Hebrew in its West semitic setting: a comparative survey of non-Masoretic Hebrew dialects and traditions. Part 1, A comparative lexicon section A proper names. Part 1, A comparative lexicon, section B Root system: Hebrew material 9789004072459, 9004072454, 9789004080645, 9004080643

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Foreword
General introduction
Provisional list of abbreviations
Bibliography to Section A
Transliteration key
Introduction to section A: Sectional synopsis and comments on the name list
a) Introductory remarks
b) Determination of vowel phonemes and other distinctive features
c) Reduction of secondary sources to the original level
d) Statistical synopsis
e) Comments on single entries
The list of Names

Citation preview

HEBREW IN ITS WEST SEMITIC SETTING

STUDIES IN SEMITIC LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS EDITED BY

J. H. HOSPERS Professor of Semitic Languages and Literature and Archeology of the Near East in the University of Groningen

XIII A. MURTONEN

HEBREW IN ITS WEST SEMITIC SETTING Part One, Section A

LEI DEN

E. J. BRILL 1986

HEBREW IN ITS WEST SEMITIC SETTING A COMPARATIVE SURVEY OF NON-MASORETIC HEBREW DIALECTS AND TRADITIONS

BY

A. MURTONEN PART ONE

A COMPARATIVE LEXICON Section A PROPER NAMES

LEI DEN

E. 1. BRILL 1986

ISBN 90 04 07245 4 Copyright 1986 by E. J. Brill, Leiden, Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission from the publisher

CONTENTS Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII General introduction ..................................... XI Provisional list of abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. XVII Bibliography to Section A ................................ XXVII Transliteration key ....................................... XXXI Introduction to section A: Sectional synopsis and comments on the name list ......................................... . a) Introductory remarks ............................... . b) Determination of vowel phonemes and other distinctive features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c) Reduction of secondary sources to the original level ..... d) Statistical synopsis .................................. e) Comments on single entries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11 20 52 66

The list of Names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..

205

FOREWORD With the present volume, the final results of my-so far-33-year-old study of non-Masoretic Hebrew dialects and traditions begin to be published. The adjective "final" is only used in a relative sense, further qualified by "my", and even this qualification has deeper significance than usual, as I am only too well aware of the shortcomings of my work, despite its lengthy duration, particularly with regard to using and assimilating the work of other scholars in the field. It is true that, due to limitations of time and space, many contributions had to be omitted or mentioned only summarily en bloc with other similar ones, usually anonymously-particularly if they had been mentioned in standard works or other well-known publications previously-; but I have no doubt that I have inadvertently or due to the relevant publications having remained inaccessible to me missed many important contributions altogether. Nevertheless, as the present work is the first to deal with all the non-Masoretic dialects and traditions comprehensively, and I believe that I have not missed any piece of first-hand material which would structurally or in any important detail alter my results, I believe that the work will be of some benefit to colleagues and thus worth publishing. The methodology and contents of the planned series being surveyed in the Introduction, what remains here is to acknowledge scholarly and other professional help as well as financial assistance received from various individuals, learned societies and governmental and other bodies and foundations in the course of the study; some of this has been detailed in the forewords to Materials and other preparatory publications, but as these were largely defective even at the time of their publication, I am here trying to make amends for the sins of omission by compiling what I hope is a complete list up to date. Among the teachers, colleagues and friends whose help and advice I have enjoyed, many of whom-alas !-my expression of gratitude does not reach in corpore any more, Paul Kahle must be mentioned first; it is therefore to his memory that the work is dedicated. Of my teachers at the University of Helsinki, A. Lauha, A. Saarisalo and A. Salonen have been more or less directly connected with this work; of my own and slightly younger generation, J. Aro, E. Salonen and I. Soisalon-Soininen; of those younger still, T. Harviainen. Of former and present colleagues and friends at the University of Melbourne, my thanks are due to J. Bowman, J. Fraser, D. Hallam, C. Hope, A. K. Kazi, N. Mirza, T. Muraoka and J. Thompson of Middle Eastern Studies, G. Clarke of Classical Studies. and E. Williams of Statistics; of former students to Leanne Brown and T. Falla for direct and many

