyms and thereby may reduce the probability that should be accorded to suggestions of new ones. In other words, the homonymy is a product of the lexicographical process, in which all Hebrew words are gathered together; but in the original situation, the homonymous words did not all exist together in the same register, place, or time, so that homonymic conflict did not take place. A real homonymy in the same texts is that of 1) ‫‘ ) איי ם‬foreign coastlands, islands’, (2) ‘wilderness animals’ (traditionally jackals).1 Though this is a full homonym within the same register of speech, the words are easily distinguishable because ‘foreign coastline’ is excluded in the contexts which imply an uncanny howling being, for all cases of the latter are in a list of several wilderness animals. Similarly, the Song of Songs has not only the common ‫?? ד ב ר‬ 1 Torrey, Second Isaiah, pp. 289 fF., and KB take these senses as related in origin; even if true this does not much affect my argument.

TH E CO U N T OF KNOW N HOM ONYM S

147 ‘wilderness’ but also the hapax legomenon usually taken to mean ‘speech’ or ‘mouth’. Occurring as it does (4. 3) within a list of the physical characteristics of the woman, the use runs little risk of confusion. But at least these examples are found together within the same texts. It is different with the ,,X ‘not’ of Job 22. 30 *’j?T‫‘״‬,X. Assuming that this is not a textual error (as KB takes it to be), it is possible that it belonged to the vocabulary of Job but not to that of the classical prophets. Conversely, Job does not use *,X for remote lands, islands, jackals, or goblins, although these are all themes which might well come within the purview of his poem. Thus it is possible that this homonymy, though it appears in the catalogue structure of the lexicon, did not in fact operate; and the same argument could be made for the *,X which appears twice in Qoheleth. Thus although a dictionary is forced to register perhaps four words of the form *,X, it is also possible that in the usage of a particular place, time or style only two possibilities, or even only one, existed. Once all these various considerations and qualifications have been taken into account, the gross number of some 500 homonymies involving nouns may be reduced to a number of practical homonymies, involving nouns in such a way as to create any real ambiguity or conflict, of a few dozen in all. We should consider not only how many forms there are which have homonyms but also, where a form has homonymy at all, how many homonyms it is likely to have. The received dictionaries may from time to time list as many as four, five, or six homonymous words, but such cases form a small proportion of the total number of homonymies. Thus under *?‫!״‬X, according to BDB, there are four homonyms, meaning ‘ram’, ‘chief’, ‘pillar’, and ‘tree’. One may wish to modify this: the first and second might be classed as a polysemy; the sec ond and the fourth do not actually appear in the absolute singular form which we have quoted. But there are still probably three or four homonyms, and we can even add more if we take the construct form 1?X (the writing as 1?*,X makes no difference for our purpose); for then there is the familiar divine name 1?X, and also, whether it is ‘a different word’ or not, the 1?X (sometimes taken to mean ‘power’) of the phrase *,,T ^X*?~t2P. Thus for the form 1?X (1?‫״‬,X) we could possibly speak of six homonyms.

148

T H E D IS T R IB U T IO N O F H O M O N Y M S

Perhaps a better example is that of ‫ כ פ ר‬. BDB, GB, and KB register four homonyms, with meanings of ‘ransom’, ‘pitch’, the name of 21 plant, and ‘village’. But the third is a plant name and the fourth is conceivably a dialect form. In any case this situation with four homonyms or more is relatively rare. There are four also with ‫ ח רו ץ‬and with ‫ צ י ר‬, and more precariously with ‫ צ ר‬. But of the total number of forms where homonyms occur, the vast majority among the nouns offer only two possibilities, once proper names are excluded. Only quite rarely have large clusters of identical homonyms, with like grammatical function and excluding proper names, achieved general recognition. With verbs, as with nouns, the dictionaries often list what appear to be homonyms, but on examination these turn out to be from texts of widely separate provenance, so that no synchronic homonymy occurred. Of the four homonymic verbs ‫ ע נ ה‬, the second (‘be occupied’) occurs only in Qoheleth, which book, however, does not use the third (‘be afflicted’)—though affliction, one might say, is a ;prime theme of this author—or the fourth. Possibly ‫ע נ ה‬ ‘sing’ was losing ground before the more frequent ‫( ש י ר‬which alone had a noun ‘song’ to go with it), and by the time of Qoheleth was obsolete, thus enabling the newer ‫‘ ע נ ה‬be occupied’ to find a place. The word ‫‘ ג א ל‬defile’ occurs in Deutero-Isaiah, in which ‫ג א ל‬ ‘redeem’ is also prominent. One might expect therefore to find some considerable conflict. It is interesting therefore that practically no overlap of actual forms occurs, the only case being the form ‫ נ ג א ל ה‬at Zeph. 3.1. The forms usually registered as niphal and hiphil are both unusual forms, which do not occur for ‫ג א ל‬ ‘redeem’‫ נ ג א ל ו ־‬and ‫ א ג א ל תי‬. Thus actual homonymy of forms is very slight, and possibly the avoidance of homonymy has fostered the production or retention of the peculiar verbal forms. Caution must, however, be exercised, because forms which are not attested may nevertheless have occurred. Another relevant test is a comparison of the incidence of homonyms in Hebrew and in the other Semitic languages. It would be paradoxical if philological treatments produced in Hebrew an incidence of homonyms greater than that which is found in the other Semitic languages themselves. The incidence of homonyms might be expected to vary in

TH E CO U N T OF KNOW N HOM ONYM S

149

relation to the phonological changes in the prehistory of each language. Where phoneme mergers have been frequent, the incidence of homonymy should be expected to be higher. Other things being equal, there should be more homonyms resulting from such merger in Hebrew than in Arabic and Ethiopic, but fewer than in Accadian or Mandean. It is in fact not unlikely that Hebrew roughly occupies such an intermediate position. This, however, is far from an exact account of the matter, because phoneme merger is not the only cause of homonymy. The in fluence of loan-words, for instance, has also to be considered, and is quite high in Accadian, with its many Sumerian words. Preliminary surveys I have done in two languages fairly close to the circumstances of Hebrew, namely Ugaritic and Syriac, do not encourage us to suppose that Hebrew had an incidence of homo nymy substantially higher than has already been recognized; on the contrary, they suggest that the normal degree of homonymy was somewhat lower. The Ugaritic glossary, when studied cursorily, appears to display numerous homonymies; but most of these would disappear when the texts were vocalized. One can, for instance, expect that hmr ‘ass’ would be as distinct in Ugaritic from hmr ‘clay, mud’ as is the case in Hebrew. The same would apply to rh ‘spirit’ and rh ‘smell’. In Ugaritic verbs a number of homonymies can be found, but not very many. With hwy, for example, there is no overlap of themes; the verb ‘bow down’ occurs only in a theme unknown for hwy ‘live’. In some cases, homonymy appears by the reconstruction of one scholar but not by that of another. There are two homonyms slh according to Gordon (i. ‘send’, ii. ‘cast’ or ‘beat out’ a metal), and Driver construes the situation in the same way; but Aistleitner tries to include both under the same word (his no. 2610). The form t glby gppy dglt d iif xhr, zw f zlly hblf hggy hmyy hsd, tw \ kws, kssf m&r, mit, nglt sbrt shr, 7/, 'mdy *rb, prgy pTy siv\ y/Z, spp, qbbt qtmf qply qsr, rhbt rht, r \ rpt, sgm, sgr, ihm, ihr, iwh (Jyh)y ill, Up, iqp, irb, tkk.

TH E CO U N T OF KNOW N HOM ONYM S

1) ‫‘ )דלה‬hair, thrum’ 1) ‫‘ )דמה‬be like’ 1) ‫‘ )דמם‬be silent’ 1) ‫‘ )דרור‬freedom’

(2) (2) (2) (2)

151

‘the poor* ‘cease’ ‘wail’ ‘swallow’.

Modern philological suggestions would certainly, if accepted, add to this number; see Index, nos. 81-4, 87-101. One would expect Syriac to be a suitable comparison for Hebrew—not far removed in period, in cultural situation, or in type of literature. Yet, if the sample can be generalized, the incidence of homonymy in Syriac is actually lower than that already recognized in Hebrew, to say nothing of the substantial additions to Hebrew consequent on philological suggestions. It would then seem possible that philological treatments, though assuming a close overlap in lexical resources between the Semitic languages, nevertheless bring about a large disparity between them in respect of homonymy. It is conceivable, on the other hand, that there have been periods of unusually high homonymy in the development of a language, and that in Hebrew the biblical period was such an epoch; by the end of the biblical era many such homonyms had been eliminated and a certain levelling of the vocabulary brought about. Syriac would then be more comparable with the post-biblical era in Hebrew. This possibility, though difficult to prove, deserves further research. (4) Homonymy and Style Another aspect of homonymy in Hebrew is its relation to style. It is by no means intrinsically impossible that Hebrew contained larger numbers of really interchangeable homonyms than (let us say) Syriac or modern literary Arabic. If this were so, however, it would almost certainly have an effect upon style. Certain kinds of Chinese poetry are said to build much of their stylistic effect upon the homonymic and ambiguous nature of the elements used. This is not an argument that Hebrew is like Chinese in this re gard, unless we go on to say that Hebrew style, like the correspond ing Chinese style, is actually built upon the subtle appreciation of ambiguities in language. Such an assertion about Hebrew style I have never seen. But in any case, if homonymy was a major feature of classical Hebrew, we might expect it to have an effect on style, whether by the development of devices through which clarity

T H E D IS T R IB U T IO N OF H O M O N Y M S 15* in ambiguous contexts might be found, or alternatively by the development of a style through which the effects produced by recurrent homonymy are prized and cultivated. A style of this latter land is found in some medieval Hebrew poetry. Now there are quite a large number of places at which scholars have claimed to identify the use of a pair of homonyms in juxtaposition as a literary device. Not all of these command agreement by all scholars, but some can be considered very likely. A widely accepted case is Ps. 137. 5, already quoted.1 Play upon homonymies and double meanings was a feature of the ancient riddle style. A clear instance comes from the master of this style, Samson: Judges 15.16: ‫ב ל ח י ה ס מו ר ס מו ר ס מ ך תי ם‬ : ‫ב ל ח י ה ס מו ר ה כי ת י א ל ף אי ש‬

‘With the jawbone of an ass, mass upon mass, with the jawbone of an ass I slew a thousand men.’ There is exploitation of the homonymy between ‫‘ ח מ ו ר‬ass’ and ‫‘ ח מ ו ר‬heap’. Even if the phrase ‫ ח מ ו ר ח מ ר ת י ם‬is taken in another sense (e.g. ‘shave, scrape, flay’, supposedly after an Arabic hamara—accepted by GB, p. 242b),2 the play on homonymy remains. A play on homonyms is probable also in the answer to the riddle about the honey, Judges 14. 18: : ‫ מ ת ו ק מ ך ב ש ו מ ה עז מ א רי‬- ‫מ ה‬ There is an Arabic ‫י‬ary ‘honey’, and the riddle played upon a Hebrew cognate, more or less homonymous with ‫‘ א ר י‬lion’.3 Play upon homonyms merges into the more general juxtaposition of words which merely have some similarity; this can produce all sorts of effects, from the emphatic to the comic. Isa. 5. 7 has been 1 See above, p. 48. 2 Cf. B H 3. The Greek e£a\eicov igrjAen/‫׳‬a does not support the interpretation followed by GB. More probably it was influenced by the other verb ‫ ח מ ר‬, used of the wiping on of pitch in Exod. 2. 3 (wiping on and wiping off can probably be covered by the same verb, cf. the history of ‫) כ פ ר‬. It was also influenced by the range of e£aAe1 in Greek, which could be used for the ‘wiping out’ of people, e.g. Aes. Ch. 503, !17] ,gaAdiftys crnepua ilcAomSah‫׳‬, and thus fits nicely with the total sense found in the Greek. 3 See J. R. Porter in J T S N.s. xiii (1962) 106-9.

HOM ONYM Y AND STYLE

153 quoted already.1 A striking case is Isa. 42. 1-4, with the assonance of ‫ ר צ ץ‬and ‫ ר ו ץ‬, and the use twice of ‫( כ ה ה‬perhaps two homonyms meaning ‘be dim’ and ‘rebuke’). The exact image of this song, however, remains obscure. At some other places, at which the stylistic exploitation of homonymy has been argued, stylistic considerations seem to tell against the suggestion. At Isa. 55. 1, for instance, it has been suggested that ‫ כ ס ף‬is used firstly to mean ‘food’ (cf. the Accadian kispuy kasapu, kusipatu, etc.; von Soden, pp. 487, 453, 514) and then with the usual sense of ‘silver, money’. The text would then mean something like: Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the water; and he who has no food (‫) כ ס ף‬, go, buy and eat; and go, buy without money (‫ ) כ ס ף‬and without price wine and milk. The effect of the collocation, if this suggestion were right, would surely be to produce a poor and stupid comic jingle.2 That the text repeats twice the familiar sense of ‘money’ seems infinitely more probable. Elsewhere, again, a collocation of homonyms may have taken place more or less accidentally, without any deliberate striving after effect. At Qoh. 7. 6: ‫כי ס קו ל ה סי רי ם ת ח ת ה ס י ר‬ ‫ סי ר‬means firstly ‘thorn’ and secondly ‘cauldron’, but it is possible that the homonyms are juxtaposed without either the intention of an effect or the result of one. Or does this passage from one meaning to another of a rather unimportant word symbolize futility and foolishness P3 Other places where the collocation of homonyms has been suggested include Isa. 32. 6 (1) ‘do’ ‫עשה‬ (2) ‘conceal·4 ‫עיט‬ (1) ‘den’ (2) ‘bird of prey’5 Jer. 12. 9 Mic. 1· 7 ‫אתנן‬ (1) ‘effigy’ (2) ‘harlot’s hire’ (1) ‘morning’ (2) ‘offering for oracle’ Ps. 5· 4 ‫בקר‬ Ct. 3 - 8 (1) ‘war’ (2) ‘sword’ ‫חרב‬ 1 Above, p. 48; for others, see Driver in V T iv (1954) 242. 2 A good deal worse in this respect is Dahood’s discovery of ‫‘ ע רי ם‬gods* at Jer. 2. 28, and 19. 15, giving for the former a sense ‘For your gods, O Judah, were the number of your cities/gods\ 3 Gordis, p. 259, takes this to be an example of the writer’s literary skill. 4 Eitan, p. 58. 5 Cf. above, pp. 128 f.

154

T H E D IS T R IB U T IO N O F H O M O N Y M S

Several places suggest play on the similarity of ‫‘ י ל א‬fear’ and ‫ל א ה‬ ‘see’, e.g. Ps. 40. 4, 119. 74, Job 6. 21. Sometimes, where a pair of homonyms is held to exist but where the text in question uses only one of them, it is possible that paronomasia or punning is intended; that is, that one form is used with the intention of suggesting two quite different meanings. For example, a word ‫‘ א ה ב ל‬leather’, in addition to the familiar ‫‘ א ה ב ל‬love’, has been found at Hos. 11. 4 5 ‫ז כ ם ב ע ב ת ו ת א ה ב ה‬# ? ‫ס ג ל י א ך ם א‬ where the senses in question are ‘bands of leather’ and ‘bands of love’ (parallel ‘cords of hide’ ?), and Cant. 3. 10, where Solomon’s palanquin is ‫ס ך כ ב ו א ת מ ן תו כו ז ל צוף א ה ב ה‬ In ttiis latter example, since the parallels are substances like ‘silver’, ‘gold’, and ‘purple’, there seems to be strong reason for accepting the rendering ‘leather’. On the other hand one can hardly ignore the fact that love (‫) א ל ב ה‬ is precisely the main theme of the Song of Songs, and, in a somewhat different sense, of Hosea also. It is therefore a little hard to contemplate that a word ‫ א ה ב ה‬would be used prosaically for ‘leather’ in these two works, without the striking similarity to the word ‘love’ being noticed. To sum up, on the one hand it is a reasonable possibility that, when a rare homonym occurred in the Old Testament, its own homonymy was a factor in its own desuetude and thereby in the loss of understanding of its meaning. Where philological treatments claim to uncover homonyms previously not detected, this circumstance is in their favour. In relatively few cases, however, so far as my research goes, have such treatments tried to document with evidence this obsolescence of words because of homonymy. Treatments which use this argument should in principle attempt to show in what way semantic confusion may have arisen, in the circumstances of the relevant contexts, and in relation to the historical distribution both of homonyms which coincided with the word in form and of synonyms which, by coinciding roughly with it in meaning, may have taken over its semantic function when it came to be lost. On the other hand we have not found evidence that homonymy

HOM ONYM Y AND STY LE

155

was a very widespread feature of biblical Hebrew. Its total incidence of homonymy, though probably higher than that of Greek or Latin or Arabic, was much lower than that of English or French. Philological treatments, if too many of them are accepted un critically, would seem arbitrarily to raise the incidence of homonyms above the level justified by general evidence, and thereby to make Hebrew a language more troubled by homonymy than the very Semitic languages (apart from Accadian) which are being used as sources; and this procedure, in turn, must carry peculiar im plications about style and communication in Hebrew, which implications have not generally been realized. These arguments favour reserve in accepting large additions to the count of homonyms in Hebrew.1 1 Cf. recently D. F. Payne, ‘Characteristic Word-play in “ Second Isaiah” : a Reappraisal’ in J S S xii (1967) 207-29.

VI I THE DISTRIBUTION OF LEXICAL RESOURCES IN THE SEMITIC LANGUAGES (i) General treatments often appear to depend logically on the assumption of a high degree of community or overlap between the various Semitic languages in their use of lexical resources. It is implied that, a cognate word having been found, this will form a probab le lead to (a) the existence of a related Hebrew word and (b) the meaning of that Hebrew word. The existence of a word in a cognate language is taken as a sort of prima-facie case for the existence of a corresponding word in Hebrew, and this prima-facie case is then clinched by the fact of a Hebrew text which seems to fit this word and give good sense. The question of principle can be put in a quite simple form. How great is the degree of coincidence (leaving aside words of nonSemitic origin) between the various Semitic languages in their use of vocabulary ? If this degree is high, then there will be a high de gree of probability (other things being equal) in a claim that, if a word exists with a known meaning in language A (let us say, Arabic) it can therefore confidently be expected to occur in a recognizably related form and with a recognizably related meaning in language B (in our case, Hebrew). If the general degree of coincidence is low, then there will be a correspondingly low degree of probability in this claim. When we find it argued or implied that the existence of a word or form in a cognate language is prima-facie evidence for its existence also in Hebrew, such an argument or implication clearly rests on the assumption that the degree of coincidence is very high. It should be noted that the question of related form cannot in this context be treated usefully apart from the question of related meaning. Where the same form, or a form corresponding under P hilological

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157 known conditions, is found in more than one language, is the mean ing also substantially the same ? If we have ‘the same word’, but if it is found with a different meaning in language B from that known in language A, this does not make it difficult to claim that the word exists also in B, but it means that it will be hard to know what it means in B, and that therefore we shall have less chance of reaching any solution of the problem at all. For, we must remember, the whole situation under discussion is one in which the existence of the word in language B has not hitherto been recognized; and this means that there is a lack of evidence for its meaning in language B, apart from the evidence of the cognate language. Moreover, since we are using as further evidence the context of a particular passage, the relevance of that context is itself depen dent upon the degree of assurance we have about the meaning of the word we now claim to recognize for the first time. To put it simply, it will not help us much if we identify the root x-y-z, well known in Arabic, if we still do not know what this would mean in Hebrew. For these reasons it is of real importance to consider, from our general knowledge of the Semitic languages apart from the exigencies of particular difficult passages, what is the degree of community in the use of formally corresponding lexical items, and what is the degree of community in the meanings with which they function in the various languages of the group. Now there is no difficulty, to begin with, in assembling a sub stantial list of words which in form (allowing for the normal cor respondences) and in meaning (allowing for slight and easily explicable differences) run fairly uniformly across the whole series of the ancient Semitic languages or a large number of them. Such a list is offered by Bergsträsser in the appendix to his comparative study of the Semitic languages.1 It contains about 170 items, of which Bergsträsser claims that they comprise the ‘relatively certain correspondences of the five chief branches of the Semitic languages’ (excluding loanwords from one branch to another). This, he says, is far from exhausting the lexical stock of proto-Semitic; for all words which are lacking in one or more of the branches, or which have been altered beyond recognition, are omitted. This list contains some very fundamental words: basic words for human beings and relations, animal names, parts of the human 1 G. Bergsträsser, Einführung, pp. 181-92.

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body, some cosmic elements like day and night, and a number of common verbs, along with the numerals and a few prepositions. We may quote a few of the words in their Hebrew form: ‫א ב‬ ‘father’, ‫‘ י ל ל‬bear’ (a child), ‫‘ ע ק ר ב‬scorpion’, ‫‘ ז ר ע‬seed’, ]‫ע י‬ ‘eye’, CH ‘blood’, ‫‘ יו ם‬day’, ‫‘ מי ם‬water’, ‫‘ ב י ת‬house’, ‫‘ נ שא‬lift’, ‫‘ ק ר ב‬approach’, ‫‘ ב כ ה‬weep’, ‫‘ ש ב ר‬break’. For all these words, about 170 in number, close correspondences in form and sense can be found running across the whole field of the basic branches of the Semitic languages. The closeness of the agreement running through this list should not, however, impress us too much. This list is itself a very limited segment of the vocabulary of any one of the languages. Against it we have to set the vocabulary which is used in one language, or in two, but is not represented in the others. It is easy to produce impressive lists of words which are common in two or three of the relevant Semitic languages, but which are entirely absent from others or else occur in them only with meanings substantially different. Dillmann1 gave a list of about twenty-five important words which are shared by Hebrew and Ethiopic but do not appear in Arabic at all or appear in it only with very different meanings. They include, for instance: ‫‘ א ש‬fire’; ‫‘ ע ץ‬tree’; m ‘stone’; ‫‘ א ש ך‬testicle’; ‫‘ י כ ל‬be able’; ‫‘ י צ א‬go out’. Following this, Ullendorff2 offers a list of ‘an impressive number of words shared by Hebrew and South Arabian for which either no equivalent roots are attested in the other Semitic languages or else with such sharply differing meanings as to make the semantic and structural identity doubtful’. Ullendorff’s list comprises twenty-two examples and includes such prominent words as ‫‘ אי ש‬man’; ‫‘ ה ר ג‬slay’; ‫‘ י ר ה‬shoot’; ‫‘ י ש ע‬salvation’; ‫‘ ק ה ל‬assembly’. Delitzsch used similar lists in his arguments against the priority of Arabic for the elucidation of Hebrew vocabulary. One such list endeavours to show how Arabic presents, in comparison to Hebrew, Aramaic, and Accadian, narrowed or clearly derivative meanings.3 This he applies, for example, to : 1 Ethiopic Grammar, pp. 6-7. Some of these words are shared also by Accadian and Ugaritic. 2 V T vi (1956) 195 ff. 3 Prolegomena, pp. 27 f.; list showing Hebrew-Aramaic community, pp. 3235, and Hebrew-Accadian community, pp. 45 ff. Cf. above, p. 70.

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‫‘ אמר‬say’—Arabic 'amara ‘command’ ‫‘ בוא‬come’—Arabic baa ‘return home’ ‫‘ בעל‬possess’ and also ‘marry’—Arabic baala specifically ‘marry’ ‫‘ עזב‬leave, forsake’—Arabic '-z-b particularly ‘be unmarried’ These indications, then, encourage us to pursue further the question of the degree of overlap in lexical stock between the various Semitic languages. While Bergstrasser’s list took a particular meaning and showed the correspondence of words with that meaning throughout the Semitic group, there seem to be other meanings (such as the words for going in a direction) which tend to have different words in the cognate languages: Hebrew Arabic Aramaic Accadian Ethiopic n-z-l n-h-t ‘go down’ ‫ירד‬ aradu wàrâdà hâfa d-h-l ‘fear’ adâru ‫ירא‬ fârhà palahu ‫פחד‬ ‘know’ '-r-f y-dedü ‫ידע‬ ’a’màrâ '-l-m In some of these one language has a form closely similar to that of another in the same line, but with a meaning substantially different. Arabic w-r-d means not ‘go down’ but mainly ‘arrive’; Hebrew ‫ נ ז ל‬means not ‘go down’ but ‘flow’; Arabic f-r-h is ‘be lively’; very few Semitic languages show a cognate with Hebrew ‫י ר א‬ ‘fear’;1 though Arabic f‫־‬r ‫־‬/ is a very common word ‘know’, the relevant Hebrew ‫ ע ל ף‬exists only as a noun ‘neck’ and as a denominative verb ‘break the neck’; Hebrew ‫ ע ל ם‬means ‘hide’. These differences, which refer to the normal words in use, are not removed by the occasional appearance in Hebrew of a form normally Aramaic, such as ‫‘ נ ח ת‬go down’, 0 ‫‘ ל ק‬go up’. Conversely, one may take a given form and, allowing for the normal correspondences, consider what meanings attach to it in the other languages. For example: (a) Hebrew ‫‘ א מ ר‬say’: the senses of cognates are—Accadian ‘see’, Arabic and Aramaic mainly ‘command’, Ethiopic ‘show, know’, (b) Hebrew ‫‘ ל ק ח‬take’: in Arabic this is ‘conceive’ or ‘impregnate’; Ethiopic laqha means ‘lend’, not ‘take’ ;2 in Syriac the root does not exist except for laqha 1 It occurs in Ugaritic, but not frequently; Leslau, Contributions, p. 42, gives a rather remote parallel from Tigre for ‫ פ ח ד‬. 2 Leslau, Contributions, p. 29, against KB.

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*planities circa urbem’,1which is semantically remote. For ‘take’ the Aramaic word is ‫ ב‬0 ‫ נ‬, which is not found in Hebrew; the Aramaic ,ithpeel of ‫ ל ק ח‬is rare and means ‘be taken as a wife’; Ethiopic *ahazd is cognate with a Hebrew word, but also often appears with the sense ‘begin’. Cognates of the Hebrew are found in Ugaritic and Accadian (Iqh, lequ). Our purpose, we should remember, is not to discover an etymology or identify the same root in another language. The traditional etymological consciousness, because it is directed towards questions somewhat different from ours, can indeed cause us some confusion. In particular, (1) it may be content to find in the cognate languages a word which has the same root, though that word is actually in a quite different formation; (2) it may overemphasize the fact that a cognate has the same root and underemphasize the fact that the meaning is substantially different, or it may emphasize the historical connectedness of the two meanings in such a way as to ignore their difference in function; (3) it may fail to balance the recognition of cognates with a recognition of the number of languages in which a cognate is not found. For example: (1) There is a familiar Hebrew word ‫‘ חו מ ה‬wall’. The etymologist will probably connect this with verbs meaning ‘protect’ in cognate languages. This, however, does not in itself mean that such a verb, which would be ‫ ח מ ה‬, is in use in Hebrew with this meaning. The etymology of any particular word does not establish the existence of other formations from the same root. It is useful to distinguish between roots which are productive and those which are not. Hebrew has a root ‫ ל א ך‬, which appears in the familiar words {a) ‫‘ מ ל א ך‬messenger’, (b) ‫‘ מ ל א כ ה‬work’. An obvious cognate is the common Ethiopic la aka ‘send’. Unlike the situation in Ethiopic, however, it is improbable that the verb ‫ ל א ך‬existed in Hebrew as a free form. Though the root ‫ל א ך‬ exists, it cannot therefore be used to predict occurrence in other formations; nor, for the purpose of calculating the extent of lexical overlap, can it be counted in the same way as free and productive roots. Moreover, while we could rightly divine the Hebrew meaning of ‫ מ ל א ך‬from that of the Ethiopic verb, it is doubtful if we could do this for ‫ מ ל א כ ה‬if the meaning of the latter were in fact unknown. 1 Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, p. 370.

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Other examples can easily be added, e.g. the roots of ‫ל מ י ל‬ ‘always’; ‫‘ נ ב י א‬prophet’; ]!"ID ‘priest’; ‫‘ ק ו ל‬voice’. (2) There is a familiar Arabic jalasa ‘sit’. Hebrew ‫ ג ל ש‬provides an exact correspondence and is probably cognate; it seems, however, to mean ‘glide down’, and is used of a herd of goats coming down a hill (Cant. 4. 1,6. 5). Perhaps etymologists can surmise a mode of semantic connection between the two. But, if the meaning in Hebrew were in fact unknown, it is very unlikely that we should be able to reconstruct it correctly from the Arabic. The following are some other words, the meanings of which in Hebrew could probably not be divined from cognate languages, if the meanings had not been known in the first place: ‫‘ ל ב ר‬speak’; ‫‘ פ ח ל‬dread’; ‫‘ ב ר א‬create’; ‫‘ ג ב ו ל‬boundary’; ‫‘ ב ר י ת‬covenant’; and ‫‘ ע ל ם‬hide’. Sometimes, even if the root is known, the derivation of particular meanings does not follow the same analogy in different languages. We know that ‫ ל ל ך‬means ‘road’. The verb ‫ ד ר י‬means ‘tread’. But the words in other Semitic languages which mean ‘road’ are not cognates of ‫ ; ל ל ל‬and, moreover, they are often not related to the word which means ‘tread’ in the relevant language. Aramaic ‫ א ו ל ח א‬appears to associate itself with the verb ‘travel’, Arabic tariq with a verb ‘knock’, sari* with a verb ‘enter, begin’, and Ethiopic fanot with a verb ‘send’. It is by no means certain that, even if a ‘root-meaning’ is known, analogy will be available in such a way as to ensure a right conclusion to the meaning of a given form. (3) It is important to register not only the presence but also the absence of cognate words. The latter is frequently neglected. Nonexistence of cognates is not usually made explicit by the dictionaries, and it is dangerous to treat their silence as evidence that forms are not found. Moreover, because they are trying to explain or illustrate a Hebrew word, they will often cite a form in another Semitic language with a meaning which comes close to the Hebrew meaning, without making it clear that in the language quoted this is not by any means the usual meaning. In these three respects, then, our purpose is something different from the traditional interest in etymology.1 Another test is to go through the known vocabulary of a given language and consider how many of the items have a Hebrew word 1 Cf. again below,

299.

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which shows adequate correspondence with them in form and in meaniig. In itrabic, as has already been implied, a very little thought is enough to disclose a large number of familiar words which either have r.o formal correspondence in Hebrew or else have a formal correspondence only where no close semantic similarity exists. Let the reader consider, for example, such familiar Arabic words as the following: iayh ‘old man, sheikh’ *aql ‘intelligence’ gayr ‘other than* hasan ‘beautiful’ fadl ‘favour’ Him ‘knowledge’ fiqh ‘legal science’ jard ‘run’ jama a ‘collect’ jihad ‘holy war’ 'ajüz ‘old woman’ jänib ‘side’ *arsala ‘send’ jahila ‘be ignorant’ Some of these Arabic words have, indeed, been ‘found* in Hebrew by scholars: ‫ ע ל ם‬at Qoh. 3. 11 has been interpreted as like Arabic Him ‘knowledge’,1the root ofjihadhas been found at II Kings 4. 34 (MT 2,(!.‫ יגהר‬and Tur-Sinai identifies in the ‫ ד ק ה י ל‬of Job 11. 10 a verb ‫‘ ק ה ל‬forget’ cognate with jahila (Index, no. 277). Such suggestions must, at this stage of the argument, be held in suspension; we cannot allow our comparison to be dominated at the start by large numbers of suggested words, some of which have hardly come to be widely known, much less accepted. Again, samples taken from various kinds of Arabic literature (e.g. early poems, modern legal documents) suggest that the percentage of wor ds used which have a cognate of similar sense in ancient Hebrew will seldom exceed 30-40 per cent. In order to follow out this procedure more systematically, one may se t out an area of the vocabulary of a Semitic language, e.g. all words beginning with a certain consonant, and set against them the cognates in Hebrew which have, or do not have, reasonably close similarity. I have done this, for example, with the Syriac verbs beginning with /b/, as listed in Brockelmann.3 I have listed the Syriac verbs, and set against them in several columns a mark indicating the degree of their agreement with cognate Hebrew verbs. If the cognate Hebrew word is close in sense to the Syriac, the mark is in column A; if it is remote, the mark is in column B; if a word from the same root appears in 1 So Hitzig, according to Gordis, Koheleth, p. 221. 2 Montgomery, Kings (ICC), p. 372. 3 See Appendix, pp. 305 ff.

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Hebrew, but not as a verb, the mark is in column C ; and if there is no cognate in Hebrew, the mark is in column D. The total num ber of roots under which an entry was made is sixty-nine; the total number of entries is seventy-eight. The difference is because I have followed Brockelmann in entering two homonymous verbs in Syriac, or else have given separate entries to separate meanings of a Syriac verb, where these differ in their relation to meanings found in Hebrew. I have also noted some occurrences in Mishnaic Hebrew, which may also be relevant in several ways. The entries by columns come out as follows: D A C B (sense close (not found (Hebrew, but (sense remote in Hebrew) to Hebrew) not as a verb) from Hebrew) 26 3° 13 9 These figures cannot be applied very strictly, for a number of uncertain factors exist: one may be uncertain what to do with denominative verbs, one may doubt the real existence of some of the meanings registered in dictionaries, one may be uncertain where to place a word which deviates from the normal phono logical correspondences. For deciding whether a meaning in Syriac is close to or remote from one in Hebrew, my rough criterion has been the judgement whether one meaning is close enough to the other for us to be able to divine the meaning rightly from the cognate in the situation of normal philological treatments. In spite of these qualifications the sample seems to be a reason ably fair one. Syriac and Hebrew are languages which one would expect to be fairly comparable, since they belong to roughly the same culture area and their literature is to a fair extent devoted to similar subjects. If the sample is a fair one, it suggests that even in quite compar able languages like Syriac and Hebrew the number of verbs in the one which have closely corresponding cognates in the other with closely similar meanings may be only about 40 per cent., while the number of verbs which have no cognate verb at all in the other language is actually higher than this. Another survey I have done, of Syriac and Hebrew verbs beginning with /'/, suggested that the number of verbs showing close correspondence in form and mean ing was about 25-30 per cent, of the total number of Hebrew verbs and about 33 per cent, of the total number of Syriac verbs. Samples

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with other Semitic languages confirm the general direction of this argument. In Ethiopic verbs beginning with / ' / 1 find the number having reasonably close agreement with Hebrew cognate verbs to be about one in six, along with a number of places where we find less direc t agreements (e.g. Ethiopic has cof ‘birds’ but not a verb corresponding to Hebrew ‫) ע ו ף‬. Thus the evidence on the whole, while confirming some considerable community in the use of lexical resources in the Semitic languages, appears not to favour a degree of overlap or coincidence so high that the presence of a phenomenon in one language will easily form a prima-facie case for its presence in another. The overlap 13 somewhat higher if it refers only to roots, or to purely formal correspondences; but the philological treatments of which we are speaking go further than this. They involve a relation between the form-sense relationship in one language and the formsense relationship in another; and this is just what is not, on the evidence from known examples, predictable in a very high degree. At this point we may profitably recall experience with IndoEuropean, where similar phenomena occur. Words may show formal correspondence of some closeness, but not mean the same thing. German sterben is from the same root as English ‘starve’, but the sense is not ‘starve’ but ‘die’. At first sight one might suppose this to be an analogy to the relation between Arabic ja a ‘be hungry’ and Hebrew ‫‘ גו ע‬expire, perish’, a familiar term of the P document. It would be unwise, however, to accept this impression; for sterben and starve appear to go back to a sense ‘be numb, stiff’ rather than ‘be empty, hungry’.1 If we l ake a particular term or concept and collect the words in that field in the various Indo-European languages (the approach taken by Bergstrasser in his list already quoted for Semitic), we usually find not one root in use but a large number.2 For ‘die’, for instance, Buck lists about seven different roots. If we take subdivisions of Indo-European, such as the Germanic languages alone, we find a greater community of use; but this does not apply to the Indo-European language group as a whole. It is of course possible 1:0 suppose that Semitic never became so diversified in this 1 This example illustrates how the logical study of features of the referent, producing the argument that ‘if you starve you die’, misrepresents the linguistic facts entirely; on this see below, pp. 290 if. 2 For a compendious display of this procedure see Buck, Dictionary of Selected Synonyms.

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regard as Indo-European did; but at least it is salutary to consider the position of the latter. It may be briefly mentioned that the view that Hebrew is a ‘mixed language’ has sometimes been used as part of a plea for the existence in Hebrew of a large incidence of agreements with several cognate languages. There is some difficulty, however, in knowing just what is meant by ‘mixed’, and I think that it is a confusing term. I shall not, therefore, pursue the matter farther.1 It is also possible that one could find certain semantic fields in which a higher degree of lexical community is found between Semitic languages than in other fields. For instance, Low in his researches on Aramaic fish-names observed that very few fishnames of common Semitic origin were to be found.2 One might with further research be able to list fields in which considerable community existed, and set against this other fields in which the degree of community was low; if this were done, then the probability of success for philological treatments would be high in the former and low in the latter. Finally, the scholar must bear in mind that a sense quotable for a cognate language like Arabic may be a rare or specialized development of that language and therefore not represent an older Semitic stage likely to be shared also by Hebrew.3 Even if the sense ‘stay in a place’ is a legitimate one for ganiya, is not this a doubtful basis for an identification of Hebrew ‫( ע נ ה‬Index, no. 251), when the major Arabic sense is ‘be rich’ (Lane, pp. 2301 f.)? Can the sense ‘advise’ be ascribed to ‫( ה שי ל‬no. 306), when the main sense of the Arabic is ‘sign; make a sign’? Arabic bin (no. 54) is handled by Lane (p. 288) and Freytag (i. 179~80a) in a way that suggests clear dependence on the sense ‘between’, and it is unlikely that an independent sense ‘region, field’ existed in such a way that it could plausibly be attributed to Hebrew also. Does jarama mean ‘complete’ (no. 79) and so justify a word for a ‘landing’ on a stair, when the statistically dominant sense is ‘commit a crime’ and the likely 1 The 4mixed’ character of Hebrew was argued particularly by Bauer. For developments of this kind see Driver in The People and the Book, p. 109; J T S xxxi (1930) 275; Winton Thomas in Record and Revelationf p. 401. For a critical note see Harris, Development of the Canaanite Dialects, p. 11 n .; for a judgement that the term 4mixed’ is confusing, Goshen-Gottstein, ScrH iv (1958) 135. 2 4Aramäische Fischnamen’, p. 550. This circumstance tells against Low’s own identification of a Hebrew ‫ ע מ ל ץ‬, see below, pp. 236 f. 3 Cf. already above, p. 116.

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primitive sense is ‘cut off’ (wool, fruit) (Lane, pp. 412 f.)? The identification of 1‫־‬111‫‘ ל‬be astounded’ (no. 86) depends on an Arabic cognate ‘be stupefied’, but dahiyy and related words surely mean ‘be smart, be cunning’ (Lane, pp. 927 f.). When dana means mainly ‘be vile, weak’ (adj. dun), is it likely to yield a Hebrew sense of m ‘provide abundance’ (no. 87) on the limited grounds of V ‘perfecta opulentia fruitus est vir’ (Freytag, ii. 73-74)? Though baha is glossed as ‘cognovit, dignoviV by Freytag (i. 181b), does not the general Arabic usage suggest a basically sexual reference, ‘lie with (a woman)’ and the like (cf. Lane, p. 278b), which makes unlikely a Hebrew cognate ‘remember’ (no. 53)? When kadama really means ‘bite’, and when the sense ‘firmiter vinctus fuit (capti‫־‬ vusy ut effugere non posset)' (Freytag, iv. 18a) is probably derivative from the sense ‘bite’, is it likely to provide a sense ‘hold fast (in fetters)’ for a newly identified Hebrew ‫( כ ד ם‬no. 172)? Is there enough evidence in the solitary V inbaqaa ‘he went away quickly’ (Lane, p. 235a) to justify ‘go away’ for ‫( ב ק ע‬no. 6 2)? Thus, even when dictionary entries are quite accurate for their respective languages, one has to consider whether senses registered are likely to be central enough and old enough to allow of a sharing with biblical Hebrew. Sometimes, however, research in other Semitic languages will confirm the probability of an early date. One might have doubted the early date of the sense ‘mortgage, pledge’ for Arabic rahana (no. n o ), but its antiquity is made certain by its frequent use in Nabataean inscriptions. A Hebrew ‫‘ ח ט א ת‬penury’ has been identified on the basis of Ethiopic hatiat. Dillmann himself (col. 621) characterizes this Ethiopic sense as ‘extremely rare’; but the verb and other noun forms in Ethiopic tend to suggest that this is indeed an ancient element of meaning, such as might be found in other Semitic sources much earlier (no. 126). (2) Biliteral Theories The normal elementary picture of the structure of the Semitic word is that of a triliteral pattern formed by three consonants which, with certain known exceptions, are fairly stable in all changes of the word. Biliteral theories, on the other hand, maintain that the triliteral structure is itself the product of extension or supplementation of a base of two consonants, through the addition

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of a third. The important class of ‘hollow’ verbs, like fflj? ‘stand’, is then the residuum of an earlier state. A number of roots have in common two consonants, but not three, and it is possible that they represent the supplementation of a basic biliteral form with differ ent third consonants. Again, there is often a similarity between verbs with two main consonants (the ‘hollow’ and ‘geminated’ types) and those which have this base supplemented by a ‘weak’ consonant (most commonly /y/ or /w/ or /n/) either before or after. The various theories here involved deserve much discussion in themselves. Their relevance to our theme in this book, however, is as follows. The classical picture of development from a parent lan guage (‘proto-Semitic’) implies the theoretical construction of this parent language, and the use of correspondences which reflect the phonological changes in words the consonantal sequences of which were already formed in the proto-Semitic period. If, however, the supplementation of biliteral bases by the addition of a third radical had not already occurred in any standard way in the proto-Semitic period—if, in other words, the development of some words did not take place by normal sound changes from pre-existing full forms, but occurred einzelsprachlich with individual development from earlier bases—then some questions fall upon the entire system of comparison which has been understood up to now in this book.1 A comparative philology which operates by close control of the phonological correspondences found in cognate languages appears to assume that the root sequences were already firm in the ancestor. The root being x-y-z in proto-Semitic, it will have in the various Semitic languages in normal circumstances the normal correspon dents of x-y-z. Suppose, however (and this is what biliteral theories appear to suggest), that in the proto-Semitic stage the only firm root for this case was x-y, for which a rather vague meaning can be given. The forms which will appear from this root will then (in most cases) not be correspondents of x-y. They will take a variety of patterns; in one language we shall find x-y-z, in another x-y-y, in another x-z-yy in another z-x-y, in another x-y-p, in another q-x-y. In the circumstances envisaged by such hypotheses, only a rather vague statement can be made either about the formal 1 A survey of the literature concerning biliteralism up to 1952 is given by G. J. Botterweck, pp. 11-30; more recently, Moscati, Comparative Grammar, PP· 7 2 5 ‫· ־‬

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characteristics of the root or about its meaning. The biliteral bases cannot be fitted into strict phonological correspondences in the way that is pictured in Bergstrasser’s list (which applies to known complete words). For instance, Driver, offering long strings of examples, talks of a base gz-ks-ks-qsjs ‘sever’, for which he cites fourteen words in Hebrew alone.1Another base is zr^sr-sr-sr-sr and dr-tr-tr ‘surround’ or ‘turn round’. This can be evidenced from a number of cognate languages in tables like this: ‘tie up’ ‘besiege’ ‫צור‬ ‫צרר‬ Heb:‫־‬. ‘enclosure’ ‫אצר‬ ‘store up’ ‫חצר‬ ‘restrain’ ‘band (of people)’ ‫עצר‬ ‫עצרת‬ *asara ‘confine’ hasara ‘surround’ Arab‫׳‬. Accad. qasaru ‘bind’ Such tables, repeated for other forms of the manifold and variable character which such bases are supposed to assume, total up to between forty and fifty words from assorted Semitic languages, all of which have some form of the base contained in them and all of which can in some degree be explained semantically (or so it is argued) from the meaning of the base. Out of these very numerous words, however, only very small groups, usually of two or three here and there, present the kind of precise phonological correspondences of which we have previously spoken, while very considerable diversities in meaning also occur. Consider, for instance, the semantic relation between Hebrew ‫ח ד ר‬ ‘room’, glossed by Driver as ‘enclosed chamber’, and Syriac hdar ‘go round’. Even if one accepts that this relation is rightly stated, one can hardly claim that, if the meaning of one of the words was unknown, the meaning of the other would supply an adequate guide to its discovery. The normal correspondences function in a kind of prediction. Given, let us say, a normal Arabic form such as simal ‘left (hand)’, we car! predict with fair accuracy what the normal Hebrew form or Aramaic form would be. But, given the base zr-sr-sr-sr-sr, and even given an Arabic word which is an instance of its use, we cannot predict whether a Hebrew word using the same base will have a third root consonant or what that consonant will be,2 or whether it will use the same one (or the corresponding one) of the five forms 1 Driver, Problems of the Hebrew Verbal System, pp. 4 f. 2 ‘A ll consonants may be used as “determinants” *, writes Moscati, p. 74; italics mine.

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169

of the base; nor can we tell what it would mean, except that it will be something to do with (or something which in its past semantic history may have had something to do with) surrounding, turning round, going round, or being round. If there is some truth in biliteral theories, they may help to explain certain points which have already been discussed. For instance, where words in two Semitic languages do not show normal correspondences but are very similar in meaning, it may perhaps be possible to say that they are different expansions of the same base. This would account for their closeness without requiring the argument that sound correspondences in general should be treated loosely. Similarly, some of the words which have been cited* as instances of ‘metathesis’ might rather be regarded as different expansions of a biliteral base, with the third consonant put in a different place.1 It is doubtful, however, whether this argument can be used helpfully in the context of philological treatments, where the meaning of the word in Hebrew is itself not certainly known. For reasons which have already been stated,2 such treatments are not likely to carry cogency and conviction if phonological correspondences are fluid and uncertain. Where the relatedness of cognates depends on the appeal to a hypothetical common base, the chances of a convincing philological treatment are not good. Conceivably there were two sectors in Semitic vocabulary. The first was already in a fairly fixed form in the proto-Semitic period. The words of this sector will then appear in the historical languages in forms showing the normal correspondences. In the second sector, however, the root sequences were still not firm in the protoSemitic period, and various branches developed their words independently later, through expansion of a vague common base.3 If this were so, philological treatments would work mainly in the first sector of the vocabulary, while in the second they would have a very much lower degree of probability. 1 Cf. above, pp. 96 if. 2 Cf. above, pp. 83 if. 3 An example might be the words meaning ‘naked’; the common base for this seems to be the sequence represented in Hebrew as ‫ ; ע ל ה‬but Hebrew and Arabic develop types like ‫ ע ר ו ם‬, and Syriac develops *rfl and Ethiopic 'rq. One cannot help wondering whether Arabic, which may be held to have become separate at an early stage in Semitic language separation, did not develop many of its characteristic lexical items thereafter on its own; if this is so, its idiosyncratic productions are not helpful for philological treatments in Hebrew.

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Thus, in general, while the hypothesis of original biliteral bases is relevant to the general assessment of philological treatments in the Old Testament, it is nevertheless unlikely that specific appeals to bili :eral bases will, in the present state of our knowledge about the prehistoric stages of Semitic languages, provide an important or independent basis for the plausibility or probability of particular suggestions. On the contrary, emphasis on biliteral bases, carrying with it; some implication that these bases were expanded independently in the separate languages, tends on the whole to undermine rather than to support the use of philological treatments. (3) Semantic Fields In each language words function in relation to other words in the same or contiguous semantic field.1 The meaning of ‫ מ נ ח ה‬, for instance, can be described only in relation to the other words existing in the Hebrew of a certain time in the field of sacrifice, gift, and tribute. Its meaning is then a choice within the series of possibilities available within Hebrew. Again, the sense of a familiar word like ‫״ ח ט א‬sin’ depends on its relation to other words in similar fields, such as ‫ ר ש ע‬and ‫ פ ש ע‬, and to other words in opposing fields. Sometimes quite systematic structures can be stated, such as the terminology of the sacrificial system in Leviticus, or the two pairs: ‫‘ ק ד ש‬ho1y’ ‫‘ ט ה ו ר‬clean’ ‫‘ ח ו ל‬not holy‫‘ ׳ ט מ א‬unclean’ What is ‫ ט ה ו ר‬is not thereby ‫ ; ק ד ש‬and what is ‫ ח ו ל‬, traditionally ‘profane’, though not ‘holy’, ‫ ק ל ש‬, is not thereby in any way wrong or evil. It is wrong, however, if the distinctions between members of pairs are obscured, or if that which is ‫ ט מ א‬is mixed with that which is ‫ ק ל ש‬. Not all semantic fields are systematically diagrammed in this way; rather than a system, there is a bundle of meanings. Even then, however, the meanings are dependent on the meanings of other words in the same language at the same time. Even though languages are cognate and have a large number of individual cognate words, the make-up of these bundles may be, and indeed is likely to be, very substantially different. This may explain why, when in language A form x-y-z is found with a certain meaning, no corresponding x-y-z may be found in 1 Cf. above, pp. 89 f., 136 if.

S E M A N T IC F IE L D S

171 language B. In language A it has a significant function through its contrast with forms a-b-c and p-q-r. In language B, however, a-b-c does not exist, while p-q-r has developed a different meaning and therefore moved into a different semantic field, and the ground occupied by x-y-z is occupied by d-e-f and l-m-n. The method of identifying cognates works only for individual words; but the semantic functioning of words is within word-groupings which are quite asymmetrical in one language as compared with another, even when the languages are closely cognate. We can illustrate this from the identification of the verb !HDD interpreted as meaning ‘announce’ (hiphil) at Prov. 15. 2. M T reads: 1‫ ·?שרן ךן>;מים תי טי ב ד ע ת‬Driver, reading the verb as ‫ ת ט ב‬or ‫ ת ט ב‬from the root ‫ ט ב ב‬, gives the sense as ‘the tongue of the wise announces knowledge’. A sense like ‘understand’ or ‘heal’ might similarly, we may add, be proposed for Prov. 17. 22. This root ‫ ט ב ב‬is indeed found in several Semitic languages. In Syriac it seems to have the sense ‘know, discover’; but it occurs chiefly in nouns like tebba ‘knowledge; story’ and adjectives like tbiba ‘famous, experienced’, and in derived verbal themes with meanings like ‘make known’ and ‘announce’. In Arabic also it is registered as ‘know’, but the most familiar form is tablb, mainly specialized as ‘doctor’; and the modern sense of the verb is mainly ‘treat medically’. In Ethiopic it means ‘be wise’, while verb forms exist meaning ‘educate, inform’. This information, however, should be related to our knowledge of other words in the semantic field. Ethiopic, for instance, does not have the common root h-k-m in this field; and while it has the root y -d -\ from which Hebrew has ‫‘ י ד ע‬know’, this is not used in Ethiopic in the sense ‘know’, but only in the causative ‘announce, inform’. Again, while Ethiopic has the root b-y-n> which supplies a sense ‘know, be intelligent’ in certain contexts in Hebrew, the sense in Ethiopic is rather different, being rather ‘distinguish, notice, make clear’. Again, the normal word for ‘know’ in Ethiopic is *-m-r in the theme II. 1, as has already been observed in another connection. Thus, though all of these elements in Ethiopic can be given parallels and connections in other Semitic languages so long as they are taken individually, the make-up of the total bundle is quite different from what we find in other Semitic languages. The fact that t-b-b is present and important in Ethiopic, therefore, has to be

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related to the other relevant elements, and may be partially explained by them. The fact that t-b-b exists somewhere in the Semitic languages by no means implies that it will necessarily exist in a lani^uage which also has h-k-m, y -d -\ and b-y-n in the senses in which they are found in Hebrew. Similar changes of balance in the lexical stock can be traced in the languages which have h-s-s in this semantic field, such as Accadian and Ugaritic. Another example is the organization of words for social systems, such as government. Sarru in Assyria was the king’s title, as ‫מ ל ך‬ was in Israel. Hebrew had a word ‫ ש ר‬, cognate with the Accadian sarru, but it not only did not mean the same thing, it does not appear to have designated one clearly institutionalized political office at all. Most other Semitic languages appear not to have a cognate with sarru at all. Another term representing an institution in Accadian was limu, limmu. Against the idea that words cognate with this should be identified in Hebrew1 one has to set the possibility that the Accadian semantic development was peculiar to the institutional framework of Mesopotamian society. In general, though cognates can usually be found for any of the terms for government office in any Semitic language, the make-up of the group of terms in any one is likely to be markedly different from that of any other. This point deserves very much more extended research. For our present purpose it must, however, be left here, and its importance can be summarized as follows. Firstly, traditional comparative method has tended to deal with individual words and has failed to give equal place to their function in relation to other words. This in itself may be a weakness in the method. Secondly, the consider ation of the groups of words within a semantic field in a Semitic language may help us to understand how particular words, of which cognates are known in other languages, may yet not be present in the vocabulary of the one principally being studied. Thirdly, the same consideration may show how the semantic development of words may not follow directly from an original ‘basic meaning’ and may thus be quite other than is foreseeable even from accurate information about cognates. Given a form in one Semitic language, we can predict what form there may be in another, if normal correspondences are followed; but the meaning 1 Cf. pp. 133, 254 *·

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cannot so easily be predicted from the sense of the former, because in both cases it is dependent on interrelations with still other words, which interrelations are not predictable at all. (4) Words with Opposite Meanings (’Addäd) This section will consider briefly the position of those words which either (a) in the same language have two opposite meanings or (b) in one language have a meaning opposite to that which is found in another cognate language. For this phenomenon Arabic grammar has used the technical term 5addäd (singular didd). In Arabic studies this is normally used for the former of the two cases specified, i.e. where a word exists with two opposite meanings in Arabic itself. Some recent studies, however, such as those of Guillaume, have extended the term and applied it where the opposite meanings are found in two different but cognate languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. The subject of ’addäd was considerably cultivated in the work of Arabic philologists, and there grew up a genre of literature with the title Kitäb al- Addäd. Sometimes opinions have become prevalent according to which Arabic is particularly rich in words of this type; and one hears half-joking references to a language in which every word can mean a certain thing and also the opposite of that thing. Modern studies, however, have indicated that this picture of the Arabic vocabulary is extremely exaggerated. Weil writes:1 The opinion which has long been maintained, that Arabic, contrary to all the other Semitic languages, contains a very large number of such ’addäd is no longer tenable. If all that is false and all that does not belong here are cut out of the list, there remains also in Arabic only a small residue. We may then abandon the conception that words having two completely opposite meanings are extremely common in Arabic or any other Semitic language, and that our semantic decisions can be taken on the basis of such a view.2 1 G. Weil, Encyclopaedia of 1slam, 2nd edition, vol. i, p. 184. The first ed., p. 131, interestingly enough had itself included the false but deceptive example of Hebrew ‫‘ ע ש ר‬riches’, Arabic ‘usr ‘poverty’; the words are not in fact cognate (cf. Aramaic ‫) ע ת ר‬. 2 For a careful study of the Arabic words see Nöldeke’s article ‘Wörter mit Gegensinn’; an earlier survey of the problem in Hebrew is Landau, Gegensinnige Wörter (Berlin, 1896).

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It is rather more common to find that words have a meaning in one language opposite to that which they have in another cognate language. Arabic wataba commonly means ‘spring up’, while the corresponding Hebrew ‫ י ש ב‬means ‘sit’ or ‘sit down’. There are Arabic dialects (Himyarite) which are said to have the same meaning as the Hebrew. Hebrew itself has the interesting ‫ !י ש ב‬at Gen. 15. 11, where the meaning seems to be that Abraham ‘started up’ or ‘set in flight’, i.e. ‘scared away’, the birds. LXX has ovv€Kdd‫׳‬,G€vy following the ordinary sense of ‫י ש ב‬. Aquila, though usually an etymologizer, renders with aTreaofirjcjev, which is the right sense; the Vulgate similarly has abigebat and the Syriac makkes. The Targum has ‫‘ א ת י ב‬turned away’, a word which probably seemed close in form to the Hebrew; but some MSS. have ‫ א פ ר ח‬, ‘made to fly (away)’, giving the sense but not the word-similarity. Rashi understood the word as from the verb ‫‘ נ ש ב‬blow’. The existence of words, where apparently obvious cognates yet had opposite senses, was already known to the medieval lexicographers. A familiar instance was ‫‘ א ב ה‬be willing’, which means the opposite of the cognate Arabic *aba (y) ‘refuse’.1 The development of opposite meanings may often have occurred through semantic change. A word having a certain range of meaning, the middle of the range drops out of use (perhaps through being taken over by another word altogether), leaving two extremes, which we may or may not have clues to connect. This is another of the main causes of homonymy, in addition to phoneme merger and the adoption of loan-words, discussed already above. The following examples have arisen in the context of modern philological treatments: The verb ‫ י ל ל‬usually means ‘go down’, but it is sometimes said that it also occasionally means ‘go up’.2 Driver says that it sometimes means ‘go south’, while ‫ ע ל ה‬in the same circumstances means ‘go north’; in any case there are places where some special explanation seems to be needed, e.g. Judges 11. 37, where Jephthah’s daughter says ‫ ו י ך ל ה י ע ל ~ ה ה ך י ם‬. Cf. also David’s ‘going 1 See, for instance, Wechter, Ibn Barun, pp. 56, 61. Similarly contrasting meanings have been pointed out for familiar words like ‫ ל א ה‬and ‫ ; י כ ל‬see Driver, C M Ly p. 158; Botterweck, Triliterismus, p. 39. 2 See KB, s.v., and literature there cited; Driver, Z A W lxix (1957) 7 4 7 ‫; ־‬ Leslau, Z A W lxxiv (1962) 322, who gives the support of Ethiopian parallels.

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up’ from Maon to Engedi, I Sam. 24. 1. Driver, discussing this instance, cites some other paradoxical phenomena, such as Arab. fa ra a , said to mean either ‘go up’ or ‘go down’ a mountain. Again, Kopf, discussing the meaning of ‫ ב ט א‬in Hebrew, says that if this means ‘thoughtlessness, over-hastiness’, and if we compare Arab, batua ‘be slow, hesitate’ (}L·), then this is an example of opposed senses in the two languages.1 Discussing ‫‘ ש ר ב‬heat’, Driver2 takes note of an Accadian sarbu ‘shower’, surubbu ‘(cold) fever’, suribu ‘cold’, and says that the connection between the senses of cold and heat is illustrated by Lat. urere. Going back to the Middle Ages we may remark that Saadia, discussing the difficult ‫ ג י ל ו ב ר ע ל ה‬of Ps. 2. 11,3 argued that the peculiarity could be explained by use of the analogy of the Arabic i-r-i, which serves as an expression of both fear and joy.4 Perhaps the most striking example, however, of the way in which philological treatments have produced an alleged double opposition of meaning within Hebrew itself, is the familiar word ‫ ב‬, normally supposed to mean ‘in’. Ugaritic evidence in particular is interpreted with the sense ‘from’. This sense, says Gordon, is common, and is ‘in accordance with a Hamitic-Semitic feature whereby prepositions meaning “in” or “to” tend to connote also “from” ’.5 There are indeed places in Hebrew where the sense ‘from’ would at first sight appear to make good or better sense, e.g. Ps. 68. 19, ‫ל ק ח ת‬ ‫□ מ תנו ת ב א ד‬, which would then mean ‘thou hast received gifts from men’ (so easy a solution that it may be too facile). There has been no shortage of voices assuring us that Ugaritic evidence makes it clear that ‘from’ is the actual meaning, all difficulty being thereby removed. There are, however, certain objections against this course of argument. The first is the question of the communicative efficiency of a language in which the word for ‘to’ and the word for ‘from’ are apparently identical. This is, as we have seen, one of the obvious problems of homonymy. Possibly Ugaritic b, when meaning ‘from’, might have had a different vocalization from b with the sense ‘in’, 1 V T viii (1958) 165. 2 J T S xxiii (1922) 410. 3 Cf. above, p. 5, and below, p. 284. 4 See Eppenstein, op. cit., p. 9. The sense given by Wehr for tariba in modern literary Arabic is *be moved (with joy or grief)’. 5 UH, p. 217. Cf. also Gordon’s detailed discussion, XJHy pp. 83 f.

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so that no homonymy existed. Again, it is possible that ‘from’ is not the sense of b in itself but only the sense of b when in collocation with certain other words, which supply the guidance to select the sense ‘from’. If this were so, it might follow (a) that the sense ‘from’ could not be defined as such apart from such contexts, and (&) that the relation of b to such contexts might be confined to Ugaritic and certainly could not automatically be transferred to Hebrew. For instance, one of the most convincing cases for the sense ‘from’ ap pears i:a tb' bbth 4they departed from his house’. But perhaps the sense of b here is defined by collocation with tb' ; and since tb' does not have a cognate in Hebrew we cannot be sure whether this is relevant for comparison with Hebrew at all. In trd b'l bmrym spn or td yi$t bbhtn, which Gordon cites with translations as ‘drive Baal from the heights of Sapan’ and ‘the fire went away from the houses’, a great deal depends on the exact usage and sense of the verbs, which may be beyond our power to determine. Secondly, the whole setting of b in Ugaritic is not comparable with the setting of D in Hebrew, for the simple reason that Hebrew has ]Ü ‘from’, while Ugaritic does not. The meanings of words are fun ctions of choices within the given vocabulary at one time; and in Hebrew the choice between D and ]D furnished an oppo sition entirely lacking in Ugaritic in the literary texts. In any one language the meaning of the prepositions is a highly subtle, diffi cult, and idiosyncratic structure of possibilities and choices, which cannot be broken into by clumsy assertions that a cognate language has another meaning for a given item. Some Semitic languages have bn for ‘from’, but not mn\l some Ethiopian languages have k with ti e meaning of ‘from’ but not with the familiar Semitic sense of ‘as, like’. In each case the differences between prepositions de pend on the total stock in each individual language, and these meanings cannot be arbitrarily shifted around from language to language merely on the grounds that the languages in question are cognate. Thir dly, some question may be raised about the kind of ‘mean ing’ which attaches to the sense ‘from’ for b in Ugaritic itself. Not 1 South Arabian bn has been regarded as a product from the common mn by phonetic change; so Brockelmann, Grundriß, § 252b r) (p. 497), § 84c a (p. 226). But the existence also of In and hn may suggest rather that ‘the whole ESA series bn, In, hn are morphologically only enlarged forms of b /‫־‬, h to which the differentiated meaning “from” has been attached’. (So Beeston, Descriptive Grammar, p. 57.)

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all cases which have been quoted are incapable of interpretation in another way. T h u s: stym bkrpnm yn bks hrs dm 'sm is translated by Gordon as: ‘drink wine from jars, the blood of vines from cups of gold’. But it is not wholly impossible to consider the sense ‘in’; one may drink ‘in’ or ‘with’ a cup, as well as ‘from’ one. This can apply also to bph rgm lys a bspth hwth. While it seems to us natural to speak of a word going forth ‘from’ the mouth or lips, it is not impossible to see the sense as ‘in her mouth (or, by her mouth) the word goes forth’ etc. The insistence of scholars on the sense ‘from’ may sometimes rest on no more secure foundation than the fact that an English translation will use the word ‘from’. But a translation can give a correct general rendering of a passage, without providing in its equivalences a correct understanding of particular lexical items. These paragraphs are not written in order to deny that the meaning of Ugaritic b may be stated as ‘from’. They do, however, indicate some of the problems implied if it is really thought that in Ugaritic the same word could freely and equally mean either ‘to’ or ‘from’; and they suggest that, whatever is true for Ugaritic, the position is likely to be different in Hebrew because the presence of ]ft in the latter language makes the whole network of prepositional meanings quite different. These points have commonly been neg lected when prepositional meanings discovered in Ugaritic have then been indiscriminately discovered in the Hebrew Bible; the same applies to the case of L Such, then, are some difficulties which may arise when hom onymy takes the acute form of completely opposite meanings for the same form, or when forms which correspond in cognate lan guages nevertheless display quite contrary senses. In general, if it is supposed that cognate words are yet likely to have quite contrary senses, this consideration reduces the probability of success with philological treatments on any large scale. Such treatments imply that, where a cognate form is discovered, its (known) meaning will suggest that of the (hitherto unknown) Hebrew word. If it is to suggest this meaning only by a reversal of its own meaning, the process is likely to degenerate into guesswork.

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(5) Patterning of Roots and Compatibility of Consonants In the familiar triconsonantal root pattern Semitic languages do not tolerate any three phonemes in any order, but only certain combinations. The rules under which consonants are compatible differ, however, to some extent between the various languages. (1) Certain combinations do not occur, or are very rare. While it is common for the same consonant to occur in positions 2 and 3, it is not generally tolerated for it to occur in positions 1 and 2. In positions 2 and 3, according to Moscati,1 the same consonant may be found twice, but not two different consonants with a similar point of articulation (e.g. Hebrew ‫ ב‬and D). Exceptions to these restrictions are more frequent in nouns, e.g. ‫ ל י ל ה‬, ‫ שמ ש‬, ‫ ; ש ר ש‬a number of noun patterns find their way into verbs through the formation of denominatives, e.g. Hebrew ‫‘ ש ר ש‬uproot; take root’. (2; The restrictions on compatibility may have somewhat broken down in the course of time. Greenberg, whose article is the startingpoint for recent research,2 tries to detect distinctions between the restrictions attributable to the ancestor language and those observed in historical times; he adds a control comparison with Egyptian. Similarly, words of Aramaic origin may eventually have disturbed the patterns observed in native Hebrew.3 (3) Rules of compatibility are not identical in all Semitic languages. According to Moscati,4 ‘in Accadian /g/ and /z/ are never found in third position, nor can all three radicals be voiced’. If this is true, Accadian will not contain a word corresponding to Hebrew ‫ ב ג ל‬under the normal correspondences for individual consonants. Similarly, Moscati says that in Hebrew the sequences /t-q/ and /q-t/ are compatible, but not /q‫־‬t/; while in Arabic /q-t/ is found, but iiot /t‫־‬q/.4 This does not quite agree with Greenberg’s tables, which show one case of /t-q/ in Arabic in positions 1-2, and four in 2-3. It may be remarked in passing, in any case, that the study of compatibility rules may give a much better account of the phenomena which were traditionally handled under assimilation, dissimilation, and metathesis; thus the difference between Hebrew 1 Moscati, Comparative Grammar, pp. 74 f. 2 Word vi (1950) 162-81. 3 The calculations of Koskinen, ZD M G cxiv (1964) 16-58, eliminate certain words from consideration on the grounds that they are *clearly* of Aramaic origin. 4 Moscati, pp. 74 f.

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‫ ק ט ל‬and Arabic qatala is to be ascribed to differing compatibilities rather than to an ‘assimilation’. We should then have an approach to general pattern systems, instead of lists of individual assimilations, dissimilations, and metatheses; and these lists could not be used as an argument in favour of exceptions to general linguistic statements.1 Again, Hebrew has no verb with H in position 2 and a sibilant in position 3.2 But in Arabic there are several (in Greenberg’s tables 4 before /§/, 1 before /s/, 2 before /z/, none before /s/: a total of 7 out of 127 verbs with /h/ in position 2). Similarly, according to Koskinen /'/ and /h/ can occur in Arabic and Syriac in the same verb (e.g. /*-h-d/), but not in Hebrew (nor Ugaritic and Palestinian types of Aramaic).3 Again, in positions 2 and 3 Hebrew greatly prefers the sequence /1-p/ over the sequence /l‫־‬b/. No true verb has the latter: ‫ ח ל ב‬and ‫ כ ל ב‬are noun roots only, ‫ ש ל ב‬is probably a denominative verb, and ‫ ג ל ב‬is commonly taken to be a loan-word. With /1-p/ real verbs seem to include about seven or eight; this depends on how far roots are distinguished: ‫ א ל ף‬, ‫( ל ל ף‬two roots ?), ‫( ח ל ף‬two roots ?), ‫ ס ל ף‬, ‫ ע ל ף‬, ‫ ש ל ף‬. The ratio in Hebrew is thus six, seven, or eight to zero.4 In Arabic verbs, however, Greenberg’s corresponding figures for /£/ and /b/ are sixteen and fifteen. If these figures are even approximately right ,we should not expect to find in Hebrew words cognate with familiar Arabic words like talaba ‘slander’, jalaba ‘get, gain’, talaba ‘seek’—not, at any rate, with the regular sound correspondences. Thus in general there appear to be some differences in statistical preference, either for one consonant as against another, or for one position of the same consonant as against another, between cognate Semitic languages.5 An interesting illustration can be provided from Ugaritic. Ugaritic, like Arabic, has a phoneme which we mark as /t/, and its normal correspondent in Hebrew is ‫ ש‬. But the statistical 1 Cf. the discussion above, pp. 96 if. 2 Koskinen, p. 57. 3 Koskinen, p. 29. 4 Koskinen, p. 55; his reckoning, including some non-verbal roots, is not identical with mine, and is less suitable for direct comparison with Greenberg. 5 Some remarkable differences emerge from a direct comparison of Koskinen’s figures with Greenberg’s; e.g. /t/ is in Hebrew least common in position 3, but in Arabic it is most frequent in that position. But little can be done with this until exactly comparable figures are worked out.

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frequency of /t/ in Ugaritic seems to be different from what it is in Arabic. By Greenberg’s figures, in Arabic /t/ occurs in first position with exactly the same frequency as does /t/, namely fifty times. In Ugaritic verbs the frequency is different. Driver’s glossary registers eighteen Ugaritic verbs with /t/ in first position, and this excludes special denominative types such as derivatives from numerals, e.g. tnn ‘do a second time’. For verbs with /t/ in first position, the corresponding figure is only eight.1 This might be accidental, but a real difference in root patterning between Ugaritic and Arabic is more probable. A notable instance is the verb tt' ‘fear’, which is cognate with the Phoenician ‫ ש ת ע‬and has served to identify ‫ ש ת ע‬in Hebrew also. The sequence /t-t/ in positions 1 and 2 is not a compatibility allowed in Arabic; Greenberg registers no instance at all. In Hebrew, on the other hand, where there is no phoneme /t/, a word like ‫ שת ע‬falls within the very frequent type of words with ‫ ש‬in position 1, followed by a stop in second position (cf. especially ‫?צתל‬, ‫ שתם‬, ‫) ש ת ק‬. Clearly roots may come to be used in one branch of the Semitic languages when in another they do not fall within the accepted patterns. One reason for this may be the very different phonetic realization in each language of the phonemes to which we apply the same conventional signs (such as /t/) and through which we establish our comparative correspondences. Though Arabic /f/ and /j/ ‘correspond" to Hebrew D and ‫ג‬, their phonetic realization is very different, and analogous differences in ancient times may have affected the degrees of compatibility. To sum up, it is not likely that these considerations will frequently provide a direct criterion for the evaluation of philological treatments. No excessive reliance should be placed upon the statistics until Hebrew lexicography has been tested afresh in this respect. Nevertheless the rules of patterning and compatibility are a matter of real importance, and they probably affected the make-up of the different Semitic vocabularies. In addition to the semantic considerations which have already been touched on,2 they suggest some reason why non-coincidences in lexical stock exist on the formal level also. They show how each of the languages has a 1 Even if we identify the words in a way different from Driver’s, the results are in this regard not very different; e.g. Gordon’s positive identifications of verbs in UH seem to be about z with /t/ in position i and io with /t/. 2 See above, pp. !7off.

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181

certain individuality, which cannot be broken down on the ground that other languages are cognate and that many individual words have close correspondences of form arid meaning. Conversely, they permit no excessive optimism that a known form and meaning in one language will guide us directly to the meaning of a mysterious form in another. (6) Words Known Through Personal Names A number of words which are well known in other Semitic languages appear in biblical Hebrew only in personal names.1 These words seem to constitute a prima-facie argument for the idea, which we shall see to be probable on other grounds, that the vocabulary of ancient Hebrew was substantially larger than that which is found in the Bible. Sometimes we might hardly know the meaning of these elements in Hebrew names but for the evidence of cognates, so that they seem to represent a primary success for a philological approach. This list is chosen to illustrate some words of fairly general interest; it does not include words of narrowly specific types such as names of animals or plants. The words are listed in the order of the root as it would normally be quoted in Hebrew, assuming the interpretation cited to be correct. ‫‘ או ש‬give’, found in the name Jehoash^KirP), also in the Elephantine form ‫ ; י או ש‬Noth, p. 171. Some derive the name Josiah also from this; for an alternative see the item two below. ‫‘ א ש ל‬rejoice’, found in the name Asarel (‫) א ש ל א ל‬, interpreted by Noth, p. 183, on the basis of Ar. 9asira, as ‘God has filled with j°y’· ‫‘ א ש ה‬heal’, which may perhaps be found in the name Josiah (1‫; ) י א ש י ה‬ Noth, p. 212, prefers this to the explanation through ‫ ש‬1‫‘ א‬give’; it gives a name parallel to .‫י ר פ א ל‬ ‫ ב ר ע‬The name Beriah (1‫ ) ב ר י ע ך‬is taken by Noth as related to Ar. bora a ‘excellence’; p. 224 n. Contrast popular etymology from ‫ ר ע‬, I Chron. 7. 23. ‫‘ ד ר ק‬hard’—the name Darkon (]‫ ; ) ר ר ק ל‬so taken by Noth, p. 225, on the basis of Ar. darq ‘hard’ (?—so Freytag, ii. 24 b). 1 Some names which occur in the Bible are names not of Israelites but of Midianites and others (cf. ‫ א ל ד ע ה‬, above, p. 23); linguistic elements contained in such names, even though genuinely Semitic, are not necessarily evidence for actual Hebrew.

182 LEXICAL RESOURCES IN THE SEMITIC LANGUAGES

‫הדה‬

‘lead’, in the name Jahdai (‫ !ד י‬1‫ ;) י‬see Noth, p. 196. ‫ ה ד ה‬at Isa. 11. 8 may be the same word; but if so, then the sense (‘to put’ the hand) is rather different from that suggested by the name (divine guidance, cf. Ar. mahdi ‘guided one’).

‫‘ ז ב ד‬give’, Noth, p. 46 f.; common in names, e.g. Elzabad, Zebadiah, but very rare before the exile (one under David and two during the monarchy). The verb, and also the noun ‫ ז ב ד‬, occur elsewhere only in the explanation of the name Zebulon, which of course is not from this verb, though the words have a similarity (Gen. 30. 20). ‫‘ ז מ ר‬protect’, Noth, p. 176. The familiar biblical name is Zimri (‫) ז מ רי‬, but the Samaritan Ostraca provide names with the fuller form such as ‫ ב ע ל ז מ ר‬and ‫ ז מ רי ה ו‬. The cognate verb is common in South Arabian names. ‫‘ ח מ ה‬protect’, found in names like Jahmai (‫ ;) י ח מ י‬Noth, p. 196 f. Cf. the noun ‫‘ חו מ ה‬wall’, but no verb; see above, p. 160. ‫‘ נ מ ה‬bring tidings’, suggested by Guillaume to fit the Qumran reading at Isa. 41. 27 (see below, p. 193). The name involved is Nemuel (‫) נ מ ו א ל‬. Against the idea that this name contains a verb ‫ נ מ ה‬there are two arguments: (1) this gives no sense paralleled in Israelite names (2) the forms ‫ א ל‬1‫ י מ‬and ‫ א ל‬1‫ ל מ‬, which look related, count against a derivation from .‫נ מ ה‬ ‫‘ עו ש‬help’, in the name Jeush (‫ ש‬1‫) י ע‬, Ar. gâta; Noth, pp. 176, 196. This verb actually occurs in the MT at Joel 4. 11, but the text has been doubted (e.g. BDB, p. 736a), perhaps unnecessarily. The sense ‘help’ seems to have been unknown to the ancient versions (arwaOpoi&crdey ‫י ת כנ שון‬, erumpitè). ‫עמר‬

‘live’, in the name Omri (‫ ; ) ע מ ר י‬Noth, p. 63, who mentions that this name might be of Arab origin. The cognate is the frequent Ar. 'amara ‘live’.

‫ערש‬

‘plant’, suggested by Noth, p. 203, for the name Jaareshiah (‫)י ע ר שי ה‬, on the basis of Ar. garasa and Accad. erësu, the latter of which is extremely frequent in personal names.

‫עתל‬

‘tall’ (so Noth; or perhaps ‘carry’, Ar. catala?); found in the name Athlai (‫) ע ת ל י‬, and cognate with Accad. etellu ‘high’, (‘prince’?); Noth, p. 191.

‫‘ קלת‬nourish’, found in the name Jekuthiel (‫ ; )י ק ל תי א ל‬Noth, p. 203. Cognate with Ar. qdta. Cf. the place name ‫ י ק ת א ל‬, b d b , p. 430,

W ORDS KNOW N TH R O U G H PER SO N A L NAM ES

‫תלה‬

183

‘protect’. Noth’s interpretation of the name Ithream (‫) י ת ר ע ם‬, p. 197, on the basis of Accad. taru (Bezold). Noth admits the possibility of a relation rather with the known Hebrew root ‫י ת ר‬ ‘be more, be left over’, and this is on the whole more likely. If these identifications are right, they seem to be indubitable evidence of Hebrew words beyond the normally recognized vocabulary. Some of these names were used quite frequently. There were three Omris besides the great king of that name, and a whole host of Zebediahs, Zabdiels, and others with names from the root ‫ ז ב ל‬. Nowhere would philological solutions be so compelling as when Hebrew personal names themselves provide evidence for the words suggested. Yet, of the list given above, few examples have figured in philological treatments known to m e; and some of those which do so figure, such as ‫ נ מ ה‬, seem to be rather precarious ones. The recognition of new words from the cognate languages in Israelite personal names themselves does not, as one would expect, lead to clear identifications of related words in the running text. Can some other explanation be found ? The fact of poetical parallelism should also be taken into account. Of the words listed above a number relate to concepts quite common in Hebrew literature—‘give’, ‘nourish’, ‘heal’, ‘protect’, ‘help’, and ‘live’. We should expect that unusual words might appear as second elements (‘B‫־‬words’) in parallelisms, even if they were not used independently of such contexts. This is particularly so where there is no adequate normal parallel for a word. Thus ‘give’ is very common in poetry, yet there is no adequate common parallel for ‫ נ ת ן‬. It is surprising that ‫ ז ב ל‬was not used with some frequency to provide such a parallel. The same can be said of ‫‘ ע מ ר‬live’, which would give an excellent parallel for the heavily-worked ‫ ח י ה‬. Thus the evidence of personal names hardly encourages us to suppose that, simply because a word may have had currency in Israelite onomastics, it may therefore confidently be expected to be found in the running text of the Bible. The non-usage, or very limited usage, of plausible terms like ‫ ע מ ר‬and ‫ ז ב ל‬tends to lead us to the opposite conclusion, surprising as it is: that, even when a good explanation from cognates is available and even when usage in personal names is quotable, the lexical stock used in the biblical text was rather closer to the traditional picture than to that which would be constructed by the addition of numerous new words deduced from cognate parallels.

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We may suggest a reason for this. It is possible that certain words existed in Hebrew but were used only in the formation of proper names; or, alternatively, that they were used, but only in other reg: sters of the language than those which found their way into the biblical text. This is, of course, no more than a suggestion, which may not be capable of proof. I would mention, however, one analogy which, though not complete, is at least partially valid. The ‘Amorite’ names are names which notably diverge from the standard Accadian of the running texts in which they are found; so that in these materials the names are ‘Amorite’ though the general language is not. It may be that Israelite personal names used lexical elements which were not general in Hebrew; and possibly social and linguistic history might provide some such explanation.1 (7)

Lexicostatistics or Glottochronology

Finally, some mention should be made of the recent approach known as lexicostatistics or glottochronology.2 The basic conception is this: since the rate of change of vocabulary is fairly constant, the study of changes between cognate languages in a basic central word list will indicate the chronology of the separation of the different cognate branches from their ancestor. The procedure involves several assumptions, which have been partly tested in certain linguistic areas, and in particular: (a) the assumption that some parts of the vocabulary are less subject to change than others; this enables the investigator to set up a basic core vocabulary, the rate of change of which is used in the calculation; (b) the assumption that the rate of retention in the core vocabulary is constant through time; thus a certain percentage of words will be lost every thousand years; (c) the assumption that the rate of retention and loss of basic 1 Noth lays a heavy emphasis on an Aramaic stratum; e.g. Personennamen, pp. 4 3 1 7 1 ,7‫ ־‬n., 176 n. One might speculate that such a common Aramean background in Israel’s prehistory has left behind in personal nomenclature some words which ceased to be general in other usage. We may compare names like Jacob (‫)י ע ק ב‬, which surely meant ‘(God) protect’ but which is not accompanied by any free use of the verb in this sense in the biblical text. 2 See Sarah C. Gudschinsky, ‘The ABC’s of Lexicostatistics (Glottochronology)’, Word xii (1956) 175-210, reprinted in shorter form in Hymes, Language in Culture and Society, pp. 612-22; and cf. the bibliography of the subject there also, pp. 622 f.

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185

vocabulary is approximately the same in all languages. According to Gudschinsky, this has been tested in thirteen languages, and the results range from 86*4 to 74*4 per cent, of words retained per thousand years. All but two of these thirteen, however, were Indo-European languages. The procedure is then to set up a basic core list of words and compute from the incidence of cognates in a pair of languages the date of division of the primitive speech community to which both belonged. Needless to say, the technique is of particular interest for groups of languages which are known to be cognate but of which no historical records over a long period of time exist. A good deal of uncertainty appears still to surround the approach of glottochronology, and I do not suggest that it is a certainly valid one. In any case its object is in principle a different one from that of the present study. We are not trying to establish the date at which the proto-Semitic ancestor speech community broke up, but rather to establish the degree to which cognate elements can be expected to appear in the various Semitic vocabularies. Thus it is by no means my purpose to argue for the rightness of the approach of glottochronology. Nevertheless this approach may well be suggestive for us. Even the question of the date of separation of the proto-Semitic language community is not without some interest for us. Where scholars speak as if a very high degree of community in the use of lexical resources existed between Semitic languages, one sometimes has the impression that they suppose the proto-Semitic stage to be chronologically not very greatly removed from the appearance of the first linguistic documents—rather, indeed, as if the story of the Tower of Babel had rightly portrayed the remoteness of the origin of linguistic diversity! If the diversity of the Semitic group goes back not four or five thousand but ten or twenty thousand years— and it is at least conceivable that the approach of glottochronology might demonstrate this statistically—our expectancy for the find ing of cognates in Hebrew because a form exists in another Semitic language must be somewhat reduced.1 It may be that the discussion of glottochronology may prove 1 Cf. Driver’s statements on the closeness of the Semitic languages to one another, quoted above, pp. 36 f. The Romance languages, with which comparison is there made, can be traced from a known ancestor over a very limited period. Driver’s argument appears to disagree with the approach of glottochronology.

186

L E X IC A L R E S O U R C E S IN T H E S E M IT IC L A N G U A G E S

stimulating in the following regards. Firstly, the idea that there is a core vocabulary, in which the rate of change is lower than for other words, might fit with the observation we have already made in this chapter, namely that while one sector of the vocabulary can be found to have a high degree of agreement in many Semitic lan guages, outside of this sector other sectors can be found which have much greater non-agreement (e.g. words for going in a direction— up, down, out, and so on). Secondly, however, it might be that the contents of such a core vocabulary would have to be set up differently for Semitic from the group which has been used for other languages. Thirdly, it is conceivable that, for reasons which we cannot at present decide, the rate of vocabulary change in Semitic languages has not been the same as that found in the study of other language groups.1 Thus the approach of glottochronology remains potentially constructive and actually suggestive for our problem. Our study has tended to suggest that, while philological treatments of the Old Testament text have assumed a high degree of community in the use of lexical items, the degree actually observable in the Semitic languages may be somewhat lower. Where languages are cognate, only a limited percentage of their vocabulary can be expected to occur in cognate and corresponding forms. This has been indicated from other observations already in this chapter; the difference made by glottochronology is to relate this to a statistical scheme of probability over a chronological scale. If, as Gleason indicates,2 the rate; of loss of items is about 19 per cent, per thousand years for the core vocabulary, then two cognate languages after a thousand years will probably have about 66 per cent, of the stock in common, and 44 per cent, after twice that period. Since the rate of loss outside the basic core vocabulary is even higher, the probability that unusual and obscure items in one language can have their sense pre dicted on the basis of another is not statistically very high. It remains to summarize the results of the discussion in this 1 Some limited application of the approach through glottochronology to Arabic dialects will be found in Hymes, ‘Rate of morpheme decay in Arabic*, IJ A L xxv (1959) 267-9. 2 Gleason, Introductionf p. 450. The calculation assumes the most probable event, i.e. that the two languages will not lose the same item s; language A will retain 81 per cent, of those retained by language B, and also 81 per cent, of the 19 per cent, lost by language B.

L E X IC O S T A T IS T IC S OR G L O T T O C H R O N O L O G Y

187

chapter. The discussion has not been conclusive, and has not produced any clear and definite estimate of the probability that lexical elements found in one Semitic language will be shared by another. It has shown, however, that caution has to be exercised in this matter, and that it is premature and injudicious to assume that the presence of material in one Semitic language forms a primafacie case for its existence in another. Comparative study, when directed squarely upon the problem, itself shows that this is not so. Thus, in arguing against too quick an assumption of lexical overlap between the Semitic languages, we are not arguing against the comparative method, but applying it properly, and applying it to the lexical stocks as wholes, rather than to individual items within them. To put it negatively, a hyper-comparative approach, which has been overconfident in a high assessment of the degree of lexical overlap between languages, has been damaging to a truly compara tive understanding of the situation.

VI I I THE MASSORETES, VOCALIZATION AND EMENDATION (1) General M any philological treatments hold firmly to the consonantal text, resisting suggestions that it should be emended; they are extremely free, however, towards the vocalization, often implying that it is a late and ill-informed interpretation which may be modified by scholars at will.1 Exceptions, indeed, can be found. For the enigmatic ‫ו א ל ~ ת ר ה ו‬ at Isa. 44. 8 Driver’s suggestion of an explanation on the basis of Arabic daha implied an emendation to ‫ ו א ל ~ ת ך ה ו‬affecting the consonants only, or even to ‫ ו א ל “ ת ד ה ו‬affecting also the vowels and making the verb a niphal.2 In this approach the philologist uses his imagination to detect forms close to, but not identical with, the consonantal text, which promise a successful philological treatment. Conversely, a philological treatment will sometimes start from, and use as evidence, a feature of the existing pointing; and, after using a cognate language to explain the meaning, it will return to the existing pointing, which it has thus explained and justified. At Neh. 5. 7 Kopf notes the unusual niphal in the phrase ‫וי מ ל ך‬ ‫ ל בי ע ל י‬and, comparing the Arabic sense, ‘take possession’, construes, as ‘I was beside myself’. Though the clue to the sense is found in Arabic, the suggestion starts from and returns to the Massoretic pointing. A similar example is found at Hos. 8. 4. Here the verb ‫ מ ל ך‬is taken by Driver to mean ‘advise’, after the sense in Aramaic. The verse reads: : ‫ ל כ ו ו ל א מ&ני ה ע ד רו ו ל א מ ־ ע תי‬$ ‫ה ם ה‬ 1 Cf. Driver, cited above, p. 35; Dahood in Biblica xliv (1963) 291, with reference to Albright in Peake, pp. 62 f. 2 Cf. above, pp. 6 f., 166, and below, p. 231.

GENERAL

189

and the meaning found by Driver is: ‘they have taken counsel, but not of me; they have got advice, and I know not of it.’ The first verb means ‘caused advice to be taken’, thus justifying the hiphil; and the second is related to Arabic ’asara and is in Hebrew a denominative hiphil meaning ‘obtained advice’. Thus, though the senses suggested are novel, the interpretation supports and justifies the hiphil pointing of the MT. These illustrations show, then, that philological treatments can and do at times either (a) involve emendation of the consonantal text or, conversely, (b) confirm the punctuation as well as the consonantal text. It nevertheless remains generally true of philological treatments that many of them involve a departure from the Massoretic punctuation. The exceptions can hardly hope to become the rule. Moreover, many philological treatments, though they do not abandon or emend the major consonants (generally speaking, the radicals, apart from ‘weak’ letters), nevertheless involve other changes (commonly supposed to be ‘minor’), such as displacements of word divisions and confusion between w and y. If these ‘minor’ changes are used with high frequency in a small space their effect is not greatly different from that of outright emendation. When this is so, it is legalistic to claim that the consonantal text is being left intact. Even if basic root consonants are not altered into others, the text may be in effect rewritten. The following examples will show different degrees of this process. Moderate changes are involved in the quite attractive treatment of Ezek. 27. 19 by Millard. The M T offers the rather impenetrable: ‫; ו ךן ד ו ן ??אוזל‬ Of this AV made ‘Dan also and Javan going to and fro.’ B H 3 emends, so also RSV. Millard takes the text as: ‫ ו תי _יין מ אי ז ל‬: meamng: ‘and casks of wine from Izalla’.1 1 y S S vii (196a) 201 if. Cf. the identification of Izalla already in GB, p. 15 b.

190 T H E M A SS O R E T E S, V O C A L IZ A T IO N A N D E M E N D A T IO N

The word ]‫‘ ל‬cask’ is identified on the basis of Accadian dannu (cf. also Ugar. dn). The textual alterations are fairly minor. Other suggestions are more complex and involve very far-reaching changes in word division and vocalization. Hab. 3. 6-7 has the very difficult passage: mt ‫ ת ח ת אגן ר אי תי‬: ‫ה לי כ ו ת ע ו ל ם ל ו‬ These are the words rendered by the ‘his ways were as of old’ and ‘I saw . . . in affliction’ of RSV. Albright, reconstructing this, produces a text which reads (apart from the last word): : ‫ה ל כ ו ת ע ו ל ם ל ת ח ת או ן‬ and means: ‘eternal orbits were shattered’. This suggestion, while not changing any consonant, is an extremely radical reshuffling of the consonants into a completely different series of words and clauses. Such a reconstruction is really no less an emendation than a conjectural alteration of one or two consonants would have been; the effect is entirely as drastic. We may add Tur-Sinai’s reconstruction of Job 37. 17: : ‫ ב ג ד י ף ח מי ם ב ה ש קי ט א ל ץ מ ד רו ם‬- ‫א ש ר‬ Tur-sinai: ‫ ר ב ? ב ר כ ח ה מי ם ב דז קז קי ט א ך ץ ז מ ך ך ם‬# ‫א‬ m t

The meaning of the reconstructed text is said to b e: 'So that, when the waters become forceful and cause their wet clay to fall down.’ The new philological identification is that of a ‫ מ ל ר‬, cognate with Ethiopic mddr ‘earth’, Arabic madar. Though some of the textual changes are individually easy ones (e.g. interchange of ‫ ל‬and ‫) ל‬, the reconstruction is in fact extremely far-reaching, with a liberal assortment of dittographies and haplographies in the space of some nine consonants. Though Tur-Sinai says that ‘the punctuators failed to understand the text’, it is hard to see how they failed to understand the supposedly original ‫ ב ג ב ר כ ל ה מ י ם‬, which is not difficult in comparison with most of the text they had to point in

Job. These instances show that changes of vocalization, or shifts in consonant order or word division, implied in philological treatments may sometimes be so drastic in effect as to make it legalistic

GENERAL

191

to claim that the consonantal text is unchanged. We may now go on to consider the questions more systematically. (2) Fallibility in the Consonantal Text Philological scholars, then, though critical of emendation, have often been inconsistent and have used emendation, or else, as argued above, have produced virtual emendations through re shuffling of the consonants. It may be answered, indeed, that inconsistency is not a serious charge, since the transmission of the text was itself subject to inconsistency, so that a responsible scholar will have to use different methods at different times. In particular it may be suggested that emendation is legitimate, but only after all attempts at a philological treatment have resulted in failure. This, however, hardly goes far enough. To admit the legitimacy of emendation at all is to admit that the consonantal text is fallible; and to admit this is to admit that the basis for philological treat ments in the consonantal text is not wholly secure. Wholesale state ments that emendation is illegitimate, if meant literally, imply that the consonantal text was infallibly preserved. Given the conditions of transmission of the Hebrew Bible, if the consonantal text is not necessarily right, then emendation may at times be necessary. Once this is admitted, it follows that from the beginning the alteration of the text has to be considered on equal terms in prin ciple with the possibility of a philological explanation. It is not enough to agree that emendation may be considered only after all forms of philological explanation, however remote, have been exhausted. The difference between the two approaches lies from the beginning in a balance of probabilities. This follows from the admission that the text may be faulty, and is not invalidated by the argument that many textual emendations in the past have proved to be wild and arbitrary; the same is true, after all, of many philo logical explanations. There is substantial, and indeed decisive, evidence that conson antal texts could be written and transmitted incorrectly. Such evi dence can be found in the Old Testament itself in passages which appear twice; it can be found in the Qumran documents; and it can be found in the literature of cognate languages such as Ugaritic. A comparison of passages which appear twice, such as Ps. 18, which is also II Sam. 22, suggests that errors in the copying of the

192 T H E M A SS O R E T E S, V O C A L IZ A T IO N A N D E M E N D A T IO N

consonantal text are probable. One cannot, indeed, assume that all such differences between parallel texts are a result of textual corruption; some may go back to free variants in oral tradition. The variation between ‫( כ ף‬II Sam. 22. 1) and ‫( י ד‬Ps. 18. 1) may perhaps be explained in this way; on the other hand, it could easily be a scribal change. It is also possible that some of the differences between parallel passages are genuine linguistic, rather than textual, differences; that is to say, the parallel texts have words genuinely different though approximately parallel, rather than forms which have arisen by scribal error. Ps. 58. 11 has a phrase which seems closely parallel to one in Ps. 68. 24. The former is:

‫הרשע‬ ‫בדם‬ ‫פעמיו ירחץ‬ τ τ τ ‫ ־‬: I ‫ ־‬:· τ τ : ‘he washes his feet in the blood of the wicked’. This presents no difficulty. But at 68. 24 the words in M T are:

‫למען תמחץ בעלף מ־־ם‬ Now since ‫ מ ח ץ‬in Hebrew usually means ‘strike’, it has been common practice to emend the verb at 68. 24 to ‫ ת ר ח ץ‬, thus producing agreement with 58.11; so for example B H 3ywith the alleged support of the versions.1Delitzsch,2 however, argues that there was an Accadian mahasu meaning ‘pour over’ (synonymous with balalu)., and gives actual examples in literature. If this is right, the phenomenon has to be treated as a linguistic rather than a textual one. Finally, the sense is possibly only the normal Hebrew one ‘strike’: ‘that you may strike your foot in the blood . . Λ Nevertheless, it is not likely that all differences in parallel passages could be removed or explained in this way, and many of them should probably be ascribed to scribal errors, as textual critics have generally done. Ps. 18. 11 has an uncommon verb in the phrase:

‫ר!ךא על־כןפי־תח‬ which means perhaps: ‘and he swooped upon the wings of the wind’. 1 Recently Kraus, p. 467. It is doubtful whether the versions really support this emendation. LXX for example has (67. 24) όπως αν βαφτ} 6 πονς σου £ν αΐματι. This is not very good evidence that the Hebrew translated was ‫ ל ח ץ‬, which is never rendered with βάπτω in the LXX. Contrast 57. 11 (verb νίφεται). The Greek just gave a rendering such as the context seemed to demand. * Proleg., pp. 69 if. More recently cf. von Soden, p. 581a, ‘(5) besprengert mit\

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The parallel II Sam. 22. 11 (along with some manuscripts in the Psalm) has the reading ‫ ל ך א‬, which would mean: ‘and he appeared upon the wings of the wind’. Probably this latter is simply a wrong text, and shows clearly the mistaking of ‫ ל‬for ‫ ל‬by copyists and its influence even in the text of the Psalm. Thus the parallel passages afford strong evidence for occasional scribal corruption of the consonantal text. That such corruption exists is, of course, no new idea, and has in fact been the normal accepted belief among scholars. There should indeed be no need to repeat the evidence for it, were it not that arguments in favour of philological treatments have sometimes come close to regarding the consonantal text as sacrosanct; and for this reason it is right to reiterate some evidences of its fallibility. The Qumran material also shows quite clearly that the consonantal text has been liable to corruption. This is so of course whether the Qumran texts are right or wrong when they differ from MT. There are indeed places where it has been suggested that the Qumran text will yield to a philological treatment while the M T will not. An interesting example is the difficult Isa. 41. 27: : ‫ר א שון ל צ י ו ן הנ ה הג ם ו לי רו ש ל ם מ ב ש ר א תן‬ This, the M T, seems to mean literally: ‘A first for Zion, behold, behold them; and to Jerusalem I will give a messenger of good.’ The obscurity of this text has led to numerous emendations, for which see B H 3. The Qumran text iQIsA has ‫ מ ה‬1‫ הנ‬where M T has ‫ ה נ ם‬. Guillaume argues that ‫ מ ה‬1‫ נ‬is clearly a participle, in parallelism with the ‫ מ ב ש ל‬of the second part. It is to be explained, he says, from the Arabic nama 4bring tidings’, for which he quotes cases in old Arab poems.1 1 On this word see above, p. 182. Driver, The Judaean Scrolls, pp. 435, 444, gives the same interpretation as Guillaume. He appears also to find this word in iQIsA 35. 7, where the M T has *and papyrus’; but from the photographs the word seems clearly to be exactly as in the M T except for the added waw. The Arabic nama, while certainly a real verb the use of which can easily be checked in early poetry, is probably an idiosyncrasy of Arabic, and seems to have no cognates in other Semitic languages. Thus the evidence for its existence in Hebrew is weak; nor, in Isa. 35. 7, is it clear what sense it would make.

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In any case the Qumran text, whether better or not, adds to the evidence i:hat texts varied. If readings in the Qumran texts are superior, it means that in the absence of the Qumran evidence (which might, after all, never have been discovered) the conjectural emendations might have been right and would certainly have been justifiable, There are in fact cases, as is well known, where the Qumran scrolls have been found to contain readings which had previously been conjectured by scholars. A third place where we can see evidence of faulty transmission of consonantal texts is the Ugaritic literature. In places this is highly repetitive, quite long sections being reiterated in almost exactly the same words. In such passages some fairly obvious spel ling errors have been detected;1 and this is a literature the line of transmission of which to us ceased in the fourteenth century B.C.! There is every reason to expect, therefore, that the transmission of texts Las included errors in the consonantal as well as in the vocalized writing; and, in spite of the exaggerated reliance on textual emendation which has sometimes been shown, it will always remain an important possibility that difficulties have arisen by graphic error rather than by loss of linguistic understanding. Textual criticism must retain its traditional place and not be com pletely displaced by a too purely philological approach. In order to make further progress, we have now to give closer consideration to the transmission of the vocalization. (3) The Importance of the Vocalization The picture implied in philological treatments is one of (a) a long period during which the consonantal text was carefully cherished, and transmitted, and (b) a late and arbitrary process by which a vocalization was more or less imposed on this text by men who indeed tried their best to understand it but were handicapped by the limitations of their knowledge of Hebrew (now to them a long-dead language) and by the narrowness of their understanding of these particular texts. Is this a credible picture? Does it not raise in another form the question which Nyberg raised against the older textual criticism, namely that it assumed that the Jews very 1 For some examples see Gordon, UH 4. 16 (pp. 17 f.). For instance we have the word bt'rth 4in its scabbard’, once written bVrtp (3 Aqhat i 29). This can be assuredly explained as the writing of the two strokes of Ugaritic p in place of the three of h.

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early lost the understanding of what their own Scriptures meant, while they transmitted them by a mechanical copying procedure?— And, it would appear (in this we go beyond what Nyberg argued), having transmitted this consonantal skeleton of a Scripture by a mechanical copying procedure, did they then centuries later attempt to clothe it in the flesh of a newly created vocalization ? Firstly, the vocalization of the Hebrew Bible was not invented when the written marks of vocalization were invented. A distinc tion has to be made between the actual existence of vocalization and its written marking. Biblical manuscripts long ago had no marking of vocalization in the form now dominant, i.e. the Tiberian point system. This system grew up from about the sixth century a .d . But long before this some degree of discrimination of vowels had been provided in the form of the vowel letters or matres lectionis. While it is possible to write Hebrew with no vowel letters at all, this was not the practice in any extant biblical texts. Even the Siloam inscription, from Hezekiah’s time, has some vowel letters, though not exactly the distribution to which we have become accustomed from the M T. The Qumran scroll iQIsA, as is well known, has a more copious use of vowel letters than the MT, and (somewhat like modern Hebrew) uses them in indicating ‘short’ vowels which were not so indicated in MT. Thus, even in the period before the pointing system was introduced, a written indication of vocalization did exist; and indeed in certain texts the written indication was greater than is to be found in the M T if the pointing of the latter is re moved. Thus even when it was without vowel points the text was not without indications of vocalization. Certainly this vocalization was not ‘complete’; it did not try to indicate or discriminate all the phonemes of the text. But this is no absolute peculiarity of Hebrew; it is true of most writing systems that they do not systematically mark all the phonemes. For instance, stress and pitch are phonemic in English, but there is no way of representing this in the normal writing system.1 In classical Greek vowel length was phonemic, but it has graphic representation only for certain of the vowels and not for others; and the pitch accent was phonemic, but was not marked until long after the classical period.2 Consonant length is 1 On this see Gleason, pp. 40-50. 2 See Gleason, p. 419.

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phonemic, and is extremely important, in Ethiopian languages, but has r.o written marking (though some modern grammarians have introduced it). In failing to provide a clear one-to-one marking for all vc wel phonemes, the Hebrew matres lectionis departed from the consistent early Phoenician writing system, which had systemati cally omitted the entire sub-system of vowels; instead, they formed a series of optional markings for certain groups within the vowel sub-system.1 The fact that at this stage there was not a well-pro portioned correspondence between the phonemic and the graphemic systems is nothing extraordinary. Thus the texts of biblical Hebrew, even when they were still ‘unvocalized’, were not devoid of sensitivity to the indication of vowel distinctions in writing. When the complete vocalization, which included not only the vowel points but also other diacritic signs like the daghesh and also the accent system, came to be applied, it was related to a more rudi mentary series of vowel indications which was already present. More important, however, for our purpose is the tradition of vocalization which was passed on in addition to the written indica tions Week by week and year by year, Moses and the prophets were read. It is a mistake to think of a written consonantal text which was handed on through generations without vocalization and then afterwards was ‘vocalized’. This is true of the stages of the written text when taken in a somewhat artificial isolation; but it is not true of the history of the tradition. The Massoretes began with a text lacking vowel points and proceeded to point it and accent it; but this does not mean that they invented the vocaliza tion. What they invented was a series of increasingly subtle systems for the marking of the vocalization which was already in use. Thus the term ‘vocalization’ is somewhat ambiguous. The system of points was applied late (after the completion of the Tal mud), and previously texts were unvocalized in the sense that these signs were absent; even then the vowel letters provided a partial marking of vowels. But the biblical text was transmitted also in a spoken form; the text was publicly read and the mode of reading was passed on. There is no evidence of a stage at which this linguis tic transmission of the text had come to be interrupted, so that Jews had to start again with no material but a written text, from which the further linguistic elements such as vowels, which were unmarked in writing, had to be deduced or invented. 1 See Gleason, op. cit., p. 419.

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It is not probable that Jews learned to read the biblical text by looking at the written signs and guessing at the vowels which may have accompanied them. Rather, they learned by reading with a teacher, or listening to a synagogue reader; and this teacher or reader knew from his own learning how the text was to be read.1 In this respect there was a difference from the reading of a casual communication like a letter, which would certainly have to be read without any tradition of vocalization, but in which the intrinsic difficulty of the text would be likely to be less, while a wrong reading would not carry religious consequences.2 It is commonly held to be a characteristic of the Semitic lan guages that the consonants are a basis or backbone and provide all the cardinal ideas, while the vowels indicate only modifications of these ideas. Only to a limited extent is this true.3 Often one cannot tell a ‘basic idea’ from the consonants alone. The mere consonants DX do not make clear whether the idea is ‘father’ or ‘ghost’ or ‘bud’. The vowels are critical as the consonants are. In the reading of an extended passage discrimination is made through the context. This can be done even when the vowels are not marked. It is not that the ideas come through to the mind independently of vowels; rather, the context guides the reader to select the vocalization which makes sense of the passage (or—and particularly if a passage is read silently—to select senses which imply a particular vocalization, and thereby to select, from the number of vowel patterns possible within the consonant sequence, the ones which make sense). The consonant sequences do not in themselves furnish the basic sense; taken just as they are written, they do not make clear which con sonants are ‘root consonants’ and which are not. While we have learned to look for triradical consonantal roots and work outwards from these, we should be aware that (a) this procedure was developed by a grammar which itself presupposed the vocalization as its means of analysis, and (b) this procedure is not necessarily the way in which ancient and medieval Jews read the text (or any other document). This is relevant especially because the ancient reader normally read aloud and not silently. 1 Cf. the Talmudic passage quoted below, pp. 213 f. 2 Cf. my article ‘Vocalization and the Analysis of Hebrew*, p. 4, and below, pp. 208 f., where I suggest that the procedure of translators like the LXX differed from that of normal reading in Hebrew. 3 Cf. Ullendorff, Orientalia xxvii (1958) 69 if.; Moscati, Comparative Grammar, p. 72.

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The nainly consonantal nature of Semitic writing systems, however, might be thought to show the contrary and demonstrate that the consonants were after all regarded as the main centres of meaning But is it true that Semitic writing systems are so over whelmingly consonantal? It is not true of Accadian writing; nor is it true of Ethiopic, in which the consonants cannot be written without an attached vowel. Ugaritic script indicated vowels for one of the consonants, namely aleph. Arabic script, when not pointed, does not mark all vowels; but it is equally characteristic of it that it always marks some vowels: normally, in fact, all long vowels are marked,1 and only short vowels are unmarked. The commoner Semitic characteristic is not the marking of consonants exclusively, but the marking of only some vowels. The use of a script which is strictly without marking of vowels is indeed rather exceptional. The undoubted fact that writing systems which can work without any vowel marking are among those which have emerged in the Semitic world is not sufficient cause for us to conclude that there is a mysterious identity between the consonants and the basic meaning, Thus the relation between vowel and consonant in the writing of Semitic languages does not in itself give us reason to treat lightly the tradition of vocalization or to suppose that the vocalization was marked without very considerable guidance from previous tradition. It is possible, indeed, to suggest explanations of the primarily consonantal nature of many Semitic writing systems without making any reference to a bearing of the basic meaning by the con sonants, and indeed without making reference to meaning at all; such explanations would depend rather on the actual formal struc ture of Semitic languages. It is possible that the marking of a phoneme in writing was con nected with the occurrence of that phoneme in initial position. In the Semitic languages which are relevant for the early development of the alphabet, all word patterns of importance had a consonant in initial position, while none had a vowel in initial position. Con versely the alphabet provided a grapheme for each phoneme which might occur in initial position. The arrangement thus automatically segmented words into syllables with a consonant in first place. If this is plausible, the character of the system had nothing to do with the idea that consonants bore the core of 1 Morag, Vocalization Systems, p. 13.

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meaning; it derived from the formal structure of languages which had no relevant patterns except with consonants in initial position. In Greek adaptations of the script, however, vowels were early marked, and the necessity to do this may similarly be associated with the fact that many important Greek patterns have vowels in initial position. We can state this in another way. The common and traditional view is that the basic meaning lay in the root, i.e. the consonants of the root, and that the vowels indicated modifications of this idea. But, even within the terms of this view, we observe that ‘modifications’ may equally include consonants, in which case they are marked in the script, or not include consonants, in which case they are not (we assume at this stage an absence of matres lectionis). Thus if ‫ ק ט ל‬is to be taken as a ‘modification’ of the basic ‫ ק ט ל‬, surely exactly the same status belongs to ‫ ; ה ק ט ל‬but the latter has a consonantal addition which is marked in the script. If the consonantal nature of the script had had anything to do with the idea that the consonants should be marked because they formed the basic meaning, then it would have been natural for a script to develop in which the ‫ ה‬of the hiphil was not marked any more than the vowels of the piel. It is more consistent to maintain that what was to be marked was decided by structure. The traditional view comes nearer to the truth in this respect, that the pattern of many Semitic words, and especially verbs (where we can best use the term ‘discontinuous morphemes’),1favoured the practicability of some such writing system. Even so, as we have seen, most systems quite rapidly introduced the graphic marking of some vowels. This suggestion is made here only to show that alternative ideas about the primarily consonantal nature of the scripts can be entertained; but the remainder of my argument does not depend on the rightness of this suggestion. It is well known that the pronunciation of Hebrew has changed historically. Certain spellings in the Qumran texts, for instance, have suggested to scholars that the 3rd masculine pronoun was pronounced as /hu’a/ in the Qumran period, while in the Massoretic period it was pronounced as /hu/. None of the pronunciations 1 The term will be found in Gleason, p. 72 f. Gleason correctly states that Hebrew is unusual for the high number of such discontinuous morphemes which it contains; it is inexact when we go farther and make this the basic principle of Hebrew, as the popular view often does.

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extant in modern times, probably, preserves a series of distinctions identical with those intended by the Massoretes. That Hebrew pronunciation should have changed historically is only what we should expect from our knowledge of languages generally. Equally we know that the pronunciation of Hebrew has differed regionally and dialectically. This was already so in ancient times, and in more modern times there are the whole series of differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew.1 These differences may be considerable. The vowel sign qames is an [a] vowel in Sephardi, but an [o] vowel in Ashkenazi. A D in post-vocalic position is an [s] in Ashkenazi, a [t] in older Sephardi, and a [t] in modern Israeli. There have also been different written systems of marking the texts : the Babylonian punctuation, for example, not only uses signs of different shape from the Tiberian, but is a different system, having a different total number of vowels. All of these, then, are ways in which the pronunciation of Hebrew has varied along co-ordinates of time and place. The question now is whether this variety is any reason why the tradition of vocalization should be considered intrinsically unreliable and therein separable in principle from the tradition of the written text. It would seem that many scholars, knowing of the existence of this variation in pronunciation, have concluded that the tradition of vocalization is an unchartable chaos, the produce of arbitrary decisions on the part of men who were out of touch with the real ities of the texts under treatment. This, however, does not necessarily follow. The fact of historical change and regional variation in the pronunciation of Hebrew, including the known existence of different written systems of vocalization, does not in itself prove that the vocalizations existing in tradition are unreliable or arbitrary in relation to the questions which are being studied in this book. Firstly, we are not concerned with achieving a phonetically accurate reproduction of the words of, let us say, the prophet Isaiah. Since the pronunciation of Hebrew has become phonetic ally different, this would be a very difficult task. Such questions, however, are quite marginal to our subject. The existence of phonetic change in time is irrelevant except in so far as it can be shown to have led in actual evidenced cases to the obscuring of 1 For a statement describing nine different Jewish regional pronunciations see Bauer and Leander, Historische Grammatik, pp. 170 ff.

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information given by linguistic elements, for example, through pro ducing a situation where one word comes to be confused with another. One might have expected that philological treatments where they involve a change in the traditional vocalization might include an argument that known historical examples of phonetic change apply to the words under treatment. Not all elements of Hebrew have been equally affected by phonetic change. If such change were a main cause of the unreliability of the vocalization, we should expect the incidence of philological treatments to be heaviest at points where phonetic change is known to have occurred and lightest at points where no substantial change has occurred. No such correla tion, however, is observable in a survey of philological treatments, nor have I seen reason to believe that scholars who produced treat ments have considered the possible importance of such a correlation. Moreover, sound changes do not operate at a constant rate on all sounds. While certain sounds in a given language may alter very greatly in a very short time, others may persist with little change over thousands of years. It is therefore wrong to expect that the undoubted fact of sound change in Hebrew will necessarily mean that the late pronunciation traditions are in a level and general manner unrepresentative of ancient practice. Moreover, a language may preserve important distinctions even though very great changes in phonetic character have taken place. A striking example is that of the stress accent in modern Greek, the position of which is to a large extent the same as that of the pitch accent in ancient Greek, even though the general pronunciation of Greek and the whole character of the accent itself have changed very greatly.1 Where philological treatments have involved a departure from the traditional vocalization, not only have they not generally given evidence of relevant phonetic change, but they are themselves mostly inconsistent with the possibility of explanation by appeal to phonetic change. One of the important aspects of phonetic change is its high relative constancy, such as is found in the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi pronunciations. Where philo logical treatments have required a change in vocalization, however, they have seldom or never implied phenomena of high constancy. Generally they have demanded the revocalization of this one parti cular word, irrespective of the effects this would have on other 1 Cf. Thumb, Handbook, p. 28.

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words employing the same patterns. For instance, it is not uncommon for scholars who find a verb pointed as (say) hiphil in the Massoretic text to rule that it should in fact be a piel. Quite possibly this kind of decision may be right. But it cannot be justified on the ground of phonetic changes general in the transmission of Hebrew pronunciation. All known forms of Hebrew pronunciation provide distinctions adequate to discriminate between piel and hiphil in normal circumstances. This is so even if the various pronunciations are very different from each other. A confusion in transmission between piel and hiphil could normally be attributed to historical phonetic shifts only on the hypothesis that these obscured the distinctions between the two sets of forms. Since, in the texts under examination, this does not appear to be so, and since adequate marking of the distinctions continues to be accepted apart from the isolated cases where the vocalization is emended, the phenomenon can hardly be attributed to general phonetic shifts. It is not easy to see how such shifts could mean that the vowels of a word somehow got picked up and redistributed, as seems to be implied when we regard the vocalization as something which the scholar can redistribute at will. For instance, at Prov. 26. 28, M T !‫ישנא ד כ י‬. ‫ל שון ״ ש ק ל‬ apparently means ‘a lying tongue hates its victims’. It has been suggested (Index, no. 91) that the last word be read ‫‘ ל כ ו י‬acquittal’ (as Aram. ‫ = ל כ א‬standard Hebr. POT). If this suggestion means that an original writing ‫ ל כ ו י‬came to be written as 1‫ל כ י‬ and was followed by a change of vocalization, then it is basically a graphic corruption and belongs to the textual rather than the philological type of treatment.1 But even then it leaves unclear how communities, in which /dikkuy/ had been read, suddenly changed over to the reading /dakkaw/. If, on the other hand, a noun pronounced /dikkuy/ came to be pronounced /dakkaw/, this is no ‘mere’ change of vocalization, but a complete shift from one word to another, which cannot be explained by phonetic drift or other change of pronunciation. Any such change would have affected also other words of the type ‫ ג לוי‬, such as ‫ צ פ ו י‬or ‫ ש ק ו י‬. In fact philological treatments have generally implied a more semantically based process of vocalization; they have suggested 1 Cf. again below, p. 218.

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that the Massoretes were governed, not by the antecedent tradition of pronunciation, but by opinions about the meaning of the text. Seeing a consonant group in the unvocalized text, they are thought to have analysed it for grammar and meaning and marked it with the points implied by the results of this analysis. If the vocalization is ‘wrong’, this is because the Massoretes identified the word wrongly and, failing to discern the meaning, attached an erroneous vocalization. There are, however, some serious difficulties in the way of this conception of the work of the Massoretes. One such difficulty is the traditionalism which appears to have inspired their work. There have, indeed, in recent years been some opinions according to which the Massoretes were rather linguistic innovators. This will be discussed shortly. But it seems better for the present to follow Bergstrasser’s view: What we know of their activity shows an obstinate clinging to the smallest details of what was transmitted to them.1 Similarly Bacher had earlier written: These signs [i.e. the vowel points] are the embodiment of the vocalic pronunciation, which the Massoretes had received in oral tradition over many generations along with the written text of the biblical books. The knowledge of the linguistic forms, handed down in the reading of the text, reaches back into times not too far distant from that in which Hebrew was still a living language.2 It is true that various schools and stages of punctuation existed. But the process is an increasingly detailed attempt to mark what was already there, rather than the making of decisions entailing a departure from it. The discussion traceable to the Massoretes is of a primarily nonsemantic nature. The Massoretic treatises known to us, such as the Ochlah we-Ochlah or the Treatise on the Shewa, are concerned with classification of phonemic and graphic differences. These are not, indeed, wholly unrelated to semantic differences. But the mode of discussion hardly leaves room for the conception that the Mas soretes first made up their minds what the text meant and then pointed it accordingly. 1 O LZ xxvii (1924) 582-6. See Kahle, Cairo Genista (2nd ed.), p. 188. 2 ZD M G xlix (1895) 13.

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The same can be said about the marginal notes, commonly called the Massorah, appended to the Hebrew Bible. These are not to any great extent of lexicographical or of semantic nature. Most commonly they are listings of writings. In these listings the obvious semantic questions—for instance homonymy—are commonly ignored. For the sense of a biblical passage the right identification of a homonym can be of obvious importance, but the Massorah gives little such guidance. There are two homonymic nouns ‫ ; מ ק ב ת‬one means ‘hammer’ and the other means ‘hole, excavation’. The latter occurs only at Isa. 51. 1, but the Massorah of the Aleppo Codex neither marks it as an unusual form nor gives any indication that it should be understood otherwise than its homonym. In the same sentence, however, the Massorah marks the phrase ‫ ר‬1‫‘ א ל ~ צ‬unto the rock’ with an annotation that this group with this writing occurs thrice, though no semantic problem is touched by this. Again, at Isa. 13. 8 the form ‫‘ ל ה ב י ס‬flames’ is marked with a note that it occurs thrice in all. The other two cases are ‫ ל ה ב י ם‬at Gen. 10. 13, I Chron. 1. 11, where the meaning is ‘Lybians’. The Massoretic note, being concerned with writings and not with meanings, makes no attempt to separate the two types.1 It is true that certain notes of semantic type may be found, but these are so occasional as to show that the exception cannot be made the rule. For instance, at Prov. 25. 14, where the word ‫נ שי אי ם‬ occurs in a sense other than the common ‘prince’, the Massora Parva of Codex B 19a gives the note ‫] ענן‬1‫‘ ל טי לי ] ל ש‬four (occurrences of) words in the sense of “cloud” ’.2 There are other places where the Massorah, using the technical term ‫‘ ל שון‬has the sense of’, provides some semantic guidance, very often in relation to unseemly expressions. Such notes, however, form so infinitesimal a proportion, in relation to the total number of Massoretic notes or in relation to the total number of places where semantic uncertainty is found, that we may suppose that they were usually prompted by some special reason; and thus these exceptions do not alter the fact that the main body of Massoretic annotations was non-semantic in nature. Hapax legomena indeed are often marked with the sign ‫( ל‬for 1 See Weil in V T S ix (1963) 276 n.; cf. Textus iii (1963) 119. 2 The other three cases are at Jer. 10. 13, 51. 16; Ps. 135. 7.

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‫‘ ל י ת‬there is none’, i.e. no other instance).1 But the identification of rare words in our lexical sense is by no means the purpose of these notes. The mark ‫ ל‬is used on graphic forms which are unique, and this has nothing intrinsically to do with the uniqueness of the word in a lexical sense. A form will be so marked even if the word is a very common one, provided that the writing is an unusual one (e.g. in respect of ‫ מ ל א‬or ‫ ר‬0 ‫ ח‬in mode of writing) or one otherwise liable to confusion. Generally, then, the Massoretic lists concern the exact writing and reading. Often the procedure is semantically indifferent, though it is important to the scribe, whose concern is with exact copying of text. Even where the lists have semantic implications, these often remain implications rather than express conclusions, and the statement expressly made by the lists is one about the pronunciation. There is a list which, under the consonantal form ‫ י ח ל‬, records the number which have the vowel patah and the number which have qames.z To us this involves the two different roots ‫ ח ל ל‬and ‫ י ח ל‬, and thus different meanings; but the form which the Massoretic annotation takes is a declaration about the variation between one vowel and another. All this makes it difficult to sustain a view of the Massoretes as men who pointed the text as they ‘understood’ it; if this had been so, one would have expected a primarily semantic sifting and cataloguing of the material. The picture of the Massoretes as interpreters who worked out, or guessed, from the consonantal text what its meaning might be and then vocalized it accordingly, has other difficulties which appear after very little thought. One of these is the fact that it is extremely difficult, in cases where a text is intrinsically obscure, to know how the Massoretes ‘understood’ it at all. If they had in fact worked out an understanding of it, and then pointed the text on this basis, one would expect it to be rather more transparent what they intended than is actually the case. The difficulty of the existing text tends at many points to suggest that the Massoretes transmitted a received text with its own difficulties, rather than iron these out into something which by their then knowledge was smooth and satisfactory. 1 Cf. Rabin, ‘Millim Bod*dot’, in Encyclopaedia Miqra'it. 2 Weil, V T S ix (1963) 280 n. Weil rightly points out that this failure to make a distinction between forms from different roots cuts entirely across our lexical approach and forms a substantial difficulty for the modem student of the Massorah.

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This is a somewhat different matter from the standardization of grammar. It is often held that the dialectal and temporal variations in ancient Hebrew have been overlaid by the fairly unitary system now represented in the pointing. Such a standardization does in fact seem to have taken place, though I think it was not the work of the Massoretes, i.e. of those who introduced the pointing, but rather was introduced in the liturgical reading tradition much earlier (which seems much more natural). It is reasonable to sup pose that this tradition introduced a more uniform and standard morphology. It would, in fact, be necessary to do so unless the readers of the Bible were endowed with phonetic, historical, and literary discriminations of a quite exceptional order. The synagogue reader could no more be expected to imitate the different Hebrew pronunciations of the Song of Deborah, the prophet Amos, and the wisdom teacher Qoheleth than the modern English reader tries to reproduce the phonetics of Shakespeare, Pope, and Scott when he reads these authors. Intelligibility would require that a levelled system should be employed. It is quite a different thing to suggest that within such a levelled system the discriminations between morphemes were arbitrarily altered by the Massoretes in order to achieve a meaning which seemed to them to be satisfactory. Thus the fact of the standardization of the grammatical system, if it is a fact, does not in itself justify the conception of an arbitrary mould ing of the text by the Massoretes on the morphemic-semantic level. One must also ask how the Massoretes, if their work involved innovations on the level of meaning, succeeded in getting these innovations accepted by the community, in view of the inertia of religious traditions and practices. Substantial changes on a seman tic level would lead immediately to exegetical and theological decisions. How could such innovations be carried through, amid the sensitivity to such questions in the contemporary controversy between Qaraites and Rabbanites ? How could the opposite party fail to point out that the reading of the text had been wilfully altered by the new traditions in the vocalization ? It should be added that the term ‘the Massoretes’ seems some times to be used in two senses, a narrower and a wider. I have used it in the narrower sense, to denote the scholarly families which worked upon the copying of the text and the provision of vocaliza tion and accents in the period of roughly a .d . 600-1000. But the term may also be used of the more general transmission of the text,

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without special and exact reference to the punctuators. When we read in the context of modern philological treatments that ‘the Massoretes failed to understand the text' this may be meant to apply not to the actual punctuators like the Ben Asher or Ben Naphtali families, but rather to the general tradition which already lay behind them and was assumed by them. If this is so, then some of the arguments I have just made do not apply in the same way. The conception that the text was misunderstood, if no longer applying to the Massoretes in the stricter sense, is not liable to the criticisms I have just advanced. The meaning may be that the misunderstanding, and the ‘correction’ of the text in order to fit a new understanding, had already taken place before the Massoretes recorded the tradition. If this is what is meant, then my arguments do not have the same effect; but neither is the problem solved thereby. For if ‘the Mas soretes’ is a term used to designate the general tradition of reading and understanding over some centuries, then the work of the actual punctuators can hardly be stigmatized with terms like ‘artificial’; for their decisions were not produced in the process of providing a punctuation but must, right or wrong, have been inherent in the tradition long before the process of punctuation began. The decisions now are no longer ‘late’, but may have taken place at any time between the formation of the original text and the fixation of the Massoretic punctuation. Only detailed research can tell us whether they had already been made by the time of the Qumran texts, or even by the time of Ezra. The difficulty of attributing to the Massoretes great initiative in semantic interpretation leads on the whole to the judgement that the source of confusion often lay early, rather than late, in the history of transmission. (4) Evidence for Pre-Massoretic Vocalization The last section discussed the general relation between the Hebrew vowels and the language as a whole, along with some relevant aspects of the work of the Massoretes. We now go on to discuss some areas in which evidence may be found for the vocaliza tion of Hebrew before the Massoretes registered it with points. The evidence is complicated, and will receive only a partial survey here. Moreover, it is not new evidence; but it has generally been used in

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the study of different problems from our present one. Our concern is not with purely phonetic or even purely grammatical differences, but with differences which have a substantial effect on meaning. My purpose is to show that certain often-quoted sources and theories do not, on examination, disprove the continuance of a tradition of vocalization long before the time of the Massoretes. Finally, the many anomalies of the Massoretic pointing itself are an argument against the idea that the vocalization was the product of an artificial process. One of the early sources of evidence is the Septuagint. The stan dard works mention with some emphasis that the text, from which this translation was made, was unvocalized. Thus Swete writes: Lastly, almost every page of the LXX yields evidence that the Hebrew text was as yet unpointed. Vocalization was in fact only tradi tional until the days of the Massorah, and the tradition which is en shrined in the Massoretic points differs, often very widely, from that which was inherited or originated by the Alexandrian translators.1 What is true of the Alexandrian translation, however, does not necessarily apply to the way in which the Hebrew text was pre served within those communities which read in Hebrew and/or Aramaic. Firstly, all the evidence indicates that knowledge of Hebrew in the Egyptian Jewish community was poor.2 Philo, their most learned man, is usually supposed not to have known any. The Egyptian synagogue did not (according to the usual view, at any rate) read the Bible in Hebrew at all, in this respect differing from the other practice in which the Hebrew text was read along with a Targum into another language. For this reason LXX renderings which would seem to imply erratic vocalizations in Hebrew do not necessarily reflect the transmission of the text where the Hebrew was read in the synagogue. Secondly, it is a possible hypothesis that the use of the then written text alone, i.e. the unpointed text, was a special feature of the work of some translators, which in this respect differed from the processes used in the transmission of the Hebrew text. These translators worked from the written text, deciphering it and pro viding a sense in Greek which seemed to correspond. It is not necessarily correct to say that they ‘vocalized’ it. Rather, given the 1 Introduction, p. 322. 2 For further comment on this see below, pp. 267 if.

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sequence of written signs, they may have selected, out of the various possibilities of meaning which were provided by that sequence, one which seemed to them, from a number of varying and sometimes competing criteria, to be good, and this they repre sented in Greek. They did not submit the text to a grammatical analysis, and for this reason we do wrong when we say, as we some times do, that they took such and such a form to be a participle, or that they supposed it to be a piel when it is really a hiphil, and the like.1 These considerations were quite foreign to their situation. Given a sequence of characters x-y-z, they may have neither vocalized this nor analysed it grammatically, but may have had in their minds a series of Greek words which might be the meanings of x-y-z, and from these they chose one. Thus the LXX were actually doing, if this suggestion is right, what common scholarly theory has depicted the Massoretes as doing: given an unpointed text, they deduced a sense and fixed that sense by their translation, just as the Massoretes are pictured as having deduced a sense and fixed it thereafter by their pointing. The difference is, however, that the Massoretes were in fact doing something quite different: they were not fixing a sense, but record ing a tradition of reading. The suggestion here advanced is consistent with the fact that the word divisions are often placed by the LXX at points which not only are different from those of the M T but also are intrinsically extremely improbable. In construing the sequence of written signs, they permitted themselves greater latitude than that which the lan guage system, as we know it, in fact allowed, both to take elements out of sequence and to vary the boundaries between one element and another. Until the Middle Ages there was no grammatical analysis which made clear the conditions under which Hebrew consonants might seem to disappear, to intrude, or to occur in peculiar positions; and, until this analysis was done, phenomena which to us seem quite regular may have seemed to justify other kinds of disregard of sequence which to us are entirely irregular. The task of perceiving and fixing a sense, forced upon the trans lator by the nature of his task, was greatly eased by this latitude in the sequence in which elements might be taken.2 In this notional 1 Cf. also below, pp. 265 f. Contrast the picture of St. Jerome, below, pp. 211 ff.: he, following the work of the later Greek translators (and the Hexapla), knew that the vocalization could not be neglected. 2 Cf. examples cited below, p. 267.

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altering of the sequence, the translators were not, like the modern textual critics who have done something similar, trying to establish the original text. They did not ‘read’ something different; they worked in such a way that, if sense could be found by what for us implies a change of sequence, then that sense would do well enough. To resume the main point, then: in some ancient translation techniques it was possible to work from a text which did not register in writing all the phonemes of the language, without this implying that no tradition of these phonemes existed. The later translations into Greek and Latin may also furnish evidence for the vocalization (a) through their renderings, which may, when due account is taken of the techniques of the same translator elsewhere, constitute evidence for a mode of reading and therefore implicitly for a vocalization (b) through their transcriptions of Hebrew words into Greek or Latin scripts. The former is illustrated at Ps. 68. 32 (Gk. 67. 32): mt

Aq.

‫כרש ת רי ץ י ד י ו ל א ל ה י ם‬ ΑΙΘίοφ δρομώσει χ^ΐρα αύτοΰ τω 06ώ

For ‘run’ (‫ רו ץ‬qal) Aquila uses τρβχβιν (δραμ,ειι‫)׳‬, e.g. Ps. 19 (18). 6, Prov. 6. 18, Qoh. 12. 6 (though in this last the sense is different). The formation Βρομούν is his characteristic coinage to represent the hiphil type. Aquila certainly did not know the form ‫ ת ר ץ‬suggested in B H 3—one of its excursions into the philological approach—but either (a) he knew the vocalization to be /taris/ as in M T (or something semantically equivalent), or (b) at least he deduced the same consequence from the graphic form. Aquila’s renderings, however, do not necessarily agree with the implication of the M T vocalization: e.g. his μβτα σου έκουσιασμοί for M T ‫נ ד ב ת‬ at Ps. n o (109). 3, or his οϊσουσιν for ‫י א תיו‬ at Ps. 68 (67). 32. While this could be ascribed to poor discrimination of vowels later clearly separated in MT, another explanation is possible: the renderings may be attributed to Aquila’s etymologizing technique. This technique, by concentrating on the consonantal shape of words, tended to depreciate the discriminatory importance of the vocalization. With these qualifications, however, and with adequate understanding of the translation techniques, the renderings of Aquila and others often support the vocalization

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of M T against any alternative grossly different in its semantic effects. Secondly, evidence may be found in the transcriptions of Hebrew in Greek or Latin scripts. Aquila can cite quite out-of-the-way words in forms close to MT, e.g. Isa. 6 0 . 13 daSaap kcll daaoovp (‫ ך ה ר ו ת א שו ר‬1‫)ר‬. The second column of the Hexapla wrote Ps. 46 (45). 1-3 as follows:1 Xapbavaaorj Aaj3vr]K0p aX aXptcod cap eXcoeip, XavoV /xacre ovo£ e£p ficrapajd vepuaa puoS aX ycv Aco vcpa ^aapLtp aaps ovfiaficoT apip, j8Aej8 tapupL.

A high proportion of vowels are very close to MT. Similarly, Jerome has many words which suggest a firm tradition of vocalization.2 The following are taken from the early chapters of Genesis: bresith (3 ‫) ר א ש י ת‬, eden (]‫) ע ד‬, meccedem (‫) מ ק ד ם‬, hissa (‫) א ש ה‬, arom (‫) ע ר ו ם‬, thardema (‫) ת ר ד מ ה‬, hatath (‫) ח ט א ת‬. Here is a complete sentence (Gen. 4. 15): m t ‫ו י א מ ר ל ו י ה ו ה ל כ ן כ ל ־ ה ר ג קי ן ש ב ע ת י ם י ק ם‬ Jerome: uaiomer 10 adonai lochen chol oreg cain sobathaim ioccamo There is, indeed, reason to inquire about the phonetic basis of some of these words (e.g. sobathaim, ioccamo); but they do not support any claim that vagaries of vocalization were such as to produce any widespread semantic confusion. Jerome has a comment on the word ‫ ל ב ר‬at Jer. 9. 21, which has often been quoted as evidence for the absence of vocalization.3 He writes: uerbum Hebraicum, quod tribus litteris scribitur ‘daleth, beth, res’— uocales enim in medio non habet—pro consequentia et legentis arbitrio si legetur ‘dabar’ ‘sermonem’ significat, si ‘deber’ ‘mortem’, si ‘dabber’ ‘loquere’. From what has already been said, we are in a position to see this remark in a wider context. Jerome’s remarks cannot be universalized into the conception that in vocalizing the consonantal text every man did that which was right in his own eyes. It is by no 1 Quoted after Swete, Introduction, p. 62. 2 On Jerome,s use and analysis of Hebrew see my articles in B JR L xlix (1966-7) 281-302 and J S S xii (1967) 1-36. 3 e.g. B. J. Roberts, Text and Versions, p. 49.

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means normal for him to offer us a choice between every possible vocalization of a consonant sequence; his normal procedure is to give a vocalized transcription without any sign of hesitation. At Jer. 9. 21 Jerome is facing a particular problem, i.e. that the earlier translators had been divided. The original LXX had missed out the word altogether, in accordance with its common tendency to abbreviate the text in Jeremiah. The Hexapla added θανάτω, which came from Theodotion. Aquila and Symmachus had λάλησον ( — MT). Thus translations already existing had provided for two of the three possibilities which Jerome enumerates.1 For this reason (and perhaps some other reason which we do not know) he mentions the possibility that the written characters can be construed in these different ways. The observation therefore does not represent either Jerome’s normal practice or that normal in his own time. We may add that Jerome may very probably have known, and been influenced in his remarks here by, the practice of the al-tiqre interpretation,2 which was certainly current in the Jewry of his time, but which, as we have seen, by no means implies any uncertainty in the tradition of vocalization. That the temptation to use for literary or homiletic effect other vocalizations which are theoretically possible and which provide attractive extra meanings or levels of meaning (which, as we have seen, is the essence of the al-tiqre interpretation) was known to Jerome, can be seen from examples like his handling of ‫ ר עי ם‬at Jer. 6. 3.3 If the word is read as reim it will mean ‘lovers’; read as roim, it will mean ‘shepherds’—satis eleganter, Jerome remarks, revealing the literary appreciation which he has of the double meaning. For in the previous verse (6. 2) Zion has been compared to a beautiful woman who attracts lovers, while now (v. 3) we hear of the gathering of shepherds for the attack on the city. Thus the alternative vocalization is a fancy which suggests an additional way in which two sides of a metaphor are linked. Jerome knew perfectly well that ‫ ר ע י ם‬meant ‘shepherds’ and was vocalized as roim\ this is fixed by the following ‫ ע ד ר י ה ם‬, and the versions, including Jerome’s own, took it so. The striking difference made by gross variations in implied 1 Cf. also Hab. 3. 5, where a similar discussion by Jerome notes the LXX λόγος for ‫ ד ב ר‬, but Aq. λοιμός,

2 See above, pp. 45 f., and below, p. 214. 3 Text in CC Series Latina, lxxiv, pp. 63 f.

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vocalization can be seen well in the Psalms, where Jerome’s own translations represent, firstly, a version remote from MT, and, secondly, one close to it. This is Ps. 102 (101). 24 f: (i) LXX αττεκρίθη αντω εν όδω ισχνός αυτόν την όλιγότητα των ημερών μον ανάγγειλόν μοι. Psalt. Gall. respondit ei in uia uirtutis suae paucitatem dierum meorum nuntia mihi. (ii) Symmachus εκάκωσεν iv όδω την Ισχνν μον εκολόβωσε τάς ημέρας μου. ερώ, ό θεός μον . . . Psalt. iuxta Hebr. adflixit in uia fortitudinem meam, adbreuiauit dies meos. dicam: deus meus. . . The Hebrew implied is: (i)

: ‫ ך ךן ד כ ה ו ק צ ר ; מ י א מ ר א ל י‬3 ‫ע נ ה‬

(ϋ) ‫ א מ ר א ל י‬: ‫ ך ךןי כ ח י ) ק ׳ כ חי( ק צ ר ; מ י‬.‫ענ ה ב‬ The vocalization implied by Symmachus and the iuxta Hebraeos is semantically equivalent with the M T and departs wholly from the approach of LXX, though the latter can be attached to exactly the same consonantal text.1 Similar remarks may be made about the Talmudic evidence. Here is Baba Bathra 21a-b, which deserves to be quoted in full, and is one of the passages commonly cited to show that vocalization signs were not yet in use:2 It is written: for Joab and all Israel remained there until he had cut off every male in Edom (I Kings 11. 16). When Joab came before David, the latter said to him: Why have you acted thus [i.e. killed only the males] ? He replied: Because it is written: Thou shalt blot out the males (‫ ) ז כ ל‬of Amalek (Deut. 25. 19). Said David: But we read, the remembrance 0/(Π!3Τ) Amalek. He replied: I was taught to say HDT. He [Joab] 1 See Gordis, Biblical Text, p. 59, who cites it as a passage where the Gallican Psalter ‘substantiates beyond the shadow of a doubt a full verse and more of our Massoretic Text and yet has not one word in common with it!’ The recon structed pointing for LXX is that of Gordis. 2 Quoted here after the Soncino version. The passage is mentioned by Roberts, Text and Versions, p. 49.

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then went to his teacher and asked: How didst thou teach me to read ? He replied : ‫ ז כ ר‬. Thereupon Joab drew his sword and threatened to kill him. Why do you do this ? asked the teacher. He replied: because it is written: Cursed be he that doeth the work of the law negligently. He said to him: Be satisfied that I am cursed. To which Joab rejoined: [It also says] Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood. According to one report, he killed him; according to another, he did not kill him. This passage not only shows that at the time no system of vowel points existed. It also shows that a reader of the biblical text was understood to receive the vocalization from a ‘teacher’, who himself in turn received it from the tradition of teachers before him. This is, after all, not entirely unlike the situation in modern English, another language in which the orthography represents the linguistic realities with at least as little precision as the representation of Hebrew in unpointed script. Children therefore learn at school the spelling and pronunciation, i.e. the socially accepted linkage between the language system and the writing system. In the situation of the Talmudic legend the reader stood within a tradition, even if more than one such tradition existed, and did not invent the vocalization for himself. This need for teaching and learning was perpetuated in Jewish usage even after the vocalization was written, because the synagogue practice is still to read from an unpointed text. Moreover, the passage shows that a pronunciation tradition agreeing with the later Massoretic marking was already in existence. The play in the legend on ‫ ז כ ר‬and ‫ ז כ ר‬is a midrashic device very similar in type to the al-tiqre interpretations; and these, as we have seen, are not evidence that the received text was not in existence or was in any way in doubt. David’s reading, characteristically, was the same as the Massoretic.1 Some discussion should now be given to Kahle’s well-known theory according to which the Massoretes made substantial innovations or restorations in the grammar of Hebrew. The three points of Kahle’s argument are the following. Firstly, for centuries before their time the laryngals or gutturals were not 1 It is slightly misleading when Roberts, p. 49, says that ‘it is significant that the argument was settled, not by resorting to textual study, but by an authoritative statement of exegesis’. More correctly, there never was any argument at all, but only a legendary story built up on the similarities and differences of two texts, with the familiar device of a change of vowels worked into a narrative form.

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pronounced; the evidence for this is found in transcriptions, state ments by Jerome and so on. The Massoretes made every guttural carry a consonantal value, followed by its own vowel. Secondly, and on the basis of similar sources, plus non-Tiberian punctuation and certain considerations of comparative philology, he held that the 2nd person pronoun suffix was /-ak/, and the Massoretes altered this to /‫־‬eka/. Thirdly, in the M T the six letters bgdkpt have a double pronunciation, but according to Kahle there is no earlier evidence of this. The double pronunciation fixed by the Massoretes ‘was earlier completely unknown to the most authoritative Jewish circles’.1 Now if Kahle was factually right in claiming that these changes were made by the Massoretes, it is conceivable that certain of them might produce or contribute to confusions and losses of important distinctions, and thus bring about the mistakes concerning the sense of a word which only a philological treatment can disentangle. These possibilities are for the present, however, no more than simple theory. In my long list of philological treatments I have not found examples which attributed the loss of understanding of the text to the specific changes upon which Kahle has laid so much weight. Conversely, we may say, philological treatment has not so far confirmed the hypothesis of Kahle by producing solutions the explanation of which would be assisted by his hypothesis. The double pronunciation of bgdkpt is not important for our present problem. The difference is non-phonemic and the two possibilities are allophonic;2 the phoneme is realized in one form or the other, determined by position. Taken alone it is not of great semantic importance. This may, indeed, be one reason why some early transcriptions ignored the matter; another reason is the defectiveness of transcriptions in the writing systems of Greek and Latin, in which the sets of possible phonemes and allophones are very different from those of Hebrew.3 Thus, though Kahle’s view that the Massoretes were linguistic innovators has had great influence, the innovations alleged by him, even if true, are not such as to prove that the vocalization is generally arbitrary, and especially so in its effect on meaning. Rather, they are a group of limited alterations which in themselves could not be 1 Cairo Genista, p. 182. 2 Morag, Vocalization Systems, p. 24 and note. 3 See my article in J S S xii (1967) 1 3 6 ‫ ־‬, especially pp. 9 1 3 ‫ ־‬.

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responsible for large-scale changes of vocalization, intended to produce a particular sense. Thus the position I have argued is not in itself affected if Kahle’s views are correct. In any case these views may be mistaken; they were disputed when they were first announced, and important arguments have recently been directed against them.1 Views of the Massoretic activity based on them must now be reconsidered. Moreover, philological considerations themselves raise certain difficulties against the conception of the Massoretes as men who, often ignorant of the older state of the Hebrew language, vocalized it to fit their own conceptions of the meaning of the text. One such consideration is offered by those philological treatments in which the word studied is pointed anomalously in relation to the normal Massoretic procedure. In such cases the existing pointing fits with and supports the philological treatments, and can hardly be regarded as a screen of normalization cast over an ignorance of the meaning. A good example is ‫ ד ע ה‬at Prov. 24. 14, which has been interpreted as meaning ‘call’ or 'seek’.2 If this was the familiar verb ‫‘ י ד ע‬know’, then the vocalization is anomalous; GK (§ 48 1) is at pains to discuss it, and has no good analogy to offer. If the verb is a ‫‘ ד ע ה‬call’ or the like, the anomaly of the form is much less. But if we accept this solution, we must also accept one of two alternatives: either that the Massoretes actually knew the right sense here, or that, though they took the word to be a form from ‫‘ י ד ע‬know’ (or simply did not analyse it semantically at all), they did not normalize its punctuation into what would be expected under their own usual procedure. A similar case is the word ‫‘ ת ל מ ה‬treachery’.3 The anomaly which made this a difficulty in the first place lay in the vocalization, which did not conform to usual M T patterns. The Accadian parallel advanced by Dossin, if right, confirms the Massoretic vocalization. If the philological explanation is right, then the Massoretes refrained from interfering with the vocalization of a word which was abnormal. In addition to the existence of anomalies among the forms of 1 See in particular the (in my opinion devastating) criticisms of Kutscher, J S S x (1965) 21-51; also, inter alia> Goshen-Gottstein in ScrH iv (1958) 117 f., and ‘The Tiberian Bible T ext’, esp. pp. 90 if. 2 Cf. above, pp. 23 if. 3 Index, no. 299. On the anomaly see Moore, Judges (ICC), p. 259; ‘an unexampled and really inconceivable type of noun’.

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M T the apparent linguistic antiquity of many such forms has to be taken into account. Wherever comparative philology succeeds in fitting data from the M T into a comparative framework which also accommodates material from other Semitic languages, this success is a testimony to the general plausibility of the tradition of M T.1 Phenomena like the waw consecutive were doubtless often marked wrongly in detail; but the general nature of the phenomenon would hardly be known to us if the Massoretes had not registered it adequately in many places, though it was something they could not possibly have known about from the contemporary linguistic environment. A vast amount of the detail in cur comparative grammars presumes and permits an affirmation of the linguistic credibility of the work of the Massoretes. (5) Conclusions The traditional philology gave little place to the antiquity of a liturgical style of reading a sacred literature such as the Bible. Much philological study has preferred to find certainty in comparative evidence, rather than in the analysis of received streams of tradition, and has been sceptical towards the tradition of reading. But modern linguistic methods have reopened the question, and striking results have been achieved by the work of Morag on the reading traditions of the Yemenite Jews.2 It is by no means true, as scholarly prejudice has often supposed, that such traditions are ‘artificial’—which would mean, presumably, the product of factors unconnected with, and irrelevant to, the original situation of the literature being read. The agreement between certain Yemenite phonetic features and elements in the Babylonian system of pointing, the fact that the Yemenites have different pronunciations for their reading of the Bible and their reading of the Mishnah, and the existence in their reading of biblical Hebrew of phones non-existent in their own Arabic vernacular, all suggest the presence of valuable historical evidence. 1 This argument is logically the same as that which Bergstrasser is said to have made when Kahle first announced his theory of an innovating activity by the Massoretes. The innovators, Bergstrasser argued, must in that case at least have read Brockelmann’s smaller comparative grammar; how else could the innovations have been reconcilable with use in a comparative reconstruction ? See Hempel in ZAW lxi (1945-8) 251; Kutscher in JSS x (1965) 43. 2 S. Morag, ‫( העברית שבפי יהודי תימן‬Jerusalem, 1963)· See review article by E. Y. Kutscher in JSS xi (1966) 217-25.

218 THE MASSORETES, VOCALIZATION A N D EM E N D A T IO N

Morag has discussed the question whether such traditions were stabilized at a time when the original language was still a living one. Such may be the case, he has suggested,1 when three conditions are fulfilled: (a) that the system used is stable and consistent in itself; (b) that it does not conform to features known in the vernacular of the time; (*:) that its structural relation to other forms of the same language group is capable of formulation in terms of historical linguistics. The growth and preservation of a liturgical reading tradition is no doubt a special case within linguistic history; but its special character by no means makes it unrelatable to the general processes of linguistic change: only the conditions for such change are peculiar. If, then, the Massoretes registered in their pointing the state of such a tradition in their own time, there is no reason to doubt that this tradition was connected with earlier stages of the Hebrew language by lines of development analogous to other known processes of linguistic change. In preference to the sharp distinction between a reliable consonantal text and an unreliable vocalization, one might rather hold that the two aspects were interdependent. For example, graphic error in the written text has sometimes been the occasion for confusions in the vocalization. I would take this to be so in the parallel texts quoted above, where Ps. 18. 11 ‫ ! י ל א‬is likely to be the right text.2 The easy graphic error 1‫( י ל א‬II Sam. 22. 11) then generates the vocalization ‫ ל ל א‬which is natural to this writing.3 This leads towards a textual rather than a philological solution; indeed, what we are saying is only what was logically implied in the traditional textual criticism. Moreover, this argument suggests that it is quite wrong to believe in a reliable consonantal text later wrongly vocalized through misunderstanding. The two are interdependent, and an erroneous writing may sometimes generate a vocalization which is suitable for that writing.4 1 In a paper given to the International Conference on Semitic Studies, Jerusalem, 1965. 2 See above, pp. 192 f. 3 Cf. similar remarks about the case of ‫ ד כ י ו‬, above, p. 202. 4 If we suppose a stage at which the /d/ and /r/ were marked by the same grapheme, then the case would be one of error in interpretation of a grapheme which had two phonemic values.

