Ancient Hebrew מעצד and עצד in the Gezer Calendar
2013; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 72; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/671444
ISSN1545-6978
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Historical Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeAncient Hebrew מעצד and עצד in the Gezer CalendarAaron KollerAaron KollerYeshiva University* Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIntroductionThe Hebrew Bible contains dozens of terms for tools which must have been common words for speakers of ancient Hebrew, but which present particular challenges for lexicographers of this dead language. Since the biblical texts do not include agricultural manuals or craftsmen’s catalogs, some words make their only appearances in highly allusive contexts, where there is little to indicate what object the word actually referred to. For example, Isaiah mentions (10:15) the garzen in a rhetorical question: “Shall the garzen be glorified more than the one who hews with it?” The lexical information which can be gleaned from this verse is quite spare. Fortunately, in this case, we have the use of the garzen in the Siloam Inscription as well, which also talks about “hewing” (חצב) with a garzen, and that text is so embedded in its physical context that it is possible to infer what tool the text is referring to.1The purpose of the present note is three-fold. First, it argues that the correct meaning of Hebrew מעצד is “adze.” Second, it pleads for systematic but judicious use of Mishnaic Hebrew in the lexicography of Biblical Hebrew. Third, it investigates the use of the root עצד in the Gezer calendar and concludes, based on considerations of agricultural practices in antiquity, that Gezer’s עצד is better connected with Aramaic חצד than with the Hebrew מעצד; in light of this, it raises once more the long-debated question of the dialect of the Gezer calendar.The biblical lexeme מעצדAfter listing cognates in Mishnaic Hebrew, Ugaritic, Arabic, and Geʿez, HALOT defines מעצד as “blacksmith’s tool.” BDB defines the word as “an axe,” though the first evidence cited (from Arabic and Geʿez) indicates that the root עצד is associated with agricultural work. The contexts of the two biblical attestations of the lexeme, however, show that it was actually the tool of a carpenter. The two uses are in the related passages Jeremiah 10:3 and Isaiah 44:12, both of which belong to the long tradition of mocking idols and their makers by describing the mundane processes by which the idols were made.2The first attestation is in Jeremiah 10:3: “For the idol of the nations is worthless: he cut a tree from the forest; it is merely the work of a craftsman with an adze.”3 The passage describes an idol (ḥuqqōt hā-ʿammīm4) made of wood, which originated as a tree in the forest. After stating that the idol is “worthless” (heḇel), the process by which the idol was constructed is reviewed, to emphasize the absurdity of worshipping the idol thus produced. The last nominal phrase of Jeremiah 10:3 contains a compound genitive construction (maʿăśēh yədē ḥārāš) modified by a prepositional phrase (bammaʿăṣād). What exactly bammaʿăṣād modifies is ambiguous, but on all readings, the maʿăṣād is being used to work on wood.5Further specificity may be gained from the semantics of the word ḥārāš. This is a generic word for a “craftsman,” one who might work in any medium. Ibn Janaḥ pointed this out, comparing the similarly multi-purpose Arabic term .6 Despite this versatility, the ḥārāš is not a woodsman; neither the ḥārāš nor the ʾuskāf chops down trees in the forest.7 The maʿăṣād, therefore, is not the tool used to chop down a tree, but to work on the wood later, in the shop.8 It is a carpenter’s tool.9 The second case is found in Isaiah 44:12: “he makes iron into an adze, working with coal; with mallets he forms it, and works it with the strength of his arm.” According to some, the word maʿăṣād is not supposed to appear in this passage: since at least the time of Bishop Robert Lowth, suggestions have been made to rid the text of the word.10 The basic problem sensed by many is, as Winton Thomas explained, “if [the phrase ] is to be clothed with meaning, [it] requires a verb, which seems to have fallen out, either before or after .”11 This problem results from the fact that the phrase is usually taken to be a noun phrase, consisting of “craftsman” in the construct, and “iron,” thus, “an iron craftsman,” or “a craftsman who works in iron.”12 To fulfill