#aramaic — Public Fediverse posts

Mysterium Esdrae II: The Curious Case of Nehemiah

This is the second in a series of guest posts by Fenna Capelle (Part I; Part III). Fenna studies Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (research) (MA) at Leiden University.

As we concluded at the end of our last blog, the relationship between Ezra-Nehemiah and 1 Esdras, its dark, mysterious, apocryphal look-alike, invites closer examination. It is amusing to notice, even now as I read, research and write for this blog, how much I tend to favour the canonical texts that I grew up with: naturally, apocryphal texts must be secondary to canonical ones, which are ever unaltered and original. There is, however, an overall agreement that the editor(s)/author(s) of both Ezra-Nehemiah (written in Hebrew and interlined with some chapters in Aramaic) and 1 Esdras (composed in Greek) worked from a shared Semitic vorlage, i.e., a hypothetical/reconstructed source text that underlies a later manuscript and that editors or authors work from. The question remains, however, whether the Semitic text underlying 1 Esdras was exactly the same as Ezra-Nehemiah in its present form (Talshir and Talshir 1995; Talshir 1999, 269-270). It would be good, at the outset, to address an obvious question: what are some differences we observe between the two texts and how might we explain these variations?

Nehemiah, a Judean exile and cup-bearer to king Artaxerxes, is granted the king’s permission to return home and help rebuild the city of Jerusalem (Neh. 1:1-2:5), some 13 years after Ezra’s return from exile (see Pakkala 2008, 205-206):

Firstly, it is odd that the character of Nehemiah makes no appearance at all in the book of 1 Esdras, which seems to focus solely on the character of Ezra. As with solving any good mystery, one conjures up possible scenarios: either the author/editor of 1 Esdras has consciously omitted the character of Nehemiah, or 1 Esdras is simply an older, sans-Nehemiah version of the narrative. In this case, another scribe must, at some later stage, have added the Nehemiah material, leading to the form of the text in Ezra-Nehemiah (as Dieter Böhler argues in his 2003 article). I must concede, contrary to this, that most of the extra material (‘pluses’) is found in the book of 1 Esdras, not that of Ezra-Nehemiah – think, for example, of the story of the three guards. Zipporah Talshir, in a monograph dedicated to above matter, argues that 1 Esdras is a section deliberately cut out from the Ezra-Nehemiah sequence to form a framework for the story of the guards, that this lengthy addition is the text’s raison d’être (Talshir 1999). My point is that one would, in most cases, expect a more expansive, elaborate text to be later than a text that is less so — unless, of course, there is a good reason for deletion, as I, and others with me, think might be the case with Nehemiah (see Wright 2011, 145-163; paywalled).

The two texts, however, appear to differ somewhat in their view on these rebuilding efforts. 1 Esdras describes how Zerubbabel and co. “returned to Jerusalem and the rest of Judea, each to his own town” (1 Esd. 5:8 — N.B. all English translations of 1 Esdras taken from A New English Translation of the Septuagint). A few chapters later, when Ezra has returned and confronted the Israelite nation with their missteps, a large crowd gathers around him, weeping and repenting:

While Ezra was praying and making his confession, weeping and lying on the ground before the temple, there gathered around him a very great crowd of men and women and youths from Jerusalem, for there was great weeping among the multitude.

1 Esd. 8:88

1 Esdras makes it seem as if the city of Jerusalem is already repopulated by the time Ezra returns to reinstate YHWH’s law (Böhler 2003, 5). The parallel passage in the canonical book of Ezra, however, describes matters a bit differently:

Then all the people of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within the three days; it was the ninth month, on the twentieth day of the month. All the people sat in the open square before the house of God, trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain.

Ezr. 10:9 (all Biblical quotations taken from the New Revised Standard Version)

People gather from all over the place to hear Ezra speak. Jerusalem appears unpopulated as of yet, the rebuilding of which will eventually be Nehemiah’s task (Böhler 2003, 5).
Some years ago, Jacob Wright, professor of Hebrew at Candler School of Theology, published an article responding to this exact matter (Wright 2011, 145-163). He argues, in my opinion rather convincingly, that 1 Esdras has consciously eliminated Nehemiah from the historical record of the restoration. Given the array of exilic Biblical prophecies foretelling the rebuilding of Jerusalem (see, for example, Jer. 30:18; 31:38-40; Isa. 44:26-28; 49:14-20), it seems suspicious that the writer of 1 Esdras would fail to make the rebuilding explicit (apart from the few cases in which we may infer a rebuilt Jerusalem, as we have seen above). The reason for omission, Wright argues, may lie in the character of Nehemiah himself:

His explicit polemics against the priesthood (Neh.13), his presentation of a gubernatorial jurisdiction that extended to the temple (Neh.10), and his advocacy of a strong, militarized Judah that threatened the alliances of the aristocratic priests —these are just a few of the things that would have undoubtedly provoked the consternation of 1 Esdras’ pro-priestly authors.

Wright 2011, 150

Indeed, 1 Esdras seems, above all else, concerned with temple-service and priesthood. To return to the story of the three guards (of course missing from the canonical book): the insertion of this story allows for a buildup towards Zerubbabel’s temple-related quest: rebuilding of YHWH’s house, returning of the temple-vessels and rededication of the altar. If we follow Wright’s thinking, it seems probable that 1 Esdras relies on an already existing tradition where Ezra and Nehemiah were a two-for-one deal! The question, then, is how far this reshaping extends and what other traces of editorial intervention we might detect in the text. I propose we focus our next blogpost on one of these editorial interventions: the correspondence with king Artaxerxes to block construction of the temple and city.

Mysterium Esdrae II: The Curious Case of Nehemiah

This is the second in a series of guest posts by Fenna Capelle (Part I; Part III). Fenna studies Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (research) (MA) at Leiden University.

As we concluded at the end of our last blog, the relationship between Ezra-Nehemiah and 1 Esdras, its dark, mysterious, apocryphal look-alike, invites closer examination. It is amusing to notice, even now as I read, research and write for this blog, how much I tend to favour the canonical texts that I grew up with: naturally, apocryphal texts must be secondary to canonical ones, which are ever unaltered and original. There is, however, an overall agreement that the editor(s)/author(s) of both Ezra-Nehemiah (written in Hebrew and interlined with some chapters in Aramaic) and 1 Esdras (composed in Greek) worked from a shared Semitic vorlage, i.e., a hypothetical/reconstructed source text that underlies a later manuscript and that editors or authors work from. The question remains, however, whether the Semitic text underlying 1 Esdras was exactly the same as Ezra-Nehemiah in its present form (Talshir and Talshir 1995; Talshir 1999, 269-270). It would be good, at the outset, to address an obvious question: what are some differences we observe between the two texts and how might we explain these variations?

Nehemiah, a Judean exile and cup-bearer to king Artaxerxes, is granted the king’s permission to return home and help rebuild the city of Jerusalem (Neh. 1:1-2:5), some 13 years after Ezra’s return from exile (see Pakkala 2008, 205-206):

Firstly, it is odd that the character of Nehemiah makes no appearance at all in the book of 1 Esdras, which seems to focus solely on the character of Ezra. As with solving any good mystery, one conjures up possible scenarios: either the author/editor of 1 Esdras has consciously omitted the character of Nehemiah, or 1 Esdras is simply an older, sans-Nehemiah version of the narrative. In this case, another scribe must, at some later stage, have added the Nehemiah material, leading to the form of the text in Ezra-Nehemiah (as Dieter Böhler argues in his 2003 article). I must concede, contrary to this, that most of the extra material (‘pluses’) is found in the book of 1 Esdras, not that of Ezra-Nehemiah – think, for example, of the story of the three guards. Zipporah Talshir, in a monograph dedicated to above matter, argues that 1 Esdras is a section deliberately cut out from the Ezra-Nehemiah sequence to form a framework for the story of the guards, that this lengthy addition is the text’s raison d’être (Talshir 1999). My point is that one would, in most cases, expect a more expansive, elaborate text to be later than a text that is less so — unless, of course, there is a good reason for deletion, as I, and others with me, think might be the case with Nehemiah (see Wright 2011, 145-163; paywalled).

The two texts, however, appear to differ somewhat in their view on these rebuilding efforts. 1 Esdras describes how Zerubbabel and co. “returned to Jerusalem and the rest of Judea, each to his own town” (1 Esd. 5:8 — N.B. all English translations of 1 Esdras taken from A New English Translation of the Septuagint). A few chapters later, when Ezra has returned and confronted the Israelite nation with their missteps, a large crowd gathers around him, weeping and repenting:

While Ezra was praying and making his confession, weeping and lying on the ground before the temple, there gathered around him a very great crowd of men and women and youths from Jerusalem, for there was great weeping among the multitude.

1 Esd. 8:88

1 Esdras makes it seem as if the city of Jerusalem is already repopulated by the time Ezra returns to reinstate YHWH’s law (Böhler 2003, 5). The parallel passage in the canonical book of Ezra, however, describes matters a bit differently:

Then all the people of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within the three days; it was the ninth month, on the twentieth day of the month. All the people sat in the open square before the house of God, trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain.

Ezr. 10:9 (all Biblical quotations taken from the New Revised Standard Version)

People gather from all over the place to hear Ezra speak. Jerusalem appears unpopulated as of yet, the rebuilding of which will eventually be Nehemiah’s task (Böhler 2003, 5).
Some years ago, Jacob Wright, professor of Hebrew at Candler School of Theology, published an article responding to this exact matter (Wright 2011, 145-163). He argues, in my opinion rather convincingly, that 1 Esdras has consciously eliminated Nehemiah from the historical record of the restoration. Given the array of exilic Biblical prophecies foretelling the rebuilding of Jerusalem (see, for example, Jer. 30:18; 31:38-40; Isa. 44:26-28; 49:14-20), it seems suspicious that the writer of 1 Esdras would fail to make the rebuilding explicit (apart from the few cases in which we may infer a rebuilt Jerusalem, as we have seen above). The reason for omission, Wright argues, may lie in the character of Nehemiah himself:

His explicit polemics against the priesthood (Neh.13), his presentation of a gubernatorial jurisdiction that extended to the temple (Neh.10), and his advocacy of a strong, militarized Judah that threatened the alliances of the aristocratic priests —these are just a few of the things that would have undoubtedly provoked the consternation of 1 Esdras’ pro-priestly authors.

Wright 2011, 150

Indeed, 1 Esdras seems, above all else, concerned with temple-service and priesthood. To return to the story of the three guards (of course missing from the canonical book): the insertion of this story allows for a buildup towards Zerubbabel’s temple-related quest: rebuilding of YHWH’s house, returning of the temple-vessels and rededication of the altar. If we follow Wright’s thinking, it seems probable that 1 Esdras relies on an already existing tradition where Ezra and Nehemiah were a two-for-one deal! The question, then, is how far this reshaping extends and what other traces of editorial intervention we might detect in the text. I propose we focus our next blogpost on one of these editorial interventions: the correspondence with king Artaxerxes to block construction of the temple and city.

Mysterium Esdrae II: The Curious Case of Nehemiah

This is the second in a series of guest posts by Fenna Capelle (Part I; Part III). Fenna studies Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (research) (MA) at Leiden University.

As we concluded at the end of our last blog, the relationship between Ezra-Nehemiah and 1 Esdras, its dark, mysterious, apocryphal look-alike, invites closer examination. It is amusing to notice, even now as I read, research and write for this blog, how much I tend to favour the canonical texts that I grew up with: naturally, apocryphal texts must be secondary to canonical ones, which are ever unaltered and original. There is, however, an overall agreement that the editor(s)/author(s) of both Ezra-Nehemiah (written in Hebrew and interlined with some chapters in Aramaic) and 1 Esdras (composed in Greek) worked from a shared Semitic vorlage, i.e., a hypothetical/reconstructed source text that underlies a later manuscript and that editors or authors work from. The question remains, however, whether the Semitic text underlying 1 Esdras was exactly the same as Ezra-Nehemiah in its present form (Talshir and Talshir 1995; Talshir 1999, 269-270). It would be good, at the outset, to address an obvious question: what are some differences we observe between the two texts and how might we explain these variations?

Nehemiah, a Judean exile and cup-bearer to king Artaxerxes, is granted the king’s permission to return home and help rebuild the city of Jerusalem (Neh. 1:1-2:5), some 13 years after Ezra’s return from exile (see Pakkala 2008, 205-206):

Firstly, it is odd that the character of Nehemiah makes no appearance at all in the book of 1 Esdras, which seems to focus solely on the character of Ezra. As with solving any good mystery, one conjures up possible scenarios: either the author/editor of 1 Esdras has consciously omitted the character of Nehemiah, or 1 Esdras is simply an older, sans-Nehemiah version of the narrative. In this case, another scribe must, at some later stage, have added the Nehemiah material, leading to the form of the text in Ezra-Nehemiah (as Dieter Böhler argues in his 2003 article). I must concede, contrary to this, that most of the extra material (‘pluses’) is found in the book of 1 Esdras, not that of Ezra-Nehemiah – think, for example, of the story of the three guards. Zipporah Talshir, in a monograph dedicated to above matter, argues that 1 Esdras is a section deliberately cut out from the Ezra-Nehemiah sequence to form a framework for the story of the guards, that this lengthy addition is the text’s raison d’être (Talshir 1999). My point is that one would, in most cases, expect a more expansive, elaborate text to be later than a text that is less so — unless, of course, there is a good reason for deletion, as I, and others with me, think might be the case with Nehemiah (see Wright 2011, 145-163; paywalled).

