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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] qohelet
  • Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:19:35 +0200

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






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