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February 04, 2006

An Experiment with a Little Content

Note: This post has two functions, one is to publish the content that you can read below. The other is to test the use of a couple of the Society of Biblical Literature's font. Some of you may see garbage, others may see squares. If this works, I will tell you how to get the fonts if you want them. If it doesn't work I will modify or delete the post and try something else. In any case the post may expand as I add some discussion and try some other things.

When you are working on a difficult text, you covet anything that might shed light on it. It was for that reason that I became very excited the other day when I ran across a Phoenician inscription with the word ’sp in it. This is one of the words that occurs in a difficult context on the tablet from Ta'anach (Taanak) that I am studying and will be posting on soon.

The Phoenician text is a fragment of a Phoenician funerary inscription from Byblos which Starcky (1969), 259-273, published in 1969. Cross (1979), 40, dates the inscription to the first half of the fifth century BCE. The last three words of the first line read ’sp bmr wbdl[ which Starcky translated ". . . recueilli dans la myrrhe et le bdellium." While the text is late, Cross (1979), notes the Hebrew idiom used in Jeremiah 8:2 ("they shall not be gathered or buried [ לֹא יֵאָסְפוּ וְלֹא יִקָּבֵרוּ]"; 25:33 (They shall not be lamented or gathered or buried [ לֹא יִסָּפְדוּ וְלֹא יֵאָסְפוּ וְלֹא יִקָּבֵרוּ] . . .") and Ezekiel 29:5, ("you shall . . . not be gathered or assembled [ לֹא תֵאָסֵף וְלֹא תִקָּבֵץ].") in which he understands the root אסף to mean "prepared for burial". He therefore translates the end of line one of the inscription, "prepared for burial in myrrh and bdellium."

While I do not think this understanding of the root ’sp applies to the tablet from Ta'anach both because the Phoenician and Hebrew examples are late and, more importantly there is a smoother understanding of our text, it is just possible that we should read ’s2p on the Ta'anach tablet as a G or possibly D stem imperative meaning "prepare" and render the phrase, "Prepare a wrapping of henna" or the like. However, I'm not so sure that this really informs the Ta'anach alphabetic text. More later.

Posted by DuaneSmith at February 4, 2006 11:47 AM | Read more on Ugarit |

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The Hebrew characters look fine if the browser encoding is set to UTF-8. The comments to this post of mine has instructions for changing the encoding of different browsers:
http://snailstales.blogspot.com/2006/01/how-to-view-this-blog-properly.html

Posted by: Aydin at February 4, 2006 03:05 PM

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