The two texts, however, appear to differ somewhat in their view on these rebuilding efforts. 1 Esdras describes how Zerubbabel and co. “returned to Jerusalem and the rest of Judea, each to his own town” (1 Esd. 5:8 — N.B. all English translations of 1 Esdras taken from A New English Translation of the Septuagint). A few chapters later, when Ezra has returned and confronted the Israelite nation with their missteps, a large crowd gathers around him, weeping and repenting:

While Ezra was praying and making his confession, weeping and lying on the ground before the temple, there gathered around him a very great crowd of men and women and youths from Jerusalem, for there was great weeping among the multitude.

1 Esd. 8:88

1 Esdras makes it seem as if the city of Jerusalem is already repopulated by the time Ezra returns to reinstate YHWH’s law (Böhler 2003, 5). The parallel passage in the canonical book of Ezra, however, describes matters a bit differently:

Then all the people of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within the three days; it was the ninth month, on the twentieth day of the month. All the people sat in the open square before the house of God, trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain.

Ezr. 10:9 (all Biblical quotations taken from the New Revised Standard Version)

People gather from all over the place to hear Ezra speak. Jerusalem appears unpopulated as of yet, the rebuilding of which will eventually be Nehemiah’s task (Böhler 2003, 5).
Some years ago, Jacob Wright, professor of Hebrew at Candler School of Theology, published an article responding to this exact matter (Wright 2011, 145-163). He argues, in my opinion rather convincingly, that 1 Esdras has consciously eliminated Nehemiah from the historical record of the restoration. Given the array of exilic Biblical prophecies foretelling the rebuilding of Jerusalem (see, for example, Jer. 30:18; 31:38-40; Isa. 44:26-28; 49:14-20), it seems suspicious that the writer of 1 Esdras would fail to make the rebuilding explicit (apart from the few cases in which we may infer a rebuilt Jerusalem, as we have seen above). The reason for omission, Wright argues, may lie in the character of Nehemiah himself:

His explicit polemics against the priesthood (Neh.13), his presentation of a gubernatorial jurisdiction that extended to the temple (Neh.10), and his advocacy of a strong, militarized Judah that threatened the alliances of the aristocratic priests —these are just a few of the things that would have undoubtedly provoked the consternation of 1 Esdras’ pro-priestly authors.

Wright 2011, 150

Indeed, 1 Esdras seems, above all else, concerned with temple-service and priesthood. To return to the story of the three guards (of course missing from the canonical book): the insertion of this story allows for a buildup towards Zerubbabel’s temple-related quest: rebuilding of YHWH’s house, returning of the temple-vessels and rededication of the altar. If we follow Wright’s thinking, it seems probable that 1 Esdras relies on an already existing tradition where Ezra and Nehemiah were a two-for-one deal! The question, then, is how far this reshaping extends and what other traces of editorial intervention we might detect in the text. I propose we focus our next blogpost on one of these editorial interventions: the correspondence with king Artaxerxes to block construction of the temple and city.

Mysterium Esdrae I: The Other Ezra

This is the first in a series of guest posts by Fenna Capelle (Part II; Part III). Fenna studies Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (research) (MA) at Leiden University.

It is safe to say that the Biblical Apocrypha do not constitute the daily reading of a young person raised in a Dutch Reformed church, as I was. All the greater was my delight upon realising the insights this corpus of texts might offer us; valuable insights into the ways ancient communities engaged with scripture and interpreted the events of the world around them. The Biblical Apocrypha operate outside an established canon of scripture, whose relation to said canon can at times be elusive, as we shall see in the case of 1 Esdras. 1 Esdras is an apocryphal text that we find included amongst the texts of the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Whereas the Hebrew Bible has preserved just one version of the story of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Septuagint contains two: Esdras A (1 Esd.) and Esdras B (2 Esd.). The latter is a quite literal translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic book of Ezra-Nehemiah, yet, as we shall see at length throughout this series, Esdras A, or 1 Esdras, is not.

The book of 1 Esdras opens at the events described in the last chapters of 2 Chronicles: King Josiah leads a festive Passover ceremony at the temple (1 Esd. 1:1-22; 2 Chron. 35: 1-19). Josiah’s reign, however, is cut short, as an ill-advised war against Pharaoh Necho of Egypt proves fatal for him (1 Esd. 1:23-29; 2 Chron. 35: 1-19). Josiah is succeeded by a string of weak and impious kings, whose missteps result in exile. A good amount of time passes between the first and second chapter of 1 Esdras; by the time of 1 Esdras 2, the Babylonian empire has fallen into the hands of the Persians, following King Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. This same Cyrus the Great issues a decree that allows the Judean exiles to return home and take with them the temple vessels that King Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the first temple (Ezr. 1:1-11; 1 Esd. 2:1-15. About the temple vessels, see also Dan. 5:2,23). Thus, the first wave of exiles returns in the days of Cyrus, led by a Judean official named Sheshbazzar.

Upon their return, they are met by varying communities of people that had continued to populate the land of Judah throughout the period of exile (for historical insight into the situation in Judah throughout the exilic period, I recommend Lester Grabbe’s article ‘The Reality of the Return’; paywalled). These remnant communities, however, do not look favourably upon the returnees’ desire to restore Jerusalem and the temple. As such, a letter is sent to the Persian king, who is now not Cyrus but Artaxerxes I (more about the chronology of Persian kings will follow in a later blogpost). The letter argues that if the returnees’ construction plans are realised, the Persian Empire may lose the province of Judah. Persuaded, the king agrees to halt rebuilding efforts in Jerusalem. (1 Esd. 2:16-30; Ezr. 4:7-24). The construction work will not be resumed until the reign of Darius I, prompted by a fortunate turn of events at a party.

1 Esdras 3:1-5:6 tells of a grand banquet organised by king Darius, during which three of the king’s bodyguards propose a contest: each is to answer the question, “What is the strongest thing known to man?”. Darius, excited at the idea of a competition, summons many nobles before whom the guards are to offer speeches on this matter. The first bodyguard makes a case for wine; the second, diplomatically so, states that a king is strongest of all; the third says ‘women’. Darius, especially pleased with the third answer (or rather, not willing to displease his concubine, Apame), declares the third guard victorious. This guard happens to be none other than Zerubbabel (cf. 1 Chronicles 3), the grandson of king Jehoiachin, and the governor of Judah (see the book of Haggai). As a reward for his speech, the king grants Zerubbabel one wish. Thus, Zerubbabel entreats Darius to honour his vow to rebuild the temple, a request to which the king agrees. The ban on the construction is lifted, and a second wave of returnees arrives in Judah, led by Zerubbabel. Upon their return, the altar is rededicated, daily sacrifice resumed and the foundations for the temple are laid (1 Esd. 5:47-73; Ezr. 3:1-4:5).

These restorations, in true Biblical fashion, are celebrated with much fanfare, trumpets, dances and shouting. The noise of the jubilant masses, however, attracts the opponents of the temple, who again manage to halt construction. In response to the opposition, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah rally support to continue building. The support comes in the form of two Judean officials who advice king Darius to initiate a search in the imperial archives for king Cyrus’s initial edict (the document granting permission to rebuild the temple). The edict is found and Darius commands construction to be resumed to fulfill Cyrus’s decree. The last section of 1 Esdras centres around the figure of Ezra, who comes to Judah with a third wave of returnees (1 Esd. 8:1-9:55). Upon arriving, Ezra is horrified to learn that many Judeans had given themselves in marriage to non-Israelite women. Ezra returns, Torah in hand, to exhort the people, encouraging them to annul these mixed marriages. Thus, under Ezra’s purview, the nation turns again to God and Torah.

In this series of blogposts I will aim to address multiple things: in the first blog following this introduction I would like to discuss some tensions that arise when we compare the canonical and apocryphal texts. The observant reader may already have noticed that, although the book of 1 Esdras is generally in keeping with the Hebrew, or what we call the Masoretic Text (MT), we can spot some serious divergence (see figure 2 below and also Grabbe 2021; paywalled). These differences will help us approach questions of intertextual relationship: to what did both texts owe their current shape? Does Ezra-Nehemiah rely on 1 Esdras, or vice versa? Do both maybe stem from a common “ancestor text” that both texts interpret in different ways and add things to? If things are added or omitted, what might be a good reason for a writer to do so?

In the third part of this series, I will make a brief case-study of the letter to King Artaxerxes. In a genuine effort not to confuse the reader too much, I will discuss some of the confusion that exists around the correspondence with Artaxerxes, which features in both the MT and 1 Esdras (Ezr. 4:7-24; 1 Esd. 2:16-30). The fourth and final blogpost will continue with the same bit of correspondence, arguing that the repositioning of this letter in the book of 1 Esdras is rather a sensible thing to do from a narrative perspective, and fits an overall tendency that we detect in the book. Finally, having weighed the information, I would like to propose that the author(s)/editor(s) of 1 Esdras might have worked with a version of the story that is really quite similar to Ezra-Nehemiah – we will see how there is clearly an editorial and revisionary hand at work in 1 Esdras. In other words, I’ll put forth an argument in favour of, to steal a fancy phrase from Lisbeth Fried “the priority of Ezra-Nehemiah” (Fried 2011).

Mysterium Esdrae I: The Other Ezra

This is the first in a series of guest posts by Fenna Capelle (Part II; Part III). Fenna studies Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (research) (MA) at Leiden University.

It is safe to say that the Biblical Apocrypha do not constitute the daily reading of a young person raised in a Dutch Reformed church, as I was. All the greater was my delight upon realising the insights this corpus of texts might offer us; valuable insights into the ways ancient communities engaged with scripture and interpreted the events of the world around them. The Biblical Apocrypha operate outside an established canon of scripture, whose relation to said canon can at times be elusive, as we shall see in the case of 1 Esdras. 1 Esdras is an apocryphal text that we find included amongst the texts of the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Whereas the Hebrew Bible has preserved just one version of the story of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Septuagint contains two: Esdras A (1 Esd.) and Esdras B (2 Esd.). The latter is a quite literal translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic book of Ezra-Nehemiah, yet, as we shall see at length throughout this series, Esdras A, or 1 Esdras, is not.

The book of 1 Esdras opens at the events described in the last chapters of 2 Chronicles: King Josiah leads a festive Passover ceremony at the temple (1 Esd. 1:1-22; 2 Chron. 35: 1-19). Josiah’s reign, however, is cut short, as an ill-advised war against Pharaoh Necho of Egypt proves fatal for him (1 Esd. 1:23-29; 2 Chron. 35: 1-19). Josiah is succeeded by a string of weak and impious kings, whose missteps result in exile. A good amount of time passes between the first and second chapter of 1 Esdras; by the time of 1 Esdras 2, the Babylonian empire has fallen into the hands of the Persians, following King Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. This same Cyrus the Great issues a decree that allows the Judean exiles to return home and take with them the temple vessels that King Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the first temple (Ezr. 1:1-11; 1 Esd. 2:1-15. About the temple vessels, see also Dan. 5:2,23). Thus, the first wave of exiles returns in the days of Cyrus, led by a Judean official named Sheshbazzar.

Upon their return, they are met by varying communities of people that had continued to populate the land of Judah throughout the period of exile (for historical insight into the situation in Judah throughout the exilic period, I recommend Lester Grabbe’s article ‘The Reality of the Return’; paywalled). These remnant communities, however, do not look favourably upon the returnees’ desire to restore Jerusalem and the temple. As such, a letter is sent to the Persian king, who is now not Cyrus but Artaxerxes I (more about the chronology of Persian kings will follow in a later blogpost). The letter argues that if the returnees’ construction plans are realised, the Persian Empire may lose the province of Judah. Persuaded, the king agrees to halt rebuilding efforts in Jerusalem. (1 Esd. 2:16-30; Ezr. 4:7-24). The construction work will not be resumed until the reign of Darius I, prompted by a fortunate turn of events at a party.

