Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Randall,

I do not think I have much more to say about Qohelet. But I will make 
some comments on your points below



RB

> vayyixtov Rolf
> > it is very likely that Old
> Babylonian is the source for the "late" Hebrew
> word ZMN as well as the Old Persian word jamana.>
>
> But did zmn enter Hebrew directly from Old (!?!) Babylonian or
> mediated thru Aramaic?
> If Old ! Babylonian then it was
> already in Hebrew throughout OT times and one must deal with
> the third test of Hurvitz: why is `et and mo`ed used exclusively
> in torah and prophets? There was extensive literary contextual
opportunity for zeman. But it wasn't ever used.
> One must reject an Old bablylonian suggestion for a direct
> loan into Hebrew as without merit or support.


RF

The book implies that Solomon wrote it, and this leads us, according 
to the dating of the books of kings to the 11th and 10th centuries 
B.C.E. What do we *know* about the Hebrew language at that time? We 
know absolutely nothing about spoken Hebrew, and the part of the 
Tanakh that supposedly is from that time, is very small. If we assume 
that Hebrew had a vocabulary of 20,000 words, we know less than 10 % 
of these. On this basis it is a very bold claim to say that ZMN did 
not exist in Hebrew in the 10th century.

I do not know whether you can read documents in Akkadian, Ugaritic, 
and Phoenician. But each time I read documents from these languages, 
I am stunned with the high percentage of words that are Hebrew 
cognates. In some Ugaritic texts it seems to me that 80-90% of the 
words have Hebrew counterparts. Is the reason for this that Hebrew 
borrowed its vocabulary from other languages? When we keep in mind 
that Akkadian is one branch of the Semitic languages that is far away 
from the North-West branch, and we find so many parallel words, it is 
very likely that all these languages drew on a common Semitic stock.

All this "loan" and "late word"- business and the methods of Hurwitz 
are in my wiew shoddy linguistics. It is rather sensational that you 
reject an Old Babylonian loan of a word into Hebrew because it is 
"without merit and support," when your own "pre-exilic corpus is so 
limited, and you all the time use arguments from silence-"the word is 
not found, so it did not exist". By the way, I have never argued that 
Hebrew borrowed ZMN from Akkadian. My observation was that a cognate 
existed in Akkadian at the same time that Solomon lived according to 
the books of Kings. Therefore we cannot argue that it is a late word.

> > the QATAL form with and without prefixed WAW can have past
> reference. Therefore, QATAL and WEQATAL in BH is used in the
> same way as in MH,>
>
> this continues to miss and misconstrue the aspectual quality of the
> ve-qatal in biblical Hebrew where ve-qatal is used in long stretches
> and contexts where the marked reference is past habitual. Mishnaic
> Hebrew does not use ve-qatal for marked habitual past.

RF
I have analyzed all the QATALs and  WEQATALs in the Tanakh,  and I 
completely disagree with your aspectual view of WEQATAL. Your basic 
error in my view, is that you do not distinguish between temporal 
reference and tense and between pragmatics and semantics in the BH 
verbal system.

> > [karateppe] as narrative verbs with past reference we find 6
> QATALs, 2 WEQALs, and 21 infinitive absolutes, 16
> of which have prefixed waw. Thus the infinitive
> absolute is the typical narrative form.   . . .  Thus,
> Qohelet's use of infinitive absolute with a
> following pronoun functioning as a finite verb
> resembles Phoenician and not Mishnaic Hebrew. >
>
> Sorry, just the opposite. Eccl 4:2, [8:9, 9:11] is only one [three]
> example, which does not resemble Karateppe at all. But
> it [these] does resemble the four narrative qatol examples in the Qumran
> fragments to the book of Tobit.
>
> >  The two supposed Persian loan-words have counterparts in old
> Sankrit, which could suggest that their origin is much older than
> Persian times. >
>
> this may be missing the point. the question is not how old or ancient
> a particular word is/was, but WHEN, how, and in what shape did it
> enter Hebrew?

RF
It is true that a loan-word enters a language. You argue that a 
particular word is not found in what you believe is pre-exilic 
Hebrew. I show that a  root similar to the word existed in another 
language in pre-exilic time (e.g. ZMN in Akkadian and PRATIGAMA  in 
Old Indo-Iranian), indicating that the root is old. We do not come 
much further, because if some contemporary person has not said it 
explicitly, we cannot know when a particular loan-word entered a 
language. Attempts to show that is pure guesswork.

> > (The rejection of
> the parallel between the Sanskrit word PRATIGAMA and Qohelets word
> PITGAM because the latter lacks "r" is weak indeed. We may compare
> "Nebuchadnezzar" and "Nebuchadrezzar" (Nabu-kudurru-utsur) >
>
> Again, this misses the picture and claim. the 'r' is in sanskrit, but it is
> missing in Aramaic and it is the exact Aramaic form that we find in
> Hebrew, leading to a probability that the word entered with aramaic
> and not from sanskrit.

So we get:

The word pitgam without "r" only existed in Aramaic in the first part 
of the 1st millennium B.C.E.
The word pitgam without "r" is found in Hebrew in the second part of 
the 1st millennium  B.C.E.
The word pitgam without "r" in Hebrew is a loan-word from Aramaic.

This is an invalid syllogism.

> > Dahood's observation that there are parallells between Mishnaic
> Hebrew and Phoenician that are not found in the Tanakh also deserves
> to be studied. Do we find Proto-Mishnaic traits in Phonician?>
>
> Yes. One was cited in an earlier thread, where 'ta' was written as an
> accusative article attached to a word in bar Kochba letters and
> Punic (Western/Late Phoenician).
>
> In fact the Phoenician--Mishnaic connection also undermines a claim
> that Qohelet was written by Judean. Having some visiting builders does
> not explain why why a foreign dialect would suddenly be adopted by
> a Judean king. (I use 'dialect' because I assume that the Phoenician
> and Judean Hebrew were mutually intelligible Canaanite dialects to a
> reasonably high degree.) One must also remember that it is not old
> words that establish dating but young ones. Older pieces of a
> language continue to be used while new pieces enter.


As the list-members are aware of, we know almost nothing regarding 
the Hebrew language in the 10th century (Only the Gezer calendar and 
the Siloah inscription). Qohelet is not a foreign dialect, but it is 
normal Hebrew (cf. the WAYYIQTOLs). However, it represents a genre 
that is not found elsewhere in the Tanakh, and sometimes has a 
differetn style and use of  expressions . It has been shown by Dahood 
that a great number of characteristics are similar to 
Phoenician/Ugaritic. Let me suggest the following scenario:

According to the books of Kings, there was an extensive interaction 
between Jerusalem and Tyre and other Phoenician cities in the days of 
Solomon. Suppose now that  there was a pessimistic philosophic 
tradition among the Phoenicians, perhaps even one having been written 
down. Solomon, if he is Qohelet,  realized that many of the 
pessimistic expressions were correct, because a great deal of what 
people do is nothing but chasing after the wind. But Solomon 
worshiped H)LHYM, and he wanted to show the people that in spite of 
the great emptiness, there was a better way (12:13). So he took the 
Phoenician tradition as a point of departure and wrote a treatise 
where he used some of the Phoenician expressions and some of their 
linguistic characteristics, while the treatise was written in normal 
Hebrew.

This is of course guesswork, but it is a possible model that can 
explain all the parallels between Qohelet and Phoenician inside the 
frame of a possible Solomonic authorship.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo