Hebrew Studies 58 (2017): 81–97 LEXICAL ISOGLOSSES OF ARCHAIC HEBREW: ( ְּפ ִל ִיליםDEUT 32:31) AND ( ֵּכןJUDG 5:15) AS CASE STUDIES* Tania Notarius Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of the Free State Abstract: Archaic Biblical Hebrew is a phase of the linguistic development preceding by several centuries the Classical stage of the Judean Kingdom. Archaic poetic texts belong historically to the Early Iron age— the stage of their early literarization—they were transmitted for several centuries, either orally or in a sporadic written fixation, before being incorporated into longer prosaic compositions at a later stage, which was also a stage of their early perception. Wider socio-linguistic and lexicological discussion illustrates this model.
This paper starts with a short discussion on what I consider as phenomena of the most archaic stage of the linguistic development of Hebrew as attested in the corpus of the Hebrew Bible (sec. 1). In order to substantiate my view, I will concentrate on some cross-cultural and sociolinguistic aspects of the literarization process of the ancient poems (sec. 2). The main focus of the paper will be on lexicon, namely on paths for adopting unusual and archaic vocabulary into an “updated” literary version (sec. 3). Two case studies will be studied: from the perspective of cognate data in Semitic languages the lexeme ( ְּפ ִל ִיליםDeut 32:31) is to be related to the root p-l-l with the meaning “be cracked, parched,” understood as a disgraceful description of one’s enemies (sec. 3.1). As for ֵּכן (Judg 5:15)—in view of the distribution of the lexemes for “being” in different cognate dialects (sec. 3.2), I suggest that this form is to be correlated with the meaning “be” of the root k-w-n and represents a local vernacular isogloss. 1. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS ARCHAIC BIBLICAL HEBREW? The corpus of the Hebrew Bible represents diverse language types— stylistically, chronologically, and dialectologically. Archaic Biblical * Many aspects of the paper were discussed with Clinton Bailey, Aaron Koller, Edward Greenstein,and Aaron Hornkohl; I thank them for the very meaningful comments. All possible mistakes are mine. A preliminary draft of the paper was presented at the on-line Colloquium of the Department of Hebrew Language of the University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa) and at the 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, Israel), and the author greatly benefited from the questions and comments of the participants.
Tania Notarius Hebrew is a stage of the linguistic development that chronologically precedes the Biblical Hebrew of the formative period (Classical / Standard or Early Biblical Hebrew); in this sense it can be called proto-Hebrew.1 The linguistic characteristics of this stage are identifiable in the corpus of old poems on the basis of several factors: their contrast to corresponding Classical Biblical Hebrew tokens and their match to the cognate phenomena in ancient Northwest Semitic languages.2 Some archaic features are sporadically preserved in texts representative of Classical Biblical Hebrew
1. For the traditional studies of archaic Hebrew, see W. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of the Two Contrasting Faiths (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968); F. M. Cross and D. N. Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry (Missoula: Scholars, 1975); D. A. Robertson, Linguistic Evidence in Dating Early Hebrew Poetry (SBLDS 3; Missoula: Scholars, 1972); C. Cohen, Biblical Hapax Legomena in the Light of Akkadian and Ugaritic (Missoula: Scholars, 1978); S. Morag, “ עיונים לשוניים במשלי בלעם:( ”רובדי קדמותLayers of antiquity: Some linguistic observations on the oracles of Balaam) Tarbiz 50 (1981): 1–24; A. F. Rainey, “The Ancient Hebrew Prefix Conjugation in the Light of the Amarna Canaanite,” HS 27 (1986): 5–19. The traditional approach was criticized by I. Young, “The ‘Archaic’ Poetry of the Pentaeuch in the MT, Samaritan Pentateuch, and 4QExodc,” Abr Nahrain 35 (1998):74–83; Y. Bloch, “ אימתי? בחינה מחודשת של תיאוריית השירה- אז ישיר [( ”המקראית הקדומהThen he sang—when? A reexamination of the theory of early biblical poetry] MA thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005); R. Vern, Dating Archaic Biblical Hebrew Poetry: A Critique of the Linguistic Arguments (Piscataway: Gorgias, 2011). For more updated research, see T. Notarius, The Verb in Archaic Biblical Poetry: A Discursive, Typological, and Historical Investigation of the Tense System (Leiden: Brill, 2013); N. Pat-El and A. Wilson-Wright, “Features of Archaic Biblical Hebrew and the Linguistic Dating Debate,” HS 54 (2013): 387–410; P. Bekins, Object Marking in Biblical Hebrew Poetry (forthcoming). See the research reviews in A. Mandell, “Biblical Hebrew, Archaic,” in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (ed. G. Khan; Leiden: Brill, 2013); A. Gianto, “Archaic Biblical Hebrew,” in A Handbook of Biblical Hebrew (ed. W. R. Garr and S. E. Fassberg; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2016), pp. 19–29. 2. The principles of contrast and external evidence are rooted in the method of A. Hurvitz, “Linguistic Criteria for Dating Problematic Biblical Texts,” Hebrew Abstracts 14 (1973): 74–79 or A. Hurvitz, A Concise Lexicon of Late Biblical Hebrew: Linguistic Innovations in the Writings of the Second Temple Period (Leiden: Brill, 2014). The study of the historical and literary context of the poems is also important (cf. the principle of distribution by Hurvitz) but will be left out of the present essay; compare, for example, B. Halpern, “The Resourceful Israelite Historian: The Song of Deborah and Israelite Historiography,” HTR 76 (1983): 379–401; N. Na’aman, “Literary and Topographical Notes on the Battle of Kishon (Judges iv–v),” VT 40 (1990): 424–425; J. C. de Moor, “The Twelve Tribes in the Song of Deborah,” VT 43 (1993): 483–493; T. L. Fenton, “Hebrew Poetic Structure as a Basis for Dating,” in In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel: Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar (ed. J. Day; London: T & T Clark, 2004), pp. 386–409; S. T. Hollis, “Two Hymns as Praise Poems, Royal Ideology, and History in Ancient Israel and Ancient Egypt: A Comparative Reflection,” in Egypt, Canaan and Israel: History, Imperialism, Ideology (ed. S. Bar, D. Kahn, and J. Shirley; Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 115–135; C. Cohen, “Pharaoh’s ‘ שלישיםThird-Man Charioteers’ (Exod. 14.7; 15.4) and the Unnoticed Literary Allusion to the Battle of Qadesh in the Song of the Sea,” in Visions of Life in Biblical Times: Essays in Honor of Meir Lubetski. (ed. C. Gottlieb, C. Cohen, and M. Gruber; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2015), pp. 17–46; M. S. Smith, Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), to mention just a few.
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Lexical Isoglosses (particularly in poetry), but the old poems reveal the archaic language type in a more consistent and systematic way.3 Due to the meager character of data, our knowledge of proto-Hebrew is not complete and partly reconstructed; the reconstruction is carried out in terms of the historical-comparative analysis, enriched by the methods of linguistic typology.4 The assertion that Archaic Biblical Hebrew is an additional stage of transition from ancient Northwest Semitic epigraphic data to the Hebrew of the Iron Age (both epigraphic and biblical) allows for the illumination of linguistic changes in a more refined and meticulous way.5 Heterogeneity is an intrinsic attribute of any linguistic data; Classical Biblical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew are no exception.6 Linguistic diversity is evidenced in the ancient Northwest Semitic epigraphic material of the Late Bronze Age; it is typical of early Canaanite and Aramaic alphabetic epigraphic data.7 The archaic language type of Hebrew demon3. Compare Y. Bloch, “The Prefixed Perfective and the Dating of Early Hebrew Poetry—A Re-Evaluation,” VT 59 (2009): 34–70; Y. Bloch, “The Prefixed Perfective in the Construction אז יקטל and Its Later Replacement by the Long Prefixed Verbal Form: A Syntactic and Text-Critical Analysis,” JNSL 36 (2010): 49–74 for the analysis of sporadic uses of narrative yiqtol in different corpus parts: such practice is not an evidence of the archaic language type due to its non-systemic character. The requirement of systematicity, advocated in T. Notarius (The Verb in Archaic Biblical Poetry, pp. 273– 274), correlates with Hurvitz’s criterion of concentration; compare also the discussion in J. Joosten, “Pseudo-Classicisms in Late Biblical Hebrew, in Ben Sira, and in Qumran Hebrew,” in Sirach, Scrolls, and Sages (ed. T. Muraoka and J. F. Elwolde; Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 146–159. 4. See N. Pat-El and A. Wilson-Wright, “Features of Archaic Biblical Hebrew”; P. Bekins, Transitivity and Object Marking in Biblical Hebrew: An Investigation of the Object Preposition ʾet (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014); P. Bekins, Object Marking; on the role of the linguistic typology in Biblical Hebrew historical studies see the discussion in T. Notarius, “The Second Person Volitives in Hebrew and Ancient North-West Semitic,” in Advances in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics: Data, Methods, and Analyses (ed. A. Moshavi and T. Notarius; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2017), pp. 101–125. 5. Compare the analysis in P. Bekins, Object Marking; S. Sanders, “Dating the Earliest Hebrew Verbal System: The Role of Dialect Variety in Ancient Linguistic Change,” in Dennis Pardee Festschrift (forthcoming); T. Notarius, “Narrative Tenses in Archaic Hebrew in the NWS Linguistic Context,” in Neue Beiträge zur Semitistik. Fünftes Treffen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Semitistik in der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft vom 15.–17. Februar an der Universität Basel (ed. V. Golinets, H. Jenni, H.-P. Mathys, and S. Sarasin; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2015), pp. 223–246. 6. Compare A. Gianto, “Archaic Biblical Hebrew,” in A Handbook of Biblical Hebrew (ed. W. R. Garr and S. E. Fassberg; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2016), pp. 19–29; G. Rendsburg, “Hurvitz Redux: On the Continued Scholarly Inattention to a Simple Principle of Hebrew Philology,” in Biblical Hebrew: Chronology and Typology (ed. I. Young; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2003), pp. 104–128; J. Naudé, “The Transitions of Biblical Hebrew in the Perspective of Language Change and Diffusion,” in Biblical Hebrew: Studies in Chronology and Typology (ed. I. Young; London: Clark, 2003), pp. 150– 163. 7. On the linguistic diversity in the Ugaritic corpus see D. Pardee, The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West Semitic Literary Composition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); El-Amarna Canaano-Akkadian—E. von Dassow, “Canaanite in Cuneiform.” JAOS 124 (2004): 641–674; E. von Dassow, “Peripheral Akkadian Dialects, or Akkadography of Local Languages?” in Language in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 53rd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (ed. L. Kogan et
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Tania Notarius strates considerable linguistic diversity as well, apparently in correlation with different dialects and stylistic conventions.8 Particularly striking is that selected linguistic features of proto-Hebrew correlate with some phenomena of Late Biblical Hebrew; one has to distinguish between the genuine Late Biblical Hebrew phenomena that periodically appear in some parts of the corpus, indicating a non-consistent, mixed language type, and phenomena merely reminiscent of Late Biblical Hebrew usages but that actually, by means of explicit typological and systemic differentiation, can be interpreted as genuinely archaic.9 There may be different explanation for these random Archaic Biblical Hebrew / Late Biblical Hebrew correlations. On the one hand, some Late Biblical Hebrew phenomena may be remnants of dialects other than Classical Biblical Hebrew, but continued from Archaic Biblical Hebrew. On the other hand, these correlations may be sporadic, caused by circularity of linguistic change and typical developmental paths. Only if a phenomenon is represented as an initial stage of linguistic development rooted in otherwise consistent archaic language type can it be taken as an illustration of the archaic language type of Biblical Hebrew.10 al.; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2010), pp. 895–926; Old Aramaic—J. Tropper, “Dialeckvielfalt und Sprachwandel im fruhen Aramaischen Soziolinguistische Überlegungen,” in The World of the Aramaeans III: Studies in Language and Literature in Honour of Paul-Eugene Dion (ed. P. M. M. Daviau, J. W. Wevers, and M. Weigl; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), pp. 213–222; Phoenician epigraphy—H. Gzella, “The Linguistic Position of Old Byblian,” in Linguistic Studies in Phoenician (ed. R. D. Holmstedt and A. Schade; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), pp. 170–198; and compare also S. Sanders, “Dating the Earliest Hebrew Verbal System.” For a case study in Judean dialectology compare G. Rendsburg and W. Schniedewind, “The Siloam Tunnel Inscription: Historical and Linguistic Perspectives,” IEJ 60 (2010): 188–203. 8. Compare the discussion in T. Notarius, “Narrative Tenses in Archaic Hebrew.” For different dialectal features in some parts of the corpus see G. Rendsburg, “Israelian Hebrew Features in Genesis 49,” Maarav 8 (1992): 161–170; G. Rendsburg, “A Comprehensive Guide to Israelian Hebrew: Grammar and Lexicon,” Orient 38 (2003): 5–35; G. Rendsburg, “Israelian Hebrew Features in Deuteronomy 33,” in Mishneh Todah (ed. N. S. Fox, D. A. Glatt-Gilad, and M. J. Williams; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009), pp. 167–183; S. Izre’el, “Canaanite Varieties in the Second Millennium BC: Can We Dispense with Anachronism?” Orient 38 (2003): 66–104; E. A. Knauf, “Deborah’s Language: Judges Ch. 5 in Its Hebrew and Semitic Context,” in Studia Semitica et Semitohamitica (ed. B. Burtea, J. Tropper, and H. Younansardaroud; Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2005), pp. 167–182. 9. Compare the discussion in D. A. Robertson, Linguistic Evidence; C. H. Gordon, “North Israelite Influence on Postexilic Hebrew,” Israelite Exploration Journal 5 (1955): 85–88; S. Gevirtz, “Of Syntax and Style in the ‘Late Biblical Hebrew’—‘Old Canaanite’ Connection,” JANES 18 (1986): 25–29; T. Notarius, The Verb in Archaic Biblical Poetry, pp. 299–302. For a case of the second person volitives compare T. Notarius, “The Second Person Volitives,” pp. 117–118. 10. In terms of the present approach, this will be a principle of linguistic continuity, absent from Hurvitz’s method: the contextualization of a phenomenon within the continuous linguistic development is an important condition of historical-linguistic analysis; see the discussion in T. Notarius, “Historical Linguistics Is Not Text-Dating” (a review-essay of Dong-Hyuk Kim, Early Biblical Hebrew, Late Biblical Hebrew, and Linguistic Variability: A Sociolinguistic Evaluation of the Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts), HS 55 (2014): 101–109.
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Lexical Isoglosses All in all, the assumption of Archaic Biblical Hebrew, fragmentarily attested in some biblical material, is a hypothesis that allows for the explanation of the given data in the most economical and non-contradictory way. This assumption is not without problems. Perhaps the main difficulty with positing a pre-classical stage in Biblical Hebrew linguistic development is the chronological gap between the potential commitment to writing of the old poems and the date of their assumed early composition. If, as follows from the most recent socio-linguistic investigations, most of the Classical Biblical Hebrew writings were literarily shaped during the last two centuries preceding the final collapse of Judah in 586 BCE, namely in Late Neo-Assyrian and Early Neo-Babylonian periods, the old poems should have been composed a couple of centuries earlier, and if not written, transmitted orally in a relatively authentic form.11 2. THE OLD POEMS: A CHALLENGE OF ORALITY AND LITERARIZATION The socio-linguistic patterns of the oral textuality have been investigated for different literary traditions.12 Recently Aaron Koller addressed the problem of proper literary “comparanda” for the Song of Deborah:13
11. See the socio-linguistic investigation of S. L. Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); W. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); W. Schniedewind, A Social History of Hebrew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); J. Naudé, “Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew and a Theory of Language Change and Diffusion,” in Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew (ed. C. Miller-Naudé and Z. Zevit; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012), pp. 61–82. The conclusion is based on complex archaeological and epigraphic data, compare I. Finkelstein and N. Silverman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology: New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free, 2001); D. Carr, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); S. Faigenbaum-Golovin, A. Shaus, B. Sober, D. Levin, N. Na’aman, B. Sass, E. Turkel, E. Piasetzky, and I. Finkelstein, “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of Judah’s Military Correspondence Sheds Light on Composition of Biblical Texts,” PNAS 113.17 (2016): 4664–4669. 12. On the dichotomy of orality and textuality in general and in application to different literary traditions see, for example, J. Rubanovich, ed., Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World: Patterns of Interaction across the Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2015); C. Cooper, ed., Politics of Orality: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece (vol. 6; Leiden: Brill, 2007); M. Bachvarova, From Hittite to Homer: the Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For the “Homeric” question, see F. Montanari, A. Rengakos, and C. Tsagalis, eds., Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012). On patterns of orality in application to Ancient Hebrew literature, see S. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996); D. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); J. M. Hutton, The Transjordanian Palimpsest: The Overwritten Texts of Personal Exile and Transformation in the Deuteronomistic History (Berlin: de Gruyer, 2009). 13. A. Koller, “The Song of Deborah” (lecture given at the University of Haifa in May 2016). I thank the author for allowing me the use of his manuscript.
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Tania Notarius he turns to two blocks of data—the Egyptian military poetic texts of Ramesses and Merenptah14 and Arabic poetry.15 In spite of many shared features, the Egyptian and Arabic models represent different types of textuality: the Egyptian military songs were composed and put into writing promptly after the relevant historical events (together with parallel prose reports), while the Arabic oral poetic compositions were preserved in oral transmission for centuries before being committed to writing.16 Although the “Egyptian model” involves material chronologically closer to the biblical poems, Koller concludes that the “Arabic model” is closer typologically and provides a better parallel for the old Hebrew military songs.17 This model suggests that since the
14. Koller was concerned primarily with the Kadesh texts, which includes the poetic account of Ramesses’s famous battle at Kadesh in 1274 BCE; see A. Gardiner, The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); M. Lichtheim, “The Kadesh Battle Inscriptions of Ramses II,” in Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, vol 2: The New Kingdom (M. Lichtheim; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 57–72; B. Ockinga, “On the Interpretation of the Kadesh Record,” Chronique d'Égyptologie 62 (1987): 38–48; A. J. Spalinger, The Transformation of an Ancient Egyptian Narrative: P. Sallier III and the Battle of Kadesh (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002). Following Lichtheim, Koller emphasizes that the epic poem was a new and atypical genre of Egyptian poetry. 15. Both pre-Classical and oral Bedouin poetry are relevant for the discussion; see A. Musil, The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins (New York: American Geographic Society, 1928); J. Monroe, “Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry: The Problem of Authenticity,” Journal of Arabic Literature 3 (1972): 1–53; M. V. McDonald, “Orally Transmitted Poetry in Pre-Islamic Arabia and Other Pre-Literate Societies,” Journal of Arabic Literature 9 (1978): 14–31; C. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); A. Sowayan, Nabaṭi Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); M. Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978); M. Kurpershoek, Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia: An Edition with Translation and Introduction (vol. 1–2; Leiden: Brill, 1994–1995). 16. Koller admits that the narrative framework is compatible only with the “Egyptian model,” but many examples from oral Bedouin literature indicate that this is not necessarily the case; see the corpus of H. Palva, Artistic Colloquial Arabic: Traditional Narratives and Poems from al-Balqa' (Jordan) (StudOr 69; Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1992) or M. Kurpershoek, Oral Poetry and Narratives, which attest to the consistent combination of narrative framework and poetry. C. Bailey, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) brings typical examples of Bedouin poems and narrative frameworks transmitted together and compares this pattern to the biblical cases of Judges 4–5 and Exodus 14–15; he notices that while poems are transmitted with a considerable degree of accuracy, the narrative frameworks are more flexible and unsettled. 17. The conclusion is rooted in the factor of regionality, namely the idea that some cultural patterns are stable in certain regions within a consistent type of population; see E. J. van der Steen, Tribes and Territories in Transition: The Central East Jordan Valley in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Ages (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); E. J. van der Steen, Near Eastern Tribal Societies during the Nineteenth Century: Economy, Society and Politics between Tent and Town (Sheffield: Equinox, 2013). Although a direct comparison between ancient and modern tribal communities must be carried out with caution, a better understanding of modern structure provides useful insights into the history of the past; compare the introductory considerations in C. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survival (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. ix–xv, 1–2. Some general conceptions of tribalism and institutionalism are nowadays consistently applied in the archaeological, ethnographic, and historical study on the Ancient
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Lexical Isoglosses (semi-)nomadic society is to a great extent illiterate (or at least that writing plays a limited role in it), orality is a main avenue for preserving information and transmitting texts, poems in particular. Koller considers possible limits to the life-span of the orally transmitted poetic composition— about two to three centuries.18 Broader comparative literary material confirms this basic assumption; in different cultural environments, there are examples of poetic compositions surviving centuries of oral transmission and exhibiting typologically archaic language in comparison to that of the period of their written stabilization.19
