Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

Karl,

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:22:09 -0700, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Will:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>wrote:
> 
>> > Do you have any evidence that hoplite isn’t a loan word into Greek, that
>> > by
>> > the fifth century had been in the language so long that its foreign roots
>> > were forgotten? Just like “pork” and “beef” have been in English so long
>> > that we don’t consider them as loan words brought into English by foreign
>> > invaders?
>>
>> One does have to deal with the fact that οπλιτης/hoplite is pretty
>> clearly derived from οπλον/hoplon, which seems originally to have been
>> a fairly fluid term for a variety of tools before its later becoming
>> specialized in the sense of a type of shield, and then armour in
>> general.  That means that even if _hoplon_ were a loan into Greek,
>> _hoplites_ would not be, and one has to allow for the development of
>> meaning in the primary word and the subsequent creation of the derived
>> word before the latter was imported into Hebrew.  (_Hoplon_ itself may
>> be a loanword into Greek for all I know - at least I'm not aware of an
>> IE etymology.)
> 
> Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s my understanding that only a little of
> Greek literature from before Homer survives, and even in Homer the picture
> is of citizen soldiers, not a professional or even semi-professional class
> of elite soldiers as existing then. Therefore any argument that the
> term οπλιτης/hoplite didn’t exist before about 500 BC is an argument from
> silence, not evidence.

You're right about Greek literature before Homer, but the point is
that to the best of my knowledge Homer doesn't use the term
ὁπλῖται/hoplites, and although he does use the word ὅπλον/hoplon, it's
with the sense "tools" or "tackle", not in the sense "shield" or
"armour" that gave rise to the form _hoplites_.

Furthermore, the term _hoplites_ is a specialized term for a certain
type of warrior that fought in a very specialized type of formation
(the "phalanx") that required a high degree of training, quite unlike
the bronze-age "heroic" warfare depicted in the Iliad.

You say this is an argument from silence, but I say, why assume a
specialized term for a type of warrior existed in Homeric times when
there's no evidence that either the word or the type of warfare
associated with it existed in Homer's time (let alone the still
earlier time of the action of the Iliad.  I have to agree to what
George wrote in an earlier reply, this is a matter of possibility
vs. probability, and the probability seems quite slim, not enough to
warrent equating חפלתי with ὁπλίτης.

Well, at this point I'm going to drop the matter, since it seems to be
getting somewhat tangential to Biblical Hebrew.

-- 
William Parsons
μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι.