Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

   That is a good and interesting question. The term
 apears in other Semitic languages such as Aramaic and
 Arabic also with an initial 'He'. It involves the vexing
 problem of transmission in general. 

  When it comes to texts of the BH, the problems of dating
 composition and redactions raise complicated challanges.
 Clear  diachronic developments can be detected in some
 instances but not in others.

  An early loanword could well have been preserved and
 used by a later author or editor. A good illustration of
 linguistic influence, though from another Semitic language,
 are the many Ugaritic word-pairs which appeared in
 BH centuries after the collapse of that kingdom.

 I wish I could have had a more definite comment. It
 would be interesting to see what Randall has to say
 about this specific loan-word.

 Uri Hurwitz                           Great Neck, NY


>
>  hey-khal
>
***

That word is very interesting.

We have in fact several phonetic snapshots of Sumerian.

S1. is reflected in Hurrian hai-galli
where h is a velar fricative

S2. is Hebrew hey-khal
with a weak laryngeal fricative.

S3. one more stage is Akkadian and Hurrian ay-akk-
where *Hay is ay with no initial at all.
ayakk-u/i is used for goddesses' temples: it's a (partly altered) Sumerian 
genitive *hay-an-ak- "house-of"

S4. late stage is just conventional E- with muted-out h and ay > e.

It's intriguing to see that Hebrew has a phonetic stage which probably 
reflects the end of the 3rd millennium, sometimes before Sumerian actually 
became a dead language.

The attestation in Samuel I.9 sounds like one thousand years older.
I wonder how this can be explained.


Arnaud Fournet





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