C O N C L U SIO N S

219

Sometimes we can see how analogy with another biblical passage could have caused a new but wrong vocalization. One of the most convincing philological treatments is Ginsberg’s suggestion that at Prov. 26. 23, where M T has

‫ סף סיגי ם סצסה על־?!ךש‬5 we should read rather CT31DDDD 'like glaze’, as in Ugaritic spsg, itself from Hittite or paralleled in Hittite. This gives a sense of: 'like glaze set over an earthen vessel . . .’. The close association of ‫' כ ס ף‬silver’ with ‫ סיגי ם‬in several other passages (Isa. 1. 22, Ezek. 22. 18, and above all Prov. 25. 4, just a little before our passage) may easily have suggested the reading of MT, once the original ) 0 D0 was forgotten. Even here a graphic disturbance (shift of word division) was probably included in the corruption. Where wrong readings of the text have grown up, the indications are that we should generally attribute them not to the ignorance of late Massoretes but to a much earlier stage in the tradition. The following points should be considered: (a) The earlier period (let us say, before the second century a . d .) was the time in which wide variations in the written text still existed. These are not mere scribal errors, i.e. failures to copy correctly a text already fixed in its letter. The state was a much more fluid one, with different orthographies and different ways of reading. It is comparatively easy to picture how false readings may have arisen, where, for instance, a text written in one orthography is construed as if it had been written in another; or, again, where a text previously known orally came to be written down in the conditions of varying orthographies. All this was before the selection of one text-type limited the variety which gave licence to error. We may contrast the great vagaries in the Hebrew text of Sirach, a book which presumably did not enjoy the stability accorded by this kind of official status for the text. (b) Wrong vocalizations might well arise if a work had circulation as a written document in certain narrow circles for some time before it came to be read in the wider community, i.e. as a holy text in the synagogue. Even if an esoteric group, such as a circle of prophetic disciples, had known the right reading of a text, this knowledge of theirs might fail to be passed on to the wider public; and in a more extreme case, a book might be taken up as a written document, without any mediation of a tradition of reading (must not this have

220 T H E M A SS O R E T E S, V O C A L IZ A T IO N AND E M E N D A T IO N

happened to Josiah’s Book of the Law?). Once a document had come to be generally accepted reading in the synagogue, a careful transmission of readings would begin. The absence of an efflorescence of substantial variants in the centuries from the second to the eighth or ninth confirms this. The early stage provides a far more plausible setting for confusions of vocalization than the time of the Massoretes, or even Talmudic times, where there already was a very firm tradition of reading. (c) Something would depend on the degree to which the status of ‘Scripture’ at the times concerned was deemed to imply close and exact respect for the letter of the text. Such close and exact respect, when applied at points where the text had in fact already suffered graphic error, might be the origin of forced vocalizations. (d) The testimony of the versions very often agrees with this. It is often, and rightly, observed in philological treatments that the versions like LXX, even if they understand the text wrongly, testify to the same text as M T ; and, where this text is taken to be in error, it implies that the origin of the error was early, possibly going back to several centuries B.C. To take the example of Prov. 26. 23 studied just above, the vocalization and division ‫ כ ס ף סיגי ם‬can hardly be ascribed to ‘the Massoretes’; the various versions, though otherwise differing, are clear that the word is ‘silver’. The text was already like M T in this respect, at a time the best part of a thousand years before the Massoretes. (1e) This suggestion may also help to deal with a question which may have arisen from our discussion of the vocalization. Since the pronunciation of Hebrew changed, is it not likely that the Massoretic vocalization is increasingly unreliable the older the text we are considering? Will there not be varying degrees of reliability in the vocalization, and perhaps in the text generally, between the Song of Deborah, the sayings of Jeremiah, and the Hebrew parts of Daniel? The most drastic changes probably took place quite early within the Old Testament period itself. Phonetic and grammatical change may have caused obscurity in the Song of Deborah, but such changes had probably already done their work by the time of Jeremiah. A simple progression along a time scale therefore does not at all measure correctly the degree of change. The changes in question have the character rather of quanta, discrete steps of change. To take an obvious example, it is possible that the Song of

CONCLUSIONS

221

Deborah had vocalic inflexional endings; any disorganization caused by the loss of these took place early, and probably took place in one major step. On the other hand, since some of the confusion of vocalization has arisen from the graphic form of the text, a late text like the Hebrew Daniel is not thereby necessarily particularly lacking in confusion. It is now time to sum up the issues involved in the evaluation of the Massoretic vocalization stated or implied by so many philo logical treatments. The following general estimates seem at present to be possible. Firstly, no one doubts that the traditional vocalization is subject to error and may deserve emendation by scholars under the safe guard of proper consideration of the factors involved. There is no evidence, however, that entitles us to carry this so far that we begin to regard the vocalization as entirely arbitrary or chaotic and there fore subject to alteration on no greater basis than the liking of the modern scholar. The vocalization is historical evidence just as other aspects of the text are; it has to be explained and not merely altered. In very few cases examined by me have philological treat ments given any full and adequate explanation of the vocalization. Secondly, not only is the vocalization historical evidence formed in the transmission of the text, like the consonantal or written text; but it also is a part of the text which goes back to origins long before the graphic marking of the vocalization by the Massoretes began. This does not mean that the vocalization is ‘right’. It does mean that it has to be investigated in relation to the modes of interpreta tion existing in Israel from early post-biblical times on; and only through reference to the history of these modes can we determine whether the vocalization is a natural linguistic growth from earlier stages. Thirdly, philologists in their constant appeal to the cognate languages, when it is linked with a low evaluation of the vocaliza tion of Hebrew, often fail to realize how much their own system of knowledge depends upon and draws upon the Massoretic vocaliza tion of Hebrew, both directly in that they repeatedly continue to quote it as if it were reliable, and indirectly in that the modern organizations of Hebrew grammar are themselves lineal descen dants from the earlier Hebrew grammar; and this earlier grammar succeeded in making order out of the chaos of extant Hebrew forms only because it carefully followed the Massoretic vocalization

222 T H E M A SSO R E T E S, V O C A L IZ A T IO N A N D E M E N D A T IO N as a guide. The tendency to ignore the Massoretic vocalization is a tendency to bring Hebrew into the category of languages such as Ugaritic where no intermediate tradition of pronunciation exists. But the possibility of organizing a scientific study of these languages depends, perhaps more than has been realized, upon the existence of the languages where an intermediate tradition of pronunciation does exist. All in all, of the various aspects in which one has to evaluate modern philological treatments of the Old Testament text, the position of the vocalization appears to be the most unsatisfactory. Many of the necessary preliminary studies have not been done; adequate proofs are seldom given; and the wide learning of com parative philology has often failed to give precision and care to the establishment with evidence of the position it accords to the Massoretes. In future, philological treatments will have to account for what the Massoretes did, and not simply push it aside as the product of ignorance.

IX LATE HEBREW AND THE LOSS OF VOCABULARY P h i l o l o g i c a l treatments imply that our difficulties have arisen

because words or their meanings came to be forgotten; correspond ingly, the vocabulary of Hebrew in biblical times must have been larger than has normally been recognized. In order to consider these implications, and to study the method of philological treat ments properly, we have to examine the vocabulary of post-biblical Hebrew. In such an examination there are a number of different aspects, and, since these are commonly interlinked in the discussion of any single example, I shall first mention five, and thereafter go on to give illustrations which will involve some or all of them. The aspects are the following: (i) Most obviously, the disuse of a word in late times may be the reason why its meaning ceased to be understood. If this is so, the sense has to be recovered from cognate languages precisely because within Hebrew itself it was lost from consciousness at a relatively early date. This argument is particularly persuasive, of course, in the case of those words which (a) are very rare within the Old Testament itself, or (b) occur only in very early sources within it, or (c) occur only in certain very specialized contexts within it. The situation is the same if a word, instead of ceasing to be used in later Hebrew, came to be used with a different sense. This also might explain why the older meaning came to be forgotten. In neither of its forms, however, can this argument be used without some examination of the evidence of post-biblical Hebrew. One cannot assume that disuse in late Hebrew provides an argu ment for the loss of understanding of a word unless one has first examined the resources of the post-biblical vocabulary, in order to see how far they included words similar to or related to the biblical word in question.

224

L A T E HEBR EW A N D T H E L O S S OF V O C A B U L A R Y

Our present reference works do not make this task easy for us. The dictionaries of biblical Hebrew generally make no effort to tell us about the history and currency of items after biblical times, with some exception made only for Sirach and the Qumran texts. The dictionaries of post-biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, suffer from some defects in their planning, their comprehensiveness, and their degree of scientific discrimination. The use of these reference works is in any case made more uncertain for many biblical students by their poor training and experience in post-biblical texts. These difficulties, however, do not remove, but actually increase, the importance of a proper consultation of postbiblical Hebrew for any study of the transmission of linguistic understanding. (2) Secondly, a number of philological treatments do in fact make their identification of obscure biblical words through appeal to post-biblical Hebrew, or else include post-biblical Hebrew evidence in addition to evidence from cognate languages. It may be held that a treatment which can quote post-biblical Hebrew evidence has more to be said for it than one which can quote evidence only from other languages. At least it has succeeded in showing that the word or the root in question did at some time exist in Hebrew. It is thus free, other things being equal, from the suspi cion that the word and meaning appealed to are entirely an idio syncrasy of the vocabulary of another language; and it does not require to use the doubtful principle that anything which occurs in any Semitic language may be supposed to have occurred in Hebrew. In this respect the use of post-biblical Hebrew evidence appears to be a source of strength. Against this, however, we have to weigh another consideration. If late Hebrew evidence for our word is readily available, and affords a sense which clarifies the biblical passage, it is no longer quite so easy to see how a failure in understanding took place and led to a loss of knowledge of the sense of the biblical word; thus some additional explanation may be required. Relatedness to a post-biblical Hebrew phenomenon is a kind of evidence which may work negatively as well as positively. (3) Thirdly, as we have seen, philological treatments commonly tend to enlarge the vocabulary of Hebrew, and it has been argued that the vocabulary must, for all the purposes of everyday life, have been very much larger than that which is preserved in the Bible. I

L A TE H EBREW AND T H E LO SS OF VOCABULARY

225

think that this is certainly true, but that its bearing on our present discussion has not commonly been rightly seen. The argument is that there are many objects which the Israelites had, and actions which they did, in biblical times which are not mentioned in the Bible and for which we therefore do not know the name in biblical Hebrew. Thus Driver, for example, has repeatedly emphasized that Hebrew vocabulary was larger than has previously been recognized.1 It is, he urges, mistaken ‘to consider that which is preserved in the M T sufficient even for the limited needs of daily life in ancient Palestine’.2 Albright has stated that ‘the known biblical Hebrew vocabulary cannot represent over a fifth of the total stock of North-west Semitic words used between 1400 and 400 B.C.’3 In a sense, probably no one would doubt this. The Bible is a very limited segment of all that was said in ancient Hebrew. Words have been found in our quite small Inscriptional material which were certainly normal Hebrew but which do not appear in the Bible. The ‫ א שו ח‬or ‫ א שי ח‬which appears in Moabite in the Mesha* inscription, and in later Hebrew at Sir. 50. 3, meaning ‘reservoir’, was surely normal Hebrew. The form ‫ י ם‬D at I Sam. 13.21 was not recognized, and the text was regarded as corrupt, until quite recent times, when the evidence of artefacts showed that this was the name of a weight, ‘pirn’ or the like. Nevertheless modern discoveries of extra-biblical documents earlier than the Mishnaic period should make us cautious about claiming that a very large additional vocabulary is likely quite easily to be found. Though Palestinian inscriptions, the Hebrew Sirach, and the Qumran documents have produced some new words, their number should not be exaggerated; it is in fact quite limited. Good examples from Sirach are ‫‘ ש ר ק‬shine’ (43. 9; 50. 7; cf. Arab. ’asraqa), ‫‘ ל צ ל‬observe’ (14. 22; cf. Arab, rasada) and ‫ל ק ו ת‬ ‘punishment’ (9. 4; cf. the place-name Eltekeh, which indeed implies rather a sense of ‘meet’). The Dead Sea Scrolls also show only a limited number of words of Semitic origin not found in the Bible; a good example is the phrase ‫‘ א ו ח ז י א ב ו ת‬intercessors’, known in Syriac and going back to Accadian.4 Driver himself 1 e.g. J T S xxxi (1930) 275. 2 J B L lxviii (1949) 57 f3 In Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, 2nd ed. (1962), p. 62. 4 For discussion see Wernberg-Moller, p. 53.

226

LA TE HEBREW AND T H E LO SS OF VOCABULARY

asserts only that ‘a very few’ words require explanation from other languages; he identifies among others a fll*! Vehemence’ (with Accadian cognate), a ]1‫‘ ש א‬purpose’ (cf. Arab, saa), and an ]‫ע י‬ ‘company, group’.1 Of other new words found in the Qumran documents, a number are not of Semitic origin, e.g. ‫נ ח שי ר‬, usually understood as ‘hunting, pursuit’.2 In some cases the interpretation is itself highly controversial. Anyway, it cannot be said that the discovery of fresh documentary evidence has produced a large number of words not already known in biblical vocabulary. It nevertheless remains true that we should expect some considerable number of words for things and actions not mentioned in the Bible, and the lack of such in Sirach and at Qumran could conceivably be accounted for on the ground that these documents are devoted to the same general kind of subject matter which is found in the Bible. Now post-biblical Hebrew contains a large number of just such words, i.e. names for things which are not named in biblical Hebrew. It is generally probable that the words designating such objects in the Mishnah or the Talmud are also the words which were used in biblical times, unless there is some particular reason to the contrary. Doubtless some of these words are new formations, replacing an older word of which we have no knowledge; but it remains probable that many of them are old. I have in mind such words as $ 3 3 ‘preserves’, ‫‘ ג ח ר‬jetty’, ‫‘ זו ל‬cheapness’, ‫ךת‬.‫■ ןחש‬hump’, ‫ל קן ת‬$ ‘scar’, ‫■ ש ע ה‬hour‫׳‬, 3 ‫‘ ג פ ה‬stone fence’, and ‫‘ ג ב ב ה‬rakings’. Thus, in so far as the argument for philological treatments involves the appeal to objects and actions which are not named in the Bible, we should expect it fairly frequently to point to the language of Mishnah and Talmud as a source of evidence—always providing, of course, the necessary safeguards against mistaken use of words for processes which were technologically new in the Hellenistic period, or other innovations of post-biblical times, such as new religious or political developments. Here, however, we come to another important distinction. 1 See Driver, The Judaean Scrolls, p. 435. The suggestion of ‫( עין‬or ‫) ע ץ‬ by Yalon is discussed by Wemberg-Moller, p. 59. Even among the suggestions listed by Driver, not many have found general agreement among scholars. 2 Cf. de Menasce, V T vi (1956) 213 f. Rabin, Orientalia xxxii (1963) 132 f., interprets it rather as ‘terror, panic*. 3 On this word see my Biblical Words for Time, pp. 102 if.

L A TE H EBREW AND T H E LO SS OF VOCABULARY

227

Though the point we have just made justifies us in expecting that research will make more extensive the Hebrew vocabulary known to us, this does not apply to quite any area of that vocabulary. It applies well, as we have seen, to objects for which we do not have a name in the Bible. It does not, however, apply so well to objects or actions for which we already have a name, or even two or three roughly synonymous names, in the Bible. In point of fact, in the philological treatments which I have collected, not a large propor tion refer to objects or actions for which we hitherto have not known the name. On the contrary, the larger proportion have reference to objects or actions for which names are already well known. Thus the argument that the vocabulary of ancient Hebrew must have been much larger than is known from the biblical text, while undeniable in itself and in theory, does not serve to justify a parti cularly large number of the new identifications of words which philological treatments have produced. The validity of the argu ment depends on the semantic field of the words concerned. For the semantic fields which were primarily involved in biblical litera ture (particularly religion and the human states and institutions connected with it) it is quite possible on the contrary that biblical usage exploited almost all of the lexical resources which were available. (4) Fourthly, we have the problem of detecting what I shall call ‘restorations’ in the post-biblical literature. When a word used in biblical Hebrew appears also in post-biblical material, this may mean that a continuity of general usage existed throughout both periods. It may, however, also mean that a word found in the biblical text has been taken up and renewed in later literature, on the basis not of continuity in general usage but of reference solely to the limited biblical texts where the word occurs. The word is thus one quoted, and from this quotation it enters into a new lease of life. The sense which it now has, however, is not necessarily identical with that meant by the author in the original biblical milieu. On the contrary, it may be a sense attached solely to an occurrence in the biblical text as it was later read and understood; and this text may have been affected by graphic accidents and errors of transmission which have nothing to do with the con tinuity of linguistic meaning. It may not be easy to decide in a post-biblical text whether restoration of this kind has taken place. Two criteria may be

228

LA TE HEBREW AND T H E LO SS OF VOCABULARY

helpful: firstly, literary type, and secondly, frequency of occurrence. Restorations, in the sense here intended, are most common in a highly allusive style, in which deliberate arcane reference is made to known biblical locutions. Such locutions may become technical in an esoteric current of exegesis, or may be cultivated in a learned poetic style. The Qumran hymns and books of discipline, and the type of liturgical poem called piyyut, are examples. If the stylistic setting is more conversational and straightforward, the likelihood of such restorations is somewhat lower. Frequency of occurrence is a criterion which more or less follows from the above. If a usage occurs with some frequency in the large late Jewish literature, it is on the whole less likely that an arcane reference to a particular biblical text is being made. This is not a certain criterion, for a usage might arise by restoration and then spread so as to become popular; but at least it is a consideration worth some weight. (5) A fifth consideration is the influence of Aramaic. Those Jews who, in post-biblical times, were in a position to discuss the meaning of biblical words and to relate them to current usage would generally know Aramaic as well as Hebrew. Thus, for the purpose of studying the transmission of understanding and the loss of understanding, similarities between biblical words and Jewish Aramaic words have to be taken into account in the same way as similarities between biblical and post-biblical Hebrew. A distinction should also be made between types of Aramaic which were probably current among Jews and types which were not; lexical idiosyncrasies of the latter should not usually be brought into this comparison. These then are the five general considerations which should be borne in mind. I shall now proceed to discuss some examples in which one or more can be seen in practice. I shall first of all exemplify some restorations, since of the various considerations this is the one which is most easily isolated from the others. A good example is the word ‫ ח ל כ ה‬or ‫ ח ל כ א י ם‬which occurs thrice in the difficult Ps. io.1 BDB doubted the text, but also tried an explanation of the word as related to an Arabic halaka ‘be 1 The division of the word into two parts, ‫ ח י ל כ אי ם‬, by the Qere at Ps. io. io is an example of what might begin as a graphic change but achieve an effect on later linguistic restorations, as suggested above, p. 218.

L A T E HEBREW AND T H E LO SS OF VO CA BU LARY

229

black*, and passing from there into the sense ‘unfortunate*. This is itself not a difficult semantic shift, being paralleled by ‫ ק ל ל‬for example. KB has even greater doubts, and declared the word to be ‘unexplained*. Komlos suggested that the ‫ ל‬was a formative element, and derived the word from ‫‘ ח כ ה‬hook*.1 There continues to be some doubt about the sense and etymology. Now the Qumran hymns show four examples of this word (1QH 3. 25, 26; 4. 25, 35). For the most part scholars seem to take the sense to be something near the ‘unfortunate’ of BDB, but make it perhaps a little stronger. Mansoor, on the other hand, pointing out that the parallelism at 3. 25 and 4. 35 is with ‘the wicked*, thinks that the sense is ‘wicked, tyrants*.2 Even if we can certainly work out what the word means in the scrolls, we do not thereby necessarily show that this was the sense in the Bible. At several places in the scrolls it seems likely that a particularly obscure word or phrase in the Bible is picked up and given a heavily loaded sense; and one of the reasons for this may be precisely that the word was so enigmatic in the first place. This is likely to be done by any exegetical technique which holds the very details of the Bible to contain mysterious, yet quite specific, references to incidents and persons of a later time. Meanings may have changed during the long history of use of the texts. Firstly, if it is true that certain stock parallelisms were held in common with pre-Israelite poetry, it is possible that items which are formally identical with Canaanite or Ugaritic materials may nevertheless have come to be understood and used with another sense in Hebrew. Secondly, within Hebrew itself, in texts like the Psalms which were used over a long period, it is possible that another sense has sometimes taken the place of that originally meant, and that homonyms which we can distinguish philologically may have come to contaminate the sense of one another.3 Where literature was in continual use, like the Psalms, therefore, it is an oversimplification to suppose that there is one Hebrew meaning which has to be found. Changes of meaning may have taken place not only as biblical texts came to be interpreted in post-biblical times, but 1 In J S S ii (1957) 243-6. 2 Mansoor in V T S ix (1963) 316. 3 Thus the words ‫‘ י ל ה‬throw* and ‫‘ י ל ה‬instruct’, though probably philologically distinguishable (so GB, pp. 317 £.; KB, pp. 402 f., but not BDB, p. 434b; the older tradition is to derive the latter sense from the former in the meaning of throwing or casting lots), may have come to contaminate each other in the course of time, especially through certain forms such as ‫ תו ר ה‬.

230

LA TE HEBREW AND T H E LO SS OF VOCABULARY

also within biblical times themselves, if these texts were used and re-used over a prolonged period. Another instance is the ΠΤΓΙ or ‫ חזרת‬which occurs only in Isa. 28. 15, 18. A sense of ‘agreement, contract, covenant’ is suggested by the parallelism with ‫ ב ל י ת‬and also by the evidence of most versions (LXX συνθήκας; Vulg. pactum; Targum ‫ש ל ם‬ ‘peace’; but Syriac hezwa, perhaps meant as ‘vision’, and in any case a caique on the Hebrew word). A completely different understanding is found only in the Hexaplar entry άλλος· καταφυγήν.1 Driver has provided comparative evidence which confirms this sense (ESA hdyt ‘agreement’, especially in the phrase bhdyt ‘in conformity with’). This seems greatly to surpass the attempts to explain the word, on the basis of the verb ΠΤΠ ‘see’, as some kind of prophetic advice (so BDB, p. 302b; GB, p. 221a; KB, p. 285, accepts emendation into ‫ ח ס ל‬for both cases). We may hold it very probable that the versions quoted were right. The word is then cognate with Arabic h-d- ‘be opposite’ etc., and thus also with the familiar ΠΤΠ ‘breast (of a sacrificial animal)’. This example is interesting because the meaning has survived into medieval and modern Hebrew. Curiously, however, I do not find a case quotable from the Talmudic period. Perhaps the later Hebrew use is a restoration, prompted by the parallelism with ‫ ; ב ר י ת‬but if so it is a right restoration. I am on the whole inclined, however, to consider it more likely that the tradition of meaning survived; but, if this is so, I am uncertain how to account for the lack of use in‫ ׳‬the Talmudic period. A similar case is the obscure word ‫ ת כ ו‬. This hapax legomenon occurs only at Deut. 33. 3. BDB, GB, and KB have no explanation of the meaning; B H 3 offers the choice of two colossal emendations. The sentence is: mt ‫והם תכו לרגלך‬ Vulg. et qui appropinquant pedibus eius Now Stummer has pointed out2 that in a piyyut of Yannai (sixth century a .d . ?) the verse occurs: ‫י ען תו כ ה ל ר ג ל ך ו ב צ ד ק ק ר א‬ ‫ע ל כן ל ר ג לו צ ד ק הו ק ר א‬ 1 Is this the result of taking the Hebrew word as one related to nODD, which is translated καταφυγή by LXX at Ps. 45 (46). 2, 103 (104). 18? 2 Notscher Festschrift, pp. 265 if.

LA TE HEBREW AND T H E LO SS OF VOCABULARY

231

meaning perhaps: *because he approached your foot and called in righteousness; therefore righteousness is made to meet his foot.’ This may possibly be evidence that the verb was used in a continuity of meaning from biblical times down, and may thus serve towards a recognition of its actual sense in the biblical text; it may, on the other hand, be deemed to have been a restoration.1 In that case, Yannai belongs to the same tradition which is represented by Jerome; but this would not mean that this tradition is *right’.2 Again, medieval Hebrew has a verb ‫‘ ל ה ק‬gather together’, and the noun ‫ ל ה ק‬. The prayer by Qalir for Rosh-ha-Shanah has the phrase ‫* שו אגי ם ב ל ה ק‬shouting aloud in unison’; similarly, Saadia writes ‫ ו ה מ ל ך י ק ר א נ ה ל ע ם ב ל ה ק י ם‬, it would seem likely that this is a restoration (and new formation) on the basis of the assumed sense of ‫ ל ה ק ת‬at I Sam. 19. 20.3 Two hapax legomena which are mentioned elsewhere in this book are the ‫ א ל׳ ״ ת ר ה ו‬of Isa. 44. 8 and the ‫ וינהל‬of I Sam. 7. 2.4 Both of these occur in later poetry. A piyyut published by Dr. Wallenstein includes the lines:5 ‫ו ד ב ר י ד ב רו ו ב ל י ך הו‬ ‫מ מ סי כ י ר ע ל ש ד מו ת ם‬ *And they will surely speak and not be afraid of those who pour confusion (on) their fields.’ A poem ascribed to Saadia6 includes both of our two words together, and the senses are *fear’ for ‫( ל ה ה‬here hiphil, *frighten’) and ‘follow obediently’ or the like for :‫נ ה ה‬ ‫ר אי ת ה צ ר י ל מ ח ת ה ל כ ל ־ נ ו ה י ה ם‬ ‫ ב ט ד ו ד י ה ם מי ר אי ה ם ו מ ך הי ה ם‬$ 1 For a recent discussion of the evidential value of late (medieval) poetry in textual criticism see A. Mirsky in Textus iii. 159-62. 2 Another treatment is to read as one word ‫ ו ה מ ת כו‬and construe as from ‫‘ מ כ ך‬be low’, giving the sense ‘they prostrate themselves’: so, for instance, Cross and Freedman, JB L lxvii (1948) 200 f. 3 See above, pp. 25 f. 4 See above, pp. 6f., 166, 188, and below, 264 f. 5 Wallenstein, Piyyutim, p. 26. 6 Siddur R. Saadia Gaon, p. 4 1 7 , 1. 21.

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We may translate: ‘You have fated the destruction of adversaries along with all their followers—(the destruction of) the scourge of those who dominate, frighten and terrify them.’ Both of these words, then, have to be considered as possible restorations. In order to give a full estimate of the nature and course of probable restoration, one would have to trace the development of styles in the use of vocabulary right up to the Middle Ages. Rabin writes:1 When the written use of biblical Hebrew was revived, after a long pause, in the middle ages, all stages of biblical Hebrew served equally as model, with special emphasis upon poetic and rare expressions. Rabin traces the beginning of this revival of biblical Hebrew to the ninth century. A possible test for restorations may be the following: if a word is found in both post-exilic and post-biblical sources, the chances for linguistic continuity in use are greater; if the word is found in the Bible only in very early sources, and then not again until late post-biblical times, the likelihood of a restoration is the greater. For example, ‫ ל ה ק ה‬falls within the latter type. Having exemplified the problem of restorations, we may now go on to look at other possibilities. As we have said, the disuse of a word in late times may be a reason why its meaning ceased to be understood. There are a number of ways in which this may have happened. A difficult example is the history of understanding of ‫י ש פי קו‬ at Isa. 2. 6:

: ‫_ילדי נסרים יקזפיקו‬5‫ ו‬. . . ‫כי מלאו מ?ןךם‬ The root ‫ ש פ ק‬or ‫‘ ס פ ק‬be enough’ actually occurs in the Bible (the verb in I Kings 20. io, a noun form ‫ ? צפ קו‬at Job 20. 22), and several cases are found in Sirach, there spelt 0 ‫ פ ק‬. The sense ‘have enough’ is very familiar in later Hebrew, and in Isa. 2. 6 it provides a good parallelism with the other verb ‫ מ ל א ו‬. Yet most interpreters have rather turned to the somewhat artificial 1 ScrH iv (1958) 149.

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233

interpretation as ‘strike hands’ (i.e. in a bargain), which has some support in Arabic idiom and, with limitations, in the rendering of Symmachus, quoted by Jerome as et cum filiis alienis applauserunt. Buchanan Gray,1 rejecting the sense ‘be enough’, says that ‘the use by Isaiah of a verb with such a history is not very probable’. But it is probable that the LXX understood the word as ‘be enough’ or ‘be plentiful’, in rendering: /cat τέ κ ν α πολλά α λλό φ υλα €γ€νηθη α ύ το ΐς.

The Vulgate has et pueris alienis adhaeserunt‫ י‬and this also illustrates the influence of late Hebrew. Jerome writes: pro quo scriptum est in Hebraeo, iesphicu, quod Hebraei interpretantur, έσφ ψ ώ θησαν, et nos uertimus, adhaeserunt.2 The έσφ ηνώ θ ησ α ν of the ‘Hebrew’ interpretation seems to depend on the post-biblical verb ‫‘ פ ק פ ק‬drive in a wedge’ (Jastrow, p. 1211a).3 It is not clear to me how Jerome got from this to his adhaeserunt. The sense ‘strike the hands’, already known in antiquity, came from the biblical verb ‫ ס פ ק‬or ‫ ש פ ק‬. It is interesting that the more obvious late Hebrew sense, that of ‘be enough’ or ‘have enough’, which is also the more probable sense philologically,4 nevertheless did not succeed in maintaining itself in ancient times against other interpretations, one of which also rested on post-biblical Hebrew but on a much less satisfactory basis in it. It may be something in the exegetical tradition of the passage that has caused this. In any case, it is clear that the influence of post-biblical Hebrew did not always work in the way that would seem to us most obvious. At Hos. 8. 13, m t ‫ ז ב ח י ה ב ה ב י יז ב חו‬, one suggested interpretation follows a post-biblical word ‫‘ ה ב ה ב‬singe, roast lightly’;5 the meaning would be something like ‘burnt-offerings’. At 1 ICC, Isaiah, p. 58. 2 Jerome’s iesphicu here is another vocalization, which, whatever we say about the ef is clearly in agreement grammatically with the hiphil form of M T. 3 A ‫ ש‬, where it is first radical in verbs, is sometimes taken as if it were a preformative as in shaphel forms. Cf. Isa. 41. 10 ‫ א ל״״ ת ש ת ע‬, LXX μη πλανώ— surely a construction as from the common ‫‘ ת ע ה‬go astray’. 4 This sense is supported for Isa. 2. 6 by Winton Thomas in Z A W lxxv (1963) 88 f., and also in KB, p. 928. 5 Index, no. 103; cf. earlier BDB, p. 396b; GB, p. 172b.

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L A T E H EBR EW A N D T H E L O SS OF V O C A B U L A R Y

Prov. 30. 15 a similar word could then mean ‘burn (with erotic passion)’. Yet it is doubtful if the versions show evidence of influence from the post-biblical word. Renderings with α γ α π ά ν suggest simply an analysis as from ‫ א ה ב‬, while those with φερ€ φ6ρ€ are an analysis as from the exhortation ‫ ה ב‬, ‫ ה ב ה‬. The Targum’s ‫‘ ד ב ח י ן ד מ ג ב ן מן או ני ם‬sacrifices which they collect from extortion’, and the Syriac dbJi dgbyt\l also suggest that the existence of ‫ ה ב ה ב‬did not have much influence on the understanding of the passages. Another example is the Talmudic Hebrew ‫‘ ל ב ו ד‬compact, solid’, used of the building of walls; Syriac has the corresponding verb, meaning ‘thicken, solidify’. Tur-Sinai believes that the Bible had this word. He reads Job 38. 30 as: : ‫כ א מ ן מי ם י ס ח ב א ו ו פני ת הו ם י ס ל ב ד ו‬ and translates: ‘The waters are hidden as (behind) stone, and the face of the sea sticketh together.’ He takes this to mean that there is no hole in the heavenly firmament. Since the M T is ‫ י ת ל כ ד ו‬, the explanation assumes a consonantal corruption, as also at 41. 9 (but not at Isa. 5. 8). Since, however, ‫ ל ב ו ד‬was a technical term in Talmudic law, it is a little difficult to suppose that, if it was originally present in the text, it would fall out through misunderstanding. The evidence of late Hebrew is therefore somewhat unfavourable to the interpretation. The rare word ‫‘ י ק ה ה‬obedience’ occurs only at Gen. 49. 10, Prov. 30. 17. The identification of this word is well established from comparative sources, e.g. both North and South Arabic. Late Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic on the other hand seem to show no trace of continued use. Translations such as LXX π ρ ο σ δο κία , Vulgate exspectatioy probably derive from the likeness to the common ‫‘ קו ה‬hope’ (Lam. 2. 16 προσδοκάν). The only faint association in late Hebrew is with ‫‘ ק ה ה‬faint, long for’ (Jastrow, p. 1322a). Yet the Targum with its ‫ו ל י ה י ש ת מ עו ן ע מ מ י א‬ seems to indicate that the right sense was known. The complete disuse of a word, perhaps over many centuries, does not seem to have damaged the preservation of its form and sense; even the vocalization is in a credible form, and Rashi pointed out that the 1 Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, p. 100b.

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235

formation is the same as in ‫ ש מ ח ת‬. The absence of any other obvious word with which confusion might have arisen may have assisted its preservation. We mentioned above1 the identification by Driver at Jer. 12. 9 of a word ‫‘ צ ב ו ע‬hyena’. In favour of the identification of such a word, and against the more normal construction as the passive participle of the verb ‘to dye, colour’, one or two facts can be quoted. There is not only the biblical place-name ‫ צ ב ע י ם‬, which has been construed as ‘valley of hyenas’ ;2 there is also the post-biblical noun ‫ צ ב ו ע‬, commonly taken to be a hyena, leopard, or other beast.3 Once again, however, this very fact, while it confirms the likelihood that a word ‫ צ ב ו ע‬for hyena existed in the biblical period, also makes it harder to understand how the consciousness of this meaning at Jer. 12. 9 was lost if in fact this had been the right meaning. Not only did the word ‫ צ ב ו ע‬exist, but some discussion of the attributes of this strange animal is found in the literature.4 Moreover, the translation of ‫ עי ט צ ב ו ע‬by as the philological treatment maintained. Here, however, there is a rather peculiar Qere 1‫ י ע ט‬. This word 1 On such Qumran texts see, for instance, Cross, Ancient Library of Qumran,

e.g. PP· 13345‫·־‬

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247

occurs elsewhere only in I Sam. 15. 19, where LXX has ώρμησας ‘rushed’ (upon the spoil), and 25. 14, where we have: m t ‫וי ע ט ב ה ם‬ LXX /cat ίξόκλινζν απ αυτών. V

‫—ך‬

Thus, whatever the meaning of the strange word ‫ לי ע ט‬, and whatever the origin of its occurrence as a textual variant at I Sam. 14. 32, the translation at I Sam. 25. 14 makes it extremely probable that the LXX is a translation not of the present Kethibh at 14. 32 but of the present Qere ‫ לי ע ט‬. Thus the Greek translation, contrary to first appearance, does not show any sign of knowing a Hebrew ‫‘ ע ש ה‬turn oneself, incline’, although there is a reasonable case for the identification of this word on other grounds. Driver argued that there is a word ‫ ע ל‬meaning ‘time’. Jer. 11. 12 has ‫‘ ב ע ת ר ע ת ם‬in the time of their trouble’, and, a little later, in a continuation of the same passage, 11. 14 has ‫ ב ע ל ר ע ת ם‬. Here, however, some Hebrew manuscripts read ‫ ב ע ת‬as in 11. 12, and editors commonly follow this easier reading. But, Driver points out, the LXX writes iv καιρω in both passages; the Vulgate has in tempore. Evidence can be found also at Isa. 30. 8, 64. 8, Ezek. 22.4 ,30. in this last, m t ‫ ב ע ל ה א ר ץ‬, LXX has iv καιρω της γης, a rendering which means ‘time’ though there is no doubt that Ezekiel means ‘on behalf of’. There is reason to suppose, however, that some of the evidence is the product of assimilation and other textual processes. The LXX iv καιρω at Jer. 11. 14 is probably a translation from the assimilated reading ‫ ב ע ת‬, or else an independent result of the same assimilation. At Isa. 30. 8 it is doubtful whether ‫ ע ל‬is rendered by any form of καιρός, depending on textual variations in the Greek. Most of the versional evidence, in fact, can be accounted for through assimilation to other nearby phrases, along with the influence of other words like ‫( מ ל ע ל‬frequently translated by καιρός) and Aramaic Since none of the Hebrew contexts intrinsically favour the sense ‘time’, the suggestion therefore should probably not be accepted.

‫·עוז‬

(3) The Question of the Versional Text Secondly, we have to bear in mind the history of transmission of the Greek (or other) versional text and its possibilities of corruption, which may be quite independent of the Hebrew. Here again

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T H E U S E O F E V ID E N C E F R O M T H E V E R S IO N S

there is sometimes a danger that we may overvalue a particular form of the Greek text and set upon it a confidence which lies less in its own intrinsic merit than in the attractiveness of the philological treatment which it appears to confirm. An important instance is ‫ ג ב ו ל‬, normally taken to mean ‘frontier’, at Ps. 78. 54. Arabic has the familiar jabal ‘mountain’, and gbl ‘mountain’ has been identified in Ugaritic. Now in Ps. 78. 54 ‫ ג ב ו ל‬is translated by ορος ‘mountain’: m t : ‫ ז ה ק נ ת ה י מי נ ו‬- ‫ ג ב ו ל ק ד שו ה ר‬- ‫ו י בי א ם א ל‬ LXX (77· 54) Ka'L eia^y ay ev αντο υ ς 61ς ορος α γ ιά σ μ α το ς α υ τό ν, ορος τούτο, ο έ κ τη σ α το η 8e£1a αύτοϋ.

This, not surprisingly, has been taken as evidence that ‫ג ב ו ל‬ was known to mean ‘mountain’ by the LXX. But the Greek texts may be in error. The trouble may be caused by two facts: (a) the great similarity of the two Greek words, ορος ‘mountain’ and ορος (or opiov) ‘frontier’; (2) the fact that ορος ‘mountain’ occurs (translating ‫ ) ה ל‬in the second clause, a circumstance which could easily lead to an error in transcription. Grabe therefore suggested the emendation opiov, which is accepted by Rahlfs and printed as his text. A corruption would be even more understandable if the LXX had written ορος in the first place. Though they did not usually use ορος for ‘frontier’, they may have done so here precisely because of the juxtaposition with ορος ‘mountain’ in the same verse. All other cases of ‫ ג ב ו ל‬in the Psalms are rendered by opiov.1

Thus the Greek evidence for a Hebrew ‫‘ ג ב ו ל‬mountain’ dissolves into an accident of the Greek text, caused by the remarkable similarity of the Greek words, along with the parallelism with ‘mountain’ in the text translated. We may add the absence of traces in other early versions or of survivals in later Hebrew. Even more important than the history of the text, however, is the technique of translation used by the version, which may vary substantially from book to book and even between one part of a book and another. All claims that a version either presupposes a different text or shows a different linguistic understanding of the same text have to be tested by relating them to the general methods of the version in question. The sections which follow will illustrate 1 Cf. also I Sam. 10. 2, and Wutz, Onomastica Sacrat p. 546.

T H E Q U E S T IO N O F T H E V E R S IO N A L T E X T

249

some of the methods of translation which are important for this question. (4)

Imprecise Methods of Translation

At Ps. 84. 7: : ‫ ? ל כ ר ת י ע ט ה מו ל ה‬- ‫ג ם‬ LXX /cat yap evXoyiag Scocret o vo/ioOertov mt

Rabin has suggested the presence of a Hebrew ‫‘ ע ט ה‬give’, cognate with the familiar Arabic ’a ti. But in this Psalm the translator, who is normally a fairly sober and literal worker, has by the end of v. 6 (unlike the earlier part of the Psalm) got himself thoroughly lost. He missed ]‫ מ ע י‬, which might have told him that the context was something about water; he thus fails to see that ‫ ב ר כ ו ת‬are ‘pools’, and takes them as the commoner homograph ‘blessings’. With ‫ מ ו ל ה‬the sense ‘rain’ does not occur to him, though it is not uncommon in contexts clearly watery, as at Joel 2. 23 and (with ‫ ) י ו ר ה‬at Deut. 11.14, Jer. 5. 24. He takes it as the much commoner word ‘teacher, lawgiver’. Thus it turns out that the sentence is about a lawgiver who does something to blessings. The verb is not a common one, and the translator varies his rendering according to the context. If there is a reference to clothing, he usually uses 7r6p1/3aAAecr#a6 or a similar word (LXX, 1 0 8 . 1 9 , 2 9 ), and so also, by a familiar metaphor, where the subject is shame (LXX, 7 0 . 13 ). At 89 (8 8 ). 4 6 , again of shame, he uses the metaphor not of clothing but of pouring upon. Given this degree of variability, he may well have written 866061‫ ־‬in our passage as a general rendering, which would give a passable sense, whatever the exact original metaphor might be.1 The Gallican Psalter followed the LXX with etenim benedictionem dahit legislator, but the word ‘give’ disappears as soon as Jerome consults the Hebrew and writes benedictione quoque amicietur doctor. The Syriac, with its w*p bwrkf yt'tp s'm nmws\ ‘and he also who gives the law will be wrapped in blessing’, agrees with the LXX in the interpretation of ‫ מ ו ר ה‬but not in the interpretation of the verb. This sense of ‫מ ו ר ה‬ was, of course, prominent at Qumran and elsewhere in late Hebrew. 1 On this mode of translation in the Psalms see Flashar in Z A W xxxii (1912), passim.

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T H E U S E O F E V ID E N C E F R O M T H E V E R S IO N S

It is quite improbable, therefore, that the passage is evidence of knowledge of a Hebrew word meaning ‘give’. Similar doubts are raised by the claim1 that κ α τ ο ι κ ε ΐ ν at Isa. 13. 22 is evidence of a word ‫‘ ע נ ה‬stay in a place’. This would be plausible if the Isaiah translation were a precise one, carefully rendering each word with a close equivalent. We can test this in two ways: firstly, by looking at the way in which κ α τ ο ι κ ζ ΐ ν is used in the Greek Isaiah; secondly, by looking at the verses just before and after 13. 22 in order to see how closely the translator is following his text at that point. The verb κάτοικον is used in Isaiah from time to time where it is not a close equivalent. At 9. 1 (8. 23) it is an expansion, and there is no Hebrew verb ‘dwell’. 14. 23 is much the same. At 16. 7 it is used to translate the obscure word 2.‫ א שי שי ם‬At 27. 10 it is hard to see what it is translating. At 62. 5 it is a general (rather than a close) rendering of ‫‘ ב ע ל‬live with’, where the original reference is to marriage. Clearly, the use of κ α τ ο ι κ ε ΐ ν in Isaiah does not necessarily suggest an exact equivalence to any Hebrew word. Similarly, in the immediate context of Isa. 13. 22 a number of striking divergences (e.g. ovSe μ η β ΐ σ ί λ θ ω σ ι ν els α υ τ ή ν for M T 1‫ ל א ת ש כן‬, and ο υ δ έ μ η δ ί έ λ θ ω σ ι ν α υ τ ή ν for M T ‫)]* ל א׳ ״ ל ה ל‬ will show how far the translator is from attempting any precise rendering of the Hebrew text word for word. As commonly in Isaiah, the translation includes wide divagations from an exact rendering. This is so even in words which were undoubtedly entirely familiar to the translator, such as ‫ ש כן‬. This verb, which ironically does mean κ α τ ο ι , κ ε ΐ ν , is twice given other and very imprecise renderings in the space of two verses. Words and phrases are missed out altogether, and there is a tendency to re-use a word which has just been used before, or one close to it (so elaeXdeLv, SteXdeLV, and ά ν α π α υ β σ θ α ι ) . It is unlikely that the use of κ α τ ο ί κ β ΐ ν here for Hebrew ‫ ע נ ה‬constitutes evidence of exact linguistic knowledge. Sometimes a Greek text will agree with a possible philological treatment, but will leave us uncertain whether it does so by accident or on a basis of real knowledge. At I Sam. 1. 18: m t ‫ופך?! ל ^ ־ ה י ו ־ ל ה ע ו ד‬ LXX κ α ί τ δ π ρ ό σ ω π ο ν α υ τ ή ς ο υ ovverreaev erri 1 See above, p. 243.

2 On this word cf. also below, p. 254.

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251

we may adduce the sense ‘fall’, known for ‫ הו א‬at Job 37. 6. Against this, however, we may point out: (a) Other versions do not support the LXX. (b) The Greek locution may be an assimilation to a familiar passage like Gen. 4. 6: lva

τ ί συνβπβσζν το πρόσωπόν σου;

(^) Even if ‘fair is a good gloss for Job 37. 6, it remains uncertain whether the kind of ‘falling’ used in the phrase ‘his face fell’ could be expressed with this verb. We should not be over-persuaded by the fact that we use the same English gloss ‘fall’. Senses known in Hebrew apply only to snow, and (in the noun ΓΠΠ, ‫ ) ל ו ה‬to ‘disaster, calamity’. (1d) It is one thing to find a ‫‘ הו א‬fall’ in the peculiar vocabulary of Job, another to find it in a prose section of Samuel, in which ‫ ה י ה‬in the common sense ‘be’ is very much more frequent than in the poetic sections of Job. The probability of a sense ‘fall’ for ‫ היו‬at I Sam. 1. 18 is thus somewhat below 50 per cent. (5) The Use of Favourite Words The second point requiring attention in the use of the versions is the fact that translators often have certain ‘favourite’ words. It is a stylistic feature of the Greek Psalter to use one word freely for a considerable number of different Hebrew words. Such an instance is the group κραταίωμα or κραταίωσή and the adjective κραταιός.

The word ‫ סו ל‬usually means ‘secret; private council’. The translation by κραταίωμα at Ps. 25 (24). 14 has been taken to point to a Hebrew word cognate with the Arabic siid ‘chieftaincy’. Again, we have seen how the ‫ מגני א ל ץ‬of Ps. 47 (46). 10 is translated by οι κραταιοϊ τής γής> and this has been taken as evidence related to Arabic words so as to give a sense ‘bold, insolent’.1 But κραταίωμα (κραταίωσις) is clearly a word freely used in the Greek Bible. We find it rendering 0‫‘ ל ע‬rock’ and ‫מ ע ו ז‬ ‘refuge’2 as well as ‫‘ ע ז‬strength’ and ‫‘ מ שג ב‬refuge’. The adjective 1 See above, pp. 241 f. 2 This rendering is an etymologizing one (the word is taken as from the root of ‫* עז‬strength’).

252

T H E U S E O F E V ID E N C E F R O M T H E V E R S IO N S

κραταιός is used not only for obvious words like ‫ ע ז‬and ‫ ע צו ם‬but also for ‫ ע ר י ץ‬and ‫ א ד י ר‬. An even more marked example in the Psalms is ταράσσω ‘disturb’. This word is employed in numerous contexts, where a variety of meanings is found in Hebrew. We find it translating such various words as ,‫ ע ש ש‬, 1 ‫רגז‬, ‫ ס ח ר‬, ‫ ש ח ח‬, ‫ ח מ ר‬, ‫ר ע ש‬ ‫ ל ה ט‬, ‫ נ ד ל‬, ‫ ש ל ל‬, ‫ פ ע ם‬, ‫ צ מ ת‬, ‫ ח ל ל‬, etc. Such a Greek translation can hardly be used as evidence for a philological reinterpretation of a Hebrew word. It seems rather that the idea of disturbance or non-disturbance appeals to the translator, and is used by him without concern for the way in which it obscures the difference between the Hebrew meanings in the verses translated. Evidence for a Hebrew ‫ מ י ד‬, cognate with Arabic mada (y ) ‘be violently agitated’, has been seen in Hab. 3. 6: m t ‫י מ ך ד א ר ץ‬1 ‫ע מ ד‬ LXX έσττ], καί εσαλβνθη ή γη.

This solution avoids the emendation ‫! י מ ע ד‬. But σ α λζνεσ θα ι is a favourite LXX word; Hatch and Redpath register no fewer than twenty-three different Hebrew terms rendered with it. In the Dodecapropheton it is used also for ,‫בלע‬ ‫ מוג‬, ‫ מ ס ס‬, and ‫ ר ע ל‬, and it occurs in fact only a few verses earlier, at Hab. 2. 16 ( σαΧ ςύθητι or Β ίασαλβνθητι, M T ‫ ח ע ר ל‬, presumably reading as ‫) ה ר ע ל‬. The rendering is only an assimilation to a probable sense of the context and to the thought of passages like Ps. 18. 8,46. 4, 68. 9, Nah. 1. 5; it is no sign of special linguistic knowledge. To put it in another way, the ‘shaking’ of the earth can be treated as a stereotype of prophetic thought. The same is true of the idea of ‘making firm’ the creation, as at Isa. 51.6: ‫כ י ־ ש מ י ם כ ע שן ג מ ל ה ו‬ ‫״‬ ‫י‬ ‫י ו‬ //‫ר‬ L a a οτι ο* ουρανος ως καττνος 6στ€ρ€ωαη.

τ ν V

The Greek verb is not a clue to good linguistic knowledge of the sense of ‫ ; מ ל ח‬it is a stereotype of creation, found of ‘heaven’ at Ps. 33 (32). 6 (‫) ע ש ה‬, Isa. 45.12 ( ‫)נ ט ה‬, 48.13 ( ‫) ט פ ח‬, and of ‘earth’ at Isa. 42. 5, 44. 24 (‫) ר ק ע‬. The Targum, which construes Isa. 1 This is of interest for the equivalence ώς ταραχή = ‫ כ ע ש‬at Hos. 5. 12; cf. above, pp. 144, 243 f., and below, p. 279. Cf. also Index, no. 130.

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253

51. 6 of the passing away of the heaven like smoke, is following a different stereotype. Dahood, arguing that the verb formation with infixed /-t-/ remained alive through the biblical period, cites the translation of VIS *Vllpil by άπέστρβψβν τό ττρόσωττον αντοϋ and auertit faciern suam.1 The form was thus taken by the translators to be from ‫‘ סו ר‬turn away’. Even a brief study of the contexts shows, however, that this must have been a stylistic preference in Greek, and has nothing to do with the original Hebrew verb formation. Ά ποστρίφζιν is a favourite LXX verb. The translation of ‫ ה ס תי ר‬with it occurs almost only where the object is ‘face’. (If we exclude cases where there is no LXX rendering, as sometimes in Job, there are forty-five cases where the object of 0‫ ת ר‬is not ‘face’, and forty-three of these are rendered with ‘hide, shelter’, etc., i.e. κρύπτω , αποκρύπτω , or σκβπάζω; the only partial exceptions are Isa. 57. 17, Ps. 89. 47.) The Vulgate, cited by Dahood, is not independent evidence, for this is the Galilean Psalter, translated from the LXX and therefore naturally agreeing with it. Where Jerome translated from the Hebrew, i.e. outside the Psalter, the rendering is almost always ‘hide’, and in the Psalter iuxta Hebraeos Jerome with complete regularity corrected from auerto with ‘face’ as object to abscondo. The ‘hiding’ of the face is a quite genuine and an important aspect of Hebrew religious idiom. Dahood’s interpretation destroys this, and his citation of the LXX is not evidence in favour of his interpretation, but only shows that they too, through some stylistic or theological preference, had lost, or were unable to reproduce, this insight. (6) Etymologizing Etymologizing is the procedure of interpreting a word by refer ence to the meaning of another (usually a better-known) Hebrew word which had a similarity to it and could, in more modern terminology, be taken as its root; or a word may be analysed into separate units from which it is taken to have been made up. More extreme still, a translator may strive, as Aquila sometimes did, to represent words of common root in Hebrew with words of common root in Greek. Though the etymologizing tendency is stronger in 1 Dahood, Psalms, i. 64.

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the later Greek translators, it appears sporadically also in the LXX. Isa. 16. 7 has a rare word ‫ ; א שי שי ם‬Driver has argued that it means ‘luxurious dwellers’, after Arabic ‫י‬atta ‘be luxuriant, luxurious; live comfortably’. Whether this is so or not, it is not supported by the tols ev^paivopuzvoLs of Symmachus; this is an etymologizing guess from the similarity to the familiar ‫ שיש‬hejoice’, so translated by him at Jer. 32 (39). 41, cf. L X X atIsa.61.10. Etymologizing is also the probable explanation for the rendering of ‫ ל א מ י ם‬by apxovres at Gen. 27. 29, Isa. 34. 1, 41. 1, 43. 4, 9, and by /SacrtAefs’ at Isa. 51. 4. At first sight, the frequency makes this identification very impressive. Driver writes: ‘One cannot deny this sense, so frequently attested’; but he holds that this sense is never right at the places where the LXX find it; it is actually found at Ps. 148. 11, 7. 8. The former reads: : ‫מ ל כ י ־ א ר ץ ו כ ל ־ ל א מ י ם ש רי ם ו כ ל ־ ש פ ט י א ר ץ‬ and would then mean: ‘The kings of the earth and all rulers; ministers, and all the judges of the earth.’ The familiar sense ‘peoples’ seems at first sight to fit less well into the sequence. Ps. 7. 8 is a less clear case; an ‘assembly of nations’ is more likely to surround one than an ‘assembly of rulers’, and in 7. 9 the Lord judges ‘nations’ (1.(‫ע מ י ם‬ In later Hebrew ‫ ל א ם‬was little used, and ‫ א מ ה‬was becoming more frequent. It is unlikely that the sense ‘nation’ came to be unknown, though it is possible that, when even this sense became infrequent, very occasional other senses (viz. that of ‘ruler’ in this case) came to be forgotten. Even in the biblical period ‫ ל א ם‬was a somewhat traditional word. It was mainly used in the plural, was almost entirely poetical, and in parallelisms is almost always a ‘Bword’, i.e. a word taking second position in a parallel pair.2 That the LXX rendering is the result of etymologization can be seen from the ] ‫ ל א שי א ל מי‬which is a Targum of the tribal name ‫ ל א מ י ם‬at Gen. 25. 3.3 The word was analysed as ‫ ל‬+ ‫ א מ ה‬. 1 Cf. above, pp. 133, 172. 2 See Boling in J S S v (i960) 221-55, and especially p. 233. In the Psalms Boling found only one exception out of nine occurrences. 3 See Gen. R. ad loc. The same is the reading of the Neofiti text.

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Jerome knew the same interpretation: Laomim uero φυλάρχους, id est principes multarum tribuum atque populorum.1 The rendering in LXX and Targum is probably affected also by stock parallelisms. All instances have ‫ ל א מ י ם‬as the B-word; the A‫־‬word is usually ‘nations’ or the like, once ‘man’ (Isa. 43. 4). The Targum has ]‫‘ מ ל כ ו‬kingdoms’ at Gen. 27. 29, and similarly at Isa. 34. 1, 41. 1, 43. 4, 43. 9; the tendency to produce a parallelism of nations/kingdoms can be seen at 43. 4, where ‫ א ד ם‬is rendered by ‫ ע מ מ י א‬. The rendering of ‫ ל א ם‬as ‘ruler’ never occurs in an independent sentence where the point would be substantially different if the sense were ‘ruler’ rather than ‘people’. Further arguments against this identification of ‘ruler’ are: (a) This development is surely peculiar to Accadian, and even there the sense is not ‘ruler’ generally, but refers to the eponym of the year. The institutions are entirely Mesopotamian. In the Ugaritic phrase ybmt Vimm, the second word is usually taken to be ‘peoples’, rather than ‘rulers’ as Driver would have it. (b) Even at Ps. 148. 11 in the Hebrew itself it is questionable whether the sense ‘rulers’ fits better. It would certainly do so if it were clear that lists of four items in a context of this type must always be homogeneous in order to give good sense. But the list may be one in which the liking for homogeneity is interfered with by the liking for supplementary parallelism, producing the very common parallelism of ‘kings’ and ‘peoples’.2 The verse then returns to continue the list of types of rulers. The pattern can be described as A-B-A-A.3 This sense is not in any way a poor one. Since the sense ‘peoples’ for ‫ ל א מ י ם‬was a very familiar one, there was no strain in passing from ‘kings’ to it and then back to other words for rulers. These considerations reduce the degree of difficulty in the accepted sense ‘peoples’, and thus reduce the original basis for the philological treatment. (7) Free Rewriting The fourth procedure on the part of the translators is that of very general paraphrasing. The rendering is a free rewriting of the passage, producing a sentiment which is really the translator’s 1 Hebr. Quaest. in Gen., ad 25. 3. 2 Cf. Ps. 72. II (with 135 ;(‫גולם‬. IO (with ‫ גולם‬first). 3 Cf. Exod. 4. 11: dumb/deaf/clear-sighted/blind = a-a- b -a ; Isa. 2. 12 (see below, pp. 280 f.): high/lofty/uplifted/low = a‫־‬a‫־‬a‫־‬b .

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idea, connected here and there with the words of the original. This applies particularly to books like Proverbs and Job. These are books which contain many textual-philological difficulties and which for this reason have produced large numbers of philological treatments. They are also books in which the translators felt free to handle the text very loosely.1 Painfully exact renderings may be succeeded in the next verse by examples of extreme freedom and complete rewriting. Driver, arguing the existence of a Hebrew ‫ ז ר‬meaning ‘enemy’, says that the use of exdpos to render ‫ ז ר‬in one passage where it is clearly wrong (Prov. 6. 1) proves its currency. The texts are: mt

‫מ י א ם ־ ע ר ל ת ל ר ע ף תקן^ת ל ז ר כ ? ך ף‬

f ‫יי ׳‬ ‫י‬ / LXA VL€y eav eyyvrjdrj

‫־‬w

7rapaSa)G€Ls orjv

\ / /\ gov (piAov,

xefpa ixdpcp.

Now the correspondence of one word to another is not decisive here; for the translator, while he has related himself to the text before him, has made quite a different thought out of it. In the original the whole verse is a conditional clause, stated in two parallel forms; the sequel does not come till the next verse. The sense is: ‘My son, if you have become surety for your neighbour, or shaken hands in pledge for a stranger . . .’ The Greek rendering is: ‘My son, if you pledge your friend, you will give over your hand to an enemy.’ Here the thought is already complete within the verse. Since he has seen the two parts of the sentence as a contrast, the translator has made it natural to see the ‫ ז ר‬of the second part as part of the total contrast in terms of friendship and enmity. The interpretation as ‘enemy’ may be no more than part of this understanding. It is doubtful whether it suggests any intrinsic linguistic knowledge that ‫ ז ר‬could mean ‘enemy’, and so it does not provide strong evidence for the identification of a ‫ ז ר‬meaning ‘enemy’ elsewhere. To say this is not to deny this identification, for which there is quite a good case on other grounds. But it does mean that we 1 On these books see G. Gerleman, Studies in the Septuagint (Lund, 1946 and 1956).

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257

cannot accept the simple equivalences of Hebrew and Greek words, as registered for instance in Hatch and Redpath, as evidence for new linguistic identifications without considering the way in which the whole context is handled by the translator. Moreover, {a) it was possible for the translator just to take ‘strange’ as equivalent to ‘enemy’ or ‘evil’ on quite non-linguistic grounds, as he does with the ‘strange woman’ of Prov. 5. 3 (Gk. φ α ύλη ywanci, πόρνη ); (b) he may have been influenced by ‫‘ צ ר‬enemy’. The wide separation between the ideas of the Hebrew text and those of the Greek rendering can be seen at Prov. 17. 14: m t

: ‫ ג ל ע ה רי ב גטו ש‬1‫פ ו ט ר מי ם ר א שי ת מ ד ו ן ו ל פ נ י ךזן‬ ‘The start of strife is one who lets out water; so let go before a dispute breaks out.’

LXX εξουσίαν δίδω σιν λόγους ά ρ χη δικαιοσύνης π ρ ο η γ ε ίτ α ι δε τ η ς ένδειας σ τά σ ις κ α ι μ ά χ η .

‘The beginning of righteousness gives authority to words; but quarrelsomeness and fighting lead to poverty.’ The rendering σ τά σ ις κ α ι μ ά χ η does not help to identify a Hebrew ‫ ש‬1‫‘ נ ט‬clash of battle’. The translator has produced an admirable Hellenistic-Jewish sentiment of his own, which has occasional contacts with elements in the Hebrew, e.g. δικαιοσύνη for ]‫ מ ל ל‬, taken as from ]‫‘ ל י‬justice’, and ‫ ה ת ג ל ע‬, construed in the sense of ‘litigation’ (Jastrow, p. 250b). If such a word ‫ נ טו ש‬is to be discovered, a better basis lies in the ‫ ו ת ט ש ה מ ל ח מ ה‬of I Sam. 4. 2; but here no support can be found in the Greek. In books where the translation is of free or paraphrastic type, such as Proverbs, quite a large proportion of the evidence is affected by this argument. A few more examples may be of interest. At Prov. 23. 31: m t

: ‫ י י ן כי י ת א ד ם‬. ‫א ל ־ ת ך א‬

LXX μ η μ εθ ύ σ κ εσ θ ε οϊνω the Greek is not really evidence in favour of the identification of a verb ‫‘ ר ו ה — ל א ה‬drink’, whatever evidence there may be for this from other sources; and Driver is over-literal in saying that ‘there

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is no harm in looking on wine, whatever its colour be’.1 The Greek version removed the subtlety of the Hebrew idiom, cutting out the indirectness of ‘looking at’ wine and going straight for the absolute moral issue of drunkenness. It is no evidence of linguistic knowledge. A substantially stronger case, in my opinion, can be made for the identification of a verb ‫‘ ח ק ל‬despise’ at Prov. 28. 11; m t

: ‫ח כ ם ? עיניו אי ש ע שי ר ו ד ל מ בין בסיקךבזי‬

LXX σοφός π α ρ ’ έα υτω άνηρ πλούσ ιος, πόνης δέ νοημω ν κ α τα γν ώ σ ζ τα ι αυτού

Here Targum and Peshitta have renderings such as bsr Ih, giving also the sense ‘despise’, though the Vulgate with its pauper autem prudens scrutabitur eum does not support them; and with Jerome there stand Aquila and Theodotion whose όξιχνιά σ ει follows the more normally recognized sense of this verb. It is not easy to maintain that the LXX reached their rendering at 28. 11 by mere guesswork from the context, and the philological suggestion (by Winton Thomas), while hardly absolutely certain, is well worth consideration. The ‫ ח ק לי ״ ״ ל ב‬of Judges 5.16 might then be thought of as ‘scornings of the heart’, which in the context would be a good sense. Another example occurs at Prov. 25. 27, but there the LXX is very remote from the Hebrew and probably offers no guidancec Finally we may mention, for the sake of its intrinsic interest, the peculiar rendering of ‫‘ ב א ל ץ‬in the land’ as μ ό λ ις ‘scarcely’ at Prov. 11. 31: m t

: ‫סן צ ד י ק ב א ך ץ י ש ל ם א ף כ י ־ ר ש ע ו חו ט א‬

L X X et ο μβν δίκ α ιος μ ό λ ις σ ώ ζετα ι, ο άσββης κ α ι α μ α ρ τω λ ό ς 7του φ α ν ^ΐτα ι;

Driver may be right in attaching this to the influence of the Samaritan word cited by him as ‫‘ א ל ץ‬compel, coerce’. The Peshitta agrees with the LXX in this rendering (ImaJuen). 1 See also Driver’s recent intricate restatement of his interpretation in J S S ix (1964) 348 f. Whatever one thinks of the argument from the physics of wine in a cup, the LXX is not relevant evidence. The translators felt, just as Driver now argues, that drinking (or, rather, becoming drunk) is what matters, and they short-circuited the whole suggestive imagery of the verse.

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259

These then show the variety which is to be found in the transla tion technique of books like Proverbs. As has been said, however, only very few of the examples sustain the weight of use as linguistic evidence in a philological treatment of the Hebrew. (8) Additional Points in the Use of the Versions Firstly, it is on the whole a support to a philological treatment if it rests on evidence from more than one version, or from versions in several languages. Take the instance of ‫ ד מ י‬, which has been identified as meaning ‘hair (Driver, KB). The text for this is isa. 3 8 .1 0 : ‫ ב ד מ י ; י מ י אלכה‬. LXX with its iv τω ϋφζί seems to have taken this as ‫ ב ר ו ם‬or ‫ ב ר מ י‬. But among the other Greek translations (though not Aquila, Symmachus, or Theodotion, who took the word to mean ‘weakness’ or ‘silence’) we have the annotation ol erepor iv ήμίσβι των ήμβρών μου, and this is supported by Peshitta bplgwt, Vulgate in dimidio. The argument that ‫ ל מ י‬could mean half is supported by the analogy of Accadian mislu; the half is that which is ‘like’ the other half (is this convincing semantically?). Ezek. 1. 13 has the phrase iv μέσω where the Hebrew has ΙΥβΎΙ, and Driver argues: If there had been no such word as ‫ ד מ י‬or ‫ ת‬1‫‘ ד מ‬half, it would have been impossible for them so to translate 1‫ ו‬1‫ ד מ‬in a passage where the context did not suggest that meaning. The claim that it would be ‘impossible’ to suggest a different explanation is certainly too strong; assimilation is not unlikely. Nevertheless the agreement of versions in several languages does appear to strengthen materially the case for this interpretation at Isa. 38. 10, and Driver may very well be right in his identification. While, as I have said, it is on the whole a support to a philological treatment if it rests on evidence from several versions rather than one version, this is not true without some qualification and reservation. Firstly, there is the possibility of interdependence between versions in different languages: the LXX may, for instance, at places be influenced by an Aramaic Targum, while Peshitta and Vulgate may have followed the guidance of LXX. Secondly, even where one version has not been influenced by another, there remains a possibility that several versions have alike been guided by the same tradition of Jewish interpretation.

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In spite of this qualification, it still remains generally true that the agreement of several versions in the interpretation of a Hebrew word is a sign of some positive value, and that where only one version can be quoted the chances of some idiosyncratic or accidental element in interpretation are the higher. The evidence of the versions can also be related to our knowledge of late Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic. A particularly interesting case is that of ‫ ח ל ק‬. Many scholars, struggling with the difficult phrase of Amos 7.4, m t ‫ ו א כ ל ה א ת ־ ה ח ל ק‬, must have thought of the common Arabic halaqa ‘create’ and wondered if the sense might be: 'It (i.e. the great fire) was eating up the creation’. This was one of the first philological suggestions to occur to my own mind when I first learned Arabic; later I found it also in the work of scholars like Montgomery. I certainly did not wish to abandon so promising a lead. Such a verb ‫ חלק‬appears to occur in the Hebrew of Sirach, where the Greek has κτίζω (about six cases). The same sense ‘create’ might also be applied to Job 38. 24: m t : ‫אי ־ז ה ה ך ר ך י ח ל ק או ר‬ which could then mean something like: 'What is the way to where light is created ?’ The suggestion is at first sight an extremely attractive one; yet important questions remain. Even if the late Hebrew of Sirach had ‫‘ חלק‬create’, how did this insight not penetrate any of the versions at Amos 7. 4?1 Does the fact that Sirach had this verb ‘create’ suffice to show that the Old Testament had a noun ‫ ח ל ק‬meaning ‘creatures, creation’ ? No such noun is found in Sirach. Moreover, ‫ ח ל ק‬in the Hebrew Sirach does not anywhere quite clearly cover the field of cosmic creation and thus coincide with the familiar ‫ ב ר א‬. The objects of the verb (or, if niphal, subjects) are in no case the familiar cosmic terms like ‘heaven’ or ‘earth’. At 7. 15 the object is work, ‫ צבא מלאכה ועבדה‬, LXX γεω ρ γία . At 34. 13 the reference is to the evil eye; LXX (numbered 31. 13) πονηρότερον οφθαλμού τ ί εκ τισ τα ι; At 34· 27 the subject is wine; LXX 1 I do not imply that there is any intrinsic impossibility in the knowing of a word by Sirach and his translator which was unknown to the translator of the Minor Prophets. The question is still a valid one.

A D D IT IO N A L P O IN T S IN T H E U SE O F T H E V E R S IO N S 261

(31. 27) κ α ί α υ τό ς € κ τισ τα ι elg €νφροσννην ανθρώπους. At 38. I it is the doctor and his work. At 39. 25 it is ‘good things’, Ü11D; LXX α γα θ ά τ ο ΐς ά γα θ ο ΐς ε κ τ ισ τ α ι άττ α ρ χής. At 40. I it is labour, ‫ עסק גדול‬, Greek α σ χ ο λία μ β γά λ η . At 44· 2 it *s honour, ‫כבוד‬, Greek 8όξα. The sense is always derivable from the familiar biblical sense of ‫‘ חלק‬allot, distribute, provide’. The range of meaning is not such that it can be extended with probability to the Amos passage. There is some proximity to a reference which could verge on creation, but the actual function of the word in Sirach is not ‘create’. It is thus unlikely that we can conclude to a noun ‫ח ל ק‬ meaning ‘creation’ as early as Amos, or, indeed, in Sirach himself. The noun actually found, i.e. ‫ מ ח ל ק ת‬, seems to have a sense close to ‘allotment’.1 Thus after all the Hebrew Sirach does not give clear evidence of a word ‫‘ ח ל ק‬create’; and this negative view is supported by the absence of such a word from other post-biblical Hebrew sources. It may be thought that, even in passages where the Hebrew is lacking, the Greek κ τίζ ω nevertheless suggests a sense which is strictly that of ‘create’. But this in turn depends on the sense of the Greek word. Though it is used with a clear reference to cosmic creation, it is also well documented with a sense like ‘make (somebody so and so, e.g., free)’, and generally ‘bring about (such and such a state)’. The Greek Sirach seems to use κ τίζ ω in both ways. The full sense ‘create’ is clear in passages like 17. 1, κύριος €κτισ€ν €κ γ η ς άνθρω πον and several others; but, from the evidence of the Hebrew fragments so far known, we may suspect that the Hebrew was ‫ ברא‬or ‫יצר‬, or at any rate not ‫ חל ק‬. The word is clearly a favourite one of the Greek Sirach, which has about twenty-three cases, as against about forty in all the rest of the Greek Old Testament. If we take the nouns for ‘creation’, i.e. κ τ ίσ ις and κ τ ί σ μ a, where these can be set clearly against the Hebrew fragments, the Hebrew words are ‫ ב ל י ה‬and ‫ מ ע ש ה‬. Thus the Greek evidence also does not vindicate the sense ‘create’ for ‫ ח ל ק‬. The suggestion ‘creation’ for Amos 7. 4 has to rest on its own merits in the context of Amos, and not on the Hebrew or Greek evidence in Sirach. 1 Smend, p. 68, gives Verteilung as the sense; at 42. 3 the Greek for this noun is δοσυ; 41. 21 is not very clear. Our view has the support of Nöldeke in Z A W xx (1900) 85 f., who argues that the sense in Sirach shows at most a transitional meaning on the way that led to the Arabic sense ‘create’.

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If we can show that the rendering of a version reflects late Hebrew or Jewish Aramaic usage, this does not necessarily increase its evidential value. For the discovery of the original sense of a biblical passage it may be a point either of strength or of weakness. It may be a point of strength in that a late Hebrew usage may in fact have existed in biblical times. It may be a point of weakness in that the late usage may have displaced understanding of the biblical usage. A verb to which some mystery attaches is ‫ ל ג ל‬. Ps. 20. 6 has 1!!‫ ו נ ת ל‬1‫ ש ם ~ א ל ה י‬. Symmachus here translates: τ ά γ μ α τ α τ ά γ μ α τ α Β ίαστελοΰμεν. I would take this to mean ‘we shall divide into separate companies’, and this is surely related to the use of ‫ ל ג ל‬now known from the War Scroll. The Targumic ‘set soldiers in order’ agrees in general with this. It is not quite correct to say that the AV ‘set up banners’ goes back to these translations;1 rather, it goes back to an interpretation on the basis of the meaning ‘flag’ for ‫ ; ד ג ל‬τ ά γ μ α is a standard and frequent LXX rendering for ‫ ל ג ל‬. I think it likely that the philological interpretation of ‫ נ ל ג ל‬as ‘wait upon’ (related to Accadian dagalu ‘wait for, look for, regard’) or something similar is right; but the versions do not in fact provide support for it and do not suggest that any ancient translator knew of this meaning. LXX with its μ €γα λννθ ήσ ομ€θ α tried to render as if the consonants wereg-d-l; the Vulgate followed with magnificabimur. Jerome in thtiuxta Hebraeos wrote ducemus choros, which is taking them as if they were d-l-g. All this gives the impression that no one really knew the meaning. (9) Uncertainty about the Meaning of the Version Another point which should not be left out of consideration is that the meaning of a Greek text is not always clear and unam biguous. We should not suppose that, where a Hebrew text is obscure and uncertain, the consideration of a Greek rendering necessarily brings us out into the clear light of certainty. In Lam. 4. 15 we read: m t : « ?T r n ‫־־‬n x Ti O LXX ό τι άνήφθησαν κ α ί ye εσαλβυθησαν 1 Driver in H T R xxix (1936) 174 f.

UN CERTA IN TY ABOUT TH E M EANING OF TH E VERSION 263

This has been taken as evidence for a Hebrew verb cognate with the Arabic nasa ‘be joined’ (cf. Freytag, iv. 290, V ‘coniunctus fu it\) Does ά νάπτβ σθαι, however, in this text mean ‘be joined, touch, be attached’ ? In the LXX this is the usual sense of the simple verb ά π τβ σ θ α ι (most commonly translating ‫) נ ג ע‬. In close proximity to our verse, in 4. 14 and 4. 15, ηψ αντο βνδνμάτω ν α υτώ ν and ά π ό σ τ η τ ς μ ή απτ€σθ6 are both clear cases of a sense ‘touch’. But the compound άνάπτ€σθα ί means not ‘touch’ but ‘kindle’ or ‘light’, whether this is the exact sense of the Hebrew (commonly ‫ ) י צ ת‬or only its more general sense (e.g. ‫ י צ א‬with fire as subject). In twenty-four cases listed by Hatch and Redpath I think there is no exception, and two are in Lamentations itself (2. 3, 4. 11), the latter only a few lines earlier. The Greek sense, then, is not ‘be joined’. The sense is: ‘do not touch them (i.e. the impure); for they are set on fire, they are shaken . . .’. The translator construed the word (a) as from ‫‘ י צ ת‬kindle’, or (b) as from ‫‘ י צ א‬burst out’ (of fire), or (c)—in my opinion most likely—as from the root of ‫ני צו ץ‬ ‘spark’ and ‫‘ נ צנ ץ‬be kindled’, found in the Midrash in 1 1 ‫נצה ב‬ ‫‘ ר ו ח ה ק ד ש‬the Spirit of holiness was kindled in him’.1 Even within a familiar version like the LXX, then, the determination of the meanings of Greek words is not a simple m atter; and at times the Greek support for a philological treatment has rested on a doubtful or erroneous understanding of the Greek. This difficulty is even greater when highly special and artificial techniques of translation are used, as is most obvious with Aquila. Some of his words are hapax legomena, special coinages not used elsewhere in Greek; and some, though formally extant elsewhere in Greek, have in Aquila’s work special senses intelligible only as renderings of Hebrew and thus different from normal meanings in Greek. A word in an ancient translation, then, cannot be taken at its face value. Similar difficulties may arise in the Aramaic and Syriac versions, which may at times attempt to imitate the form of the Hebrew original. Sometimes this can produce very difficult problems of meaning. This is particularly so if a word is not found, or is very rare, in Aramaic apart from the Targum itself. If the root is the same as 1 Cant. R. 1. 12; Jastrow, p. 929b.

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that of the Hebrew word translated, and if the Hebrew word itself is of uncertain meaning, there are two opposite possibilities: (a) the Targum may simply have produced a caique of the Hebrew word; (b) the Targumic rendering may be evidence which provides a right comparative philological lead to the sense of the Hebrew. Thus at I Sam. 7. 2, m t

: ‫רעהו כ ל ־ ב י ת י ש ר א ל א ח ר י י הו ה‬

the verb ‫ רנ הו‬has often been suspected and emended. The Targum has ‫ו א תנ הי או כ ל בי ת י ש ר א ל ב ת ר פ ל ח נ א דיוי‬ The opinion of S. R. Driver1 was that the Targumic word was itself based on the Hebrew, i.e. my possibility (a) above. This might fit I Sam. 12. 14, where the same Aramaic renders. .. DjTPill ‫ א ח ל‬. But it is still not clear what the Aramaic word means. One tradition has it to mean ‘be gathered’,2 (cf. the use to translate ‫ ונ קוו‬at Jer. 3. 17); another has it to mean ‘follow eagerly’,3 and cf. Stenning’s ‘by our devotion to his words’ for ‫ב ד נ ת נ ה י ל פ ת ג מ ו ה י‬ at Isa. 53. 5. The view that the Aramaic word is chosen because it translates a similar Hebrew word is plausible at I Sam. 7. 2 and 12.14, but does not explain the other passages, such as Jer. 3.17, 30. 21 (MT ‫)!עג ש‬, 31. 22 (remote from Heb.), 33. 13, Isa. 53. 5 (remote from Heb.), Hos. 2. 17 (MT ‫) ו ע נ ת ה‬, etc. Thus even if the Aramaic word received some kind of start in use as a rendering for Hebrew ‫נ ה ה‬ or like forms, it seems to have gone beyond this and to have gained a currency of its own. I do not find examples in Aramaic outside the Targum. On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the Targum has a right rendering of 1.‫ י נ הו‬at I Sam. 7. 2; that its rendering was with a genuine cognate which gives a good explication of the difficult Hebrew word; and that this is one of those words which are found in the Aramaic of the Targums but not in other dialects such as Syriac. The sense would most likely be ‘follow after, be devoted’. The sense ‘follow’ is known also in post-biblical Hebrew, e.g. Saadia writes DITriil ‫‘ ל כ ל‬to all who follow them’.4 1 Notes on Samuel, p. 62. 3 So Jastrow, p. 881b.