Near East; compare J. Szuchman, ed., Nomads, Tribes, and the State in the Ancient Near East: CrossDisciplinary Perspectives (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009). 18. M. V. McDonald, “Orally Transmitted Poetry,” p. 30 estimates the period of oral transmission of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as about 250 years. Of particular interest are concrete cases attesting several generations of oral transmission: according to M. Kurpershoek, Oral Poetry and Narratives, 2:3, poems survived in a Bedouin clan for four generations, namely for some 120 years; compare also C. Bailey, “The Narrative Context of the Bedouin Qaṣīdaḫ-Poem,” Mihkare Hamirkaz Leheker Hafolqlor 3 (1972): 67–105 reports that the song that he heard from his informant, was already recorded by Musil (A. Musil, The Manners and Customs) some eighty years earlier, and C. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, pp. 122–123 represents the text as it arrived in five different recordings, the oldest of them dating to the mid-nineteenth century. Although the versions differ, the differences are mostly of quantitative rather than qualitative character, namely, the passages that coincide are textually quite consistent. The oral Soqotri corpus of V. Naumkin and L. Kogan, eds., Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature (vol. 1; Leiden: Brill, 2015), recorded at the beginning of the twenty-first century, includes many songs that were already published by D. H. Müller, Die Mehri- und Soqoṭri-Sprache (vols. 1–3; Wien: Hölder, 1902–1907) and remained mostly untouched during these hundred years of oral transmission, while Müller himself estimated that they were old folklore songs. On the status of an oral literary composition, compare F. Montanari, A. Rengakos, and C. Tsagalis, Homeric Contexts, p. 6: “a memorized oral text, i.e. one that is substantially stabilized, is equivalent to a written text.” 19. According to D. Pardee, The Ugaritic Texts, p. 25, the Ugaritic epic texts, linguistically different from the prose corpus, “represent the written form of oral traditions that go back centuries if not millennia”; for different theories about Ilimilku—the scribe who put these compositions to writing, see pp. 46–48. Sabaean written culture includes the official register of monumental and dedicatory inscriptions on stone and the vernacular register of miniscule texts on wooden sticks, which in practice represent the same linguistic system, but some very rare poetic pieces are strikingly different linguistically; compare P. Stein, “Aspekte von Sprachbewusstsein im antiken Südarabien,” in Sprachbewusstsein und Sprachkonzepte im Alten Orient, Alten Testament und rabbinischen Judentum (ed. J. Thon, G. Veltri, and E.-J. Waschke; Halle: ZIRS, 2012), pp. 39–42. According to Stein’s evaluation, the scarce representation of poetic genres does not imply their non-existence, but rather their primary setting within the realm of oral transmission. An extreme case is the Avestan corpus: according to scholarly estimation, a thousand years of careful oral transmission of texts in an ancient and mostly obscure dialect separate the literary stabilization of this corpus in oral tradition and the writing; compare A. Cantera, ed., The Transmission of the Avesta (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012); V. Naumkin and L. Kogan (Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature) emphasize in the commentaries that many songs in the Soqotri corpus have an archaic linguistic shape, contrasted to the contemporary Soqotri vernacular. As for the Bedouin setting, H. Palva, Artistic Colloquial Arabic, p. 148 notices: “As the result of the fixed form of poetry, many linguistic features occurring in poems are carried together with the poems from one dialect area to another without essential changes. It is therefore only natural that the poetic language in a large area is relatively homogeneous…. It is also more homogeneous than the language of oral narrative style, which…lacks a fixed form and is therefore more subjected to the influence of the local dialect.” For the role of poetic structure in preserving archaic features, compare J. Tropper, “Sprachliche
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Tania Notarius However, the dichotomy of orality and writing can be quite misleading, at least for ancient Israel, and a nuanced approach to the problem of the literary status of old Hebrew poems is required; the oral transmission of these poems does not contradict their sporadic reduction to writing, and, conversely, committing a poem to writing does not preclude further oral transmission.20 The old Hebrew poems disclose profound dependence on the literary motifs and stylistic conventions of ancient Near Eastern, particularly Old Canaanite, literature, to be depicted as products of a primitive illiterate tribal society;21 it is quite clear that we are dealing with professional poetry.22 The question of the level and functionality of literacy in Ancient Israel remains a debated issue: scholars have claimed that the intensive epigraphic activity in the Late Iron Age (late ninth to early sixth centuries BCE) points to the on-going literary process,23 but there are a considerable Archaismen im Parallelismus membrorum in der akkadischen und ugaritischen Epik,” AuOr 16 (1998): 103–110. 20. Compare, for example, to the notion of an “oral-literate continuum” (S. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, p. 44), on which considerable scholarly consensus has been reached; see in more detail J. N. Whisenant, “Writing, Literacy, and Textual Transmission: The Production of Literary Documents in Iron Age Judah and the Composition of the Hebrew Bible” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Michigan, 2008). The possibility that parts of the archaic corpus were transmitted in ancient anthologies like “The Book of Yashar” is discussed in E. L. Greenstein, “What Was the Book of Yashar?” Maarav 21 (2017): 25–36. 21. The channels that provide for literary continuity between the Old Canaanite and Early Israelite cultural environments may have been of different character, but certain scribal heredity between two layers is to be seriously considered; see A. Lemaire, “West Semitic Epigraphy and the History of Levant during the 12th–10th Centuries BCE,” in The Ancient Near East in the 12th–10th Centuries BCE: Culture and History (ed. G. Galil, A. Gilboa, A. M. Maier, and D. Kahn; Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012), pp. 291–307; A. Millard, “Scripts and Their Uses in the 12th–10th Centuries BCE,” in The Ancient Near East in the 12th-10th Centuries BCE: Culture and History (ed. G. Galil, A. Gilboa, A. M. Maier, and D. Kahn; Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012), pp. 405–412; and compare the data in V. Horowitz, T. Oshima, and S. L. Sanders, Cuneiform in Canaan (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006). 22. On traditional poetry as professional, compare M. V. McDonald, “Orally Transmitted Poetry,” p. 23. McDonald emphasizes that professional poets are those who do it for a living, but moreover professional poetry is part of the literary process, has high social status, and is a matter of learning and skillfulness (see N. I. Azarova, D. Kuzmin, V. A. Plungjan, et al, Poezija: Uchebnik [Moskva: OGI, 2016], pp. 51–65). 23. Compare note 11 above and see also the discussion in C. A. Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010); an example of the poetic writing is the ink inscription from Kuntillet Ajrud, see S. Aḥituv, E. Eshel, and Z. Meshel, “The Inscriptions,” in Kuntillet ‘Ajrud. An Iron Age Religious Site on the Judah-Sinai Border (ed. Z. Meshel; Jerusalem: Carta, 2012), pp. 110–114. Compare S. Aḥituv, “Notes on the Kuntillet `Ajrud Inscriptions,” in “See, I Will Bring a Scroll Recounting What Befell Me” (Ps 40:8) (ed. E. Eshel and Y. Levin; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), p. 36: “We propose that the scribe who physically wrote this poem…was not its composer.… he quoted a poetic theophany text, probably from memory…. Reading these lines one is reminded of the theophany descriptions in the Scriptures.… this must have been a text that already had been considered a classic.”