1 Esdras 3:1-5:6 tells of a grand banquet organised by king Darius, during which three of the king’s bodyguards propose a contest: each is to answer the question, “What is the strongest thing known to man?”. Darius, excited at the idea of a competition, summons many nobles before whom the guards are to offer speeches on this matter. The first bodyguard makes a case for wine; the second, diplomatically so, states that a king is strongest of all; the third says ‘women’. Darius, especially pleased with the third answer (or rather, not willing to displease his concubine, Apame), declares the third guard victorious. This guard happens to be none other than Zerubbabel (cf. 1 Chronicles 3), the grandson of king Jehoiachin, and the governor of Judah (see the book of Haggai). As a reward for his speech, the king grants Zerubbabel one wish. Thus, Zerubbabel entreats Darius to honour his vow to rebuild the temple, a request to which the king agrees. The ban on the construction is lifted, and a second wave of returnees arrives in Judah, led by Zerubbabel. Upon their return, the altar is rededicated, daily sacrifice resumed and the foundations for the temple are laid (1 Esd. 5:47-73; Ezr. 3:1-4:5).

These restorations, in true Biblical fashion, are celebrated with much fanfare, trumpets, dances and shouting. The noise of the jubilant masses, however, attracts the opponents of the temple, who again manage to halt construction. In response to the opposition, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah rally support to continue building. The support comes in the form of two Judean officials who advice king Darius to initiate a search in the imperial archives for king Cyrus’s initial edict (the document granting permission to rebuild the temple). The edict is found and Darius commands construction to be resumed to fulfill Cyrus’s decree. The last section of 1 Esdras centres around the figure of Ezra, who comes to Judah with a third wave of returnees (1 Esd. 8:1-9:55). Upon arriving, Ezra is horrified to learn that many Judeans had given themselves in marriage to non-Israelite women. Ezra returns, Torah in hand, to exhort the people, encouraging them to annul these mixed marriages. Thus, under Ezra’s purview, the nation turns again to God and Torah.

In this series of blogposts I will aim to address multiple things: in the first blog following this introduction I would like to discuss some tensions that arise when we compare the canonical and apocryphal texts. The observant reader may already have noticed that, although the book of 1 Esdras is generally in keeping with the Hebrew, or what we call the Masoretic Text (MT), we can spot some serious divergence (see figure 2 below and also Grabbe 2021; paywalled). These differences will help us approach questions of intertextual relationship: to what did both texts owe their current shape? Does Ezra-Nehemiah rely on 1 Esdras, or vice versa? Do both maybe stem from a common “ancestor text” that both texts interpret in different ways and add things to? If things are added or omitted, what might be a good reason for a writer to do so?

In the third part of this series, I will make a brief case-study of the letter to King Artaxerxes. In a genuine effort not to confuse the reader too much, I will discuss some of the confusion that exists around the correspondence with Artaxerxes, which features in both the MT and 1 Esdras (Ezr. 4:7-24; 1 Esd. 2:16-30). The fourth and final blogpost will continue with the same bit of correspondence, arguing that the repositioning of this letter in the book of 1 Esdras is rather a sensible thing to do from a narrative perspective, and fits an overall tendency that we detect in the book. Finally, having weighed the information, I would like to propose that the author(s)/editor(s) of 1 Esdras might have worked with a version of the story that is really quite similar to Ezra-Nehemiah – we will see how there is clearly an editorial and revisionary hand at work in 1 Esdras. In other words, I’ll put forth an argument in favour of, to steal a fancy phrase from Lisbeth Fried “the priority of Ezra-Nehemiah” (Fried 2011).

Mysterium Esdrae I: The Other Ezra

This is the first in a series of guest posts by Fenna Capelle (Part II; Part III). Fenna studies Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (research) (MA) at Leiden University.

It is safe to say that the Biblical Apocrypha do not constitute the daily reading of a young person raised in a Dutch Reformed church, as I was. All the greater was my delight upon realising the insights this corpus of texts might offer us; valuable insights into the ways ancient communities engaged with scripture and interpreted the events of the world around them. The Biblical Apocrypha operate outside an established canon of scripture, whose relation to said canon can at times be elusive, as we shall see in the case of 1 Esdras. 1 Esdras is an apocryphal text that we find included amongst the texts of the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Whereas the Hebrew Bible has preserved just one version of the story of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Septuagint contains two: Esdras A (1 Esd.) and Esdras B (2 Esd.). The latter is a quite literal translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic book of Ezra-Nehemiah, yet, as we shall see at length throughout this series, Esdras A, or 1 Esdras, is not.

The book of 1 Esdras opens at the events described in the last chapters of 2 Chronicles: King Josiah leads a festive Passover ceremony at the temple (1 Esd. 1:1-22; 2 Chron. 35: 1-19). Josiah’s reign, however, is cut short, as an ill-advised war against Pharaoh Necho of Egypt proves fatal for him (1 Esd. 1:23-29; 2 Chron. 35: 1-19). Josiah is succeeded by a string of weak and impious kings, whose missteps result in exile. A good amount of time passes between the first and second chapter of 1 Esdras; by the time of 1 Esdras 2, the Babylonian empire has fallen into the hands of the Persians, following King Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. This same Cyrus the Great issues a decree that allows the Judean exiles to return home and take with them the temple vessels that King Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the first temple (Ezr. 1:1-11; 1 Esd. 2:1-15. About the temple vessels, see also Dan. 5:2,23). Thus, the first wave of exiles returns in the days of Cyrus, led by a Judean official named Sheshbazzar.

Upon their return, they are met by varying communities of people that had continued to populate the land of Judah throughout the period of exile (for historical insight into the situation in Judah throughout the exilic period, I recommend Lester Grabbe’s article ‘The Reality of the Return’; paywalled). These remnant communities, however, do not look favourably upon the returnees’ desire to restore Jerusalem and the temple. As such, a letter is sent to the Persian king, who is now not Cyrus but Artaxerxes I (more about the chronology of Persian kings will follow in a later blogpost). The letter argues that if the returnees’ construction plans are realised, the Persian Empire may lose the province of Judah. Persuaded, the king agrees to halt rebuilding efforts in Jerusalem. (1 Esd. 2:16-30; Ezr. 4:7-24). The construction work will not be resumed until the reign of Darius I, prompted by a fortunate turn of events at a party.

1 Esdras 3:1-5:6 tells of a grand banquet organised by king Darius, during which three of the king’s bodyguards propose a contest: each is to answer the question, “What is the strongest thing known to man?”. Darius, excited at the idea of a competition, summons many nobles before whom the guards are to offer speeches on this matter. The first bodyguard makes a case for wine; the second, diplomatically so, states that a king is strongest of all; the third says ‘women’. Darius, especially pleased with the third answer (or rather, not willing to displease his concubine, Apame), declares the third guard victorious. This guard happens to be none other than Zerubbabel (cf. 1 Chronicles 3), the grandson of king Jehoiachin, and the governor of Judah (see the book of Haggai). As a reward for his speech, the king grants Zerubbabel one wish. Thus, Zerubbabel entreats Darius to honour his vow to rebuild the temple, a request to which the king agrees. The ban on the construction is lifted, and a second wave of returnees arrives in Judah, led by Zerubbabel. Upon their return, the altar is rededicated, daily sacrifice resumed and the foundations for the temple are laid (1 Esd. 5:47-73; Ezr. 3:1-4:5).

These restorations, in true Biblical fashion, are celebrated with much fanfare, trumpets, dances and shouting. The noise of the jubilant masses, however, attracts the opponents of the temple, who again manage to halt construction. In response to the opposition, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah rally support to continue building. The support comes in the form of two Judean officials who advice king Darius to initiate a search in the imperial archives for king Cyrus’s initial edict (the document granting permission to rebuild the temple). The edict is found and Darius commands construction to be resumed to fulfill Cyrus’s decree. The last section of 1 Esdras centres around the figure of Ezra, who comes to Judah with a third wave of returnees (1 Esd. 8:1-9:55). Upon arriving, Ezra is horrified to learn that many Judeans had given themselves in marriage to non-Israelite women. Ezra returns, Torah in hand, to exhort the people, encouraging them to annul these mixed marriages. Thus, under Ezra’s purview, the nation turns again to God and Torah.

In this series of blogposts I will aim to address multiple things: in the first blog following this introduction I would like to discuss some tensions that arise when we compare the canonical and apocryphal texts. The observant reader may already have noticed that, although the book of 1 Esdras is generally in keeping with the Hebrew, or what we call the Masoretic Text (MT), we can spot some serious divergence (see figure 2 below and also Grabbe 2021; paywalled). These differences will help us approach questions of intertextual relationship: to what did both texts owe their current shape? Does Ezra-Nehemiah rely on 1 Esdras, or vice versa? Do both maybe stem from a common “ancestor text” that both texts interpret in different ways and add things to? If things are added or omitted, what might be a good reason for a writer to do so?

In the third part of this series, I will make a brief case-study of the letter to King Artaxerxes. In a genuine effort not to confuse the reader too much, I will discuss some of the confusion that exists around the correspondence with Artaxerxes, which features in both the MT and 1 Esdras (Ezr. 4:7-24; 1 Esd. 2:16-30). The fourth and final blogpost will continue with the same bit of correspondence, arguing that the repositioning of this letter in the book of 1 Esdras is rather a sensible thing to do from a narrative perspective, and fits an overall tendency that we detect in the book. Finally, having weighed the information, I would like to propose that the author(s)/editor(s) of 1 Esdras might have worked with a version of the story that is really quite similar to Ezra-Nehemiah – we will see how there is clearly an editorial and revisionary hand at work in 1 Esdras. In other words, I’ll put forth an argument in favour of, to steal a fancy phrase from Lisbeth Fried “the priority of Ezra-Nehemiah” (Fried 2011).

#RICHARD #BOYLE #2ND #VISCOUNT #SHANNON
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Very cool: there's a 14th-century #Greek translation of some biblical books including Daniel that switches to a (pseudo-)Doric dialect for the #Aramaic section!

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A little bit of Lycian

Lycian is a first-millennium BCE language of the Anatolian family, a subgroup of Indo-European. It was written with its own, funky alphabet, and as such it is currently relevant to my interests. One of the longest texts happens to be a Lycian-Greek-Imperial Aramaic trilingual:

Reading up on Lycian in Melchert (2008; paywalled) the other day, I was really interested to read that the letters transliterated as b, g, d were fricatives: [β], [ɣ], [ð]. They seem to have shifted from the expected *b, *g, *d, based both on reconstruction and the letters used. This raises two short questions, to which I welcome your input:

1. As in Modern Greek, the otherwise unvoiced stops p, t, k were voiced after nasals. So, just like Modern Greek, Lycian can add a dummy nasal to write a voiced stop in other positions, as in Ñtarijeus– for Darius. How cool is that?
2. This looks very similar to what happened to Greek at some point. Could this be some kind of effect of Greek-Lycian contact? Does Modern Greek have a Lycian substrate?!

Quoting Ñtarijeus– reminds me of the other point I wanted to make:

Cases such as hrppi “above” or sñta (a numeral) seem to indicate that liquids and nasals had syllabic allophones, and the standard view is that the special letters ñ and m̃ stand for syllabic nasals. This may have been true when the graphemes were invented, but this analysis cannot account for postvocalic occurrences such as qãñti “they slay.” The gemination in hrppi (see below) argues that at the phonetic level the pronunciation was [hərp.pi] with an anaptyctic vowel. If one makes the reasonable inference that the same is true for nasals (sñta=[sənta]), then one may make the generalization that ñ and m̃ occur only in syllable-final position. This distribution suggests that they are unreleased allophones of the nasal consonants.

Melchert (2008: 50)

Melchert’s reasoning seems sound to me (although, shouldn’t that be [sənda]?), but I balk at the mention of unreleased nasals. Are these phonetically possible? If the air doesn’t come out your nose, how do you know it’s a nasal? Do any other languages have this?

Instead, maybe the Lycian lenition of voiced plosives we just saw can help us out here too. While this also relies on exotic sounds, perhaps we are dealing with lenition of the nasal stops too. If prevocalic *n and *m lenited to [ð̃] and [β̃], but syllable-final *n and *m remained nasal stops, a reshuffling of the letter signs makes for a plausible distribution that, at least, only relies on sounds that we can imagine how to pronounce: n spells [ð̃], ñ spells [n], m spells [β̃], and m̃ spells [m].

That’s all for now; don’t forget to Lyc and subscribe.

A little bit of Lycian

Lycian is a first-millennium BCE language of the Anatolian family, a subgroup of Indo-European. It was written with its own, funky alphabet, and as such it is currently relevant to my interests. One of the longest texts happens to be a Lycian-Greek-Imperial Aramaic trilingual:

Reading up on Lycian in Melchert (2008; paywalled) the other day, I was really interested to read that the letters transliterated as b, g, d were fricatives: [β], [ɣ], [ð]. They seem to have shifted from the expected *b, *g, *d, based both on reconstruction and the letters used. This raises two short questions, to which I welcome your input:

1. As in Modern Greek, the otherwise unvoiced stops p, t, k were voiced after nasals. So, just like Modern Greek, Lycian can add a dummy nasal to write a voiced stop in other positions, as in Ñtarijeus– for Darius. How cool is that?
2. This looks very similar to what happened to Greek at some point. Could this be some kind of effect of Greek-Lycian contact? Does Modern Greek have a Lycian substrate?!