2 So Levy, ii. 94b. 4 Cf. above, p. 231.

UN CERTA IN TY ABOUT TH E M EANING OF TH E VERSION

265

Another interpretation is found in KB,1following Driver,2 giving a sense ‘hold to’ (KB says ‘hold with’, but means ‘hold to, adhere to’) on the basis of Arabic naha (y ) glossed as ‘come’. One of the difficulties of this solution is the semantics of the Arabic word itself. Though we do have evidence for senses like ‘suivre le conseil de quelqu’un dans une affaire’,3 there is no doubt that the massive preponderance of meaning in Arabic lies in senses like ‘prohibit, terminate’. The sense upon which this solution relies is probably remote from the chief or the earliest meaning of the Arabic word. This does not make the solution impossible, but must be noted as a factor in evaluating it. It may be that this consideration makes the Aramaic evidence just quoted more important and the Arabic evidence less so. The gloss ‘come’, offered by KB, certainly seriously over-simplifies the matter. Similar problems may be found with the Syriac translation. Thus, though under Vt we find a noun ‘terror’ and a verb ‘terrify, rush in, invade, oppress’, all cases registered by Brockelmann are in the Old Testament and almost all are at places where the Hebrew itself has ‫ ב ע ת‬. Some sense-borrowing from Hebrew may have taken place. Cf. also the interesting case at I Sam. 20. 13 m t : ‫כי ־יי ט ב א ל ־ א בי א ת ־ ה ר ע ה ע לי ף‬ Pesh. ’n ’tb mn ’by bysf d ‘lyk meaning ‘if I learn from my father evil which is against you’.4 The Syriac appears to have chosen a word similar in form to the Hebrew, which also produced a possible sense in the context, though that sense differed from the Hebrew sense. (10) The Versions and the Grammar of the Original One further point may be mentioned briefly. The versions will not generally give reliable guidance on the grammar of the original.5 A philological treatment will at times depend on the assessing of a Hebrew form as originally, let us say, a noun or an adjective or a passive verb. Sometimes one finds the argument that a version took the Hebrew as such and such a part of speech, 1 KB, p. 599a. 2 J T S xxxiv (1933) 377· 3 Dozy, ii. 730, for intahd fi l-shay Hla ra'y fulani. 4 Cf. Brockelmann, Lex. Syr., p. 265b. Cf. also above, p. 230 (‫) חז ה‬. 5 See already above, pp. 209, 253.

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because this was the part of speech used in the version. Such an argument is very precarious unless we know from samples of the version in this book that its technique included reproduction in the rendering of the same parts of speech, so far as is possible, which the original had. It will generally not be found that this is so, and especially where the text is an obscure one anyway. Thus at Jer. 2. 31 M T has ‫ א ר ץ מ א פ ל י ה‬but Ehrlich wants to read ‫ ; מ א פ י ל ה‬and Driver supports this,1 saying that ‘all the versions support a participial or adjectival form’. This is more than can be asserted on the basis of the versions, which generally translate the sense and reference of the original without trying to reproduce its grammar. Similarly at Job 31. 23 M T: ‫כ י פ ח ד א ל י א י ד א ל‬ LXX φόβος γ ά ρ κυρίου σ υνέσ χεν μ ε it is very precarious to argue2 that the σ υνεσ χεν μ ε ‘indicates a verb for ‫ א י ל‬with pronominal object at the end of the clause’. There are not, in fact, many instances in which philological treatments have tried to obtain from the versions guidance about the grammar and syntax of the original, and we need not give further space to the matter, providing that students will be warned against reliance on this kind of argument except where specific evidence for grammatical awareness on the part of the translators can be offered. (11) Conclusions The above discussion has taken account of the main factors and problems which may be met in the use of the versions as evidence for philological treatments. It remains to try to sum up the matter with a general evaluation of the use of versional evidence. The first thing to realize is that many passages which are difficult for us today were difficult for the ancient translators also. In such a position of difficulty these translators had to make what they could out of the context and out of such indications as the text (i.e., primarily, the unpointed written text) had to offer. These indications might include ‘etymological’ similarities to other words, 1 Driver in J T S xli (1940) 165 f. 2 Driver in A J S L lii (1935-6) 165; cf., however, his somewhat different treatment in Biblica xxxii (1951) 182.

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267

especially to words which were more familiar; they might occasionally include suggestions and influences from the vocabulary of other languages known to the translators; and they quite commonly included a practice in which the letters were taken in a different sequence or otherwise jumbled, or arbitrary worddivisions were implied.1 In taking guidance from the context the ancient translators worked from the more familiar words to the more uncertain; and they were influenced by parallelisms and the general tenor of the passage, and by associations with words which accidentally had occurred just before. Their procedure was not entirely different from that of the modern philological interpreter, and so it is not surprising if from time to time their results agree with or seem to support those produced by philological treatments. Though many other considerations of the modern interpreter were absent from the mind of his ancient predecessor, the influence of context worked in a similar way. When the two agree, it is often the result not of knowledge of a rare word but of analogous divination from the context. My own study of past examples, where scholars have offered versional evidence to support the identification of Hebrew words not previously recognized, has led on the whole to an unfavourable judgement. Out of well over one hundred examples closely studied, using the criteria and considerations discussed in this chapter, only a few seem to me to be certainly valid examples, while another proportion of perhaps 15 per cent, may present some reasonable probability. In a considerable majority of examples the versional evidence can be explained more easily in some other way than as an indication that unusual Hebrew words were exactly known to the translators. It should not be altogether surprising if this conclusion is reached. Let us consider particularly the position of the LXX. Philological treatments, as I have shown, often imply a very optimistic picture of the knowledge of Hebrew vocabulary on the part of the Greek translators. But this optimistic picture is by no 1 See examples like ‫ ד ג ל‬, p. 262; ‫ ש כ ב ת‬, p. 137 n.; ‫ ת ש ת ע‬, p. 233 n . ; ‫ ל ה ק ת‬, pp. 25 f., 231 f., 270 f. Similarly the rendering of the unusual verb ‫ נ כ ר‬by 7re7rpaK€v at I Sam. 23. 7 is probably not evidence of knowledge of a rare verb meaning ‘sell’; faced with a puzzling form, the translators just guessed that it belonged to ‫* מ כ ר‬sell’, which luckily enough gave good sense. Cf. above, p. 209; Index, no. 214.

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means that which the classical tradition of Septuagintal studies has maintained. Swete for instance writes:1 The majority of the translators had probably learnt the sacred language in Egypt from imperfectly instructed teachers, and had few opportunities of making themselves acquainted with the traditional interpretation of obscure words and contexts which guided the Palestinian Jew. Thus philological opinion itself has traditionally been far from unanimous in its optimism about the guidance to be found in the versions. My own assessment of the versions is far from a negative one. It seems to me in general that the ancient translators did their task remarkably well, considering the circumstances.2 Their grasp of Hebrew, however, was very often a grasp of that which is average and customary in Hebrew. Our concern, on the other hand, has been for abnormal or rare words or meanings. Rarity in the sense of quite out-of-the-way terms in subjects like architecture and tools did not necessarily leave the translators too much at a loss. Where it is a matter, however, of obscure words in normal contexts and of strange meanings for common words, there was a strong tendency towards the levelling of the vocabulary and the interpretation of that which was rare as if it was that which was more normal. Sporadic aberrant renderings may then quite accidentally provide an apparent agreement with an unusual identification made by us today. In the case of the LXX a significant point is its setting within the Egyptian Jewish community. The complete domination of Greek within this community rendered it particularly lacking in access to reliable knowledge of the sense of obscure Hebrew words. Thus, in so far as a translation was likely to depend on local sources 1 Swete, Introduction, p. 319; and, for the opinion of a master in philology, see Nöldeke, Die alttestamentliche Literatur (Leipzig, 1868), p. 246. Cf. also above, p. 240 n. 2 Terms like ‘incompetence’ have, however, been quite freely used; e.g. Katz, ‘Septuagintal Studies’, p. 200, summarizing and confirming the conclusions of earlier workers: ‘The translator of Isaiah who worked at an early date was com pletely unequal to his task. Many Hebrew words were unknown to him . . .’. I differ, however, from workers like Dahood whose principle is that their philo logical identifications from Ugaritic are right and that the LXX, which does not recognize these, is therefore wrong. Against many of Dahood’s interpretations I would consider that the absence of support from the LXX shows that the latter did know Hebrew quite well. Cf. p. 240, n. 1.

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of knowledge of the original tongue, the setting in Egypt counts against a high expectancy of accuracy in the LXX. This is particularly so, secondly, because the LXX bears the marks of an origin very early in the total history of Bible trans lating. Its translation is extremely uneven. Later the Jewish com munity, after growing experience of the trouble which could be caused by inaccurate translation, especially when it could be exploited in theological controversy, came to seek greater accuracy and uniformity; and so also did the Christians at a later time. The later Greek translations may on the whole be expected to have shown greater care and diligence in finding out what was really known of Hebrew idioms; but etymologizing and literalizing techniques may in return have obscured much of this diligence. In general, then, the setting in the Egyptian community, and at so early a date, should tend to make us doubt any great claims for knowledge of rare lexical items on the part of the LXX. This does not mean that such unusual knowledge may not sporadically appear; but, to state the argument conversely, if we find that true instances of confirmation of philological solutions by LXX evidence are rare, then this would not conflict with our general knowledge of the origin of this version. Another way in which the evidence of the versions may be tested is to consider cases in which the meaning, as discerned by philological treatments, has not been seen by the versions. Even those scholars who have most frequently maintained that the LXX or other version discerned rightly a sense which philology has now demonstrated to be correct have even more frequently had to say, or at least to imply, that the versions missed the sense entirely. Out of all the philological identifications which have been offered, the number which can reasonably claim some degree of right recognition by the ancient translators is not high—well below 25 per cent., I should say, even at a generous estimate, and perhaps something nearer to 10 per cent. Thus, while there is every reason to expect that versional evidence will occasionally show correct recognition of a word now known to us through comparative philology, the record of philological work itself does not lead us to expect that such correct recognition will be statistically very frequent. Again, if we take not the total number of philological treatments but the number of those which seem to us to be highly successful,

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once more we find the relation of the versions to the right sense to be rather weak statistically. I would consider it to be a highly probable treatment when Ginsberg discovers a ‫‘ ר ב ע‬dust’ in Num. 23. 10: ‫מי מנ ה ע פ ר י ע ק ב ו מ ס פ ר א ת ר ב ע י ש ר א ל‬ But if the word meant ‘dust’, this was unknown to LXX (τις εξάριθμήσεται δήμους Ισραήλ;), to Jerome (nosse numerum stirpis Israel), to the Targum, which paraphrases on the basis of the sense ‘four’, as does Aquila (τον τετάρτου Ισραήλ), or to the Peshitta (rwb'h 4the quarter’).1 Again, the attractive explanation of Π1ΤΓΠΡ?? at Gen. 49. 5 as ‘counsels, plans’ makes good sense and has good philological support.2 The LXX rendering, εξ αίρέσεως αυτών, cannot be given a quite clear interpretation, but it seems rather probable that the εξ represents the ‫ מ‬of the Hebrew word, and that no root ‫ מ כ ל‬was identified. Aquila with άνασκαφαί certainly saw here the verb PHD ‘dig’. Other versions give either a distant paraphrase or the sense ‘weapons’, which, even if it should be right, does not indicate any exact understanding of the word ‫ מ כ ר ת י ה ם‬, since this sense would probably be deduced from the context, and especially from the preceding ‫ כ ל י‬, in any case. There is no evidence that any version had linguistic knowledge which would support any philological suggestion. Again, I would consider that the identification of Πp ‫ ל ה‬at I Sam. 19. 203 is an attractive and probable treatment. The versional renderings, however, are more naturally interpreted as general surmises of the sense than as correct identifications of a rare word. LXX has εκκλησίαν, which could be taken to imply that their Hebrew manuscripts had ‫( ק ה ל ת‬so the traditional textual treatment) but more probably is rather a construing of a written ‫ל ה ק ת‬ as if it were ‫ ק ה ל ת‬. The Peshitta likewise has knP ‘assembly’. The Targum’s ‫‘ ס י ע ת‬company’ is a very general rendering, and the cuneum of the Vulgate probably means simply a ‘number’ or ‘quantity’.4 The later Greek translators all have words simply 1 Index, no. 294, cf. no. 295. Cf. also above, p. 11 n. 2 See above, p. 57. A review of the evidence will be found in Skinner, Genesis (ICC), p. 516 n. 3 See above, pp. 25 f., 231 f., 267 n. 4 Ducange provides an entry of the sense ‘any number of men or things’, and from Jerome’s own writing one can cite adv. Iovin. 2. 8: quasi quidam perturbationum cunei ad arcem nostrae mentis intraverint; cf. also ep. 92. 3.

C O N C L U S IO N S

27 1

meaning ‘group’, ‘gathering’—Aquila όμ ιλό ν , Theodotion σ ύ σ τ η μ α , Symmachus σ υ σ τ ρ ο φ ψ . No translator shows any sign of knowing the sense ‘old man, old age’, which is a component basic to the comparison with Ethiopic.1 Even when a versional rendering agrees with a philological identification, one may still have difficulty in deciding whether the agreement betokens precise and correct knowledge of the sense by the version, or whether on the other hand it may be a probable divination from the context and other factors. At Num. 16. i I consider the identification of a verb Hp*’ ‘be insolent’2 to be highly attractive. Yet the agreement of the Greek νπ€ρηφαν€νθη may be the result of a good guess rather than a right knowledge of the sense of the word. We do not have much exact knowledge of the version known as d Ε β ρ α ίο ς , but its tendency seems to have been one of paraphrastic remoteness rather than accurate adherence to the Hebrew.3 Since many versions at Num. 16. i show wide diversity of understanding, along with considerable paraphrasing, the chances are on the whole that o cΕ β ρ α ίο ς should be classified in the same way. He was right, we may surmise, without knowing how or why he was right. We repeat, then, that the considerable number of identifications which seem strong philologically but which have little support in the versions forms a further reason why we should not expect that versional evidence will support the philological treatment in a high proportion of cases. To this we add another argument. Philological treatments, where they have appealed to versional evidence, have appealed much more often to the LXX than to other versions, such as the Aramaic Targums. But is this pre-eminence of the LXX not paradoxically an argument against the procedure? If there were rare words in biblical Hebrew, the knowledge of which was already dying out in ancient times, is it not much more likely that this knowledge survived among Aramaic-speaking Jews than among Greek speaking? Yet I have found philological treatments to appeal relatively seldom to the Targums, in comparison with the number 1 LXX γήρας μητρός for at Prov. 30. 17 is surely a striking coincidence rather than sound evidence; cf. Greenfield, H U C A xxix (1958) 212 ff. 2 See above, p. 17 f. 3 See Field, pp. lxxv-lxxvii, and especially the paraphrastic instances cited at the top of p. lxxvi.

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of appeals to the LXX. May it not be the weaknesses rather than the strengths of the LXX translation techniques which have provided apparent evidence ? With this in mind we ought to reconsider the argument from mistaken renderings. As we noticed above, scholars have appealed to mistaken renderings by the LXX (or other versions) as evidence of real linguistic knowledge, even though the rendering was admittedly a wrong one at the point where it appeared. After consideration of the examples, one must judge that this argument, though a possible one, is not a probable one. Where a translator is wrong, there will often be other explanations more likely than the view that he has in mind some rare word known to him correctly (though not correctly for the passage in question) but generally unknown to scholars until now. The chances that he is confused, or is guessing, or is paraphrasing, or is rewriting altogether, are considerable. In the nature of the case most examples of alleged 4correct mistakes’, if we may so call them, are extremely isolated, and great caution should be used before they are taken as evidence of real linguistic knowledge. Finally, something should surely be granted to the argument that a translator who is rendering wrongly is, just because he is wrong, displaying some degree of incom petence in handling language.

XI SOME PARTICULAR LINGUISTIC, LITERARY, AND CULTURAL PROBLEMS chapter will gather together a number of other factors which may have an effect on our estimate of the probability of philological suggestions. Some are more directly linguistic in nature; others are more literary; and yet others belong to the springs of human motivation, ordinary or religious, which may underlie the words and passages investigated. T

h is

(1) Onomatopoeia Professor Driver has laid some emphasis on the onomatopoetic origin of Semitic words, and this has been apparent especially in attempts to identify biblical birds and animals from their names. Thus: Many of the names of birds will be found to be in Hebrew as in other languages onomatopoeic in origin; but no exact reproduction of a bird’s cry must be expected. The onomatopoeon may represent a real attempt to reproduce the original sound or may be a mere echoing repetition of a single note to give the effect of a monotonous cry; and it may undergo every form of linguistic assimilation or dissimilation.1 The principle is then extended to all sorts of other words. Driver argues, for instance, that the element ‫ ג ע‬, as found in ‫ג ע ש‬, is a noise made in the abdomen when relaxing or in the bottom of the throat when vomiting; it is then applied to groaning or to disgust. When used of rivers and waters, it means ‘rise up’, and this explains ‫ ו תג ע ש‬at Ps. 18. 8.2 The principle is further extended so that it decides what is primary and what is secondary in meaning. The familiar ‫ ע‬1‫ג‬ 4expire, die’ is related, by similar onomatopoetic formation, to 1 PEQ April, 1955, p. 5; cf. ZAW lxv (1953) 255, 258; JSS vii (1962) 15 f. 2 ETL xxvi (1950) 341; cf. Greenfield in HUCA xxix (1958) 205 f.

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many words for throat or bowel sounds, and therefore must ‘originally’ have meant ‘gasp for breath’ and only secondarily ‘die’. By the same token the state of death is ‘properly’ expressed by ‫ מ ל ת‬, originally ‘be mute’ (like many other words using/m/), and so ‘be silent in death’.1 These reasonings, then, have an effect on the estimation of probabilities in linguistic history. In the question whether there is a verb ‫ ף‬0 ‫‘ כ‬be pale’, a start is made from the assertion that the biliteral base /g, k, q + z, s, s/ expresses onomatopoetically the sound of cutting and tearing. Then, it is argued, there is an easy development from breaking to paleness, and kaspu, like Arabic Jidda, will originally have described silver as ‘broken stuff’, since it was purified by breaking two or three times. Thus the onomatopoetic theory is used to state the sequence of semantic development. The meanings of Hebrew words cannot be deduced from cognate languages without some view of general semantic probabilities. An onomatopoetic theory, because by its nature it attempts to state something extremely early in language formation, tends to dominate the assessment of developments in meaning. It therefore has considerable importance for our present subject. Of this theory of onomatopoeia, it must be said that it has not approved itself to the majority of Semitic scholars, nor does it appear to have the support of modern general linguistics.2 There has been a general abandonment of the attempt to find in onomatopoetic formation the origin for any substantial element in language. Even for the names of birds and the like such an origin is not widely found—for English, consider such names as sparrow, thrush, or eagle, alongside names like cuckoo, peewit. Even for sound-imitating words like ding-dong, it has long been noticed that these vary from language to language, and in each language fall into 1 JSS vii (1962) 15 f. 2 On this see for example Jespersen, Language, pp. 396-411; Bloomfield, Language, p. 156 f .; Hockett, Course, p. 298 f. Some of the words which look as if they were onomatopoetic can demonstrably be shown to have become so only through sound change; Saussure, Course, p. 69, cites French fouet, fouetter ‘whip’, derived from the Latin fagus ‘beech-tree’, which neither sounded like nor meant a whip. From a more philosophical point of view, Ziff, Semantic Analysis, p. 25, though himself using onomatopoeia as an argument against the complete conventionality of language, admits that ‘onomatopoeia is of no great importance in language’. A particularly good discussion is in Ullmann, Semantics, pp. 82-96 and elsewhere.

O N O M A T O P O E IA

*75

the normal phonemic patterns of that language, although the natural sounds do not so vary at all. Even these words, therefore, have a strong element of the conventionality which characterizes language. The elements commonly called onomatopoetic may perhaps be better expressed as motivated terms, motivated ‘as stylizations of acoustic impressions'.1 It may be felt that the word is something like the natural sound; this is a sense or *motivation' of the language user, but has nothing necessarily to do with origins. This is not to say that there is no reality at all in the phenomenon of onomatopoeia. The principal weakness of the idea, as used in the philology of Semitic languages, is its application to the origin of words. Applied to their function, as for instance in the idea that certain words may be felt by their users to symbolize or represent actual sounds, rather more value can be granted to it. But the application of it to the origins of words, with the con sequent establishment of a ‘basic meaning’ through onomatopoeia and the associated idea that language, though now conventional, was originally not so, is extremely precarious. This, we may add, is especially so with Semitic languages; their somewhat rigid re striction on possible formations leaves rather little room for sug gestion through word-formation. For example, it has sometimes been thought that the vowel /i/ ‘is admirably adapted to convey an idea of smallness’ ;2 but it is hard to see how this could work in Semitic languages, where the choice of vowels is generally dictated by the pattern in which words are cast. Applied to Semitic the onomatopoetic theory is ultimately a very limited scheme according to which labial stops like /p/ in dicate bursting open, dental stops like /d/ indicate cutting, nasals like /m/ indicate silence or low humming sounds, and so on; but this explains very little. There are indeed some Semitic words to which such explanations appear to fit; but such cases are of little importance, for they cannot be made to support a general theory except by arbitrary selection of meanings and precarious histories of semantic development. The onomatopoetic theory therefore does not appear to have positive value in the present discussion, and arguments about semantic development which depend upon it are of no great weight. Much more importance attaches to the theory of biliteral 1 Thieme, in Hymes, p. 586b. 2 See Ullmann, Semantics, p. 87.

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bases, which has often been associated with the idea of onoma topoeia ; but the effects of this have already been discussed above. The importance of the biliteral base does not depend on association with onomatopoeia; indeed, on the contrary, the extremely limited range of meanings attached to the bases as normally identified could only imply a high degree of conventionality, and cor respondingly a marked distance from the directness of onomatopoeia, in the words developed from these bases. (2) Some linguistic-cultural relations There remain one or two conceptions about language in its relation to thought and culture which may be mentioned briefly because they have appeared in the context of philological treat ments. One of these is the idea that the original sense of words was always a ‘concrete’ one. Thus Eitan writes: It is a philological axiom that every word, whether noun or verb, had (or its root had) originally a concrete significance and that only by way of metaphor did it receive subsequently derived meanings, as need for them arose.1 One may doubt, however, whether this axiom has great validity, and still more may one doubt the attempts to use it as a basis for argument in particular cases. Eitan’s own example is at Exod. 17. 13; the sense, he believes, is that Joshua ‘carried off’ or ‘snatched away’ Amalek. So, he argues, the Palestinian Arabic halasa ‘reap with a sickle’ is merely a specialized shade of the more general classical halasa ‘carry off, snatch away’. Thus, he goes on: The Hebrews, a predominantly agricultural people, would naturally have derived from this general signification a more special one, ‘to reap’, i.e. to carry off with a sickle. Eitan goes on to assert that this sense ‘would have been’ (sic) preserved by Palestinian peasants up to the Islamic invasions (and so passed from Hebrew into Palestinian Arabic). I do not think that this particular type of argument has appeared very frequently in philological treatments. I mention it here, how ever, because it illustrates how general conceptions of the relation between language and culture may influence a scholar’s picture of a probable semantic history. Eitan, p. 35.

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Occasionally solutions show some other kind of cultural preference. Of the interpretations offered by Hirschberg in a recent article,1 for instance, a large proportion have a sexual reference. The notorious crux at Amos 5. 26 is interpreted by him through taking both thePat^av of LXX (understood as a Hebrew ‫ ל י פ ה‬, cognate with Arabic ra yyif‘fertile’) and the ]VD as sexual objects or symbols.2 Philological procedures may at times be guided by particular lines of cultural assessment, and the student should be aware of this possibility if he is to evaluate philological arguments properly. (3) Parallelism Philological treatments frequently place a very heavy emphasis upon the phenomenon of parallelism. That parallelism is a marked feature of Hebrew poetry is a matter of common knowledge. But the importance of parallelism becomes even greater when the establishment of text or of meaning is in doubt. If we know the meanings, we notice and appreciate the parallelism, and the parallelism in turn sets the meanings in relief and forms them into a striking pattern. When we do not know the meanings, however, the parallelism becomes one of the principal guides by which we discover the meanings.3 Among philological treatments of poetical texts, a large proportion make some considerable appeal to parallelism. Can so heavy a load be placed upon it? Some sophisticated analyses of parallelism have been produced. These depend for the most part on the assumption that the meanings of the various Hebrew terms are known. When the study is rather an attempt to discover the meaning of a word, the situation is different. The question is not: given the meanings of two parts of a sentence, what is the nature of the parallelistic relation between them? It is rather: given a sentence which appears to be parallelistic, and given the meaning of one part, what chances are there that this will help us to know the meaning of the other part ? The obvious difficulties are: (1) We do not know in the beginning whether the verse will be a synonymous parallelism or some other kind; we may not even have complete certainty that it is parallelistic at all. 1 In V T x i (1961) 373-85.

2 Ibid., pp. 375 f .; cf. Index, no. 224.

3 Cf. the saying of Menahem ben Saruk, above, p. 62.

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(2) Even where a verse is certainly parallelistic, we do not certainly know what effect this will have on a particular word within it. Two elements in a parallelism may be identical or synonymous within the sense of the customary definitions of these terms, and yet the words in one element may have quite considerable differences in meaning from the words in the other. The former of these need, perhaps, not be illustrated with examples; for the second, a simple illustration in the English will suffice: Ps. 24. 3:

‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ? And who shall stand in his holy place?’

In this familiar sentence, let us suppose that one of the words in the second part is of unknown meaning. The parallelism helps us, but it helps us only a certain way. If the word ‘place’ were unknown, we might surmise from the parallelism that it meant ‘temple’ or ‘house’ or ‘area’ or ‘ground’. If we really pressed the idea of synonymous or identical parallelism so as to make it apply to each word, we would guess that DIpD is another Hebrew word meaning ‘hill’. There are places where the parallelism of two words for ‘hill’ occurs, e.g. Isa. 10. 32:

‫ינפף ידו הר בית־ציון גבעת ירושלם‬ The same would be true if the meaning of Dip ‘stand’ were uncertain. Parallelism might make us guess that it was another word for ‘go up’. This is a central problem in all use of parallelism as an interpretative key. The parallelism is a parallelism of the literary units; it does not guarantee that the lexical units used within each literary unit are synonyms.1 One element in a parallelism may use ‘walk’, while another uses ‘sit’ (e.g. Isa. 9. 1; Ps. 1. 1 has ‘walk’, ‘stand’, and ‘sit’ as the three verbs). Let us see how this works in a real instance of philological treatment. We have already looked at the interesting proposal to 1 This is already recognized by earlier works, e.g. Driver in J T S xxxiii (1932) 43: ‘parallel passages do not necessarily demand verbal identity’ and ‘close strophic parallelism is not so required’ that words in parallelism ‘must mean the same’.

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identify a Hebrew ‫‘ ע ש‬rottenness’ at Hos. 5.12. The sentence as a whole is:

: ‫ואני כעש לאפרים וכרקב לבית יהודה‬ It is the close parallelism which gives strength to the suggestion that ‫ ע ש‬means ‘rottenness’, thus being identical with ‫ ל ק ב‬, rather than meaning ‘moth’. Both words then mean ‘rottenness’, giving an absolute parallelism. But when one looks at this a second time, one realizes that the absolute parallelism is not so great an advantage. Only if the parallelism is identical, not only in the two thoughts expressed in parallel, but also in each word used in each of the two thoughts, is the identification of two words both meaning ‘rottenness’ entirely satisfying. Conversely, even if the relation is between ‘moth’ and ‘rottenness’, we still have a good parallelism. The two parallel phrases are both about forces of decay and corruption. If the total parallel sentence is an expression about decay or corruption in general, it is possible that the effect is strengthened, and not weakened, if we have words for two different corrupting agencies, i.e. moth and rot, rather than two words for rot. Thus, even if the interpretation of ‫ ע ש‬as ‘rottenness’ gives a more exact synonymy for ‫ ל ק ב‬, the understanding of ‫ ע ש‬as ‘moth’ is actually perhaps more true to the general pattern of Hebrew parallelism. These considerations tell on the whole against the acceptance of this particular philological suggestion. Parallelism, then, even when it seems to be of a ‘synonymous’ type, does not in itself provide any assurance that a particular word will be similarly parallel or synonymous with the corresponding word in the parallel clause. Or, to state the matter in another way, even when we know that there is a synonymous parallelism, we do not know in what aspects the two realities set in parallel will be compared. In the case just discussed, if ‘rot’ is specifically the point, then two words with this meaning will give a good effect; but if the point is a more general one of ‘spoiling’ or ‘decay’ or ‘deterioration’, then ‘moth’ and ‘rot’ provide a good parallelism even though they do not mean the same thing. The argument from parallelism is rather stronger in Jer. 4. 31: ‫כ י קו ל ב ח ו ל ה ש מ ע תי צו־ ה כ ס ב כ י ך ה‬ Though it is possible to take ‫ צ ל ל‬as ‘anguish’, the parallelism with

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‫‘ ק ו ל‬voice’ was invoked by Driver in favour of an interpretation as ‘shrill cry’, implying another word ‫ צ ל ה‬, cognate with Arabic sarra and sartr, and homonymic (at least in the consonants) with ‫‘ צ ר ה‬anguish’. The use of the verb ‘hear’ makes it a little more likely that the second object will be a sound rather than a state of distress. This argument, indeed, is not absolutely convincing. Firstly, in Hebrew one could probably speak of ‘hearing’ distress or anguish.1 Secondly, one could say that a phrase ‘anguish like (that of) one bearing her first child’ is loosely attached to ‫ ל ה‬1‫ ח‬, without implying logical dependence on ‫ ש מ ע ת י‬. Nevertheless the point has some considerable strength, and may be further confirmed by an appeal to the LXX: 076‫ ־‬φω νήν ώ ς ώ δινονσης η κ ο ν σ α , ro d σ τε ν α γ μ ό ν σου ώ ς π ρ ώ το το κ ο υ σ η ς. Further evaluation depends on consideration of the same explanation at Jer. 48. 5 (LXX 31. 5). At 4. 31 the fact that the same verb ‘hear’ seems to apply to both objects strengthens the case for a closely similar sense. At 48. 5 there is a parallelism with ‫‘ ב כ י‬weeping’. On the whole I think that this example of philological treatment has been successful. A still more striking example is Isa. 2. 16: m t

: ‫ו ע ל כ ל ־ א נ י ו ת ת ר שי ש ו ע ל כ ל ־ ש כ י ו ת ה ח מ ד ה‬

L X X : κ α ι 6776 π α ν π λο ΐο ν θ α λά σσ η ς κ α ί 6776 π ά σ α ν θ£αν πλοίω ν κ ά λλο υς.

Driver argues that sense and parallelism ‘require’ ‫ ת‬1‫ ש כ י‬to be the name of a kind of boat and ‫ ה ח מ ל ה‬the name of a country. The identification of ‫ ש כ ת‬is widely accepted; that of Arabia Felix as the country is less certain. ‘Ships of Tarshish’ is a set phrase; it is less likely that another phrase existed relating the name of ships of another region. The parallelism of cedars of Lebanon and oaks of Bashan, on the other hand, is stereotyped (cf. Zech. 11. 2; Ezek. 27. 5f.). The passage may go as follows: All that is high and lofty All cedars of Lebanon

all that is uplifted and low all oaks of Bashan

1 Cf. in jer. 41.11 (object ‫ ;) ר ע ה‬4 8 .29 (‫ ;)גאון מו א ב‬6 . ‫;) ח מ ס ו שד י שמע( ל‬ job 20.3 (object ‫) מו ס ר כ ל מ תי‬.

P A R A L L E L IS M

All the high hills Every high tower All the ships of Tarshish

281

all the lofty mountains every fortified wall all the lovely boats (views?)

‘Low’ (‫ ) ש פ ל‬in the first line, if this is the right text and sense, implies that the parallelism is not absolute. In the LXX rendering, it may be θέαν that translates ‫ ש כ י ו ת‬, and πλοίων may be an explanatory addition to fit the parallel of the first hemistich; or, since θαλάσσης is a midrashic-etymological rendering of ‫ ת ר שי ש‬, πλοίων may be added to provide a complement.1 No other translation perceives a word for ‘ship’ (cf. Aq., Sym. οψβις, θέας ; Syr. dawqe). Thus, though there is a strong case for the identification of ‫ ש כ ת‬as the name of a boat, the argument from parallelism in itself is not entirely decisive. A similar argument arises at Isa. 44. 24-28; a considerable chain of closely identical parallelisms may still leave uncertain the position in parallelism of a single term: He who says to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be inhabited and to the cities of Judah, You will be built up; and its ruins I shall set up again; He who says to the deep, Be dried up; and its streams I shall dry u p ; He who says to Cyrus ‫ר ע י‬ and all my purpose he will complete; Saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built, and to the temple, Thou shalt be refounded. What is the sense of ‫ ? ר ע י‬Traditionally it is taken as ‘my shepherd’, parallel with ‘my anointed’ in 45. 1. But the parallelism in 44. 28 is kept very close if we follow the LXX 6 λέγω ν Κύρω φρονεΐν and interpret as in Syriac r a y reyana, etc., ‘thought’: He who tells to Cyrus my thought and all my purpose he will complete. The less rigid parallelism of ‘my shepherd’ and ‘my anointed’ is, however, more probable, and the LXX analysed as the same root which is found in ]!‫( ר ע י‬διαλογισμός Dan. 7. 28); cf. especially Ps. 139 (138). 2:

33‫ת ה ל ר עי‬

συ σννηκας τούς διαλογισμούς μου .

1 On this treatment of ‫ תר שי ש‬see B JR L xxx (1967) 291 f. and J S S xii (1967) 117 f.

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The designation of Cyrus as ‘my shepherd’ is in fact a good parallelism in thought, though not an exact one in form, with the completion of the purpose of the Lord. In general it is a good rule to interpret by observation of the context. In the circumstances of our study, however, where one linguistic element is obscure, the following of context is not necessarily a good method. An unusual word may say just what one would not expect on the ground of context alone. It is by following context, where one linguistic element is uncertain, that interpreters and translators are led to harmonizations and assimilations. Parallelism may make clear the general bearing of a passage with out determining the exact information furnished by particular words. There are different kinds of parallelism, and sometimes a passage may turn out to be not parallelistic at all. It cannot be invoked as a straightforward guide to the meaning of uncertain words. It remains, however, a very important factor, which the scholar cannot neglect. Finally, where Ugaritic words are used for the elucidation of Hebrew, it should be remembered that the meanings of many of these depend in the first place on paral lelisms in Ugaritic, and the same caution has to be used in any reliance on these Ugaritic meanings. (4) Religious Factors The problems discussed in this book do not belong directly to theology or the study of religion, and we have worked almost entirely on a textual and linguistic level. There are, however, ways in which judgements of a religious or theological nature may affect our estimate of probabilities in a philological or a textual treatment. These would seem to fall into two main categories: (a) Judgements of fact about the religious situation of a par ticular time, which may affect our discernment of what a text may be saying, and (b) Judgements of style and taste, of religious logic and theo logical consistency, which may help us to know whether a given utterance ‘makes sense’, whether it is credible that a person of a given period could find it meaningful. Turning to the first of these two categories, we should give some particular mention to Nyberg. His discussion of the text of Hosea was accompanied by the development of some rather original

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views of the religious history of Palestine, and these views in turn reacted on his textual and philological discussion. The combination of these two was characteristic of his method. At the difficult place Hos. 7. 5: : ‫יו ם מ ל כ נ ו ה ח ל ו עזרים ה מ ת מיין מ ש ך ; ד ו א ת ־ ל ^ צ י ם‬ Nyberg1took ‫ מ ל כ נ ו‬to refer to the god Melek and ‫ ש רי ם‬to refer to his heavenly court; while of the words IT* ‫ מ ש ך‬he pronounced that their meaning was unknown, but that they seemed to refer to some ritual action, in which the god Melek was subject. A similar element in Nyberg’s thought is the prominence of the divine name fAl. Nyberg identifies this at several points in Hosea, and its presence enables him to avoid emendation. Thus at Hos. 11. 7 (usually dealt with by emendation): ‫ ע ל י ק ר א הו‬- ‫ו א ל‬ Nyberg changes only the word-division and reads the text as ‫רו־דא‬.··‫ק‬: ‫ע ל ·י‬t ‫א ל ־‬v ‫ו‬: *and therefore to *A1they cry’.2 The identification of the divine name eAl, this time in the form ‫( ע ל ו‬cf. Ugar. 'lw)y has been particularly well received at I Sam. 2. 10: ‫ם‬..‫ר ע‬: ‫ם _י‬. ‫מי‬ ‫ ע ל ו ב ש‬. If the first word is taken as the divine _ T _ T T name ‫ ע ל ו‬, we have good parallelism with the other half-verse, and there is no need for the textual emendation to ]‫ ע ל י ו‬, proposed by 3 H 3f which gives us semantically the same result. Such then are some examples of the possibility that information about religious thought in the Near East may enable us to see meaning in a biblical passage where it has formerly eluded us, and thereby avoid emendation of the text. Less frequently discussed and more subtle in nature is the question of whether a given religious utterance ‘makes sense’ or not. There is a familiar verse in Proverbs: Prov. 29.18 ‫? אי ן חזון י פ ר ע ע ם‬ AY *Where there is no vision the people perish*. 1 Nyberg, Hoseabuch, p. 50. Cf. Hos. 8. 10, ‫ מ ל ך שרי ם‬, Nyberg, Z A W , p. 251. 2 Nyberg, op. cit., p. 89; for his chief argument about ‘A1 see p. 58; and for the divine name *Am cf. p. 27.

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RSV ‘Where there is no prophecy the people cast off restraint’. Driver’s comment is: ‘Vision can hardly be said to restrain a people from excesses.’ This conviction leads him to seek another explanation; and, guided by the ε ξ η γ η τ ή ς of LXX, ού μ η ύ π α ρ ξη ε ξ η γ η τ ή ς εθνει, π α ρ α νο μ ώ , he considers a word w meaning ‘magistrate’ and cognate with Accadian and Aramaic words. This interpretation is weak, however, for two reasons. Firstly, it fails to take into account the high originality of the Proverbs translator. It is possible that his ε ξ η γ η τ ή ς 9 meaning vaguely a guide or interpreter of the divine will, is only his interpretation of ‫‘ חזון‬vision’. He may also have seen a reference to the familiar synagogue term ]|Π. The Hebrew word in any case is to him only the source of his literary inspiration. Secondly, in the context of Hebrew religion, with the importance attached by it to prophetic ‘vision’, it is an entirely credible sentiment that ‘vision’ should keep a people from excesses or from disaster. The original doubt about the meaningfulness of the text if the word was understood as ‘vision’ is thus misplaced. The ‫ גי לו ב ר ע ל ה‬of M T at Ps. 2. π f. raises the same kind of question. Is it indeed an improbable conjunction to construe as ‘rejoice with trembling’? Would the psychology of religion find this lacking in congruity? The sense that some other meaning must be required was present already in the Middle Ages, when interpreters were already discussing the possibility of a ‫ גי ל‬meaning ‘tremble’ or the like. Reider thought that the sense was ‘worship’, and compared Ps. 43. 4 ‫ ש מ ח ת גי לי‬, understood as ‘the joy of my worship’; Driver identified a word meaning ‘be affrighted’ (see Index, nos. 76-77). Is not the textual reorganization ‫ב ר ע ל ה נש קו‬ ‫ ב ר ג ל י ו‬still the most convincing suggestion?1 Another interesting example is found in the Qumran Isaiah text iQIsA at 52. 14. Here the M T reading is: ‫כ ך מ ק ז ח ת מ אי ש מ ך א ה ו‬ This has commonly been taken (with vocalization as ‫ ) מ ש ח ת‬to mean: ‘His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance.’ 1 Cf. above, pp. 5, 175.

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285

This is, of course, from the verb ‫‘ ש ח ת‬mar, spoil, destroy’. Now the reading of the scroll is :

‫כן משחתי מאיש מראהו‬ Guillaume, discussing this, says that the verb cannot have been the ‫‘ מ ש ח‬anoint’, which is ‘inconceivable without Christian ideas’. He believes nevertheless that this is a verb ‫ ; מ ש ח‬it must be one different from the familiar ‫‘ מ ש ח‬anoint’. Once again philological treatment produces a new homonym. The true cognate in Arabic is not masaha ‘smear’ but masaha, which ‘in its primitive sense’ meant ‘to gall the back of a camel and exhaust it’, and is also used of the fraying of thread and of the transforming of men into animals. The Arabic form masth is, according to the Qâmüs, ‘of ugly form and without comeliness’. The meaning of the Isaiah passage is thus probably ‘so did I mar his appearance’. We do not need to go into the complicated series of considérations which are needed to evaluate this suggestion. The point for the present is that we should note the starting-point in the assurance that in this context the idea of anointing is impossible. Such then are some examples of the way in which judgements of theology and of religious history may enter into the determination of probabilities in textual and philological matters. (5) The Argument from Actuality It may seem quaint that one should take a title such as this, since purists might demand that all arguments should be based on some kind of actuality. What I mean here is to notice comprehensively all sorts of information which is not itself primarily linguistic or literary in nature but which may affect our judgement of the possible sense of linguistic items. Archaeology, the study of the geography of the ancient world, the knowledge of social customs and technological development may all by their increase help to explain and clarify, and thereby justify, linguistic terms which were formerly obscure, or may give suggestions for semantic connexions and developments which were a cause of trouble. Such arguments from actuality may thus form the start of a dissatisfaction with the received meaning of a text, and so lead to the search for new meaning through textual or philological treatment. We have already mentioned how archaeological discovery has validated the text of I Sam. 13.21 and given us clear evidence

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for the weight ‘pirn' or ‘payim’. There is nothing new in the kind of argumentation we are describing here; it is one of the oldest forms of exegetical thinking. All I want to do is to illustrate it for modern philological treatments. Pregnancy is esteemed as a great blessing by Oriental women. Yet the speech of God to Eve in Gen. 3. 16 is, by the usual interpretation, a statement which represents pregnancy as something punitive or disastrous. Through this observation, Rabin is moved to seek a different meaning for the word ‫ ה ר נ ך‬. He is influenced also by the parallelism with ‫‘ ת שו ק ה‬desire', and he finds the meaning to be probably ‘sexual desire', and possibly ‘whining', with reference to Ugaritic and Arabic cognates. The actuality observed may be a piece of fact known from outside the story, or it may be the congruity of the story itself. At Judges 19. 2 Driver cleverly notices that the words ‫ו תזנה ע ל י ו‬ ‫ פי לג שו‬should not mean ‘she prostituted herself', as the customary understanding of the verb ‫ זנ ה‬would suggest. There is no hint of such an element elsewhere in the story of the Levite’s concubine. Indeed, the tragedy is substantially heightened if the woman had been chaste right up to the time of the evil deed at Gibeah. Moreover, several of the versions appear to agree in avoiding the stain on the poor woman. The Targum has ‫‘ ו ב ס ל ת ע ל ו ה י‬she despised him'; Jerome writes reliquit eum\ LXX has /cat (Lpyiadr] avrcp (A text) ‘she was angry at him', or inopevOrj d7r5a vro v ‘she departed from him' (B text). This is of interest because the normal meaning of the verb ‫ זנ ה‬must have been sufficiently familiar to these translators. The cognate Accadian zenu ‘be angry' may thus give a solution, incidentally adding another homonym to Hebrew. Place-names are another possible setting for this kind of problem; and especially so when, as sometimes happens, a form can be construed either as a place-name or as some other kind of word. We saw above1 the possible place-name Izalla at Ezek. 27. 19, which (if correct) serves to remove an enigmatic participial form from the lists of exceptions in our grammars and lexica. Philological treatments can cause place-names to disappear as well as to come into existence. Some interpreters have removed Ophir from the text of Isa. 13. 12:

‫ הם אופיר‬3‫ואךם מ‬: ‫ז‬$‫אוקיר אנוש מ‬ 1 See p. 189.

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287

arguing that it means: T shall value a man more than gold; more than fine gold shall I esteem a man.’ The word ‫ א ו פ י ר‬is then supposed to be from a verb ‫ י פ ל‬, cognate with Arabic wafara ‘be plentiful’, Ugaritic ypr ‘make to abound’. If this is right, one presumably has to argue that the other two cases of the collocation ‫( כ ת ם א ו פ י ר‬Job 28. 16; Ps. 45. 10), plus the other significant associations of Ophir with gold, have produced an assimilation of the sense at Isa. 13. 12 and caused the verb to be mistaken for the place-name. I myself think that ‘gold of Ophir’ is a much more likely sense for Isa. 13. 12 also.

XI I SUMMING-UP W e have sought in this study to work out the criteria by which we may judge a suggested philological treatment to be successful or unsuccessful. These criteria are not rules the simple observation of which will certainly lead to a right result. They themselves are probable rather than absolute; and sometimes they may seem capable of working in either direction—as we have seen, a philo logical suggestion may be confirmed by the fact that a parallel exists in post-biblical Hebrew, but may also be weakened thereby. There may always be extreme cases which defy the probabilities which generally apply; but it would be unfortunate if some such extreme cases were to be taken as the rule and thereby allowed to justify a long series of others equally extreme. Thus, though we cannot set out rules which can be mechanically followed, the following is a summary of the points which should normally come into consideration when a philological treatment is suggested: (1) How far the word in question lies within the normal phonological correspondences with a cognate word considered for its elucidation, and what are the long-range consequences for comparative studies if this is ignored or treated lightly. (2) How far the meaning given for the cognate word is a real meaning, stated with adequate precision, and known with reason able probability as one which may go back to such time that a cognate with a meaning semantically relatable may have survived in Hebrew also. (3) A critical consideration of the semantic connections pre sumed in the identification, in relation to acknowledged examples and with a developed awareness of the difference between theoretical constructions and historically controlled evidence. (4) An awareness of the possibility that words are adoptions from non-Semitic languages, or have been influenced in their history by such adoptions; or that the information given about them in dictionaries has been confused through contamination with such adoptions.

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(5) A consideration of the possibility of a textual error, i.e. that the form in the text has arisen by an accident of the graphic transmission. (6) If the new identification produces a new homonym in Hebrew, some consideration of how this is statistically related to other homonyms and to the total extent of homonymy in Hebrew and in Semitic languages generally. (7) If the new identification produces a new synonym or near synonym in Hebrew, or, to put it another way, if it comes very close to the semantic field of words already known, some con sideration of the change of balance this causes in the lexical stock. (8) Some consideration of the statistical probabilities for the assumption that a word in another Semitic language will be likely to lead to the identification of a cognate in Hebrew. (9) If the identification relies on versional evidence, a full consideration of the versional reading for (a) the possibility that the version had a different Hebrew text, (b) the style and transla tion techniques of the translator of this book, (*:) possible vicis situdes in the graphic transmission of the version itself, and, in general, (d) the possibility that the rendering rests not upon exact knowledge of the Hebrew word but upon other influences, such as theological interpretation, paraphrasing, etymologizing, and divination from parallelisms or from the general context. (10) A consideration of post-biblical usage, including Jewish Aramaic; and including also the possible effects of midrashic expositions upon the history of understanding; and also, finally, the views of the medieval Jewish lexicographers. ( n ) If the new identification involves an abandonment of the Massoretic vocalization, a consideration of how the Massoretic vocalization arose and what it means, and of how our abandonment of it, seen in the long run, would affect (a) our view of the history and nature of Massoretic activity, (b) our total knowledge of the Hebrew language and meanings in it. (12) Finally, it goes without saying that all new identifications, even if all these requirements have been taken into account, have still to be weighed for probability against the more traditional or accepted meanings for the Hebrew words in question. Of these various criteria, the one which deserves some further elaboration at this point is the semantic one. As was noted earlier,1 1 Above, pp. 88 if.

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the semantic side in traditional philology was often naive, hasty, and thoughtless. The following points are offered as suggestions which may assist the student: (1) The approach to the study of meaning must be strictly linguistic, rather than logical, in character. It may seem strange to insist on this: readers may ask whether, during the long reign of philological method, this has not always been so. The answer is that it has not. The older historical and comparative philology, lacking an adequate approach to questions of meaning (especially because of its concentration on the separate tracing of atomic elements in their development), in its semantic notions very often fell a prey to conceptions of a logical rather than of a linguistic nature. This can be plentifully illustrated from the traditional Semitic philology. Take a statement (admittedly, a fairly extreme example) about ‫ נ ת ר‬. This verb is supposed to mean ‘tear’; but the piel is used of insects which hop. In Arabic we have tarra ‘be severed’, tarr ‘prancing, trotting’; thus, Driver writes:1 There can be no objection to connecting n-t-r as applied to locusts with tarr as applied to light horses; and the underlying idea by which verbs of rending or tearing asunder are linked to verbs denoting trotting quickly or prancing or hopping seems to be that of separation from the ground, whereby the beast appears to be now touching the earth and now suspended in mid-air. Though it is an extreme case, this passage typifies the way in which many semantic relations were set up in the older philology. The investigator, taking a series of forms which seem to be cognate and of which the senses are known, works by thinking out a common factor attaching to them all, so that a more or less direct relation from this common factor to the meaning of each form in each of several languages can be seen. The procedure is logical rather than linguistic in type, because it works by consideration of common features in the referents rather than by working out a process of meaning transfer within stages of linguistic usage. It is true that Driver frequently detects ‘secondary’ elements in these groups of meanings; but this is hardly enough to alter the basic character of the method. The method is fundamentally one of association of actual features of groups of referents. It is difficult 1 In the Robinson Festschrift (1946), pp. 70 ff.

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291

to find any way of relating such an approach to that of modern semantic studies.1 Linguistic history would seem to suggest rather that the mean ings of groups of cognates, collected across the lines of temporal differences and from different languages, will tend to be haphazard in their relation to common features of any group of referents designated. Meanings are not derived from one basic idea, or directly from a class of referents, but from the meanings of forms already found. Form x, let us say, designates the referent^; and in association with form x we find the forms y and z> which appear to be cognate with x. It may be expected that, if all the history of development is known, their meanings may be seen to have some relation to that obtaining between x and its referent p ; but we do not know which of the many aspects of this relation may be relevant for the senses of y and z, nor do we know that the aspect relevant for y will also be relevant for z. Semantic transfers will not general ly flow smoothly from a basic general idea, but may arise from features which are quite minor, and which are thus logically accidental and unpredictable, in relation to the meaning of a form taken as original, or in relation to a previous change of meaning. This criticism of a ‘logical’ approach does not mean that logic is irrelevant, or that semantic work can be done without some foundation of general theory. The logic implied in the process we have just criticized would seem to be one of simple relations between things and names, the names attaching to evident qualities of the things.2 A more sophisticated logic of linguistic usage may not necessarily have this damaging effect. (2) Students may find it helpful to use the distinction between reference and information.3 By ‘reference’ I mean that to which a word refers, the actual or thought entity which is its referent. 1 As exemplified, for instance, in recent treatises such as the works of Ullmann. 2 Such a logic seems to be implied in the very important ‘as* of the traditional Hebrew dictionary, e.g. when it is explained that ‫‘ חנית‬spear’ is so called ‘as’ flexible etc.; so BDB, p. 333b, though this explanation is-feot necessarily accepted by BDB. The logic of this ‘as’ is all-pervasive in BDB; and no difference is made by the simple observation that for this or that word a different derivation can be suggested. 3 Already mentioned above, p. 118. The terms of the distinction were suggested to me by that between ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’ in Quine, From a Logical Point of View, e.g. pp. 9, 21 f., 47, etc. I have used ‘information’ because it has now become fairly technical for the effect of choices within a recognized sign system.

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SUMMING-UP

By ‘information’ I mean the difference which is conveyed, within a known and recognized sign system (a language like Hebrew or Arabic), by the fact that it is this sign and not another that is used. The major linguistic interest, it would seem to me, lies in the latter. Many arguments in which biblical scholars adduce linguistic evidence appear to me, however, to involve some con fusion between the former and the latter. For instance, there are certainly places where Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions use a word cognate with Hebrew □IpD, and where the reference is to a place of burial. It does not follow that this word communicates the specific information ‘tomb, grave, place of burial’. Rather, the writers, referring to a tomb or the area around it, called it a ‘place’. While it is interesting to note that the word is used of a tomb, this fact does not entitle us to suppose that ‘tomb’ (as information of a distinction from any other place) is the meaning of this word, and then to transfer it, as Dahood wants to do, to Hebrew passages like Job 16. 18, Qoh. 8. 10 (where it does not improve the sense anyway).1 Though the place referred to in some inscriptions is in fact a tomb, this does not make ‘tomb’ the information specified by the choice of this word and thereby transferable to other contexts. (3) An increased emphasis should be laid upon the statement of meaning in one language only. A Hebrew word has its meaning only in Hebrew, an Arabic word only in Arabic. We have to overcome the heritage of that supposedly comparative approach (actually anti-comparative in its effects) which defines a Hebrew word by thinking about what ‘it means’ in another language. The resources used in philological treatments (for example, the mean ing of an Arabic word) are meanings in that language, while the results to be reached are meanings in Hebrew. Meaning in Hebrew is independent of meaning in Arabic, and depends on choices within the Hebrew lexical stock of a given time. This is an argument for, and not against, the comparative study of Semitic languages; it is a source of confusion when scholars quote Arabic or other meanings as if it were somehow ‘natural’ that they would also be the meanings in Hebrew, and part of sophistication in comparative philology is the learning to avoid this kind of confusion.2 1 Index, no. 280. 2 One example out of many: Gray, Kings, p. 306, mentioning a quite normal

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This point is also confirmed by the emphasis on ‘information’ which we have just discussed. The communication of meaning in Hebrew was not determined at all by what the words meant in Arabic, and was not primarily determined by what they meant in proto-Semitic; it was primarily determined by the choice between the words available in Hebrew. Because words operate in relation to one another within Hebrew, all philological solutions to par ticular difficulties have to be considered not only in themselves, for the satisfaction they give in a particular difficult context, but also in their more general implications, for the effect they have on the total balance of the available series of choices in Hebrew. (4) One may on the whole expect that the results of our seman tic work, in the conditions which call for the use of philological treatment from the cognate languages, will be probabilistic and approximative rather than decisive and exact. This is not because some philological suggestions are right and others wrong; rather, it is something that is likely to attach to the method intrinsically even if it can be substantially improved and refined. Only oc casionally will solutions achieve such certainty that they can become given realities of the Hebrew lexical stock in the same way as familiar and well-attested words with numerous known contexts are given realities. For one thing, our knowledge of the semantic developments which have led to the various meanings of cognates in the ancient Semitic languages is generally hypothetical and indirect; and, for another, even if we can be sure of the rightness of a suggestion inspired by a cognate word, it is unlikely that this will provide us with an exact knowledge of the sense in Hebrew. Such a sug gestion is more likely to assure us of the rightness of the Hebrew text and of the general field of meaning in which the word may lie; this being done, the further determination of meaning will depend mainly on the context. Precise references, nuances, and over tones, even when suggested within a philological treatment, will generally be decided not by the evidence of cognates but by the Hebrew context itself. occurrence of ‫‘ ל ב ש‬honey’, tells us that it ‘might indicate Arabic dibs* (a liquid preparation from grape-juice), and then goes on to agree that it probably means honey (from bees). The repeated casual dragging in of the Arabic meanings, as if they had some natural probability, is a source of confusion, and not of enlightenment.

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SUMMING-UP

For instance, the identification of ]‫ ב צ ק ל‬on the basis of Ugaritic bsql is as certain and successful a philological treatment as can ever be expected.1 Yet it does not give us the exact sense in Hebrew. We know that in Ugaritic bsql is a kind of vegetation, the growth of which is highly esteemed and desired, and that it is of value for food. Applied to the Hebrew example, this information is enough to give certain negative precisions: it excludes the possibility that the initial ‫ ב‬is the preposition ‘in’, and so it excludes all exegesis in senses like fin his bag’. We are thus sure that some kind of grain or vegetable is meant (or the plot in which such was grown); but this was already clear as the general sense of the passage in any case, and the uncertainty was its relation to this word. We cannot be sure that there was a Hebrew ‫ ב צ ק ל‬which meant exactly the same plant as was meant at Ugarit. There are ample instances of words for animals, foods, commodities, and so on, where different objects are designated by words formally cognate.2 Thus even a very successful philological treatment can give a good deal of negative discrimination but does not necessarily furnish a clear and positive precision of meaning. These then are some ways in which we may expect the semantic side of the assessment of philological treatments to develop. Some further explanation should be added about the emphasis just made on meaning within one language. The point is that the meaning of words can be stated as the difference made by their choice as against other words in the same language at the same time; and negatively this implies that senses cannot be indiscriminately imported from other languages just because words are cognate. This does not mean, however, that the cognate languages can be merely neglected, or that intra-Hebraic etymologizing is to be encouraged. The latter has, indeed, historically been the source of much trouble, from which the use of cognate languages has done much to liberate us. That ‫ ת ש ת ע‬- ‫ א ל‬at Isa. 41. 10 had the general sense of ‘do not fear’ was perhaps always fairly clear; but it was the discovery of Phoenician ‫ ש ת ע‬and the Ugaritic cognate which made it clear that 1 See above, p. 26. 2 Cf. dibs! ‫ ד ב ש‬, above, p. 292 n.; Hebrew ‫ ל ח ם‬is ‘bread’ or ‘food’ generally, but Arabic lahm is ‘meat’ (Hebrew ‫ ) ב ש ר‬and Socotri lehem is ‘fish’; ‫ א רי‬is ‘lion* in Hebrew, but Geez ’arwe ‘wild animal’ generally, Tigrinya yarawit ‘serpent* (see Leslau, Harari, p. 31), and also Accadian eru ‘eagle’, etc.; see Ullendorff in VT vi (1956) 192.

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this was indeed the sense, and so overcame the necessity for a dubious derivation within Hebrew through ‫ ש ע ה‬in a sense like ‘gaze about (in fear)’. Similarly, we have seen in the case of ‫חז ה‬ how the sense ‘agreement’ was known long ago, but this understanding came to be confused and darkened by attempts to derive from the verb ‫‘ ח ז ה‬see’. In such cases the philological treatment validates the form and meaning as Hebrew, where the tendency to derive from other extant Hebrew words has obscured or confused the morphological interpretation and the semantic tradition. Again, it has been a common tendency to take the Hebrew ‫ מ הי ר‬in a phrase like ‫( סו פ ר מ ה י ל‬Ps. 45. 2) as meaning ‘quick’, because the verb ‫ מ ה ר‬is ‘hasten’; but comparison with the Ethiopic sense ‘train, teach’ and other cognate senses may suggest that the sense is rather ‘skilled’. Similarly, in Isa. 16. 5 ‫ מ ה ל צ ל ק‬may be ‘skilled injustice’ rather than ‘swift injustice’. ‘Skilled’ is in fact given as a gloss in the standard dictionaries; but in KB it is the second gloss given, while in BDB it is the fourth. The effect of the comparative information is to restore primacy to a sense which the Hebrew context itself favours, but which has been somewhat obscured by the attempt to show derivation from the sense of the actual verb in Hebrew. Such an attempt, we may add, is favoured by the tendency to look for a common root-meaning and to identify it if possible with the sense of the verb. When we talk of meaning within Hebrew, then, this is the meaning of units as seen within the collocations in which they occur and within the semantic fields of agreement and opposition in which they function. Attempts to state meaning derivationally cannot be intra-Hebraic in many cases, because the forms and senses extant in biblical Hebrew may not be those through which the derivation actually took place. One of the values of the comparative approach has been that it has set free senses, which are likely in the Hebrew context, from domination by derivations reached from within Hebrew alone. Our arguments here have some effect on priorities in education for biblical scholarship. The strong influence of comparative philological method may have produced an unfortunate overemphasis on comparative study in the training of students. The prestige and fashionableness of the philological approach often cause students to study a larger number of Semitic languages than they can master. These languages are not mastered properly

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and all the effort does not lead to a thorough knowledge of the texts. This in turn leads to the cheapness and poor quality which we have sometimes seen reason to deplore in philological treatments of the Hebrew Bible, and especially to the phenomenon of dictionary-searching.1 To observe this, unfortunately, is not enough to put a stop to the tendency. The intellectual prestige of the philological approach is reinforced by the apparent social prestige of linguistic polymathy. It continues to be widely supposed that study of a large number of Semitic languages is the gateway to competence in biblical studies.2 All this would not matter if the effect of learning many languages were accompanied by the acquisition of a thorough knowledge of Hebrew. This, however, is not always so. Students may sometimes be found to begin with Hebrew but, before they have really gained wide experience in this language, to be directed to other languages, on which their more developed and mature talents are then spent. Thus the comparative emphasis, though intended for the elucidation of the Hebrew Bible, in educational practice has sometimes weighted the balance against a thorough knowledge of Hebrew. Moreover, in the comparative approach there has been a certain tendency to treat Hebrew as the distinctively unknown language, while the other Semitic languages (with some exception for Ugaritic, in which, as we have remarked, comparative insights are particularly the basis of knowledge) tend to be treated as known quantities, used as sources from which Hebrew can be elucidated.3 Thus the student, starting out to learn Hebrew, has to learn a series of languages which are to serve as sources for the elucidation of Hebrew. Within the study of these other languages, however, 1 Cf. the similar argument of Driver in VTS iv (1957) 5 etc. 2 I have sometimes advised students not to over-extend their mental energies by attempting too many languages, and thus for example to avoid the effort of learning Arabic when they had no intention of reading Arabic texts on any scale; yet have been told that it would be a real disadvantage to them in an academic career if they had only a small number of Semitic languages registered on their records. 3 An occasional exception will prove this rule: Driver, discussing Ps. 22. 30 ‫ כ ל ־ ד ש נ י ־ א ר ץ‬, says that the clue is in the Syriac rendering kpnh dV°; this does not mean famelici terrae (Walton), but ‘those who are wrapped up’ in the earth. This sense of k-p-n is not in the dictionaries but is suggested by cognate words such as Hebrew ‫‘ כ פ ן‬be involved, intricate’. Note the parallelism with ‫ י ו ר ד י ע פ ר‬- ‫ כ ל‬. Thus the Hebrew is used as part of the evidence to explain the Syriac, and the Syriac, once so explained, is used to explain the Hebrew. This type of argument is, however, very exceptional in my experience.

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he does not find to anything like the same degree a spirit of ex pectancy that problems will have to be solved by going outside of the language being studied: Arabic is not taught as a language which has to be elucidated through reference to Hebrew. More over, Arabic is now increasingly taught as a spoken language, and this enhances its familiarity; sometimes it is the only Semitic language known to the biblical student as a living mode of com munication. Thus the proliferation of the comparative philological approach has created a practical problem in the teaching of Hebrew. One might expect the logical sequence to b e: first learn Hebrew; then gain experience in the reading of Hebrew literature; finally, progress to a study of cognate languages and their literatures. This sequence was already made more difficult by the rise of textual emendation, which greatly limited the ease with which biblical texts could be used for the simple gaining of experience in reading. Now philo logical treatments appear to make it doubtful whether there exists an agreed body of ‘Hebrew’ in the sense in which there is an agreed body of ‘Greek’ or of ‘French’, and to suggest that there is no stable basis until ‘Hebrew’ has first been reconstructed from cognate sources. If such is the case, then the task of teaching is indeed difficult. Perhaps, indeed, there is no help for this, and biblical Hebrew is simply a more corrupt and obscure entity than the other clas sical and Semitic languages. In its degree of being a consistent and knowable linguistic entity, suitable for study in itself, Hebrew may perhaps be more like Ugaritic than like Arabic or Syriac, more like Sogdian or Tocharian than like Latin or Greek. I am not sure, however, that this unhappy conclusion should be drawn, and one doubts whether it has been meant even by those philo logists who have most devotedly added to the content of Hebrew from cognate sources. In spite of the multitude of difficulties and obscurities which have provoked the recourse to philological treatment, it must be empha sized that Hebrew is a knowable and manageable linguistic corpus, with a rich though diverse transmission of meaning from ancient times on. The gaining of substantial experience within this corpus is one of the most important ways in which the information yielded by cognate sources can be controlled; and failure to study and utilize the tradition of meaning has been one of the ways in which

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the philological approach has tended to impoverish scholarship.1 In spite of our debt to comparative philology, Hebrew does remain a teachable subject in its own right; and, while the student must now always be aware of the contributions of cognate languages, he will, unless he is ready to study these languages thoroughly, be best employed not in gaining a smattering of them but in learning how to evaluate, in relation to his Hebrew knowledge, the suggestions made on the basis of them‫ ״‬This means that eventually adequate modes of communication and co-operation have to be built up between two kinds of scholar: (a) those who really know the cognate languages or some of them (can any now really know them all?) and (b) those who only assimilate this knowledge within their own grasp of Hebrew. But we can at least do something to depreciate the false prestige which has attached to the polyglot ideal, and rebuild the picture of the Hebraist. The polyglot ideal, we may remind ourselves, by no means obtains in the IndoEuropean field; no one supposes that to appreciate Greek literature one must study all the Indo-European languages. It would, on the other hand, be a hopelessly retrograde step if one were to imagine that work within Hebrew might once again proceed as if the pressure of comparative insights and methods merely did not exist. This pressure is no new thing, but has been acting upon biblical study for centuries; only lately, however, has its presence begun to cause a kind of crisis in understanding. The discussion of the comparative philological approach reveals many new ways in which Hebrew requires to be studied, and makes it impossible for us to contemplate a return to a traditionalist Hebrew study, divorced from the framework of general linguistic study (a framework even wider than that of Semitic comparative philology). We may now pass on to mention some particular practical tasks in which our discussion may have some effect. (1) Our discussion should have some effect on the work of biblical translation, which is constantly going on. Sometimes the production of philological suggestions has been connected with a plea for the production of an absolutely accurate translation of the Hebrew Bible. The approximative character of the information 1 In this respect philology, by going behind the tradition of meaning, has an aspect similar to archaeology when the latter goes straight to the ancient sites and cuts behind the literary historical traditions.

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yielded by comparative approaches, however, means that this is by no means easy to achieve. Translations have often been conceived with the aim of furnishing the ‘right’ meaning. Where the philo logical information provides the exclusion of some impossibilities, plus a range of relative probabilities, this is likely to force a premature choice. Unless several alternative translations are furnished, therefore, the act of translation is likely at times to give a poor rather than an adequate representation of the result of philological work. This, we may add, is one main reason why the biblical student has to study the original languages. It is sometimes argued that improved modern translations are making linguistic study less necessary than it used to be. Quite the contrary is true. Increased modern philological knowledge, while it has enabled us to over come certain difficulties which the older translations had, has also made the assessment of meaning more approximative in character, has multiplied the factors which may bear upon it, and may thus have made the production of definitive translations more remote. (2) Our discussion has shown the importance of certain statistical information, such as comparative counts of homonyms and of the percentages of words having cognates in groups of related languages. The procedures used in this book for these questions are extremely crude; the refinement of techniques for this sort of problem should be undertaken in the years ahead. (3) The desirability of an etymological dictionary of the Semitic languages has often been asserted. Our discussion has shown that such a work should not only register the existence of a word in a certain language, but also negatively its non-existence. Registra tion of the non-occurrence of cognates is essential if we are to assess the percentage of cognates normally found. Similarly, it has to register the cases where a language has a certain root, but only in a word-class or part of speech different from that of the other languages; or, likewise, where it exists only in one or two particular fixed forms, and is no longer free or productive. (4) Dictionaries of Hebrew should be designed in such a way as to distinguish those statements of meaning which are based upon the actual collocations in Hebrew from those statements which are based upon cognates and etymological information. One might consider that a dictionary, instead of beginning with the

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mention of cognates, might restrict itself to stating meaning within Hebrew, leaving etymological discussion to a separate dictionary, as is done with modern languages like English; or it might place the citation of cognates after the discussion of the Hebrew contexts, so as to avoid the possibility that the statement of meaning in Hebrew is distorted in order to show a plausible line of development from the preferred etymology; again, typo graphical devices might be used in order to distinguish the different kinds of source. The advantage of a separate etymological dic tionary would be that it could give full discussion instead of only the brief citation of preferred examples. If dictionaries were produced which gave less prominence to comparative material than has lately been the custom, they might give more space to contextual factors which indicate meaning, such as parallelism (this is a most important indication, even though we have shown that it is far from a simple or infallible one), and to the oppositions or contrasts with other items which might be expected to enter the same semantic field. (5) The study of biblical Hebrew cannot be deemed complete without a satisfactory follow-up into post-biblical Hebrew. The present biblical dictionaries make only limited excursions as far as Sirach and Qumran. It would not be an impossible undertaking to construct in one volume a dictionary of the post-biblical interpretation of biblical Hebrew words, in which would be dis cussed the treatment of words implied in the early Greek and other versions, used in halachic and midrashic interpretation, and stated in the Jewish lexicographers and commentators, up to about a .d . 1300 or 1400. Such a work would be far from providing the ‘right’ interpretation of biblical words; but it would provide the setting within which linguistic meaning was transmitted and might thus help us to assess ways in which such meaning had been either preserved or distorted. (6) Another practical problem is the design of a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible. Classically, an edition has been conceived as a representation of the textual evidence. But the significance of this evidence depends on linguistic considerations. How can space be found in a critical apparatus, however, for linguistic as well as textual evidence? Yet to print only textual evidence, without linguistic discussion, is to invite retrograde and conservative constructions of it from many readers. Versional evidence in

30! particular cannot be printed without some linguistic evaluation. Perhaps no means other than compromise and good sense can be found to solve this problem.1 It is clear that philological treatments have now come to occupy the centre of interest which in the scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was held by the practice of emendation. Amid the general loss of confidence in these emendations today, it is easy to forget that in their time they may have served a significant purpose. They were an attempt to rationalize the study of the text, in that they insisted that scholarly solutions must make sense within the recognized body of know ledge of the Hebrew language: arbitrary exceptions to this could not be made, and the artificial interpretative tricks of earlier periods were to be rejected. Simply because this was tried so hard, and because emendation explored and exhausted its own possibilities, emendation in due course provided a certain important stimulus to the new rise of philological treatments. Nevertheless emendation produced in the end a deep depression and scepticism, for the impression given was that the interpreter in many cases was rewriting the text rather than explaining what was written. The most serious criticism was both for arbitrariness and for banality. The confidence that the grammar and lexicon of Hebrew were already well known, a confidence which is part of the rationalizing tendency just mentioned, had the result that many emendations presented a much more familiar-looking Hebrew than the existing text displayed. Emendations which result in an easier text, however, break the familiar rule of difficilior lectio potior (a rule which, indeed, is not universally and absolutely valid). The process implied that an easier text was corrupted into a more difficult, a corruption which is far from satisfactorily ex plained by an appeal to the irrational stupidity and incompetence of scribes. The philological treatment displays a different and a better approach in these regards. It is just to claim with Winton Thomas that it ventures out into the unknown; in a puzzling text it has the chance of discovering something new, not a scrambled version of familiar Hebrew but words and phrases which hitherto were not known to be Hebrew at all. Such an expectation of expansion SUMMING-UP

1 On these problems see in particular my review of the sample edition of Isaiah in JS S xii (1967) 113-22, and especially pp. i!9 ff.

S U M M IN G -U P 302 was only right in an era when the knowledge of Semitic languages, and particularly those of the environment of the Old Testament, was being greatly enlarged. Nevertheless there is some danger that the present pursuit of the philological treatment will end by being regarded with the same deep scepticism which has been the fate of the fashion for textual emendation. Firstly, many of the followers of the philo logical approach have also from time to time used drastic emenda tion of the consonantal text. As for the vowel text, the low opinion of it has been so widespread, and the rewriting of it so drastic, as to create an even worse impression of arbitrariness than was produced by the older emendations of the consonantal text. Emendation had generally treated the existing signs, i.e. the written letters of the MT, as evidence which serves as a clue towards the discovery of the true text, or which at least must be explained when the discovery is made; but philological treatments have often held themselves free to alter the vocalization without giving an account of it, and have not accepted the existing vocalization signs as presumptive evidence. Thus the treatment of the vocalization in the philological approach has often been more arbitrary than straight emendation of the consonantal text has been. Secondly, and perhaps more fundamental, there is the sense that philological treatments are often a semantic rewriting of the text: just as emendation abandoned the graphic tradition of the text in order to create a new or reconstructed writing, so philo logical treatments abandon the semantic tradition of meaning in Hebrew in order to create a determination of meaning from else where. For these reasons philological treatments are not quite so far removed from textual emendation as some claims would suggest, and the danger of an ultimate scepticism hangs over them both alike if their procedures are pressed too recklessly and too uncritically. The bewildering number and variety of philological treatments, and their lack of considered comprehensive theory hitherto, are likely to make the student eventually feel that not all of these suggestions can be right. Such a judgement can by no means be attributed to an ante cedent hostility to the philological approach; for it is one which may be confirmed also to some considerable extent by the judge ments of those who have themselves been foremost within it. Even where scholars have committed themselves whole-heartedly

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to the comparative philological approach, this fact in itself has not necessarily led to any considerable measure of agreement among them. Of the very numerous suggestions which have come from Tur-Sinai, for instance, how many have received wide acceptance even among devotees of the philological approach? Again, many of the critical analyses used on philological treatments in this book are represented also in Driver’s very strong strictures on Dahood.1 Once we allow for considerable crudity and extravagance in the application of the method by Dahood, we must ask whether the method strictly as a method is not only that which Driver himself, and the movement for philological treatments in general, has implied throughout. In other words, these strong criticisms of Dahood, while striking at a lack of judgement in the application of a method, do not appear to provide us with adequate means to discriminate between a satisfactory philological method and one which is not satisfactory.2 Thus, to sum up this point, philological treatments have not as yet, in spite of a general agreement in method, succeeded in presenting a very wide body of agreed results; while, on the other hand, in discussing the method as a whole we can claim to be doing no more than drawing out the im plications of types of critical evaluation which philological scholars are already tacitly applying to their own and their colleagues’ work. Our investigation is thus not a criticism of the method of philological treatments, but a making explicit of the criteria implicit in the method. It would, in my judgement, be a great misfortune if the move ment for philological treatments were to be received in the end with unthinking scepticism. Faulty it has been in a number of regards. It has prided itself on freedom from the faults of textual conjecture, when it has in fact shared these faults and has also obscured the fact that textual emendation is not at all an impossible or invalid approach. Many suggestions have been offered over-confidently, and the exultation of knowledge about 1 In yS S x (1965) 112-17; this review appeared when the argument of the present book was already complete. 2 Cf. the judgement of D. N. Freedman in Hyatt, The Bible in Modern Scholar ship, p. 303. While far from committing himself to the rightness of Dahood’s interpretations (he gives the cautious qualification ‘even if only a fraction stand the test of scholarly criticism5) he maintains that Dahood’s work is ‘only a logical extension of the pioneering effort of other Ugaritic specialists’. Quite so; but some may judge that such an extension proves that there is something wrong with the logic.

