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August 19, 2006
Hypothesis Testing
The hypothesis I am trying to test is, "There is continuity between the Bronze Age scribal training traditions and the Iron Age scribal training traditions." Of course, this hypothesis could also have been stated negatively. While I'm waiting for some other things to mature or, in some cases become available, I thought I'd divert myself and try to see if there were any Akkadian loanwords in indisputable pre-exilic contexts. If they occurred in any number and early, they might be indicative of a continuum from the Bronze Age scribal education system into Iron Age in Israel.
The best place to find an indisputable pre-exilic Hebrew vocabulary is in pre-exilic epigraphic Hebrew. One can never be completely certain of this when looking at Biblical Hebrew, even in the "pre-exilic" prophets. There just might have been a later hand in there somewhere or other. So, I opened my new copy of Mankowski's Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew and my new copy of Gogel's, A Grammar of Epigraphic Hebrew, and did a little brute force comparison.
First, before I tell you my results, let me say that a casual glance through the possible Akkadian loanwords in Mankowski's annotated list (13-151) or his tables 3 and 4 (173-175) gives one the distinct impression that most of these words came into Hebrew during or after the exile. Mankowski sees about 60 direct Akkadian loanwords in Biblical Hebrew from a list of approximately twice that number that various scholars have suggested. He sees no direct Akkadian loanwords in Judges, Hosea, Obadiah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Malachi or Ruth. Isaiah has more than any other book, 13 unique loanwords, seven of these occurring in chapters 1-39. Jeremiah has 11 direct loanwords. Other books with higher numbers of Akkadian loans are Psalms, 9, and II Corinthians, 8. Of course, these raw numbers are rather meaningless without being normalized into a percentage the individual vocabulary items in each book. By "direct" I mean without an Aramaic or other intermediary.
Second, a few words about methodology: I worked from possible loanwords to the epigraphic evidence using Gogel's, 293-383, lexicon. I excluded all possible candidate words that Mankowski did not think were really loans from Akkadian and all words which he called "culture words" and all words that he thought came into Biblical Hebrew from Akkadian via any other language, Egyptian, Aramaic, etc. Since I started with the roots rather than the whole words, the rather short list below has my notes and judgment on the likelihood that the whole words in epigraphic Hebrew are really Akkadian loanwords. Please note that the candidate words listed below are mine; Mankowski did not consider epigraphic material. And of course, my methodology did not consider possible loans, if any, that do not also occur in Biblical Hebrew.
Below is the complete list of Akkadian loanword candidates in epigraphic Hebrew with my notes on each.
- ’škr, Kadesh Barnea, Qadmoniot, 16 (61), 1983, 12 (apud, Gogel, 377) - a noun meaning "gift" from the Akkadian iškaru, which generally means "equipment" or "product" and only in neo-Assyrian, "tax." But the meaning "delivery of (goods)" is well attested in Neo-Babylonian. While I have not been able to study the Kadesh Barnea text directly, the morphology of the word in question would lead me to believe that this is likely the same loanword that occurs in Psalms 72:10 and Ezekiel 27:15. I am assuming that this inscription is from the 7th–6th century BCE fortress at Kadesh-Barnea but I'm not sure. More study is required. I'll update this post if I get more information. I don't have easy access to Qadmoniot. One would also want to know the path by which this word came into Hebrew. Or was there one path for epigraphic Hebrew and another for Biblical Hebrew? By the time of the 7th–6th century BCE fortress at Kadesh-Barnea, Judah had already had lots of contact, to put it mildly, with the Assyrians and the Babylonians. It is extremely likely that this word came into epigraphic Hebrew from Neo-Babylonian well into the Iron Age rather than via the Bronze Age Middle Babylonian. (Mankowski, 42; Gogel, 377).
- zk’, Beth-Shemesh Seal 10a:2 and Seal 10b:2, where it appears to be part of the personal name, Kesa Zakka, if the name is from the root *ZKK then it may mean "pure" and be related to the Akkadian zakakātu or zakukūtu meaning "glass." A more supportable example of a loan from the Akkadian occurs in Job 28:17. There are several problems in seeing zk’ being in any way related to the Akkadian word. First, as Gogel indicates, it is not clear that the root of zk’ is *ZKK. If it were, the Semitic root is well documented in Hebrew in words that are clearly not Akkadian loanwords. While common Semitic origins may be seen between zk’ in the Beth-Shemesh seals and Akkadian zakakātu there is no reason to see a loan. (Mankowski, 52; Gogel, 322)
- kwr, Samaria 49.4 in mkwr, "from Kur," the noun kwr means "kiln" from Akkadian kūru, the root is also present in Leviticus 11:35. This example suffers because Kur is likely a proper name in this ostracon from Samaria and its relationship to Akkadian kūru is tenuous at best. (Mankowski, 63, 67; Gogel, 340)
Not a very impressive list! Three candidates and one likely loanword! You may also want to give half a point to kwr. Even granting that, this is a very short list. Of course, I may have missed some candidates. However, even if I only found half of them that would still be a very short list of Akkadian loanwords in epigraphic Hebrew. While these findings do not completely negate my hypothesis, they sure aren't supportive of it either.
However, the fact that there may well be one such loanword has another implication. Finding an Akkadian loanword in a Biblical text does not necessarily mean that the passage in which it occurs is exilic or post-exilic.
I think I may try the same experiment with Egyptian loanwords.
References:
Mankowski, Paul V., Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, Harvard Semitic Studies, 47, Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2000.
Posted by Duane Smith at August 19, 2006 1:43 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |
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Comments
A fascinating read! Of course, the sample (epigraphic Hebrew) is both small - biblical books of thast size are likely not to have Akkadian loan words present, and usually relatively simple texts, which are not contexts likely to require the use of loan words...
Posted by: tim bulkeley at August 20, 2006 11:09 AM
Tim,
Thanks for your comments. I'm glad you enjoyed the post. Your first point is certainly correct. I'm trying to develop a statistical model that hopefully will give some measure of the likelihood loanwords, or any other set of words for that matter, showing up within a corpus of some number of other words. There has been some work on this among the cryptologists (the real ones) but it is not clear if any of it will work in our context.
As to your second point: on the one hand, to most speakers or writers of a language a word is just a word. Except for those few that are sensitive to loanwords, a well-established loanword in a language will not seem unusual and will be used, if appropriate, even in simple contexts. So I don't think it is a question of a loanword being required or not being required. On the other hand, much of the epigraphic material is limited to a relatively few genres and can be shockingly formulaic. There also seems to be a disproportionate frequency of proper names. If loanwords never became part of the formulae or part of the common expressions within a genre then you are correct that they would have, at best, a very low frequency.
Heck, they actually have a very low frequency within the Hebrew Bible.
Posted by: Duane at August 20, 2006 3:43 PM
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