the requirement of the verb, therefore, Winton Thomas cited numerous previous suggestions for emending the text and added one of his own.13Of the emendations proposed, the easiest to accept which accomplishes the goal of reconstructing a verb in the clause is to emend ופעל to יפעל. This creates the clause חרש ברזל מעצד יפעל בפחםס, which supposedly means “the craftsman makes the iron into a מעצד in the coals,”14 taking the מעצד to be the object of יפעל. The word order here is quite awkward, however. It would require that יפעל have two direct objects, ברזל and מעצד;, and one (מעצד) is supposed to an object of result; this is a common syntactic phenomenon, but nowhere else in classical Hebrew is this construction attested with both direct objects preceding the verb. In other cases, both objects come after the verb, as in “he built the stones into an altar” (1 Kings 18:32).15 It is true that in Biblical Hebrew word order is rarely a fatal objection, however, and this suggestion does have the advantage of enhancing the parallelism between Isaiah 44:12 and 44:13.16Even more convincing is the proposal which finds the missing verb in the text itself: some commentators take not as a noun in the construct (“a craftsman of”), but a verb in the perfect (“he crafted”). This possibility is attested in medieval texts,17 but according to one modern scholar, it “found little support,”18 then or now. It seems to have been revived, however, by the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH), which offers the translation, “he has fashioned the iron of an axe or iron into an axe.”19 The analysis of as a verb is shared by the New Revised Standard Version, as well. Adopting the second possibility given by the DCH, we have again an “object of result,” but this time the syntax is similar to that found in sentences such as ויבנת את האבנים מזבח (verb + material + result): חרש ברזל מעצד, “he crafted the iron into a מעצד.”One other possibility, suggested already in medieval times, is to assume that the prophet at this point goes back in time to describe not the construction of the idol itself, but the construction of the tools used to make the idol. Radaq (fl. ca. a.d. 1200) restored the verb to the clause by positing an ellipsis in the first clause of Isaiah 44:12, and rendered as “the iron-craftsman [makes] a מעצד”; the following clause, “and works in the coal,” then described how the blacksmith worked to make the מעצד.20 Indeed, (“. . . and works in the coal, shaping it with hammers”) seems to be a perfect description of a blacksmith hammering a piece of iron into a blade, an action accomplished by repeatedly heating the iron and then hammering on the edge, often followed by cold-hammering.21One might add that the prophet reaches back in time to describe the construction of the tools in order to strengthen his polemic. The Mesopotamian ritual seems to have been anxious about the use of mundane tools in the fabrication of divine images: when a statue was dedicated, the tools used (an adze, a chisel, and a saw) were bound up in the body of a sacrificed sheep and thrown into the river.22 For the Mesopotamian priests, the fact that mundane tools were used in the process of fabricating the idol was a potential source of embarrassment or confusion: how could everyday tools create a transcendent home for the deity? The Israelite author picks up on just this point, emphasizing that the man-made idol is made with regular tools—which were themselves recently fabricated! This thus furthers his argument that there is nothing divine about the construction of the resulting artifact.According to all these readings, there is no evidence of the maʿăṣād being used in metal work, as is often claimed.23 Instead, the blacksmith is said to make the maʿăṣād, but not use it, and only in the next verse does the wood-craftsman enter the narrative, and begin to create the idol. It is the “wood craftsman” (ḥāraš ʿēṣīm) who actually uses the maʿăṣād, and so the testimony of this text, sparse though it is, agrees with that of Jeremiah 10:3. In both biblical texts, the maʿăṣād is a tool used for woodworking. This conclusion is worth emphasizing: although the data are minimal, they are sufficient to determine that the maʿăṣād was a tool utilized by the carpenter, not by the blacksmith or the farmer.The Mishnaic Hebrew dataConfirmation that the maʿăṣād was a carpenters’ tool, and further details of its morphology and function are provided by rabbinic literature. In both legal and midrashic texts