SU M M IN G -U P 304 new-found materials like Ugaritic has often encouraged extravagant over-assertiveness and the ignoring of problems which are quite plain to common sense. As I have argued several times, there has been a failure to face the cumulative consequences which follow when a method, quite valid in the single case, is applied over many hundreds or even thousands of examples. There has been a failure to consider the problem systematically and to give equal considera tion to all the criteria which are relevant. If this has been so in the past, however, it does not mean that it need be so in the future. If an adequate awareness of the wider aspects of the problems, and especially of the relevant criteria, is fostered, there is every reason to expect that the better solutions will be well received and the poorer sifted out. The basic assump tion, that study of the relations between the Semitic languages may further the understanding of the Hebrew Bible, is incon trovertible. The trouble has not lain in comparative scholarship, but in poor judgement in its application, and in failure to see and follow out some of the general linguistic questions which are already implied in the primary use of comparative method. Though it is not true that the comparative method is any longer the major way to the understanding of language, and though it has in the past sometimes shown an undesirable imperialism, it remains highly desirable that its interests should be followed up. This book is therefore consecrated to the deeper and fuller study of that linguistic world in which the Hebrew Bible is set, and against the background of which our future growth in under standing of its language must take place. The time is past, however, when the primary creative and positive contribution of comparative study was the production of in dividual philological solutions. That this was tried, and to some extent accomplished, is entirely understandable, just as, at an earlier stage of scholarship, it is understandable that every effort was made to exploit the method of conjectural emendation. We have now reached the stage, however, at which mere productivity in philological suggestions has become negative and confusing in effect, and the positive task is the exploration of the method in itself. This present book is, I believe, the first to be wholly devoted to this purpose.

APPENDIX SYRIAC VERBS AS IN BROCKELMANN, SET AGA IN ST HEBREW VERBS AS IN BDB (SLIGHTLY MODIFIED)

{see a b o v e p p , 1 6 2

Verb Vs bgh bgl bgn bgr bd

’

bd l bdq

b d q ll bdr bhbh bhl

bhq bhr bht b(w)d b(w)q bzur bwt bz

bzh bz' b zq

Sense be evil be delayed be talkative cry, seek close, hold in escape (?) mix be poured out be disturbed

A Hebrew, with close sense

/.)

B Hebrew, sense remote

C Hebrew, but not verb

D not Hebrew

x x x x X1 X X X X

(etbadbad) pretend be talkative be mad scatter examine disclose (denom.) repair disperse be anxious be quiet shine be glorious be ashamed perish rot be uncultivated pass the night spoil scorn cleave scatter

x(?) X2 X X X

x x3

1 Cf. MH ‫ בג ר‬be of age*. 3 ‫ ב ז ל‬rare, usually 4 5 Or perhaps column D,

X4 X X X

x X X5 X X

x X X X

2 Hebrew sense = ‘divide*. .‫ פ ז ר‬Unless cogn. Hebrew ‫‘ ב הו‬vanity*.

306

Verb bhn bhr bhs btl btn by’ byn by* byt bk’ bhr bl bl’ blm bl* bis blq bU bn’ bs’ bsm bsr bsr b*’ b*d b*t b*k b*l b*q b*r b*t b*t II bs bs’ b§r

APPENDIX: COMPARISON OF SYRIAC AND HEBREW VERBS

Sense

A Hebrew, with close sense

examine show examine choose (?) repair ( ?) move, excite cease (denom.) conceive console understand cease, delay (denom.) make familiar weep be ripe mix wear out silence, bind m outh be struck flower appear, be directed spoil build despise smell good, enjoy despise, refute (denom.) be incarnate desire depart kick tread to dust m arry; begin to ripen strike seek out, glean oppress rouse (denom.) become thin examine be lacking, diminish

Hebrew, sense remote

Hebrew, but not verb

not Hebrew

x X X

x(?) X X

X1 X X2 X X X X X X X X3 X X X X X X4 X X X X X X X X X X X X* X X x (or B)

1 Qoh. only. * Cogn. 3 ? ‫ ביי‬Hap. leg. 4 But Hebr. /z/; cf. Grundriß, i. 153. 5 = ‫ ב ע ש‬if Brockelmann is right.

APPENDIX: COMPARISON OF SYRIAC AND HEBREW VERBS

Verb bq bq bqr br* brh brk brm br$ brq Ml

Sense rot examine, decree examine create make clear kneel, swear consume penetrate, reveal flash ripen, cook

A Hebrew, with close sense

B Hebrew) sense remote

Hebrew, but not verb

D not Hebrew

X X1 X X X X X X

X X

1 Unless in personal name.

307

ABBREVIATIONS ABR A JSL

Australian Biblical Review American Journal of Semitic Languages

A nO r

Analecta Orientalia

AO ASTI B A S OR BH3 B JR L BO BSO AS

Archiv Orientdlni Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute Bulletin of the American Schools for Oriental Research Brown, D river, and Briggs, Hebrew Lexicon Biblia Hebraica (Kittel), 3rd or later edition Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Bibliotheca Orientalis Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

BW ANT BW AT BZA W

Beiträge zur W issenschaft des A lten u n d N euen T estam ents Beiträge zur W issenschaft vom A lten T estam en t Beiträge zur Zeitschrift fü r die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

BDB

CBQ CC CML D LZ ESA

ET ETL GB

Catholic Biblical Quarterly Corpus Christianorum Canaanite Myths and Legends (Driver) Deutsche Literaturzeitung Epigraphic S outh A rabian

HTR H U CA

Expository Times Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Gesenius, Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament (17th ed. by Buhl, 1915) Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammary ed. Kautzsch, 2nd English ed. by A. E. Cowley (Oxford, 1910) Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual

IC C

International Critical Com m entary

ID B IE J IJ A L JA O S JB L JJS JN E S JP O S JQ R JR A S JSS JTS

Interpreter's Bible Dictionary Israel Exploration Journal International Journal of American Linguistics Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Near Eastern Studies Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society Jewish Quarterly Review Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Journal of Semitic Studies Journal of Theological Studies L. K oehler and W . Baum gartner, Lexicon in Veteris Testa ‫־‬ menti Libros (Leiden, 1953)

A B B R E V IA T IO N S

LSJ MH MT O BL

309

Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (rev. ed. by H. Stuart Jones and R. Mackenzie, Oxford, 1940) Middle Hebrew, Mishnaic Hebrew Massoretic Text Orientalia et Biblica Lovaniensia (ed. G. Ryckmans, Louvain. 19 5 7 )

OED O LZ Or Suec OTM S OTS PEQ PL RB ScrH SJT TLS UH

Oxford English Dictionary Orientalistische Literaturzeitung Orientalia Suecana The Old Testament and Modern Study (ed. H. H. Rowley, Oxford, 1951). Oudtestamentische Studiën Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Patrologia Latina (Migne) Revue biblique Scripta Hierosolymitana Scottish Journal of Theology The Times Literary Supplement Ugaritic Handbook (by C. H. Gordon, AnOr xxv, Rome,

VD VT VTS WO ZA ZAW ZD M G ZNW

Verbum Domini Vetus Testamentum Vetus Testamentum Supplements Die Welt des Orients Zeitschrift fü r die Assyriologie Zeitschrift fü r die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft Zeitschrift fü r die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft

1 9 4 7 )

BIBLIOGRAPHY T h i s bibliography lists works m entioned in the text and some others w hich are relevant for the general questions discussed. It does not, however, provide individual listing for periodical articles in w hich philo logical treatm ents have appeared; for these the reader is referred to the Index of Examples. A istleitner, J., Wörterbuch der ugaritischen Sprache (Berlin, 1963). B acher, W ., ‘D ie hebräische Sprachw issenschaft vom 10. bis zum 16. Ja h rh u n d e rt’, in W inter, J., and W ünsche, A., Die jüdische Literatur seit dem Abschluß des Kanons, ii. 135-235 (T rier, 1894). ------ , ‘D ie Anfänge der hebräischen G ram m atik’, Z D M G xlix (1895)

1-62 , 33 5 ‫ ־‬9 2 . B arr, J., The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 1961).

-----, Biblical Words for Time (London, 196z). -----, Old and New in Interpretation (London, 1966). ----- , ‘St. Jerome’s Appreciation of Hebrew’, B JR L xlix (1966-7) 281302.

----- , ‘St. Jerome and the Sounds of Hebrew’, J S S xii (1967) 1-36. ------ , ‘Vocalization and the Analysis of H ebrew am ong the ancient T ranslato rs’, in the B aum gartner Festschrift (Leiden, 1967), pp. 1-11. B arth, J., Etymologische Studien (Leipzig, 1893). B auer, H., and L eander, P., Historische Grammatik der hebräischen

Sprache des alten Testaments (Halle, 1922). B eeston, A. F. L., A Descriptive Grammar of Epigraphic South Arabian

(London, 1962). B en -Jehuda, E., Thesaurus totius hebraitatis et veteris et recentioris

(Berlin, later Jerusalem, 1908-59). B ergsträsser, G., Einführung in die semitischen Sprachen (Munich, 1928).

Bertholet Festschrift: Festschrift fü r Alfred Bertholet (Tü bingen, 1950). B irkeland, H., The Language of Jesus (Oslo, 1954). B lau, J., ‘Etymologische U ntersuchungen auf G ru n d des palästinischen A rabisch’, V T v (1955) 3 3 7 4 4 ‫· ־‬ ------ , ‘Ü b er hom onym e u n d angeblich hom onym e W urzeln’, V T vi (1956)

242-8. B loomfield, L., Language (London, 1935). B lumenthal, D. R., ‘A Play on Words in the Nineteenth Chapter of

Job’, F T xvi (1966) 497-501.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

3”

B oling , R. G., * “Synonymous” Parallelism in the Psalms’, J S S v

(i960) 221-55. B orgen, P., Bread from Heaven (Leiden, 1965). B otterweck, G. J., Der Triliterismus im Semitischen (Bonner Biblische Beiträ ge iii, Bonn, 1952). B rockelmann, C., Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen (2 vols., Berlin, 1908-13). ---- , Lexicon Syriacum (2nd edition, Halle, 1928). ---- , Hebräische Syntax (Neukirchen, 1956). B rüll, A., Fremdsprachliche Redensarten und ausdrücklich als fremd sprachlich bezeichnete Wörter in den Talmuden und Midraschim (Leipzig, 1869). B uck, C. D ., A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal IndoEuropean Languages (Chicago, 1949). B uxtorf, J., Tiberias sive commentarius masorethicus triplex (Basiliae, 1620). C appellus, L., Arcanum punctationis revelatum sive de punctorum vocalium

et accentuum apud Hebraeos vera et germana antiquitate (Leiden, 1624). Casey, R. P. Festschrift: Biblical and Patristic Studies in memory of R. P. Casey (ed. B irdsall, J. N., and T homson, R. W., Freiburg, 1963)· Caskel, W., Die Bedeutung der Beduinen in der Geschichte der Araber (Kö ln, 1953 )· ---- , ‘Zur Beduinisierung Arabiens*, Z D M G ciii (1953) *28-36. ---- , ‘The Bedouinization of Arabia’, American Anthropological Society Memoir no. 76 (1954). Castell, E., Lexicon Heptaglotton (London, 1669). Chicago, Oriental Institute of the University, The Assyrian Dictionary, (Chicago, from 1956). Cross, F. M., and F reedman, D . N., Early Hebrew Orthography (New Haven, 1952). ---- , The Ancient Library of Qurnran (London, 1958). D ahood, M., ‘The Value of Ugaritic for Textual Criticism’, Biblica xl

(1959) 160-70. ---- , ‘Qoheleth and Northwest Semitic Philology’, Biblica xliii (1962) 3 49 - 6 5 · ---- , ‘Northwest Semitic Philology and Job’, in McKenzie, J. L., The Bible in Current Catholic Thought (New York, 1962), pp. 55-74. ---- , ‘Hebrew-Ugaritic Lexicography’, Biblica xliv (1963) 289-303, xlv (1964) 3 93 - 4 1 2 , xlvi (1965) 311-32, xlvii (1966) 403-19, xlviii (1967) 421-38. ---- , Proverbs and Northwest Semitic Philology (Rome, 1963).

312

B IB L IO G R A P H Y

D ahood, M., Psalms 1-50 (Anchor Bible, New York, 1966). ------ , Ugaritic-Hebrew Philology, (Rome, 1965). D elitzsch, F riedrich, Prolegomena eines neuen hebräisch-aramäischen

Wörterbuches zum Alten Testament (Leipzig, 1886). D horme, P., Le Livre de Job (Paris, 1926). D illmann , A., Lexicon linguae aethiopicae (Leipzig, 1865). ------ , Ethiopie Grammar (E.T., London, 1907). D ozy, R. P. A., Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (2 vols., Leiden, 1881). D river, G. R. : for a full bibliography, including much material relevant

to this study, see the Driver Festschrift (below), pp. 191-206. Problems of the Hebrew Verbal System (Edinburgh, 1936). ‘Hebrew Poetic Diction’, V T S i (1953) 26-39. Canaanite Myths and Legends (Edinburgh, 1956). Aramaic Documents of the Fifth Century B .C . (abridged and revised edition, Oxford, 1957). ------ , The Judaean Scrolls (Oxford, 1965). Driver Festschrift: Hebrew and Semitic Studies presented to G. R. Driver (ed. D. WiNTON T homas and W. D. M cH ardy, Oxford, 1963). D river, S. R., Notes on the Hebrew Text and Topography of the Books of Samuel (2nd ed., Oxford, 1913).

------ , ------ , ------ , ------ ,

E fros, I. L, Maimonides’ Treatise on Logic (Proceedings of the American

Academy of Jewish Research, viii, New York, 1938). E hrlich, A. B., Randglossen zur hebräischen Bibel (7 vols., Leipzig,

1908-14). E issfeldt, O., The Old Testament: an Introduction (Oxford, 1965).

Eissfeldt Festschrift: Von Ugarit nach Qumran (ed. H empel, J., and R ost, L., BZAW lxxvii, Berlin, 1958). E itan , I., A Contribution to Biblical Lexicography (New York, 1924). E llenbogen, M ., Foreign Words in the Old Testament: their origin and etymology (London, 1962). E merton, J. A., ‘The Purpose of the Second Column of the Hexapla’, J T S N.s. vii (1956) 79 - 8 7 · ------ , ‘Did Jesus speak Hebrew?’, J T S N.s. xii (1961) 189-202. E ppenstein , S., Übersicht über die hebr.-arabische Sprachvergleichung bei den jüdischen Autoren des Mittelalters (Frankfurt a. M., 1905). F ield, F., Origenis hexaplorum quae supersunt (2 vols., Oxford, 1875). F itzmyer, J. A., The Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran (Rome, 1966). F lashar, M., ‘Exegetische Studien zum Septuagintapsalter’, Z A W xxxii

(1912) 81-116, 161-89, 241-68. F raenkel, S., Die aramäischen Fremdwörter im Arabischen (Leiden, 1886).

B IB L IO G R A P H Y

313

F reedman, D . N ., ‘T h e Biblical Languages* in H yatt, The Bible in Modern Scholarship, pp. 294-312. F reytag, G . W ., Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (Halle, 1830-7). F ück , J., Die arabischen Studien in Europa (Leipzig, 1955). G emser, B., Sprüche Salomos (2nd ed., T übingen, 1963). G erleman, G ., Studies in the Septuagint: I. The Book of Job (L und, 1946); I II . Proverbs (L und, 1956). G leason, H . A., A n Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (revised ed., N ew York, 1961). G olius, J., Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (Leiden, 1653). G onda, J., ‘T h e Etymologies in the A ncient Indian B rähm anas’, Lingua V ( ! 955 61-85 (6 ‫ ־‬. G ordis, R ., The Biblical Text in the Making (Philadelphia, 1937). ------ , Koheleth— the M an and his World (New York, 1955). G ordon, C. H ., Ugaritic Handbook (A nO r xxv, Rome, 1947). G oshen- G ottstein, M . H ., ‘L inguistic S tructure and T rad itio n in the Q um ran Documents*, ScrH iv (1958) 101-37. ------ , Text and Language in Bible and Qumran (Jerusalem , i960). ------ , ‘T h e T ib erian Bible Text*, in Biblical and other Studies (ed. A ltm ann, H arvard, 1963), pp. 79-122. ------ (ed.), The Book of Isaiah : Sample Edition with Introduction (Jeru salem, 1965); review by Barr in J S S xii (1967) 113-22. G ray, G. B., Isaiah i-xxvii (IC C , E dinburgh, 1912). G ray, John , I & I I Kings (London, 1964).

—, The Legacy of Canaan (V T S

v, L eiden, 1957; 2nd edition, L eiden,

!965)· G reenberg, J. H ., ‘T h e P atterning of R oot M orphem es in Sem itic’, Word vi (1950) 162-81. G rossmann, R., and S achs, H ., Compendious Hebrew-English Dictionary (revised edition by M . H . Segal, Tel-A viv, 1949). G udschinsky, S. C., ‘T h e A B C ’s of Lexicostatistics (Glottochronology)*, Word xii (1956) 175-210; reprinted in shorter form in H ym es, Language in Culture and Society , pp. 612-22. G uillaume, A., ‘A C ontribution to H ebrew Lexicography*, B S O A S xvi (1954) ! - ! a . ------ , ‘T h e A rabic B ackground of the Book of Job*, H ooke Festschrift (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 106-27. ------ , ‘Paronom asia in the O ld T estam en t’, J S S ix (1964) 282-90. ------ , Hebrew and Arabic Lexicography ( = Abr-Nahrain i. 3 -3 5 ; ii. 5 -3 5 ; iii. 1-10; iv. 1-18), Leiden, 1965.

314

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H alkin, A. S., ‘The Mediaeval Jewish Attitude toward Hebrew’, in

Biblical and Other Studies (ed. Altmann, Harvard, 1963), pp. 233-48. H alperin, H., Rashi and the Christian Scholars (Pittsburgh, 1964). H amori, A., ‘Paronomasia in Abu Tammä m’s Style’, J S S xii (1967) 83-90. H arris, Z. S., The Development of the Canaanite Dialects (New Haven, 1939 )· H a t c h , E ., and R e d p a t h , H . A ., A Concordance to the Septuagint (2 vols., O xford, 1897).

H aywood, J. A., Arabic Lexicography (Leiden, i960). H ockett, C. F., A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1958). H oenigswald, H . M., Language Change and Linguistic Reconstruction

(Chicago, i960). Hooke Festschrift: Promise and Fulfilment (ed. by F. F. B ruce, Edinburgh, 1963). H uffmon, H. B., Amorite Personal Names in the M ari Texts (Baltimore, 1965). H yatt, J. P., ed., The Bible in Modern Scholarship (Nashville, 1965). H ymes, D., ‘Rate of Morpheme Decay in Arabic*, IJ A L xxv (1959) 267-9. ---- , ed., Language in Culture and Society (New York, 1964). I bn K haldün , Muqaddimah (ed. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols., New York, 1958). Jacob, B., ‘Das hebrä ische Sprachgut im Christlich-Palä stinischen’,

Z A W xxii (1902) 83-113. Jastro w, M., A Dictionary of the Targumim , the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (London, 1903). Jeffery, A., The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'än (Baroda, 1938). ---- , ‘Hebrew Language’, in ID B ii. 553-60. Jespersen, O., Language (London, 1922). K ahle, P., The Cairo Geniza (2nd ed., Oxford, 1959). K atz, P., ‘Septuagintal Studies in the Mid-Century’, in The Background

of the New Testament and its Eschatology: Studies in Honour of C. H. Dodd (ed. W. D. Davies and D. Daube, Cambridge, 1964), pp. 176208. K autzsch, E. F., Die Aramäismen im Alten Testament (Halle, 1902). K oehler, L., ‘Vom hebrä ischen Lexikon’, O T S viii (1950) 137-55. K opf, L., ‘Religious Influences on Mediaeval Arabic Philology*, Studia Islamica v (1956) 3 3 5 9 ‫· ־‬ ---- , ‘Das arabische Wö rterbuch als Hilfsmittel fü r die hebrä ische Lexicographie’, V T vi (1956) 286-302. ---- , ‘The Treatment of Foreign Words in Mediaeval Arabic Lexicology’, ScrH ix (1961) 191-205.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

315

K oskinen, K., ‘Kompatibilitä t in den dreikonsonantigen hebrä ischen

Wurzeln*, ZDM G cxiv (1964) 16-58. K raus, H.-J., Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten

Testaments (Neukirchen, 1956). ---- , Psalmen (Biblischer Kommentar, Neukirchen, 2 vols., 1961). K rauss, S., ‘Talmudische Nachrichten über Arabien’, ZDM G lxx (1916) 32153

‫·־‬

K utscher , e . y ., ‫הלשון ו ה ר ק ע הלשוני של מגיל ת ישעיהו ה של מה מ מגילו ת‬

‫( ים ה מ ל ח‬Jerusalem,

1 9 5 9 )·

---- , ‘Contemporary Studies in North-western Semitic’, J S S x (1965) 21-51· ---- , ‘Yemenite Hebrew and Ancient Pronunciation’, J S S xi (1966) 217 ‫ ־‬25 . L ambton, A. K. S., Persian Vocabulary (Cambridge, 1954). L andau, E., Die gegensinnigen Wärter im A lt- und Neuhebräischen (Berlin,

1896). L ane , E. W., Arabic-English Lexicon (8 vols., London, 1863-93). L ehmann , W. P., Historical Linguistics: an Introduction (New York,

1963)· L eslau, W., Ethiopie and South Arabic Contributions to the Hebrew

Lexicon (Berkeley, 1958). ---- , Etymological Dictionary of Harari (Berkeley, 1963). Levi della Vida Festschrift: Studi orientalistici in onore di Giorgio Levi della Vida (2 vols., Rome, 1956). L evy, J., Chaldäisches Wörterbuch über die Targumim und einen grossen Theil des rabbinischen Schriftthums (3rd ed., Leipzig, n.d.— 1867?). Lö w, I., ‘Aramä ische Fischnamen’, in Orientalische Studien Th . Nöldeke . . . gewidmet (Giessen, 1906), pp. 549-70. M aimon , M oses ben , Treatise on Logic (ed. 1 . 1 . Efros, American Academy

for Jewish Research, New York, 1938). M enner, R J., ‘Conflict of homonyms in English’, Language xii (1936)

229-44. M etzger, B. M., The Text of the New Testament (New York, 1964). M irsky, A., ‘Biblical Variants in Medieval Hebrew Poetry’, Textus iii

(1963)159-63. M ontgomery, J. A., Kings (ed. H. S. Gehman, ICC, Edinburgh, 1951). M oore, G. F., Judges (ICC, Edinburgh, 1895). M orag, S., The Vocalization Systems of Arabic , Hebrew and Aramaic

(The Hague, 1962). ------ , ‫( ה ע ב רי ת שבפי י הודי תימן‬Jerusalem, 1963) (for an English review,

see under Kutscher).

3i 6

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M oran, W . L ., *Gen. 49. 10 and its U se in Ezek. 21. 32*, Biblica xxxix (1958) 405-25. M oscati, S., The Semites in Ancient History (Cardiff, 1959). ------ , ed., A n Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages (W iesbaden, 1964). M owinckel, S .,Han SomKommer (Copenhagen, 1951); English, He That Cometh (Oxford, 1956). N eubauer, A. (ed.), Book of Hebrew Roots by M arw än b. Janäh (Oxford,

1875). N ida, E. A., Toward a Science of Translating (Leiden, 1964). N öldeke, T ., 'W ö rter m it G egensinn (A ddad)’ in his Neue Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft (Strassburg, 1910), pp. 67-108. N ötscher F estschrift: Alttestamentliche Studien (ed. Junker, H ., and Botterweck, J., Bonner Biblische Beiträge, i, Bonn, 1950). N oth, M ., Die israelitischen Personennamen (B W A N T , iii Folge, 10, Stuttgart, 1928). N yberg, H . S., Hilfsbuch des Pehlevi (Uppsala, 2 vols., 1928 and 1931). ------ , 'D as textkritische Problem des A lten T estam ents am H oseabuche dem onstrie rt,, Z A W lii (1934) 241-54. ------ , Studien zum Hoseabuche (Uppsala, 1935). P alache, J. L ., Semantic Notes on the Hebrew Lexicon (Leiden, 1959). P ayne, D . F., 'A m biguity in O ld T estam ent Exegesis’, A S T I , fo rth coming. P eake, A. S., ed., The People and the Book (Oxford, 1925). Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (2nd ed. by M . B lack and H . H . R owley, L ondon, 1962). P erles, F ., Analekten zur Textkritik des Alten Testaments (M unich, is t series 1895, 2nd series 1922). P ope, M . H ., El in the Ugaritic Texts ( V T S ii, Leiden, 1955). ------ , Job (Anchor Bible, N ew York, 1965). ------ , ‘M arginalia to M . D ahood’s Ugaritic-Hebrew Philology', J B L lxxxv ( 1966) 455 ‫ ־‬66 . Q uine , W . V. O., From a Logical Point of View (N ew Y ork, 1963). R abin , C., Ancient West-Arabian (London, 1951).

-----, Qumran Studies

(Oxford, 1957).

------ , ‘T h e H istorical Background of Q um ran H ebrew ’, ScrH iv (1958) 144-61.

B IB L IO G R A P H Y

317

------ , ‘T h e O rigin of the Subdivisions of Sem itic’, in Hebrew and Semitic Studies presented to G. R. Driver (Oxford, 1963), pp. 104-15. ------ , ‘H ittite W ords in H ebrew ’, Orientalia xxxii (1963) pp. 113-39. ------ , ‫ מ לי ם בו ד דו ת‬, in Encyclopaedia Miqrait. R ankin , O. S., Jewish Religious Polemic (E dinburgh, 1956). Record and Revelation (Essays by m em bers of the Society for O ld T estam ent Study, ed. R obinson , H . W ., O xford, 1938). R eichelt, H ., Awestisches Elementarbuch (Heidelberg, 1909). R ichter, E., ‘Ü b er H om onym ie’, K retschm er Festschrift (Vienna, 1926), pp. 167-201. R oberts, B. J., The Old Testament Text and Versions (Cardiff, 1951). R obins , R. H ., General Linguistics: An Introductory Survey (London, 1964). R obinson F estschrift: Studies in Old Testament Prophecy (ed. R owley, H . H ., E dinburgh, 1950). R obinson , H . W . (ed.), Record and Revelation (Oxford, 1938). R osenthal, E. I. J., ‘M edieval Jewish Exegesis: Its C haracter and Significance’, J S S ix (1964) 265-81. R osenthal, F ., A History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden, 1952). R osenzweig, A., ‘D ie A l-T ikri D eutungen’, in Festschrift zu 7 . Lewys 70. Geburtstag (Breslau, 1911). R ossini, C. C., Chrestomathia arabica meridionalis epigraphica (Rome, Ï9 3 0 · R owley, H . H ., ed., The Old Testament and Modern Study (Oxford, 1951 )· R udolph , W ., Jeremia (T übingen, 1947). ------ , Esra und Nehemia (T übingen, 1949). R uzicka, R., ‘U eber die Existenz des g im H ebräischen’, ZA xxi (1908) 293 - 340 . ------ , ‘L a Q uestion de l’existence du g dans les langues sém itiques’, AO xxii (1954) 176-237. Saadia: S iddur R. Saadja G aon, Kitàb Gämi As-Salawät wat-Tasâbïh (ed. D avidson, I., A ssaf, S., and Joel, B. L, Jerusalem , 1941). S aussure, F. de, Course in General Linguistics (E. T ., N ew York, 1959). S chindler, B., and M armorstein, A., Occident and Orient . . .: Gaster Anniversary Volume (London, 1936). S chultens, A., ‘D issertatio theologica-philologica de utilitate linguae arabicae in interpretanda sacra lingua’, in his Opera Minora (Leiden, 1769), pp. 487-510. S chulthess, F ., Homonyme Wurzeln im Syrischen (Berlin, 1900) (cf. review by N öldeke in ZDM G liv [1900] 1 5 2 6 4 ‫) ־‬. ------ , Lexicon Syropalaestinum (Berlin, 1903).

318

B IB L IO G R A P H Y

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319

W echter, P ., Ibn Barün’s Arabie Works on Hebrew Grammar and Lexico graphy (Philadelphia, 1964). W ehr, H ., A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (ed. J. M . Cowan, Cornell, 1961). W eil, G ., ‘\Addad*, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd edition, L o ndon and Leiden, i960, i, pp. 184-6). W eil , G . E., ‘L a nouvelle édition de la M assorah (B H K iv) et Phistoire de la Massorah*, V T S ix (1963) 266-84. ------ , Élie Lévita (Leiden, 1963). W einreich, U ., Languages in Contact (New York, 1953). W eiss, A. von , Hauptprobleme der Zweisprachigkeit (H eidelberg, 1959). W ellhausen, J., Der Text der Bücher Samuelis (G öttingen, 1871). ------ , Die Kleinen Propheten (Berlin, 1898). W ernberg-M oller, P., The Manual of Discipline (Leiden, 1957). W ild , S., Das Kitäb al-A in und die arabische Lexikographie (Wiesbaden, 1965)· W right, G. E., (ed.), The Bible and the Ancient Near East (New York, 1961). W ürthwein, E., The Text of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1957). W utz, F. X ., ‘D ie T ranskriptionen von der S eptuaginta bis zu H iero nymus* (BWA T , ii Reihe, 9, S tuttgart, 1933). ------ , Onomastica Sacra .(T exte u n d U ntersuchungen, xli. 1-2, Leipzig, 1

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) .

Y ahuda, A. S., The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian (London, 1933). Y asin , I zz ad -D in al-, The Lexical Relation between Ugaritic and Arabic (New York, 1952). Z iff, P ., Semantic Analysis (Ithaca, i960). Z immermann, F ., ‘Folk Etym ology of Biblical Names*, V T S xv (1966) 311-26.

INDEX OF EXAMPLES T h i s Index includes only a selection from the total number of philological treatments known to me. Almost all those referred to in the text of this book are included, along with others which provide a representative collection. Inform ation is presented in a very com pressed form. In order to understand the argum ents advanced, readers should consult the source itself. W here a suggestion has been applied to several different passages, I generally cite only the m ore striking instances. T h e order of presentation is as follows: (1) Exam ples are listed in alphabetical order of roots, except in a few cases, in w hich the familiar form is listed and a cross-reference given. (2) T h e H ebrew m eaning alleged by the suggestion. (3) T h e chief language or languages used for cognate evidence, and, if necessary, the form or sense therein. A question m ark is added w here the existence or the sense of the cognate form cited seems to be seriously doubtful in th at language. (4) O ne or m ore of the biblical passages concerned. (5) In parenthesis, relevant details such as parallelisms or versional readings. (6) A cross-reference, if the example has been discussed in the text of this book. (7) T h e source of the suggestion, not necessarily in its earliest form, b u t in one w hich states the argum ent adequately and is reasonably accessible (see p. 11). T h is Index is n o t intended as a glossary of H ebrew ; it is for use in conjunction w ith the discussion in this book. Inclusion of entries does not im ply th at I consider the data or conclusions to be correct. I have not, however, intentionally included anything w hich seems likely to mislead, provided th at the argum ents of this book have been studied. O bvious m isprints and m inor errors in the sources have been corrected. 1.

‫ א ב ח ה‬A. ‘slaughter’, Accad. ababu (?). Ezek. 21. 20 (cr^ayta). D elitzsch, pp. 74 f. (b u t later abandoned?).

‫ א ב ח ה‬B. ‘brightness’, Ar. 9ubbaha. Ezek. 21. 20. Reider, H U C A ii (1925) 95· 3 · ‫‘ אב!־‬carry away’, Accad. abaku . Isa. 9. 17. D river, J T S xxix (1928) 390 . 4. ‫‘ א ב ל‬be d ry ’, Accad. Jer. 12. 4 (|| ‫)יב ש‬, etc. D river in Schindler, P· 7 3 · 5. ‫(‘ אגן‬moon) disc’. Ct. 7. 3. See text, p. 107. Reider, H U CA ii (1925) 94.

IN D E X O F E X A M PL E S 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

321

‫‘ א ד ב‬bind, oppress’, Accad. (?). I Sam. 2. 33. D river, jfT S xxiii (1922) 70. ‫ א ד ם‬A. ‘earth ’, as ‫ א ך מ ה‬. Prov. 30. 14 (|| ‫) א ל ץ‬, etc. D ahood, Proverbs, PP· 57 f. ‫ א ד ם‬B. ‘delightful’, E th. Prov. 12. 27, see text, pp. 28 f. Eitan, p. 28. Cf. Ullendorff, F T vi (1956) 191 f. ‫ א ד ם‬C. ‘skin’, Ar. H os. 11. 4, see text, p. 154. D river, JfT S xxxix (1938) 161. ‫‘ א ד ן‬father’, U gar. Prov. 27. 18. D ahood, Proverbs, p. 55. ‫‘ א ה ב ה‬leather’, Ar. Hos. 11. 4, see text, pp. 144, 154. D river, C M L , P· 133; JfT S xxxix (1938) 161; H irschberg, V T xi (1961) 373. ‫‘ ) הו ב( א ה בו הבל‬become guilty’, Μ Η ‫ חו ב‬, Ar. haba and cf. C D C H os. 4. 18. Rabin, S c rH viii (1961) 389. Cf. no. 103. ‫ א ה ל‬A. ‘have grazing rights’, Ar. G en. 13. 12, 18. Rabin, S c rH viii (1961) 384. ‫ א ה ל‬B. ‘count w orthy’, Ar. Job 25. 5. D river, A JfS L lii (1935-6) 161 f., following Ehrlich.

15.

‫‘ או ד‬be grievous, burdensom e’, Ar. ’ada. I I Sam. 13. 16 (M T * ‫ע ל‬ ‫) א ו ד ת‬. Cf. Job 31. 23. See text, p. 266. D river, in N otscher, p. 48.

16.

‫‘ אי ד‬one b u rd en ed ’, participle of above. Prov. 17. 5 (|| ‫ ; ל ש‬άπολλνμένω). D river, Biblica xxxii (1951) 182, cf. D ahood, Proverbs, p. 38.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

‫‘ מ א ד‬g rief’, noun from no. 15. Ps. 31. 12; poin t ‫ מ א ד‬. D river, JfT S xxxii (1931) 256. ‫ תארה‬A. ‘lam ent, plaint’, Ar. (?— 3-w -y ‘feel p ity ’ or taaw w aha ‘moan, com plain’, Lane, pp. 130b, 129c?). Ps. 38. 10 (|| ‫) אנ ח תי‬, io . 17. D river, J fT S xliii (1942) 153; Leveen, ibid, xlv (1944) 19. ‫ ת או ה‬B. ‘ease, inactivity’, Ar. 3awa ‘tu rn aside, lodge’. Prov. 21. 25 etc. D ahood, Proverbs, p. 41 f., after Reider, no. 20. ‫‘ או ה‬dw ell’, as above. N um . 34. 7. Reider, V T ii (1952) 113. ‫ ת או ה‬C. ‘abode’, as above. G en. 49. 26. Reider, ibid. ‫‘ או ל‬freem an’, Accad. awilum. I I K ings 24. 15 (Kethibh). D river, JfT S XXXiv (1933) 33 f·; JfQR xxviii ( 1 9 3 7 1 1 6 (8‫ ־‬. ‫‘ או ל‬rain, dew ’, Ar. 9ary. Isa. 18. 4, cf. ‫ צ ח‬, no. 268; Job 37. 11 and medievals. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1938) 65 f. ‫‘ או ש‬gift’, U gar. 3sn, Ar. 3ws. Prov. 8. 21 (M T ‫ ;}יש‬see text, p. 181. D ahood, Biblica, xxxiii (1952) 33 n.

25. ]!‫‘ א‬eq u ip m en t’ ESA 3dn. D eut. 23. 14. R abin, S c rH viii (1961) 387. 26.

‫ א ח ל‬A. ‘su b stitu te’, M H ‫ א ח ל א י ו ת‬. G en. 22. 13. Rabin, S c rH viii (1961) 387.

27.

‫ א ח ל‬B. ‘w ith ’, n ot ‘after’, U gar. 3ahr || 'mn. Qoh. 12. 2. Scott, J fT S 1 (1949) 178; D ahood, Biblica xliii (1962) 363.

322

IN D E X O F E X A M P L E S

28.

‫‘ א מ ם‬walk forw ard’, Ar. 3mm. Isa. 60. 4, read ‫( תא^בה‬M T ‫) ת א מנ ה‬. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1938) 83 f.

29.

‫ א מ ר‬A. ‘lift up, be h igh’, cf. Accad. Am urru. Job 22. 28-9. T u r-S in ai, 30b, p. 349. ‫ א מ ר‬B. ‘refuse, retract*, T alm . Aram . Job 3. 3. T u r-S in ai, Job, p. 50.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

‫ א מ ר‬C. ‘see’, Accad. Ps. 71. 10 (‘m y foes are on the look-out for m e’). D ahood, Biblica xliv (1963) 295 f.; cf. ‘see’ as ‘original’ H ebrew sense in A lbright, J A O S lxxiv (1954) 229 n. 47. ‫ א ס ר‬A. ‘clinch, close’, not ‘begin’ (‘according to etym ology’). I Kings 20. 14. Gray, Kings, p. 377. ‫ א ס ר‬B. ‘totality’, Ar. Hos. 10. 10. See text, p. 74. N yberg, Hosea, p. 79. ‫‘ א פ ת ה‬to the u tterm o st’, Accad. appuna ( = ‘m oreover’, von Soden, p. 60). Ps. 88. 16. Delitzsch, pp. 135-7.

35.

‫‘ א פ ל‬be late’, Aram ., Accad. uppulu. Jer. 2. 31, here ‘(land) becom ing parched late in season’ (|| ‫ ; מ ל ב ר‬Kexepoajfidvr]). See text, p. 266. D river, JfT S xli (1940) 165 f.

36.

‫‘ א פ ס‬ocean’ as ultim ate sense, Accad. apsu, non-Sem itic. Pope, E ly ’ P· 72· ‫‘ א ר א ל‬herald’, Accad. urullu. Isa. 33. 7 (M T ‫) א ך א ל ם‬. Oesterley, Record and Revelation, p. 419.

37. 38.

‫‘ א ר ב‬sexual desire’, A rab. 9irba. H os. 7. 6. N yberg, Hosea, pp. 52 f.

39.

‫‘ א רג‬smoke, sm ell’, Ar. 9arija. Job 7. 6. T ur-S in ai, jfob, pp. 137 f.

40.

‫‘ א ר ץ‬verm in’, Ar. 3arad. Job 12. 8, G en. 1. 26. T u r-S in ai, Joby p. 210.

41.

‫‘ א של‬w arriors’, E SA 9sdy cf. Ar. 9asad ‘lion’. D eut. 33. 2 (M T ‫ ; א ש ד ת‬ayyeAoi). Beeston, jf T S N.S. ii (1951) 30 f.; M iller, H T R lvii (1964) 241 ff. ‫‘ א ש ר‬strong, strengthen’, A ram . Isa. 1. 17 etc. (cf. Isa. 47. 15 PorjOeia for ‫) א ש ר‬. D river, W O i. 234, J fT S xxxviii (1937) 37, Biblica xxxv (1954) 3°°· ‫ אשש‬A. ‘be luxurious’, Ar. 9atta. Isa. 16. 7, see text, pp. 250, 254. D river, in Eissfeldt Festschr., p. 43; B ertholet Festschr., p. 144.

42.

43. 44.

‫ אשש‬B. ‘be strong’, Accad. asisu (?). iQ p H ab. 6. 11. M ansoor, V T S ix (1963) 320 f.

45.

‫‘ א תנן‬effigy’, Ar. tinny tanin (Lane, p. 318). M ic. 1. 7. See text, p. 145. H alper, A JfS L xxxiv (1907-8) 366-8; D river, V T iv (1954) 242.

46.

47.

‫‘ בג‬share, lo t’, scribal error for D , suggested by ‫ ב ג‬, Aram, from Iran. baga-. Ezek. 25. 7. Perles, JfQR xviii (1906) 384. Cf. D river, Aramaic Documents, p. 40 n. ‫‘ ב ד‬diviner’, Accad. (M ari) baddum. Isa. 44. 25 (Vg. divinorum) etc. D river, W O ii. 19.

IN D E X O F E X A M P L E S 48.

323

‫‘ ) מ ך ( מ ב ך‬source’, U gar. mbk, npk. Prov. 8. 24 (M T ‫)! כ ב ד י‬. A lbright, V T S iii (1955) 8. Job 28. 11, 38. 16. D river, C M L , p. 162 n.

49· ‫‘ בו ך‬squeeze, distress’ (not ‘w ander’), Ar. baka. Ex. 14. 3. Rabin, S crH viii (1961) 388. 50.

‫‘ בו ץ‬ru n ahead’, Ar. basa. Ezek. 30.9 (read ‫ ; ב צי ם‬omevSovTes). D river, Biblica xxxv (1954) 300.

51.

‫‘ ב ח ל‬jo in ’, U gar. p h r. Qoh. 9. 4, I Sam. 20. 30. D ahood, Biblica xliii (1962) 361.

52.

‫‘ ב ט ח‬fall, lie’. Jer. 12. 5, Job 40. 23; see text, pp. 90 f. D river, Robinson Festschr., pp. 59 f . ; E T L xxvi (1950) 341 f . ; K opf, V T viii (1958) 165 ff. ‫‘ בי ה‬rem em ber’, Ar. baha (?— see text, p. 166). Ps. 68. 5 (read as ‫) בי ה‬. Guillaum e, J T S N.s. xiii (1962) 322 f.

53.

54. ]‫‘ ? י‬region*, Ar. bin (not bayri). Isa. 44. 4 (‘field of grass’) etc. See text, p. 165. G uillaum e, J T S N.s. xiii (1962) 109 ff. 55. 56. 57.

‫‘ ב ל י‬rottenness’, Syr. bly. Isa. 38. 17. D river, J T S xxxviii (1937) 47. ‫‘ ב ל ע‬reach, slander’, Ar. big. Ps. 52. 6, Isa. 28. 7. D river, J T S xxxiii (1932) 40; Z A W lii (1934) 52. ‫‘ ב מ ה‬beast’, after relation of ‫ ב ה מ ה‬/‫ ב מ ה‬by A lbright, V T S iv (1957) 255 f. Isa. 2. 22 (‫‘ ב מ ה נח שב הו א‬m ust be considered a beast’). D ahood, Biblica xliv (1963) 302.

58.

‫‘ ב צ ד‬price’, cf. A r. b'd ‘(far) b ehind’. Prov. 6. 26 (nfjLrjy pretium). D river, V T iv ( 1 9 5 4 ) 2 4 3 ff·

59.

‫‘ ב עי‬beggar’, Syr. baaya. Job 30. 24 (1 ‫)? ע י‬. D river, A J S L lii (19356) 164.

60.

‫‘ ב ע ל‬do, m ake’, U gar. Qoh. 8. 8 etc. See text, pp. 100 f. D ahood, Biblica xliii (1962) 361 f.

61.

‫‘ ב צ ק ל ן‬fresh vegetation’, U gar. I I K ings 4. 42; see text, pp. 26, 294. D river, C M L, p. 164 n.

62.

‫‘ ב ל ע‬go away’, Ar. baqaa (?; see text, p. 166). Isa. 7. 6 (‘make it go over to ’, d7roarp€1jjo1JL€v). E itan, H U C A xii—xiii (1938) 58.

63.

‫‘ ב ק ש‬m agnify’, Accad. baqaiu (= rabu, synon. list). Prov. 29. 10. D river, Biblica xxxii (1951) 194, J S S xii (1967) 108.

64.

‫‘ ב ל ל‬be cool’, Ar. barid. Isa. 32. 19. Reider, H U C A xxiv (1952-3) 88 f.

65.

‫‘ ב רי ת‬splendour’, Accad. bararu ‘shine’. Isa. 42. 6 (|| ‫) או ר‬. See text, p. 144. T u r-S in ai, J P O S xiv (1936) 7.

66.

‫‘ ב ר ח‬w ound’, Ar. baraha ‘bruise’. Job 20. 24. D river, V T S iii (1955) 81.

67.

‫‘ ב רי ח‬prim eval’, Ar. barih ‘past (of tim e)’, cf. Eg. b’h. U g. btn brhy || Is. 27. 1, Job 26. 13. A lbright, B A S O R lxxxiii (1941) 39 f., n. 5.

IN D E X OF E X A M P L E S

324 68. 69. 70.

‫‘ מ ב ש ר‬refu ter’, Syr. bsar. Isa. 41. 27, cf. Job 19. 26 (1 ‫) מ ב ש לי‬. See text, pp. 119, 193. D river, N otscher Festschr., p. 46. ‫‘ ב שן‬serpent’, Accad. basmu, U gar. btn. Ps. 68. 23. D river, C M L, p. 164 n. ‫‘ ג בו ל‬m ountain’, A r.jabal. Ps. 78. 54; see text, p. 248. D river, C M L , p. 146.

71.

‫‘ ג ד ל‬spin, weave’, cf. ‫ ג ך לי ם‬. Ps. 12. 4, 41. 10. D ahood, Psalms, p. 73.

72.

‫‘ ג ה ד‬act strenuously’, Ar. as in jihad. II K ings 4. 34 (tyAaaS etc., taken as for ιγ ααδ). See text, p. 162. M ontgom ery, Kings, p. 372.

73.

‫‘ ג ה ה‬face’, Ar. wajh} jiha. Prov. 17. 22, cf. 15. 13 (‫) פני ם‬. Perles, J Q R N.s. ii (1911-12) 102; D river, E T L xxvi (1950) 344.

74.

‫‘ גוי‬field, land’, Ar. jaw w. See text, p. 144. Zeph. 2. 14 (Tg. ‫חיו ת‬ ‫ ; ב ר א‬τα θηρία τη ς γης). Eitan, ρ. 32 f.

75· ‫‘ גזל‬be great’, Ar. jazala. Job 24. 19. Guillaum e, Hooke Festschr., p. 116. 76.

‫ גי ל‬A. ‘w orship’, A v .ja la ‘move in circle,’ so ‘dance’. Ps. 2. 11. See text, pp. 5, 175, 284. Reider, H U C A xxiv (1952-3) 98 f.

77. 78. 79.

‫גי ל‬/‫ גו ל‬B. ‘be affrighted’, Ar. wajila. Ps. 2. 11,18.16 (11| ‫)י ר א‬. See text, pp. 5, 175, 284. D river, N otscher Festschr., p. 51. ‫ גי ל‬C. ‘live’, ESA gyl ‘course of year’. Ps. 2. 11 etc. D ahood, Psalmsy P· ! 3· ‫‘ ג ר ם‬landing (of stairs)’, Ar. jaram a ‘cut off, com plete’ (?— see text, pp. 165 f.). I I K ings 9. 13. G ray, Kings, p. 489.

80.

‫‘ ל ב א‬stren g th ’, U gar. dKat. D eut. 33. 25 (Tg. ‫ ; ת ו ק פ ך‬Ισχύς). So Job 41. 14 (M T ‫) ך א ב ה‬. Cross, F T ii (1952) 162; Orlinsky, V T vii (1957) 202 f.

81. 82.

‫ ד ב ר‬A. ‘follow’, Ar. Cant. 5. 6. Eitan, pp. 34 f. ‫ ד ב ל‬B. ‘be carried off’, A ram . Ps. 116. 10 (1 ‫) א ד ב ר‬. D river, J T S xxxv (1934) 382.

83.

‫ ד ב ל‬C. ‘tu rn the back’, Ar. Job 19. 18 etc. Eitan, pp. 33 ff.; D river, Z A W lii (1934) 55 f-

84.

‫ ד ב ל‬D . ‘overthrow ’, Accad. dabaru. II C hr. 22. 10 (|| ‫ ו ת א ב ד‬I I K ings 11. 1). W . T hom as, Record and Revelation, p. 393; D river, J T S xxvii (1926) 159 f.

85.

‫‘ ד ג ל‬wait for’, Accad. Ps. 20. 6, see text, p. 262. D river, H T R xxix (1936) 174 f. Cant. 6. 10 ‘brilliant’, G oitein, J S S x (1965) 220 f.

86.

‫‘ ד ה ה‬be astounded’, Ar. dhw, dhy ‘be stupefied’ (?). Isa. 44. 8; see text, pp. 6 f., 166, 188, 231. D river, J T S xli (1940) 164. a . ‘abound’, hiph. ‘provide abundance’, Ar. dana (w) (?— see text, p. 166). Job 36. 31. D river, V T S iii (1955) 90. Cf. no. 90.

87.

‫דון‬

88.

‫ ד ץ‬B. ‘be close’, Ar. dana. G en. 6. 3. Rabin, S crH viii (1961) 388 f.

IN D E X O F E X A M P L E S

325

89.

‫‘ לי‬soun d ’, Ar. dawiy. Job 39. 25 ( 1 ‫)ןנךי שו פ ל‬. Cf. no. 150. E ita p. 36 f. 90. ]‫‘ די‬food’, Ar. zuw dn\ verb ‘feed’. Job 36. 31 (|| 17 .36 ,(‫ א כ ל‬. Guillaum e, Hooke Festschr., pp. 122 f. Cf. no. 87. 91.

‫‘ ד כ ה‬acquit’, A ram. Prov. 26. 28; see text, p. 202. D river, J fR A S (1948) 168 n.

92.

‫‘ ד ל ף‬oppress’ (not ‘d rip ’), Accad. daläpu. Ps. 119. 28. D river, JfT S xxxi (1930) 277; G reenfield, H U C A xxix (1958) 207 ff.

93· ‫‘ ד ל ק‬p ursu e’ (not ‘b u rn ’), Ar. G en. 31. 36; see text, p. 144. Blau, V T vi (1956) 246; K opf, V T viii (1958) 170 f. 94. ‫‘ ד מי‬half’, cf. Accad. mislu. Isa. 38. 10 (A' eV 7)[jLLcr€L} in dimidio, etc.). See text, p. 259. D river, J T S xxxviii (1937) 46. 95. ‫‘ ד מ ע‬corn’ (not from ‫‘ ד מ ע‬tears’), Sam. dm ‘the b est’, Ar. dimdg ‘b rain ’. Exod. 22. 28. Blau, V T vi (1956) 246 f. 96.

‫‘ דן‬cask’, Accad., U gar. Ezek. 27. 19; see text, pp. 189 f. M illard, J fS S vii (1962) 201 if. 97. ‫ ד ע ה‬A. ‘ask, desire’, Ar. d a d . Prov. 24. 14 etc.; see text, pp. 23 if., 216. W inton T hom as, J fT S xxxviii (1937) 401. 98. ‫ ד ע ה‬B. ‘pull dow n’, Ar. dafd I I I (?— Lane, p. 883, b u t isolated). Ezek. 19. 7, Ps. 74. 5; see text, p. 25. D river, JfBL lxviii ( 1 9 4 9 )

5 7

f .

99· ‫ד י ו‬ 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105.

‘dom inion’, U gar. drkt. Prov. 8. 22. A lbright, JfBL lxiii (1944) 219 n .; V T S iii (1955) 7· ‫· ד ר ך‬persecute’, Ar. Lam . 3. 11 (1 ‫ ; ד ר כ י‬KareSico^ev). D river, Z A W lii (1934) 308. ‫‘ ד שן‬be hidden, shrouded’, Ar. datara (but ‫‘ ד שן‬fat’ = Ar. dasam). Ps. 22. 30; see text, p. 296 n. D river, H T R xxix (1936) 176 f.

‫‘ ה ב אי ם‬flowers’, Syr. habtd. Isa. 27. 6, not from ‫‘ ברא‬com e’. T u rSinai, Jfoby p. 196 n. ‫ ה ב ה ב‬,‫‘ ה ב‬burn, b u rn w ith passion’, E th., A r., etc. Prov. 30. 1 Hos. 8. 13,4. 18. See text, pp. 233 f. G lück, V T xiv (1964) 367 fr. Cf. nos. 12, 250. ‫‘ ה ב ר‬w orship’, S. Sem. kbr (spirantization). Isa. 47. 13; see text, p. 119. Ullendorff, J fS S vii (1962) 339 f. ‫‘ ה ד ר ה‬divine appearance’, U gar. hdrt || him. Ps. 29. 2. Cross, B A S O R cxvii (1950) 21. ‫ הרב‬see no. 12.

106. ‫‘ הרה‬w o rd ’, U gar. hw ty Accad. aivdtum. Job 6. 30. Pope, Jfob, p. 55. 107. ‫‘ הי ה‬fall’. I Sam. 1. 18 etc.; cf. ‫הרא‬, Job 37. 6. See text, pp. 250 f. D river, W O i. 414. 108.

‫‘ ה מה‬behold’, Ugar. hm . Ps. 48. 6. Dahood, C B Q xvi (1954) 16.

326 109.

IN D E X O F E X A M P L E S ‫‘ ה רון‬sexual desire*, U gar. hrr. G en. 3. 16; see text, p. 286. Rabin, S crH viii (1961) 390.

n o . ‫‘ ה רן‬pledge’, Ar. rahana, cf. M H . Job 34. 32 (1 T p ) . See text, p. 166. T u r-S in ai, Job, pp. 486 f. i n . ‫‘ ה ר‬stony tract*, Ar. harrat. Amos 1. 13. Reider, V T iv (1954) 279. 112. ‫ ז בו ל‬A. ‘princely estate’, U gar. Ps. 49. 15 (Sofa). D river, C M L , p. 149. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119.

‫ ז בו ל‬B. ‘throne-platform*, U gar. A lbright, Robinson F estsch r.,p . 16. ‫( ז ר‬V^T) ‘enem y’, Accad. Ezek. 7. 21; Prov. 6. 1 ixOpco, see text, p p . 256 f. D river, Biblica xxxv (1954) 148 f. ‫‘ ז מ ר‬protect*, Ar. damara. Exod. 15. 2; see text, pp. 29 f., 182. W inton T hom as, E T xlviii (1936-7) 478; Record and Revelation, pp. 395 f. ‫‘ זנה‬be angry’, Accad. zenu. Jud. 19. 2; see text, p. 286. D river, E T L xxvi (1950) 348. ‫‘ ח ב ב‬pure ones’, Accad. ebebum ‘be pure*. D eut. 33. 3, cf. no. 41. M iller, H T R lvii (1964) 241 if. ‫ ח ב ר‬a . ‘connect, inform*, Ar. habar (but ‘com panion’ = hbr). Job 16. 4. R o sen th a l,Historiography, p. 10 n. 2. Cf. no. 119. ‫ ח ב ר‬B. ‘heap u p ’, U gar. bth b r ‘store-house*. Job 16. 4. T u r-S in ai, Job, pp. 262 f. Cf. no. 118. ‫ חגר‬see no. 140.

120.

‫‘ ח ד ל‬be p lu m p ’, Ar. hadula. I Sam. 2. 5. W inton T hom as, V T S iv ( 1957) 14 f· 121. pin ‘gather*, Accad. hiaqum ‘mingle*. Prov. 8. 29. D river, Biblica xxxii (1951) 178. 122.

‫‘ חו ש‬worry*, Accad. etc. Qoh. 2. 25. Ellerm aier, Z A W lxxv (1963) 197-217.

123.

‫ חזו ת‬,‫‘ חז ה‬agreem ent’, ESA hdyt. Isa. 28. 15, 18; see text, p. 23 D river, J T S xxxviii (1937) 44. Also verb, cf. A r. h d \ Job 8. 17, J T S xl (1939) 391* ‫‘ חז ץ‬magistrate*, Accad. hazannu. Prov. 29. 18; see text, pp. 283 f. D river, W O i. 235.

124. 125.

‫ ח ט א ת‬A. ‘step, walk’, Ar. hatwa. Job 14. 16; see text, pp. 142 n., 144. E itan, pp. 38-42.

126.

‫ ח ט א ת‬B. ‘p en ury’, E th. h a tia t. Prov. 10. 16. See text, pp. 144, 166. W inton T hom as, J T S N.s. xv (1964) 295 f.

127.

‫ ח ל ה‬A. ‘be sorry, think*, E th. halaya. I Sam. 22. 8 (7tovwv); Jer. 5. 3. D river, J T S xxix (1928) 392, J Q R xxviii (1937-8) 101. Eitan, H U G A xii-xiii (1937-8) 82 f.

128.

‫ ח ל ה‬B. ‘be alone*, Ar. hala. Qoh. 5. 12 (‘a singular evil*). Eitan, ibid., p. 62.

IN D E X O F E X A M P L E S 129. 130.

327

‫ ח ל ה‬C. ‘adorn’, Ar. hala. Prov. 3. 35 (M T 18 .14 ,(‫( מ ח ל ו‬M T ‫) נ ח לו‬. D river, Biblica xxxii (1951) 177.

‫ חי ל‬,‫‘ ח ל ל‬be troubled’. Ps. 55. 5, 109. 22, alternative forms, differen sem antic fields, both L X X rapacraoj; cf. text, p. 252. K addary, V T xiii (1963) 486-9.

131.

‫‘ ח ל ם‬be healthy’, A ram , him . Ps. 126. 1, so T g . N.s. vii (1956) 2 3 9 4 3 ‫· ־‬

132.

‫ ח ל ק‬A. ‘create’, Ar. hlq. A m . 7. 4; see text, pp. 69, 26 0 f. M ontgomery, J B L xxiii (1904) 95 f . ; D river, V T S iii (1955) 91.

133· ‫ ח ל ק‬B. PP· 134. ‫חל ש‬ pp. 135. 136.

Strugnell, J fT S

‘die, p erish ’, U gar. hlq. Ps. 5. 10, 12. 4. D ahood, Psalms, 35, 73· ‘reap ’, Pal. Ar. halasa. Isa. 14. 12; see text, p. 276. Eitan, 42-6.

‫‘ מ חנ ה‬protective siege-w ork’ (not ‘cam p’), cf. M H ‫ חנו ת‬. Ezek. 4. 2. Driver, Biblica xxxv (1954) 148. ‫‘ ח פ ץ‬make straight, stretch ’. Job 40.17, Ps. 37. 23. Perles, Analekten, p. 76.

137· ‫‘ ח ק ר‬despise’, Ar. haqara. Prov. 28. 11 (Karayvdjaera6, bsr), 25. 27; see text, p. 258. W inton T hom as, J fT S xxxviii (1937) 402 f., after Perles; E itan, p. 7 n. 138.

‫‘ ח ר ב‬deceitfulness, vain speech’, Ar. haraba (Dozy, i. 356). Ps. 59. 8; Jer. 25. 9 (ovclS lgijlos). See text, p. 116. D river,y T S x x x iii (1932) 42 f.

139.

‫‘ ח ר ב ה‬palace’, E SA rnhrb ‘castle’, Ar. mihrab ‘pavilion’ (contrast root hrb ‘ru in ’). Job 3.14 etc. D aiches, J Q R xx (1908) 637 ff.; D river, E T L xxvi (1950) 349; b u t cf. Pope, Job, p. 31.

140.

‫‘ ) חג ר( ח רג‬fear’, A ram . ‫ ח רג ת א‬, Ps. 18. 46. B ut versions ‘lim p’, read ‫וי חג רו‬, as I I Sam. 22. 46 = A ram ., Syr. ‘lim p’. G unkel, Psalmen, p. 73; D river, H T R xxix (1936) 174.

141.

‫‘ ח ר ה‬be angry’, Ar. wahar (so not from ‘b u m ’). Rabin, S c rH viii (1961) 390 f.

142.

‫‘ ח ר ם‬cut off’, Accad. haramu. Isa. 11. 15; see text, p. 119. D river, J T S xxxii (1931) 251.

143.

‫‘ ח ת א‬sh atter’, U gar. h t \ H ab. 3. 6 -7 ; see text, p. 190. A lbright, B A S O R lxxxii (1941) 47 n. 27; Robinson Festschr,, pp. 11 f., 15.

144. 145. 146.

‫‘ ט א ט א‬po u n d (m ud floor); annihilate’, Ar. w a tia . Isa. 14. 23; see text, p. 56. K opf, V T viii (1958) 174 f. ‫‘ ט ב ב‬know, announce’, Syr., A r., E th. Prov. 15. 2; see text, pp. 171 f. Driver, Biblica xxxii (1951) 181. ‫ טו ב‬A. ‘speech’. H os. 14. 3 etc.; see text, pp. 16 f. G ordis, V T v (!955) 88-90.

328 147.

IN D E X OF E X A M P L E S ‫ טו ב‬B. ‘very m u ch ‫״‬, T alm . A ram. M ic. 1. 12 etc. See text, p. 17. G ordis, JfT S xxxv (1934) 186 f.

148.

‫ טו ב‬C. ‘rain’. Ps. 4. 7 etc. D ahood, Psalms, p. 25.

149.

‫‘ יגע‬to rtu re’, Ar. waji a. I I Sam. 5. 8 (piel perf. cons.). G insberg, Z A W li (!933) 308. ‫‘ י ד ה‬voice’, Ar. dawiy w ith m etathesis, cf. no. 89. H ab. 3. 10. G insberg, Z A W li (1933) 308. ‫ י ד ע‬A. ‘make subm issive’, Ar. wada a. Jud. 8. 16 etc.; see text, pp. 19 if. W inton T hom as, JfT S xxxv (1934) 298-306, xxxviii (1937) 404 f. ‫ י ד ע‬B. ‘care for, keep in m in d ’, Ar. wadi a. Exod. 2. 25; see text, p. 22. W inton T hom as, J fT S xxxv (1934)300!., xlix (1948) 143 f.

150. 151.

152. 153.

‫ י ד ע‬C. ‘be reconciled’, Ar. wadi a I I I . Am. 3. 3; see text, pp. 19 if. W inton T hom as, JfT S N.s. vii (1956) 69.

154.

‫ י ד ע‬D . ‘dism iss’, Ar. wada a I II . I Sam. 21. 3; see text, pp. 21 f. W inton T hom as, J fT S xxxv (1934) 298 if.; E itan, pp. 48 if. ‫ י ד ע‬E. ‘w rap u p ’, Ar. wada a. H os. 7. 9; see text, p. 22. H irschberg, V T xi (1961) 379. ‫ י ד ע‬F. ‘sw eat’, dialect, cf. ‫יז ע‬. Isa. 53. 11; see text, p. 23. N öldeke, Neue Beiträge, p. 194 f . ; D ahood, in M ackenzie, p. 72.

155. 156. 157.

‫‘ מ ד ע‬m essenger’, from ‫ ; י ד ע‬U gar. m nd'. Qoh. 10. 20; see text, p. 23. D ahood, Biblica xxxix (1958) 312.

158.

‫‘ י סו ד‬tail-end, fundam ent, thigh’, Accad. isdu, same m eaning-range b u t not cognate. H ab. 3. 13. A lbright, Robinson Festschr., p. 17.

159.

‫‘ י ס ר‬make strong’ (piel), Aramaism, A ram. ‫ א ש ר‬. Hos. 7. 15, Job 4. 3. D river, J fT S xxxvi (1935) 295· ‫‘ תו ע פ ת‬im petuosity’, Ar. wgf. N um . 23. 22. A lbright, JfBL lxiii (1944) 215. ‫ או פי ר‬,‫‘ י פ ר‬esteem ’, cf. Ar. wafara ‘abound’, U gar. ypr. Isa. 13. see text, pp. 286 f. Eitan, H TJCA xii-xiii (1937-8) 61.

160. 161. 162.

‫‘ י צ א‬be clean, p u re’, Ar. w adua. Prov. 25. 4 (KadapLcrdrjaerai). See text, p. 120. D river, Biblica xxxii (1951) 190.

163.

‫‘ י צ ד‬fasten’, Ar. wasada. Isa. 44. 12 (M T ‫) ל צ ך הו‬. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1938) 78.

164.

‫‘ י צ ה‬give last injunctions’, Ar. wasä I I ‘make a w ill’. II K ings 20. 1. G ray, Kings, pp. 633 f. ‫ י ק ה‬,‫‘ ת קו ה‬godly fear’, not ‘hope’; Ar. taqwä, root wqy. Job 17. second ‫( ת קו ה‬Vg. patientia). G uillaum e, H ooke Festschr., p. 113.

165. 166.

‫‘ י ק ה‬be insolent’, Ar. waqiha. N um . 16. 1, Job 15. 12, Prov. 6. 25; see text, pp. 17 if., 271. Eitan, pp. 20 if.; D river, W O i. 235, 415.

167.

‫ י ק ר‬A. ‘be heavy, still; rest’, Ar. waqara. Prov. 25. 17. W inton T hom as, JfT S xxxviii (1937) 402.

IN D E X O F E X A M P L E S 168.

329

‫ י ק ל‬B. ‘split, hew ’, Ar. waqara. I K ings 5. 31. Gray, Kings, p. 148. ‫ י רי ב‬see no. 293.

169.

170. 171. 172.

‫ ת ר ע ת‬,‫‘ י ר ע‬m ajesty’, lit. ‘terror-producin g ’, Ar. wari'a ‘be tim ESA hwr ‘cause to fear’. N um . 23. 21 (1 ‫ ; ו ת ר ע ת‬eVSo£a). A lbright, J B L lxiii (1944) 215. ‫‘ י שח‬semen virile’, Ar. wasiha ‘be filthy’. Mic. 6. 14. Pope, J B L lxxxiii (1964) 270, after Ehrlich, v. 288. ‫‘ כ ב ת‬behum bled’, A r.kabata. Jer. 17. 13 (M T ‫) בו ש || ;י כ ת בו‬. Driver, jfQ R xxviii ( 1937114 (8‫· ־‬ ‫‘ כ ד ם‬hold fast’, Ar. kadama (?— see text, p. 166). Ezek. 27. 32. Guillaum e, J T S N.s. xiii (1962) 324 f.

173· ‫‘ ם י ון‬vagina’, Ar. kain. Am. 5. 26, see text, p. 277. H irschberg, V T xi (1961) 37s f. !74· ‫‘ כ כ ר‬gorge’, Yem enite kurkur. Rabin, W est-Arabian, p. 28. See text, p. 100. 175. ‫‘ כ ל ב‬h u n te r’, as Syr. kallaba. Seen from transls. of Ps. 22. 17 (Aq. Sym. Orjparaiy L at. venatores). D river, H T R xxix (1936) 176. 176.

178.

‫‘ כ ל ם‬speak’, Ar. kallama. Judges 18. 7; M ic. 2. 6; see text, pp. 14 f. Reider, V T iv (1954) 280. ‫‘ כ ס ף‬be broken, depressed’, Accad. kasapu etc. Zeph. 2. 1. Driver, A nO r xii (1935) 62 f . ; J T S xxxvi (1935) 404; V T iv (1954) 242; cf. no. 178. ‫‘ כ ס ף‬food’. Isa. 55. 1; see text, p. 153. References as for no. 177.

179.

‫‘ כ פי‬equal, like’, Ar. k ifa . Job 33. 6. T ur-S inai, Job, p. 465.

177.

180.

‫‘ כ ר ה‬feast’, loan from Accad. karu. II K ings 6. 23; see text, p. 102. Rabin, S c rH viii (1961) 399. Cf. no. 288.

181.

‫‘ פו ש רו ת‬song, m usic’, U gar. k tr t. Ps. 68. 7. G insberg, B A S O R lxxii (1938) 13. ‫‘ כ ת ף‬w eapon’, U gar. ktp. I Sam. 17. 6, D eut. 33. 12. O ’Callaghan, Orientalia xxi (1952) 42 f., cites b u t does not accept for H eb r.; D river, CML> p. 145.

182.

183. 184. 185.

186.

‫‘ ל א‬victor’, Accad. le u ‘overcom e’. Ps. 7. 13 (M T ‫) ל א‬. D ahood, Psalms, pp. 46, xxxvi. ‫‘ מ ל א ך‬priest, priestly m essenger’, cf. Phoen. parallel passages. Qoh. 5. 5, M ai. 2. 7 (|| ]‫)? כ ה‬. D ahood, Biblica xxxiii (1952) 207. ‫‘ ל א ם‬ru ler’, U gar., Accad. limu. Ps. 7. 8, 148. 11; see text, pp. 133, 172, 254 f. D river, C M L , p. 158; E T L xxvi (1950) 346; Gray, Legacy, p. 197. ‫‘ ל ב ה‬w rath ’, Accad., A ram . Ezek. 16. 30. D river, J T S xxxii (1931)

T ’ 366. 187.

‫‘ ל ב ד‬stick together’, T alm . H ebr. Job 38. 30; see text, p. 234. T u r ‫״‬ Sinai, Job, pp. 530 f. O r ‘be m atted, felted’, as of cloth?

330 188.

IN D E X OF E X A M P L E S ‫ ל ב ש‬A. ‘linger’, Ar. labita. Isa. 14.19. Eitan, H U C A xn -xin (1 9 3 & ) 63.

189. # ‫ ל ב‬B. ‘draw near’, Ar. labisa ‘join closely\ Judges 6. 34 etc. Reider, y j S iii (1952) 79· 190. ‫‘ לג‬waves’, Ar. lujj ‘depth of sea’. Job 12. 23 (M T ‫) ל ג ר ם‬. T u r-S in ai, yob, p. 219. 191. ‫ ל ה ק ה‬A. ‘elder-com pany’, E th. Ihq. I Sam. 19. 20, see text, pp. 25 f., 231 f., 267 n ., 270 f. D river, y T S xxix (1928) 394; Ullendorff, V T vi (1956) 194; W inton T hom as, y T S xlii (1941) 154 (Prov. 30· 17)· 192. ‫ ל ה ק ה‬B. ‘com pany’, Ar. 5ilhäq ‘affiliation’, w ith criticism of no. 191. Greenfield, H U C A xxix (1958) 212 if. 193.

‫‘ ל מ ךי ם‬strings’, M H (?). Isa. 8. 16. T ur-S in ai, yob, p. 240.

194.

‫‘ מ ק‬pow erful’, Ar. mäjin ‘bold’. Ps. 47. 10; see text, pp. 241, 251. D river, y T S xxxiii (1932) 44. Cf. A lbright, V T S iii (195s) 10 (‘beggar’).

195· ‫‘ מ ד ר‬w et clay’, E th. mddr ‘earth’. Job 37. 17 (M T ‫ ;) מ ד ר ו ם‬see text, p. 190. T u r-S inai, yob, p. 515. 196.

‫‘ מ הי ל‬skilled’, E th. mähärä ‘teach’. Ps. 45. 2, Isa. 16. 5. See text, p. 295. Ullendorff, V T vi (1956) 195.

197.

‫‘ מ ח ץ‬d ip ’, Accad. mahäsu. Ps. 68. 24; see text, p. 192. D elitzsch, Proleg., pp. 69 if. Cf. no. 205.

198. 199. 200.

‫‘ מ טו‬war, cam paign’, ESA m tw . H ab. 3. 9, 14. A lbright, Robinson Festschr., p. 15. ‫ מ ו ד ד‬,‫‘ מי ד‬be shaken’, Ar. mäda. H ab. 3. 6 (60‫־‬aXevdr]); see tex p. 252. D river, Z A W Iii (1934) 54 f. ‫‘ מ כ ר‬counsel’, E th. G en. 49. 5; see text, pp. 57, 270. W inton T hom as, y T S x x x v ii (1936) 388 f.; Ullendorff, V T vi (1956) 194.

201.

‫‘ מ ל ח‬be dark’, Ar. maltha ‘be grey’. Isa. 51. 6; see text, p. 252. D river, E T L xxvi (1950) 349 f.

202.

‫ מ ל ך‬A .‘advise’, A ram . Hos. 8 .4 ; see text, pp. 188 f. D river, N ötscher Festschr., p. 50. Cf. no. 306.

203.

‫ מ ל ך‬B . ‘take possession’, Ar. N eh. 5. 7; see text, p. 188. K opf, V T ix (1959) 261 f.

204.

‫‘ מ ע ה‬m u ltitu d e’, Ar. m a iy y a ‘com pany’. Isa. 48. 19. G ray, Legacy, p. 192. ‫‘ מ צ ח‬tread ’, U gar. msh. Ps. 68. 24 (1 ‫ ; ת מ צ ח‬M T ‫ ת מ ח ץ‬is graphic error caused by ‫ י מ ח ץ‬in v. 22). Reider, H U C A xxiv (1952-3) 101. Cf. no. 197.

205.

206.

‫ מ שח‬A. ‘m easure, extend’, M H . (1940) 169 f.

Ezek. 28. 14. D river, y T S xli

207.

‫ מ שח‬B. ‘m ar’, Ar. masahat masth *ugly’. Isa. 52.14 Q um ran; see text, p. 285. G uillaum e, y B L lxxvi (1957) 41 f.

IN D E X O F E X A M P L E S 208.

331

‫‘ מ תן‬stren g th ’, M H and Ar. matuna. Qoh. 7. 7. (M T ‫ מ תנ ה‬, εύτονίa, robur); see text, p. 91 n. D river, V T iv (1954) 229 f.

209.

‫‘ מ ל‬blow ’, A ram. Job 10. 17. T ur-S inai, Job, pp. 181 f.

210.

‫‘ נ ד‬fire’, E th. nadda. Isa. 17. 11. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1938) 65. Cf. no. 212.

211.

‫‘ נ ח ל‬sift’, Ar. nahala, Accad., Syr. Ps. 82. 8. D river, H T R xxix (1936) 187.

212.

‫‘ נ ח ל ה‬destruction’, E th. nahla ‘collapse’. Isa. 17.11. Eitan, cf. no. 210.

213.

‫‘ נטו ש‬clash (in battle)’, Ar. watasa, watts. Prov. 17. 14 (μάχη), I Sam. 4. 2; see text, p. 257. D river, Biblica xxxii (1951) 182. ‫‘ נ כ ר‬acquire, sell’, U gar. nkr. I Sam. 23. 7 (πεπρακεν); see text, p. 267 n. Hos. 3. 2. G ray, Legacy, p. 190.

