Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 12/7/06, Yigal Levin wrote:
> This make it more problematic. If hed is a shortened (or construct) form of
> hedad, it has nothing to do with thunder, and it's difficult to see the
> connection between "shouts of joy" and Hadad. On the othe hand, the Arabic,
> and more importanatly the Ugaritic cognates seem to mean "thunderous noise",
> which fits Hadad better. And if so, there is no connection between "hed" and
> "hedad".

Well, my search for hedɔd shows that the word appears five times in the
Bible: Isaiah 16:9, 16:10, Jeremiah 25:30, 48:33, 51:14.

Now, of these, Isaiah 16:10 and Jeremiah 48:33 which are similar enough
in wording to suggest dependence, could be taken to mean that hedɔd
refers to a shout of joy.

But Isaiah 16:9, just a verse before one of these is speaking of a different
kind of shout: JPS translates it the "battle shout", and that very much
suggests the noise of the battle drums.

In Jeremiah 25:30 it is parallel to $ɔ)og yi$)ag (JPS: "he shall mightly
roar"), and in Jeremiah 51:14, we seem to be speaking of an "uproar."

In light of these, I think that hedɔd probably had no connotation of joy
in ancient times, and its meaning was more of some kind of thunderous
roar: a roar that could come in joy, but could also be the terrifying
roar of battle.

This brings us closer to the word hed and the possible cognates.  I
am not sure these words are all cognates.  It isn't clear to me that hed
and Arabic ha:dd are both derived from the same word in some Common
Semitic word.  However, these all seem to be reflexes of the same root,
so the root is equivalent in all.

> And thanks for the article, Yitzhak. I'll have to read it more carefully. An
> article of mine, on theophoric toponyms with "Baal", is due to appear in the
> next Judea and Samaria Studies (in Hebrew). If you (or anyone else) want, I
> can email you a pre-copy.

I would very much appreciate a copy.  I copied that O'Connor article into
Microsoft Word now and it came out over 60 pages!

Yitzhak Sapir