Last week TheTorah posted a few interesting articles, in between bravely telling its mostly-secular-Jewish readers how sorry they were for not being liberal enough. Catnip for me is when they support an old-fashioned position like admitting Moses was a Semite after all. Thomas Schneider has posted this one.
"Phinehas" remains Egyptian. The p- prefix is a tell, before everything got all Aramaic. It would mean "the dark one", something like "Krishna"; in its Torah context the man may have been "Kushi". tꜣ-nḥsj would be the dark-person's land, which William Paul Coates stuck upon his kid because daddy was ign'int. (I don't find where Egypt used this construction.) Back to Torah: "Phinehas" would, I think, count as a fossil of a (foreign) name brought into Hebrew which origin the Torah's Ptolemaic-era transmitters and translators might no longer have remembered. Canaani in that ABH age of the Song of Miriam might not even have had its own (há-) prefix.
"Moses" rather represents that fossil "ABH" Hebrew. We've looked at a few examples, like Yoel Elitzur's elón preserved only in placenames. Schneider points of the yiph'al names like Isaac and mah ancestor Yakub.
Elitzur here brought ḌḤK as a basic Semitism. This is ṢḤQ for Genesis, which needs to explain the name יצחק; the root is also in Exodus (thus Ezekiel) and once in Judges. Alternative Hebrew is ŚḤQ from... Judges again, and Jeremiah and 1-2 Reigns/Samuel, and the Psalter and Proverbs. By the way Psalm 105, Jeremiah, and Amos(!) agree that Isaac's name is with S not Ṣ. The majority principle leads to ŚḤQ for the actual Hebrew. 'Tis a little harder to figure in Arabic because I cannot find it in Safaitic. Once it gets into the postNabati script it could just as easily be ḌḤK - or ṢḤK.
In yi'phal, Isaac meant "he scoffs". Schneider ponders an earlier stage where the tribal hero was the man who scoffs at his enemies. The man we know as Jacob/James is more problematic, but Schneider goes with old Amurru where it would mean "he protects" (*Yi'qab?). Either name can be made to imply that God is the ish/gabur who protects His people and laughs off their enemies. The Bible would represent a still-later phase at least for Isaac, as the Lord scoffs back: at... Sarah, who had scoffed at His angels (or avatars). Isaac is not "Tisaac" after all. By the way, as two fossils, bumbling through tribal formulae as they did, here are two more names which Elitzur cannot use to place the whole Torah into the Bronze Age as he'd like.
Jan Joosten has brought a couple more examples. The Exodus employs a term for midnight. Joosten takes it literally: halfway-the-night; Westerners would think, "stroke of-". LBH in Psalm 119 and Job instead imply something more general, middle-of-the-night. This posed a problem for contemporary Exodus-inheritors who, reasonably, asked why The Knower Of All had played so loose with times at such an important event. Clearly Joosten has solved that little problem for us all: the Lord was telling Israel - in Egypt - exactly what time it was, and it's not His fault the language changed after the Exile.
A more touchy subject is the military use of psṭ. Aramaic owns its own psṭ which means "spread out", like classical (Najd?) Arabic basīṭ. But unlike, oh, CBH gly ("scour", I've argued, alongside Safa'-Arabic); here Joosten sees Hebrew going its own way, earlier. psṭ would have intended "raid" and such that Chronicler guff about "spread out after winning the war" would be an Aramaism, brought in after the invasions. Heck as far as I know, this sense might have entered Edomite and/or Nabaṭite as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment