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August 29, 2008

Friday Loanword: māḫāzu

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Akkadian māḫāzu ranges in meaning from a small enclosure, often with a well or pond, serving a cultic purpose to a town with such a enclosure, to simply a town, to a quay or harbor. While not the most common word for "harbor" in Akkadian, it is that meaning of māḫāzu that will most concern us here.

With that, let's turn to Psalm 107:30,

Then they [the mariners] rejoiced because they had quiet, and he brought them to the harbor (מְחֹוז) of their desire.

The LXX renders *מָחֹוז, λιμενα, "harbor." And harbor fits well in context. In addition, מָחֹוז is used in post-biblical Hebrew to mean harbor. So I think there is little reason to doubt the meaning of the Hebrew of Psalm 107:30. But where did this seemingly (see below) hapax legomenon word come from? Mankowski, 89-90, following others, thinks it came into Hebrew as a loan from Akkadian māḫāzu. And so do I. But I do worry about it a little.

There are complexities in this understanding. Perhaps the greatest problem is that a cognate word occurs in Ugaritic, ma/iḫd. It's even used as the geographical name of an actual harbor city, ^URUma-a-ḫa-di. Ugaritic maḫadu appears in an multi-lingual vocabulary text from Ugarit. The line in question, RS 20.123+ II:21', reads,

KAR (Sumerian) Ka-a-ru (Akkadian) ma-ḫa-[z]i (Hurrian) ma-aḫ-ḫa-[du] (Ugaritic)

Kāru is the more common Akkadian work for "harbor." It was itself borrowed from Sumerian KAR. The Hurrian is likely a loanword from Akkadian. The Ugaritic word, while unlikely itself to have been borrowed directly from Akkadian, suggests the possibility that the Hebrew word came by way of Northwest Semitic channels rather than directly from Akkadian. As Mankowski. 90, says, "the Ugaritic word seems to reflect indigenous phonology and to be cognate with māḫāzu and not a borrowing." Mankowski, 90, goes on to say,

Is מחוז likewise a NWS cognate? The Ugaritic alphabetic spellings indicate the presence of aleph, which (along with the final -d corresponding to Heb. and Akk. -z) corroborate the commonly proposed derivation as an m-preformative of the verbal root ʾaḫāđu. Yet, the expected Hebrew reflex of this noun would be מאחז, with the aleph indicated in the orthography. The fact that the Aramaic, Hebrew and Punic forms lack the aleph suggests that they descend ultimately from the Akkadian.

Then there's the issue of the waw holam in מָחֹוז. But, an abnormally interesting question awaits our attention before I take that up.

Above I hinted that מָחֹוז in Psalm 107:30 might not really be a hapax legomenon word in Biblical Hebrew. Let me be clear, it is hapax legomenon in the Hebrew of the MT. But how about Isaiah 23:10:

in the MT. This is a notoriously difficult verse. It more or less begs for emendation if only to make rudimentary sense of it. Slightly modifying Flint's, 48, n. 57, reconstruction, Barré, 18, arrives at the following proposed Vorlage for Isaiah 23:10:

Cross (back) to your own land, for Tarshish has perished, (for) the harbor/port city is no more. (Barré's translation)

Hmmm. Is this a potential second example of the loan in Biblical Hebrew? If the original had an intervening waw or at minimum an intervening long vowel (not indicated the reconstruction) it would make the inversion of the ח and ז harder to explain. Based on this suggestion, I wonder if the Vorlage of מָחֹוז in Psalm 107:30 wasn't also מחז and pronounced something like Akkadian māḫāzu and that the ō was introduced into the MT to make the noun conform to the common מָקוֹל noun pattern. Mankowski, 90, suggests forced conformation to this pattern while arguing that the vocalization pattern indicates that the ō is not the result of the Canaanite Shift.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at August 29, 2008 7:20 PM | Read more on Humor |

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