Quoting Ñtarijeus– reminds me of the other point I wanted to make:

Cases such as hrppi “above” or sñta (a numeral) seem to indicate that liquids and nasals had syllabic allophones, and the standard view is that the special letters ñ and m̃ stand for syllabic nasals. This may have been true when the graphemes were invented, but this analysis cannot account for postvocalic occurrences such as qãñti “they slay.” The gemination in hrppi (see below) argues that at the phonetic level the pronunciation was [hərp.pi] with an anaptyctic vowel. If one makes the reasonable inference that the same is true for nasals (sñta=[sənta]), then one may make the generalization that ñ and m̃ occur only in syllable-final position. This distribution suggests that they are unreleased allophones of the nasal consonants.

Melchert (2008: 50)

Melchert’s reasoning seems sound to me (although, shouldn’t that be [sənda]?), but I balk at the mention of unreleased nasals. Are these phonetically possible? If the air doesn’t come out your nose, how do you know it’s a nasal? Do any other languages have this?

Instead, maybe the Lycian lenition of voiced plosives we just saw can help us out here too. While this also relies on exotic sounds, perhaps we are dealing with lenition of the nasal stops too. If prevocalic *n and *m lenited to [ð̃] and [β̃], but syllable-final *n and *m remained nasal stops, a reshuffling of the letter signs makes for a plausible distribution that, at least, only relies on sounds that we can imagine how to pronounce: n spells [ð̃], ñ spells [n], m spells [β̃], and m̃ spells [m].

That’s all for now; don’t forget to Lyc and subscribe.

New paper: Arabic in the Nabataean papyri

An online preview of my new article with Sigrid Kjær, ‘Arabic in the Nabataean papyri, including P.Yadin 7’, appeared on the Journal of Semitic Studies website last weekend.

Abstract: The impact of Arabic and Ancient North Arabian on the Nabataean corpus is well known. While Arabisms in the Nabataean inscriptions have received significant attention, the small, yet crucial corpus of Nabataean papyri remains relatively understudied in this regard. In this study, we reassess the possible North Arabian loanwords, especially those suggested by the first editors of the papyri and by Ada Yardeni in various separate studies. Based on the criteria of phonology, morphology, and attestation, we conclude that roughly half of the suggested examples cannot plausibly be attributed to borrowing from Arabic or other North Arabian languages. The low but significant number of remaining, plausible Arabisms strongly cluster in the semantic field of legal and financial technology, supporting the view that Arabic influence on Nabataean may have been more restricted in scope than has long been thought.

Enjoy!

New paper: Arabic in the Nabataean papyri

An online preview of my new article with Sigrid Kjær, ‘Arabic in the Nabataean papyri, including P.Yadin 7’, appeared on the Journal of Semitic Studies website last weekend.

Abstract: The impact of Arabic and Ancient North Arabian on the Nabataean corpus is well known. While Arabisms in the Nabataean inscriptions have received significant attention, the small, yet crucial corpus of Nabataean papyri remains relatively understudied in this regard. In this study, we reassess the possible North Arabian loanwords, especially those suggested by the first editors of the papyri and by Ada Yardeni in various separate studies. Based on the criteria of phonology, morphology, and attestation, we conclude that roughly half of the suggested examples cannot plausibly be attributed to borrowing from Arabic or other North Arabian languages. The low but significant number of remaining, plausible Arabisms strongly cluster in the semantic field of legal and financial technology, supporting the view that Arabic influence on Nabataean may have been more restricted in scope than has long been thought.

Enjoy!

New paper: Arabic in the Nabataean papyri

An online preview of my new article with Sigrid Kjær, ‘Arabic in the Nabataean papyri, including P.Yadin 7’, appeared on the Journal of Semitic Studies website last weekend.

Abstract: The impact of Arabic and Ancient North Arabian on the Nabataean corpus is well known. While Arabisms in the Nabataean inscriptions have received significant attention, the small, yet crucial corpus of Nabataean papyri remains relatively understudied in this regard. In this study, we reassess the possible North Arabian loanwords, especially those suggested by the first editors of the papyri and by Ada Yardeni in various separate studies. Based on the criteria of phonology, morphology, and attestation, we conclude that roughly half of the suggested examples cannot plausibly be attributed to borrowing from Arabic or other North Arabian languages. The low but significant number of remaining, plausible Arabisms strongly cluster in the semantic field of legal and financial technology, supporting the view that Arabic influence on Nabataean may have been more restricted in scope than has long been thought.

Enjoy!

New paper: Arabic in the Nabataean papyri

An online preview of my new article with Sigrid Kjær, ‘Arabic in the Nabataean papyri, including P.Yadin 7’, appeared on the Journal of Semitic Studies website last weekend.

Abstract: The impact of Arabic and Ancient North Arabian on the Nabataean corpus is well known. While Arabisms in the Nabataean inscriptions have received significant attention, the small, yet crucial corpus of Nabataean papyri remains relatively understudied in this regard. In this study, we reassess the possible North Arabian loanwords, especially those suggested by the first editors of the papyri and by Ada Yardeni in various separate studies. Based on the criteria of phonology, morphology, and attestation, we conclude that roughly half of the suggested examples cannot plausibly be attributed to borrowing from Arabic or other North Arabian languages. The low but significant number of remaining, plausible Arabisms strongly cluster in the semantic field of legal and financial technology, supporting the view that Arabic influence on Nabataean may have been more restricted in scope than has long been thought.

Enjoy!

New paper: Arabic in the Nabataean papyri

An online preview of my new article with Sigrid Kjær, ‘Arabic in the Nabataean papyri, including P.Yadin 7’, appeared on the Journal of Semitic Studies website last weekend.

Abstract: The impact of Arabic and Ancient North Arabian on the Nabataean corpus is well known. While Arabisms in the Nabataean inscriptions have received significant attention, the small, yet crucial corpus of Nabataean papyri remains relatively understudied in this regard. In this study, we reassess the possible North Arabian loanwords, especially those suggested by the first editors of the papyri and by Ada Yardeni in various separate studies. Based on the criteria of phonology, morphology, and attestation, we conclude that roughly half of the suggested examples cannot plausibly be attributed to borrowing from Arabic or other North Arabian languages. The low but significant number of remaining, plausible Arabisms strongly cluster in the semantic field of legal and financial technology, supporting the view that Arabic influence on Nabataean may have been more restricted in scope than has long been thought.

Enjoy!

Judah’s Aramean period

A few weeks ago, I was startled to learn about this inscription (and a few more like it) from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, in northeastern Sinai:

Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, although it’s in present-day Egypt, is culturally a northern Israelite (= Samarian) site. Quite a few inscriptions were found there, dating to around 800 BCE, and mostly in Israelite Hebrew, which by this time had started to develop its own script, Paleo-Hebrew, different from what was used for Phoenician and Aramaic. The inscriptions like the one in the picture, however, are weird in two regards. First, their Hebrew is in the southern, Judahite dialect, not in the northern, Israelite one. And second, the script is not Paleo-Hebrew, but what I’d like to call Northern Levantine, the sister script I just mentioned that is used for Phoenician and a range of other Northwest Semitic languages—but normally not Hebrew!

There’s some debate about whether (all of) these inscriptions are really in Judahite Hebrew and not, say, Phoenician. But if they are (the one on the image seems clear enough), why the weird script? The editors of the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud inscriptions don’t really know either, but suggest some kind of Phoenician influence in Judah at this time. I don’t know of any other evidence to suggest that, and it seems ad hoc.

But why this Phoenician fixation? Unless I’m missing something serious, there aren’t any consistent differences at this time between the Phoenician script proper and the broader North Levantine script as it was also used for Ammonite, Sam’alian, and, again, Aramaic. Here’s a nice Old Aramaic inscription so you can check.

Unlike the Phoenician hypothesis, I think there may be sufficient evidence for Aramean, specifically Damascene influence on Judah, around the same time that Hazael of Damascus was exerting influence all over the place:

17 At that time King Hazael of Aram went up, fought against Gath, and took it. But when Hazael set his face to go up against Jerusalem, 18 King Jehoash of Judah took all the votive gifts that Jehoshaphat, Jehoram, and Ahaziah, his ancestors, the kings of Judah, had dedicated, as well as his own votive gifts, all the gold that was found in the treasuries of the house of the Lord and of the king’s house, and sent these to King Hazael of Aram. Then Hazael withdrew from Jerusalem.

2 Kings 12:17-18 (NRSVUE)

This event, commonly dated around 830 BCE, does not get a lot of follow-up in the Bible. But this is overlord behaviour. When Sennacherib besieges Jerusalem and has to be bought off, that’s a major event of the Assyrian period. When Nebuchadnezzar besieges Jerusalem (the first time) and takes the Temple vessels as tribute, that’s the Babylonian period. Could it be that at the same time that Hazael was conquering his Aramean neighbours and defeating the Israelites in Transjordan (2 Kings 10:32-33), Judah entered a mini Aramean period? If so, it wouldn’t be crazy for scribal training in Damascus-dominated Judah to teach the newly emergent script of its Syrian overlords.

But in the end, Judahite Hebrew is normally written with Paleo-Hebrew, not a Northern Levantine script like Aramaic. So, what, did they switch at some point? Well,

8 Then Amaziah sent messengers to King Jehoash son of Jehoahaz son of Jehu of Israel, saying, “Come, let us look one another in the face.” 9 King Jehoash of Israel sent word to King Amaziah of Judah, “A thornbush on Lebanon sent to a cedar on Lebanon, saying, ‘Give your daughter to my son for a wife,’ but a wild animal of Lebanon passed by and trampled down the thornbush. 10 You have indeed defeated Edom, and your heart has lifted you up. Be content with your glory and stay at home, for why should you provoke trouble so that you fall, you and Judah with you?”

11 But Amaziah would not listen. So King Jehoash of Israel went up; he and King Amaziah of Judah faced one another in battle at Beth-shemesh, which belongs to Judah. 12 Judah was defeated by Israel; everyone fled home. 13 King Jehoash of Israel captured King Amaziah of Judah son of Jehoash son of Ahaziah at Beth-shemesh; he came to Jerusalem and broke down the wall of Jerusalem from the Ephraim Gate to the Corner Gate, a distance of four hundred cubits. 14 He seized all the gold and silver and all the vessels that were found in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king’s house, as well as hostages; then he returned to Samaria.

2 Kings 14:8-14 (NRSVUE)

This is several decades and one or two generations later: Amaziah of Judah is Jehoash of Judah’s son, and Jehoash of Israel is the grandson of Hazael’s contemporary Jehu of Israel. And again, what we see here is typical overlord-vassal behaviour. It seems fair to say that here, Judah is (re)entering a period of Samarian dominance. Wresting Judah from Damascus as part of the larger Israelite campaign against Aram of this time seems like a good reason for Jehoash to have sent his armies south, perhaps a better reason than Amaziah being a bit of a blowhard.

That provides us with a natural setting for Judah to switch to the Samarian-promoted Paleo-Hebrew script attested in most of the Judahite Hebrew epigraphy. When we next get information about Judah’s geopolitical situation, it’s the late eighth century and they’re wisely switching allegiance to the Neo-Assyrian Empire. While the Assyrians used Aramaic for administration in the western part of their empire (the Aramaic-derived script used for Hebrew today is still called ktav ashuri, ‘Assyrian writing’), I’m not sure they would have cared enough to enforce the use of Northern Levantine all over the place for local, non-Aramaic languages too. You need Persians for that level of organization.

So, between ca. 830 and 790, we’ve got a window where it might have made more sense for Judahite scribes to write like Arameans than like northern Israelites. I’ll have to double check (especially the material from Arad), but I think the timing works out for the use of Northern vs. Southern Levantine for Judahite Hebrew corresponding to Damascene vs. Samarian dominance. Why exactly Aramaic-Judahite-Hebrew-writing scribes would have been leaving (Yahwistic!) religious plaster inscriptions at a waystation in the desert in Sinai, however, remains a mystery to me for now.

