I am grateful for the long-awaited publication
of Hayim ben Yosef Tawil’s An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical
Hebrew: Etymological-Semantic and Idiomatic Equivalents with Supplement on Biblical
Aramaic (Jersey City: Ktav, 2009). The volume is clearly a labor of love, a
pioneering effort in what is still a virgin field of inquiry. The volume bills
itself as a systematic evaluation of “the parallels and cognates between these
two branches of the Semitic family of languages” (ix). It comes with the highest
possible recommendations: on the back cover, Moshe Bar Asher, William Hallo,
and Peter Machinist all sing its praises.
Go ahead and buy it if you haven’t already
(if you are an SBL/ASOR/ETS member, you can order it from Eisenbrauns
through Dec 31 for $70.20, an unbeatable price). It’s impossible not to learn a
thing or two from virtually every one of its xxiv + 503 pages.
Specifically, Tawil’s Companion
compares the lexis of biblical Hebrew with that of Akkadian wherever
etymological equivalents have been identified, with limited but nonetheless helpful
coverage of semantic equivalents and idiomatic equivalents which do not
have an etymological basis.
A strength of the Companion is its
careful cataloguing of shared features like cognate accusative and other syntactic
constructions; denotative and idiomatic usages; a-b parallelisms and sequencing;
hendiadys, merismus, simile/metaphors, and transferred meanings. To be clear,
Tawil, since he restricted himself to thoroughly canvassing the lexis of Hebrew
and Akkadian in instances of etymological equivalence, merely scratches the
surface. If all cases of semantic equivalence were canvassed, the volume would
have stretched to thousands of pages. That’s how much work remains to be done.
Would that this Companion encourage others,
especially those with training in linguistics, to finish the task. There is
really no telling how many passages of the Bible will be illuminated and better
understood, once the research project Tawil has pioneered is brought to
completion.
Another plus: Tawil points out numerous cases
in which NJPSV has a footnote saying “Meaning of Hebrew word uncertain” (in
this sense, NJPSV is the only honest translation of the Hebrew Bible on the
market; NJPSV so notes, I would guess, over a thousand times) whose probable
sense is nonetheless certain based on comparative data the massive corpus of Akkadian
literature provides.
An example from p. 225 may suffice to
illustrate both the value and limits of Tawil’s Companion. The heading
of the entry reads as follows:
מרץ = Akk. marāṣu v. OAkk. on (CAD M1 269a; AHw 609a). Akk. to fall ill, become
troublesome; Heb. to be bad, painful.
The approach is straightforward. Tawil begins
with a biblical Hebrew vocable and identifies its etymological equivalent in
Akkadian. The chronological range of attestation in Akkadian is provided, along
with page and column references to the location of the cited equivalent in the
standard reference dictionaries, CAD and AHw. Then the principal meanings of
the Akkadian and Hebrew vocables are listed.
This is all very helpful, but not quite as
helpful as one might wish. The starting point is a Hebrew vocable, which is
fine, but an apples-to-apples comparison of Hebrew to Akkadian is not possible without
recourse to a complex algorithm. Specifically, verbs should not be compared
with verbs sic et simpliciter, but G verbs with G verbs, Š verbs with H
verbs, etc. (Tawil knows this very well, as other entries prove.) That too is simplistic, since the semantic counterparts of many verbs
in Akkadian which occur in the G but not the N stem – like kabātu = כבד - will be neatly distributed across the G and N stems in Hebrew
(this shows up in Tawil’s illuminating treatment of כבד = kabātu, #7 [153b], though
one is not alerted to the fact in the heading of said entry, which takes note
of the G and D stems in Hebrew and Akkadian alone). Furthermore, and this is a crucial
point, attributive participles in Hebrew should be compared with
attributive adjectives in Akkadian. Akkadian is rich in adjectives and
Hebrew is rich in participles with identical attributive functions.
In point of fact, מרץ occurs in the
N stem, as an N attributive participle, and in the H (= Š) stem. For that
reason, it would have been preferable for the heading to read as follows:
מרץ = Akk. marāṣu v. OAkk. on (CAD M1 269a; AHw 609a); marṣu adj. OA, OB on (CAD M1 291a . . .). Akk. G to
be/become ill, hurt, aggrieved; adj. ill, hurtful, grievous; Š make
ill, trans. hurt, trans. grieve; Heb. N to be grievous; N ptp. grievous;
H trans. grieve.
[Note that I have chosen the English glosses for the Akkadian and Hebrew items so as to do a number of things simultaneously: illustrate the semantic coherence *and* range *and* development of the items in question; illustrate the semantic coherence of the items across the two languages; and provide translation equivalents which, if deployed, "fit" in a broad number of cases and allow for a relatively high degree of concordance in translation across attested examples: the effort to do all of this simultaneously coheres with a long philological tradition alive and well in Gesenius and BDB and AHw far more than in CAD and HALOT; CAD and HALOT (and DCH) are better if the goal is to see what meaning one might assign to items in context without recourse to philological thought experiments (*controls,* I would argue, when used properly) of the kind just mentioned]
Tawil’s מרץ entry continues as follows:
The semantic
equivalent of Akk. marāṣu “to be sick” is the Hebrew verb חָלָה.
Exactly right, and if Tawil had made a
point-by-point comparison of the denotative and idiomatic usages of marāṣu and חלה,
specific phrases, sequences, and a-b parallelisms in which they both occur, he would
have treated his readers to a feast several columns in length.