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Lexical Isoglosses number of epigraphists who suggest that already in the tenth to early ninth centuries BCE alphabetic writing in Canaan was sufficiently developed for sporadic literary production.24 These debates turn the scholarly focus from the moment of writing to the moment of literarization—a moment when a poem is shaped as a literary piece, either in its oral or written form. Definitely, the literarization of a text does not mean that further transmission, whether oral or written, precludes textual flexibility; however, professional poets, reciters, and scribes would always have access to the authentic literary piece. The epigraphic and historical-archaeological data together with typological cross-cultural patterns allow us to establish some major milestones in the literarization process of the old Israelite poems. The stage of early literarization, dating approximately to the beginning of the monarchic period or a bit earlier, presupposes poetic composition by professional poets followed by their oral, sporadically written, transmission. The decisive point at which the poems were committed to writing must have occurred several centuries later, around the end of the monarchic period, as part of the general First Temple period literary process. Actually this process of the late literarization was also the stage of the early perception of old songs. Practically, the perception process copes with philological problems—glosses, word changes, or rewriting are acceptable practice in this situation. However, it is striking that the general archaic linguistic structure as well as many genuine philological cruxes remained, pointing at the high literary status and the relatively careful maintenance of the poetic textual material. 24. Compare M. Richelle, “Elusive Scrolls: Could Any Hebrew Literature Have Been Written Prior to the Eighth Century BCE?” VT 66 (2016): 592: “to the question: ‘Could any Hebrew literature have been written in the early royal period?’, the answer of an epigrapher is definitively positive.” Richelle brings two main epigraphic arguments: there are up to thirty-six alphabetic inscriptions from the Southern Levant from that period, implying that statistically many more texts were around; the corpus of seals and bullae points to the widespread practice of sealing papyri. M. Richelle, “Elusive Scrolls,” p. 593 claims: “This is not to say that we should dismiss orality as a means of composing literary works; in fact, there may have been an interaction, even a continuum between Israelite orality and literacy.” See also the discussion in S. Aḥituv and A. Mazar, “The Inscriptions from Tel Reḥov and Their Contribution to the Study of Script and Writing during Iron Age IIA,” in “See, I Will Bring a Scroll Recounting What Befell Me” (Ps 40:8) (ed. E. Eshel and Y. Levin; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), pp. 39–68; A. Demsky, Literacy in Ancient Israel (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 2012); and A. Demsky, “Researching Literacy in Ancient Israel: New Approaches and Recent Developments,” in “See, I Will Bring a Scroll Recounting What Befell Me” (Ps 40:8) (ed. E. Eshel and Y. Levin; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), pp. 89–104; A. Millard, “The Knowledge of Writing in Late Bronze Age Palestine,” in Languages and Cultures in Contact: At the Crossroads of Civilizations in the Syro-Mesopotamian Realm: Proceedings of the 42nd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (ed. K. Van Lerberghe and G. Voet; Louvain: Peeters, 1999), pp. 317–326.
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Tania Notarius In what follows, I will deal with words that belonged to Classical Biblical Hebrew vocabulary, but in a meaning different from their archaic usage. The adaptation of old usages is not always smooth, causing misunderstanding and glossing; I claim that if a word belonged to the Classical Biblical Hebrew lexicon and moreover continued into Late Biblical Hebrew, but had a different meaning in Archaic Biblical Hebrew, which was nevertheless preserved and transmitted by ancient scribes, this word should be considered an archaic isogloss. 3. ARCHAIC HEBREW FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE LEXICON Although lexical research has always been an important part of Archaic Biblical Hebrew research,25 a more systematic study of the protoHebrew lexicon is in order, especially in view of the renewed interest in lexical isoglosses in Semitic languages.26 I suggest two case studies of a phenomenon that is particularly notable for Archaic Biblical Hebrew— lexemes common to both Archaic Biblical Hebrew and Classical Biblical Hebrew, with a non-standard meaning in Archaic Biblical Hebrew. 3.1. ילים ִ ‘ ְּפ ִלScorched, Broken, Defeated’ (Deut 32:31) (1) צּורנּו צּו ָרם וְּ א ֵֹּיְּבינּו ְּפ ִל ִילים ֵּ ִכי לֹא ְּכ Indeed their Rock is not like our Rock, and our enemies are parched with thirst/defeated. (Deut 32:31)
The form ְּפ ִל ִיליםis used rarely in the Hebrew Bible—here, in Exod 21:22, and in Job 31:11—but the root pll and its derivatives are well attested.27 The verse has a long history of interpretation. The LXX trans25. For lexical studies on Archaic Biblical Hebrew see the works of Stanley Gevirtz, and also C. Cohen, Biblical Hapax Legomena; C. Cohen, “Pharaoh’s ;”שלישיםW. Dietrich, “Hebraische Hapaxlegomena in den Samuelbuchern,” in Biblical Lexicology: Hebrew and Greek. Semantics— Exegesis—Translation (ed. J. Joosten, E. Bons, R. Hunziker-Rodewald, and R. Vergari; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 103–130; E. A. Knauf, “Deborah’s Language”; compare also J. Tropper, “Sprachliche Archaismen,” pp. 103–110. 26. Compare note 12 above and compare L. Kogan, Genealogical Classification of Semitic: The Lexical Isoglosses (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015) on the systematic study of the Semitic lexicon. The present essay does not pretend to be sufficiently comprehensive and systematic, but illustrates the discussion on selected phenomena. 27. Compare L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, “פלל,” HALOT 3:933–934; the form is the plural of פלילor ָעֹון ְּפ ִל ִילים ;פלילהin Job 31:11 is commonly emended to עון פלילי.