VIII

FOREWORD

others for indirect assistance. Of those in Israel, mention must be made of N. Allony, Z. Ben-Hayyim, H. Blanc, J. Blau, Irene Garbel, G. Goldenberg, M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, L. Kopf, E. Y. Kutscher, A. Mirsky, S. Morag, G.Ormann, C. Rabin, A. Rosen, S. Talmon, N. H. Tur-Sinai, I. Yeivin and M. Zulay; elsewhere in the Middle East, L. Harding, J. T. Milik and R. de Vaux (formerly) of East Jerusalem, Bekhatrob Elshafei and Murad Kamil of Cairo/Alexandria, P. Costa (formerly) and Motahhar Ali al-Eryani of San'a, Adhana Mengsteab, Amsalu Aklilu, S. Chojnacki, Fecadu Gadamu, Getatchew Haile, Hailu Fullass, and R. Pankhurst (formerly) of Addis Ababa as well as my informants in Holon, Nablus, the Republic of Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Addis Ababa and the Gurage province of Ethiopia of whom Mulugeta Habte and Tesfa Seyum must be mentioned by name here too, as they also assisted in organizing and preparing the material. Elsewhere in the world: A. Haldar, H. S. Nyberg and G. Widengren of Uppsala, G. Fant of Stockholm, H. Odeberg of Lund, K. G. Prasse of Copenhagen, R. Macuch and (formerly) L. Rost of Berlin, R. Meyer of Jena, E. Coseriu, K. Elliger, K. Galling and W. R6llig of Tubingen, H. Jungraithmayr, W. W. Muller and O. Rossler of Marburg, W. von Soden of Munster, W. Fischer and O. Jastrow of Erlangen, H. Hirsch and H. Mukarovsky of Vienna, Maria Horner of Graz, K. Petnicek of Prague, W. Vycichl of Geneva, Giovanni Card. Mercati of Vatican, G. Garbini, F. Israel, S. Moscati and G. Pettinato of Rome, D. and M. Cohen of Paris, G. Weil of Nancy, A. Diez Macho of Barcelona, J. Hoftijzer of Leiden, B. Andrzejewski, D. Appleyard, J. Carnochan, A. K. Irvine, T. Johnstone and E. Ullendorff of London, J. Barr, A. F. L. Beeston, G. R. Driver and A. Lehmann of Oxford, J. L. Teicher of Cambridge,. G. R. Smith of Durham, E. Robertson and H. H. Rowley of Manchester, L. Marwick of Washington, W. F. Albright of Baltimore, L. Finkelstein, H. L. Ginsberg, A. Jeffery, S. Lieberman and H. Orlinsky of New York, H. Fleming and St. Lieberman of Boston, M. Tsevat of Cincinnati, S. Levin of St. Louis, K. Baer, I. J. Gelb, G. Gragg, D. Pardee and Erika Reiner of Chicago, A. Kaye of Colorado, A. Bloch of Berkeley, R. Hetzron of Santa Barbara, W. Leslau and S. Segert of Los Angeles, and B. Jernudd of Hawaii. The following institutions have provided me with valuable scholarly and material assistance: University libraries in Helsinki, Uppsala, Jerusalem, Tubingen, Marburg, Cambridge, St. Louis, Los Angeles (UCLA); the British Library and British Museum as well as the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Institute, Oxford; the Sassoon Library, Letchworth, Hunts; John Rylands Librar:y, Manchester; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan; the Pontifical Library, Vatican; the Schocken Library, Jerusalem; Institut fUr Afrikanistik, Philipp-Universitiit, Marburg; the State