within this corpus, the maʿăṣād is a tool regularly used by the carpenter for carving wood. Mishnah ʿArakhin 6:3 rules: Although they said that we seize the property of those liable for evaluations, we give them thirty days’ worth of food and twelve months’ worth of clothes, a made bed, his shoes and his tefillin. . . . But if he was a craftsman, we give him two of each of his tools of trade: we give a carpenter two maʿăṣāds and two saws. . . . All indications are that the maʿăṣād was the adze, which was certainly the standard operating tool of a carpenter.24 Sifre Deuteronomy §308 relates this parable:25 Moses said to the Israelites, “You are crooked! You are perverters! You are going nowhere but the fire!” To what is this comparable? To one who had a curved staff in his hand, so he gave it to the craftsman to fix. He fixes it in the fire, and if not, he straightens it with a lathe,26 and if not, he cuts it up with the maʿăṣād and tosses it into the fire. And thus it says, I will give you to burning people, destructive craftsmen (Ezekiel 21:36). According to this text, the maʿăṣād was a tool used for carving up wood.27 The adze was used for carving up wood, and served as the primary tool for this purpose until the plane was introduced by the Romans.28More details of the tool’s use arise from the discussion in the Mishnah and Tosefta Baba Qamma, regarding the rights to ownership of waste products created in the context of a carpenter’s work. The Mishnah elsewhere (Baba Qamma 10:10) ruled: What a craftsman produces [as waste] with the adze (maʿăṣād) is his, but [that which he produces] with the ax (kaššīl) belongs to the owner; if he was doing [the work] in the house of the owner, even the sawdust belongs to the owner. The ruling was based on the fact that the maʿăṣād “adze” produced finer cuttings than the ax (kaššīl). If a man brought a block of wood to the carpenter to be carved into something, the waste produced by the maʿăṣād was ruled to be fine enough that it need not be returned to the owner of the wood; the ax, on the other hand, severed pieces that were worth saving, and so that waste was to be returned to the wood-owner.29 Certainly the adze was used at later stages of the work than the ax, and produced finer waste. Thus the rabbinic evidence confirms what is evident from the biblical data alone—that the maʿăṣād was a tool of carpentry—and augments it, allowing us to conclude with confidence that ancient Hebrew maʿăṣād referred to the adze. Although lexicographers should combine data from different eras with caution, in this case the data are in agreement, supporting the claim that the meaning of the word did not change between the late Iron Age and the Roman period, and that the Mishnaic texts are relevant for the lexicography of the biblical word.Cognates elsewhere in SemiticGiven this relative plethora of evidence, one may rightly wonder why lexicographers have not consistently defined the maʿăṣād as an adze. The explanation for this is that cognates in other Semitic languages do not share this meaning. Verbs and nouns derived from the root עצד elsewhere seem to mean “to cut” and “a cutting tool,” but are not otherwise related to carpentry. Instead, the evidence in other languages points to different types of activities, especially agriculture, and this has misled Hebraists into importing an agricultural meaning into definitions of the Hebrew word as well.UgariticConsonantal mʿṣd appears in a few lists of implements. For example, KTU 6.632, a record of silver and tools owned by various individuals, mentions that a certain AGDTB owned ḫmšt. ʿšr[t] / ksp, w nit w mʿṣd / w ḫrmtt, “15 silvers, and a niʿt and a mʿṣd and a ḫrmtt.30 The same mʿṣd tool appears in syllabic texts, as well. PRU 6 157, a list of implements, includes “1 ma-ṣa-du” (l. 15); another list, PRU 6 142, includes [x] urudu.meš ma-ṣa-du-ma meš (l. 3). Although the ʿayin is not written in either attestation, the ending -ūma makes it clear that the word is Ugaritic, and not Akkadian, and that it should be equated with consonantal mʿṣd.31The meaning of the term within Ugaritic is debated. John Healey writes that “[t]he cognates suggest mʿṣd is a cutting-tool used on trees or plants”;32 Jonas Greenfield argues that Ugaritic mʿṣd is an axe or an adze, and adds, “This is based on the use of mʿṣd in Bib. Heb.”33 Based on the presence of the undoubtedly agricultural ḫrmtt (cognate with Hebrew חרמש, “sickle”), the entire list has sometimes been taken to be agricultural in nature; Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín’s Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language offers “agricultural cutting tool, ‘sickle(?)’