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Lexical Isoglosses lates it as “lacking in understanding” (ανόητοι).28 Targum Onkelos translates “judges, arbiters” ( ;דייניאthus also Theodotion and Vulgate), most probably in agreement with the interpretation accepted for Exod 21:22 (cf. also in 4QRPa). On the basis of this tradition, Rashi emphasizes the typical prophetic dichotomy in the enemies’ role: הרי,ועכשיו אויבנו שופטים אותנו ‘ שצורנו מכרנו להםAnd/but now our enemies judge us, because our Rock has delivered us to them’.29 The same interpretation is transformed semantically on the basis of some syntactic considerations: Mirsky, 30 following Ibn Ezra, reads with the negative particle לֹאdue to ellipsis: “our enemies are not judges (wise men, able to understand)”; some insist on the rhetorical interrogative value of the verse: “Are our enemies judges?”31 A different interpretation comes from the Hexapla group of sources: Symmacus has βιαȋοι and the Syro-Hexapla qṭyryˀ ‘violent’; perhaps this meaning is derived from the interpretation of the adjective ְּפ ִל ִיליin Job 31:11.32 However, the interpretation of ְּפ ִל ִיליםas “judges” is doubtful even for Exod 21:22. Speiser made a strong case for the meaning “estimate, considerations” in both cases: Exod 21:22—“according to estimate (of the miscarriage harm)”; Deut 32:31—“even in our enemies’ estimation.”33 His interpretation of the latter case, however, looks forced (why should
28. The suggestion that the Urtext had אויליםseems farfetched. 29. Compare also P. C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), p. 386: “the enemies of the people of God could be instrumental in the execution of God’s judgment.” However, the original meaning of the whole passage in Deut 32:28–33 is hardly Deuteronomistic; compare T. Notarius, The Verb in Archaic Biblical Poetry, p. 75 n. 8. 30. A. Mirsky, דעת מקרא:( ספר דבריםThe book of Deuteronomy: Daat Mikra commentary; Jerusalem: Musad Ha-Rav Kuk, 2001). 31. Compare R. D. Nelson, Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Louisville: John Knox, 2002), p. 376; compare F. H. W. Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (ed. E. Kautzsch; trans. A. E. Cowley; Oxford: Clarendon 1983) §156b; in Ramban’s interpretation “our enemies” are Israelites, since the whole passage is the direct discourse of non-Israelites. 32. See Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt: sive, Veterum interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragmenta (Oxonii: Typographeo Clarendoniano, 1871–1875), 1:322. This semantic shift is illustrated by the targumic interpretation of Job 31:11 ()עֹון ְּפ ִל ִילים ָ and Job 31:11 ( עון )פלילי: ‘ סורח פרישgreat sin’ suggests that both constituents are understood as synonymous. 33. See E. A. Speiser, “The Stem PLL in Hebrew,” JBL 82 (1963): 301–306; compare also D. L. Christensen, Deuteronomy 21:10–34:12 (WBC 6b; Nashville: Nelson, 2002), pp. 811, 817. For different juridical connotations of the term and the cognate root, see A. Berlin, “On the Meaning of pll in the Bible,” RB 96 (1989): 345–351; C. Cohen, “The Ancient Critical Misunderstanding of Exodus 21:22–25,” in Mishneh Todah (ed. N. S. Fox, D. A. Glatt-Gilad, and M. J. Williams; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009), pp. 437–458; according to Y. Feder, “Pleading One’s Case Before God: A Hittite Analogy for תפלה,” ZAW 125 (2013): 650–653, the cognate ‘ תפלהprayer’ has Hittite equivalents.
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Tania Notarius the speaker care about the enemies’ estimation?), as was noticed by Tigay.34 The etymology of the root pll, however, has not been systematically considered in this respect. The root pll belongs to the oldest layer of the Semitic lexicon and is attested in all the branches of Semitic, but with broad semantic scope, disclosing the depth of semantic splits.35 Primarily, the root pll denotes a physical condition and change of state (“be scorched, parched”; “break,” “defeat”). The Ugaritic root pll ‘be cracked, parched’ is evidence for this meaning.36 The interpretation correlates with the Arabic falla ‘break, notch; defeat’, particularly with its derivative filla ‘upon which rain has not fallen, in which there is nothing’.37 Seemingly, the meaning “break, defeat” denotes an ingressive aspect in application to the basic stative meaning: “be parched, break” (stative, intransitive) [+ ingressive] => “break, defeat” (change-of-state, transitive); compare also Syriac pll 2 “break.”38 On the other hand, the basic meaning of the physical condition (“be scorched, parched”) prompted the meaning of emotional and cognitive condition and activity (“estimate,” “intercede,” “supplicate”; “control”); such a semantic shift is typologically substantiated and is very typical for Semitic languages.39 This usage is evident in Hebrew pll ‘assume, pro34. See J. H. Tigay, Deuteronomy: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1996), p. 310: “The parallel phrase ‘their rock’ suggests that this phrase means something like ‘our enemies gods,’” and he emends to ופלילי אויבינו, “(nor) are our enemies’ guardians [equal to our Rock],” based on the Akkadian pālilu ‘guardian, leader’, used as an epithet of deities, and suggesting a reversed word-order in construct chain, and compare p. 404 n. 132. See also J. H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 404 n. 135, and compare W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (Wiesbaden: Harrassovitz, 1965–1981), 2:813b and E. A. Speiser, “PALIL and Congeners: A Sampling of Apotropaic Symbols,” AS 16 (1965): 389–393. 35. This review does not deal with possible parallel roots, for example, the reduplicated plpl. 36. See G. del Olmo Lete and J. Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 672: pl ˁnt šdm y špš pl ˁnt šdm[]il ‘parched are the furrows of the fields, O Shapsh, parched are the furrows of the field’ 1.6 IV 1–2 // 1.6 IV 12–13; and the references there; the translation of the element il is not clear. According to J. Tropper, Ugaritische Grammatik (Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2000), p. 676, the verbal form pl is from pll G suffix conjugation fem. pl. in present meaning “vertrocknet sind die Furchen der Acker.” The meaning “search” is advocated in N. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit: The Words of Ilimilku and His Colleagues (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), p. 137 (and the bibliography there). 37. See E. W. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (8 vols.; London: Williams & Norgate, 1863– 1885), pp. 2433–2434. 38. See M. Sokoloff, Syriac Lexicon: A Translation from the Latin, Correction, Expansion, and Update of C. Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009), p. 1201, as for the root pll 1 ‘sprinkle’ a parallel to roots pwl and plpl is suggested. 39. Compare *rgz Hebrew “tremble”—“be angry,” *ḫrd Hebrew “tremble”—“worry,” *dwy Akkadian “be sick”—Aramaic “be miserable, feel sorry,” *qwṭ Arabic “vomit”—Hebrew “dread, be horrified,” Syriac zwˁ “to be in motion, tremble”—“be afraid,” Aramaic spd “tremble”—“lament or eulogize,” and in particular *ˀbl Akkadian “dry out”—Hebrew, Ugaritic “mourn” which is the closest
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Lexical Isoglosses nounce a judgment; intercede, pray’ and most of its derivatives.40 In Sabaic the root pll is consistently used in the meaning “ask for omen, implore, supplicate.”41 I tend to think that Akkadian palālu ‘control, keep a watch on’ is also semantically derived from this meaning.42 Additionally, the root develops the semantics of motion (“go in front,” “get away,” “descend,” “flee”), particularly in South Semitic: compare Geez fll, falla, falala ‘descend, prolapse’; Jibbali fll ‘to make off, get away, run away’; Mahri fll ‘make off, get away, flee’;43 this usage is once attested also in Sabaic.44 Out of this semantic spectrum ְּפ ִל ִיליםin Deut 32:31 is best explained according to the meaning of physical condition and change of state; the form can be interpreted as either a stative verbal adjective or passive participle—“scorched, parched; broken, defeated.” The following verses 32–33 confirm the imagery of dryness, parching, and destruction: ִמגֶּ ֶּפן-ִכי רֹוׁש ַּא ְּׁש ְּכֹלת ְּמרֹר ֹת ָלמֹו-ּומ ַּש ְּדמֹת ֲעמ ָֹרה ֲענָ ֵּבמֹו ִענְּ ֵּבי ִ ‘ ְּסד ֹם גַּ ְּפנָ םTheir vine comes from the vinestock of Sodom, from the vineyards of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of poison, their clusters are bitter’. If the referent is human “enemies,” the interpretation “our enemies are parched (with thirst)” makes the best sense; in the context of the military song, the passive of the dynamic—“our enemies are broken, defeated” is also good. If, however, “enemies” stands metonymically for the “land of enemies” (this metonymic shift looks justified in view of the parallelism to “Rock” of the previous half-verse and of the following land description), the interpretation is “the land of our enemies is parched, scorched, destroyed.” semantic parallel to the case under discussion. I am aware of the considerable semantic gap between meanings “be dry, parched” > “pray, mourn, estimate,” but deriving different meanings from one root is preferable over postulating separate roots without any phonetic justification. 40. See L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, HALOT 3:933–934; E. A. Speiser, “The Stem PLL in Hebrew,” pp. 301–306. 41. See A. F. L. Beeston, “fll,” Sabaic Dictionary (English-French-Arabic) (Louvain: Peeters, 1982), p. 44. The search in the on-line Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions (CSAI) brought five clear cases (FB-Maḥram Bilqīs 1, Gl 1441 = Gl 1432 + 1433, Ja 628, Ja 718+Ja 785, Nāmī NAG 12). (Online: dasi.humnet.unipi.it/index.php?id=25&prjId=1&corId=0&colId=0&navId =707844884&rl=yes). 42. See W. von Soden, “palālu,” Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, 2:813–814; compare I. Gelb et al., “palālu II,” The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1956–2006), pp. 50–51; but palālu I ‘go in the front, precede’ (the examples are from literary texts) conjoins with the semantics of motion. 43. W. Leslau, “fll,” Comparative Dictionary of Geez (Classical Ethiopic) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987), p. 159; T. M. Johnstone, “fll,” Jibbali Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 57; T. M. Johnstone, “fll,” Mehri Lexicon and English-Mehri Word-List (London: University of London, 1987), p. 93. 44. See A. F. L. Beeston, “fll,” Sabaic Dictionary, p. 44; according to a search in CSAI the case is Ja 576+Ja 577 (Online: dasi.humnet.unipi.it/index.php?id=30&prjId=1&corId=0&colId =0&navId=707844884&recId=9044&mark=09044%2C006%2C008).