IX

FOREWORD

Public Library, Leningrad; the Congress Library, Washington; the libraries of Columbia University and of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York; Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati/New York; the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago; the National Library, Canberra; the Fisher Library, University of Sydney; the State Library and Ormond College Library, Melbourne; and of course not least the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, although some recent regulations have made it progressively more difficult to use for long-term research; fortunately, our departmental library compensates for that to some extent. Financial assistance~indirect inc\uded~has been granted me by governmental agencies in Finland, Israel, the United States of America, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi; the British Council; the Finnish Cultural Foudation; the foundations of Emil Aaltonen, of Helmi and Heikki Honkanen, and of Leo and Regina Wainstein; the Finnish Oriental Society; the Union of the Societies of Peace (in Finland); the Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation; the Australian Humanities Research Council; the Arts Faculty Research Development Fund as well as departmental research funds, University of Melbourne. Finally, I want to thank Professor Hospers and Firma E. J. Brill for accepting this volume in the series of Studies in Semitic languages and linguistics and efficiently carrying out the work despite some unexpected problems caused by a new typesetting method. Incidentally, vol. II has also been completed and is with the publisher; and about one quarter of vol. III wri tten so far. Melbourne, 10 July 1985

A.

MURTONEN

GENERAL INTRODUCTION The present volume is meant to be the first in a series to constitute a comprehensive survey of Hebrew, to the extent permitted by the sources available, from the earliest traceable beginnings to the period of activity of the principal Tiberian Masoretes about the turn of the tenth century A.D. The time limit cannot be defined accurately, as the manuscripts and oral traditions from which the materials have been drawn often do not alIow reliable dating in terms of absolute chronology and partly extend beyond any time limit, however broad, that could be drawn between what might be calIed the Masoretic period and what precedes it; therefore I prefer to calI the object of the survey non-Masoretic rather than pre-Masoretic Hebrew. Admittedly, even this term is not fulIy accurate, as at least the Babylonian tradition from which I include sizable amounts of material may be calIed Masoretic hardly less justifiably than the Tiberian one; but as the Babylonian material occupies an essentialIy terminal position for the definition of which even Tiberian material must occasionalIy be used so that the term, "non-Tiberian", would not be completely accurate either, I decided to retain the term used in my earlier publications, with these qualifications. On the other hand, despite the avoidance of the term, "pre-Masoretic", and assertions of some recent authors to the contrary, it has become increasingly clear to me that in most essential points the forms of Hebrew described here historicalIy antecede the Tiberian tradition which is indeed readily understandable as a combination of some of these traditions, with the Babylonian one as the main component, and rather few traits original to the Tiberians themselves. The work is to consist of four main parts, viz., I) a comparative lexicon, 2) phonetics and phonology, 3) morphosyntactics, and 4) historical synopsis. The lexicon wilI be divided into the folIowing sections: A) proper names, Ba) root system: Hebrew material, Bb) root system: comparative material, CD E) numerals, pronouns, and particles. The separation of the comparative material from the Hebrew one in the root system is due to practical considerations, as its treatment wilI understandably be largely different, and the vast bulk of Hebrew material on numerous items would tend to obscure its significance. The specific reference to West Semitic in the title of the work does not imply that material from other related languages would be excluded, but only indicates the provenience of the largest and most significant parts of it. The rest of the simple morphs, including the inflectional ones, wilI be published in one volume because of their relatively small number overalI and with regard to attested significant variant forms.