.”34 This text therefore suggests that the Ugaritic mʿṣd was an agricultural implement, although even this is not certain. Certainly no semantic information about the Hebrew word is to be gleaned from the Ugaritic,35 and utilizing the Ugaritic word for help in defining the Hebrew word would be an example of what the Talmud called “making the known be dependent on the unknown.”36ArabicA similarly close cognate to Hebrew maʿăṣād is Arabic (miʿḍad),37 defined by E. W. Lane as: an instrument with which trees are cut, or lopped. . .; anything with which this is done; described by an Arab of the desert as a heavy iron instrument in the form of a reaping-hook, with which trees are cut, or lopped . . . also . . . signifies an iron instrument like a reaping hook without teeth, having its handle bound to a staff or cane, with which the pastor draws down the branches of trees to his camels or his sheep or goats and a sword which is commonly, or usually, employed for cutting, or lopping, trees.38 What the tools mentioned and described have in common, to the extent specified, is their shape: they all are, or contain, a hook. Beyond that, there is variety among these tools regarding their purposes (cutting, pulling) and morphologies (with or without teeth, or the presence or absence [or mere insignificance?] of a handle). But Lane offered no pictures in connection with this lexeme,39 and the various tools he mentions seem to vary widely in their forms and functions, so further specificity is not possible.40This word is plausibly related semantically to Hebrew maʿăṣād, since the adze, after all, does have a shape somewhat like a hook. It may well be that the variety preserved in the diverse Arabic evidence reflects an early stage of the word’s referential range, which became narrowed in Hebrew until it referred only to the adze, or, alternatively, that an originally narrowly-defined word had its reference broadened to include all tools with a hooked shape. But these possibilities are irrelevant to the meaning of the word within Hebrew. Regarding lexicography (as opposed to lexical history), the Arabic data is useful only to the extent that it confirms what is known already from the Hebrew sources; nothing further can be said about Hebrew maʿăṣād based on Arabic miʿḍad alone. It is likely, however, that lexicographers of Hebrew have illegitimately imported the semantics of the Arabic lexeme into their definitions of the Hebrew cognate.41GeʿezGeʿez has a verb ʿaḍada, defined by Leslau as “reap, mow,” and a derived noun also exists, in the forms māʿĕḍad and māʿĕḍĕd (plural maʿāḍĕd), with the meanings “sickle, scythe, pruning hook.”42 Geʿez /ḍ/ is the reflex of Proto-Semitic /ṣ́/, which merged with /ṣ/ in Hebrew, so *ʿṣ́d would be עצד in Hebrew and ʿaḍada in Geʿez; thus the cognate status of these words seems assured. As with the Arabic data, however, it would be illegitimate to utilize the semantics of the Geʿez word to interpret the Hebrew word.Conclusions on cognatesIn sum, the cognates of Hebrew maʿăṣād in Ugaritic, Arabic, and Geʿez43 all refer to cutting tools. The Geʿez word and possibly the Ugaritic word refer specifically to agricultural tools; the Arabic word is defined by a form rather than by a function. Among the various cognates, then, only the Hebrew term refers to a carpenter’s tool, and none of the others are semantically close to the Hebrew.The Gezer calendarRelevant to this discussion is l. 3 of the tenth-century b.c. text known as the Gezer calendar. Most interpreters agree that the tablet identifies the agricultural activities of all twelve months, although Seth Sanders has pointed out that intended are “loose, colloquial month[s],” rather than formal months,44 by which he means that they need not be precise periods of 29 or 30 days, and need not begin or end at any set time; “months” here are, rather, a means of approximating the units comprising the annual agricultural cycle. Within this text, the line of interest to us reads עצד פשת ירח; the graphemes עצד have often been seen as a verbal noun derived from the same root that produced the noun מצעד, with a meaning such as “the cutting.” On the further assumption that the following string, פשת, is the direct object of the verbal noun עצד and a form of the Hebrew word for “flax,”45 it is concluded that עצד means “harvest” or something