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Tania Notarius The proper interpretation of ( ְּפ ִל ִיליםDeut 32:31) points to a usage nontypical for Classical Biblical Hebrew, but rooted in the oldest layer of the Central Semitic lexicon (shared with Ugaritic and Arabic). This usage is a lexical isogloss of Archaic Biblical Hebrew and goes back to the stage of the early literarization of the song; strikingly it was preserved at the stage of early perception. 3.2. ‘ ֵּכןWas’ (Judges 5:15) (2) שכר ֵּכן ָב ָרק ָב ֵּע ֶּמק ֻׁׁש ַּלח ְּב ַּרגְּ ָליו ָ ם־דב ָֹרה וְּ יִ ָש ְּ שכר ִע ָ וְּ ָש ַּרי ְּביִ ָש Issachar’s leaders were with Deborah, and Issachar was/stood with Barak, sent out to the valley among his infantry. (Judg 5:15ab)45
The Song of Deborah is a difficult text from all perspectives: textually, poetically, and linguistically, and verse 15b represents typical difficulties. The LXX omits the phrase שכר ֵּכן ָב ָרק ָ וְּ יִ ָשcompletely.46 The form ֵּכןis not transparent and is interpreted either as an assertive or comparative particle,47 or as a (substantivized) deverbal adjective “true, loyal, 45. There are several problems in this verse: the forms ָש ַּריand ְּב ַּרגְּ ָליוare not discussed in this essay.
46. According to N. LaMontagne, “The Song of Deborah (Judges 5): Meaning and Poetry in the Septuagint” (Ph.D. diss., The Catholic University of America, 2013), p. 44 the omission of שכר ָ וְּ יִ ָש ֵּכן ָב ָרקin the LXX is due to the “poetic expediency.” Some manuscripts add καί Βαράκ, ούτως Βαράκ instead; compare Biblia Hebraica Quinta: Judges (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2011), pp. 60+ – 61+: “GL1O, not knowing what to do with this syntagm, omitted the translation. In an attempt to fill the omission GBL2M made a doublet of Βαράκ instead of duplicating Ίσσαχάρ. The further confusion in the Greek tradition was probably caused by this first omission.” Also B. Lindars, Judges 1–5: A New Translation and Commentary (Edinburgh: Clark, 1995), pp. 256–258 suggests that “the omission is unlikely to represent the O[ld] G[reek] or its Hebrew Vorlage.” See H. Pfeiffer, Jahwes Kommen von Suden: Jdc 5, Hab 3, Dtn 33 und Ps 68 in ihrem literaturund theologiegeschichtlichen Umfeld (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), pp. 31–32, 54 on the opposite claim that ֵּכן ָב ָרק is a gloss of the latest redactional layer; he does not explain, however, why in this case the glossator did not use a standard comparative particle; this version is also followed in C. Levin, “Das Alter des Deboralieds,” in Fortschreibungen: Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (C. Levin; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 124–141; E. A. Knauf, “Deborah’s Language,” p. 181 translates: “while Baraq broke into the brook-land.” 47. For ֵּכןas a comparative compare C. L. Echols, “Tell Me, O Muse”: The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) in the Light of Heroic Poetry (New York: Clark, 2008), p. 16; J. Sasson, Judges 1–12: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 298–299; M. S. Smith, Poetic Heroes, p. 255. This traditional interpretation is not without problems: according to D. Barthélemy, Critique Textuelle De l’Ancien Testament: Josué, Juges, Ruth, Samuel, Rois, Chroniques, Esdras, Néhémie, Esther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), p. 87, one would expect כfor simple marking, or כbefore Issachar and ֵּכןin apodosis for a double marking (see P. Joüon and T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew [Roma: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2006], §174; compare E. König, Historisch-Comparative syntax der hebräischen Sprache [Leipzig: Hinrichs,
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Lexical Isoglosses support.”48 Both interpretations are awkward and present syntactic difficulties. The specific and apparently dialectal character of the Song of Debora’s language has been broadly discussed in the research,49 yet the form ֵּכןhas not been explored in this respect. I claim that the form is derived from the root kwn with the meaning “to be” and presents a local Canaanite isogloss.50 The root *kwn is an important Semitic lexical isogloss as demonstrated by Kogan: according to his conclusions, *kwn ‘be’ is attested in all the branches of West-Semitic, including Proto-Northwest Semitic (with some exceptions), while East-Semitic Akkadian kânu ‘to be firm, stationary; reliable, correct’, together with the Hebrew and Aramaic counterparts, “provides a suitable source of semantic development” from which the meaning “to be” was derived.51 In Northwest Semitic, the lexeme for “being” separates Ugaritic, Old Canaanite, and Phoenician (kwn) from Hebrew and Aramaic (hyy/hwy): the branching of Hebrew together with Aramaic rather than with its Canaanite sister-tongues is noteworthy.52 In the Song of Debora the root hyy ‘to be’ is not used at all, in contrast to other parts of the archaic poetic corpus: compare Deut 32:38; Exod
1897], §371 for rare poetic cases gapping כin the first member of a comparison); on the difficulties of the adverbial interpretation compare C. F. Burney, The Book of Judges: With Introduction and Notes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918), p. 138. For assertive, compare T. C. Butler, Judges (WBC 8; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), p. 114, “Indeed, Issachar is right there with Barak” but it is not quite clear how exactly he understands the form כן, ֵּ as there is no explicit discussion. 48. See C. F. Burney, The Book of Judges, pp. 137–138, “leal to Baraq”; B. Lindars, Judges 1–5, p. 257, “true to Baraq”; and R. G. Boling, Judges: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), pp. 103, 112, “Baraq’s support,” who connect the form to the root kwn. A. Soggin, Judges: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), p. 89, “a support” relates it to the Arabic kinnu or kinānu ‘covering, protection’ (root knn). Burney emphasizes that the term is related to the Akkadian kênu “reliable, faithful” and Syriac kȋn ‘steadfast, just’. The problem is that the adjective ‘ ֵּכןtrue, reliable’ in Hebrew or its cognate in Akkadian, even if referring to a persons will not govern another argument, by means of a preposition or without it; in Amos 5:14 ֵּכןis used adverbially and Job 9:35 is obscure. 49. See G. Rendsburg, “Hurvitz Redux,” pp. 122–126 (as an answer to M. Waltisberg, “Zum Alter der Sprache des Deboraliedes Ri 5,” ZAH 12 [1999]: 218–232); E. A. Knauf, “Deborah’s Language”; C. L. Echols, “Tell Me, O Muse,” pp. 83–85. 