Another nice one: Imperial #Aramaic אגור 'temple' (neutral) > later Aramaic 'shrine, altar' (pagan or otherwise heterodox)

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:qbe3b7ljafblsyy4dhkkgj7t/post/3mie7szwmm22h

Another nice one: Imperial #Aramaic אגור 'temple' (neutral) > later Aramaic 'shrine, altar' (pagan or otherwise heterodox)

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:qbe3b7ljafblsyy4dhkkgj7t/post/3mie7szwmm22h

Finally made the connection between Imperial #Aramaic לחן 'temple servant', feminine לחנה,* and Biblical and later Aramaic לְחֵנָה 'concubine', 'wench' or something like that. * That's 𐡋𐡇𐡍 and 𐡋𐡇𐡍𐡄 for my fellow Unicode freaks

Finally made the connection between Imperial #Aramaic לחן 'temple servant', feminine לחנה,* and Biblical and later Aramaic לְחֵנָה 'concubine', 'wench' or something like that. * That's 𐡋𐡇𐡍 and 𐡋𐡇𐡍𐡄 for my fellow Unicode freaks

I'm learning #Akkadian, and whatever happy neurochemical is prompted by recognizing old friends, I love that seeing a cognate for a term I already know in a different Semitic language triggers the same response.
eqlum = field
Why hello, old חקל!
šemûm
Good to see you again, שמע!
#Hebrew #Aramaic

Hey, I reconstructed some #Aramaic letter names! Going back to around 500 BCE, I guess. The similarity to #Greek is usually explained via #Phoenician, but we don't actually have any Phoenician letter names AFAIK.

Hey, I reconstructed some #Aramaic letter names! Going back to around 500 BCE, I guess. The similarity to #Greek is usually explained via #Phoenician, but we don't actually have any Phoenician letter names AFAIK.

Nice overview of some #Aramaic script types.

Aramaic - Examples of writing

Nice overview of some #Aramaic script types.

Aramaic - Examples of writing

The perils of paleographic dating: a few Aramaic examples from Arabia

My last post included a quote by Michael Macdonald that concluded:

This text shows that different forms of the same letter within the Aramaic alphabet could be held in the memories of scribes, and presumably readers, and used as they pleased to achieve various effects. Such a conclusion is not particularly startling but it shows the dangers of trying to use supposed palaeographical sequences to date inscriptions.

This is in reference to the second of the three inscriptions on the picture below, the one that Macdonald says is in Tayma Aramaic. While most of the inscription is in something in between Imperial and Nabataean Aramaic, the first word is in nice, old-fashioned lapidary Imperial Aramaic. The effect is something like lead-in small caps in Latin typography:

Tʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ the funerary monument of …

I think this is a great point. While certain script styles may be typical of a certain time and place, that doesn’t mean they were strictly limited to that setting and you can never be 100% sure of a dating based on paleography alone. In this short post, I want to give two more examples.

First, here are two funerary inscriptions in Nabataean Aramaic (Macdonald, one of the editors, again considers the first one Tayma Aramaic). They are both dated, so we know they were written a century and a half apart (203 and 356 CE). But the earlier one has considerably more advanced letter forms than the later one. In each case, I’ll give you a transliteration in (Unicode’s pretty archaic) Nabataean and Arabic script so you can compare the letter shapes to those extremes.

𐢅𐢀 𐢕𐢘𐢜 𐢁𐢝𐢗𐢍𐢆
𐢕𐢃𐢑𐢋𐢀 𐢃𐢛 𐢍𐢈𐢖𐢘
𐢛𐢁𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢌 𐢅𐢌 𐢁𐢚𐢍𐢒
𐢗𐢑𐢇𐢈𐢌 𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢒 𐢈𐢁𐢝𐢓𐢈
𐢁𐢊𐢈𐢇𐢌 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊 𐢁𐢍𐢛
𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 𐢑𐢇𐢘𐢛𐢏𐢍𐢀

دا نفس اسعيه
نبلطا بر يو𐢖ف
راس تيمى دي اقيم
علهوي عمرم واسمو
احوهي بيرح اير
سنت 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 لهفركيا

𐢅𐢕𐢆 …
𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢊𐢕𐢌 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐 𐢛𐢍𐢜
𐢊𐢄𐢛𐢀 𐢑𐢓𐢈𐢍𐢆 𐢁𐢞𐢞𐢆 𐢃𐢛𐢞
𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢈 𐢃𐢛 𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐
𐢛𐢍𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢀 𐢅𐢌 𐢓𐢍𐢞𐢞 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊
𐢁𐢂 𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢓𐢁𐢞𐢍𐢔 𐢈𐢊𐢓𐢝𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢁𐢊𐢅𐢌 𐢃𐢛𐢞 𐢝𐢕𐢍𐢔 𐢞𐢑𐢞𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢞𐢓𐢕𐢌

دنه…
عديون بر حني بر سموال ريس
حجرا لموية اتته برت
عمرو بر عديون بر سموال
ريس تيما دي ميتت بيرح
اب سنت ماتين وحمسين
واحى برت سنين تلتين
وتمني

It’s also interesting that the older text is mostly in good Aramaic (with one or two interesting spelling mistakes), while the second one uses a more phonetic spelling of the Aramaic words and has borrowed two Arabic numbers. So the linguistic evidence at least points in the right direction, dating-wise.

The second and last example is a graffito that wasn’t published too long ago (Nehmé 2017), but that may deserve some more attention outside epigraphic circles. What appears to be the same inscription, dated to 548/9 CE, starts with the Aramaic phrase dkyr (𐢅𐢏𐢍𐢛) ‘may he be remembered’ written in a not terribly advanced Nabataeo-Arabic and then continues in the Arabic language and Paleo-Arabic script. The use of the cognate verb in the opening phrase (ذكر الإله ḏakara l-ʾilāhu ‘may God remember’) allows for a nice comparison of the two script types. Normally, we would consider these to be centuries apart, but they appear to have been inscribed by the same hand.

So remember, kids, have fun dating inscriptions paleographically, but be careful out there.

The perils of paleographic dating: a few Aramaic examples from Arabia

My last post included a quote by Michael Macdonald that concluded:

This text shows that different forms of the same letter within the Aramaic alphabet could be held in the memories of scribes, and presumably readers, and used as they pleased to achieve various effects. Such a conclusion is not particularly startling but it shows the dangers of trying to use supposed palaeographical sequences to date inscriptions.

This is in reference to the second of the three inscriptions on the picture below, the one that Macdonald says is in Tayma Aramaic. While most of the inscription is in something in between Imperial and Nabataean Aramaic, the first word is in nice, old-fashioned lapidary Imperial Aramaic. The effect is something like lead-in small caps in Latin typography:

Tʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ the funerary monument of …

I think this is a great point. While certain script styles may be typical of a certain time and place, that doesn’t mean they were strictly limited to that setting and you can never be 100% sure of a dating based on paleography alone. In this short post, I want to give two more examples.

First, here are two funerary inscriptions in Nabataean Aramaic (Macdonald, one of the editors, again considers the first one Tayma Aramaic). They are both dated, so we know they were written a century and a half apart (203 and 356 CE). But the earlier one has considerably more advanced letter forms than the later one. In each case, I’ll give you a transliteration in (Unicode’s pretty archaic) Nabataean and Arabic script so you can compare the letter shapes to those extremes.

𐢅𐢀 𐢕𐢘𐢜 𐢁𐢝𐢗𐢍𐢆
𐢕𐢃𐢑𐢋𐢀 𐢃𐢛 𐢍𐢈𐢖𐢘
𐢛𐢁𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢌 𐢅𐢌 𐢁𐢚𐢍𐢒
𐢗𐢑𐢇𐢈𐢌 𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢒 𐢈𐢁𐢝𐢓𐢈
𐢁𐢊𐢈𐢇𐢌 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊 𐢁𐢍𐢛
𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 𐢑𐢇𐢘𐢛𐢏𐢍𐢀

دا نفس اسعيه
نبلطا بر يو𐢖ف
راس تيمى دي اقيم
علهوي عمرم واسمو
احوهي بيرح اير
سنت 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 لهفركيا

𐢅𐢕𐢆 …
𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢊𐢕𐢌 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐 𐢛𐢍𐢜
𐢊𐢄𐢛𐢀 𐢑𐢓𐢈𐢍𐢆 𐢁𐢞𐢞𐢆 𐢃𐢛𐢞
𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢈 𐢃𐢛 𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐
𐢛𐢍𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢀 𐢅𐢌 𐢓𐢍𐢞𐢞 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊
𐢁𐢂 𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢓𐢁𐢞𐢍𐢔 𐢈𐢊𐢓𐢝𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢁𐢊𐢅𐢌 𐢃𐢛𐢞 𐢝𐢕𐢍𐢔 𐢞𐢑𐢞𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢞𐢓𐢕𐢌

دنه…
عديون بر حني بر سموال ريس
حجرا لموية اتته برت
عمرو بر عديون بر سموال
ريس تيما دي ميتت بيرح
اب سنت ماتين وحمسين
واحى برت سنين تلتين
وتمني

It’s also interesting that the older text is mostly in good Aramaic (with one or two interesting spelling mistakes), while the second one uses a more phonetic spelling of the Aramaic words and has borrowed two Arabic numbers. So the linguistic evidence at least points in the right direction, dating-wise.

The second and last example is a graffito that wasn’t published too long ago (Nehmé 2017), but that may deserve some more attention outside epigraphic circles. What appears to be the same inscription, dated to 548/9 CE, starts with the Aramaic phrase dkyr (𐢅𐢏𐢍𐢛) ‘may he be remembered’ written in a not terribly advanced Nabataeo-Arabic and then continues in the Arabic language and Paleo-Arabic script. The use of the cognate verb in the opening phrase (ذكر الإله ḏakara l-ʾilāhu ‘may God remember’) allows for a nice comparison of the two script types. Normally, we would consider these to be centuries apart, but they appear to have been inscribed by the same hand.

So remember, kids, have fun dating inscriptions paleographically, but be careful out there.

Tayma Aramaic or early Nabataean?

This month, I spent two weeks teaching an introduction to Nabataean epigraphy at a small winter school set near the Nabataean ruins of Hegra, in northwest Arabia. One of my final tasks as part of the AlUla Inscriptions Corpus Analysis Project at Ghent University, this was an extraordinary experience and one that will feature in a number of blog posts to come. In this one, I want to focus on a question that came up in preparing my final class, on early Nabataean, centering on some fascinating Aramaic material from the next oasis over: Tayma.

Under the editorship of Michael C.A. Macdonald and (for vol. 3) Muhammad al-Najem, a range of inscriptions from Tayma were published Open Access in 2023 and 2025. These include inscriptions in Akkadian, Taymanitic (the local, West Semitic language written in an Ancient North Arabian script), Imperial Aramaic,1 Nabataean Aramaic, and, in Macdonald’s view, a unique, local variety: Tayma Aramaic. The arguments for treating Tayma Aramaic as a distinct variety are not made explicit,2 but I think the reasoning is as follows:

1. The Tayma Aramaic script is for the most part more archaic than the Nabataean, so it cannot descend from it.
2. The Tayma Aramaic script is occasionally more innovative than the Nabataean, so it cannot be ancestral to it either.
3. Therefore, Tayma Aramaic is a distinct sister of Nabataean, like square script (and not one of its ancestors, like Imperial Aramaic, or one of its descendants, like Paleo-Arabic).

By way of illustration, here is a gorgeous triply-inscribed funerary stela (or three or four separate stelae, I guess) in Imperial Aramaic, Tayma Aramaic, and Nabataean (from vol. 2: 100):

Macdonald’s commentary on the second inscription (vol. 2: 103) contains this very quoteworthy passage:

The importance of this inscription is its physical and chronological position between the Imperial Aramaic text (TA 10277 A) and the Nabataean one (TA 10277 C), a position which is reflected in the variety of its letter forms. The first two letters have their Imperial Aramaic forms, but the following letters are in a mixture of post-Imperial Aramaic shapes. Thus if one compares the first and last letters (h) one can see that the first is angular and the last is more rounded. More dramatically, comparison of the second letter with the eighth (y) shows that the stance of the letter has been reversed and that the short horizontal line half-way down the stem has disappeared. Comparison of the fifth letter (š) with the third letter in inscriptions A and C shows what looks like a steady, if purely theoretical, progression: from the Imperial Aramaic form (in A) to one local development (in B), and another (later) local development, the Nabataean form (in C). However, an indication of the complications of palaeographical ‘history’, is provided by the fourth letter (p) in TA 10277B. This letter, in a text which clearly predates the introduction of Nabataean into Taymāʾ, has a similar form to that at the end of line 2 in the Nabataean inscription of AD 203 found at Taymāʾ, see TM.N.004 in Macdonald – Al-Najem 2021 [and now also in vol. 3, BDS]. By contrast the form in the Nabataean inscription here (C, which is 188 years earlier than TM.N.004) is much closer in shape to the Imperial Aramaic p (the second letter in A); and there are other letter forms which will be discussed in the present author’s study of the development of the Aramaic script at Taymāʾ (Macdonald [in prep. a]).
This text shows that different forms of the same letter within the Aramaic alphabet could be held in the memories of scribes, and presumably readers, and used as they pleased to achieve various effects. Such a conclusion is not particularly startling but it shows the dangers of trying to use supposed palaeographical sequences to date inscriptions.