XII

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

In the light of my comprehensive view of the nature of Semi to-Hamitic languages - and, as far as I am competent to judge, of language in general -, as described provisionally in the General introduction to my Statistical analyses of morphosyntactics and to be further elaborated in the fourth part of the present work, it would have been more logical, taking the lexicon as a systematized text sample, to place the morphosyntactical part next in sequence. Practical reasons, however, require phonetic and phonological analysis first, as the orthography of some of the material would otherwise cause ambiguity on many items in morphosyntactics. Phonetic analysis will be based on oral material recorded on tape etc., where such material is available, else on manuscript texts, phonological analysis on the results of the phonetic one. Morphosyntactical analysis will be conducted along the lines applied in the series just referred to, but with much more detailed documentation and argumentation than was possible in that work. Statistical evaluation will thus occupy relatively less space, but that does not reduce its importance. Historical synopsis, as the name implies, will attempt a comprehensive view of the development of the language in all its aspects throughout the period. The history of Hebrew as distinct from its Old Canaanite parental may be dated roughly from about the time of the entrance of the Israelite tribes into the land of Canaan, whatever their prehistory. As the linguistic process connected with this may have started in the Palestine area by the Amarna age, I have included the Canaanite glosses in the Amarna letters in the Hebrew section of the lexicon, however, in brackets and restricting myself to the glosses proper, as listed in J. A. Knudtzon, Die EI-Amarna-Tafeln p. 1545-49, and to those proper names (ib. p. 1555-83) which are attested in at least one other source. It may be appreciated that even the Hebrew material was too large to be checked entirely against the original documents. For the vocabulary of the old Palestinian inscriptions I relied largely on Jean-Hoftijzer's Dictionnaire; for proper names as well as more recently discovered texts and the occasional (double-)checking, on the Israel Museum catalogue Inscriptions reveal; Aharoni's Arad inscriptions and other original publications; also H. Michaud's Sur la pierre et I'argile and Donner-R6I1ig's Kanaaniiische und aramiiische Inschriften etc. Again, proper names not otherwise attested are excluded, as lack of vocalization makes their phonetic and sometimes semantic interpretation uncertain. The same applies to Qumran (and Wadi Murabbaat, Masada) texts which are being utilized as they become available, mainly in the series of Discoveries in the Judaean desert after the earlier publications of Burrows etc. and Sukenik. For the Masada finds, Yadin's editions have been used, the Hebrew one for the Temple scroll. Needless to say, Kuhn's Konkordanz has been a great help, as also Kutscher's The language and linguistic background of the Isaiah scroll (used in the Hebrew edition), even if the present writer is

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

XIII

unable to share all of the lamented author's conclusions (cf. my article in Abr Nahrain vol. 4, 1963 p. 56ft). As in that article, the so-called Damascus documents or Zadokite fragments are also included (quoted primarily from Zeitlin's facsimile, but also checked against Rabin's ed.) as parts of the major document were found at Qumran. For Hebrew in Greek transcription, proper names in LXX mss. form the overwhelmingly richest source, so rich in fact that it would have been impossible to prepare all the material available in satisfactory form; and as it appeared desirable to include some key cursive mss. besides the main uncial ones, I decided to limit the material mainly to three extensive samples. One of these was the Pentateuch for which I had and mainly used G. Lisowsky's doctoral dissertation on Die Transskription der hebriiischen Eigennamen des Pentateuch in der Septuaginta, kindly provided in microfilm by Mr. Albrecht Schauer. The other two samples were drawn from Brooke-McLean's edition (on which Lisowsky's publication too was based) so as to consist of passages heavily saturated with proper names and probably translated during periods significantly different from each other and from the Pentateuch. These conditions were deemed best fulfilled by chs. 12 to 21 of the Book of Joshua and chs. 1 to 9 of the First Book of Chronicles; from other parts of LXX material is taken only for comparison with names attested in other traditions, but not in the main LXX samples, or for some other special reasons. The contrary case, i.e., omission of sample attestations, is more frequent; it occurs mainly in names of frequent occurrence, where most or all attestations are completely or essentially identical. As this results in deviant forms being quoted more frequently than their actual occurrence justifies, statistical evaluation of the results is affected accordingly. As the relationships of certain mss. or groups of mss. to each other crystallized in the course of the analysis, certain key mss. were selected for statistical evaluation, and large-scale checking of readings for possible undetected variants was undertaken (except for Ms. B for which photographic reproduction was not available and which could be assumed to be sufficiently accurately reproduced in printed editions), including non-sample readings. The mss. so checked included the uncial Ms. A and the cursives b (= 108 of Rahlfs' Verzeichnis), e (=52), t (= 134), and x (=426). For Greek material other than Septuagintal, I have manuscript evidence for the fragments of Origen's Hexapla including the second column as preserved in the palimpsest Codex Ambr. 0 39 which I had an opportunity to copy from the original at the Vatican Library with the kind permission of the lamented discoverer, Giovanni Card. Mercati; the photographic service also provided me with excellent photographs of the fragments with the accidental(?) omission of one. Some Hexaplaric material was also drawn from Field's edition of Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt; Sperber's Hebrew based upon Greek and Latin transliterations was used extensively at an early stage of the study,

