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March 15, 2006
The Strange Case of the Vanishing hayah in Ugaritic
Joe Cathy is beginning a series on the Hebrew verbal system. One of the more vexing verbs in Hebrew is hayah (היה) whose first meaning is often taken as "to become" but its semantic range (to fall out, to happen, to be) and syntactic function are all over the place. I hope Joe takes this up as his series unfolds.
If you learned Ugaritic from Cyrus Gordon's Ugaritic Textbook back in the day, you would know two things about the Ugaritic cognate of this verb. First, you would know that it appeared in the quadrilingual vocabulary text RS 20.123 (Gordon, 389) and second, that no matter how much Ugaritc you read you never came across the word or any of its derivatives anywhere else. That RS 20:123 contained the Ugaritic equivalent of the word was first suggested by Virolleaud, 66, and followed by Nougayrol, 244-245, among others.
At the time, I was curious about this strange anomaly.
The line is RS 20.123 II:28'. It and the following line read,
[lú šu] ma-an-ni ú-wa
[lú ša] a-wi du-ú
The first column of this text is Sumerian or at least Sumerigrams; the second column is Akkadian, the third is Hurrian and the fourth is Ugaritic written in the Akkadian syllabary. The first two columns are reconstructed on the basis of Text D of the Canonical lú šu vocabulary list that is well known from Mesopotamia and elsewhere. Never mind that the Akkadian column in line 28', when correctly restored, clearly reflects the third person personal pronoun and the Akkadian and Ugaritic columns of line 29' both have the relative pronoun, the idea that ú-wa in line 28' should be understood as cognate with Hebrew hawah/hayah persisted for some time. At least until I wrote a short paper pointing out that if one read ú-wa simply as huwa with the common meaning "it" or "he" any concern about the lack of hayah in the Ugaritic texts disappeared. The two lines would be "it" or "he" and "which." The Hurrian was not sufficiently well understood to force the case one-way or the other. It is likely that Hurrian uses the a first person pronoun in verbless sentences as a surrogate for the verb "to be."
I remember pointing this problem out to Gordon on one of his visits to Claremont and he instantly agreed with me and encouraged me to publish my thoughts on the matter.
Later John Huehnergard published an exhaustive study of the Ugaritic vocabulary as it is written in syllabic transliteration. Huehnergard, 86, came to the same conclusion I had reached. I was a little disappointed that he didn't cite my paper but perhaps it is better to be right than referenced.
Problem solved. There is no attestation of this verb in Ugaritic, alphabetic or syllabic.
A note for the pedantic: Strictly speaking, RS 20.123 belongs to the Sa vocabulary series rather than the Canonical lú šu series but in the vicinity of these lines they are similar.
References:
Huehnergard, John, Ugaritic Vocabulary in Syllabic Transcription, Harvard Semitic Studies 32, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987
Nougayrol, Jean, "Textes Suméro-Accadiens des Archives et Bibliothèques Privées d'Ugarit," Ugaritica V, Mission de Ras Shamra, XVI, Paris: P. Geuthner, 1968, 1-446 [Update, March 16, 2006, Oops, I forgot Nougayrol]
Smith, Duane, "Ugaritic hw Equals Hurrian manni," Ugarit Forschungen 9, Münster: Verlag Butzon and Bercher Keverlaer, 1977, 376-378.
Virolleaud, Charles, Compes rendus du Groupe linguistique d'Étudies Chamito-Sémitiques, VIII, 1957-60, 6
Posted by Duane Smith at March 15, 2006 4:38 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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