There’s a lot of very insightful observations here and I think the second paragraph is especially important (we’ll probably return to this point in my next post). But especially given the non-linear development of letter shapes Macdonald highlights here, I’m not fully convinced yet that Tayma Aramaic is definitely its own thing. In particular, I think it rather closely resembles the corpus of Nabataean inscriptions from the first (and maybe second) century BCE, before Nabataean had reached its classical, spidery shape.

The closest point of comparison, in my view, is in the Tayma Aramaic inscription TA 14285+14286+13651 (vol. 2: 117-118), which could actually be classified as Nabataean based on its contents:

Macdonald (vol. 2: 118) relates this inscription to “the Nabataean king known in Classical sources as Malichus [II] … [who] reigned from AD 40–70 and so year 17 of his reign would be AD 56/57” (numeral “[II]” in original). But check out this inscription from Tell al-Shuqafiyya, Egypt:

The synchronism of Cleopatra’s year 18 and Malichus’ year 26 shows that the date corresponds to 34 BCE, ninety years earlier than the date Macdonald suggests for the inscription from Tayma (based on the overlap, we must be dealing with Cleopatra VII and Malichus I). Yet, although there are certainly some differences in particular letter shapes, the overall script type seems highly similar to me. For instance, both inscriptions have the typical round 𐢁 ʾ, the roofless 𐢃 b, the zig-zagging non-final 𐢍 y, back-looping 𐢙 ṣ, and the vertical but not (yet) connecting 𐢝 š (but in the Tayma inscription, note the broad-tailed 𐢘 p here too). Unless there is some archeological argument I’m missing, it seems preferable to date both inscriptions to roughly the same period and interpret the date in the one from Tayma as year 17 of Malichus I, 45 BCE. In terms of script, it would be odd to call an Egyptian inscription referring to a Nabataean king “Tayma Aramaic”, and in fact the editor on DiCoNab—none other than Michael Macdonald—opts for Nabataean.3

Several of the other Tayma Aramaic inscriptions reminded me of BCE Nabataean inscriptions. Compare TA 17431 (vol. 2: 118-120) to the Nabataean one above as well as CIS II 349 (from Petra, 69 BCE) below:

Or TM.TAr.003 (vol. 3: 40-41) to MPNab 3 (from Petra, completed 99 BCE):

Others are just very close to Imperial Aramaic, which is also the case for the most archaic inscriptions mentioning Nabataean kings. Like an alleged Tayma Aramaic graffito, JSNab 334, and CNIK 1 (from Elusa, 2nd or early 1st c. BCE):

Or, perhaps a better comparison, TM.TAr.004 (vol. 3: 41-44) and an Aramaic-Dadanitic bilingual from al-Ula, RCU.2023.150:

In both these last comparisons, the Tayma Aramaic text is actually a bit more developed in both spelling and letter shapes than the text mentioning the Nabataeans, but mostly in ways that are shared with later Nabataean. (The exception, again, is the lengthened 𐢘 p).

In his commentary on TM.TAr.003, Macdonald writes: “The script of this text is remarkable for the variety of its letter forms and can be classed neither as Imperial Aramaic nor Nabataean, though it has some letter forms typical of each” (vol. 3: 40, emphasis mine). For the most part, this statement appears to me to be applicable to Tayma Aramaic as a whole. Given the apparent dating of the first entirely Tayma Aramaic inscription we considered to the middle of the first century BCE and the relative chronology where Tayma Aramaic precedes “Classical” Nabataean (see the triple funerary monument and occasional dating to kings of Lihyan, who ruled Tayma before the Nabataeans), can we just take Tayma Aramaic as a transitional, first-centuries-BCE script type between Imperial Aramaic and Nabataean? If so, that would fit nicely with the explicitly Nabataean inscriptions from this period, which similarly lack many typical features of mainstream Nabataean. I’m sympathetic to Macdonald’s implied objections against using the term Nabataean for inscriptions from Lihyanite Tayma (just like I wouldn’t want to call the ones from Egypt Tayma Aramaic).5 Maybe we could settle for Arabian Aramaic,6 or maybe Arabian square script and then explicitly contrast it with Jewish square script. Either way, I think we should include this material in discussions of the development from Imperial Aramaic to Nabataean proper, not sequester it in a niche of its own.

1. At first, I was pretty confused by the Imperial Aramaic material from Tayma, which is mostly in a script that looks more archaic than the Imperial Aramaic I knew and therefore can’t directly descend from it. Thanks to Jérôme Norris for explaining that this is the usual (older) Imperial Aramaic lapidary script, which is indeed more archaic than the Imperial Aramaic cursive used in the papyri. This goes to show how readily you should accept my takes on Aramaic paleography. ↩︎
2. In vol. 2, Macdonald refers to a forthcoming article in a journal I worked for for a little while, but which is now basically defunct. ↩︎
3. The same goes for the other, longer-known inscription from Tell al-Shuqafiyya, which is fifteen to thirty years older (depending on which Ptolemy is meant) and written in a more archaic script than either of the inscriptions mentioning Malichus (three-legged ܐ ʾ [in the first half], roofed 𐢂 b, wavy 𐤑 ṣ, open 𐡒 q). ↩︎
4. Translation modified more seriously than with the other incriptions. ↩︎
5. Linguistically, it’s also interesting that at least the older Tayma Aramaic material lacks “wawation” and shifts *-at to *-ah in Arabic names, like tym and wʾlh for Nabataean tymw and wʾlt. This probably reflects a local difference in the Arabic dialect(s) the names were taken from, or maybe different spelling conventions. ↩︎
6. Although that might be confusing, since the term has also been used for a hypothetical donor dialect of Aramaic loanwords into Old Arabic. ↩︎

#Arabic #Aramaic #Nabataean

Tayma Aramaic or early Nabataean?

This month, I spent two weeks teaching an introduction to Nabataean epigraphy at a small winter school set near the Nabataean ruins of Hegra, in northwest Arabia. One of my final tasks as part of the AlUla Inscriptions Corpus Analysis Project at Ghent University, this was an extraordinary experience and one that will feature in a number of blog posts to come. In this one, I want to focus on a question that came up in preparing my final class, on early Nabataean, centering on some fascinating Aramaic material from the next oasis over: Tayma.

Under the editorship of Michael C.A. Macdonald and (for vol. 3) Muhammad al-Najem, a range of inscriptions from Tayma were published Open Access in 2023 and 2025. These include inscriptions in Akkadian, Taymanitic (the local, West Semitic language written in an Ancient North Arabian script), Imperial Aramaic,1 Nabataean Aramaic, and, in Macdonald’s view, a unique, local variety: Tayma Aramaic. The arguments for treating Tayma Aramaic as a distinct variety are not made explicit,2 but I think the reasoning is as follows:

1. The Tayma Aramaic script is for the most part more archaic than the Nabataean, so it cannot descend from it.
2. The Tayma Aramaic script is occasionally more innovative than the Nabataean, so it cannot be ancestral to it either.
3. Therefore, Tayma Aramaic is a distinct sister of Nabataean, like square script (and not one of its ancestors, like Imperial Aramaic, or one of its descendants, like Paleo-Arabic).

By way of illustration, here is a gorgeous triply-inscribed funerary stela (or three or four separate stelae, I guess) in Imperial Aramaic, Tayma Aramaic, and Nabataean (from vol. 2: 100):

Macdonald’s commentary on the second inscription (vol. 2: 103) contains this very quoteworthy passage:

The importance of this inscription is its physical and chronological position between the Imperial Aramaic text (TA 10277 A) and the Nabataean one (TA 10277 C), a position which is reflected in the variety of its letter forms. The first two letters have their Imperial Aramaic forms, but the following letters are in a mixture of post-Imperial Aramaic shapes. Thus if one compares the first and last letters (h) one can see that the first is angular and the last is more rounded. More dramatically, comparison of the second letter with the eighth (y) shows that the stance of the letter has been reversed and that the short horizontal line half-way down the stem has disappeared. Comparison of the fifth letter (š) with the third letter in inscriptions A and C shows what looks like a steady, if purely theoretical, progression: from the Imperial Aramaic form (in A) to one local development (in B), and another (later) local development, the Nabataean form (in C). However, an indication of the complications of palaeographical ‘history’, is provided by the fourth letter (p) in TA 10277B. This letter, in a text which clearly predates the introduction of Nabataean into Taymāʾ, has a similar form to that at the end of line 2 in the Nabataean inscription of AD 203 found at Taymāʾ, see TM.N.004 in Macdonald – Al-Najem 2021 [and now also in vol. 3, BDS]. By contrast the form in the Nabataean inscription here (C, which is 188 years earlier than TM.N.004) is much closer in shape to the Imperial Aramaic p (the second letter in A); and there are other letter forms which will be discussed in the present author’s study of the development of the Aramaic script at Taymāʾ (Macdonald [in prep. a]).
This text shows that different forms of the same letter within the Aramaic alphabet could be held in the memories of scribes, and presumably readers, and used as they pleased to achieve various effects. Such a conclusion is not particularly startling but it shows the dangers of trying to use supposed palaeographical sequences to date inscriptions.

There’s a lot of very insightful observations here and I think the second paragraph is especially important (we’ll probably return to this point in my next post). But especially given the non-linear development of letter shapes Macdonald highlights here, I’m not fully convinced yet that Tayma Aramaic is definitely its own thing. In particular, I think it rather closely resembles the corpus of Nabataean inscriptions from the first (and maybe second) century BCE, before Nabataean had reached its classical, spidery shape.

The closest point of comparison, in my view, is in the Tayma Aramaic inscription TA 14285+14286+13651 (vol. 2: 117-118), which could actually be classified as Nabataean based on its contents:

Macdonald (vol. 2: 118) relates this inscription to “the Nabataean king known in Classical sources as Malichus [II] … [who] reigned from AD 40–70 and so year 17 of his reign would be AD 56/57” (numeral “[II]” in original). But check out this inscription from Tell al-Shuqafiyya, Egypt:

The synchronism of Cleopatra’s year 18 and Malichus’ year 26 shows that the date corresponds to 34 BCE, ninety years earlier than the date Macdonald suggests for the inscription from Tayma (based on the overlap, we must be dealing with Cleopatra VII and Malichus I). Yet, although there are certainly some differences in particular letter shapes, the overall script type seems highly similar to me. For instance, both inscriptions have the typical round 𐢁 ʾ, the roofless 𐢃 b, the zig-zagging non-final 𐢍 y, back-looping 𐢙 ṣ, and the vertical but not (yet) connecting 𐢝 š (but in the Tayma inscription, note the broad-tailed 𐢘 p here too). Unless there is some archeological argument I’m missing, it seems preferable to date both inscriptions to roughly the same period and interpret the date in the one from Tayma as year 17 of Malichus I, 45 BCE. In terms of script, it would be odd to call an Egyptian inscription referring to a Nabataean king “Tayma Aramaic”, and in fact the editor on DiCoNab—none other than Michael Macdonald—opts for Nabataean.3

Several of the other Tayma Aramaic inscriptions reminded me of BCE Nabataean inscriptions. Compare TA 17431 (vol. 2: 118-120) to the Nabataean one above as well as CIS II 349 (from Petra, 69 BCE) below:

Or TM.TAr.003 (vol. 3: 40-41) to MPNab 3 (from Petra, completed 99 BCE):

Others are just very close to Imperial Aramaic, which is also the case for the most archaic inscriptions mentioning Nabataean kings. Like an alleged Tayma Aramaic graffito, JSNab 334, and CNIK 1 (from Elusa, 2nd or early 1st c. BCE):

Or, perhaps a better comparison, TM.TAr.004 (vol. 3: 41-44) and an Aramaic-Dadanitic bilingual from al-Ula, RCU.2023.150:

In both these last comparisons, the Tayma Aramaic text is actually a bit more developed in both spelling and letter shapes than the text mentioning the Nabataeans, but mostly in ways that are shared with later Nabataean. (The exception, again, is the lengthened 𐢘 p).

In his commentary on TM.TAr.003, Macdonald writes: “The script of this text is remarkable for the variety of its letter forms and can be classed neither as Imperial Aramaic nor Nabataean, though it has some letter forms typical of each” (vol. 3: 40, emphasis mine). For the most part, this statement appears to me to be applicable to Tayma Aramaic as a whole. Given the apparent dating of the first entirely Tayma Aramaic inscription we considered to the middle of the first century BCE and the relative chronology where Tayma Aramaic precedes “Classical” Nabataean (see the triple funerary monument and occasional dating to kings of Lihyan, who ruled Tayma before the Nabataeans), can we just take Tayma Aramaic as a transitional, first-centuries-BCE script type between Imperial Aramaic and Nabataean? If so, that would fit nicely with the explicitly Nabataean inscriptions from this period, which similarly lack many typical features of mainstream Nabataean. I’m sympathetic to Macdonald’s implied objections against using the term Nabataean for inscriptions from Lihyanite Tayma (just like I wouldn’t want to call the ones from Egypt Tayma Aramaic).5 Maybe we could settle for Arabian Aramaic,6 or maybe Arabian square script and then explicitly contrast it with Jewish square script. Either way, I think we should include this material in discussions of the development from Imperial Aramaic to Nabataean proper, not sequester it in a niche of its own.