XIV

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

as also (for Latin transcriptions) Siegfried's article on Die Aussprache des Hebriiischen bei Hieronymus; but was later rechecked almost out of mention. For Eusebius' Onomasticon, I copied all the names (including those in marginal notes) from the Vatican Ms. Barb. Gr. 531 fol. 2-47 before Klostermann's (or any other) edition became available to me, and afterwards rechecked discrepancies from an excellent microfilm. For Josephian transcriptions, I copied originally the material from Schlatter's Die hebriiischen Namen bei Josephus which is still occasionally useful because of several interpretations rejected by Schalit in his Namenworterbuch, but strikingly in agreement with other non-Masoretic material. Schalit is useful because of his usually more accurate references to Niese's edition of Flavii Josephi opera than Niese's own index, but notoriously unreliable with regard to variant readings (occasionally even the main one, as purely conjectural forms are not distinguished from actual readings). For the New Testament quotations, I am happy to have obtained the new Nestle-Aland edition in time for rechecking; in the original collection of material, Schmoller's Handkonkordanz was helpful. Of the Latin material, only Jerome's translation of Eusebius' Onomasticon was used systematically (primarily in Klostermann's edition), as its usefulness appeared to be limited to rechecking on the accuracy of its Greek original, where this was identifiable; materials published by de Lagarde in his Onomastica sacra are, however, quoted mostly where no Eusebian entry exists, as also his Greek materials other than Eusebian. For the Samaritan dialect, my main sources are those quoted and used in Materials vols. II-III; i.e., my own recordings and rough phonetic notes of H. Ritter and A. Schaade previously edited by me in the 2nd ed. of Kahle's The Cairo geniza. For occasional gaps in my own materials as well as genuine variants (i.e., other than those resulting from a different method of phone matization only), I have used Ben J:layyim's publications, particularly the third vol. of The literary and oral tradition of Hebrew and Aramaic amongst the Samaritans; rarely Petermann's Versuch too. Ben-J:layyim's materials were often also indirectly useful in so far as they corroborated many of my own recordings about which I had been uncertain, and also helped in the phonematization of phonetically ambiguous cases. Samaritan neo-Hebrew being strongly influenced by their Aramaic and Arabic dialects, the source material is confined to the text and recitation of the Samaritan Pentateuch; but otherwise than in the traditions mentioned so far, I have endeavoured to include all of it, thus also fil1ing in the gaps inadvertently remaining in the two volumes of the Materials. For the old Palestinian tradition too I have striven towards completeness as far as practicable. Primarily again, I rely on my own materials, in the first place those published in Materials vol. I, as well as others which I have been

