There seems to be an Old Persian "zana" which means "type, kind" it
may also mean "man" but I am not sure if it is an extension from the
generic "kind" to the generic "man" or the opposite direction.
The earliest attestation of the root ZN in Aramaic is in Official/
Imperial Aramaic where it occurs in an Official Persian document. The
closest match to the Psalm is from:
"Arsham Correspondence", as per B. Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook
of Aramaic Documents from Ancient
Egypt 1, (Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake): 1986; A6: The Letters of Arsames
and his Colleagues c427 - Late 5th Century B.C.E., pp. 94-128.
Corrections and additions were added per TAD D, p. 150
(my data comes from the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon http://
cal1.cn.huc.edu/):
MPR$ ZN ZN YR)X K)YRX HWW $LXN
"separating all types, every month they were sending (to me)"
My quick opinion is that Aramaic and Persian are in contact during
the Achamaenid period, we have a reference in a Official Persian
document written in Aramaic. The only attestations of Old Persian are
the Achamaenid inscriptions, I do not have a concordance to see how
often "zana" occurs. In this type of situation it is very difficult
to tell the direction of borrowing, ie the Persians could have
borrowed ZN from Aramaic as easy as the other way around. We would
have to do more work to decide. Both HALOT and the CAL seem to think
the direction is Old Persian --> Aramaic, I'm not sure if that is
just a guess or if they have some other data. I may try to check
Porten and Yardeni if I make it into the library today.
The only other vocabulary item that jumps out at me from the Psalm is
the use of $E in verse 15. However, this doesn't decide the question
of date since $E can be an archaic feature of early Hebrew just as
easily as representing late influence of Aramaic. Thus ZN could also
be a much older Aramaic word which just isn't attested in any of the
early inscriptions before Imperial Aramaic and is used in the Psalm
as part of the more formal poetic language. The same goes for some of
the other more difficult words in this section. I also kind of wonder
if the last stanza (vss 12-15) originally went with the rest of the
psalm or if it was appended since the style and language seem to change.
The other question, does the construction MN ... )L... (from...
to...) appear anywhere else in this inclusive sense, "all"?
Sincerely,
Peter Bekins
[b-hebrew] "Mizan el zan" in Ps 144:13,
Peter Bekins, 08/23/2007