214. 215. 216. 217. 218.

219. 220.

‫‘ נ מ ה‬bring tidings’, Ar. nam a. Isa. 41. 27; see text, pp. 182, 193. Guillaume, J B L lxxvi (1957) 40 f. ‫‘ גסג‬forge’, Ar. nasaja. M ic. 2. 6; see text, p. 15. Reider, V T iv (1954) 280. ‫‘ נ ע ל‬sparrow ’, Ar. nugar. Job 40. 29. W inton T hom as, V T xiv (1964) 1 1 4 ff.; cf. G ordis, ibid., 491-4. ‫‘ נצה‬be joined’, Ar. nasa. Lam. 4. 15 (άνήφθησαν) ; see text, pp. 262 f. D river, Z A W lii (1934) 308; W inton T hom as, Record and Revelation, p. 396. ‫‘ גשא‬u tter, pronounce’, Accad. nasu ‘take oath ’. Isa. 42. 2, 11, and ‫ מ ש א‬. T sevat, H U C A xxix (1958) 119.

‫ נשר‬,‫‘ גשר‬herald’, Ar. nassar. H os. 8. 1, Job 39. 25; see text, pp. 26 f T u r-S in ai, Job, p. 551.

221.

‫‘ נ ת ר‬tear; hop, leap’. Accad. nutturu. H ab. 3.6 etc. D river, Robinson Festschr., pp. 70 if., V T iv (1954) 241; and full discussion in E m erton, Z A W lxxvi (1964) 191 if. See text, p. 290.

222.

‫‘ ס ד ר‬rays of lig ht’, Ar. sadira. Job 10. 22 (φέγγος); see text, p. 242. Driver, V T S iii (1955) 76 f.

223. 224.

‫‘ סו ד‬chieftaincy’, Ar. sud. Ps. 25. 14; see text, p. 251. D river, J B L lv (1936) 102, E T L xxvi ( 1 9 5 0 ) 345· ‫‘ ס כו ת‬pole’ (cultic symbol), T alm . ‫ ס כ ת א‬. Am. 5. 26; see text, p. 277. H irschberg, V T xi (1961) 375.

225· p o ‘care for’, not Accad. saknu ‘governor’ b u t rel. Ar. zakina ‘be fam iliar’, M H ‫‘ ס כנ ה‬danger’. I K ings 1. 4, Qoh. 10. 9. Rabin, S c rH viii (1961) 395. 226.

‫‘ ס פ סג‬glaze’, U gar., H ittite. Prov. 26. 23 (M T ‫ ;) כ ס ף סיגים‬see text, pp. 219 f. G insberg, B A S O R xcviii (1945) 21.

227.

‫‘ מ ס פ ר‬lim it, boundary’, A r., A ram . ‫ ק פ ר‬. D eut. 32. 8 (|| ‫) ג ב ל ת‬. Zim m erm ann, J Q R N.s. xxix (1938-9) 241 f.

332

228.

IN D E X OF E X A M PL ES ‫‘ צ ד‬tim e’. Kaipos at Jer. 11. 14, Isa. 30. 8, 64. 8, Ezek. 22. 4, 30; see text, p. 247. D river, W O i. 412; C M L, p. 140.

229.

‫ ע ד ה‬A. ‘hostility’, Ar. 'dw. Job 10. 17 (M T ‫) ע ך י ף‬. Pope, Job, p. 79, following Ehrlich.

230.

‫ ע ד ה‬B. ‘p rim e’, Ar. gdw ‘m orning, early’. Ps. 103. 5 (|| ‫) נ עו רי כי‬. D river, J T S xxxvi (1935) 155. ‫‘ ערד‬go ro u n d ’, E th. 'odd. Job 25. 5 (point ‫) ע ד‬. D river, A jfS L lii ( 1935161 (6‫ ־‬. ‫ עז ב‬A. ‘help’, Eth. 'dzzdbd. Jer. 49. 25; see text, p. 140. D river, J Q R xxviii (1937-8) 126.

231. 232. 233. 234.

235. 236.

‫ עז ב‬B. ‘be agreeable’, A r .faduba. Job 9. 27; see text, p. 141. D river, V T S iii (1955) 76. ‫‘ עזי‬patience’, Ar. caza (razw). Ex. 15. 2; see text, pp. 29 f. Rabin, S crH viii (1961) 387. O r ‘w arrior’, Ar. g azi\ G aster and W inton T hom as, E T xlviii (1936-7) 45, 478; xlix (1937-8) 189. ‫ עז ר‬A. ‘be valiant’, U gar. gzr. I Chr. 12. 1; see text, pp. 139 f. D river, C M L , p. 142. ‫ עז ר‬B. ‘ju stify ’, Ar. 'adara ‘excuse’. Isa. 50. 7, 9 (\\ ‫ ;) מ צ די קי‬see text, pp. 139 f. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1938) 81.

237.

‫ עז ר‬C. ‘h in d er’, Ar. 'azara ‘rebuke’. Job 30. 13; see text, p. 139‫״‬ D river, A J S L lii (1935-6) 163.

238.

‫ עז ר‬D . ‘be copious’, Ar. gazura. Zech. 1. 15; see text, p. 140. Eitan, p. 8.

239. 240. 241.

‫‘ ע ט ה‬give’, Ar. ,apt. Ps. 84. ‫( ך‬Swaei); see text, p. 249. Rabin, WestArabian, p. 40, n. 5 and p. 32. ‫‘ עי ט‬den ’, Ar. gayit. Jer. 12. 9; see text, pp. 128 f., 153, 235. D river, P E Q , A pr. 1955, 139. Cf. no. 266. ‫ ע ץ‬,‫‘ עין‬com pany, group’. Hos. 10. 10; see text, p. 226. W ernbergM oller, p. 59; D river, Judaean Scrollsf p. 435.

242.

‫ עי ר‬A. ‘revile’, E th. ta'ayyara. Job 3. 8; see text, p. 125. D river, V T S iii (1955) 72.

243.

‫ עי ר‬B. ‘invasion’, Ar. gara. Jer. 15. 8; see text, p. 125. D river, J Q R xxviii (1937-8) 113.

244.

‫ עי ר‬C. ‘fire’, Ar. wagara ‘be h o t’. Hos. 7. 4; see text, p. 126. W utz, p. 312. Cf. N yberg, Hosea, p. 52.

245.

‫ עי ר‬D . ‘inm ost recesses’, U g ar.g r. II Kings 10. 25; see text, p. 126. Gray, Kings, p. 507.

246. ( ‫ עי ר ) ע רי ם‬E. ‘protectors, gods’, U gar. gyr. M ic. 5. 13 etc.; see text, pp. 126, 153 n. D ahood, Psalms, pp. 55 f. Cf. no. 253. 247.

‫ עי ר‬F. ‘bore’, Ar. gara ‘sink deep’, gawr ‘d ep th ’. Isa. 50. 4; see text, p. 126. D river, J T S xli (1940) 164.

I ND EX OF EXAMPLES

333

248. ‫‘ ע ל ה‬burn, boil’, Ar. gala (galy ). Ezek. 38. 18. D river, Biblica xxxv (1954) 3°4* D ahood, Psalms, p. 74, com pares ‫‘ ע ל ה‬b u rn t offering’ (Hom mel). 249. 250.

251.

‫‘ ע ל ה‬co-wife’, Ar. ealla. G en. 49. 4 (M T ‫) ע ל ה‬. Reider, V T iv (1954) 276. ‫‘ ע לו ק ה‬erotic passion’, Ar. 'aliqa ‘hang’, b u t also ‘burn, love physically, conceive’ (?). Prov. 30. 15. G luck, V T xiv (1964) 367 ff. Cf. nos. 12 and 103. ‫‘ ענ ה‬stay in a place’, Ar. ganiya. M ai. 2. 12, Isa. 13. 22; see text, pp. 165, 243, 250. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1937-8) 62.

252.

‫‘ ע צ ל‬be fertile, am ple’, A r. gadira, U gar. gsr. Judges 18. 7, Prov. 30. 16. D ahood in M ackenzie, p. 73.

253.

‫‘ ע ל ה‬blood-daubed stone’, U g ar.g r, A r .gariy. Jer. 2. 28, M ic. 5. 13. D river, CM Ly p. 142. Cf. no. 246.

254.

‫ ע ש ה‬A. ‘tu rn away’, U gar. 'sy, Ar. Job 23. 9, 1 Sam. 14. 32; see text, pp. 67, 69, 98, 246 f. D river, Robinson Festschr., pp. 53-5.

255.

‫ ע ש ה‬B. ‘come to ’, Ar. gasa (w). Isa. 5. 4; Prov. 6. 32. K opf, V T ix (1959) 270; D river, Robinson Festschr., pp. 53 ff.

256.

‫ ע שה‬C. ‘p ro tect’, Ar. gasiya ‘cover’. Ezek. 17. 17. D river, Biblica xxxv ( 1954) 153· Cf. ‫‘ מ ע ש ה‬cloud’, Ps. 104. 13; Reider, V T iv (1954) 284.· Cf. Isa. 59. 6; Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1938) 83.

257.

‫‘ מ ע ש ר‬libation’ (not ‘tith e’), U gar. 'sr. Am. 4. 4. Cazelles, V T i (1951) 131- 4· ‫ ע ש‬A. ‘rot, p u s’, Ar. gatta (cf. 'utt ‘m o th ’). Hos. 5. 12 (6νρώς); see text, pp. 144, 243 f., 252 n., 279. D river, Robinson Festschr., pp. 66 f.

258.

259.

‫ ע ש‬B. ‘b ird ’s nest’, Ar. euss. Job 27. 18; see text, pp. 144, 244. As no. 258.

260. ‫‘ פ‬and ’, A r .fa-. Ps. 48. 14, read as ‫ ס תו‬+ ‫ ; פ‬D ahood, CBQ xvi (1954) 17. Job 33. 24; G uillaum e, H ooke Festschr., p. 121. D ahood, Proverbs, p. 53. 261.

‫‘ פ חז‬scattered’ (nomadic life), Ar. fahd. G en. 49. 4. Rabin, ScrH viii (1961) 398.

262.

‫‘ פ ס ח‬passover’, Eg. p ’ §h ‘the blow ’. See text, p. 103. Couroyer, RB lxii (1955) 481-96.

263.

‫‘ פ ר ה‬come o u t’, Eg. pry. Isa. 11. 1 (|| ‫)י צ א‬. Eitan, H U CA xii-xiii (1937-8) 59.

264. ‫‘ פ ר ח‬be cheerful’, A r .fariha. Isa. 66. 14 (\\ 1 .35 ,(‫שש‬. Eitan, H U CA xii-xiii (1937-8) 87 f. 265.

‫‘ צ א ל‬bough’, Eg. d*rt9 Copt. cal. Job 40. 21 f . ; see text, p. 105. H u m b ert, Z A W lxii (1950) 206.

334

266.

IN D E X OF E X A M P L E S ‫‘ צ בו ע‬hyena*, A r.d a b u '. Jer. 12. 9 (ύαίνης); see text, pp. 128, 235. D river, P E Q , A pr. 1955, p. 139. Cf. no. 240.

267.

‫‘ צו ר‬m id st’, Accad. surru ‘h eart’. Ezek. 21. 25 (eV μεσω αυτής). D river, J T S xli (1940) 169. Cf. Jer. 49. 13 (L X X 30. 7).

268.

‫‘ צ ח‬sun ’. Ar. dihh, E th. dahay. Isa. 18. 4. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1937-8) 65 f. Cf. no. 23. ‫‘ צי ץ‬salt’, Accad., U gar. gloss si-su-ma. Jer. 48. 9. M oran, Biblica xxxix (1958) 69 ff. ‫‘ צ ל צ ל‬b oat’, Aram. ‫ צ ל צ ל א‬. Isa. 18. I (II ‫ ;) כ ל י ג מ א‬Job 40. 31 {θ' ττλοίοις). D river, Robinson Festschr., p. 56.

269. 270. 271. 272.

‫‘ צ פ ה‬arrange’, Ar. saffa. Isa. 21. 5. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1937-8) 67. Cf. no. 272. ‫‘ צ פי ת‬guest’, Ar. dayf. Isa. 21 .5 , cf. no. 271. Eitan, as no. 271.

273.

‫ צ פון‬A. ‘island’, cf. ‫‘ צו ף‬float’, U gar. L and floats over void. Job 26. 7. T u r-S in ai, Job, pp. 380 f.

274.

‫ צ פ ץ‬B. ‘hiding-place’. Job 37. 22. T ur-S inai, Job, p. 517.

275.

‫‘ צ ר ה‬shrill cry’, Ar. sarra, sartr. Jer. 4. 31 (|| ‫ ; ק ו ל‬στεναγμός), 48. 5 (L X X 31. 5); see text, pp. 279 f. D river, J B L lv (1936) 105, J Q R xxviii (1937-8) 123.

276.

‫‘ ק בו ץ‬fixing; statue’, Syr. qbaa. Isa. 57. 13; see text, p. 122. D river, J T S xxxvi (1935) 294.

277.

‫‘ ק ה ל‬forget’, Ar. jahila ‘be ignorant’, A m arna qalu ‘w ithdraw , neglect’. Job 11. 10; see text, p. 162. T ur-S in ai, Job, p. 194.

278.

‫ קי‬,‫‘ קו‬in fan t’ (‫‘ קי א‬vom it’). Job 22. 20 (1 ‫) קי מנו‬, cf. Isa. 28. 10. T u rSinai, Job, p. 345·

279.

‫ מ קו ם‬A. ‘opposition’, Ar. maqama ‘com bat’. N ah. 1. 8. D river, J T S xxxvi (1935) 300 f· ‫ מ קו ם‬B. ‘grave’, Phoen. mqm. Qoh. 8. 10; see text, p. 292. D ahood, Biblica xliii (1962) 360.

280. 281.

‫‘ קו ר‬dig’, Ar. qara ‘cut a round hole’. Prov. 12. 27; see text, pp. 28 f. Eitan, pp. 25 if.

282.

‫‘ ק טן‬household’, Ar. qatana ‘reside’. Isa. 22. 24. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1938) 68 f.

283.

‫‘ ק ל ע‬u p ro o t’, Ar. qala'a. Jer. 10. 18; see text, p. 108. D river, J Q R xxviii (1937-8) 107.

284. ‫‘ קן‬strength’, Eg. qny ‘strong’, qnt ‘strength’. Job 29. 18. D river, V T S iii (1955) 85. 285. 286.

‫‘ קנ ה‬shoulder-joint’, U gar. qn. Job 31. 22. D river, C M L , p. 144. ‫‘ ק צ ף‬be sad, vexed’, Syr. qsap. II Kings 3. 27; see text, p. 122. D river, J T S xxxvi (1935) 293.

IN D E X O F E X A M PL E S 287. 288. 289. 290.

335

‫‘ ק ר א‬follow*, Ar. qara (י‬E th. tatahala ‘w ander’, D illm ann, col. 552. Job 4. 18. Pope, Job, p. 37. 334. ‫‘ תוה‬w ander in m in d ’, Ar. taha. Isa. 44. 9, read as verb. Eitan, H U C A xii-xiii (1938) 78. ‫ ״ ן‬see no. 45.

INDEX OF BIBLICAL PASSAGES Ordering and numbering are as in the Hebrew text. Arabic figures refer to pages of the te x t; italic figures to numbers of the Index of Examples. Genesis I.

i. 8 1« 26 3· 16 3· 20 4-6 4· 7 4· 15 5· 29 6· 3 10. 13 13· 12 13· 18 22. 7 f. 22. 13 25· 3 27. 29 30. 20 31· 36 37· 2 41· 43 43· i i 49· 4 49· 5 49. 10 49· 22 49· 26 50. 5 Exodus 2. 3 2. 25 3· 18 4. I I 5· 3 12. 4 14· 3 15· 2 15. 10 16. 13 17· 13 22. 28 23· 5

59 45 40 286, 109 47 251 304 211 47 88 204 *3 13 57 26 254 f· 254 I82 93 16 105 30

249, 2ÖJ 57, 270, 200 120 f., 234, 3^7 30 f. 21 57 152 n. 22, J52 102 f., 233 255 n. 102 f. 305

49 29 E, J-T5, 234 136

Numbers 5· 13 14· 37 16. 1 21. 14 21. 15 23. 10 23. 21 23. 22 24. 17 34· 7 Deuteronomy 1· 13, 15 11. 14 II . 30 15. 18 23· 14 25.19 32. 8 33· 2 33· 3 33· 12 33· 25 34· 3

137 16 17 f., 271, 166 46 235 11 n., 270, 294 169 160 53 20 20 249 SB 3 2 9 2 5

213 227 59, 41 230, 117 182 80 125

Judges 5· 5 5· 16 6. 34 7· 3 8. 16 9· 3i · 37 12. 6 14. 18 15. 16 16. 9 18. 7 19. 2

129 152 152 21 14 f., J76, 252 286, j j 6

I Samuel 1. 6 1. 18

67, 69 250 f., J07

1 1

114 258 j

55 19 f·, J5J 299 174

137 n .

276 95 140

IN D E X O F B IB L IC A L P A S S A G E S I. 20 2. 5 2. 10 2. 33 3· i i 4. 2 4· 15 7· 2 10. 2 12. 14 13· 21 14· 25 f. 14· 27 14· 32

20.

1 2 0

21. 12

283

24·

1 6 4

137 n . 2 2

137 n. 257, 2 1 3

a ia h i.

231, 264 f. 248 n. 264 225, 285 f. 144 144 n. 67, 69, 98, 246 f., 254,

1 8 2

1 9 1

9 · 17

265

io .

21, J54 2 .6 7 ,

2 1 4

175 244, J 03 247

2 3 2

2 8 0 ,

22. II

22. 46

1 4 9

191 192 193, 218 1 4 0

57 255 4 8 ,

II Kings 3· 27 4· 34 4· 42 6. 23 9· 13 10. 25 II. I

1 5 2 f.

23 4 6 2

133

n .

193 2 5 0 ,

2 7 8

I I .

2 6 3

i i .

182 119,

12. 2 !

13 ·

X 42 30

3 .8

2 0 4 2 8 6

f.,

x 6 x

2 5 0 ,

2 5 J

1 3 ‫ ״‬21 2 4 3 ,

134

14.

1 8 8

14. 23

2 5 0 , 1 ‫־‬4 4

16.

2 9 5 ,

16. 7 17. 18.

2 5 0 ,

II I

J 9 6

254, 43

2 1 0

, 2X 2 2 7 0

18. 4

I Kings I. 4 5· 31 I I . 16 20. IO 20. 14 20. 40 22. 53

n .

3 2 2

14. 4

235, 3-*‫־‬5

3 0 9

255

13. 2 2

II Samuel I. 21 5.8 13. 16 22 22. I

f.,

7· 6

7·

4 2

2 1 9

5· 4 5· 7 5 -8

247 58 25 f., 231, 270 f.,

I. 22 2. 6 2. 12 2. l 6 2. 22

3 0

330

15. 19 15. 23 17. 6 19. 20 20. 13 20. 30 21. 3 22. 8 23. 7 24. I 25· 3 25. 14

339

2 3 ,

2 6 3

27X ,

2 7 2

2 1 .

2 2 5

2 2 .

2 4

1 6 8

2 4 .

2 9 6

26.

3 1 0

213 232 32 246 71 n. 122, ^36 162, 7 2 26, 6x 102, x3o 79

126, 245 8 4

2 8 2

27.

6 7

27.

1 0 2

27 .

2 5 0

28.

5* 273

28.

15,

2 3 0 ,

X 23

2 4 7 ,

223

2 8 . 2 0 30.

32.

33· 7 34· i 35· i

153 6 4

37 2 5 4 f. 2 6 4

340 Isaiah (cont.): 35· 7 37· 25 38. 10 38. 17 39· 2 40. 1-3 41. I 41. 10 41· 25 41. 27 42. 1-4 42. 2 42. 5 42. 6 42. II 43· 4 43· 9 44· 4 44· 8 44* 9 44· 12 44· 24 44. 24-28 44· 25 44· 28 45· i 45· 12 47· 13 47· 15 48. 13 48. 19 50. 4 50. 7 50. 9 51· i 51· 4 51· 6 51.8 52. 14 53· 3 53· 5 53· 10 53· i i 54· 5 54· 13 55· i 57· 13 57· 17 59· 6 60. 4 60. 13 61‫ ־‬10 62. s

IN D E X OF B IB L IC A L P A S S A G E S 193 n. 28 259, 9 4 55 17 52 f. 254 f· 233 n., 294 f·, 332 2 8 7

182, 193, 63, 2x5 153 2 1 9

252 65 2 i g

254 f· 254 f· 54

6 f., 188, 231, 36 334 1 6 3

252 281 f. 47

281, 302 281 252 119, 1‫־‬04 4 2

252 2 0 4

126, 247 2 3 6

244, 236 204 254 252 f., 20J 58 284 f., 207 20 264 54 20, 23, J5Ö 100 46 153, 178 122, 276 253 256 23 211 254 250

64. 8 66. 14

247,

2 2 8 2 6 4

Jeremiah I. II

49 2. 28 153 n., 253 266, 35 2. 31 264 3· 17 4· 31 279 f-> 2 75 1 2 7 5· 3 5· 24 249 6. 2 212 212 6· 3 280 n. 6. 7 6. 20 17 8. 6 242 f., 3 1 6 9. 21 211 f. 204 n. 10. 13 108, 2 8 3 10. 18 II. 12 247 II . 14 247, 2 2 8 12. 4 4 90 f., 5 2 12. 5 12. 9 128 f., 153, 235, 240, 266 15.8 125, 2 4 3 16. 18 329 1 7 1 17· 13 137 n· 19· 3 153 n. 19· 15 1 3 8 25· 9 264 30. 21 21 31· 19 264 31· 22 32. 41 254 264 33· 13 280 n. 41. II 280, 2 7 5 48 (31)· 5 2 6 9 48. 9 280 n. 48. 29 49. 10 £. 140 2 6 7 49· 13 140, 2 3 2 49· 25 204 n. 51· 16 Ezekiel 1· 13 i. 24 4· 2 7. 21 16. 30 16. 31 17· 17 19· 7 21. 20

259 235» 3 1 5 135 1 1 4 1 8 7

62 2 5 6

L 2

34i

I N D E X OF BIBLICAL PASSAGES 267 120

21. 25 21. 32 22. 4 22. l8 22. 30 25. 7 27. 5 f· 27· 19 27. 25 27. 32 28. 14 SO* 9 31. 3 38. 18

M O

Hosea 2. 17 3· 2 3· 5 4. 4 4. 10 f. 4. 18 5· 12 5· 13 6. 3 7· 3 7· 4 7· 5 7 .6 7· 9 7· 15 7. 16 8. i 8. 4 8 .9 8. 10 8. 13 10. 6 10. 10 II. 4

11. 7 11. 9 12. 2 14· 3 (2)

247,

2 2 8

247,

2 2 8

219 4 6

280 189 f., 286, 96 3 1 8

I J

2 0 6

137 2 4 8

264 2 1 4

17 74 1 4 1

243

, 3 25

J 2, JOJ 252 n., 279, 25S 123, 2 9 3 24 524 2 4 4

283 35 22, *55 !59

69, 74 26 f., 220 188 f., 202, 306 74 283 n. 233 ■ 2‫־‬03 123 74, 3 3 , 2 4 1 71 n. 154, 9, n 283 125 f. 107 16, *46

4. 4 4· 13 5. 26 6. 12 7· 4 8. 2 Micah 1· 4 i. 7 I. 12 2. 6 5· 13 6. 14

Habakkuk 2. 16 3· 5 3· 6 3· 6 f. 3· 9 3. 10 3· 13 3· 14 3. 16

Amos i. 13 2. 13 3· 3

III

53 153

235 153, 45 147

15, J76, 2ZÖ 246, 253 I J O

252 279 33 252 212 n. 252, J 99, 22J 8, 190, J43 1 9 8 1 5 0

158 1 9 8

137 n.

Zephaniah 2. I 2. 14 3· i Zechariah i. 15 II. 2 Malachi 2. 7 2. 12

177 74

148 140,

2 3 8

280

1 8 4

243, *5-r

Psalms 2. I l f .

249 182

3 0 7

277, J 73> 224 236 n. 69, 260 f., 129 ,32‫־‬J 48 f.

Nahum i. 5 i. 8 I. 10

I. I

Joel 2. 23 4. II

257

4· 7 5· 4 5· 10 6. 7 7 .8 7· 9

278 5. I7S. 284, 76, 77, 78 I 4 8

153 · rjj on on'-‫׳‬

342

IN D E X

O F

B IB L IC A L

P s a l m s («cont . ) : 7 · 13 . ,

10 8 10, 14 10. 17 12. 4 18 18. I 18. 8 18. I I 18. 16 18. 46 19. 6 20. 6 22. 16 22. 17 22. 30 24. 3 25. 14 29. 2 29. 6 31· n 31· 12 33· 6 3 7 · 23 37· 28 37· 39

38. 10 39· 3

39· 12 40. 4 41. 10 43· 4 45·

2 10 2 1-3 4 10

45· 46. 46. 46. 47· 48. 3 48. 6 48. 14 4 9 · 15

52.

55· 5 55·

58. 59· 60. 68. 68. 68. 68. 68. 68.

23 II

8 10 5 7 9 19 23 24

183 228 f . 18 7 *,

133

191 192 252, 273 192 f . , 218 77

140 210 262, 85 310 175

296 n . , 101 278 251 f . , 223 105 32 f . 244 *7

252 136 141 f . , 327 142 n . j

P A S S A G E S

68. 32 71. 10 72.

I I

74· 5 74·

78. 54

82. 8 84. 7 88. 16 89. 20 89. 46 89·. 47 90. 8 102. 24 f . 103. 5 104. 13 104. 18 108. 10 109. 19 109. 22 109. 29 n o . 3 116. 10 n s ( 117) . 14 119. 28 119. 74 126. I 135· 7

135· 10

108 260 112 56

130 56 192 * 3 * 5 4 f-

53, 293 181 114, 252 175

69, 3 * * 192, 197, 205

255 n . 9 *

154

284 98, 295, 196 287 230 n . 211 252 241, 251, 194

249

7 1 · 13

244

7 *

107, 210

137· 5

138. s 139. 2 139· 8 148. I I

236 f . 248, 70 211 2 4 9 f · , 23 9 34

13911. 249 253 f.

130 213 230 256 230 n . 5 4 f-

249 130 249 210 82 30

92 154

131 204 n . 255 n .

48, 152, 320, 321 318 281 51

254 f · , 185

Job 3· 3 3 -8 3· 14 4· 3

4. 14 4. 18

125, 242 69 n . , 139 1 3 4 , * 5 9 , 292 134

333 331

5· 3

6. 6. 7. 9. 9·

21 30 6 21 27

9· 30 9 · 31 .

10 17 10. 22 I I . 10

154 J

141,

235

323 96 209, 229 242, 222 162, 277 n o ,

IN D E X OF BIBLICAL PASSAG ES 4 0

1 2 .

2 3

1 4 .

l 6

1 5 .

1 2

15-

3 0

1 6 .

1 3

1 9 0 1 4 2 , 1 8

f .,

1 2 5 , 6 9

1 6 .

1 8

17-

37.

1 6 6

3 7 - 22

6 9 1 1 8 ,

1 2

1 9 .

1 8

1 9 .

2 6

2 0 .

1 8

2 0 .

2 74 313

38.

2 4

2 6 0

186

2 9 2

38.

3 0

2 3 4 ,

1 6 5

38.

57 1 37 , 319

3940.

83 6 8

40 .

3 0 1

6 9

6 9 n .

2 i

1 1 9

6 9

1 8 .

3 8 .

195

190,

2 9 1

1 8 . 3

37- i i 3 7 - 17

3 2 1

n . ,

343

n . ,

8 9 , 2 2 0

f.,

7 1,

1 3 6

105,

2 65

17 f.

2 8 0

n .

40 .

9 1, 5 2

6 9

n .

40 .

2 1 1

2 0

2 1

40.

2 0 .

2 2

2 3 2

41.

2 0 .

2 4

2 1 .

2 4

6 9

n .

2 1 .

2 7

6 9

2 2 .

2 0

2 2 .

2 8

2 2 .

3 0

6 6

2 1 8 f.

2 4 .

1 9

2 6 .

41.

6 9

3- 2 7 3 - 35 5- 3 6. 6.

2 1 0

2 5 *

166

139

1 3 4

58 255

275

2 4

1 21

n . ,

2 6 .

7 1 3

2 7 .

1 8

2 8 .

1 1

4 8

2 8 .

1 6

2 8 7

10.

2 9 .

1 2

139

10.

1 8

3 0 .

1 3

3 0 .

2 4

3 1 .

2 2

1 * 2 3

1 -

33-

6 7

2 4 4 ) 2 59

139)

2 4

33*

2 5

16 2 4

11.

300

11.

1 5 1 0 0

1 7

3 6 .

1 8

3 6 .

2 8

36.

3 1

3 7 *

2 6 0

15 - 13 17 - 5

17.

110

17.

6 9

19. 26

2 S 1

129 21 , i

7 L *45 75 16

257, **5 I 7 L 75 5*4

9 0

21.

2 0

n .

21.

23- 3i

2 5 7

24.

24,

n .

2 4 .

2 9 0 8 7 ,

15-

n .

2 5 8 28,

4 * 33

2 9 7

134

2 5 1 ,

14. I

6 9

3 6 . 33

12. 27

*79

35- 9 3 6 .

126

2 6 6 ,

* 3 2

2 1 ,

10.

34- 4 34

114

10.

33-

f.,

2 3 7

3 3 - 19

2 57 2 5 6

2 8 4

2 8 5

100

129

254 303 75

2 6 .

2 9 .

80 6 9 n .

Proverbs

147

25- 5

1 5 6

4 1. 14

2 9

23- 9 2 4 .

2 10 2 3 4 ,

X 0 7

25- 4

f., 2 1 6 ,

2 S 9 9 7

3 2 8 2 1 9 ,

1 0 2

IN D E X O F B IB L IC A L P A S S A G E S

3 4 4

Proverbs ( cont .): 25. 25. 2526. 26. 27. 28. 29. 29. 29. 30. 30. 30. 30.

14 17 27 23 28 18

204 167 258, 1 3 7 219 f., 2 2 6 20 2, 9 1 10 258, 1 1 7 24 63 283 f., 1 2 4 7 234, 1 0 3 , 25 0 25 2 234, 271 n ., 1 9 1

II 7 10 18 1 4 1 5

16 17

Canticles 3- 8 3- 9 3- i o 4. 1 44. 4 5-

5. 6 6. 6. 7. 7.

5 10 3 10

10. 10. 12. 12.

9 20 2 6

225 20, 23, 157 27 210

Lamentations 2. 2. 3. 4. 44.

3 16 11 11 14 15

263 234 100 263 263 262 f., 2 1 8

Esther 1. 13

109

D aniel

3 i

153 103 154 161 147 45 144 n.

81 161 85 107, 5 16 f.

Q oheleth

5. 26 ff. 7. 28

49 281

Ezra 9. 9

300

Nehem iah 2. 2. 356. 8. 13-

13 15 8 7 19 2 -8 10

312 312 141 188, 2 0 3 16, 1 4 6 39 30

2. 25 3. 11 3- 17

122 162 101

i 3 - 19

137

13- 24

5- 5

184

Chronicles

5- 6

5. 12

7- 6 7. 8. 8. 9.

7 8 10 4

128

153 20S 100, 6 0 292, 2 8 0 51

1. 11 7- 23 12. 1

204 181 139 f.,

235

II Chronicles 1 4 .1 0 22. 10

134 f. 84

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Arabic figures refer to pages of the te x t; italic figures to numbers of the Index of Examples. Accadian, general, 36 f., 95, 102 if., 110-13, 123, i 58> 178homonyms in, 149, 155. lexical tablets, 119 ff. lexical idiosyncrasies, 255. script, 198. discovery of, 70 f., 92. loan-words in, 103, n o , 149. words cited from, passim. Accents, Hebrew, 33, 59, 196. Acoustics, 81, 275. Actuality, argument from, 285 ff. *Addady 173-7. Aeschylus, 152 n. Aistleitner, J., 149. *Al, deity, 283. A lb righ t, W . F ., 34, 75, 112, i i 4 n . , 139 n., 188 n., 190, 225 , 240 n., 3 1 , 48, 5 7 , 67, 9 9 , I 1 3 , 1 4 3 , 15 8 , i6 o f i6 g f i g 4 , i g 8 , 295.

Aleppo Codex, 204. Allegory, 3, 44, 50; linguistic-form allegory, 44. Allophones, 215. Alphabet, 198 f. Al-tiqre, 45 f., 212, 214. Al-Yasln, 119. *Am, deity, 283 n. Amarna, 33, 76. Amorite, 33, 36, 184. Analogy, semantic, 90 f., 109, 161. Animal names, 10, 128 n., 235. Antiochus Epiphanes, 39. Apodeictic assertions, 80, 93. Apollonius Rhodius, 40. Aquila, 59, 174, 210 ff., 244, 253, 258 f., 263, 270 f., 281. Arab philology, 62, 116-19, 126 n., 143 n. Arabic, cited in Talmud, 56. used by Jews, 60-4, 217. improved knowledge of in West, 67 f. words without Hebrew cognate, 162.

lexical idiosyncrasies of, 114, 116, 119, 165 f., 169 n. synonyms in, 117. homonyms in, 106, 126. script, 198. Job read as, 34. supposed close to proto-Semitic, 113 f·

predominance attached to, 67, 112 ff., 297. words and features cited, passim. Arabism, 15, 121-4, 241. Aramaic, of Old Testament, 31,73,104. replacement of Hebrew by, 38-43. of Talmud, 43. influence on other versions, 54 f. similarities to Hebrew, 50-6, 58. in Israelite names, 184 η. influence on late Hebrew, 228, 235, 262, 289. Aramaized Hebrew, 40 f. words in biblical Hebrew, 121 n.,

178·

words and features cited, passim. Aramaism, 121-4. Archaeology, 285, 298 n. Archaizing in style, 40. Area preferences, m - 1 4 . Aristophanes, 72. ‘Artificial’ language, 41. ‘As’ in derivations, 104, 291 n. Assimilation, phonological, 96 f., 101, 178 f .; of texts, 247, 282, 287. Assonance, 48, 152 f. Asterisk, not used, 11. Atomistic study, 8, 94, 134, 290, 302, 304·

Avestan, 131 f. Babel, Tower of, 185. Babylonian punctuation, 200, 217. Bacher, W., 61, 203. Bailey, H. W., 108 n. Barr, J., 44 η., 50 η., 91η., 2 ii n., 215 n., 226 n., 239 n., 281 n., 301 n.

346

IN D E X O F S U B J E C T S

Barth. J., 97, 165 n. Basic meanings, 172, 197. Bauer, H., 82, 200 n. B e ‘from’, 175 if. Bedarshi, A., 64. Bedouin, 113. Beer, G., 69. Beeston, A. F., 85, 176 n., 41, 310. Belardi, W., 108. Ben Asher, 61, 65, 207. Ben-Jehuda, 236 f. Ben Naphtali, 207. Bergsträsser, G., H 3 f., 157 if., 164, 168, 203, 217 n. Bgdkpt, 215. Biblia Hebraica (B H 3), 18, 22, 25, 27 f., 30 ff., 62, 65, 69 ff., 105 n., 139 f-, 189, i92f·, 210, 230, 239, 283. Bilingualism, 41 f. Biliteral theory, 99, 166-70, 273-6. Binyanim, 130, 149. Birds, names of, 273. Birkeland, H., 39, 114. Blau, J., 91, 93, 95. Bloomfield, L., 138, 142, 274 n. Boling, R. G., 254 n. Borgen, P., 46 n. Botterweck, G. J., 167 n., 174 n. Brockelmann, C., 31, 82, 86, 93, 96 n., 97, 150, 160, 162 f., 176 n., 217 n., 234 n., 241 n., 265 n. Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB), 19 f., 22, 26, 27, 57, 69, 97, 102, 105, 123 m, 125, 128 n., 132, 145-8, 150, 182, 229 f., 233 m, 235 m, 246, 291 n ., 295·

Brüll, A., 57 n. Buck, C. D., 164. Buxtorf, J., 66. B‫־‬words in parallelism, 183, 254 f. Caesura, 32. Cain, 47, 48 n. Cairo Codex, 65. Caique, 264 f. Canaanite, 100 f., 229, 292. Cappellus, L., 66 f. Case endings, 78. Caskel, W., 113 n. Cassuto, M. D., 26. Castell, E., 67. Cazelles, H., 257. Checkmate, 107 f.

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, 115, 143 n. Chinese, 77, 151. Christianity, 285. Classification of Semitic languages, 113-

Codex B 19a, 65, 204. Cognate words, proportions of, 15664, 305- 7 -

Communication, 134-45, 150 n. Comparative literature, 10. Comparative philology, 76-94 and passim. ancient rudiments of, 50-60. Compatibility of consonants, 106 n., 178-81. Componential analysis, 142 n. Concrete sense in words, 276. Conjecture, see Emendation. Consonants, varying frequency of, 87, and see Patterning, Compatibility, as basis for ideas, 197 f. and character of writing system, 198 f. Consonantal text, fallibility of, 191-4. Context, dubious guidance of, 282. Coptic, 92, 105. Correspondences, phonological, 29, 64, 78, 81-5 , 93, 95‫ ־‬102, 169, 180 f., 288. Hebrew-Aramaic lexical, 50 if. Semitic lexical, 156-64. Couroyer, B., 262. Cowley, A. E., 104 n. Criteria, 8 f., 11 f., 288-304. Critical edition, problems of, 300 f. Cross, F. M., 231 n., 246 n., 80, 105. Cushitic, 106. Dahood, M., 23, 100 f., 112, 126, 153 n., 188 n., 240 n., 253, 268 n., 2 9 2 , 3 0 3 , 7 , i o y 16, 19, 24, 27, 31, 5J , 57, 60, 71, 78, 108, 133, 148, J 5 6 , J 5 7 , 183 f., 246, 248, 252, 260, 280, 311. Daiches, S., 13g. Daniel, Book of, 39 f., 49, 220 f. Date, as criterion for preference, 112 f. Dead Sea Scrolls, see Qumran. Decipherment, 92. Delitzsch, Franz, 70. Delitzsch, Friedrich, 70 f., 158, 192, 1, 34, 197Derash, 44, 46.

IN D E X O F S U B J E C T S Deutero-Isaiah, 146, 148, 155 n. Dhorme, E., 19η., 2 9 7 . Diachronic linguistics, 94. Dialect, general, 83 f., 98-101. in Hebrew, 23, 25, 73. in Canaanite, 100 f. in Arabic, 99 f., 174, 186. Dictionaries, problems of, 8, 95, 105, 115-21, 145, 161, 163, 224, 291 n., 296, 299 f. Dillmann, A., 57, 70, 139 ff., 158, 166,

347

Efros, I. I., 126 n., 143 n. Egypt» Jews in, 54, 208, 241, 268 f., and see Septuagint. Egyptian language, 92, 103 if., 111, 178. Ehrlich, A., 71, 266, 14, 170, 229. Eitan, I., 9, 18 f., 22, 28, 75, 140, 142 n., 153 n., 276, 8, 23, 28, 62, 7 4 , 8 i , 8 3 , 8 9 , 1 2 5 , J 2 7 f . , 2 3 4 ‫־‬, 2 3 7 ‫־‬, J , J 6J> 16 3 , 2 ‫־‬6 6 , , 2 j ‫־‬o , 2 1 2 y 2 3 6 , 2 3 8 y 2 5 J , 2 5 6 ,

2‫־‬

263 f., 265, 271 f.y 2 8 l i.y 287 y 333· 320y 328y 334. Discontinuous morphemes, 199. Dissimilation, 96 f., 101, 178 f. Elephantine, 39, 181. Dossin, G., 216, 299. Ellenbogen, M., 103 n., 104 n. Dozy, R. P. A., 116, 265 n., 1 3 8 . Ellermaier, F., 122. Ellipse, 3, 48, 63. Drift, phonetic, 89, 201 f. Driver, G. R., general statements of, Emendation of text, 3 f., 6 f., 30-5, 69-75, 188-222, 239 f., 245 f., 289, 3 3 7 5 ,72 ,7‫ ־‬, m f · , 116, 165 η., 297, 301 if., and in detail passim. 185 n., 225, 296 n. Emerton, J. A., 39 n., 221. on the versions, 72, 240 n. Enclitic memy 31 ff. and semantic method, 290. English, 135 f., 138, 155, 195,274,300. on Aramaisms, 121 ff. Enoch, 4. on parallelism, 278 n. Eppenstein, S., 98 n., 175 n. on onomatopoeia, 273 f. Erroneous translations, evidence from, on biliteral bases, 168. 240, 244 f., 247, 254, 256, 258 f., and Dahood, 111 f., 303. particular observations, 26, 28, 91, 272. 105 η., io8 f., ii9 f ., 125, 128, ESA, see South Arabian. languages, modern, 105 f., i3 3 n ., 1 3 9 1 5 3 ,149 , 4 3 ‫ ־‬nEthiopian ·, 1 7 * , 174 f., 188 f., 225 f., 230, 235, 112, 176, 196. 241-4, 247, 2 5 4 2 6 2 ,9‫ ־‬n., 265 f.,Ethiopic, general, 36, 67, 78, 97, 112 f. loan-words in, 102, 105 f. 280, 284, 286, 3y 4y 6y 9, I i y 1 4 l8 y 22y 35y 42y ^ ‫ ^ ־‬, ^ Ο, homonyms in, 149. gender in verbs, 30. 5 2 , 5 5 f., 5 * f · , 6 r , 6 3 , 6 6 , 6 8 - 7 0 , writing system of, 198. 73, 77, 82-7y 91 i.y 94y 98, words tabulated against Hebrew, 100 f., 107y 112y ii4 y 116, 121, 1 2 3 i.y 1 2 7 y I29y I32y 1 3 ^y 158 f., 164. semantic field of ‘know’ in, 171 f. 1 3 8 - 4 0 y 1 4 2 , *45, 1 5 9 , *62, words cited, passim. 166, 171y 175, *77 f·, 1 8 2 , 1 8 5 f.y jp r , I94y 22 0 1 ,99‫ ־‬f.y Etymology, general, 62, 85, 103 f., 2 o 6 y 2 o 8 y 2 I I y 2 I 3 y 2 l 8 y 2 2 1 ff., 115 f., 129, 143 f., 160 f., 229. 2 2 8 y 2 3 0 - 3 , 2 3 5 y 2 3 7 y 2 4o - 3 , medieval, 62, 64. popular, and etymologizing, 45-50, 2 5 8 f.y 2 6 6 f.y 247 E, 2 5 3 -6 , 2 7 0 y 2 7 3 f.y 279, 2 8 3 ~ 6 y 2 8 9 - 9 1 y 52, 59, 62, 108 f., 118, 174, 210, 251, 253 if., 266 f., 269, 281, 289, 2 9 3 , 3 0 0 ~ 2 y 3 0 6 f .y 3 l 2 y 3 1 5 f .y 3 l 8 y 3 2 1 f.y 3 2 5 ff. 294 f· etymological dictionary, 299 f. Driver, S. R., 69, 144 n., 264. Eve, 47. Ducange, C. D., 270 n. Duhm, B., 75, 242. Face, hiding of the, 253. Dunash ibn Labrat, 62 f. Favourite words of translators, 251-3, 261. Economy of hypotheses, 80. Field, F., 58 n., 271 n. Education, linguistic, 295 f.

348

IN D E X O F S U B J E C T S

Fish, names of, 165, 236 f. Fitzmyer, J. A., 39 n. Fraenkel, M., 82. Fraenkel, S., 108 n. Freedman, D. N., 231 n., 303 n. French language, 136,138,155,274 n., 297. Freytag, G. W., 7 n., 72 n., 116, 117 n., 165 f., 181, 263. Gaster, T. H., 234. Geiger, A., 16. Gemser, B., 24 n., 28. Gender, 30 f. Geographic proximity as criterion,

113·

Gerleman, G., 256 n. German, Germanic, 81, 83 f., 164. Gesenius-Buhl (dictionary = GB), 19, 57, 128 n., 137 n., 148, 152, 189 n., 229 n., 230, 233 n. Gesenius-Kautzsch (grammar = GK), 24 n., 31, 216. Gevirtz, S., 299. Gillieron, J., 138 f. Ginsberg, H. L., 33, 219, 270, 149 f., 181, 226, 294. Gleason, H. L., 83 n., 186, 195 n., 196 n., 199 n. Glottochronology, ii4 n ., 184-7. Glück, J. J., 103, 250. Goetze, A., 121 n. Goitein, S. D., 85. Goldman, M. D., 23 n. Golius, J., 117 n. Gonda, J., 47 n. Gordis, R., 16 f., 45 n., 153 n., 162 n., 213 n., 146 f., 217, 315. Gordon, C. H., 26 n., 149, 175 ff., 194 n. Goshen-Gottstein, M. H., 42 n., 94 n., 165 n., 216 n., 239 n. Grabe, J. E., 248. Grammar, generally, 3, 30-3. in analysis by versions, 209. standardization of Hebrew, 73, 206. anomalies in Massoretic, 216 f. Grapheme, 196, 198, 218 n. Gray, G. B., 233. Gray, J., 85 n., 107 n., 126, 292 n., 32, 79, 164, 168, 185, 204, 214, 245Greek language, 12, 40, 43, 77, 86, 91, 109, 152 n., 155, 195, 297·

modem, 201. words in Hebrew, 40, 57 f., 62, 104. adaptation of Phoenician script, 199words cited, passim. Greenberg, J. H., 106 n., 178 ff. Greenfield, J. C., 41 n., 271 n., 273 n., 92, J92, 332. Grimm, J., 81 f., 84. Grossmann-Segal (dictionary), 236 f. Gudschinsky, S. C., 184 η., 185. Guillaume, A., 34 b, 99, 123 η., 125, 173, i 82, 53 f; 75> 9, 165, 172‫־‬, 207, 2x5, 260, 303, 313. Gunkel, H., 75, 140. Gutturals, 214 f. Ha-Levi, Isaac b. Eleazar, 64. Hailperin, H., 66 n. Halper, B., 45. Hamitic, 175. Hapax legomena, 6 f., 61, 70, 102, 119, 147, 204 f., 230 f., 263. Harari, 294 n. Harmonization, 282. Harris, Z. S., 165 n. Hatch and Redpath (concordance), 252, 257, 263. Haywood, J. A., 116 n. Hayyug, Yehuda b. David, 63. ο *Εβραίος, 18, 271. Hebrew language, disuse of by Jews, 38- 43· a human language, 67. uniformity of, 73, 100, 206. regional pronunciations of, 200 f. knowledge of in Egypt, 208, 240 n., 268 f. dialects in, 23, 25, 73. general intelligibility of, 297 f. mode of reading unpointed, 197. size of vocabulary, 223-7. Hebrews, Epistle to the, 49. Hempel, J., 217 n. Hexapla, 209 n., 211 f., 230, 243. Hieroglyphic, 92. Himyarite, 174. Hirschberg, Η. H., 22, 277, 11, 155, 173, 224. Historical criticism, 68, 77. History, as element in philology, 76-81, 89. Hittite, 92, 104, 219. Hitzig, F., 162 n.

IN D E X O F S U B J E C T S Hockett, C. F., 274 n. Hoenigswald, H. M., 77, 80 n. Hommel, F., 248. Homonyms, general, 17 f., 23, 12555, 243, 289. complete and partial, 18, 23 f., 127, 129 f. and homographs, 18, 24, 131 n., 2 4 9 ·

in roots, 130 f., 145, 150. in verbs, 131 ff. and style, 135, 151-5. and semantic fields, 136-42, 146. and polysemy, 142 ff., 147. and textual corruption, 144. and riddles, 152. and communication, 134-45, 150 n · and phoneme mergers, 126-9, 149 f. produced by semantic change, 174. in Syriac, 109, 149 ff. in Ugaritic, 149. in Arabic, 106, 128. of like and unlike function, 135 f., 146. separation by text or period, 146 f. word-formation and, 131 ff., 148. medieval terms for, 126 n. and Massorah, 204 f. contamination between, 108 f. counts of, 145-51, 299. newly identified, passim. Hugo of St. Victor, 66. Humbert, P., 105, 265. Hummel, H. D., 33. Hyatt, J. P., 303 n. Hymes, D., 80 n., 184 n., 186 n., 275 n. Ibn Barun, 64 n., 98 n., 174 n. Ibn Ezra, 17, 63 f. Ibn Janah, Abulwalid Merwan, 63, 98. Ibn Koreish, Yehuda, 62. Ibn Khaldun, 126 n. Ibn Tibbon, 60. Idiosyncrasies, lexical, 114, 119, 224. Indian etymologies, 47 n. Indo-European, 86, 164, 185, 298. Inflexional affixes, 86 f., 221. Information, 118, 291 ff. Internal reconstruction, 80. Interpretation, linguistic elements in Jewish, 44-50. Islam, 59 f., 63, 74, 276. Isoglosses, 83 f., 113.

349

Izalla, 189, 286. Jacob, B., 11 n. Jastrow, M., 234, 235 n., 244 n., 257, 263 n., 264 n. Jerome, 5011., 65, 67, 20911., 211 ff., 215, 231, 233, 249, 253, 255, 258, 262, 270. Jespersen, O., 86 n., 143, 274 n. Jesus, language spoken by, 38 f. Job, Book of, read as Arabic, 34. treatment in B H 2, 69 f. Greek version, 256-9. Jouon, P., 119. Josiah, 181, 220. Kaddary, M. Z., 1 3 0 . Kahle, P., 203 n., 214-17. Katz, P., 268 n. Kautzsch, E., 121 n. Kennicott, B., 1. Keywords in prophecy, 48 f. Kimchi family, 55, 64, 67. Kitab a l-A in , 116 n., 118. Koehler, L., 91 n., 236. Koehler-Baumgartner (dictionary = KB), 17, 19 f., 26, 30, 57, 91 n., 128 n., 146 n., 147 f., 174 n., 229 f., 233 n., 236, 241, 259, 265, 295. Komlos, O., 229. Kopf, L., 106 f., n 6 f ., 175, 188, 52, 93, 144, 203.

Koskinen, K., 178 f. Kraus, H.-J., 67 n., 75, H 4 n ., 192. Krauss, S., 56 n. Kretschmer, P., 138 n. Kutscher, E. Y., 42 n., 216 n,, 217 n. Lagarde, P. A. de, 26, 82. Lambton, A. K. S., 106 n. Landau, E., 173 n. Landsberger, B., 121. Lane, E. W., 107 n., 116, 117 n., 118, 165 f., 236, i 8 y g8. Laryngals, 214 f. Late Hebrew, 69 h, h i f., 151, 22237, 262, 289, and see Mishnaic Hebrew. influence of Aramaic on, 228. poor training in, 224. Latin, 78, 86, 91, 130 n., 131, 155, 175, 274 n., 297; ecclesiastical, as ana logy to Hebrew, 38, 42. Laws in linguistic change, 81 ff.

350

IN D E X O F S U B JE C T S

Leander, P., 82, 200 n. Lebanon, 32, 49. Lehmann, W. P., 80 n., 83 n. Leslau, W., 97, 141, 159, 174 n., 294 n.

‘Let’, 138. Leveen, J., 18. Levi della Vida, G., 105 n. Levita, E., 66. Levy, J., 264 n. Lexical tablets, Accadian, ii9 ff. Lexicography, Arabic, 106, 115-19. medieval Jewish, 58, 174, 289, 300. general problems, see Dictionaries. Lexicostatistics, 184-7. Linguistic-cultural relations, 276 f. Linguistics, modem general, as di stinct from philology, 94. Liturgical reading, 217. Loan-words, 17, 101-11, 226, 288. Logic, 126 n., 164 n., 290. Low, I., 16, 165, 236 f. Ludolf, H., 26, 57. LXX, see Septuagint. Maimonides, 60, 126 n., 143 n. Mandaic, 78, 142, 149. Mandaism, 74. Mansoor, M., 229, 44. Mari, 114 n. Massorah, 61, 65 f., 204 f., 208. Massoretes, general, 33, 59 f., 188222, 289 and passim. traditionalism of, 203. double sense of the term, 206 f. compared with LXX, 209. supposed failure to understand text, 31, 190, 202 f., 240 n. supposed innovations of, 214-17. semantic element in work of, 202-7. anomalies in work of, 216 f. and pre-Massoretic vocalization, 207-17. Massoretic text, antiquity of, 1, 73. pre-Massoretic date of errors in, 219 ff. Matres lectionisy 195 f., 199. Meaning, in comparative philology, 76, 86-91, 289 ff. in one language, 292, 294 f. Mechanical preservation of text, 73. Medieval comparative philology, 566 5 ,7 6 ,1 7 4 ·

Melek, deity, 283.

Mem, enclitic, 31 ff. Menahem b. Saruk, 62, 277 n. Menasce, P. J. de, 226 n. Menner, R. J., 135 n., 138 n., 143. Mesopotamian institutions, 172, 255. Merger of phonemes, 126-9, 174. Metaphor, 3, 242, 276. Metathesis, 25, 97 ff., 169, 178 f. Metzger, B. M., 4. Michaelis, J. D., 68. Midianites, 181 n. Midrash, 41, 45 h, 57 ff., 214, 263, 281, 300. Millard, A., 189 f., 96. Miller, P. D., 41, 117, 311. Mirsky, A., 231 n. Mishnaic Hebrew, 38-42, 62, 69 n., 76, 122, 163, 217, 305 n., and see Late Hebrew. Mixed language, Hebrew as a, 165. Moabite, 122, 225. Modern (Israeli) Hebrew, 195, 236 f. Montgomery, J., 162 n., 260, 72, 132. Moore, G. F., 14 f., 55 n., 216 n. Morag, S., 198 n., 215 n., 217 m Moran, W. L., 33, 36, 114, 269, 317. Morphology, 206, 295, and see Grammar. Moscati, S., 98 n., 113, 129 n., 167 n., 168 n., 178, 197 n. Motivated terms, 275. Mowinckel, S., 120. Multiplicity of meanings, 44 ff. Murtonen, A., 79. Nabataean, 166. ‘Naked’, words for, 169 n. Names, symbolic use of, 47 ff., and see Personal names, Etymology. Nehemiah, 39. Neofiti Targum, 254 n. Nestle, E., 4. New Testament, 4, 39 n., 46 n., 49. Nicholas of Lyra, 66. Nida, E. A., 142 n. Noah, 47, 48 n. Nöldeke, Th., 82, 150 n., 17311., 261 n., 268 n., 156. Nötscher, F., 120, 230. Non-Semitic words, 101-11. Noth, M., 106, 181 ff., 184 n. Nyberg, H. S., 72-5, 100 n., 107 123 n., 126, 194 f., 282, 33, 38,

244, 324·

IN D E X O F S U B JE C T S O’Callaghan, R. T ., 182. Oesterley, W. Ο. E., 37. Onomatopoeia, 273-6. Ophir, 286 f. Opposite senses, words with, 173-7. Origen, 243. Orlinsky, Η. M., 137, 80, 3x9. Orthography, 214, 219. Oxford English Dictionary, 108, n o . Palestinian Arabic, 276. Palmyrene, 133 n. Pan-Ugaritism, i n . Parallelism, 32, 62, 65, 183, 243 f., 248, 254 f., 267, 277-82, 286, 289, 300. homogeneity in, 255. differences between parallel pass ages, 191 ff. Paronomasia, 48, 154. Patterning of roots, 178-81. Patterns in word-formation, 132, 136. Payne, D. F., 155 n. Peake, A. S., 188 n., 225 n., 240 n. Perles, F., 71, 244, Φ , 73f 136, 137, 308. Persian, general, 67, 72. words in Arabic, 106 ff. words in Hebrew, 104, 109. Personal names, 22 f., 29, 47, 105 f., 145 f., 181-4. Peshat, 60, 65. Peshitta, 16, 18, 21, 53 n., 74, 123, 174, 230, 234, 243, 249, 258 f., 265, 270, 281, 296. caiques in, 263 ff. Philo, 49, 208. Phoenician, 36, 92, 101, 112, 196. Phonemes, 78, 83, 98, 178, 195, 210, 215, 218 n., 275. merger of, 78, 126-9, 149 f., 174. varying frequency of, 87. marked in writing, 195 f., 198 f., 210. phonemicization, 102. Phonetics, 81, 101, 180, 200 ff., 206, 208, 211. Pirn, 225, 285 f. Pitch accent, Greek, 195, 201. Piyyutim, 152, 228, 230 f. Place-names, 286 f. Polyglot ideal, 296, 298. Polysemy, 23, 142 ff., 147. Pope, Μ. H., 85 n., 96, 36, 106, 139, 170, 229, 321, 323, 333.

351

Porter, J. R., 152 n. Praetorius, F., 97 n. Pregnancy, 286. Prepositions, 176 f. Probability, 191, 292. Productive and non-productive roots, 160 f. Pronoun suffix, 2nd person, 215. Pronunciation of Hebrew, 199-203, 214 f. Proto-Semitic, 27, 37, 78 f., 81 f., 96η., ιο ί, ii3 , 128, 167, 185, 293· Proverbs, character of Greek version of, 256-9, 284. Psalterium Gallicanum, 213, 249, 253. Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos, 213, 249, 253, 262. Punctuation, see Vocalization. Qalir, 231. Qàmüs, 117, 119, 285. Qaraism, 59 f., 206. Qere and kethibhy 30, 228 n., 246 f. Qoheleth, 100, 123, 147 f., 153, 206. Quine, W. V. O., 291 n. Qumran, 1, 7, 39-42, 112, 120 n., 182, 191, 193 ff., 199, 207, 246, 249, 262, 284, 300. new words detected in, 225 f., 284 f. Quran, 59, 117, 224. Rabbanites, 206. Rabbi, 56. Rabbis citing other languages, 56 ff. Rabbinic interpretation, 44-50. Rabin, Ch., 30, 41 n., 42 n., 100, 102, 104 n., 205 n., 226 n., 232, 249, 286, 12 f., 25 f., 49, 88y io g y 141, 174, i8 o y 225, 234, 261y 288y 296,

304 f.

Rabinowitz, I., 39 n. Rahlfs, A., 248. Rankin, O. S., 120 n. Rashi, 55, 59, 66, 174, 234. Rask, R., 86 n. Reading, modes of, 196 f. Reference and information, 118, 291 f. Reichelt, H., 132 n. Reider, J., 15, 33, 98, 107, 284, 2, 5, 19 ff., 64, 76, h i , 176, 189, 203, 216, 239, 249, 256, 330. Religious factors, 43, 282-5. Restorations in later Hebrew, 227-32.

352

IN D E X OF SUBJECTS

Retroversion, 238 f. Reuchlin, J., 66. Richter, E., 138 n. Roberts, B. J., 8, 211 n., 213 n., 214 n. Robins, R. H., 83 n. Robinson, T. H., 290 n. Romance languages, 36, 62, 77 f., 185 n. Root as sign of basic meaning, 160 f., 197 ff. Rosenthal, E. I. J., 60 n. Rosenthal, F., 126 n., 118. Rossi, G. B. de, 1. Rudolph, W., 16, 140. Rûzicka, R., 129 n. Saadia, 60 ff., 175, 231, 264. Sacra philologia, 68. ‘Sailor’, 109 f. Samaritan, 67, 258. ostraca, 182. Samson, 21, 152. Samuel, 47 f. Sanskrit, 12, 47 n., 131 f. Saul, 48. Saussure, F. de, 83, 274 n. Scepticism, 301 f. Scholarship and transmission of meanings, 43. Schultens, A., 67 ff. Schulthess, F., 109 n., 150. Scott, R. B. Y., 27. Scripture, status of, 44, 50, 220. Seeligmann, I. L., 55 n. Segal, J. B., 103 n. Segal, M. H., 40 n., 236. Semantics, 86-91, 143, 172 f., 289-95. a weakness in philology, 88 ff., 289 ff. semantic rewriting, 302. semantic development, 109 f., 115, 118, 143, 274, 288, and passim. semantic fields, 90, 136-42, 165, 170 ff., 180, 227, 260 f., 289, 300. semantic and phonological com ponents in comparisons, 83 f., 86 f., 99. Septuagint, date and origin of, 268 f. influence of Aramaic on, 54 f. varying techniques used, 2, 15,53 f., 208 f. in Isaiah, 250. modes of analysis of Hebrew, 71 f., 208 f.

knowledge of Hebrew, 208, 240 n., 267 ff. favourite words in, 251 if. obscurity of sense of, 262 f. use of Greek words similar to Hebrew, 58. examples cited, passim. Sexual reference, 20 f., 277, 286. Shaphel, 233. Shiloh, 120. Sibilants, 78, 129. Siddiqi, A., 108 n. Sign systems, 292. Siloam inscription, 195. Simon bar Kosba, 40. Sirach, 39 f., 219, 224 if., 232, 241, 260 f., 300. Skinner, J., 31, 57 n., 270 n. Smend, R., 261 n. Social systems, terminology for, 172. Socotri, 294 n. Soden, W. von, 115, 121 n., 153, 192 n., 34. Sogdian, 297. Sound, sound changes, 76, 81-7, 89. constancy and exceptions, 82 f., 201 f. Source analysis, 68 f., 76. South Arabian (including ESA), 22, 29 f·, 78, 85, 95, 114, 143, 158, 176 n., 182, 230, 234Spelling, 214. Statistics, 83, 98, 105, 113, i 2 i f . , 130, 269, 299. Stenning, J. F., 52, 264. Stoicism, 49. Strugnell, J., 131. Stummer, F., 230. Style, general, 29, 49, 63. post-biblical, 232. and homonymy, 151-5. Suffix, 2nd person, 215. Sumerian, 48 n., 92, 103, n o , 119 if., 149. Swete, H. B., 55 n., 58 n., 59 n., 208, 211 n., 268. Symmachus, 212 f., 233, 244, 254, 259, 262, 271, 281. Synchronic linguistics, 94, 148. Synonyms, 64, 289. Syntax, 31 f., 74, 114, 266. Syriac language, general, 59, 67, 95, 119, 149 if., 160, 234. homonyms in, 109, 149 if.

IN D E X O F S U B J E C T S verbs tabulated against Hebrew, 162 f., 305 ffwords cited, 69 n., 86, 108, 122 f., 141 f. and passim. for Syriac Bible text see Peshitta. 6 Evpos, 243 n. Talmud, 43, 45 b, 56 f., 60, 196, 197 n., 213 f., 220, 226, 230, 234 f. Targum, general, 16, 18, 30, 39, 5260, 62, 174, 208, 230, 234f., 243 f., 252 f., 254 f., 258 f., 262-5, 270 f., 286. paraphrastic nature of, 52-5, 270. influence on LXX, 54 f., 259. importance for medieval philology, 62 ff. and caiques or etymologies, 52 ff., 263 ff. Textual criticism, textual treatment, 1-13, 68-72, 301-4 and. passim. textual errors, date of origin of, 218-21. in Hebrew, 144, 245 ff. in versions, 247 ff. Theodotion, 212, 258 f., 271. Thieme, P., 275 n. Thomas, D. W., 19, 21 f., 26, 34, 72, 75, 165 n., 233 m, 240 f., 301, 84, 97, n 5, 120, 126, 137, 151-4, l6?y 190 f., 200, 217 f., 234, 309, 314, 328. Thumb, A., 201 n. Tigre, 159. Tigrinya, 113, 294 m Tocharian, 92, 297. Torczyner, H., 45 n., and see T urSinai. Torrey, C. C., 146 n. Transcriptions, 18, 71 f., 129. Translations in Bible from other languages, 123. Translations, modern, 298 f. Triliteral root, 62 ff., 166, and see Biliteral theory. Tsevat, M., 2x9, 329. Turkish, 77. Tur-Sinai, N. H., 27, 75, 123, 134^·, 142, 162, 190, 234, 242 n., 303, 29 f., 39 f., 65, io 2 t n o , 119, J79, 187, 193, 195, 209, 220, 273 f., 277 f., 292, 307, 327, 331.

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Ugaritic, general, 36, 38, 75, 85, 92 f., 11 fy 114m, i58f.,222,22cf, 240n., 268 n., 286 f., 294, 296 f., 303 n., 304homonyms in, 149. parallelism in, 282. script, 198. graphic errors in, 191, 194. b ‘from’, 175 if. words cited, passim. Ullendorff, E., 2 6 , 2 9 n . , 5 7 , 8 5 , 1 0 7 n., 1 1 3 , 1 1 9 , 1 3 9 n., 1 5 8 , 1 9 7 n., 2 9 4 n., 5, 1 0 4 ‫־‬, J 9 J , J 9 6 , 2 0 0 , 2 9 5 , 310. Ullmann, S., 2 7 4 n., 2 7 5 n., 2 9 1 n. Verb, homonymy in the, 131 ff. verb-classes, 131 f. verbs as loan-words, 104 n. Vermes, G., 49 n. Vemer, K., 84. Versions, general, 2, 5, 73, 144, 23872, 289. their mode of *reading’, 238 f. influence on each other, 259 f. stereotypes in, 252 f. and grammar of original, 265 f. imprecise renderings, 52-5, 2495 3 , 2 5 5 ‫ ־‬8 .

uncertainty of sense, 262-5. and see Septuagint etc., and Erroneous translations. Vision, Prophetic, 283 f. Vocalization, general, 188-222, 289. existed before marked in writing, 195 ff., 207-17, 221. evidence for pre-Massoretic, 207-17, 233 n. age and reliability of, 73, 220 f. interdependent with textual history, 218 f. not based on semantic decisions, 202-7. and analysis of Hebrew grammar, 36, 63, 65, 216 f., 221 f., 289. alleged dispensability of, 35 f., 67, 73, 188 ff. inspiration of, 66 f. ambiguity of term, 196. examples of emendation, passim. Vollers, K., 55 n. Vowels, as modifiers of basic sense, 197. Vulgate, 18, 3 0 , 59, 140, 174, 230, 2 3 3 f·, 2 4 3 n., 247, 258 f., 262, 270, 286, and see Jerome.

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Wagner, M., 121. Wallenstein, M., 231. Walton, B., 296 n. Waw consecutive, 217. Weak consonants, 63, 96, 189. Wechter, P., 64 n., 98 n., 174 n. Wehr, H., 175 n. Weil, G., 173. Weil, G. E., 66 n., 204 n., 205 n. Weinreich, U., 42 n. Weiss, A. von, 42 n. Wellhausen, J., 68 f., i n , 144. Wernberg-Moller, P., 225 n., 226 n., 241. Wild, S., 116 ff. Word divisions, 189 f., 209, 267. Word-formation, 63, n o , 131 ff., 275.

Wright, G. E., 33 n. Writing systems, Semitic, 198 f. Latin and Greek, 199, 215. Wurthwein, E., 8. Wutz, F. X., 55 n., 71 f., 107, 248 n 244. Yahuda, A. S., i n . Yalon, H., 226 n. Yannai, 230 f. Yemenite Arabic, 100. Yemenite Jews, 217 f. Ziff, P., 274 n. Zimmermann, F., 227. Zimmern, H., 121. Ziudsudra, 48 n. Zoroastrianism, 74.

POSTSCRIPT L o o k in g back over nearly twenty years, the author can hardly fail to be satisfied with the effect that this book had. For it can scarcely be doubted that it succeeded in its central aim, which was to introduce an element of systematic and critical reflection into the proliferation of novel identifications of Hebrew words, supposedly based upon the methods of comparative philology. That such identifications could be right, that the method could indeed work successfully, remains true, and I myself never doubted it. But the number of such identifications suggested, their constantly increasing proliferation, and the frequent contradictions between one such solution and another could not but lead to a deep scepticism in the end. The inventive virtuosity of those who made the discoveries could not prevail against a cool and methodical evaluation. Comparative Philology and the Text o f the Old Testament was published, as it turned out, near the crest of the wave of philo logical innovations, just a short time before that wave began to break and disintegrate. The rise and fall of the fashion can be well traced, among other places, in the modern translations of the Bible. It was very odd that G. E. Mendenhall criticized my book for failure to consider whether the examples quoted had been accepted in recent translations.1 I could not refer to the New English Bible, for its Old Testament had not then been published (it appeared in 1970). But everyone who was in contact with scholarship at the time knew that the NEB would be full of exactly the sort of examples I reviewed in this volume, and so it was.2 The launching of new philological proposals upon the public through translations—often before the scholarly world had accepted them, or had even heard of them—was equally manifest in the work of 1 George E. Mendenhall, ‘Debate over Linguistic Methodology’. Review of Comparative Philology and the Text o f the Old Testament, by James Barr. Interpretation 25 (1971) 358- 62. 2 For my own discussion of this version, some years after it appeared, see my article, ‘After Five Years: A Retrospect on Two Major Translations of the Bible’, Heythrop Journal 15 (1974) 381- 405, in which I discuss it jointly with the New American Bible, which appeared in the same year.

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M. Dahood, most notably in his translation of and commentary on the Psalms in the Anchor Bible.3 Translation and the innovative philological method seemed then to be closely linked in practice. But this was the highwater mark. Since then, if the production of new translations forms an index of scholarly opinion, scholar ship has generally become much more cautious in the acceptance of novel philological identifications. The New American Bible, in spite of the very considerable textual and philological expertise that went into it, was much less a prey to the semantic emendation of words than the New English Bible. And the more startlingly innovative renderings of NEB found few defenders: if at some future time a revised edition is published, one may surmise that many of these renderings will prove to have been eliminated. Confirmation of this trend comes from the fine version of the Jewish Publication Society of America.4 The translators included some fine philologists, who in principle probably fully supported the claim that the comparative philological method worked, that it could produce effective and convincing results. Nevertheless in this respect the version, as it turns out, is distinctly semantically con servative: it tends to look for a meaning within Hebrew, rather than one that can be traced from another Semitic language. Look, for instance, at its rendering of Cant. 6. 4: You are beautiful, my darling, as Tirzah, Comely as Jerusalem, Awesome as bannered hosts.

—not so very distant, after all, from the King James Version of the same. But another feature of the JPS version is its modesty about its ability to solve the problems. Its footnotes are peppered with the telling phrase: Meaning o f Heb. uncertain. It shows no quick confidence that some source like Ugaritic will let the meaning be read off; in spite of high philological expertise, the meaning of the Hebrew remained uncertain. 3 Mitchell Dahood, Psalms: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, 3 vols. Anchor Bible, vols. 16, 17, 17A (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965, 1968, 1970). 4 A New Translation o f the Holy Scriptures according to the Masoretic Text, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962, 1978, 1982; 2d ed. of vol. 1 appeared in 1967). All three volumes were revised and combined in a single volume entitled Tanakh: A New Translation o f the Holy Scriptures according to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

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And the change of mood among scholars concerned with Bible translation on the highest standards was obvious, as we come closer to the present day, in the international committee (chaired by D. Barthélemy) that produced a report for the United Bible Societies.5 The report was prepared by a group of scholars, most of whom had been actively concerned in the major modern biblical translations in several languages. But from the beginning they lay down their conviction that comparative philology will be useful only occasionally and with great reserve. There are indeed possible parallels unknown till now; but these evidences are rare and dispersed. Our grasp on the material of languages recently dis covered is itself dependent on our knowledge of biblical Hebrew. The committee therefore resolved to make only a very circumspect use of comparative philology in the interpretation of the Old Testament.6 This shift of mood has another side. One of the claims of the comparative philological method, as it had been exercised in Old Testament studies, was that it preserved the text and enabled the scholar to avoid emendation; indeed, this was a methodological necessity for it, for only if the text was right did it have a starting point in the search for a parallel in some other Semitic language. Philological discovery was thus to be much more important than textual criticism. But the philological pioneers seldom adhered to this principle with much consistency. The New English Bible con tained a very large number of departures from the Masoretic Text.7 The New American Bible had a similar and extensive list. The Jewish Publication Society version, though for understand able reasons claiming to translate ‘according to the traditional Hebrew text’,8 gives at times the impression that the translators know quite well that they can make good sense only by implying or preferring some different reading. In fact, therefore, some of the 5 To date only two volumes of a projected five have appeared (covering Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations): Dominique Barthélemy, ed., Critique textuelle de lAncien Testament. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, vols. 50/ 1, 2 (Fribourg Suisse: Editions Universitaires; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1982-). 6 Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, vol. 1, xiv. 7 They are listed in L. H. Brockington, The Hebrew Text o f the Old Testament: The Readings Adopted by the Translators o f the New English Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 8 Note the use of this phrase in the subtitle of the combined edition (see n. 4).

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major translations produced in the sixties and seventies, however much they professed opposition to the recognition of textual varia tion as the cause of problems, may be said to have been, despite themselves, monuments to the need for serious textual criticism even among those who would prefer to bypass it through philo logical discovery. But any really critical attitude to the text is likely to make more precarious the point of departure toward philological solutions. The work of Barthélemy’s committee is solidly textual in its approach. Various aspects of these issues come to expression in the three articles which are printed below and which form a supplement to the original book. The article ‘Philology and Exegesis: Some General Remarks, with Illustrations from Job’ was originally a paper presented at the Journées Bibliques of Louvain in 1972. The meeting took a series of current problems in Old Testament studies in which a confrontation of contrary opinions might take place, and one of these formed a session in which Professor Dahood and I read papers, both relating to the general approach of compara tive philology and referring this to the particular example of Job 3.9 In my own argument I seek to explain, among other things, why my original book had concentrated less on Dahood’s work— and less on Ugaritic—than some might have expected. I also show, in the case of the Punic name Magon, that the evidence alleged by Dahood from the Phoenician area was actually a complete mis understanding of the source. Along with this goes another point: The position taken by Dahood, far from being well based in comparative philology, was destructive of comparative philology, for he went beyond using Ugaritic as a source from which Hebrew could be elucidated and was interested rather in proving that Ugaritic and Hebrew were identical; in his own words, it was a method of ‘virtually equating Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew’.10 I also, with examples from Job 3, look at another aspect: the problem of the internal relations and nuances that obtained within Hebrew itself, as distinct from the ‘original’ associations of the same terms even when these can be determined. These thoughts 9 Both papers were published in the conference transactions: Dahood’s article, ‘Northwest Semitic Texts and Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible’, is found on pp. 11- 37; mine is reprinted on pp. 362-87 below (the source note contains the full bibliographic data of the original publications). 10 Dahood, ‘Northwest Semitic Texts’, 19.