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

xv

able to check against the underlying manuscripts. These include the two volumes of Masoreten des Westens by Kahle and the following ones by his pupils: Kober's Zum Machsor Jannai, Edelmann's Zur Friihgeschichte des Machzor, and Ormann's Das Siindenbekenntnis des Versohnungstages; Ormann also contributed to Materials vol. 1. Zulay's Piyyute Yannay was very helpful in the initial stages of deciphering partly poorly preserved manuscripts, and his help in the interpretation of the contents of these liturgical poems wellnigh indispensable at that stage; his premature departure therefore all the more lamentable. The consonant text of Bodleian Ms. 2714, 5 (Heb. d 41) was also published by 1. Davidson in the 3rd vol. of Genizah studies in memory of Doctor Solomon Schechter p. 8ff; while in Oxford, I copied the vocalization of the ms. on to it. More recent publications contain mostly texts with less regular and sometimes only occasional vocalization; they are therefore used here mostly in cases of special interest only (such as proper names because of their overall scarcity in this tradition); most frequentiy Dietrich's Neue paliistinisch punktierte Bibelfragmente which work I saw in its very early stages; and Revell's Hebrew texts with Palestinian vocalization; some of the mss. published in these I had seen but rejected when selecting material for Materials vol. 1. Unfortunately, Revell (self-confessedly, p. 156) did not even attempt to reproduce the individual forms nor accurate positions of the vowel signs, so that his publications cannot be relied upon in ambiguous cases; likewise, the lack of translation or other interpretation of the texts published by him makes them not only often more difficult to use, but in cases where he only prints the vocalized words without any context, the meaning of the words remains uncertain. Vocabulary of a part of the material in Masoreten des Westens vol. I compiled by a student of mine, (now) Dr. Terence Falla, was also useful in preparing the present work. For the Babylonian tradition, the sources are again too plentiful to be utilized to anything like their full extent. Moreover, as my experience has repeatedly told me that the often more or less faded and in some mss. secondarily "corrected" punctuation marks may be disfigured so as to be unrecognizable or seemingly absent in photographic reproductions, and that therefore only readings based on the originals may be regarded as sufficiently reliable, this places another limitation upon me, as my first-hand experience is limited to the fragments included in the Antonin collection (Ebr. JIIb) of the Public Library in Leningrad, and even them I did not have time to copy in extenso; one of them, a Mishna fragment (no. 328) was published in Leshonenu vol. XXI, others are quoted from unpublished copies based mainly on photographic reproductions called rotocopies. As these, however, are generally of better quality than printed facsimiles, I quote them under their collection number, while for other Bible fragments I use the sigla assigned by Kahle. The latter are also used less regularly because of the inferior quality of the

XVI

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

photographs which often obscures parts of the punctuation marks so as to make their interpretation uncertain; most of this material has been copied from the facsimiles by another student of mine, Miss Leanne Brown (but, needless to say, I take fuIl responsibility for any mistakes); Ec I, however, is an exception, and as parts of it were published by Kahle in Der masoretische Text des Alten Testaments and in Masoreten des Ostens, who had long and thoroughly studied the original, quotations from it could be regarded as the most reliable of all, were it not that the original punctuation has been "corrected" by a later scribe who, it seems, often tried to obscure the original marks intentionaIly. The usefulness of Israel Yeivin's gigantic The Babylonian vocalization and the linguistic tradition it reflects too is limited by the fact that it appears, partly at least, to be based on such photographs of inferior quality. On the other hand, Finkelstein's edition of Sifra or Torat Kohanim according to Codex Assemani LXVI gives a good reproduction of a ms. clearly legible throughout; it has therefore been utilized in full. Porath in his Mishnaic Hebrew also seems to make generaIly reliable use of his sources, and therefore a number of items which could not be rechecked against more original sources have been quoted from this rich coIlection of material. Where Tiberian forms are referred to, the reference is to the new edition, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1967-77), unless expressly stated otherwise.

*** More details will be given in the introductory parts to different sections, including the sources for comparative materials and the extent of their use in the introduction to section Bb.

PROVISIONAL LIST OF ABBREVIA nONS A A' AASF B abs. abstr. ac(c}. A.D. Ad

a(dj.} a(dv.} af a.fr. agst. Akk Am A.M. Ambr. Amor -AN

anon Ant Ant. AP aPal A ps AR.Ar -AR Arab Aram Ard art. aSm Ass AT ATa ATap AtF

ATs aux

B+

secondary verbal stem formed by means of a preformative /'/ or /a/. Greek version of OT called Aquila's. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae ser. B. absolute (state etc.). abstract. accusa ti ve (case). an no Domini. secondary verbal stem formed by means of a preformative /'I from a base with a long second radical. adjective, -ivaI. adverb(ial}. afformal, conjugation formed by means of afformatives only (