1. At first, I was pretty confused by the Imperial Aramaic material from Tayma, which is mostly in a script that looks more archaic than the Imperial Aramaic I knew and therefore can’t directly descend from it. Thanks to Jérôme Norris for explaining that this is the usual (older) Imperial Aramaic lapidary script, which is indeed more archaic than the Imperial Aramaic cursive used in the papyri. This goes to show how readily you should accept my takes on Aramaic paleography. ↩︎
2. In vol. 2, Macdonald refers to a forthcoming article in a journal I worked for for a little while, but which is now basically defunct. ↩︎
3. The same goes for the other, longer-known inscription from Tell al-Shuqafiyya, which is fifteen to thirty years older (depending on which Ptolemy is meant) and written in a more archaic script than either of the inscriptions mentioning Malichus (three-legged ܐ ʾ [in the first half], roofed 𐢂 b, wavy 𐤑 ṣ, open 𐡒 q). ↩︎
4. Translation modified more seriously than with the other incriptions. ↩︎
5. Linguistically, it’s also interesting that at least the older Tayma Aramaic material lacks “wawation” and shifts *-at to *-ah in Arabic names, like tym and wʾlh for Nabataean tymw and wʾlt. This probably reflects a local difference in the Arabic dialect(s) the names were taken from, or maybe different spelling conventions. ↩︎
6. Although that might be confusing, since the term has also been used for a hypothetical donor dialect of Aramaic loanwords into Old Arabic. ↩︎

#Arabic #Aramaic #Nabataean

Biblical #Aramaic phrase of the day: עַתִּיק יוֹמַיָּא ʕattīq yōmayyā (indefinite: עַתִּיק יוֹמִין ʕattīq yōmīn)

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4rsec7snwsap5hzp3prgkhkn/post/3lcutlddpwk2h

Yasetel liesbukh

#BonDia
Idioma: #Aramaic
#BondDia

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

🇹🇷 **Six New Aramaic Inscriptions Unearthed at Ancient City of Zernaki Tepe in Eastern Türkiye**

🔗 https://arkeonews.net/six-new-aramaic-inscriptions-unearthed-at-ancient-city-of-zernaki-tepe-in-eastern-turkiye/.

#Archaeology #Archaeodons #Türkiye #Aramaic

🇹🇷 **Six New Aramaic Inscriptions Unearthed at Ancient City of Zernaki Tepe in Eastern Türkiye**

🔗 https://arkeonews.net/six-new-aramaic-inscriptions-unearthed-at-ancient-city-of-zernaki-tepe-in-eastern-turkiye/.

#Archaeology #Archaeodons #Türkiye #Aramaic

Yasetel liesbukh

#BonDia
Idioma: #Aramaic
#BondDia

CALL and DOT

Two conferences in the last three weeks: my first Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (as a speaker), in Leiden as always, and a day and a half of the 35st Deutscher Orientalistentag, in Erlangen.

Both were a lot of fun. I saw many different talks at CALL, too many to summarize, and mostly too off-topic as well. I was there to ask why we think Cushitic forms a single family within Afroasiatic (see also these blog posts). Despite the purposefully provocative title of my talk, I was not assaulted by any angry mobs of Cushiticists.1 The main question seems to be whether we really should disregard the lexicon when looking at subclassification (and then the next question should be whether the lexicon does show that Cushitic is a clade). It was also really cool to see several talks by young researchers whom I taught as first-years and who have now all finished their MAs and partially started PhD projects: shout-outs to Nina van der Vlugt, Melle Groen, and Jeroen van Ravenhorst. Post your slides online, guys!

At the DOT, I co-chaired a panel on Semitic (in practice: mostly Hebrew) reading traditions together with Harald Samuel. While some of our presenters sadly had to cancel, we still had a great line-up, with exciting findings in every talk:

Chanan Ariel (Tel-Aviv University) proposed a highly original new explanation for the Biblical Hebrew phenomenon of dehiq, where consonants following certain unstressed vowels are geminated. According to Ariel, this is an orthoepic feature and applies to vocalic suffixes that alternate with zero, as well as some cases where the geminated consonant had to be kept apart from a following guttural. Works really well IMHO.

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) provided a thorough discussion of the ketiv-qere phenomenon, presenting an up-to-date linguistic view of its origins and purpose in hopes of spreading more awareness of this to less linguistically inclined Hebrew Bible scholars. One thing that stood out to me is that words that are present in the consonantal text but left unpronounced in the reading tradition (ketiv wela qere) are sometimes translated in targums and other ancient versions.

Jonathan Howard (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented his ongoing PhD research on the “Palestinian” vocalization system of Hebrew and Aramaic and pointed out that so far, there’s really no good evidence that it’s from Palestine. He’s hoping to find some, but it might be more impactful if he doesn’t.

Johan Lundberg (University of Oxford) walked us through the increasing complexity in Syriac punctuation signs, including the development of something that is roughly equivalent to an exclamation mark! Cool fact: in at least one of the few Syriac manuscripts of the entire Bible, the scribe has simply maintained the punctuation of each source text, resulting in several different systems coexisting in the same final work.

Emmanuel Mastey (Tel-Aviv University) presented a nice statistical inquiry into h-final spellings of 2m.sg. perfect verbs in Biblical Hebrew. Besides the very frequent case of נָתַתָּה ‘you gave’, Mastey finds that this spelling is especially common with verbs that have t as their third radical and, less so, with third-weak verbs. He suggests a phonological explanation for both classes; I wonder whether with the III-t roots, it may rather be motivated by the usefulness of distinguishing e.g. שתה ‘you placed’ from שת ‘he placed’.

Isabella Maurizio (University of Lorraine according to the programme, but I think that may be outdated? Sorbonne soon from what she told me) presented her recently completed research on the Second Column of Origen’s Hexapla, the oldest fully vocalized source (in Greek script!) for Biblical Hebrew. Big shock to me: Maurizio dates the Secunda to the 2nd c. BCE-1st c. CE, not the 3rd c. CE!

Marijn van Putten (Leiden University) appeared virtually to frighten the Hebraists with the tricky history of the Qur’anic reading traditions, with examples like one where a certain reader’s Arabic is notably more archaic than that of his teacher’s teacher. Since we barely know anything about who transmitted the Hebrew reading traditions, how much of this stuff are we missing due to a lack of data?

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen) continued the sceptical line by noting some features of Tiberian Hebrew that appear to be really late (quoting me[!] from an informal conversation in which I said that a certain change must have taken place “about two hours before Ben-Asher went to work that morning”). How do we reconcile this with the alleged presence of extremely early, First Temple period features in the reading tradition as well?

Christian Stadel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented on some clearly late and some unquestionably early features of the Samaritan reading tradition and talked about how it relates to the consonantal text of the Samaritan Pentateuch more generally. It reminded me a bit of a presentation I gave on a similar topic several years ago. I only have one semester of Samaritan Hebrew, though—taught by Christian Stadel!—while Stadel is a real expert on the Samaritan languages. So it was reassuring to hear him argue for similar conclusions as well as present a whole lot more interesting data.

Last of all (due to alphabetization, but it worked out alright), I got to present on the project on the construction of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition that I’ve been doing at Leuven since 2019. I’m not sure the argument I presented is fully sound, so it was great to be able to discuss it with some colleagues afterwards.

The Semitics section continued this morning. In her section keynote, Na’ama Pat-El (University of Texas Austin) presented her SemitiLEX project (recorded talk by another project member, haven’t watched it yet), looking at cognate Semitic lexemes not just in terms of roots, but also looking at morpho-lexical features like gender and pluralization. Unexpected result: building phylogenetic trees based on these data shows Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic clustering as four or five separate branches, instead of Northwest Semitic clustering together and then being closer to Arabic than to Akkadian.

Maria Rauscher (Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny) presented her ongoing work on a dictionary of Arabic verbal nouns, focusing on the difficult case of k-r-h ‘to dislike’. As we had some extra discussion time for both Pat-El’s and Rauscher’s talks, there was time enough for the audience to draw up battle lines and get into the details of linguistic theory (such as: are morphemes even a thing?).

Stefanie Rudolf (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) presented on two Qur’anic phrases that she suggests are unrecognized borrowings from Ethiosemitic. “The Lord of the East and the West” is attested in an Ethiopian Early Sabaic inscription, while Rudolf proposes the Arabic root f-t-w ‘to judge’ may be borrowed from Ethiosemitic f-t-ḥ. While she acknowledges the phonological difficulty of the last case, maybe we should reckon with the possibility of an unknown (South?) Ethiosemitic language that lost the pharyngeals acting as an intermediary: in the beginning of her talk, she pointed out that early Islamic sources refer to an Abyssinian with a name that is not Ge’ez but pre-Amharic (I think Ababut?), which I found very cool.

Jan Retsö (University of Gothenburg) pulled off the trick of reading out a text with no slides or handout while being perfectly easy to follow and entertaining. After an overview of the scholarship on Semitic–Ancient Egyptian cognates and loanwords, Retsö responded to Alexander Borg’s recent claim that there are lots of specifically Arabic loanwords in Egyptian. Retsö thinks there’s something there but urges for methodological precision.

Mohammad I. Ababneh (University of Halle) presented on some difficulties in Safaitic paleography, including merged letters and ligatures and other weird letter shapes. Nice to see some discussion of former Leiden colleague Chiara Della Puppa’s dissertation!

Finally, Vera Tsukanova (Philipps-Universität Marburg) took a look at the phonological adaptation of Persian loanwords into Arabic from a Semiticist and diachronic perspective. Historical differences in aspiration go a long way in accounting for prima facie unexpected sounds in borrowings.

And now, the conference is kind of on hold for various business meetings, which I took as my cue to leave. In conclusion, I would like to note that I am posting this from a high-speed train, which feels very futuristic. While some discussions in the field stay the same for what seems like forever—Paul Kahle’s lecture at the first DOT in 1922 was referenced multiple times—I take this as a sign that like Deutsche Bahn passengers, no matter the inevitable delays, detours, and frustrations, overall, we are getting somewhere.

1. Only by a toddler, possibly for unrelated reasons. ↩︎

#Akkadian #Amharic #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Bible #Cushitic #EastCushitic #Egyptian #Hebrew #linguistics #Samaritans #Syriac #Ugaritic

CALL and DOT

Two conferences in the last three weeks: my first Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (as a speaker), in Leiden as always, and a day and a half of the 35st Deutscher Orientalistentag, in Erlangen.

Both were a lot of fun. I saw many different talks at CALL, too many to summarize, and mostly too off-topic as well. I was there to ask why we think Cushitic forms a single family within Afroasiatic (see also these blog posts). Despite the purposefully provocative title of my talk, I was not assaulted by any angry mobs of Cushiticists.1 The main question seems to be whether we really should disregard the lexicon when looking at subclassification (and then the next question should be whether the lexicon does show that Cushitic is a clade). It was also really cool to see several talks by young researchers whom I taught as first-years and who have now all finished their MAs and partially started PhD projects: shout-outs to Nina van der Vlugt, Melle Groen, and Jeroen van Ravenhorst. Post your slides online, guys!

At the DOT, I co-chaired a panel on Semitic (in practice: mostly Hebrew) reading traditions together with Harald Samuel. While some of our presenters sadly had to cancel, we still had a great line-up, with exciting findings in every talk:

Chanan Ariel (Tel-Aviv University) proposed a highly original new explanation for the Biblical Hebrew phenomenon of dehiq, where consonants following certain unstressed vowels are geminated. According to Ariel, this is an orthoepic feature and applies to vocalic suffixes that alternate with zero, as well as some cases where the geminated consonant had to be kept apart from a following guttural. Works really well IMHO.

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) provided a thorough discussion of the ketiv-qere phenomenon, presenting an up-to-date linguistic view of its origins and purpose in hopes of spreading more awareness of this to less linguistically inclined Hebrew Bible scholars. One thing that stood out to me is that words that are present in the consonantal text but left unpronounced in the reading tradition (ketiv wela qere) are sometimes translated in targums and other ancient versions.

Jonathan Howard (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented his ongoing PhD research on the “Palestinian” vocalization system of Hebrew and Aramaic and pointed out that so far, there’s really no good evidence that it’s from Palestine. He’s hoping to find some, but it might be more impactful if he doesn’t.

Johan Lundberg (University of Oxford) walked us through the increasing complexity in Syriac punctuation signs, including the development of something that is roughly equivalent to an exclamation mark! Cool fact: in at least one of the few Syriac manuscripts of the entire Bible, the scribe has simply maintained the punctuation of each source text, resulting in several different systems coexisting in the same final work.

Emmanuel Mastey (Tel-Aviv University) presented a nice statistical inquiry into h-final spellings of 2m.sg. perfect verbs in Biblical Hebrew. Besides the very frequent case of נָתַתָּה ‘you gave’, Mastey finds that this spelling is especially common with verbs that have t as their third radical and, less so, with third-weak verbs. He suggests a phonological explanation for both classes; I wonder whether with the III-t roots, it may rather be motivated by the usefulness of distinguishing e.g. שתה ‘you placed’ from שת ‘he placed’.

Isabella Maurizio (University of Lorraine according to the programme, but I think that may be outdated? Sorbonne soon from what she told me) presented her recently completed research on the Second Column of Origen’s Hexapla, the oldest fully vocalized source (in Greek script!) for Biblical Hebrew. Big shock to me: Maurizio dates the Secunda to the 2nd c. BCE-1st c. CE, not the 3rd c. CE!

Marijn van Putten (Leiden University) appeared virtually to frighten the Hebraists with the tricky history of the Qur’anic reading traditions, with examples like one where a certain reader’s Arabic is notably more archaic than that of his teacher’s teacher. Since we barely know anything about who transmitted the Hebrew reading traditions, how much of this stuff are we missing due to a lack of data?

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen) continued the sceptical line by noting some features of Tiberian Hebrew that appear to be really late (quoting me[!] from an informal conversation in which I said that a certain change must have taken place “about two hours before Ben-Asher went to work that morning”). How do we reconcile this with the alleged presence of extremely early, First Temple period features in the reading tradition as well?

Christian Stadel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented on some clearly late and some unquestionably early features of the Samaritan reading tradition and talked about how it relates to the consonantal text of the Samaritan Pentateuch more generally. It reminded me a bit of a presentation I gave on a similar topic several years ago. I only have one semester of Samaritan Hebrew, though—taught by Christian Stadel!—while Stadel is a real expert on the Samaritan languages. So it was reassuring to hear him argue for similar conclusions as well as present a whole lot more interesting data.

Last of all (due to alphabetization, but it worked out alright), I got to present on the project on the construction of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition that I’ve been doing at Leuven since 2019. I’m not sure the argument I presented is fully sound, so it was great to be able to discuss it with some colleagues afterwards.

The Semitics section continued this morning. In her section keynote, Na’ama Pat-El (University of Texas Austin) presented her SemitiLEX project (recorded talk by another project member, haven’t watched it yet), looking at cognate Semitic lexemes not just in terms of roots, but also looking at morpho-lexical features like gender and pluralization. Unexpected result: building phylogenetic trees based on these data shows Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic clustering as four or five separate branches, instead of Northwest Semitic clustering together and then being closer to Arabic than to Akkadian.

Maria Rauscher (Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny) presented her ongoing work on a dictionary of Arabic verbal nouns, focusing on the difficult case of k-r-h ‘to dislike’. As we had some extra discussion time for both Pat-El’s and Rauscher’s talks, there was time enough for the audience to draw up battle lines and get into the details of linguistic theory (such as: are morphemes even a thing?).

Stefanie Rudolf (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) presented on two Qur’anic phrases that she suggests are unrecognized borrowings from Ethiosemitic. “The Lord of the East and the West” is attested in an Ethiopian Early Sabaic inscription, while Rudolf proposes the Arabic root f-t-w ‘to judge’ may be borrowed from Ethiosemitic f-t-ḥ. While she acknowledges the phonological difficulty of the last case, maybe we should reckon with the possibility of an unknown (South?) Ethiosemitic language that lost the pharyngeals acting as an intermediary: in the beginning of her talk, she pointed out that early Islamic sources refer to an Abyssinian with a name that is not Ge’ez but pre-Amharic (I think Ababut?), which I found very cool.

Jan Retsö (University of Gothenburg) pulled off the trick of reading out a text with no slides or handout while being perfectly easy to follow and entertaining. After an overview of the scholarship on Semitic–Ancient Egyptian cognates and loanwords, Retsö responded to Alexander Borg’s recent claim that there are lots of specifically Arabic loanwords in Egyptian. Retsö thinks there’s something there but urges for methodological precision.

Mohammad I. Ababneh (University of Halle) presented on some difficulties in Safaitic paleography, including merged letters and ligatures and other weird letter shapes. Nice to see some discussion of former Leiden colleague Chiara Della Puppa’s dissertation!

Finally, Vera Tsukanova (Philipps-Universität Marburg) took a look at the phonological adaptation of Persian loanwords into Arabic from a Semiticist and diachronic perspective. Historical differences in aspiration go a long way in accounting for prima facie unexpected sounds in borrowings.

And now, the conference is kind of on hold for various business meetings, which I took as my cue to leave. In conclusion, I would like to note that I am posting this from a high-speed train, which feels very futuristic. While some discussions in the field stay the same for what seems like forever—Paul Kahle’s lecture at the first DOT in 1922 1921 was referenced multiple times—I take this as a sign that like Deutsche Bahn passengers, no matter the inevitable delays, detours, and frustrations, overall, we are getting somewhere.

1. Only by a toddler, possibly for unrelated reasons. ↩︎

#Akkadian #Amharic #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Bible #Cushitic #EastCushitic #Egyptian #Hebrew #linguistics #Samaritans #Syriac #Ugaritic

CALL and DOT

Two conferences in the last three weeks: my first Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (as a speaker), in Leiden as always, and a day and a half of the 35st Deutscher Orientalistentag, in Erlangen.

Both were a lot of fun. I saw many different talks at CALL, too many to summarize, and mostly too off-topic as well. I was there to ask why we think Cushitic forms a single family within Afroasiatic (see also these blog posts). Despite the purposefully provocative title of my talk, I was not assaulted by any angry mobs of Cushiticists.1 The main question seems to be whether we really should disregard the lexicon when looking at subclassification (and then the next question should be whether the lexicon does show that Cushitic is a clade). It was also really cool to see several talks by young researchers whom I taught as first-years and who have now all finished their MAs and partially started PhD projects: shout-outs to Nina van der Vlugt, Melle Groen, and Jeroen van Ravenhorst. Post your slides online, guys!

At the DOT, I co-chaired a panel on Semitic (in practice: mostly Hebrew) reading traditions together with Harald Samuel. While some of our presenters sadly had to cancel, we still had a great line-up, with exciting findings in every talk:

Chanan Ariel (Tel-Aviv University) proposed a highly original new explanation for the Biblical Hebrew phenomenon of dehiq, where consonants following certain unstressed vowels are geminated. According to Ariel, this is an orthoepic feature and applies to vocalic suffixes that alternate with zero, as well as some cases where the geminated consonant had to be kept apart from a following guttural. Works really well IMHO.

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) provided a thorough discussion of the ketiv-qere phenomenon, presenting an up-to-date linguistic view of its origins and purpose in hopes of spreading more awareness of this to less linguistically inclined Hebrew Bible scholars. One thing that stood out to me is that words that are present in the consonantal text but left unpronounced in the reading tradition (ketiv wela qere) are sometimes translated in targums and other ancient versions.

Jonathan Howard (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented his ongoing PhD research on the “Palestinian” vocalization system of Hebrew and Aramaic and pointed out that so far, there’s really no good evidence that it’s from Palestine. He’s hoping to find some, but it might be more impactful if he doesn’t.

Johan Lundberg (University of Oxford) walked us through the increasing complexity in Syriac punctuation signs, including the development of something that is roughly equivalent to an exclamation mark! Cool fact: in at least one of the few Syriac manuscripts of the entire Bible, the scribe has simply maintained the punctuation of each source text, resulting in several different systems coexisting in the same final work.

Emmanuel Mastey (Tel-Aviv University) presented a nice statistical inquiry into h-final spellings of 2m.sg. perfect verbs in Biblical Hebrew. Besides the very frequent case of נָתַתָּה ‘you gave’, Mastey finds that this spelling is especially common with verbs that have t as their third radical and, less so, with third-weak verbs. He suggests a phonological explanation for both classes; I wonder whether with the III-t roots, it may rather be motivated by the usefulness of distinguishing e.g. שתה ‘you placed’ from שת ‘he placed’.

Isabella Maurizio (University of Lorraine according to the programme, but I think that may be outdated? Sorbonne soon from what she told me) presented her recently completed research on the Second Column of Origen’s Hexapla, the oldest fully vocalized source (in Greek script!) for Biblical Hebrew. Big shock to me: Maurizio dates the Secunda to the 2nd c. BCE-1st c. CE, not the 3rd c. CE!

Marijn van Putten (Leiden University) appeared virtually to frighten the Hebraists with the tricky history of the Qur’anic reading traditions, with examples like one where a certain reader’s Arabic is notably more archaic than that of his teacher’s teacher. Since we barely know anything about who transmitted the Hebrew reading traditions, how much of this stuff are we missing due to a lack of data?

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen) continued the sceptical line by noting some features of Tiberian Hebrew that appear to be really late (quoting me[!] from an informal conversation in which I said that a certain change must have taken place “about two hours before Ben-Asher went to work that morning”). How do we reconcile this with the alleged presence of extremely early, First Temple period features in the reading tradition as well?

Christian Stadel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented on some clearly late and some unquestionably early features of the Samaritan reading tradition and talked about how it relates to the consonantal text of the Samaritan Pentateuch more generally. It reminded me a bit of a presentation I gave on a similar topic several years ago. I only have one semester of Samaritan Hebrew, though—taught by Christian Stadel!—while Stadel is a real expert on the Samaritan languages. So it was reassuring to hear him argue for similar conclusions as well as present a whole lot more interesting data.

Last of all (due to alphabetization, but it worked out alright), I got to present on the project on the construction of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition that I’ve been doing at Leuven since 2019. I’m not sure the argument I presented is fully sound, so it was great to be able to discuss it with some colleagues afterwards.

The Semitics section continued this morning. In her section keynote, Na’ama Pat-El (University of Texas Austin) presented her SemitiLEX project (recorded talk by another project member, haven’t watched it yet), looking at cognate Semitic lexemes not just in terms of roots, but also looking at morpho-lexical features like gender and pluralization. Unexpected result: building phylogenetic trees based on these data shows Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic clustering as four or five separate branches, instead of Northwest Semitic clustering together and then being closer to Arabic than to Akkadian.

Maria Rauscher (Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny) presented her ongoing work on a dictionary of Arabic verbal nouns, focusing on the difficult case of k-r-h ‘to dislike’. As we had some extra discussion time for both Pat-El’s and Rauscher’s talks, there was time enough for the audience to draw up battle lines and get into the details of linguistic theory (such as: are morphemes even a thing?).

Stefanie Rudolf (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) presented on two Qur’anic phrases that she suggests are unrecognized borrowings from Ethiosemitic. “The Lord of the East and the West” is attested in an Ethiopian Early Sabaic inscription, while Rudolf proposes the Arabic root f-t-w ‘to judge’ may be borrowed from Ethiosemitic f-t-ḥ. While she acknowledges the phonological difficulty of the last case, maybe we should reckon with the possibility of an unknown (South?) Ethiosemitic language that lost the pharyngeals acting as an intermediary: in the beginning of her talk, she pointed out that early Islamic sources refer to an Abyssinian with a name that is not Ge’ez but pre-Amharic (I think Ababut?), which I found very cool.

Jan Retsö (University of Gothenburg) pulled off the trick of reading out a text with no slides or handout while being perfectly easy to follow and entertaining. After an overview of the scholarship on Semitic–Ancient Egyptian cognates and loanwords, Retsö responded to Alexander Borg’s recent claim that there are lots of specifically Arabic loanwords in Egyptian. Retsö thinks there’s something there but urges for methodological precision.

Mohammad I. Ababneh (University of Halle) presented on some difficulties in Safaitic paleography, including merged letters and ligatures and other weird letter shapes. Nice to see some discussion of former Leiden colleague Chiara Della Puppa’s dissertation!

Finally, Vera Tsukanova (Philipps-Universität Marburg) took a look at the phonological adaptation of Persian loanwords into Arabic from a Semiticist and diachronic perspective. Historical differences in aspiration go a long way in accounting for prima facie unexpected sounds in borrowings.

And now, the conference is kind of on hold for various business meetings, which I took as my cue to leave. In conclusion, I would like to note that I am posting this from a high-speed train, which feels very futuristic. While some discussions in the field stay the same for what seems like forever—Paul Kahle’s lecture at the first DOT in 1922 1921 was referenced multiple times—I take this as a sign that like Deutsche Bahn passengers, no matter the inevitable delays, detours, and frustrations, overall, we are getting somewhere.

1. Only by a toddler, possibly for unrelated reasons. ↩︎

#Akkadian #Amharic #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Bible #Cushitic #EastCushitic #Egyptian #Hebrew #linguistics #Samaritans #Syriac #Ugaritic