Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan-buth <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

Pere casamellas egrapsen:
>(John Ashton, "Abba", in
>Freedman, David Noel, ed., _The Anchor Bible Dictionary_, (New York:
>Doubleday) 1997, 1992.
>
>I don't know if these arguments will convince also Randall Buth and Henry
>Churchyard or not...

It isn't a question of 'either-or'. 
There is a third point to a triangle. I have never bought the kiddy-only
'daddy' stuff (agreeing with Ashton). abba fit/fits colloquial hebrew and
aramaic of all social ages. And it is perfectly conceivable that
bi-tri-linguals would interpret abba as having the article 'the' on the end
(partially agreeing with Ashton, but reinterpreting). Bilinguals did the
same with sabbata, too, both in Greek (>neuter plural) and in Aramaic
(which developed > 'shabba'), despite its origin as 'shabbat'. But that
doesn't mean that the word 'abba' actually developed as an article. 
Again, 'the father' as a vocative doesn't exist in Hebrew, suggesting that
abba is not a simple Aramaic reflex of a parallel Hebrew idiom but
something else, especially since it shows up in both Aramaic and Mishnaic
Hebrew and replaces avi. 
It seems to me to have developed as a special vocative and then was
reinterpreted within Aramaic as the article 'the'. [[I haven't a clue as to
'when', though. As far as we know it was a (late) 2nd-temple phenomenon, at
least until it gets discovered in an older text.]]

yisge shlamax,
Randall Buth