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come near, in some ways, to what has in recent years come to be thought of as a ‘canonical’, as distinct from a ‘historical’, perspective.11 Insufficient attention to Ugaritic? Well, perhaps. I felt, in writing Comparative Philology and the Text o f the Old Testament, that the waters of Ugarit had been so muddied by the trampling of those seeking solutions for the Old Testament that it could not, for the present and without extensive and intricate argument, be easily used as secure evidence. My article ‘Ugaritic and Hebrew SBMT shows some reason why.12 The identification of a word sbm as ‘muzzle’ in Ugaritic went back to the earliest days of Ugaritic studies, and by the sixties the same was being found in Hebrew. Far from wishing to dispute this, I began by accepting it as an excellent example, and intended to use it as a favoured illustration in this book. Only gradually did I realize that the identification (based on a rare Arabic word) within Ugaritic itself was almost certainly wrong. The article shows the complicated series of con siderations that led to this realization. Within Ugaritic studies themselves the article has not been without effect. In J. C. L. Gibson’s revision of G. R. Driver’s Canaanite Myths and Legends, the offending sbm ‘muzzle’ has disappeared from the vocabulary, and the form is taken as from sby ‘captured’ (which brings us back rather closer to the traditional Hebrew of Ps. 68. 23).13 Incidentally, the article on this word exemplifies something that I came to feel more and more strongly: namely, that a suggestion of a new meaning for a word, on the basis of cognate relationships, was not something that could be established in a note of four or five lines. On the contrary, in many cases a rather full article of twenty pages or more would be needed if all the relevant considerations were to be taken into account. Behind all these questions there lies the more theoretical question: How far are we justified in expecting that lexemes and their semantic indications will be shared through the various members of the Semitic language family? For, obviously, the higher the 11 On these problems in general, as related to the text of Job, see also the more recent work of Lester L. Grabbe, Comparative Philology and the Text o f Job: A Study in Methodology (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977). 12 Reprinted on pp. 388-411 below. 13 J. C. L. Gibson, Canaanite Myths and Legends (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1978), 50 n. 5.

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degree of this sharing, the more likely it is that comparative phi lology will produce good suggestions for particular problems in the Hebrew text; and, conversely, the lower the degree of this sharing, the less likely it will be that resources for such suggestions will exist. I had already addressed some aspects of this question in chapter 7 above, and I returned to it in the paper on ‘Limitations of Etymology as a Lexicographical Instrument in Biblical Hebrew’, which was read in various forms to various groups during the seventies, such as the Cambridge University Oriental Society, and finally to the Philological Society in 1979.14 Though I have described the problem as a theoretical one, the handling of it is based very largely within practical operations. There are certain aspects of Semitic languages that encourage a fascination with etymology and similar relations, and this fascination undoubtedly fosters the idea that comparative philological solutions to prob lems of vocabulary are likely to succeed. My own practical experi ence as a lexicographer of Hebrew, however, has led me in the opposite direction. As against those who follow a more recent trend and want to discount comparative information altogether, I gave reasons, based on the actual functioning of the languages and upon the practical needs of scholars, why this information con tinues to be of positive importance. But on the other hand I had to register some of the many cases where, even given the best will in the world for the pursuit of philological research, it seemed simply to provide no answer, and the lexicographer had to acknowledge that he had no relevant comparative information at all, or that, even if he had it, it simply failed to illuminate the relations between words in the way in which it has commonly been expected to illuminate them. That this need not be surprising was confirmed through reference to D. Cohen’s Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques.15 Another recent publication that should be mentioned is L. Kopf’s Studies in Arabic and Hebrew Lexicography.16 14 Reprinted on pp. 412-36 below. 15 David Cohen, Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques ou attestées dans les langues sémitiques, 2 fascicles to date [through GLD1] (Paris: Mouton: 1970-). 16 Lothar Kopf, Studies in Arabie and Hebrew Lexicography, edited by Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1976). I had known of Kopf’s works and used them in my own writing, but only limited parts were available to me. This collection of Kopf’s previously published articles presents us with a much larger range of Kopf’s material and thus gives us a much better purchase on the problems of using indigenous Arab lexicography as a guide to Hebrew vocabulary.

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The text of Comparative Philology and the Text o f the Old Testament, and of the three other articles, is here reproduced without any change, apart from the correction of a very few minor typographical errors. Oxford, May 1986

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS* SOME GENERAL REMARKS, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM JOB I do not propose to repeat here the arguments of my book Com parative Philology and the Text o f the Old Testament (1968). What I shall do is the following: First, I shall make some remarks about the discussion in general, taking into account some points made by reviewers.1 Secondly, since this is the introduction to a joint discussion with Professor Dahood, I shall say something about his position in particular. Thirdly, since he and I have agreed on a common text for discussion, I shall refer to some examples from Job 3. Fourthly, I shall try to say something about the philosophy of the matter and place this debate about biblical Hebrew within the wider framework of the general modern discus sion of language and semantics. Since the reception of the book has been generally favourable and encouraging, and since the ensuing discussion has given me little reason to change my mind about major points, it may be good to start with one or two questions of general aim and empha sis in the work as a whole. The first such points are taken up in Father Dahood’s detailed review.2 * Reprinted with permission from Questions disputées d ’Ancien Testament: Méthode et Théologie, ed. C. Brekelmans, pp. 39- 61. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, vol. 33 (Gembloux, Belgium: J. Duculot, 1974). 1 The fuller reviews of Comparative Philology (title thus abbreviated) so far include: F. I. A n d e r s e n , JBL 88 (1969) 345 f.; J. B l a u , Kiryat Sepher 44 (19681969) 223- 25; F. P é r e z C a s t r o , Sefarad 28 (1968) 321- 26; M . J. D a h o o d , “Comparative Philology Yesterday and Today,” Biblica 50 (1969) 70- 79; T. N. D. M e t t i n g e r , Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 45 (1970) 129- 33; W . L. M o r a n , CBQ 31 (1969) 239- 43; E. U l l e n d o r f f , BSOAS 32 (1969) 143- 48; S. D. W a l t e r s , JAOS 89 (1969) 777- 81; P. W e r n b e r g - M o l l e r , JThS 20 (1969) 558- 62. Citations of these scholars by name in the following will refer to these reviews. I do not take as serious comment the wild ranting of G. E. M e n d e n h a l l in Interpretation 25 (1971) 358- 62, although points of interest are occasionally touched upon by him. 2 I would like to acknowledge the generally pleasant tone of Father Dahood’s review; some points where he becomes more scornful, and where this scorn may be misplaced, will be mentioned in the course of this article.

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The first question is about the scope of the investigation. Dahood remarks, and quite rightly, that my study is devoted mainly to lexical elements, such as nouns and verbs, for which new meanings have been identified in modern times; it says much less about pronouns, suffixes, particles, and grammatical categories such as tenses. He thinks that if one writes about “philology” one has to include full treatments of comparative phonetics, syntax, etc. I recognize that there is a valid point here, and that Dahood’s own work contains a great deal that consists not of new lexical identi fications but rather of interpretations of suffixes and the like. But there is no issue of principle here. I was not writing a full treatise on comparative philology, but a study of one type of operation which is an application of comparative philology to the biblical text. Within the total impact of this operation, it is the lexical examples which seem to have the most striking and drastic effect. Questions of suffixes, tenses and the like are commonly much more marginal; it is the lexical instances which have made the question critical for our generation. Dahood’s own work would be very different in its impact if it offered no new lexical identifications but only new interpretations of suffixes, syntactical elements, prosodies and so on. In any case, I did make it clear in the book that nonlexical instances did occur, and discussed a few of them.3 If it had been my aim to discuss not the general impact of this kind of applied philology, but Dahood’s work in particular, the propor tions might have had to be different; but this was not my intention. In itself then there is no real issue here, but it leads on to something which may perhaps be a real issue, namely Dahood’s distinction between “the traditional philological approach and the new method and criteria introduced by Northwest Semitic dis coveries of the past forty years.”4 Dahood seems to imply three things: firstly, that the older scholars worked almost only by lexical means—the point discussed in the last paragraph; secondly, that any faults which existed in the older method have been left behind 3 Comparative Philology, pp. 30-33 [above]. The remarks about enclitic mem have excited some comment; a “perverse attack”, says Andersen. Perverse perhaps, but not an attack: I do not in fact express any opinion of my own about the existence of enclitic mem in Hebrew, but only about the character of certain argu ments offered. 4 D a h o o d , p. 71.

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by the newer; thirdly, that the discussion in my book was out of due time, since the situation described was one now left far behind.5 Of these latter two points, neither seems to me to have sub stance. As for timeliness, although the method under discussion is not a new one, its cumulative effect has quite suddenly become very much greater, both through the amount of material published and through the particular fact that so much has been made public in the form of popular Bible translations.6 As for quality, I do not share the view that the “new method and criteria”, if we are to judge by Dahood’s own publications and those of his pupils, stand at a higher level than the work of an older generation such as Tur-Sinai, Driver and Winton Thomas. On the contrary, that work of older scholars has seemed to me to have a much better and more responsible character, and it is for this reason that most of the examples I studied in the book were taken from this group. Though in the end I came to regard many of them as uncon vincing, the study of them was a real intellectual stimulus; few of them were just obviously wrong, and only a careful analysis of the sources enabled one to form a judgement. The study of them was of real value. That Dahood should look down on this work of an older generation as deficient, and that it should often be simply ignored or disregarded in works inspired or guided by him,7 is very difficult to understand. It is true that my study paid proportion ately more attention to the work of older scholars, and that it cited less of Dahood’s suggestions than it might have done; but a main reason for this, I must in frankness say, is that if I had cited more of the latter I would have felt liable to the charge of picking out quite obviously fantastic suggestions in order to bring ridicule on the method as a whole. The fact that this accusation was indeed made8 confirms that I was right in being sensitive to the possibility of it. In fact, in my selection of examples for discussion I leant over backwards to avoid, wherever possible, the citation of sug gestions which were obviously worthless, which did not teach some 5 D a h o o d , pp. 71, 79 and passim‘, also the title of his review, “Comparative Philology Yesterday and Today”. 6 On this see further below, pp. 385 f. 7 Cf. for instance W. McKane’s remarks in his review of W. A. v a n d e r W e i d e n , Le Livre des Proverbes, in JSS 16 (1971) 222- 36, especially pp. 232- 34. 8 A n d e r s e n , p. 345.

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useful lessons through the study of them, or which might seem designed simply to bring the method into ridicule»9 Thus, if my book gives less attention to the work of Professor Dahood than some would expect, this does not have its cause in any special hostility towards his work.10 On the contrary, I have no consciousness of ascribing to his suggestions any value different from that which is ascribed to them by the vast majority of Old Testament scholars. This is a powerful fact which has to be faced by Dahood—not because majority opinion determines what is true, but because the final court of appeal for so many of his suggestions lies not in Ugaritic or in Phoenician, but within the Hebrew text o f the Bible itself the final criterion is their alleged concinnity, their alleged improvement of sense, in the Hebrew Bible, and it is of this that Old Testament scholars are the proper judges. If scholars are sceptical of Dahood’s suggestions, as I believe the great majority of them are, this is not to be attributed to any opposition to the use of Ugaritic or any distrust of “the Northwest Semitic method”, but to their experience of the way in which these suggestions have been made and supported: their experience of wildness in the use of evidence, extreme bad taste in respect of that which constitutes a probable understanding of the text, obsessive attachment to the discovery of a Ugaritizing solu tion at any price, absence of proper justification,11 and exaggera tion of the difficulty of the present text and/or meaning in order at all costs to secure a new understanding, said to be based on Phoenician or Ugaritic.12 For—and this must be emphasized—the logically decisive step in operations like those of Dahood, and in the process of evaluating them, often lies not in the Phoenician or Ugaritic facts but in the fitness of the proposed interpretation for 9 Plenty of such suggestions, however, can be cited; cf. below, pp. 369 if. 10 A n d e r s e n , ibid., uses the phrase “ill-concealed hostility towards the work of Fr. Mitchell Dahood.” 11 See recently for instance C. J. Labuschagne’s review of A. C. M. B l o m m e r d e ’s Northwest Semitic Grammar and Job, in Ugarit-Forschungen 3 (1971) 373- 74. 12 On all these points McKane’s remarks in the review quoted seem to me to be right in themselves and also to express what is held by the central current or scholarship. For a view which stands at the absolutely opposite extreme from Dahood’s, cf. J. F. A. Sawyer’s remarks on the generally lucid, intelligible and meaningful character of the Masoretic Text, Semantics in Biblical Research (1972),

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its context within the Hebrew biblical text. These points will be illustrated below. There is however one particular point about Dahood’s approach which I had not sufficiently taken into account in the writing of my book, and which to me seems even more unclear now than it was then: is Dahood’s method really intended to be a comparative approach at all? I have devoted my investigation to those explana tions of Hebrew where meanings are derived from the meanings of forms in a cognate language, i.e. a language related but different. Dahood’s position, at least sometimes, seems to be rather that Ugaritic is Hebrew and Hebrew is Ugaritic; the two are the same language in somewhat different temporal and local manifestations.13 His method then is not really comparative, in the sense in which I have used the word, but consists of internal elucidation within the unitary Ugaritic-Canaanite-Hebrew world. The demonstration of this unitary (though diversified) linguistic (and also cultural) mélange is Dahood’s real interest in the matter. When he contrasts his method with that of the older scholars, it is at least possible that he is trying to say that their method was really a comparative one, working with languages which are recognized to be cognate but different, while his is a non-comparative one, working with internal relations which at most are only dialectal. If this is indeed Dahood’s intention, then two things follow: firstly, I failed to give proper attention to this (reasonably enough, since Dahood himself does not make it clear); and secondly my arguments do not deal, and were not intended to deal, with that segment of his work which is intended to be not comparative but internal in its method. But, on the other hand, even if Dahood’s work with Canaanite languages is not comparative but internal, 13 It is, of course, perfectly conceivable that Ugaritic and Hebrew should be “the same language” in this sense; and if this is so, then of course it is so. Dahood’s work can be represented as an exploration of the hypothesis that this is so; but the exploration is carried out in such a way as to override as far as is possible all the evidence that might indicate that it is not so. His presentation of evidence is not designed to assist discussion of the question whether Ugaritic is thus related to Hebrew or not; it does not leave such questions open. Any real comparative discussion is difficult, since there is very little in Ugaritic of which Dahood will grant, even for the purpose of discussion, that it does not exist in Hebrew, and vice versa. This is, incidentally, one reason why I published a comparative table of Syriac and Hebrew verbs rather than one of Ugaritic and Hebrew (cf. M o r a n , op. cit., p. 241): under the present circumstances, one would not have an adequate agreed basis for the setting up of the latter table.

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there is no doubt that he in fact shifts the whole time back and forward between comparative and internal operations, and that the comparative segment of his work is affected by, and subject to, my arguments just as before. This brings us back conveniently to a point of principle, namely that the validity of comparative philology as a discipline is not at all in question, at least from my side. It is the logic of comparative philology that is taken for granted, with only slight modifications, throughout my investigation; and if solutions are found to be deficient it is because comparative philological method, when properly examined, shows that there is evidence against them. My purpose was to state properly the methods required by compara tive philology, so that readers might be better able to judge whether suggestions, allegedly thrown up through the use of this method, were in fact validated by it. The notion, pursued in WernbergMoller’s review, that I want to “dismiss” comparative philological method or to erect a “new edifice” to take its place, has very little to do with my purpose.14 Our subject here however is not comparative philology itself but a sort of applied comparative philology. The basic work of com parative philology is, let us say, to establish a picture of the Semitic languages and their interrelations through the joint use of data from the various branches of the family. This basic philo logical work provides the fundamental logic for the task which we are discussing. But what we are talking about is not itself com parative philology in that sense: rather, it is an applied and heuristic operation, dependent on (or at worst parasitic upon) comparative philology. It is an operation which appears to use the insights of comparative philology but can very easily override them. Those whose prime interest has been to reconstruct a hitherto unknown stage of Hebrew or its prehistoric relations with Ugaritic have not necessarily observed the proper needs and rules of comparative

14 See W e r n b e r g - M o l l e r , p. 559. His picture (especially on pp. 560 and 562 of his review) of my ideas about the relation between philology and linguistics is wildly remote from my actual opinions and often attributes to me the opposite of what I think; many of his notions are quite expressly excluded by clear statements of mine. Cf. also my “The Ancient Semitic Languages—the Conflict between Philology and Linguistics”, Transactions o f the Philological Society, 1968, 37- 55; also, in general, my paper “Hebrew Lexicography”, to be published in the proceedings of the Florence Colloquium on Semitic Lexicography, held at Easter 1972.

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philology (or historical linguistics, as it might be better called); and the principles of that discipline need to be reasserted and to be protected against being pushed aside in the impetus of the rush to identify and to reconstruct. Several sections of my book were intended to do just that; one instance is the treatment of the phonological correspondences.15 One of the aspects of comparative philology which needs to be emphasized is the need for each language to be seen and under stood for itself. The study of Semitic languages was long damaged by the enslavement of each one to the ancillary service of explain ing the text of the Bible—Arabic was a principal case in point. The present interest in Ugaritic is something which in itself should be approved and supported in every possible way. But the frenetic desire to exploit its resources as a means of explaining the Hebrew Bible threatens to hold Ugaritic study within the same framework of slavery to sacra philologia from which other Semitic language studies, such as Arabic or Akkadian studies, have been liberated. While Akkadian studies have long established their freedom from a status ancillary to biblical study, Ugaritic studies still suffer damage from the Entdeckerfreude of those who have exploited them for the elucidation of the Old Testament. I would set it forth as a good principle: if you want to know something reliable about Ugaritic, ask an Ugaritologist who is interested in looking at the 15 F . I. A n d e r s e n , op. cit., p. 345 f., regards this as a falling back on neo grammarian dogma. No “dogma” is involved. If there are correspondences other than those which have been recognized as normal, then of course there are, and that is all there is to it. Andersen must be willing to use his terms very loosely if he classes the linguists cited on p. 83 n. of Comparative Philology [above] as “neo grammarians”. I make it entirely clear in the book, pp. 83 f., that there is a difference between accepting the existence of such abnormalities and taking them as a basis for identification where ex hypothesi the semantic component is the quantity to be discovered. Cf. also Transactions o f the Philological Society, ibid., pp. 48 f. Meanwhile D a h o o d , op. cit., p. 75 waxes scornful over the discovery of nbs for nps in a Hebrew ostracon. The scribe, he says, mocks my warnings on this matter. What is mocked is Dahood,s ability to understand an argument. Though the empirical finding of nbs had not occurred when my text was written, the entire argument was written in order to provide for this sort of possibility, and only factual details, but nothing in the structure of the argument, require to be altered. From another side, cf. the comments of Mettinger, p. 130b. Dahood’s argument becomes totally unintelligible to me when he alleges with some heat that I, “hamstrung by textbook theories” (what textbook?), “cannot bring myself to admit” that pairs like lbs and Ips, nbs and nps “are non-phonemic variations.” I never supposed they were anything else.

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material for itself, and not at the material as a quarry from which new quick identifications of Hebrew meanings can be dug. The position I take, far from seeking to ignore or diminish the impor tance of Ugaritic, is interested in the valuation of Ugaritic as a quantity in itself. The haste to establish the maximum possible equation between Ugaritic and Hebrew can be criticized not only for creating Hebrew in the image of Ugaritic but also for creating Ugaritic in the image of Hebrew. The same is true of Phoenician, and an example from it (actually from Punic, but this makes no difference) will illustrate some of the points which have been made above. Dahood complains that I do not discuss any Phoenician form;16 let us see what happens when we do discuss one. One of the words identified by Dahood is a Hebrew noun magan “suzerain, sovereign”. It is discussed on p. XXXVII of the Intro duction to his Psalms /, and more fully on p. 16, with reference to Ps. 3. 4. He translates this as: But you, O Yahweh, are my Suzerain as long as I live . . . This involves, of course, a departure from the traditional under standing of Hebrew magen as “shield”. Thereafter the same sug gestion is repeated several times: at Ps. 7. 11 (“My Suzerain is the Most High God”; see note on p. 45, there qualified with “perhaps”); at 18. 31 (note on p. 114), 47. 10 (pp. 286 f.), 59. 12 (but here the understanding “shield” is retained by Dahood, with only the pos sibility of “suzerain”, see Psalms //, p. 72), 84. 10, 12 (ibid., pp. 282 f., with note alleging that this rendering demolishes the interpretation of “the anointed” in The Jerusalem Bible). All of these go back to the same starting point, the notes on pp. XXXVII and 16 f. On p. XXXVII we hear that the reading as magan is “based on the Punic name for 6emperor’, magori”; and on p. 17 we read the following remarkable assertion: In Punic the Carthaginian generals are given the title m a g o n , which Latin inscriptions reproduce by im p e ra to r , “suzerain”, or d u x ; see Louis

16 D a h o o d , p. 71. Dahood’s assertion is entirely incorrect in point of fact; he seems to have counted only the five mentioned under “Phoenician” in my index, which refer to general statements about that language; actual words discussed are entered in the index of examples, and cf. also under “Canaanite” Some Phoenician

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Maurin, “Himilcon le Magonide. Crises et mutations à Carthage au dé but du IVe siè cle avant J.-C.”, S e m itic a 12 ( 1962 ) 5 - 4 3 .

Let us then look at the article of Maurin, from which such drastic effects upon the Hebrew Bible have been derived. The article concerns an important family who are known as the Magonids, so known because they are descended from one whose name was Magon—the normal usage, of course, for noun forma tions in -id. The genealogy is set out by Maurin on p. 13. Magon is the first name, the descendants have equally familiar names like Hasdrubal, Hamilcar, Hannibal.17 In about the fifth century, as Maurin puts it, the known members of this family “seem to have been regularly invested with the generalate at Carthage” (p. 13). The passage upon which Dahood appears to be relying (for there is no other in the article which is to his purpose) is on p. 16: Les titres des Magonides se retrouvent eux aussi de Malchus à la fin du IVe siè cle. Les textes latins emploient avec constance ceux d H m p e rato r ou de d u x pour qualifier les gé né raux carthaginois, et une seule fois le mot “dictatures” est utilisé par Justin à propos d’Hasdrubal, le fils de Magon.

Maurin then goes on to discuss the titles used in Greek texts, where for instance Diodorus often distinguishes between the title of king and that of general. This last is the point that Maurin is discussing. The question is whether a man, whose name might be Hasdrubal or Hannibal, has the title (and office) of king, or that of general. With this question in mind Maurin considers the name Malchus. Does this word mean “king” and function as a title, or is it just the personal name of the man involved? Maurin thinks it is the latter: Le nom de Malchus ne repré sente pas forcé ment le titre royal luimê me, comme on le croit ordinairement, mais il peut en ê tre un composé ; d’ailleurs les transcriptions antiques de ce nom sont variables; on pourrait peut-ê tre le comparer avec le nom de Magon, qui se rat tacherait à une racine signifiant “protecteur”, et qui n’est pas un titre.18 instances discussed, such as stc on pp. 180, 294 etc., are among the suggestions treated most favourably. 17 The persons concerned as well known and are fully described in any standard history. 18 M a u r i n , op. cit., p. 16, n. 2; I have omitted the references to other literature which are included in parentheses.

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In fact one sees that everything said about Punic magon by Dahood is wrong. The word is a personal name, and not a title. Carthaginian generals were not given magon as a title; either it was their personal name before they became general, or it was not. Latin imperator or dux is not a reproduction of magon, but a designation of the office of general held by people with names like Hannibal or Hasdrubal, who happened to belong to the family of the Magonids. The passage has nothing to do with a reproduction of Punic words in Latin inscriptions; it is a matter of terms used by Latin (or Greek) historians to designate the office held by certain Carthaginian leaders. The idea that magon is a title, or that it is “the Punic name for ‘emperor’”, is not only not supported, but is expressly ruled out as self-evidently untrue, by the source quoted by Dahood in favour of his interpretation.19 In fact the sense of the name Magon is well known: it comes from a very common word meaning “give”, perhaps “offer, deliver”. This occurs in Hebrew but is rather rare. In Punic on the other hand it is very common. The overwhelmingly probable meaning of the name Magon is “he has given (a son)”.20 It belongs to the same common type as the Hebrew name Nathan. Far from being ren dered by Latin and other bilingual inscriptions as “emperor” (!), it is “rendered” simply as the name Magon, and very numerous examples can be found. Thus Dahood’s entire construction of a sense “suzerain” for m-g-n in Hebrew lacks any basis in Phoenician-Punic evidence, and is contradicted by the sources to which Dahood appeals. This is not a matter of evidence in existence, which might be interpreted

19 The only mistake in Maurin (whom I take to be a classicist rather than a Semitist) is that he renders Magon as protecteur, implying the root g-n-n “protect”, present in the familiar Hebrew magen “shield”. This does not make any difference for our purpose: he rightly takes it as obvious that the familiar personal name Magon is a personal name and not a title, and argues from this that the term Malchus is also a personal name, i.e. that it does not imply that its bearer was called king. On Magon, Maurin refers to the article of J. G. F é v r i e r , “Paralipomena Punica”, Cahiers de Byrsa 6 (1956) 13- 27, see p. 21; but this makes no difference to our question: Février is simply discussing whether a writing apparently mgnm should be read as the name Magonam or as a noun “protector”, with the reading mgnn. 20 For instance, D o n n e r - R ô l l i g , K A I ii. p. 67: “Er hat (einen Sohn) geschenkt”. For an instance of the rendering of this name as the same name in another language, cf. the Numidian text of K A I no. 101, and the Latin forms as exemplified in K A I ii. p. 67.

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one way or another: the entire construction built up by Dahood, and repeated at several places in the Psalter, rests on mere mis understandings and misconstructions. It looks as if some one has misinterpreted material registered on a card index; and this of course can happen to anyone, and is nothing to worry about. But there is a more serious side to the matter: considering the extremely high frequency of the name Magon in Punic texts and the plentiful opportunity given to students to observe its usage, I find it impos sible to understand how a misconstruction such as this could have been believed and accepted by anyone actually at home in the study of Punic texts. So perhaps we may hope to hear less from Professor Dahood about the ignorance and non-appreciation of Ugaritic and Phoenician on the part of those who do not share his approach. To sum up, this instance illustrates how the study of the cognate sources (in this case Punic) is damaged and corrupted by the zeal to make them into material for a novel understanding of the Hebrew Bible. For surely no one can suppose that this whole construction of magon as meaning “suzerain” and acting as a title for Carthaginian generals would ever have arisen out of the Punic sources studied for themselves. It is the presence of the sequence m-g-n in Hebrew, and it alone, which initiated the whole opera tion. Yet in Hebrew itself there is no support for it, since the idea that God is shield fits perfectly well in all the instances concerned. The instance illustrates also the method of numerical accumu lation which is so prominent in Dahood’s work: the suggestion, once made, is repeated again and again, and when one asks for the justification of any single example one is told that numerous other examples of the same thing have been detected. In this case all the examples are equally nugatory, the basis for all of them being nil. Here we see a contrast with the majority of the examples dis cussed in my book, in which something is to be learned from the analysis of the example even if it turns out to be unconvincing. By contrast, examples like the magan just discussed contribute nothing; they teach no new lessons in philology, and nothing is learned from the analysis of them. The process of analysis can only be negative. Unhappily, it can be repeated over many instances. As I have said, the final decision in many cases rests with the taste of the scholar dealing with Hebrew, rather than with Ugaritic or other cognate evidence. Dahood, for example, thinks it impos-

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sible to take Ps. 58. 11 as “he washes his feet in the blood of the wicked”.21 According to him, one cannot wash one’s feet in blood; “no clear visual image emerges” from it. Well, I am delighted to leave it to the judgement of Old Testament scholars. But Dahood goes on: “One schooled in Ugaritic” would have known that it meant not washing in blood, but washing from blood: thus “he will wash his feet of the blood of the wicked”. So let us look at the Ugaritic text CTA 3, ii. 34 (Gordon cnt, II, 34), one of those which Dahood cites. The text as a whole seems to me to be interpretable as follows. Firstly, cAnat’s slaughter has its climax in her wading in blood (thus lines 13- 14, repeated more or less in 27- 28). This slaughter goes on until she is satisfied (line 29). Now (lines 31 f.) something is poured into a bowl, apparently dm “blood”. After this it goes straight on to say that cAnat washed her hands bdm dmr. It seems natural to suppose that this is a ceremonial washing in blood. There follows a scene with some movement of furniture; and after this, line 38, cAnat draws water and washes. It is at least feasible that there are two washings here, one in blood and one in water with dew, and the lack of repetition of phraseology supports the view that these are different (contrast the double reporting, in similar words, of her earlier wading in blood, above). I do not insist that this inter pretation is right, but it seems entirely reasonable; and in any case the view that cAnat washes in the blood of dmr in this passage is no novelty of mine, but can be found in a number of experienced workers on Ugaritic,22 though the contrary view (that she washed her hands from blood) is also found. We may hope therefore to hear rather less from Professor Dahood about what will be thought by those “schooled in Ugaritic”.23 It is of course absurd that one should have to appeal to a Ugaritic text on such a matter, and I do not in fact so appeal; I simply point out that the Ugaritic evidence itself is very like a good 21 D a h o o d , p . 77. 22 Cf. C. H. G o r d o n , Ugaritic Literature (1949), p. 18: “She washes her hands in the blood of soldiery”; G . R. D r i v e r , CML, p. 85: “washed . . . her hand(s) in the blood of the guards”; recently A . S. K a p e l r u d , The Violent Goddess (Oslo, 1969), p. 50: “She washed her hands in the blood of soldiers”; and not least W. F. A l b r i g h t , HUCA 23 (1950- 51) 20, 38: “with whose blood she washed her hands”. 23 On the point at issue in all this, i.e. the recognition of b meaning “from”, my position has the welcome agreement of W. L. M o r a n , pp. 239 f.—he being doubt less also unschooled in Ugaritic.

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deal more ambivalent than Dahood supposes. Another such point may be added: in so far as I understand Dahood’s objection to the idea of washing one’s feet in blood, he seems to mean that “wash” means “cleanse”; blood however is not a cleansing medium but a dirty substance, so that you wash not in blood, but to get rid o f blood. If this is intended, it is a crassly literalist point of view, ignoring both the metaphorical nature of the Psalms passage, which by no means maintains that blood is a good substance for washing the feet, and also the familiar religious conceptions of blood as a cleansing agent and of the shedding of blood as a form of retribution. But, apart from these obvious points, the semantics of rahas do not necessarily imply cleansing, in the sense of remov ing a dirty object; they may imply soaking, splashing, bespattering. This can be seen in Hebrew (Song o f Songs 5. 12: “splashed by the milky water”, NEB; Job 29. 6); it applies in Ugaritic (if cAnat “washes” in blood, it does not imply that she uses blood to cleanse away some other matter, but that she wets or splashes herself in blood), and in Akkadian, e.g.: “[Just as] this chariot with its base-board is spattered [ r a - a h - s a - t u - u - n i ] [with blood]; just so, [in battle with] your [enemy], may they spatter your chariots with your own [blood].”24

These examples must suffice as illustrations of some of the problems one must feel about Dahood’s work; but it certainly does not exhaust them. I leave aside such matters as Dahood’s attitude to the consonantal text, which to me seems to be a compound of a traditional religious-superstitious reverence for the signs on paper on one hand, and the pragmatic necessities of his own method on the other. I leave aside his mode of semantic discussion, which commonly seems to me to work from the semantics of the English words used in his renderings, rather than from the Hebrew or the Ugaritic. These and many other issues must be left aside here. Basically, my idea of language is entirely different from his, and also my idea of what constitutes care in the handling of philologi cal evidence. Some further general points will be added later in this article. The following remarks about some words in Job 3 are not 24 Iraq 20 (1958) 75, line 612-15 (D. J. W i s e m a n ). I am grateful to my colleague M. E. J. Richardson for very helpful discussion of these questions.

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of a very controversial character: their main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of strata with which we have to deal in the analysis of a Hebrew text, and the unlikeliness that simple philological parallels will prove to be in themselves decisive. First of all let us look at the well-known case of the word salmawet, which occurs in Job 3. 5.25 As everyone knows, the older tradition took this as “the shadow of death”; but more recent scholarly tradition has taken a different turn, holding that it is a word salmut (or ‫־‬o t) of the root s-l-m, with the sense “obscurity, darkness”. This has now come to be so completely accepted that some works have ceased to mention that the older tradition of meaning ever existed. This is surprising, for even in modern times there has been a current of very significant opinion in favour of the older understanding. Th. Nöldeke, after all—and whose opinion could be more weighty in a matter like this?—wrote in 1896 a short article26 defending both the traditional pronunciation and the sense “shadow of death”. He pointed out, though he cautiously refrained from pressing the point, that an early-Islamic poem included the phrase zill al-mawt, with the sense of “thick shadow”27—in this case not unpleasant gloom but refreshing shade of trees; he denied the existence in Hebrew and Aramaic of the root s-l-m “dark”. The reading as salmawet was again defended by J. Hehn in an article in 1918, which carried farther the line developed by Nöldeke;28 and the arguments of Hehn proved sufficiently strong to convince Bauer and Leander, whose detailed grammar records their judgement in his favour.29 Certainly not all of the arguments of Nöldeke and of Hehn could stand unchanged today;30 some of the terms in which the question was discussed in the nineteenth century might seem 25 Cf. also J. F. A. S a w y e r in JSS 17 (1972) 257 if. (review of Holladay’s dictionary), and his Semantics in Biblical Research (1972), pp. 14, 40, 90. 26 ZA W 17 (1897) 183- 87. 27 Ibid., p. 184; the source is Yäqüt 4, 566, 21. Nöldeke refrained from pressing the point because he thought that the Arabic phraseology might have undergone indirect influence from the Old Testament. Some counter-arguments against Nöldeke,s general position were offered by S. R. D r i v e r {Job, ICC, part ii, pp. 18 f.), but they scarcely constitute a refutation, as D h o r m e {Job, p. 27) thought. 28 In Orientalistische Studien, Fritz Hommel zum 60. Geburtstage . . . dargebracht (Leipzig, 2 vols., 1917 and 1918 = Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatisch-aegyptischen Gesellschaft, 21 & 22 (1916 and 1917), vol. ii, pp. 79- 90. 29 Historische Grammatik, §61t/z, p. 506. 30 My own studies in Hebr. selem “image” {BJRL 51 [1968- 69] 18 and 21) led to conclusions about this word which differed from Nöldeke’s arguments: I doubt its

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out of date by now; but, in spite of modifications which would have to be made, the weight of opinion, especially with Noldeke’s judgement involved, is still imposing, and it is surprising that these opinions seem to have been very much neglected.31 It is not my purpose here, however, to argue that the older tradition is “right” and that the word should indeed be read as salmawet and understood as “the shadow of death”. My purpose is rather to show the importance of this tradition for the under standing of the word, and thus to show that the philological facts, even if salmut is the right reading and “darkness” the “right” meaning, cannot short-circuit the complicated task of unravelling the tradition of understanding. Even if we accept that “darkness” is the right meaning, this can hardly be the end of the matter. The understanding as “the shadow of death” is very old: out of the 18 or so cases in the Hebrew, about 10 or 11 are rendered with σκιά θανάτου in Greek. These include not only some in the Writings, such as in Job itself and in the Psalms, but also two in the Major Prophets (Isa 9. 1 and Jer 13. 16). Since, on quite other grounds, Job may be a somewhat late book, at least in its final form, no very great distance in time may separate its completion from the Septuagintal interpretation of this word. It is thus quite possible that the sense “the shadow of death” was already understood by the final redactor of the canonical text of Job, or was known to him and influenced his thinking, even if it was not intended by the earliest composer of ch. 3. This in turn only leads us to further questions. As we have seen, it is usual to say that the word should be read as salmut, with the abstract noun-ending -ut. But is it really probable that the tradi tion took a word which had previously always been pronounced as salmut and altered its pronunciation to salmawet, purely in order to support a midrashic-etymological explanation, and without any justification whatever in the current phonetics of the word? This seems to me unparalleled in what we know of the transmission of the text. Midrashic-etymological explanations were of course many, connection with an Arabic s-l-m “cut off”—a suggestion made by him only hesitat ingly in any case; and I give hesitant favour to the derivation from s-l-m “dark” of the two instances in the Psalms (39. 7; 73. 20), so that I do not share his confidence that the root s-l-m with the sense “dark” did not exist in Hebrew and Aramaic at all. 31 Hehn’s article was published during the war and is somewhat inaccessible.

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but were not generally accompanied by a systematic change of the pronunciation of words for the sake of conformity to the explana tion. The case of names including heathen divinities or apparent obscenities is a different matter from such a change of pronuncia tion, if the original form was salmut. One reason, therefore, against the modern explanation of salmawet is that it makes the phe nomenon into something quite isolated and peculiar. It may be apposite to mention here some places where the generally accepted sense “darkness” does not fit very well; some of these were already mentioned by Nöldeke or Hehn. (a) In Job 38. 17 the parallel is with mawet “death”. Hehn maintained that “darkness” was impossible here. Even if this is going too far, the sense “shadow of death” seems a strong contender. Note also that salmawet is in this case a place, a place with doors (or door keepers—so NEB with its “the door-keepers of the place of dark ness”). (b) In Ps. 44. 20 there seems to be a parallel between “in the place of tannim” (probably to be read, or understood, as referring to the tannin or dragon) and besalmawet. “You have covered us with darkness” seems rather lame and thin after a previous halfverse which talks of crushing “in the place of dragons”. It is perhaps because of this consideration that NEB renders with: Yet thou hast crushed us as the sea-serpent was crushed and covered us with the darkness of death

—in other words, the recognition of death as a semantic element in the sentence gives it a proper balance.32 (c) In Jer 2. 6 our word occurs in the description of the desert, parallel with terms suggesting its quality of waste and dryness. “Darkness” does not fit well here, at least if one takes it in the more natural sense, and this would seem best in view of the other terms in the passage, which are used in very normal ways. That “darkness” is difficult here seems to have been felt by the NEB translators, who for MT be-Deres siyya wesalmawet write: “a country barren and ill-omened”. I do not know precisely what philological evidence was taken into consideration in ren dering “ill-omened”. 32 It is possible, however, that NEB presumed a textual error and read the text as salmut mawet. The corruption would be easily explained as haplography; but there is no other example, so far as I know, of such a collocation.

378

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

I do not wish to claim too much for these examples; but it is only right that they should be set alongside the well-known cases where salmawet stands in parallel with words for “darkness” like hosek or in opposition to words for “light” such as Dor. Two further aspects seem worthy of attention. One is the inves tigation of locutions in which a pattern like “the x of God” is taken to mean “a very great x ’\ Professor D. Winton Thomas in an article on “Unusual Ways of expressing the Superlative in Hebrew” devoted several pages to combinations with mut and mawet.33 He did not there mention, however, the case of salmawet. In 1962 Professor Winton Thomas published a full study of our word, in which he resumed some of the early arguments and brought to bear also the force of his own studies in mut/mawet as an expression for the “superlative”.34 He also concluded in favour of the sense literally “shadow of death”, but in effect “deep, thick darkness”, and in favour of the form salmawet. The case of this word is a curious one, in that the majority opinion in modern times has certainly been in favour of the form salmut and the sense “darkness” (root s-l-m), but among scholars who have devoted full independent studies to the word the trend has been in the opposite direction. He provided some further discussion in another article in 1968.35 Meanwhile S. Rin had published a note on “The mwt of Grandeur”, which widened the subject by making reference to the deity Mot and the work of Cassuto.36 These contributions appear to give some support to the idea that salmawet, if analysed as “shadow” plus “death”, nevertheless might—in some cases at any rate—have had a sense like “very deep shadow”, independently of any referen tial component specifying death. If this were so, then the under standing as “the shadow of death”, as represented for instance in the LXX renderings, would be no more than a literal representa tion of the original idiomatic phrase. Such a representation leaves 33 VT 3 (1953) 209- 24, especially pp. 219- 22. Quite incidentally, it seems a little unfortunate that this construction has come to be categorized as a mode of “expressing the superlative”—this is hardly what is meant. 34 In JSS 7 (1962) 191- 200. I developed the arguments of this present paper independently of Winton Thomas’s article, which might have made this section superfluous; in any case my position is not quite the same as his, and I develop the facts in a different way. ‫ ״‬VT 18 (1968) 120- 24, especially pp. 122 f. 36 VT 9 (1959) 324 f.

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

379

it uncertain how far the total sense of the idiom was still appre ciated, or how far on the other hand that total sense had now been replaced by the sum of the independent senses of the two com ponent parts. The questions then remaining would be: (a) why the vowel of the first element is a, instead of the e customary in the free form of the construct sel “the shadow of . . and (b) why the whole idiom was written as one word, without word division. Neither of these is a very serious difficulty.37 Another relevant consideration, which can hardly be ignored even if it is not clear in what direction it leads, is that salmawet has a certain similarity to a personal or place name. There are in Hebrew at least two comparable forms, and these are both proper names: Ifsarmawet “Hadramaut”, and cazmawet “Azmaveth” or (spelling of NEB) “Azmoth”. This latter is the name of several persons in early Israelite history; there was also a place called Beth-azmaveth. There is good reason to suppose that these names were compounds including the divine name Mot.38 It is a reason able surmise that salmawet could have had some association with this type of name, (a) This would account for the “compound” word form and the anomaly of the vowel a\ phenomena of this kind are frequent in names, (b) The root s-l-l with the sense “shelter” is of course common in Semitic names; cf. e.g. Tallquist, Assyrian Personal Names, p. 303b, and in Hebrew the familiar Bezaleel (and very likely Zelophehad).39 (c) In this case the analysis of the term into “the shadow of death” would be not only a linguistic process but also part of the demythologizing, so to speak, of a name associated with an alien deity and the “shelter” given by him—the deity becomes ordinary human death, the shelter becomes shadow.40

37 The argument sometimes made against the form salmawet, namely that “com pounds of this kind do not exist in Hebrew”, is a weak one; for no more is necessarily involved than a graphic peculiarity, i.e. the writing of the entire phrase without a word-dividing space. But cf. also another aspect, to be mentioned below. 38 On Hadramaut see already G. R. D r i v e r in PEQ 1945, pp. 13 f.; on Azmaveth, see C assuto, Ha-elah cAnat (Jerusalem, 1953), pp. 28 f., 47 if. 39 Cf. N o t h , Die israelitischen Personennamen, p. 152; Noth seems wrong in rejecting a connection between s-l-l and the name Zelophehad; a sense like “may the deity (pahad) shelter, protect” would seem very probable; cf. N o t h , p. 256, no. 1204. ’ 40 I merely mention, for the sake of the information, the pair of apparent names glmt and zlmt in CTA 4, vii, 54 f. (p. 30), Gordon UT 51, VII, 54. These may be

380

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

That there was a place with the name salmawet cannot, of course, be demonstrated. We have already noted, however, that the word does occur in spatial contexts on some occasions. One piece of possible support lies in the similarity between “the valley of salmawet” in Ps. 23. 4 and “the vale of the bakaD” in Ps. 84. 7. It is commonly held, and with quite good reason, that this latter was the name of a particular real place. But, whatever the “original” meaning of the name, it is very probable that from an early date it was understood to have the suggestion of “Vale of Weeping”, and this provides the universality required for use in the Psalm context. This understanding therefore, though found for example in the LXX with its έν τη κοιλάδι του κλαυθμώνος, is probably already intended in the Hebrew text of the Psalm. In general, it is likely that the Ps. 23 passage has played a central part in spreading the “shadow of death” understanding of our term. I do not claim to have solved the problem with these considera tions, but only to have shown that it is a more complicated one than is generally supposed, and one in which several different levels of explanation can be and must be held together in the mind at one time. It is at least possible that the total history involves: (a) forms from a root s-l-m “dark”; (b) an idiom where “shadow” plus “death” meant “deep shadow”; (c) a name of the type “may Mot give protection”. The eventual standardization of “shadow of death” would then be not an artificial invention, but a universali zation over the entire usage of that which had earlier belonged only to a part. The phonetic form preserved in MT is not an artificial invention but has real foundations in the history of the term. The case is an example, then, of the complexity of the strata of tradition and understanding with which we have to deal in the analysis of a Hebrew text, and the improbability that simple philological parallels will prove to be in themselves decisive. In particular, philological information from cognate languages is something that is to be taken into account, but does not in itself provide a decision; and the provision of a “correct translarelevant but I am not sure how. zl “shadow” is well established in Ugaritic, but zlm “darkness” is not; this may be relevant to the question whether it ever existed in Hebrew.

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

381

tion” cannot be a correct representation of the dimensions of the tradition. From the same verse we can speak more briefly about another illustration, MT kimerire yom. It has long been customary to identify here a word “darkness” from a root k-m-r (Syriac kmir “gloomy, sad; black, dark”)41 and this of course would make good sense; but is it what the poet wrote? There is evidence in early post-biblical Hebrew which points in another direction. Sir. II. 4 has Dl tqls bmryry ywm, and in the Qumran Hodayot and Pesharim we have several phrases like wnpsy bmryry y w m A1 Perhaps it would be hasty to conclude with Mansoor on this evidence that the text in Job must be read as “as the bitterness of the day”; it would still be possible that the Sirach and Qumran texts are restorations or restitutions, formed within late Hebrew on the basis of the MT in Job.43 Nevertheless the probability lies with Mansoor’s position: even if the root k-m-r appears to make better sense, and even if it “lay behind” an early stage of the Job poem, which is itself unlikely, it is likely that the final stage of the Hebrew intended the phrase to be understood as k plus ra-r-r.44 There is, in fact, very little trace of k-m-r in a sense like “gloomy, dark” anywhere in Hebrew, either before Job or after. May k-m-r in this sense be an isolated devel opment of Syriac?45 Our next instance concerns the importance of parallelisms and word-pairs, whether traditional or otherwise. At Job 3. 8 it is an easy suggestion, and one commonly adopted, that instead of MT yom we should read yam “sea”, giving the parallelism of sea/ Leviathan. If we do this, we may be tempted to go a step farther and make the verbs parallel also: haying D-r-r “curse” as the first, 41 The Hebrew dictionaries tend to give an impression that the sense “black” is basic in Syriac. My impression is that the sense “be sad” (of personal emotion) is much more central than that of colour; for the colour black Syriac uses primarily other words, especially the root Dkm. 42 See M. M ansoor, VTS 9 (1963) 316 f. The Qumran readings support for Sirach the reading as cited above, as against the variant kmryry (= MT in Job). The citation bmryry, above, is the form as given by Mansoor; for our present pur pose it makes no difference if it is read as bmrwry. 43 On such formations, see my discussion in Comparative Philology, pp. 227 ff. [above]. 44 For the syntax, cf., perhaps kimeribe kohen, Hos. 4. 4. 45 Akkadian kamaru is “heap up”, and not “overshadow, darken”, as is said by Dhorme, Job, p. 27; Ethiopic kdmr is also “heap”.

382

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

we may go on and say that the second is cognate with Ethiopic tacayyara, giving a sense “revile”.46 Parallelism in the verbs is achieved also by the NEB rendering:47 Cursed be it by those whose magic binds even the monster of the deep, who are ready to tame Leviathan himself with spells.

We shall concentrate, however, on the question of parallelism in the nouns, and bring the verbs in only incidentally. We recognise the intrinsic probability of a connection between Leviathan and the sea; since Leviathan was a sea-monster, that can go without saying. It does not decide however what the poet of Job was saying. In his context the basic subject matter is a day or a night, the day of Job’s begetting or of his birth, his “day” (3. 1). In verse 7 he is still talking about this same thing, about a “night”. In verse 9 also we are still dealing with features of this day—its twilight, its unsuccessful longing for light, its relation to the twi light or dawn. The probability then is that the MT is right with its yom: the poet is talking about the “day-cursers”, and there is nothing about the sea in the passage.48 A traditional parallelism between sea and Leviathan is so likely that it hardly needs to be proved, and one need not doubt its presence in the “background” here; but in the actual poem as produced, this relationship has now become otiose. Because the poet is concerned with day, he now has a significant poetical connection between Dorere and the waiting for light, Dor, in the next line; it may perhaps have elements of ambi guity, suggesting both “those who curse” and “those who give light”. As for Dorer, it is most probably the familiar Hebrew with the sense “stir up”. The primary need of the exegete is not to “identify” the mythological background, in the sense of stating exactly what pre-existing myth is presupposed; what is more important is the myth as it is reconstituted by the poet for his own 46 This is example no. 242 in my Comparative Philology; cf. text on p. 125 [above]. 47 I do not know on what evidence NEB based the rendering with “to tame with spells”; surely hardly Arabic tacwfdh, cudha “charm, spell, amulet”. 48 I do not feel quite certain about this view; one could of course go the opposite way and say that these considerations are the reason why the tradition altered an original yam into yom. If “sea” is correct, then the verse introduces ideas and images which are quite extraneous to the remaining structure of the chapter. This, and the fact that the reading as yam is an extremely facile surface emendation, seem to tip the scales in favour of the position I state above.

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

383

purposes. There are, he hints, powers that can or may or do curse the day, just as there are powers that give light; these powers can also give trouble by stirring up Leviathan, a bad-tempered monster who is opposed to the cosmic order. The pre-Israelite background is interesting information, but is not more than ancillary to the explanation of the passage. *

I would like to conclude with some remarks of a more philo sophical character, if one may call it so: some remarks which take the discussion of Hebrew philology, the use of Ugaritic, etc., and bring it into relation with the other main problem which has concerned me, the discussion of biblical semantics. When my book on semantics was published, one of the main criticisms made against it was that it belonged to an extreme current of empiricism or positivism.49 In itself, of course, such a remark is nothing to worry about: the giving of names such as empiricism and posi tivism does not constitute argument. But, I ask myself: supposing that there is some real issue here, and supposing that there are really empiricist or over-empiricist, positivist or over-positivist, attitudes to be found in the treatment of biblical language, then among whom are they to be found? The direction in which I can see such viewpoints lies among the scholars whose work I investi gated in the book on Comparative Philology. It is among them that I, as I view the matter, see the outworking of a fairly extreme empirical positivism. I would not admit that empiricism and posi tivism are in themselves in any way terms of reproach; but it is here, among the Drivers and the Dahoods of scholarship working on the detailed biblical text, that I find not just an empiricism or positivism but an almost entirely uncritical and unanalytical empiri cism and positivism. And I do not use these terms as mere labels, but will explain the characteristics which I have in mind: the concentration on a method which has simple, obvious and practi cal outlines; the emphasis on details in black and white, which details form the units of demonstration in the method; the almost 49 On this see my Biblical Words for Time (2nd edition, London, 1969), pp. 194207, “The Philosophical Background”. One reviewer, there quoted (p. 194 n.), identified “an extreme positivist and formalist attitude, which detests any introduc tion of philosophical content.”

384

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

complete absence of critical and thoughtful analysis of the basis of the method; an alienation from the sophisticated discussion of ideas, of entities such as theologies; the use of purely pragmatic criteria in argument; and, because no properly argued foundation is provided, the corroboration of each detail and its function not by any theoretical foundation but by the mere addition of yet more details of the same kind and on the same level50—a principle which at its worst deteriorates into that of validation through claims to multiple success. Out of all this I shall pick one or two special cases for further mention. It is hardly disputable that the scholars who have been most productive with philological suggestions, who have produced not just a few but hundreds or even thousands, have at the same time been people rather alienated from the main currents of exe gesis. Form criticism, for instance, which is one of the major modern approaches to biblical literature, seems to have passed them by. Not only this, but even fundamental literary criticism seems often to have passed them by; some of the points at which philological explanations have been offered were difficulties requir ing new interpretations only if widely accepted literary-critical solutions were ignored. I shall illustrate this from only one instance, a case which I mentioned in Comparative Philology, without how ever touching on this aspect of it.51 At Num. 16. 1 the text begins with wayyiqqah qorah, at first sight apparently “and Korah took”—but there is no object; and hence the suggestion that this is a completely other verb, meaning “was insolent, was defiant, rebelled”. The NEB, I notice, has “Now Korah . . . challenged the authority of Moses”, which I take to be the same interpretation in a more generalized form. This is a place, however, where tradi tional literary criticism had already provided an alternative expla nation, by suggesting that two different sources were compounded. In one source, let us say, Korah “took” the “men” who appear as the fourth word in verse 2; some others out of the long list of names, now in verse 1, form the subject of the other verb “and they arose” at the beginning of verse 2. Thus we have two sources: 50 Cf. the contrast I make between a logic dominated by discovery and a logic dominated by analysis, Transactions o f the Philological Society, ibid., p. 54. 51 Comparative Philology, pp. 17 f. [above].

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

385

(a) And Korah took men of the children of Israel (P?) (b) Dathan and Abiram, etc., arose before Moses (JE?) I do not say that this analysis is necessarily correct;52 but if it is even taken into consideration as a possibility, the case for finding a difficulty in the present text with the sense “and he took” is likely to disappear. In my distinction of two modes of dealing with a difficult text, the textual through emendation and the philologi cal through new identification of meaning on the basis of a cognate language, I should have added for some cases the source-critical, as here. Something similar can be said on the level of theological exe gesis. Proponents of the philological identification from cognate sources seem often to suppose that the provision of a right transla tion of the words constitutes more or less a complete exegesis; on the other hand, the handling of the ideas and the theologies of the texts is often wild and irresponsible. It ranges from a kind of reductionism, which seeks to diminish as far as possible the theological dimensions of the text—a tendency very visible in the work of Driver—at the one end, to a blind traditionalism, at the other end, which discovers in the Psalms traditional beliefs like that in immortality, in defiance of all that has been learned through patient study in the religion and theology of the Old Testament. In Dahood’s case it seems likely that the values and terms of a highly traditional Christian theology are attached to the Hebrew-IJgaritic cultural-religious mélange which accompanies in his eyes the lin guistic indistinguishability of the two. The aspect of translation has already been mentioned, and must be further stressed. It is unfortunate that many of the philological suggestions now being mooted have been aired for the first time, or almost the first time, in translations; and not only in translations but in translations intended for the general public and as such magnified by the full publicity of modern advertising. The work of translation is not in my judgement at all a good way of making these suggestions available for discussion. It is of course only right that the general public should have made available to it the results 52 It seems to have the support of S. R. D river, Introduction to the Literature o f the Old Testament (1891), p. 59; more recently, R. P feiffer, Introduction ( 1941), pp. 171, 189.

386

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

of the latest scholarly opinion. But it is only in our generation that for the first time interpretations of a quite novel and drastic type have been made known to the general public before they were known to—and, still more, before they were accepted by—scholarly opinion. With the publication of the Old Testament of the NEB it has become something of a sport among scholars to try to work out the basis upon which some of the renderings have been pro duced. Even those who have studied hundreds of modern philo logical suggestions can be left open-mouthed, wondering how the translators obtained from the Hebrew what they did. Just to cite one case, at a well-known place in Zech., 3. 2 the phrase ha-boher birusalayim has been detached from God and attached to Satan, so that it is no longer God who “chooses Jerusalem” but Satan who “is venting his spite on Jerusalem”. Thus NEB prints: “The LORD rebuke you, Satan, the LORD rebuke you who are venting your spite on Jerusalem.” Only by pure luck had I happened to come across the suggestion on which this was presumably based53—the identification of a b-h-r, different from the familiar word “choose”, and related to Arabic words “to steam” and the like; this new word is found in no less than seven places in the Old Testament. My own belief is that translations, at least such as are supposed to be a considered interpretation, presented to the public, can and should be produced only after a full consideration by the world of scholarship, and only after a full process of exegesis, including literary-critical, form-critical, redaktionsgeschichtlich and theologi cal consideration. To return then to the general philosophy of the study of biblical language, I believe that the position I have taken in the two main discussions, though often classed as an extreme and negative one in the first impression made, is in fact a moderate one. As I see it, the positions investigated in Semantics and in Comparative Philology are the two opposed extreme positions in the study of biblical language: in very rough terms, one was idealist, the other positivist, if such terms have meaning. To sum up the case about comparative philology, there is nothing wrong with the method of using cognate languages in order to derive novel senses for Hebrew words; but of all the products said to have been derived from this 53 D river, in Mélanges Marcel Cohen (1970), pp. 236 f. See my remarks in JSS 17 (1972) 133.

PHILOLOGY AND EXEGESIS

387

method in the last decades, only a small proportion are satisfactory. Those who think this judgement too negative have a simple course open to them: they can print the list of such suggestions which they personally consider to have been established beyond doubt. The judgement which I passed upon the products of this method in my book, though subject to some modification in proportions, is, I believe, in its basic structure a right and fair one; and, far from taking any extreme position, I believe that in making this judge ment I have spoken for the central current of Old Testament scholarship, in which I have confidence.

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM” ? 1 I A t an early stage in Ugaritic studies a word sbm was identified,

and the meaning ascribed to it was “to muzzle”. The main text originally involved includes the following: Imhst. m dd Dil ym . Iklt. nhr. Dil rbm Pistbm. tnn. Distmlh mhst. btn. cqltn slyt. d. sb ct. rDasm

A representative translation is: Did I not crush 3IPs Darling, Sea? Nor destroy River, the great god? Nor muzzle Tannin full well? I crushed the writhing serpent The accursed one of seven heads.2

This and other Ugaritic passages will be considered more fully later; for the present this is set out simply in order to make clear the context of the form sbm. Most of the other terms of the passage were then already quite clear and well identified, and they can still be taken as fairly certain. The word here printed as Distmlh was of uncertain reading; some thought it should be read as Disbmnh, i.e. as repeating our term sbm. The context, then, is a destruction of great cosmic dragons or monsters; the new identifi1 I have to express thanks to many who have assisted me with their opinions and advice, especially in their specialized fields, and most of all Professors A. F. L. Beeston, W. G. Lambert and R. B. Serjeant, and my Manchester colleagues Professor C. E. Bosworth, Dr J. D. Latham, Dr M. A. A. el-Kafrawy, Mr M. E. J. Richardson and Mr S. Strelcyn. None of these, naturally, is responsible for the results I have reached, but I am grateful for their willingness that I should quote their opinion where this has been done. [Reprinted with permission from Journal o f Semitic Studies 18 (1973) 17- 39.] 2 C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Literature (Rome, 1949), pp. 19 f.

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

389

cation of sbm added to this the image of the muzzling of such a monster. No other context in Ugaritic, such as the muzzling of actual dogs or other animals, has been identified. The sense of “to muzzle” seems to have been very widely accepted and passed on from one scholar to another; only occasional doubts and qualifica tions, which will be discussed below, have been expressed; and the identification may be said to have become part of the received tradition of meanings in Ugaritic. On the basis of the Ugaritic sbm with this meaning, such a word has been identified in Hebrew also. At Ps. lxviii. 23, where MT has: ‫אשיב ממצלוזז ים‬

‫מבשן אשיב‬

it has been suggested that the latter part of the line should be read as ‫אשבם מצלות ים‬ with the sense something like “I muzzled the abysses of the Sea”.3 This view is strengthened by the parallelism with ‫בשן‬, this word being understood as “Serpent”.4 The suggestion is at first sight an attractive one, and has received considerable recognition; it was described as “brilliant” by M. H. Pope, who regards as corrupt and “meaningless” the text when taken in its more general previous understanding as something like “I will bring back from the depths of the sea”.5 Further elaborations on the suggestion have been made, and we may quote that of P. D. Miller, Jr., who proposed to read the text as ‫אשבם מצלות ים‬

‫אשבם בשן‬

something like: “I muzzled the Serpent, I muzzled the abysses of the Sea”.6 3 So M. J. Dahood, “mismar ‘muzzle’ in Job 7, 12”, J.B.L. lxxx (1961), 270 f., and again in Psalms I I( 1968), pp. 131, 145 f. The example is included by me in the list at the end of Comparative Philology and the Text o f the Old Testament, no. 311 [above], but is not further discussed in that book. 4 Dahood, Psalms //, pp. 145 f., reaffirms this, criticizing the contrary view previously expressed by A. R. Johnson, Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel (Cardiff, 1955), p. 73 n., who said that this view was against the context. 5 Pope, Job (1965), p. 60. 6 Harvard Theological Review lvii (1964), 240.

390

UGARITIC AND HEBREW ‫״‬SBM‫?״‬

Miller at the same time reported a reading suggested by Pro‫־‬ fessor F. M. Cross and “virtually identical” with the Ugaritic passage: ‫>מחצת< מצלות ים‬

(‫אשבם בשן אשב)מנה‬

“I muzzled the Serpent, I muzzled him; I smashed the Deep Sea” II

What is the evidence for the meaning of Ugaritic sbml From the beginning, Ugaritic sbm was identified on the basis of Arabic sabama; Virolleaud wrote: “Nous expliquons estbm ( lre p. impft. ifteal) et esbmn ( lre p. énerg. I) par l’ar. ^ bâillonner (plus particulièrement: d’un chevreau, pour le sevrer).”7 Most publications cite no other evidence than this, and none at all that I have seen cites any Semitic evidence which might lead in another direction; the only note I have seen which works from Akkadian evidence (to be discussed below) accepts this Arabic evidence entirely. Thus the sufficiency of this Arabic evidence seems to have been almost entirely accepted, and the view that sbm meant “muzzle”, and was used of the muzzling of a tnn or cosmic dragon, has become part of the received tradition of meanings in Ugaritic. It has not been generally noticed that the Arabic evidence8 for this meaning is extremely thin. Though it does appear in tradi‫־‬ tional dictionaries such as Freytag and Lane, from which Virolleaud himself doubtless procured it, and which themselves got it from indigenous dictionaries, I find that specialists in Arabic have little awareness at all of the existence of this word with this meaning, and little evidence of productive use of it can be obtained. I doubt whether any of the Ugaritologists who cited the word had seen it used in any Arabic text. First of all, the sense of s-b-m which is really in use and productive in classical Arabic is quite another one, namely “to be cold” (of water, of the heart, etc.). It would be too much to say 7 La déesse cAnat (1938), p. 53; his transcription differs somewhat from that now usual, and used by me in the rest of this article. 8 “Arabic” means North Arabic, as distinct from South Arabian.

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

391

that this is common; but at least it can easily be found in texts, e.g. the famous poem of Kacb b. Zuhair, B a n a t S u ca d , which talks of wine “mixed with a limpid cool stream of water” (b i- d h T s a b a m i n m i n m a Di , literally “with that from water which possesses cool ness”).9 In MutanabbI we find a phrase m a n q a l b u h u s a b im a “one whose heart is cold.” 10 As far as I have been able to discover, “coolness” must be regarded as the main extant and productive sense in classical Arabic. What then of the sense from which the meaning “to muzzle” for Ugaritic has been derived? It seems clear that the basic form in question is the noun s ib a m . Of it Lane says: A piece of wood which is put crosswise in the mouth of a kid [and tied behind its head . . .] in order that it may not suck its mother.11

The verb forms s a b a m a or s a b b a m a seem to be clearly denomi native from this noun: they mean “he put the s ib a m upon the kid”. The dictionaries offer also another sense for the noun s i b a m . To quote Lane again, it is used of: Two threads, or strings, attached to the [kind of face veil called] by which the woman [draws and] binds [the two upper corners of] it to the back of her head.

b u r q u c,

As soon as this is taken into account, the semantics of s ib a m appear in a very different light. The sense in Arabic, from which the sense “muzzle” has been derived, even assuming that it is both genuine Arabic and correctly reported, does not mean anything like “muzzle” in the sense required for the Ugaritic and Hebrew passages, i.e. a device to prevent a large and dangerous animal from biting, and particularly a cosmic dragon. In the case of the woman’s veil absolutely no element of muzzling, fettering, or limit ing the movement of the woman is involved. If one takes the sense “device to prevent a kid from sucking” together with the sense “threads to hold a veil in place”, the likely common element is nothing near “muzzle”; what is more likely is that s ib a m on the basis of these two meant a “string” or “thread”. As we have seen,

9 This poem is conveniently available in Nöldeke, Delectus, p. 110, 4th line. 10 Edition Dar Sädir (Beirut), 11, 118. 11 Lane, p. 1499.

392

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

Virolleaud himself properly noted12 that the Arabic sense con cerned a device to assist in the weaning of a kid; but this qualifica tion has been little noticed. It is true that the participle musabbam is said to be used of a lion: “Applied to a lion, it means having its mouth tied” (Lane, ibid.). A proverbial verse cited in this connection is: S

·X—*v j

6—

“She is frightened at the cry of the crow and breaks the neck of the lion w hose m o u th

is t ie d ”.

What is the value of this testimony? First, even if the tradition as printed above is correct, the phrase al-Dasad al-musabbam is surely a literary extension, in a paradoxical sense, of the usage as applied to a kid: it means a lion to which, if one can so imagine it, the device for weaning a kid has been applied. In other words, it does not mean that the device was used for lions or other major ani mals, or that the word designated any muzzle or other device used upon lions or other major animals. Secondly, however, the reading itself may be questioned. Kazimirski13 suspects an error in the transmission of the proverb; and this would amount to no more than an error in diacritical points, between b and t. This idea appears to be not a mere conjectural emendation, but to represent a variant form found in the written tradition.14 “Au lieu de musabbam dans ce proverbe, il serait plus naturel de lire musattam.” The strength of this is that is in fact used of lions: thus “ —grogner, être grognon (se dit d’un lion)” and —Sinistre, au visage rébarbatif et ren frogné, austère. De là ^ILJI Lion.” 15 In fact the proverb seems to make more sense as a contrast between the woman’s fright at the cry of the crow and her ability to deal with a fierce-looking lion; less good sense is made by a lion to which the sibâm of a kid has

12 Indeed, he emphasized it beyond what has been evidenced in the quotation above, adding in a later paragraph that the exact sense was “mettre le bâton appelé sibamm [jic] dans la bouche (d’un agneau)”. 13 A. de B. Kazimirski, Dictionnaire arabe-français (Paris, 1960), p. 1187. 14 Lane, ibid., already records this as a variant by another “relation”, which I take to mean another tradition, written or oral. 15 Kazimirski, op. cit. p. 1190.

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

393

been applied. If, then, this alternative reading in the proverb is accepted, this Arabic text concerning the lion has nothing to do with the root s-b-m and can throw no light upon it. There is, then, no evidence of any use of s-b-m in Arabic for anything like the muzzling of a dangerous animal. To this we must add the second major difficulty of the Arabic evidence, namely the fact that the tradition of sibam/sabama, even when meaning a device for the weaning of a kid, appears to be extremely thin. I suspect that the dictionary entries, as found in Lane and compar able works, may all have arisen as explanations of the one verse of the early poet cAdI b. Zaid (Christian, from Al‫־‬HTra, sixth century a.d .):16 'jib

*xjI

0 J

*1*•‫)■»׳^־‬ o

“Man does not have any refuge from the assault of fate which will avail him against the s ib a m of a she-kid.”

My colleague Dr J. D. Latham kindly suggests to me that the last phrase might perhaps also be taken as “avail him as much as the sibam of a she-kid”, i.e. “avail him to the slightest extent”. This last would be a use analogous to the QurDanic use oji “t0 the extent of a grain”.17 ‫׳‬ This is an early and somewhat out of the way source. Further usage in quotable sources I have not as yet been able to discover. On the basis of the evidence here presented, it seems reasonable to conclude that s-b-m with the sense of using a device to tie a kid’s mouth belongs to a very narrow line indeed. It may indeed not be a genuine Semitic word at all. It is certainly unquestionable that the sense “coolness”, of water or of the heart, is much better established. Moreover, as we have seen, there is no evidence to support the idea that the semantics of s-b-m came close to muz zling, i.e. that the semantic element of preventing a dangerous animal from biting was basic to the meaning. On the contrary, if one takes together the use for weaning a kid and that for the 16 See Lisän al-carab, xv, 210, line 2; on the poet see Brockelmann, Geschichte, 1. 21 f. On this aspect of Arabic indigenous lexicography see L. Kopf in V.T. vi (1956), 296, and the writer’s Comparative Philology and the Text o f the Old Testament, p. 118 [above], with citations from Kopf and Wild on this point. 17 QurDan iv. 44/ 40.

394

U G A R IT IC AND H EBREW “ SBM” ?

attachment of a woman’s veil, the main discernible semantic element is a meaning like that of the English noun “string”, “thread”. To this we may add another argument: Arabic has a good supply of words which do mean “muzzle”, and sibam is not among them. The most prominent no doubt is the root k-m-m, and in addition there is k-c-m and g-m-m}%In the Arabic Bible (at least in the printed texts, which I have consulted), it is k-m-m that is used in the classic instance of the “muzzled ox” (Greek cpipouv, Hebrew ‫ )חסם‬and at Ps. xxxix. 3 (Hebrew ‫ אשמרה לפי מחסום‬, Arabic kimama). The grouping of the Arabic vocabulary in this semantic field thus leaves no reason to expect the presence of an de‫־‬ ment s-b-m. It will be relevant at this point to mention a Hebrew passage which might seem to be parallel and which was already cited as such by Virolleaud, namely the tying down (?) of the tongue of Leviathan in Job xl. 25 f. (EV xli. 1 f.):19 ‫תמשך לויתן בחכה ובחבל תשקיצ לשנו‬ ‫התשים אגמון באפו ובחוח תקוב לחיו‬ At first sight this mention of doing something to Leviathan’s tongue with a cord seems parallel; it is not indeed the “muzzling” of a sea-monster, but at least it is some kind of tying. The key phrase of our purpose is the second part of the first line: what is intended when the text asks (literally) “Can you cause his tongue to sink with a line?” It is not clear exactly what operation is intended. NEB writes: “or can you slip a noose round his tongue?” This would seem to suggest the use of a noose which would catch over the lower jaw and trap the fish or animal, meanwhile incidentally holding down the tongue. Another possibility is that the hook is lodged in the gorge or stomach of the animal. The line (‫ )חבל‬is tight with the strain and thus it presses down the tongue, as the fisher pulls against the strength of the beast. In any case, if either of these is right, and indeed whatever the detailed meaning here, the whole context is very remote from that of doing battle with a cosmic dragon and muzzling or fettering it. That mythological scene is not the point here: the problem is the human problem 18 For the first two of these see M. Ullmann, etc., Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache: k-c-m, p. 235; kicäm “muzzle, strap”, p. 236; k-m-m, p. 343. 19 Virolleaud, ibid.

U G A R IT IC AND H EBREW “SBM”?

395

of fishing on so grandiose a scale. The genre of the Hebrew passage is such that it mentions with some scorn the different kinds of instruments (hook, line, etc.) with which one can catch ordinary fish but not this one (whether whale, crocodile, or something more like the Loch Ness monster). The context is a fishing one, not a mythological combat as in the Ugaritic references from which we began; there is no question of “smiting”, but only the fact that man’s power and knowledge are not sufficient to catch this fish. Brief reference may also be made to Job vii. 12: MT: ‫כי־־תשים עלי משמר‬

‫הים־אני אם־תנין‬

“Am I the Sea, or a Tannin, that you put upon me a m is m a r V ’

It has been suggested of this also that the mismar might be a muzzle.20 God is silencing Job as he has silenced Yamm and Tannin. Against this we may bear in mind the considerations advanced by Pope: “The consideration which deters the present writer from accepting this interpretation here is the impression that it does not suit the context. There is nothing to suggest that God is attempting to silence Job. What Job complains of is the constant harassment and surveillance which God maintains (cf. vss. 18-20) and this accords perfectly with the normal meaning of mismar as ‘guard, watch’.”21 This argument, however, does not in any way diminish, or conflict with, the idea that God in the Old Testament holds the sea within bounds or limits, from which it would otherwise break out. This is entirely adequately evidenced. The question is only: {a) whether the image used for this keeping within bounds is that of muzzling; (b) whether Job vii. 12 concerns constraint or rather watching, surveillance. The matter is mentioned only as a guard against the supposition that, muzzling or other constraint of the sea being accepted for Hebrew, this would constitute a preference in favour of the sense “muzzle” for Ugaritic sbm. It is, however, primarily the sense of this Ugaritic word that is at present in question. To this may be added the observation that the Hebrew word which unquestionably does mean “muzzle”, namely ‫חסם‬, is not in fact found in use as an image for the holding of the sea within bounds. 20 Dahood, J.B.L. lxxx (1961), 270 f. 21 Pope, Job, p. 60.

396

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

Thus, to sum up the argument so far, the Arabic evidence upon which the original identification in Ugaritic was made is very weak, so weak indeed that an identification made purely on the basis of the context in Ugaritic, and thus depending on no cognate evi dence whatever, could hardly be said to be weaker. Yet, if it had not been for the Arabic, it is doubtful if the Ugaritic context itself would have led to the identification of the sense as “to muzzle”. On the contrary, this sense does not fit very well. The other verbs in the Ugaritic passage (mhs, kly, mbs) suggest rather destruction or annihilation. Does one muzzle a dead dragon? Quite in abstract, a muzzled Tannin could make good sense, suggesting a dragon kept under constraint, which might nevertheless be let loose again; but this, though true and even probable of dragons in the abstract, does not fit well in our text. Again, in theory muzzling could be a preliminary to killing, but this does not seem to be the sequence of events in the Ugaritic text. in

These intrinsic difficulties with the now accepted understanding were noted in a short study by S. E. Loewenstamm in 1959.22 Pointing out that most of the verbs mean something like “to destroy” or generally “to beat, fight”, he then says, “The only verb which does not seem to fit into this picture is sbm . . . The com monly accepted explanation is ‘to muzzle’ . . . It may be doubted, however, whether this meaning is acceptable in a context where another Ugaritic synonym of ‘destroy’ would be expected.” As Loewenstamm suggests, it is doubtless because of an aware ness of these points that Gordon in his Ugaritic Handbook (1947), p. 271, no. 1909, gave the sense of sbm as “to check, annihilate”; in this entry he did not cite the Arabic sib dm as a clue.23 In the later Ugaritic Textbook (1965), however, Gordon cites the Arabic par allel and gives the sense as “muzzle”; this may be an effect in part of Loewenstamm’s note, which, as we shall see, returns in the end to the sense “muzzle”. It is interesting that another lexicographer 22 “The Muzzling of the Tannin in Ugaritic Myth”, Israel Exploration Journal ix (1959), 260 f. 23 Also Ugaritic Manual (1955), no. 1801, cited by Loewenstamm. The later reference is Ugaritic Textbook, p. 487, no. 2378. Gordon had offered only “annihi late” in his still earlier Ugaritic Grammar (1940), no. 799.

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

397

of Ugaritic, Aistleitner, in his Wörterbuch, no. 2576, gives the sense indeed as “Knebel in den Mund stecken”, but only with a question mark. This difficulty led Loewenstamm to consider a piece of Akkadian evidence. This Akkadian evidence concerns the word napsamu, and Loewenstamm cited a passage from Ludlul bei nemeqi as discussed by Landsberger.24 Landsberger reconstructs a sequence like this: im-ha-as rit-ti ma-hi-si-ia u-sad-di gl§kakka-su dmarduk i-na pi-i gir-ra äkili-ia id-di nap-sa-ma dmarduk

This would mean something like: Marduk smote the hand of the smiter, caused his weapon to fall down; Marduk put a muzzle on the mouth of the lion who was eating me.

