Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Ishinan" <ishinan AT comcast.net>]

YIGAL: I won't and can't comment on the Indo-European "plough".

ISHINAN: I only brought up the subject in the context of the translation of 
the Bible and the occurrence of  the loan-word "plough" in various Germanic 
languages.

YIGAL: As far as the Arabic "flg" - as much as we might make of Arabic 
"cognates", we must remember that Arabic is a different branch of Semitic 
languages, and that ANY written form of Arabic, certainly Classical Arabic, 
is many centuries later than Biblical Hebrew. So that even if the Hebrew and 
Arabic roots do derive from the same Proto-Semitic origin, their meanings 
don't have to be related. If anything, I would posit that the Arabic meaning 
of "do make cuts in the earth" is derived from the older "divide".

ISHINAN: Correct me if am wrong, but isn't it standard procedure among 
Semitic scholars to make use of sister languages, especially Arabic, to 
explain certain Hebrew terms. A cursory look at any serious Hebrew 
dictionary will attest to this fact. Besides, I already made allusion in my 
earlier post that  proto Semitic * plg meant divide/split, while of course 
the sense of ploughing is naturally a derivative.  Now if you consider 
Arabic inappropriate and not pertaining to Hebrew in this instance, then 
what about Ugaritic?

To my knowledge, many Biblical themes were simply adapted from Ugaritic 
sources; the story of the flood for example has a near mirror image in 
Ugaritic literature;  therefore in my opinion, the language of the Bible is 
greatly illuminated by the language of Ugarit.

In this case the Ugaritic 'plg" in  KTU 1.82:24 & KTU 1.100:69  means "a 
long, narrow, shallow trench made in the ground by a plow or simply put a 
furrow". Now If you go back to the Arabic definition offered in my previous 
post you will find that it is exactly the same definition of the Arabic 
"flg": furrow the land or ploughing for sowing.

YIGAL: As a noun, Peleg is mostly connected to streams of water .

ISHINAN: So it is in the Arabic case, see the attachment in my earlier post.

http://labyrinthoflanguage.freewebsitehosting.com/PLG.html

YIGAL: And finally, "in Peleg's days the earth was ploughed"? Why? The first 
agriculturist was Cain (Gen. 4:2), and nowhere else does the Bible give a 
postdiluvian etiology for something that was already "invented" before the 
flood.

ISHINAN:  If you don't mind, I will take a leaf of the moderator's 
instructions (in this case yourself) and will avoid getting into a debate 
about the Bible historicity to prove my point, however tempting. Instead, I 
will opt to deal with strictly linguistic matters.

My initial suggestion to Doug was given in good faith, based on my belief of 
the significance of comparative studies applied to the Semitic languages. I 
have nothing further to add to my earlier proposal, which I believe has 
merit.

Thank you for your comments, even though I cannot agree with them.

Respectfully,

Ishinan B. Ishibashi