It would be insane to complain that he did
not. The scope of his work is narrower. But other Assyriologists have
done broader spadework. Here is a relevant quote from a volume by Shalom Paul,
his Amos commentary in the Hermeneia series, which is rich in observations of
this kind:
The verb נֶחְלוּ [in Amos 6:6, JFH], which is the niph‛al of the root חלה, basically means “to be sick,” and then develops the meaning “to be sick
about, grieved over, worried and concerned about.” Thus 1 Sam 22:8: “No one is
concerned (חֹלֶה)
about me.” [A footnote cites another example, with bibliography: Isa 57:10, JFH] (Compare
similarly the same semantic development in Akkadian, in which the verb marāṣu [“to be sick”] also means “to be concerned about, care
for”; for example, šumma
ina kittim aḫi atta u tamarraṣa; “If you
really are my brother and concerned about me, [send me barley].”[1]
Tawil does not appear to have consulted Paul’s
Amos commentary (it is not listed in his extensive bibliography). But he comes
to analogous conclusions with respect to מרץ:
[N]ot unlike
Akk. marāṣu, Heb. מָרַץ (attested
four times) has the extended semantic development “to be painful, difficult,
severe,” as can be seen from the following semantic equivalents: Akk: amatu marṣu “severe, painful (lit. sickening) word, matter” (CAD M1
273a c; 273b) may be compared to the Heb. phrase (considered by NJPS as “meaning
of Heb. uncertain”) מַה־נִּמְרְצוּ
אִמְרֵי־יֹשֶׁר
“how (lit. sickening)
painful, severe are ‘just’ words” (Job 6:25). More specifically, note the
following Heb. and Akk. idiomatic equivalents: Heb. קְלָלָה נִמְצֶרֶת “severe curse,” e.g., וְהוּא קִלְלַנִי קְלָלָה נִמְצֶרֶת “and he
cursed me a severe curse (1 Kgs 2:8); Akk: erreta marulta,
e.g., erreta
marulta ša nasāḫ išdi šarrūtišu u ḫalāq nišēšu littašqar “may he (Assur) pronounce an evil curse to uproot his
kingship and destroy his people (CAD A2 305a); ar[rat] la napšuri marušta līrurūšu
“may they (the gods) curse him with a
grievous, indissoluble curse” (CAD M1 294a b).
To be sure, Driver anticipated Tawil with respect
to Job 6:25. Clines notes in his Word commentary:
G. R. Driver (“Some Hebrew Words,” JTS 29 [1927–28] 390–96 [394])
sees מרץ [in Job 6:25) as cognate
with Akk. marāṣu “be ill, displeasing,” and translates “are bitter”;
hence probably neb “how harsh.”[2]
Tawil does not list the cited article in his
bibliography, though he lists others by Driver.
It is salutary that the adjective marṣu makes it into Tawil’s discussion (with a gloss of his
own devising, not that of CAD), though of course the phrase in question ought
to be awatu mariṣtu, with a reference and quotations from CAD M1 294b, not “CAD M1 273a c; 273b” (cognate
expressions with G stative marāṣu are cited there).
The loci with מרץ Tawil does not discuss – Mic 2:10
(to which should be added a famous passage in 1QHodayot) and Job 16:3 - also
have, in my estimation, excellent analogues in Akkadian, but this review is not
the place to expound on them.
Typos turn up here and there in the Companion, but they are rare for a work of this complexity and detail. For example, on xxi, Heb. לֵב חֹלֵה = Akk: libbu marṣu should be לֵב חֹלֶה, perhaps, or rather, another example should be chosen, since that particular collocation is not attested in the Tanakh; in fact, it is not discussed in Tawil’s magnificent לֵב entry stretching over 14 columns.
__________________________________________________________________________
[1] Shalom Paul, Amos (ed. Frank Moore Cross; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 209-210.
[2] David J. A. Clines, Job 1-20 (WBC 17; Dallas: Word, 1989) 161.
Thanks for this review. I've long wanted more information than the aleph sample page.
Posted by: Ben | December 04, 2009 at 08:36 AM
My pleasure, Ben. I'm not sure I do the volume justice in this review. It has many excellent features, whereas I spend an inordinate amount of time pointing out its acknowledged limitations.
Posted by: JohnFH | December 04, 2009 at 09:58 AM
Thanks,
I've already asked Santa for this book.
Posted by: Duane | December 04, 2009 at 11:20 AM
John, would you please explain your remark on the Higgaion website that your copy of Tawil has more pages. When I look at the hardback and paperback versions on the Eisenbrauns website they seem to have the same number of pages.
T L Eves
Posted by: Terry L Eves | December 04, 2009 at 09:48 PM
Hi Terry,
You mean, over at "the man," Charles Halton.
According the publisher's blurb Charles reproduced, the volume has 456 pages. My copy has xxiv + 503 pages. That's all I wanted to say.
My guess is that the publisher's blurb is simply inaccurate, and that all copies out there actually have the number of pages I indicate.
Posted by: JohnFH | December 05, 2009 at 06:14 AM
Is there anything in the book concerning Hebrew words such as raqia' in Genesis 1? Or the word beliymah in Job? Please email me if there is... Very interested!
leonardo3
AT
msn
DOT
com
Posted by: Ed Babinski | February 03, 2010 at 08:40 PM
Hi Ed,
No, nothing in Tawil on those words. They lack straightforward etymological cognates in Akkadian.
Posted by: JohnFH | February 03, 2010 at 10:46 PM