This evidence convinced Loewenstamm, in spite of his recogni tion of the difficulties in the sense “to muzzle”, that that sense must be correct. The decisive point in his argument is the observation that the Akkadian passage and the Ugaritic have not only one but two related words in common: mhs “fight” is found in both, and napsamu, derived from the stem psm , “is most probably cognate with Arabic and Ugaritic sbm”. There are several points to be remarked on in this account of the matter. A minor one, to begin with, is that the mhs of the Ugaritic passage is not in close proximity with the sbm; it occurs only in line 43, six lines later.25 The verbs in immediate contiguity with sbm are kly and mhs.26 By the time we come to the mhs of Dimths in line 43, the immediate sequence in which sbm is found has been passed and a new sequence is beginning. The contiguity of sbm and mhs is thus less than immediate. If one were to consider Ugaritic mhs to be more or less the same thing as mhs, then the position might be different; but that is not the view held by Loewenstamm.27 24 A.f.O. xvm (1957- 58), 378 f. 25 Loewenstamm by a slip says “1. 41” in his note. 26 smt, with a very similar meaning, also appears, but not until 1. 41. 27 See his footnote, loc. cit. p. 261.

398

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

The second point of interest is that Landsberger’s reading, to which Loewenstamm appealed, is a reconstruction: two lines in an Assur fragment are identified with two lines cited in the Commentary to Ludlul. This very reconstruction was minutely examined by Professor W. G. Lambert in his edition28 and pronounced to be erroneous. If this had been right, then the main point used in Loewenstamm’s argument, namely the co-occurrence of both of two terms in both passages, would have been lacking in force. Professor Lambert, however, tells me by letter that he has indeed convinced Landsberger that he, Landsberger, was wrong in this; but he, Lambert, had subsequently found new evidence, as yet unpublished, which shows that the reconstruction proposed by Landsberger was in fact right. We must then accept the validity of the reconstruction upon which Loewenstamm’s argument from Akkadian was based. There remain, nevertheless, some other sides of his argument which deserve to be discussed. The correlation of Akkadian napsamu and Ugaritic sbm involves abnormal phonological correspondences, and this was recognized by Loewenstamm himself; I shall cite the relevant passage from his note: The Accadian noun n a p s a m u , derived from the stem p s m , is most probably cognate with Arabic and Ugaritic s b m , notwithstanding the irregular correspondence between Arabic ^ and Accadian s which is, however, attested several times, especially near b /p . Cf. e.g. Accadian b (p )u s s u r u with A r a b i c H e b r e w ‫ ;בשר‬Accadian k a b s u with Arabic Hebrew ‫כבש‬. The interchange between b and p is a well-attested phenomenon as for example in the Hebrew ‫דבש‬, Accadian d ip su “honey”. It appears, therefore, that the Accadian root p s m developed from a metathesis of the proto-Semitic root sb m in a way that reminds us of the well-attested change between Hebrew ‫ כבש‬and ‫כשב‬.

Thus Loewenstamm’s explanation involves an account in one breath of three peculiarities: the alternation p /b , the alternation s/s, and the change of order ps/sb. Though parallels can be put forward for each such peculiarity, one would not suppose that Professor Loewenstamm thinks that such irregular correspondences can be admitted lightly or easily; indeed, his own “notwithstand28 Babylonian Wisdom Literature (1960), pp. 24 f.; texts on pp. 56, 58. Professor Lambert tells me that his arguments as then set out still seem to be convincing on the basis of the evidence then available.

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

399

ing” is evidence of the opposite. It is likely that the semantic probability of the correlation is, to his mind, so great as to con stitute a reason for accepting some abnormality on the phono logical side. I shall not in this paper further discuss the matter of the peculiarities in the phonological correspondences, beyond observing that they are there.29 We return, therefore, to the passage cited from L u d l u l ; and here we cannot but observe that, though the two pairs of lines are in juxtaposition, they present two very different pictures: the first is the disarming of a physical assailant, the second is the muzzling of a lion. The two complement each other, but units within them do not seem to be integrally related with the kind of integral relation posited for (let us say) m h s and s b m in our Ugaritic passage. In the Ugaritic, if you m h s a Tannin, you will also within the same universe of discourse k l y a Tannin, and, if s b m means “muzzle”, you may s b m a Tannin; but there are no such relations within the elements of the Akkadian text. The application of the n a p s a m u belongs to Marduk’s work as protector; it does not belong to the same conceptual field as the smiting or beating, which is the work being done a g a in s t the afflicted writer. Or, in other words, we do not have a parallelism between Marduk as a fighter (m a h i s u ) and Marduk as the applier of the n a p s a m u . The text does not neces sarily imply that the one being smitten is himself engaged in fighting; it is equally likely, or more likely, to mean that the complainer was defenceless, and under assault from an armed man. The real parallel for m a - h i - s i - i a , taken syntactically, is a k i l i - i a ; or, to put it in another way, that in the Akkadian verses about the beater which corresponds to the application of the n a p s a m u is not the m a - h i - s i - i a but the u - s a d - d i , the causing of the weapon to fall. This very obvious point considerably diminishes the relationship seen by Loewenstamm between the n a p s a m u and the verb m - h - s \ and the loss of this relationship considerably reduces the force of his argument for the identification of Ugaritic s b m as “muzzle”. Further, some consideration must be given to the semantic development of n a p s a m u itself and the related verb p a s a m u (vari ants p e s e n u , p a s a m u , p a s a n u ) . n a p s a m u corresponds to Sumerian 29 The question is not whether such anomalies occur, but whether their occurrence can be presumed when, as is here the case, the identification of the words in question is exactly what is in dispute; this makes a world of difference from familiar cases like the Hebrew ‫כב ש‬/‫כ שב‬.

400

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

su (=

k a t a m u “cover”), and synonym lists equate n a p s a m u with , a head covering. The commentary to L u d l u l explicitly explains n a p s a m u as m a - a k - s a - r u s a p i sTsi, a binding or covering of the mouth of a horse.30 What Marduk did to the lion seems to be something like putting a bag over its head. This is important, because for any conclusions about the sense of Ugaritic s b m we will probably have to start not from the derived noun n a p s a m u in Akkadian but from the underlying verb, p a s a m u , etc. The idea of “muzzle”, i.e. of an action intended to prevent a dangerous animal from biting, is not at all intrinsic to the verb. Even of the noun n a p s a m u , as we have seen, this is also true: used of a horse, which from the annotation of the commentary to L u d l u l would seem to be the normal application, it means a cover, which might have many other purposes than that of preventing biting; only when applied, specifically and doubtless in a trans ferred sense, to the lion does it explicitly come to be what we call a muzzle. Of the verbs this is all the more true: their semantics appear to contain no essential element of muzzling (to prevent biting) or of fettering (to prevent movement); their essential seman tic element is that of covering (to put out of sight), p u s s u m u is used of a veiled woman—a goddess, a bride—and von Soden considers that the verb p a s a m u might be a denominative from p u s s u m u . p u s u m m u is a veil.31 p e s e n u also is “conceal, make secret”.32 The possibility of establishing a close correspondence between the root of Akkadian n a p s a m u and Ugaritic s b m has thus become considerably less. Loewenstamm’s study neglected to consider the probable semantic history of the Akkadian words; the striking

k u lu lu

30 Von Soden, AHw, p. 7406, suggests a horse’s bit, “Gebiß des Pferdezaums”, but his earlier explanation, “vielleicht eine Art ‘Maulkorb’”, Orientalia xx (1951), 268, is surely better, as Professor Lambert assures me. In general, the constraint of the mouth of animals in the ancient world seems mostly to have had the purpose not of muzzling in our sense, i.e. preventing the biting of people, but rather the purpose of preventing the eating of grass, etc., and the concomitant distraction of the animal from its work. Thus in the Hebrew law, Deut. xxv. 4, the owner would naturally wish to constrain the ox because (a) it would eat the very product it is being used to produce, (6) this eating would reduce its efficiency in this work. Such constraint is however forbidden by the biblical law. 31 AHw, pp. 8826, 883a, 838a. Cf. the note in Orientalia xx, 267 ff., which takes it as manifest that the basic sense is “veil”, verschleiern. 32 AHw, p. 8566. Cf. Landsberger, Z.A. xli (1933), 220: “psn, das auch in den Spielformen psm und psn erscheint, bedeutet eigentlich ‘mit einem Schleier bedecken’ this note is on pasTru “secret” and related words.

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

401

similarity of the end product n a p s a m u , as applied in the L u d l u l text, to the sense already conjectured for Ugaritic s b m (on the basis of Arabic) was taken as sufficient. But as soon as it is seen that the Akkadian root means something different, the correla tion becomes more precarious; and the phonological peculiarities involved in it, which might have been brushed aside when the semantic equation was a close one, come to appear more serious. Moreover, we have incidentally seen that the Akkadian wordgroup in question occurs with a considerable variety of root letters, and therefore it is by no means simple to search for the true Semitic cognates: we have to look at the sequences p s m 9p s n 9p s n , p s m . This brings us to the question, what forms can be cited from any other Semitic language that correspond to the Akkadian p a s a m u (or variants)—apart from the isolated case of Ugaritic s b m , which is just what is now in question. The nearest I have found is the Ethiopian (Gecez) f a d a m a (Dillmann, 1391), meaning “to obstruct, block up (a road)” and used in a transferred sense of “to reduce to silence”. It is in fact used—surely by a great coincidence—of Jesus’ “stopping up the mouths of” the Sadducees in Matt. xxii. 34, where the Greek has ecpipcoae, originally of course “he muzzled, he stopped up”. But I do not seriously think that this is closely related, except in so far as we come to depend on hypotheses of how all· words beginning with p have some meaning element in common, and the like. Is there real evidence that any cognates of p - s - m existed in Semitic outside of Akkadian? The Akkadian evidence, then, does not after all provide any corroboration for the application to Ugaritic s b m of the sense “muzzle”, itself based as we have seen on very weak evidence from Arabic. And Loewenstamm himself, as we have seen, began his note by remarking on the apparent intrinsic weakness of this sense for the Ugaritic context itself. IV

Is there then any other direction in which we may look tor the identification of Ugaritic s b m l First, a phonological point: Ugaritic s has a normal correspon dence with both s in and s h in in Hebrew, s h in and s in respectively in Arabic, so that cognates with either could be considered.33 It 33 Cf. the table in Moscati, Comparative Grammar, p. 44.

402

U G A R IT IC AND H EBREW “SBM”?

was only the correlation with the Arabic s - b - m that previously seemed to favour one choice rather than the other. Incidentally, if the correlation with Arabic s - b - m were correct for the Ugaritic, then one would expect that any Hebrew cognate would be ‫שבם‬ and not ‫ ;שבם‬this point seems to have been unnoticed by most proponents of this correlation, and if there were a Hebrew cognate meaning “muzzle” it should in all probability be entered as ‫שבם‬. This however does not much concern us now, since we are now considering the possibility of a fresh identification; I merely point out that two consonants both in Hebrew and in Arabic can be considered, so long as no evidence from yet a third source is forthcoming. Next, a small point within Hebrew itself: there is a place called Sibmah, ‫ שבמה‬or ‫שבם‬. This name could possibly be cognate, and it would give us certain evidence of a formally equivalent consonant sequence, offering normal correspondence with an Arabic or Ugaritic s b m . I shall say something more about it in a moment. Now, the only Semitic area in which I have found a lively representation of a root s - b - m is South Arabia. Even here it is found basically in the names of places and persons, but in these it is quite common. A glance at the glossary of Conti Rossini’s C h r e s t o m a t h i a shows that the place name s - b - m is frequent,34 and in modern Hadramaut there are several places with the name Shibam; this same name seems to exist in (North) Arabic as the name of a tribe. Among personal names in South Arabian Conti Rossini lists: Db s b m , d d s b m , cm s b m , m cd s b m , h ls b m . For a form like Jb s b m he suggests the reading Abl-sabima, but he considers also the possibility that the second element might be read s ib a m , following the modern pronunciation of the place name. Other names, such as Y a s b u m , 3A s b a m , etc., are listed by Ryckmans;35 and from the Thamudic inscriptions van den Branden lists s b m and s b m t \ the latter he reads as s i b a m a t . 36 What then is the sense of the element s - b - m in these South Arabian names? Ryckmans mentioned the North Arabic sense “be cold”, which we have seen to be the dominant sense in that lan34 Chrestomathia, pp. 246 f. 35 Noms propres sud-sémitiques (1934), i. 205a, 2546. 36 Inscriptions thamoudéennes (1950): HU 251 (p. 134); Jsa. 129, 157 (pp. 400, 405); index, p. 545.

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

403

guage; but it is not clear what semantic connection he had in mind, or what such connection there could be. For a place name like Sibâm the sense “cold” might fit, but it is hard to see what sense it could have in personal names like Dbsbm. The other North Arabic sense, that of the device to prevent a kid from sucking, is of course of no help. A much more probable suggestion is one which comes from Landberg and is accepted or at least reported by Conti Rossini. For the verb s-b-m in the Hadramaut dialect Landberg reports the meaning “être haut”, and for sibâm he gives “hauteur, nom des villes”.37 For the Sabaean personal name Dbsbm he offers the very probable explanation “mon père est grand, haut”.38 The first ele ment would, of course, be a term for a deity; and this interpreta tion would be entirely in accord with well-known tendencies of Semitic name-giving, producing the same structures as common types like Abram, South Arabian DAbacaliy.39 The town name Shibâm would be of a type similar to familiar names like Ramah. Incidentally, it is not unreasonable at the same time to go back to the verse of cAdT b. Zaid, cited above (p. 393) as the early text the explanation of which has perhaps caused the transmission of the interpretation of sibâm as the device for the weaning of a kid. It may be questioned, however, whether in that verse itself the under standing as such a weaning-device is absolutely necessary for the sense. Clearly, the verse requires the context of something to do with a kid; but it might be possible to think of something like the “rising up”, the “leaping up” of a kid (cf. the parallel, “the assault of fate”), and this would seem to give quite good sense.40 Returning to the Hebrew place name Sibmah, an interpretation as “high place” would also be a very easy and natural one, and 37 Landberg, Glossaire Datinois, p. 2018. 38 Landberg, Dialectes de Varabie méridionale, 1 (Hadramaut), 616; cf. also 11 (Dathina), 317 n. 2, 701, 1298 n. 2. Landberg makes further suggestions in that he sees relationships between s-b-b and s-b-m (cf. groups like sadda and sadama, satama “close”; saqqa, saqama “break”); on p. 1298 he says Mehri has two verbs, sôbb “lever les pieds de devant et sauter (cheval), ce qui est !^ s t b m .51 The reasoning behind this is unfortunately not given in the source, nor elsewhere so far as I know. It may have a connection with the question mark which he, as we saw, set against the sense “muzzle” for sbm; and it may have something to do with the similar reading to be mentioned below under our Passage B. B. CTA 6, col. i, line 29 f. (p. 39); UT, 49: I: 2

29 ]n. Dal[Di]y n b [cl ]hh. tst bm.

]zrh. ybm.

Pilm

Here again there is a textual point. Where CTA prints tst b m , the first publication had p stb m ; see Herdner’s note 3 in CTA, ad loc. The reading as here offered, and printed in CTA, is that proposed by Virolleaud, Syria xv (1934), 236.52 On the assumption that the reading is p s tb m , this instance has been entered in glos saries as a case of our sbm (e.g. in Gordon, UT, no. 2378); but if the reading as printed above is correct, then there is no case of sbm here at all. The context appears to contain none of the terms of fighting and destruction, of sea and dragon, which formed the environment in Passage A, and there is good reason for accepting the view that no sbm was here. C. PRU 11. 3 (p. 12), especially the section:

5 Isnm. tlhk. smm. ttrp ym. dnbtm. tnn. Isbm tst. trks 10 Imrym. Ibt[

The tablet is a small piece and much is damaged. The reading tnn in line 8 is widely accepted, but the text itself has Pan.

Since this passage has not previously been discussed here, we shall consider it now. It is part of a short mythological tablet, of 51 Aistleitner, Untersuchungen , p. 83, no. 190, cited by Herdner, ibid. p. 17 n. 1. 52 He there wrote: “On peut proposer . . . ‘eile (cAnat) met son . . . dans le . .

408

U G A R IT IC AND HEBREW “ SBM”?

considerable obscurity. In the E xposé prélim inaire to PRU 11 (p. x), C. F.-A. Schaeffer writes of this text:

Il appartient également au cycle de la déesse Anat et contient cette image poétique: “Les langues lèchent les deux; la lèvre (ou la langue) tournée vers les deux.” On y trouve aussi une allusion aux deux queues de Tannin, qu’Anat attache ou enchaîne au mrym de sa maison. Auraitelle dompté Tannin et fait de ce monstre un gardien de son temple? It is interesting that Virolleaud in his own annotations on this passage does not venture to attach a clear sense to s b m :

Les deux queues de Tannin (lire tnn), pour . . . , elle (cAnat) les dispose et elle (les) attache au m rym , à la maison de cA[nat?]. Pour sbm , dans un passage ou il s’agit également de cAnat aux prises avec Tannin, voir V AB, 3, 37 [= our Passage A]. Thus Virolleaud, though himself a pioneer in the identification of sbm in our passage A, does not leap to make the same identifi cation here. For the understanding of sbm here two or three different pos sibilities come to mind, (i) Gordon, UT no. 2378, takes Isbm as a negative plus passive participle, “unfettered, unmuzzled”, (ii) The strongest case for a sense like “tie” would be made by taking Isbm tst as parallel with trk s : “she puts in a tie, she binds”. We have seen that the Arabic sense, from which the original identification in Ugaritic was made, came closer to “thread” or “thin cord” than to “muzzle”, (iii) But we have also seen that South Arabian evidence suggested a possible sense “high, be high, go up”. If we follow this up, we then could have a good parallelism also, taking Isbm in parallel with Im rym : “she puts the tannin on high, she ties her to the height, to the house o f . . .” (iv) There are yet other possibili ties, such as the retaining of the reading fa n instead of tnn (improbable), or the reading of Isnm (“tongues”, as in line 5) for Isbm. These will be left aside. At any rate, our passage C seems to be consistent with more than one possible interpretation of the sequence sb m . The third possibility here mentioned, giving the parallelism between sbm and m rym , has the advantage of stronger evidence from other Semitic languages than is available for other senses one might suggest for sbm . We return then to our passage A, which remains the main passage for the discussion of our word. As has been pointed out,

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

409

the sense “muzzled” does not fit particular well. The fact that the word we have printed as Distm lh is uncertain decreases in its turn the assurance with which we can explain Pistbm ; for the similarity of form between the two words suggests that they have a close connection. As we have seen, the environing words are distinctly verbs of annihilation and destruction. If the sense of sbm were basically something like “be high”, then it is at least possible that the meaning in this line would be something like “lift up”, “remove”, “get rid o f”. This would be comparable with familiar usages of ‫סלק‬ “go up”, developing into ‫“ הסתלק‬be removed, taken away”, or Akkadian elum “go up” but *etlum “go up and away from; get rid of (a thing)”.53 Such a suggestion for our Ugaritic text may seem both speculative and indecisive; but in fact it has much deeper rootage in evidence from the Semitic languages than the “muzzle” sense recently in vogue.54 VI

In conclusion, then, it seems that only rather tentative approaches to the sense of Ugaritic sbm can be made; and the sense “muzzle”, which has widely been attributed to it, is quite precarious, depending as it does not on the Ugaritic material itself but on an Arabic comparison, a comparison which has been shown to have a particularly thin line of attestation behind it. It follows that attempts to reconstruct a ‫ שבם‬in Hebrew also, on the basis of this Ugaritic, must be deemed precarious. This will be true a fo rtio ri of attempts to carry out further reconstructions on this basis, e.g. to read the obscure word, here printed after CTA as Distm lh , as Disbhnh 55—an attempt which at the same time uses the Hebrew ‫“ שבח‬to still, silence” to restore the obscure Ugaritic text, its suitability there being supported by the parallelism with the Ugaritic sb m , taken to mean “to muzzle”. The fact is that the Hebrew Ps. lxviii. 23 is not a particularly obscure or difficult verse, and it is certainly very exaggerated to

53 Von Soden, G rundriß der akkadisch en G ram m atik , §92e, p. 121; cf. A H w , p. 208a. 54 As has been seen, if one is really to work from North Arabic the search must basically be directed towards a sense connected with coolness of water or the like; but it is difficult to make sense of the Ugaritic on this basis. 55 Dahood, U garitic-H ebrew P h ilology (Rome, 1965), p. 20.

410

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

call it “meaningless”. The problems of its meaning are not linguistic ones in the strict sense; all the terms used are familiar and normal ones, which furnish acceptable sense when taken as they are customarily taken in Hebrew. The problem is not an intrinsic linguistic difficulty, such as can be found in many biblical passages. It is rather one of {a) ambiguity, and (b ) context. Does “bring back” refer to a saving action, a bringing back from danger, or to a punishing action, a bringing back from escape in order to face retribution? Is basan the place Bashan, or is it the word for a snake or dragon? If the place Bashan, what are the associations intended here, and what are the relations then with the “depths of the sea”? Who or what is the object of the “bringing back”? It is at least a probable filling out of the linguistic bones of the verse if we suppose that the persons brought back are the enemies of God, mentioned in the previous verse, their blood to be spilt in the following one; the basan is the mountain of Bashan, quite likely to be identical with Hermon, and in any case twice spe‫־‬ cifically mentioned in the nearby v. 16 as “the mountain of God”. The two places in the verse represent the utmost height and the deepest abyss.56 The thought has some analogies with Ps. cxxxix. 8, where also it concerns a flight from God, though not the flight of an enemy of God: God’s hand will grasp him wherever he is. It is not necessary however to insist on this interpretation, which is one among several that could be given. No more, in any case, needs to be said about the Psalms passage. Let it be observed only that this argument has nothing to do with a defence of the traditional understanding of the Hebrew as against a meaning suggested on the basis of the Ugaritic. On the contrary, it is the sense of the Ugaritic itself that is in question. The sense “muzzle”, though widely accepted for Ugaritic, was, it seems, never established on a thoroughly sound intra-Ugaritic basis and never thoroughly researched for its probable traces throughout the Semitic languages. The sense “muzzle”, far from being established on 56 Cf. already H.-J. Kraus, Psalm en /(Biblischer Kommentar), p. 476. He makes the very apt comparison with Amos ix. 3, where the contrast is between Sheol and Carmel, as well as the depths of the sea, where the dragon is ready to bite the enemies of God. The verbs there, it can be added, provide very close correspondents of ‫“( ^ו ב‬from there” God will “bring them down”, ‫“ ;ירד‬from there” he will “seek and take them”, ‫“ ; ל ק ח‬from there” he will “command the serpent and it will bite them”).

UGARITIC AND HEBREW “SBM”?

411

the basis of Ugaritic, was identified for Ugaritic itself through Arabic—the very language which some today are contrasting very unfavourably with Ugaritic as a source of suggestions for meanings in Hebrew!—and within Arabic through a hasty identification on a very weak base. But what is striking about this identification of the sense of Ugaritic sbm is the strength which it has already, over a few decades, generated in our minds. Meanings in ancient languages were passed on in a tradition; and there is some uncertainty today about the validity of that ancient tradition. But even in languages like Ugaritic, of which we have no ancient tradition of meanings, a tradition still very quickly establishes itself; and we believe that sbm means “muzzle”, because this is part of the scholarly lore in which we have grown up. Even when we are forced, as I think we are forced, to consider other possible meanings, the thought that sbm must after all mean “muzzle” intrudes upon the mind and is difficult to get rid of. This present writer, if a personal note will be permitted, did not begin with any antecedent scepticism towards the “muzzle” sense of sbm ; on the contrary, the example seemed a striking one, and one deserving to be set out as an instance of what can be achieved. In the writing of Comparative Philology and the Text o f the Old Testament I originally proposed to use it as a favoured illustration. It was the peculiarity of the form as a Semitic form, under the rules of patterning and compatibility, that most induced me to investigate it more fully, although in the end this aspect has been given only a brief mention and has not been taken as a major issue. In the end it is the thinness, and the oddity, of the North Arabic evidence, that does most to damage the now tradi tional identification, and unless stronger Arabic evidence can be brought forward in its support this identification must probably be abandoned. The fact that the much stronger evidence in South Arabia, well evidenced and in ancient sources, leads towards a quite different meaning (even if we cannot be precise what that meaning was) must force upon us a change of mind.

LIMITATIONS OF ETYMOLOGY AS A LEXICOGRAPHICAL INSTRUMENT IN BIBLICAL HEBREW1 “Etymologists, a race not wanting in effrontery . . . ” (Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 397) paper is not a highly theoretical exercise, but rather a discus sion of practical questions that arise in Hebrew lexicography. It consists to a large degree of reflections occasioned by two pieces of research. The first is my own experience as editor of the Oxford Hebrew Dictionary} The second is the interesting and useful Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques of David Cohen,3 a work which began to appear in 1970 but has as yet covered only a very small segment of the relevant vocabulary (in fact, at the time of writing, only the first two letters of the alphabet and a portion of the third). In the modern tradition of biblical Hebrew lexicography, com parative and etymological considerations have been accorded a prominent place. The policy of separating the comparative and etymological matter from the description of actual forms, usages and meanings, by writing a completely separate etymological dic tionary quite distinct from the normal registration of the language— in other words, the course that has been taken as normal in many western languages—has not been seriously attempted and, though it remains theoretically possible, looks unlikely as a practical eventuality. The current and accepted practice is that comparative and etymological material is integrated into the entries of the main dictionary of the language. Not only so, but articles are so struc-

T h is

1 This is a revised version of a paper read to the Philological Society at Worcester College, Oxford, on 9 June 1979. [Reprinted with permission from Transactions o f the Philological Society o f Great Britain, 1983 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) 41-65.] 2 Since this paper was originally read, it now appears unlikely that the dictionary as planned will be completed; but it is hoped that some aspects of the research done for it will be published separately. 3 David Cohen, Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques (Paris and The Hague: Mouton. Fascicule 1, 1970: Fascicule 2, 1976).

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413

tured that this material has a prominent position. It is commonly the first main item in an entry, after the lem m a itself, and some times after other very basic information such as the gender of nouns or the basic gloss indicating meaning; in the Germanlanguage dictionaries like WB it generally precedes even these.4 Thus a representative entry from WB begins thus:5 D-k-l\ mhe., ug. kan. ph. jaud. aam. pehl. aga. u. iam. (DISO 12), ba. ja. cp. sam. sy. md. (MdD 16b) ar., akk. (akalu)\ ath. u. tigr. (Wb. 376a) Dekel Korn.

The Hebrew word in question is the common verb ‘eat’. The meaning of the paragraph quoted is: the following is a list of languages and dialects which have a cognate form comparable with the Hebrew word under consideration. In a few cases the actual forms in these languages are cited, and in one case there is a note on the meaning of the cognate word because it does not cor respond exactly with the Hebrew word: this is noted for Ethiopic and Tigre because in these languages the verb ‘eat’ does not come from this stem but from another, and only the noun meaning ‘corn’ survives from this root. Our point, however, is: all this rather diverse and possibly confusing information appears in the Hebrew dictionary at the very beginning of the entry, before the reader has even learned the rather basic information that the Hebrew word itself is the common verb meaning ‘eat’. If we were to ask for the rationale of this order of presentation, it might well be answered that it is, at least in part, a comparativehistorical one: an entry presents first of all the comparativeetymological matter, which gives a sort of picture of the prehistory of a word (actually, a picture of its distribution and meaning in 4 I use WB as the siglum for the third edition, edited by W. Baumgartner, of L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, Hebräisches und aramäisches Lexikon zum Alten Testament. The original work was entitled Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti Libros (Leiden: Brill, 1953), and is often styled KB: Koehler did the Hebrew, the larger portion, and Baumgartner the Aramaic. The third edition was begun by Baum gartner himself, after Koehler’s death; also published by Brill of Leiden, its first Lieferung appeared in 1967 and its second in 1974. About one half of the work has thus appeared in the third edition. The other standard academic dictionaries of biblical Hebrew are considerably older. The standard English-language work, Brown-Driver-Briggs, was completed in 1907, and the corresponding Germanlanguage work, Gesenius-Buhl, in 1915. These are commonly indicated by BDB and GB respectively. 5 WB, p. 44b.

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cognate languages and dialects, from which, however, some histori cal projections may perhaps be made), and then it goes on from that to the usage and meaning in extant Hebrew texts. But this basic philosophy of the matter has, of course, not gone unchallenged in recent decades, and quite contrary philosophies of the question are to be heard. An extreme contrast is provided by the assertion that etymology should be excluded from dictionaries altogether: it may be an interesting sort of speculation, one hears it said, but the dictionary is not the place for it to be carried on. Less extremely, it may be argued that, while etymology can and should be practised within the dictionary, it should be done as a footnote or as an optional extra. In that case its subsidiary place should be recognized by the consignment of it to the end of the entry, there to represent an additional remark kept well out of the way, so that the basic analysis of forms and meanings in the texts is done first of all, without any interference from etymological or comparative considerations, and these matters come in, if at all, only as an afterthought. Among major academic dictionaries of ancient Semi tic languages, the one which has most fully exemplified this mode of operation is the imposing many-volumed Chicago Assyrian D ictionary. (The other contemporary dictionary of Akkadian, by von Soden, gives brief and modest etymological indications, placed at the beginning of the article in the manner of the Hebrew dictionaries, but as a rule less conspicuously than in the latter.) There are many temptations for the editor of a Hebrew dictionary to follow the Chicago example. To place the comparative material at the end of the article is to reduce its prominence, to make it more optional, to make it subsidiary to the analysis of the Hebrew itself, and to avoid the danger, to which many articles in the older Hebrew dictionaries certainly fell a prey, of allowing the semantic analysis of the Hebrew to be biased by the comparative informa tion already given. Before we decide immediately to adopt this newer fashion, however, it is good to consider the complications of the subject and ask just what are the considerations which have in the past moved lexicographers of Hebrew to pay the attention they did to considerations which appear to be comparative and etymological. It is not necessarily the case that biblical Hebrew is in the same position as Akkadian, and it is not necessarily true that the ‘etymo logical’ interests of dictionaries have had no other basis or function

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than historicist and comparativist curiosity. Behind the interest in evidence from cognate languages and dialects, and other such material, there lie, I suggest, questions of inner-Hebrew relations which have to be clarified; and it is because they are thought, rightly or wrongly, to help with the clarification of these innerHebrew problems that comparative and etymological materials have been so constantly introduced into prominent parts of the entries of the typical dictionary of Hebrew. One of the questions here involved is that of the relation between root lexemes and actual words. As is well known, it may be said that in Hebrew and in many other Semitic languages a word is constituted by the compounding of a discontinuous root lexeme, e.g. k-t-b ‘write’, and a pattern of affixes and vowels, e.g. m iC\ C 2 aC$, which generates the actual word found, i.e. m iktab ‘letter’, ‘writing’; or, with another pattern, the verb form katab ‘he wrote’. The existence of these root lexemes remains rather conspicuous in the structure of the language and is given additional emphasis through the script and the spelling conventions. Therefore, it may be argued, part of the process of essential identification and analy sis of m iktab is to perceive that it belongs to the root lexeme k-t-b. Would we say that anyone really knew Hebrew if he knew that m iktab meant ‘letter’ but did not know that it contained the same basic lexeme as the verb ‘write’? In other words, in asking, in a case like this, what is the root lexeme of a word, we are not necessarily, and not in fact, indulging in mere historicist or comparativist speculations but we are recognizing the fact, neces sary for the normal operation of the language, that the lexicon works on two levels, that of the root lexeme and that of the word itself. But the difficulty comes along as soon as the semantic path between the root lexeme and the word becomes cloudy, within Hebrew itself. There is a well-known m aPak which means ‘angel, messenger’ and a well-known m eldDka which means ‘work’ or the like. The lexicographer and the dictionary user perceive that these must contain a common root lexeme l-D-k\ but no such lexeme appears to exist in Hebrew other than in these two forms, and there is no recognizable semantic content which obviously attaches to such a lexeme within Hebrew. Therefore, unless the lexicog rapher is to confine himself to the two disparate words and offer no account of the lexeme common to them and yet unknown as

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such within Hebrew, he is forced to consider the cognate lan guages. The existence of words like the Ethiopic la^aka ‘send’ then appears to confirm the existence of a common lexeme and to give it a meaning which does something to make sense of the Hebrew phenomena. (The sense ‘messenger, angel’ is fairly easily derived from ‘send’, probably through an intermediate stage ‘something sent’; the sense ‘work’ is by no means so obvious, but within Hebrew itself the phrase mislah y a d ‘sending out of the hand > undertaking > work’ might provide a reasonably close analogy.) Thus the fundamental fact is that some of the root lexemes of Hebrew are known and identifiable in meaning from within Hebrew but others are not. The function of comparative and etymological material quoted within dictionaries has often been not to depict hypothetical historical origins or prehistoric processes of change but to make some sort of sense of relations that appear to exist within the Hebrew lexicon but seem not to make sense on the basis of its obvious internal relations. Its prime function therefore is not comparative in direction; rather, it strives to provide answers to questions of what might be called the inner etymology of Hebrew, the relations between its root lexemes, their meanings, and the actual words. This problem arises for the lexicographer whether he lists the root lexemes as actual items, in addition to the wordentries, or lists only the latter, including within them references to the root lexemes. If one function, then, is to bring together root lexemes and words and to establish significant relations between them, another is to separate them. Hebrew has a large number of homophonic and/or homographic words, and this is so both at the word level and at the level of the root lexemes. The making of a distinction between pairs, triplets or even quadruplets of such homonyms is often an essential for the provision of an intelligible account of the lexical stock. Dictionary makers do this by the accepted conven tion of numbering the homonymic lexemes. I hebel is said to be ‘cord’, etc., from the root lexeme I h-b-l ‘tie’; II hebel is supposed to be ‘destruction’ from the root lexeme II h-b-l ‘act corruptly’. But how do we know that these are really two separate root lexemes and/or two different words, and not just one big word which means both ‘bind’ and ‘destroy’? Working strictly from within Hebrew we might have difficulty in deciding. Arabic and other cognate terms suggest that the homonymy was produced by pho-

L IM IT A T IO N S O F ETY M O L O G Y

417

neme merger: two phonemes which were distinct in a pre-Hebrew stage, and which in Arabic are still distinct, were merged, produc ing eventually homophony and homography in Hebrew. The first term is cognate with Arabic habl ‘cord’, the second with khabala ‘confound, confuse’. The same process enables us to distinguish I c-n-h ‘answer’ from (say) IV c-n-h ‘sing’ (cf. Arabic cognates cana and ghanna respectively), when the Hebrew contexts them selves could quite easily have allowed confusion to continue (in the contexts it remains quite plausible to imagine that Miriam ‘answered’, i.e. spoke antiphonally or the like, rather than that she ‘sang’, with no component of ‘answer’ in the meaning at all, at Exod. 15. 21, and indeed many people on reading the text consider this to be the obvious meaning). Thus, to sum up, in cases of this kind it seems that assistance from comparative studies does not mean a departure from the strict study of Hebrew for itself but rather constitutes a means of sorting out the Hebrew material and making clear its own inner contours. Let it be supposed, then, that these considerations in some measure justify the involvement of the Hebrew lexicographer in the use of comparative and etymological material; and, if this is so, since this work involves the basic recognition of relations between root lexemes and word forms, and the separations between one root lexeme (and/or word) and another, with semantic consequences— all of which might have to be modified if a full account of the problems were to be given, but let it be granted for the purposes of the present paper—then let us look at some of the practical con sequences that seem to follow. In the past I have at times been very critical6 of the traditional emphasis on comparative and etymologi cal study because of its unfortunate semantic effects; that is, I have warned against attempts to take the etymology as if it indicated the ‘origin’ or the ‘basic meaning’ of a word or dominated its actual usage and semantic functioning. But that is not the point of the present article. My point is this: granting that the incorporation of comparative-etymological material within the Hebrew dictionary may well be justified through the functions which I have sketched 6 See in particular my S em an tics o f B iblical Language (London: Oxford Uni versity Press, 1961); B iblical W ords f o r Tim e (London: SCM Press, 2nd edi tion, 1969): ‘Etymology and the Old Testament’, O udtestam en tisch e Stu dien 19, 1974, 1- 28.

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out above, it remains a question whether these functions can be adequately discharged in anything like a satisfactory degree, simply because suitable information is not available. For the fact remains that the etymological relations of many words remain very uncer tain. As I look back over the articles that were prepared for the Oxford Hebrew Dictionary, I am myself surprised at the number of cases in which I had to enter ‘etymology unknown’, ‘apparently no significant cognates in Semitic’, and other such negative con clusions. Most of this present article will be a series of illustrations of this theme. I am sometimes tempted to the gloomy conclusion that the only etymologies that are reliable are the ones that tell us nothing useful. For instance, no one will doubt the etymological validity of the example with which we started: the Hebrew Dakal has cognate verbs, or other related forms, in most languages in the Semitic family, and all of these mean ‘eat’, which only goes to confirm that the Hebrew word itself means ‘eat’, which we knew all the time in any case. The etymology is unquestionable and unquestioned but we learn nothing from it, or nothing that applies particularly to this Hebrew word. The same is true of Dozen ‘ear’. For this there are precise cognates throughout the Semitic family: Akkadian uznu, Arabic Dudhn and so on. This is how it is set out in the WB entry (WB, p. 27a): Dozen (188 x): Lks, mhe., ag. ydn (EG 1, 154); ug. Ddn, aga. Ddn , pehl. Dwn (D ISO 5 ), ja. md. cudnaD, M dD 342 b, akk. uznu, ar. Dudn, iraq-ar. Didn (BzA 5 , 112), ath. Dezen, tigr. Dazzan langohrig (Wb. 381 b); aram. Grdf. Didn (Friedrich Or. 12, 20 ): sy. cp. nam. Dedna . . .7

All this adds up to the same thing: though there are differences in form, agreeing with the normal correspondences between vari ous languages of the Semitic family, plenty of them have a word that provides a more or less complete formal correspondence with Hebrew Dozen, and all of them, amazingly, mean ‘ear’. Once again 7 The legend DISO 5 in the second line should be DISO 6. The reference is to Jean and Hoftijzer’s standard Dictionnaire des inscriptions sémitiques de l’ouest (Leiden: Brill, 1965). As in the previous citation from WB, the abbreviations stand mainly for various Semitic languages and dialects. The only one that may surprise the reader is ‘pehl.’. This refers to the use of an Aramaic form as an ideogram in the writing of Pehlevi: though such ideograms function within Pehlevi language, their existence gives evidence of usage and meaning within Aramaic, from which they were taken.

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the etymological correspondence is totally convincing, but it remains otiose: there is no gap in our organization and under standing of the Hebrew lexical stock that is filled up by it. Actually, the most valuable service that this information furnishes is not lexical at all but phonological: precisely because the meaning of all these words is so clearly identical, so that there is no doubt that in that sense they are ‘all the same word’, they—along with a host of other such pieces of evidence—provide good demonstration of the normal phonological correspondences between members of the Semitic family, for instance, good exemplification of the fact that, where Arabic has dh (d ), Hebrew normally has z and Aramaic has d. This is important and has certain lexical implications, and indeed the Hebrew lexicon cannot be intelligently used by the reader who does not know that these correspondences are normal; but in itself it is not lexical information, applicable to the word ‘ear’ or indeed to any word any more than any other word. About the word ‘ear’ in particular it tells us nothing. Why then is all this information here at all? Partly it comes from a desire for consistency: perhaps in some other word something important and necessary will be disclosed through the citation of the Mandaean form or of the form implied by the Pehlevi ideo grams, and therefore these forms must be cited in every case where they are known. In part it comes from a compilation concept of scholarship: the task is to gather the material from other dic tionaries and put it into this one. Instead of classifying the material and separating out what is significant, everything is put in. No one can seriously suppose that the citation of half a dozen or so different forms of Aramaic/Syriac makes any difference to our understanding of this Hebrew word. Moreover, the compilatory conception of lexicography has the further disadvantage that it is insatiable and unfulfillable. If Iraqi Arabic is to be specially men tioned, what about Egyptian, and if it, what about Moroccan? If among Ethiopian languages Tigre is to be specially cited, then what about Tigrinya and Amharic?8 What about Socotri and the 8 In fact the reasons for the preferences shown in WB are often practical: that is, where languages (or dialects) have a modern dictionary or glossary, easily accessible and usable—and especially if in the German language—then they are more likely to receive attention. Thus Tigre is favoured because of the excellent and convenient work of E. Littmann and Maria Höfner, Wörterbuch der Tigre-Sprache (Wies baden: Steiner, 1962).

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South Arabian languages? Moreover, among the many dialects and languages listed as having a cognate to the word for ‘ear’, are there any which, in addition to it, have a term of some other meaning which nevertheless appears to belong to the same root lexeme and which therefore might suggest something about pre-Hebrew devel opments of meaning?9 However, our purpose here is not to criticize this carefully compiled list for its inadequacy or for omissions of material which ought to be in it if it is to be so lengthy anyway. Our purpose is rather to indicate that, assuming the adequacy and correctness of the impression given by this section of the dictionary entry, it still does not tell us anything about the Hebrew word for ‘ear’. Now it can easily be said that, while etymology is rather unim portant for the understanding of well-known and well-established words such as this one, there are many words that are rare or poorly evidenced for which etymology may be our only way of finding a meaning. And as a general statement I do not dispute this; but as a matter of practical experience I am more doubtful about it than I used to be. What surprised me in my work on the Hebrew dictionary was the considerable number of words, some of them rare words, or doubtful words, some of them hapax legomena, but also some of them quite basic and frequent words, for which we gain very little guidance, or only very ambiguous guidance, from the consideration of possibly cognate words in other Semitic languages; and yet few of the words I have in mind are words of which one might reasonably postulate origin as loanwords from outside Semitic. Again and again we find that either there is no word formally cognate, or that the senses are so remote that no useful etymological contact can be made. 9 The most obvious such term, as applied to this particular entry, is the wide spread group of words like Arabic Didhn ‘permission, authorization’, with which is connected the form familiar in English as muezzin ‘one who calls to prayer’. The question whether this group forms the same basic lexeme with the words meaning ‘ear’ is obviously relevant for the lexical understanding of both; but the WB entry gives the dictionary user no hint of these facts. Contrast Cohen, p. 10. The relevance of this for ancient times and the neighbourhood of ancient Hebrew culture is indicated by the presence in ancient South Arabic of meanings like ‘obedientia, iussum’ and ‘permisit, licitum fecit’ attaching to this root: see. K. Conti Rossini, Chrestomathia Arabica Meridionalis Epigraphica (Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente, 1931), p. 100.

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The first example has a certain loanword element in it, or may have. It is Ded, which appears in the familiar verse Gen. 2. 6: an Ded used to go up from the earth and water all the face of the earth. It has become common opinion that this word is derived from, or is cognate with, the Akkadian word edu usually said to mean ‘flood’, and itself said to be a loanword from Sumerian: it is thus the welling up of an underground stream, of groundwater or some thing of the sort (contrast the traditional ‘mist’ of the AV). This is given as the etymology, and therefore ‘Susswasserstrom’ or ‘Grundwasser’ as the Hebrew meaning, by the recent dictionary WB, and so also many commentaries on the passage. Deeper research into the Akkadian, however, seems to make this comparison doubtful. As CAD (E, p. 35 f.) makes clear with numerous examples, edu means something far more violent and catastrophic than can be related to the Hebrew passage. CAD gives as its main gloss onrush o f water, high water: it is something like a huge wave that may sink a ship, or again it is ‘the high tide of the sea’ which can overwhelm a camp. Used of rivers, edu may be its high flooding, but CAD emphasizes that this is a rare and catastrophic phenomenon (by contrast with rriilu which is the normal annual high water). When a hymn to Marduk refers to that deity as bel kuppT naqbT e-di-e u tamati ‘lord of sources, springs, high waters and seas’, it is the kuppu and the naqbu, the source or spring, that might have fitted the Hebrew passage, while the edu is a phenomenon of the high seas. Thus all in all it is far from clear that edu gives a suitable parallel which will in turn make it into a good etymology for the enigmatic Hebrew Ded of Gen. 2. 6. But if that is so, and if the word really means some sort of water rising from the ground, then the lexicographer has no choice but to enter under this word the legend ‘etymology unknown’, for there is apparently no Semitic evidence other than that of the Akkadian edu.10 10 Another option, indeed, is to say that Ded is indeed derived from the Meso potamian culture but represents not the Akkadian edu, for the reasons just out lined, but the Sumerian id from which it is said to be derived and which commonly means ‘river’, being translated into Akkadian as naru with this meaning. The Hebrew would then be derived directly from the Sumerian. This, while quite possible purely linguistically, runs into the difficulty which will be mentioned below: if it was a river, why did it not irrigate the soil?

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It is indeed possible to go in another direction and understand the word in the traditional sense as ‘mist’, the sense already familiar to readers of the Authorized Version. But this would mean a departure from all connection with Akkadian edu. The advantage of this course is that it provides a good connection with another known Hebrew word, the homonymic Ded of Job 36. 27, yazoqqu mdtar le-Dedd. Though the exact relation of the elements here is not clear, it is certain that the context is meteorological: we have terms for ‘drops of water’, ‘rain’, ‘clouds’ and ‘drip’ all in the same pair of lines. Perhaps the reference is, as Dhorme suggested, to water droplets volatilized (verb z-q-q) ‘to become his mist’. It is, indeed, precisely this passage that caused traditional sources to understand the Gen. 2. 6 passage as ‘mist’ from the beginning.11 If we look at it in this way, we have only the one word for these two passages, for it is hardly possible to suppose with Speiser that the Akkadian edu is the parent also of the instance in Job.12 But if our one word is the word ‘mist’ known from Job, it has no known Semitic or other etymology anyway. It is probably better to have two examples of one word, both meaning ‘mist’, and to admit that there is no etymological information at all, than to have two different Hebrew words Ded, each occurring only once, and one of them related to the Akkadian word and meaning floods of water from under the earth while the other means ‘mist’ but has no etymology at all. Even, however, if we count this as only one word, occurring twice, we have also to reckon with the homophonic Ded, spelt with yod, D-y-d, the meaning of which is well exampled and well known: it means ‘calamity’. It is a question whether for this we have any convincing etymology either. Traditional works cite the Arabic root D-w-d with the sense either of ‘bend’ or of ‘burden, oppress’, but the most that could be said for this is that it is a conceivable speculation. The fact that the word, which occurs over twenty 11 Among the ancient translations of the Bible, the Greek (Septuagint) translated the word at Gen. 2. 6 as πηγή ‘fountain, spring’, and the same was done by the Syriac and the Vulgate; the Targums (Jewish versions in Aramaic) translated rather as ‘cloud, mist’. 12 Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible: New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 16. He seems to agree that the case in Job does mean mist ‘or the like’, but thinks that this ‘need signify no more than the eventual literary application of’ the rare word for ‘an underground swell’. This is very difficult to accept.

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times in the Bible, is always spelled with yod may probably indi cate that it does indeed come from a root like D-y-d or D-w-d, and thus belongs very likely to a different word type from our previous Ded ‘mist’ (or whatever it is). Cohen relates it to an Arabic word meaning ‘calamity’ and cited by him as muDyTd.u If this is valid, it means there is a good Arabic parallel to our word, even if the derivation from a root lexeme is as vague and uncertain in the Arabic as it would have been in the Hebrew if we had had no Arabic. In any case, though we do (if these facts are correct) have some comparative and etymological information about our word, we do not as a result know anything more about it than was already manifest from the contexts in the biblical literature. Another remark should be added about our Ded which came up from the earth and moistened the surface of the ground. In a language like biblical Hebrew, and in the case of rare words of this kind, literary questions are relevant and one cannot proceed purely linguistically. What is the sequence of thought in Gen. 2. 5- 6? There was, we are told, no vegetation in the world: it was a dry world, in which God had as yet sent no rain. But then, it tells us, an Ded used to go up and used to wet the surface of the ground. It is not easy to make good sense of this in the context. If the Ded was some kind of spring or groundwater, welling up from underground sources, it would surely have provided some irrigation, enough for plants to grow. But according to the story it did not. Might this perhaps fit with the idea that it was after all a mist? There was a vapour which rose from the ground, it damped the surface, but it did not provide enough water for the plants to grow. It only damped the surface, perhaps thus making the earth pliable for God to fashion man out of the soil (Ccipar, traditionally glossed as ‘dust’, is not necessarily dry like our ‘dust’, it is often more like soil). Admittedly this explanation is far from perfect: even the damping of the earth by mist would probably be enough to sustain plant life. Perhaps the writer discounted the irrigative value of mist: for him only rain was enough to sustain proper plant life, and espe cially a garden. If, however, we cannot go this way, and if the explanation as ‘mist’ is impossible, then perhaps we have to say that the piece about the Ded is a fragment, perhaps from some previous legend, quite out of context in the present story. If this 13 Cohen, p. 16.

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were so, then of course it could be a great wave or onrush of water like the Akkadian edit. Indeed some of those who have followed that explanation and considered that it was a flood of groundwater or the like have—when they have been careful and observant enough—come to the conclusion that this is so, and that the sentence in question has no proper context in Genesis at all.14 Then, of course, it could mean anything. But that must, I think, count as a very negative and desperate conclusion. Let us move to another example: take the Hebrew word Degrop. Exod. 21. 18 is a law about quarrelling. If a man strikes another man with a stone or with a/the Degrop, then certain consequences follow. The traditional sense is ‘fist’; but there is also a long tradition of interpretation as an implement: a shovel, spade or the like, even a broom. The NEB goes in this direction: ‘i f . . . one hits another with a stone or with a spade’ (adding ‘or fist’ in the margin). One reason for this preference lay in inner-Hebrew etymology: the verb garap means ‘sweep’ or the like, and the noun magrepa, surely derived from it, is a shovel. The etymological sense, seeking to bring these together, tended to make Degrop into the same sort of thing, hence a broom, shovel or spade.15 But lately opinion has swung, perhaps decisively, back towards the fist: for the Zadokite Document, discovered early this century, includes a law that a man must not raise his hand to strike a beast with a/the Degrop on the Sabbath. Since it was forbidden to carry any imple ment on the Sabbath in any case, the law must mean that it was forbidden to strike without an implement, i.e. with the fist. This is 14 The careful and detailed commentary of C. Westermann, Genesis (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1974) accepts that the original context of the sentence is unknown but was certainly different from that of the present Gen. 2. 4- 6: see his p. 273. Many other commentators seem, like Speiser, to proceed as if this question did not exist at all. When he tells us, innocently, that ‘the biblical verse might have been lifted verbatim from an Akkadian lexical work’ (Bulletin o f the American Schools o f Oriental Research 140, 1955, 9- 11), he is really openly proclaiming that his interpretation, however well founded in Mesopotamian research, can make no sense in the context of the Book of Genesis. But he goes on as if this constituted no difficulty. Cf. Westermann, ibid., p. 274. 15 BDB, p. 175b said clearly ‘fist’, in spite of its tendency, visible in many other words, to be over-persuaded by etymological considerations; GB, p. 8b was decidedly vague and went no farther than to say that it was an ‘uncertain word’. Koehler in KB, p. 10a came down firmly on the side of ‘broom, shovel, rake’; but Baumgartner, WB, p. 11, clearly considers that the Zadokite Document swings the meaning decisively round to ‘fist’ (just at about the same time as the NEB preferred ‘spade’!).

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CD 11. 6; cf. Rabin’s note.16 But, if the term really means a fist, then there is no clear or meaningful connection with g-r-p ‘sweep’. The distance one has to go to find an etymology is well shown by Rabin himself, who, deciding for the sense ‘fist’, offers as compari sons the Socotri grff ‘courber’ (i.e. ‘to bend, to crook’) and the Amharic gdrfaffa ‘obese’. Such comparisons, however, are so extremely remote—in time, in linguistic geography, and in mean ing (plus, in the case of the second of the two words, the fact that the word seems not to exist at all)17—as to constitute a clear admission that we know of no etymology at all. If Degrop means ‘fist’, as seems very probable, there is no more to be done than to say that this is the meaning and that no connections of significance with words anywhere else are known. These are not isolated examples: this happens again and again. Take the words Dakzar, Dakzdrl, DakzarTyut, tolerably well-evidenced words, understood to mean ‘cruel’ and ‘cruelty’. There are a dozen or so cases in the Bible plus some in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Usage and meaning are fairly clear; but the fact is that we have no etymology to offer for this word, there seems to be just no sub stantial cognate evidence. The same happens with the fairly common word Deden, which designated a sort of base or socket, upon which were set the planks or pillars of the Mosaic tabernacle. It has been customary to connect this with Akkadian adattu which, in turn, was supposed to mean ‘nest’ or ‘resting-place’.18 But the CAD (A, p. 110) now makes it clear that adattu does not mean ‘nest’ or anything similar: it is a succulent part of a reed, used for fodder, and it is irrelevant to our Hebrew word on semantic grounds. The meaning is clear but there is simply no significant etymological material. I stressed in my preliminary remarks that much etymological study in Hebrew is essentially linked with inner-Hebrew lexical relations, which it is used to clarify. Often however this does not 16 Ch. Rabin, The Zadokite Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 55, note 2 on verse 6. 17 The Socotri word is quoted after W. Leslau, Lexique soqotri, p. 116, but I think the supposed Amharic word is quoted in error. It does not occur in any dictionary, including the Amharic-Amharic ones. I consulted the late Stefan Strelcyn, F.B.A., about this and he wrote to me to say ‘I do not know this word’ (letter of 12 June 1979). 18 E.g. WB, p. 16a.

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work. A good example lies in the word (or words) Dob. On the one hand we have a clear case meaning ‘wineskins’ in Job 32. 19; it seems to be agreed that this is some sort of skin or leather bottle. It occurs only here. But we also have the familiar Dob that brings us into the world of ghosts and necromancy. The word appears to be used both for the ghost and for the necromancer, the one who divined or consulted through the ghosts of the dead. The famous Witch of Endor was such a one, an Deset bacalat Dob, a woman who possessed an Dob. Now does this pair of words belong together or not? And, in either case, what sort of comparative information can be found? For the first Dob, the skin bottle, no one seems to have any cognate evidence to put forward. For the second word, the one in the world of ghosts, several comparative suggestions have been put forward, of which I will at this point mention three. Firstly, some have thought of a connection with an Arabic Daba ‘return’; but I find no probability in this, for it seems to be suggested by the modern French revenant ‘ghost’ which, if confirmed, would be an interesting parallel but in itself hardly constitutes evidence. Secondly, Rabin has pointed to an api ‘sacrificial pit’ in Hittite, surely an extremely remote suggestion, being phonologically not very close, semantically quite distant, and unlikely in principle since there are no features of the relevant passages that suggest reasons why a Hittite term should be used. Thirdly, some have pointed to the Ugaritic name or term DelDeb; for instance, so Albright. But this again is unlikely: it has nothing necessarily to do with ghosts, it is more likely to be connected with the moon, cf. the Ugaritic nkl wDeb (also Akkadian epithets of the god Sin). Thus the extra-Hebrew evidence suggests the conclusion that the ety mology is unknown. Can we, however, see a sort of inner-Hebrew etymology, in other words can Dob ‘ghost’ be somehow explained on the basis of Dob ‘leathern bottle’? One such argument came from the distin guished Semitist Nöldeke, who pointed out the similarity between two words in different Semitic languages, a Syriac zakkürä ‘ghost called up from the dead’ and an Arabic zukra ‘small bag, wine skin’.19 The argument goes thus: the bag of skin has a common 19 Nöldeke pointed out this similarity but I am not sure just how much of the following argument was intended by him. His note on the matter, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 28, 1874, 667 n., is really a marginal note and principally on another subject.

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semantic element with the stomach, and the calling up of the ghost is connected with ventriloquism; the Septuagint quite frequently used έγγαστρίμυθος for Hebrew Dob. If there is a connection between two words with radical consonants z-k-r, the one meaning a skin bottle or bag, the other a ghost, even if these are not in the same language, we can therefore suppose that the two meanings of Hebrew Dob are similarly related. Philologically, however, this line of reasoning will not hold together. There is no reason on the basis of the Hebrew, as apart from the Septuagint, to suppose that ventriloquism came into the matter at all; and even the LXX έγγαστρίμυθος probably did not specify ventriloquism but meant only the general sense of ‘person who delivers oracles through supernatural and magical means’.20 Philologically also, Syriac zakkura surely came from the Akkadian zakaru with the sense ‘call upon, call up’, but Arabic zukra ‘bag’ can hardly come from the same root, since that would have had the consonants dh-k-r in Arabic.21 In the end, therefore, we find that this argument does not give us an analogy that will establish a relation between the two senses in Hebrew as if they came from one common meaning. We therefore have to register two separate words Dob in Hebrew and accept that the etymology of both is unknown. It would be tedious to multiply examples, but here is another of the same general type. Hebrew has a word DagappTm, plural, used only by Ezekiel; I think it means ‘troops’. We also have, once, in the Dead Sea Hodayot an instance which seems quite clearly to mean the banks of a river: ‘the streams of Belial go over all the lofty banks’ (1QH 3. 29). Here then are two similar, yet sharply differentiated, words in Hebrew: does etymology help us to dis criminate between the two? No, it does not; on the contrary, far from helping us to discriminate between the two, it does not tell us anything about either. For the word meaning ‘troops’ the classical etymological approach has been simple: the word comes from, or is cognate with, the Akkadian agappu, Aramaic D-g-p ‘wing’; and originally this was the ‘wing’ of an army, hence troops in general, 20 The term was used in Greek primarily of persons who delivered oracles through this form of speech; the spread of its use in the Greek Bible suggests that the reference was not to the mode of speech but to the general associations of theurgy and necromancy. 21 See Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, p. 196b.

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and cf. Latin ala as a unit of cavalry. But all along the line this fails to work. The Akkadian word is kappu and agappu is a less common variant spelling. Moreover, kappu is the wing of a bird, it is the arm or hand, the lobe of a lung, a part of a horse’s bit, and the region of the eyebrow and eyelids, but nowhere does it have the slightest thing to do with armies, although armies are very well represented in Akkadian texts. There is not the slightest hint that Akkadian kappu is relevant: of course it could be relevant, but there is not the slightest positive evidence for it. Similarly, on the Hebrew side there is no trace of any meaning like ‘wings’ or ‘flanks’ or ‘different sides’ of an army: the Ezekiel text gives us no ground to think of any other than the general meaning ‘troops’. As for the other case in the Hodayot, the sense ‘river bank’ is clear there and also later, in the Talmud, but there is no trace of a connection with the Akkadian kappu nor indeed, so far as I know, with any other term.22 Here is a case of another kind, where an etymology can easily be found but there is reason to suppose that the word will not fit into it. At I Sam. 2. 36 one speaks of doing something for an Dagdra of money/silver and a piece of bread. It has been customary to attach this word Dagdra, which occurs only here in the Bible, to the familiar Akkadian agaru and related Aramaic words, all meaning ‘hire’. Thus we have a line of authorities who say that it is a ‘fee’, a ‘payment’, of money. The other opinion, which seems to be better based, is that this is not a word for a ‘fee’ but a word for a tiny monetary unit. This is the way in which the ancient versions took it: LXX οβολός, Targum meca, Vulgate nummus. The point is lost if we take it as ‘fee’: what goes with the small piece of bread is the very small monetary unit. Modern Israel, in reusing Dagora for a very small coin of its currency, is correctly following the sense. But the consequence is that, having gained a sense, we have lost our etymology; for, if the word means a particular and very small monetary unit, we cannot so easily derive it from a word meaning ‘hire’. Thus, though we have available a good Semitic root, it may be that the etymology is unknown. Or, on the other hand, if we 22 WB, p. 1la rightly observes the absence of a military use comparable with that of Latin ala, and prefers therefore to look in the direction of an affinity with Arabic juff, jaff \ said to mean a company or body of people. One must, however, be wary of this also, since the common meaning of this Arabic root is ‘dry’.

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were to be adventurous, we might suppose that the noun derives from Dagar ‘gather’, which is the verb of this root actually active in Hebrew, and that an Dagora was a small handful of tiny monetary tokens, as in Greek δραχμή was derived from δράσσομαι, being what a hand might hold of small tokens such as spits or nails (this was the original sense of οβολός). This is possible but it remains speculative: in particular, though Dagar is a verb in active use in the Bible, it is used only of the gathering of food. It may be that once again we should admit that no etymology is known for our word. Not only minor and rare elements of the Hebrew lexicon, but also quite prominent and well-evidenced ones, may be without substantial cognate evidence such as would constitute a thorough etymological base. Take for instance the root lexeme b-g-d, from which we have the common noun beged, the most frequent general term for clothes or garments, and the verb ‘be treacherous’ with a number of associated formations meaning ‘treachery’, ‘treacherous’ and so on. But large areas of the Semitic languages seem simply to have no comparable term: Akkadian, it seems, has none, Ethiopic has none, Aramaic does not have it in any of its numerous branches, Ugaritic does not have it either, and, as for Arabic, we have only a faint echo, if a real one at all, in bijad, said to be some kind of beduin garment, and a verb bajad ‘deceive’ registered only for the remote dialect of Dathina. Within the main areas of the ancient Semitic languages Hebrew b-g-d, in either of its two very different senses, has scarcely any echo. The case of b-g-d brings us to another of the functions of etymology, as it has been used in the lexicography of Hebrew, namely that of providing a bridge to cover the semantic gaps between sets of actual and existing Hebrew words. We already saw an example of this, above, in the words meaning ‘angel, messenger’ on the one hand and ‘work’ on the other. But, though it is pleasant when this works, it often does not work; and the relation between beged ‘garment’ and bagad ‘be treacherous’ is a good example of the latter. Even if we accept the tenuous etymological comparison with a South Arabian dialect, this does nothing to bridge the gap, for the gap is there in the comparative material just as it is in the Hebrew. One can of course say on purely logical grounds, as various people have long said, that there could be a relation between ‘covering’ or ‘clothing’ on the one hand and ‘deceiving’ and the like on the other; but the point is that this is a purely

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logical speculation, there is no philological evidence of it at all.23 There is no Hebrew verb b-g-d that means ‘cover’ or anything like that. The idea that there was a term meaning ‘cover’, and that it developed in one direction to mean ‘clothes’ (but lost its sense ‘cover’) and in another direction to mean ‘treacherous’ (but lost its sense ‘deceptive’, for ‘deceptive’ is a good deal less than ‘treach erous’) is of course logically possible but there is really no lin guistic evidence in the languages to support it. The existence in Arabic of forms derived from labisa ‘clothe’, ‘wear’ and meaning ‘deceive’ (as well as ‘be obscure’, ‘be dubious’, etc.) is probably a clear case of metaphorical extension from a well-known term, which retains its full range of meanings including those from which the extension has started out. With Hebrew b-g-d we have nothing like that. If there is a connection between the two Hebrew terms, we have to leave it open that it may have taken place by a chain of connections that logically are entirely adventitious and that are quite unpredictable and unknowable from the linguistic evidence that we have. It is more probable that the two Hebrew terms have simply no etymological connection between them. This situation is not uncommon, but recurs in several important sets of terms, of which I will mention two. The first is the group of words of the root z-k-r. The typical verb of this group, in Hebrew zakar, means ‘remember’; but the noun form, zakar, is ‘male, masculine’. We move to Arabic, and the corresponding words display exactly the same meanings. In Akkadian the verb is more ‘call, speak’ than ‘remember’, but this can be accounted for through a middle term like ‘mention’; the noun again is ‘male’. Interestingly, in spite of their strong tendency to over-etymologize, the major Hebrew dictionaries hardly even tried to bridge this gap in their etymological sections. BDB, p. 271a, in the entry on zakar ‘male’, said ‘relation to above yj obscure’, though it went on to mention, faint-heartedly, one or two attempts; GB, p. 197b, mentioned the guess that the basic sense might be stechen ‘prick’, but there is of course no word of this root which actually means this in any of the relevant languages; and the most recent lexicographer, 23 The series of supposedly analogical cases set out by Palache, Semantic Notes on the Hebrew Lexicon (Leiden: Brill, 1959), p. 10, and requoted by WB, p. 104a, Cohen, p. 42b, is a good illustration of the quite dubious etymologies that can be conjured up in the endeavour to demonstrate such a logical connection on a lin guistic level.

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Baumgartner, WB, p. 259b, is doubtless wise in entering ‘Etym. ign\ Schottroff similarly says that there is absolutely no Anhaltspunkt for the establishment of a connection between the two words, quoting also Fronzaroli.24 Another prominent example of the same kind is expressed in Hebrew by the verb gâlâ, which has two conspicuously separated meanings: firstly, ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal’, and, secondly, ‘go into exile’. If we turn to comparative methods to elucidate this, what do we find? In Arabic, exactly the same thing as in Hebrew; and in other Semitic languages the meanings appear to group themselves either with one or with the other or with both, but nowhere furnish a bridge between the two. In fact, as far as etymological guidance takes us, the two are so sharply distinct that it would be perfectly reasonable to distinguish them as two quite distinct (though homophonous and homographie) verbs: semantically, for instance, they are much farther apart than the cânâ ‘answer’ and the cânâ ‘sing’ which we distinguished before. It is very doubtful whether lexicographers have done wisely in maintaining gâlâ as one single but polysémie verb. There is no possibility of making a unitary statement about it on this basis.25 The fact that they have tried to do so is evidence, if any were needed, that formal and comparative evidence has counted for more in the lexicographical tradition than semantic indications for determining the organization of material in the lexicon. Thus, whether with common and central terms like beged and gâlâ, or with rare terms and hapax legomena, the intransigent fact remains that many words, and relations between words, which in the past have been obscure remain so today in spite of the atten tion given to etymological explanations. In Ezek. 21. 20 God says: T have put the Dibhâ of the sword against all their gates’. Con textually all sorts of things could fit here: it could be the flash of the sword, the whirr or noise of the sword, the face of the sword, the edge of the sword, the violence of the sword, the danger of the 24 Schottroff in Jenni and Westermann’s Theologisches H an dw örterbu ch zu m i. 508; Fronzaroli in the A tti della viii/19, 1964, 244. 25 An explanation such as that ‘Emigration or exile can be understood as an uncovering of the land’ (Zobel, in Botterweck and Ringgren, Theological D ic tio n a ry o f the O ld Testam ent (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), ii. 478, can surely not be taken seriously.

A lten T estam ent (Munich: Kaiser, 1971), A ccadem ia N azionale d ei L incei , Rendiconti,

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sword. There is nothing in the context that will tell us specifically more than that. But there is no really good comparative illumina tion to be found anywhere. NEB says ‘the threat of the sword’, and it is probable that this is based on the Arabic verb wabbakha, which however does not really mean ‘threaten’ but rather ‘reproach’. In any case the Hebrew form begins with Daleph. The variant spelling in Arabic with Dalif instead of wa is found in the Lisan but there is no supporting evidence from texts, and even in the Lisan there is a note that replacement of wa by Dalif is rare when a follows. In fact the suggestion is no more than a remote guess, and comparative study leaves us without any real clue to the meaning of this word. Either it is a textual error, and the real text should be the familiar tibhat ‘slaughter (by)’, implying that the first letter of the word had been mistakenly copied; and this is the way in which Baumgartner, very justifiably, still takes it; or else it is a Hebrew word, with no parallels or cognates known, the meaning of which is anything in the variety of contextually possible terms. To sum up, then, up to this point: it is true that comparative and etymological interests are interlinked with the inner-Hebrew rela tions between root lexemes and actual words and the meaning of both; and it is true that in certain cases the comparative infor mation serves to help in organizing the Hebrew material, separating out the components of it and making their relations intelligible. It has been a mistake, however, if this function has been overempha sized, as it sometimes has been: for what is sometimes true is not always true. Practical experience suggests that for many relations which are problematic in the Hebrew lexicon comparative infor mation should not be expected to help. This is not because comparative information may be semantically misleading, though that is also true, but because there is no comparative information that is to the point, or because it will only lead to a duplication of the situation which is already apparent in Hebrew itself. For the basic reasons behind all this we can turn to the work of David Cohen. In the past it is probably true that most etymo logical work in the Semitic languages has been done from the point of view of one particular language or another: at least within dictionaries this has been so, for a Hebrew dictionary has sought to present the cognates which are relevant for a particular Hebrew word. It therefore by the nature of its undertaking filters out the irrelevant matter. But the extent of the irrelevant matter is pre cisely the most striking fact of the entire question. Cohen’s die-

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tionary brings together all the Semitic material on an equal basis, and all words with a particular root lexeme, i.e. the sequence x-y-z, are brought together whatever the degree of their semantic rela tionship or absence of same. The importance of this for the future of Semitic etymological research is enormous. For, in particular, his work demonstrates systematically what was already manifest to those who cared to think about it, namely that for many given Semitic roots, formally defined, i.e. defined as the root b-r-h or the root g-d-l, one does not find a single concept or meaning from which there ramify various derived or related meanings, but on the contrary one finds a list of a plurality of terms, perhaps three or four, perhaps as many as ten, to which words in this or that Semitic language are attached, but for which in most cases there is no overarching conceptual unity and no prospect that further etymological research will create such a unity. Take for instance the root b-r-h as displayed by Cohen (p. 83): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

‘to flee’: so Hebrew, Ugaritic, etc. a name of various animals, chamois, gazelle, etc. ‘to shine, make clear’, and also various colours barh ‘torment’ in Arabic, to which Hebrew barTah and the Ugaritic parallel are (questionably) ascribed ‘bar’ of a door, familiar in Hebrew and elsewhere ‘good’, ‘exciting the admiration’, so in Arabic and perhaps Harari ‘to draw away the seal from a well’, in South Arabian a Tigre word for a mixture of water and milk

This is by no means an exceptional instance. Another good example is furnished by D-d-m (Cohen, p. 9): 1. 2. 3. 4.

‘red’, familiar in Hebrew ‘man’, also familiar in Hebrew ‘land, surface of earth’, also familiar in Hebrew Arabic Didam9 ‘something eaten along with bread, enrichment of bread’ 5. Akkadian adamu ‘procure, obtain’ 6. Amharic ddme ‘age’ 7. Amharic ddmo ‘large hut with terrace’

Clearly, future research might provide us with semantic paths that would bridge over the gaps between one and another of these units in either set; and Cohen himself discusses these possibilities

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where appropriate. But it is most unlikely that they will ever be reduced to a unity. Thus, contrary to the idea rather vaguely held in much Semitic study, the typical Semitic root, formally defined, does not lead us back to a conceptual unity but rather to a variety of unconnected semantic possibilities which can be listed but can not be explained through derivation from one another or from a putative common ancestor. These different possibilities are taken up and realized in different ways in different words in various groups of the language family. In the future much more of the comparative and etymological work that has hitherto been done by the lexicographer of individual languages such as Hebrew will have to be passed over to the work of pan-Semitic lexicography of the type initiated by Cohen. This will reduce the burden on the Hebrew lexicographer and enable the student of Hebrew to obtain a much better overall view of the shape and character of the Semitic lexicon than could ever be provided in even the best etymological work starting from Hebrew in particular. It remains obvious, indeed, that the work of the pan-Semitic etymological lexicographer will be reciprocally dependent on that of the lexicographers of the individual languages. Take the Hebrew phrase nahas bariah, mentioned just above. Is this a ‘wicked ser pent’ as Cohen thinks, or is it a fleeing serpent, a tawny serpent or something else? If it is one of these latter, then this instance will have to move from Cohen’s no. 4 and be attached to one of his other numbers. He is of course well prepared to allow for this, and it makes no difference to the validity of his method. Sometimes the lexicographical tradition of the individual lan guages is at fault, not seldom as a result of its own etymological speculations. A good example can be found in the lexeme s-p-d which means ‘mourn, lament’ and is well evidenced in a long series of languages with this sense. Various dictionaries, for instance in Ugaritic and Akkadian, suggest that this derives from an etymo logical sense ‘beat (the breast)’,26 which of course theoretically 26 J. Aistleitner, Wörterbuch der ugaritischen Sprache (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967), p. 222, no. 1944, gives: ‘die Brüste schlagen (in der Trauer)’, thus seeming to make the beating the ultimate component and the mourning incidental; simi larly von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1965), p. 1024, gives for Ugaritic, Hebrew and Aramaic the indication ‘aus Trauer die Brust schlagen’, although for Akkadian itself he gives simply the meaning ‘trauern’.

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makes good sense and has partial analogy with common terms like the Greek κόπτεσθαι. But so far as I can see there is no evidence in any of these languages that the beating of the breast was the specific meaning. In Greek κόπτω was a common term for any kind of beating, but this is imply not true of s-p-d. The idea that this was the meaning may well have arisen from Hebrew itself, and there from a rather obscure passage, Isa. 32. 12, which has the collocation cal-sadayim sopedTm, commonly taken as ‘beat the breast’. But it is very doubtful if this is a right construction here, and whether it can really suffice to validate supposition that s-p-d ever means ‘strike’ in any sense.27 The only major evidence which shows it to be other than merely ‘mourn, lament’ is the Syriac, and here it seems to mean something more like ‘fear, tremble’; and this, if right, suggests a quite different etymological direction. The uncertainty of etymological research, which is implied in much of the foregoing, is of course no new observation. Meillet in his work on Greek remarks that ‘non-specialists are often not sufficiently aware that, for every certain etymology, the dictionaries offer ten that are doubtful’, and he adds that ‘there is only a small number of Greek words of which Indo-European offers a certain etymology’.281 do not know whether this is still the opinion among Greek linguists. In any case it is worthy of note that Meillet connected these remarks with observations on the importance of loanwords from outside Greek, i.e. from non-Indo-European lan guages of the environment. In Hebrew also there are such loan words, and indeed there may be more of them than we are aware. 27 Wildberger is right in his recent commentary (Jesaia, Biblischer Kommentar, Neukirchen, 1978, p. 1263) in seeing that the preposition cal will here probably indicate the thing that has to be mourned, as in the two phrases that immediately follow, and that therefore the word for ‘breasts’ here is probably a textual error. The phrase should therefore mean something like ‘mourn for the fields’ and not ‘beat upon the breasts’. This is indeed no new idea, and similar suggestions were made long ago. But it has not always been observed that, if this is agreed, the small degree of evidence for ‘beat’ as basic meaning of s-p-d disappears. In any case the Syriac meaning ‘tremble’ points in a very different direction. 28 Meillet, Aperçu d ’une histoire de la langue grecque (7th edn., 1930), p. 62. His own words are worth quoting: ‘Les personnes qui ne sont pas du métier ne savent pas assez que, pour une étymologie sûre, les dictionnaires en offrent dix qui sont douteuses et dont, en appliquant une méthode rigoureuse, on ne saurait faire la preuve . . . Les étymologistes visent donc à interpréter chaque mot grec par com paraison avec quelque autre langue indo-européenne. Mais, en fait, il n’y a qu’un petit nombre de mots grecs dont l’indo-européen fournisse une étymologie certaine.’

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But it does not seem that their existence is a major cause for our etymological uncertainties. In this paper attention has been directed almost entirely to the problems of inner-Semitic etymology itself, for it is there that the major problems assuredly lie.

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