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January 28, 2006
To Gather or to Cure? That is the Question
While continuing to work on the alphabetic cuneiform text from Tell Ta'anak (aka Tell Ta'anach) I thought I'd take a little side trip into a unusual usage of a very common Hebrew word. 2 Kings 5:1-19 tells the story of the healing of Naaman the commander of the army of the king of Aram. According to the story, Naaman had some kind of a skin disease or perhaps leprosy. The king of Aram sent Naaman with an accompanying official letter to the king of Israel to be healed. There is a humorous little interlude in which the king of Israel protests that he is not God and worries that war may be in the offing. Anyway, Naanam eventually gets to the prophet Elisah who, via a messenger, proscribes a seven-fold bath in the river Jordon. After a little outburst of anger, Naaman takes the cure and proclaims his belief that there is no god but the God of Israel.
This is a nice little story with a fast moving narrative and a couple of unexpected twists even if the outcome is completely predictable. What interests me here is the Hebrew word translated "cure" or the like in this story. The root אסף appears in several verbal forms in the story. If you were to encounter this root anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, you would translate it with something like "gather" or "collect" in some contexts and "remove" or "take away" in others. But, as far as I can find, only in 2 Kings 5:1-19 does it mean "cure." For example, the king of Israel protesting Naanam's having come to him for a cure says, "Am I God, to give death and life, that this man sends word to me to cure (לאסף) a man of leprosy. (2 Kings 5:7, NRSV)." One might reasonably consider the word to mean "to remove" disease in this context. But there may be more to it than that. It might be a difference Semitic root.
The root ’sp appears in virtually all Semitic languages with the meaning of "gather" or "remove." In Akkadian it appears as esêpu. But long ago John Gary did one of those little scholarly magic tricks where they show you something in their right hand and make it disappear with their left hand and then make it reappear somewhere else. Gary (1963), 453, suggested that the Akkadian equivalent might really be ašāpu that means, "to practice exorcism." Then, having shown us the suggestion he makes it disappear by correctly saying, "The sibilants, to be sure, do not correspond." And then, like all good magicians, he lets us see it again somewhere else,
"but this may be explained by the fact that the verb is a loanword from Akkadian or by the conscious effort of the writer to reproduce the border dialect of the Hebrew girl (who first told the king of Aram about the king of Israel), which probably resembled Aramaic."
The problem with this is that a loanword would likely be written with a "š" also and one would guess that the most likely Aramaic equivalent would have a "t" or a "š" rather than an "s." But one can never be completely sure about these things. Notice also that the author has the king of Israel and the king of Aram use the same word. So I'm not so certain that Gary's little magic trick works. At least, I don't think he can make the Akkadian word reappear quite as easily as it might seem.
Does the root occur outside of the Hebrew Bible with the meaning "cure." Well, maybe one place. The second word in the Tell Ta'anak alphabetic cuneiform text (KTU 4.767:1) is ’sp. If you take the next two words which, for the sake of inclusiveness, may be read ‛s/s2/ţ kprt as the object of a verb ’sp then you might translate the verb "gather," i.e. "gather ‛s/s2/ţ." Kprt is likely henna and the word before kprt is something made from henna or, perhaps, part of the henna plant itself. But if you take these words to be the subject of ’sp, then you might want to render the phrase, "‛s/s2/ţ kprt cures."
In the past, I have offered no more than one preliminary post before presenting my complete study of any one of the texts sometimes thought to be in the short cuneiform alphabet. This is my third "preliminary" post related to KTU 4.767. In part these multiple posting are due to the fact that this is an extremely difficult text that is made all the more so by the fact that it seems to be completely intact and readable if one only knew for sure what it said. I am also trying to get hold of "A Prosopography and Ethno-Linguistic Characterization of Southern Canaan in the Second Millenium B.C.E." which Ran Zadok published in Michmanim, 9 (1969). The closest place I have found it is at UC Berkley. So I will try to use interlibrary loan. But this could take a long time and I might need to convince Shirley that our health could benefit from a long weekend vacation in Northern California. Frankly, I hope interlibrary loan comes through. It's been raining up there a lot and we have had a fairly dry winter so far.
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Posted by Duane Smith at January 28, 2006 2:54 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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