50. To the best of my knowledge, this interpretation has not yet been suggested. The New International Version translates Judg 5:15b, “yes, Issachar was with Barak,” but it is not clear whether the form ֵּכןis rendered by assertive “yes,” or by the verb “was.” At the site of the NIV project, neither commentary nor explanation is provided. 51. See L. Kogan, Genealogical Classification of Semitic, pp. 86–87; for kwn ‘to be correct, firm’ in Hebrew see above; for Syriac, compare M. Sokoloff, “kwn,” Syriac Lexicon, pp. 608–609. The data of Amorite about the verb “to be” is not clear; see V. Golinets, “Das Verb im amurritischen Onomastikon der altbabylonischen Zeit” (Ph.D. diss., Universitat Leipzig, 2010), pp. 367–368. 52. See L. Kogan, Genealogical Classification of Semitic, pp. 370–373; compare p. 87: “one has to assume that this feature was once present in Proto-Canaanite, but then was lost in Hebrew and replaced by the same new exponent as in the neighboring Aramaic.”
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Tania Notarius 15:2; Gen 49:15, 17, 26; 2 Sam 22:19, 24; Deut 33:5, 6, 7, 24; Num 23:10; 24:18, 22. The verbal form ֵּכןdenotes a situation of locating and positioning—“be stationed, found itself, stand” as is typical for this lexeme in Ugaritic, rather than functioning as a verb of being or an existential copula.53 The use of stative verbs for the description of tribes, alongside nominal clauses, is characteristic for the Song (cf. יָ ַּׁש ְּב ָתv. 16, יִ ְּׁשכֹון יָ ַּׁשב יָ גּור ָׁש ֵּכןv. 17). The lack of prepositions on the argument ָב ָרקcan be explained in different ways, depending on what thematic role this argument represents. If it denotes a beneficiary of the situation and the expected preposition is “together with,” gapping is apparently at work: the preposition ִעםin the first of two parallel lines ם־דב ָֹרה ְּ שכר ִע ָ וְּ ָש ַּרי ְּביִ ָשalso has force in the second line שכר ֵּכן ָב ָרק ָ ‘ וְּ יִ ָשand Issachar was (with) Barak’. However this is not ellipsis in the strict sense of the word, since prepositional ellipsis is not typical for Hebrew or cross-linguistically;54 it is rather a phenomenon of vertical syntax in poetic language—coordinated constituents are distributed between two parallel lines.55 Alternatively, if ָב ָרקdenotes location “(the army of) Baraq” and the expected preposition is ‘ בin, among, in the midst of’ (cf., e.g., w ykn bnh b bt ‘and may there be a son of his in (his) house’ KTU 1.17 I 25, or v. 14 יָמין ַּב ֲע ָמ ֶּמיָך ִ ְּ‘ ַּא ֲח ֶּריָך ִבנafter you— Benjamin, among your tribes’), the preposition בwas apparently omitted due to haplography (or haplology) followed by another ב. Perhaps the latter interpretation is preferable in view of the syntactic idiosyncrasy of the former interpretation. Finally, one should not exclude possible textual confusion in the reading. This isogloss lines up the language of the Song of Deborah with the local, apparently Northern, Canaanite vernacular, rather than with Judean Hebrew, in addition to other data that call for the specific dialectal status
53. Compare G. del Olmo Lete and J. Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language, p. 443; compare also C. R. Krahmalkov, Phoenician-Punic Dictionary (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), pp. 232– 233. In El-Amarna Canaanite, the lexeme for “be” is Akkadian bašû while the adjective kīnu has the meaning “true, reliable, loyal” (cf. EA 89:14 and EA 162:19.23). I thank Krzysztof Baranowski who discussed this issue with me. 54. The ellipsis of a preposition, as a rule, does not occur by itself: a preposition governed by a verb or governing a noun will drop together with one of them; compare Mic 7:14 and the discussion in C. Miller, “A Linguistic Approach to Ellipsis in Biblical Poetry,” BBR 13 (2003): 263. K. Gengel, Pseudogapping and Ellipsis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 12 discusses the ungrammaticality of partial ellipsis of prepositional phrases. 55. For coordination in vertical relation see D. Tsumura, “Vertical Grammar of Parallelism in Hebrew Poetry,” JBL 128 (2009): 174.
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Lexical Isoglosses of the Song’s language. This feature is to be considered an archaic isogloss, rather than a later loan; it is not replicated in Late Biblical Hebrew and witnesses the linguistic diversity typical of the corpus of the old poems. 4. CONCLUSION Archaic Biblical Hebrew is an assumption that allows for the description of the linguistic data in the corpus of the ancient Hebrew poems in the most economical and consistent way. The data are very meager and complicated: the corpus is not homogeneous, archaic features are equally diffused in the classical corpus, late features are sporadically reminiscent of archaic ones. All in all, the principles of systematicity and linguistic continuity allows for the description of numerous phenomena of protoHebrew. Socio-linguistics plays an important role in the research. This paper offers a preliminary discussion on the comparative socio-linguistic and cross-cultural data concerning the process of the literarization of the old poetic compositions into the Hebrew Bible. It is claimed that the oral poetic compositions, sporadically committed to writing at the stage of early literarization, could have predated by several centuries the stage of their late literarization within the corpus of classical writings. The stage of the late literarization was also the early perception stage; at all the stages of transmission and perception, the textual and linguistic changes were presumably occurring. It is noteworthy, however, that the archaic language of the old songs was transmitted with a relatively high level of accuracy due to the prestigious literary status of these compositions. A systematic study of the lexicon of the poems is required to substantiate this claim. In this paper two cases are investigated to exemplify a very interesting phenomenon—the perception of Archaic Biblical Hebrew lexemes whose use continues in the standard lexicon, but attest different meanings in the proto-classical stage. It has been claimed that ְּפ ִל ִיליםin Deut 32:31 is to be understood as “scorched, broken, defeated” in agreement with the meaning attested in Ugaritic and that ֵּכןin Judg 5:15 is a form of the verb “to be” (a Canaanite isogloss).
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