similar.46The reality of flax harvesting militates against understanding עצד פשת as “cutting of the flax,” however.47 This is because flax is not cut when it is harvested like standing-grain crops, but is rather uprooted.48 The purpose of this is to avoid creating a blunt end (which reduces the quality of the flax for spinning) produced by cutting the stalk in the middle.49That uprooting the flax was the practice in antiquity across the Near East is clear from both visual and philological evidence. One scene in the Egyptian tomb of Iri.n-kʾ-ptḥ shows four workers harvesting grain and six harvesting flax.50 The four grain-harvesters each hold sickles, but the six flax-harvesters are shown working only with their hands, plucking bunches of flax from the ground.51 A scene from the tomb of Nfr-sšm-ptḥ and Sḫntiw is well preserved enough to provide further details.52 Two workers hold down the bottoms of the sheaves with their feet and bind the tops; three others grasp the sheaves (two just below the blossoms, one lower down) and pull them out of the ground. Again, this is adjoined by a depiction of four workers harvesting wheat, and again these men, as opposed to the flax-harvesters, utilize sickles to perform their task.53 Contrasting scenes such as these are known from as early as the Old Kingdom, such as the one from the tomb of Zau (Fig. 1):Figure 1. Harvesters of flax (top) and wheat (bottom), from the Old Kingdom tomb of Zau.54View Large ImageDownload PowerPointOn the philological side, we may note that in a number of Near Eastern languages the word used to refer to harvesting flax is different from that used to harvest grain. In Sumerian this different method of harvesting used for flax is lexicalized: “bu-(r) is used especially for those plants that have bulbs such as onions. . .or those pulled out along with their roots such as flax.”55 Gustaf Dalman writes, “Auf dem Felde wird des ausgereifte Flachs nicht geschnitten, sondern ausgerissen (tālaš),” and he refers to passages in rabbinic literature (e.g., Mishnah Baba Batra 5:7 [see n. 59 below]), in which the verb used for harvesting flax is תלש.56Also used for the process, in Mishnaic Hebrew and many of the Middle and Late Aramaic dialects, is the root עקר “to uproot”; the Bavli mentions, for example, למיעקר כיתנא “to uproot flax” (Bavli Moed Qaṭan 12b).57 Hebrew descriptions of flax harvesting in rabbinic sources also speak of עקר “uprooting” the flax, and the tool used for this job is the קורדום. For example, Mishnah Peʾah 4:4 rules, “Pēʾāh (the corner of the field set aside for the poor): [the poor] may not harvest it with sickles or uproot it with mattocks (qordom), so that people do not strike each other.”58 Other sources, such as Mishnah Baba Batra 5:7, use “to pick,” as noted by Dalman;59 no source talks about harvesting flax with a tool, or cutting the flax, and there is no evidence that Hebrew עצ″ד or any of its cognates can mean “to uproot.”60Indeed, partly based on this, some have argued that the Gezer Calendar does not refer to flax at all,61 and that flax may never have been cultivated in Iron Age Israel.62 But after weighing the various possibilities, Frederick Dobbs-Allsopp et al. write that the understanding of פשת as a word for “flax” is the “most natural,” although they agree that even the “more natural” solution is “far from ideal.”63It is my contention that the Gezer Calendar does in fact refer to flax, and that it was the word עצד that was preventing a proper understanding of this line. The problem, in other words, is not with taking פשת to refer to flax, but that flax is not “cut.” The root עצד may have meant “to cut” but there is nothing to suggest that עצד can refer to “uprooting” flax, and therefore עצד פשת is problematic.A different possibility regarding עצד in the Gezer calendar may therefore be considered: rather than connecting Gezer’s עצד with Hebrew עצד, we may perhaps connect it with Aramaic חצד. This root is attested in Aramaic as early as the Tell Faḫariya inscription.64 In ll. 18–19, that text offers the curse, ול/זרע:ואל:יחצד “May he sow, but not reap.”65 The root appears in participial form often in seventh-century Aramaic texts, as part of the “harvester clause” (a clause found in contemporary contracts in Akkadian as well).66 For example, one contract reads, .2 בפלגהנ ירבינ. חצדנ 2. לאדר יתננ שערנ זי סלמסר עלוה. “Barley of Šulmu-šarri owed(?): 2. It will accrue interest at 50%; 2 harvesters. It will be returned to the threshing floor.”67 A noun חצד apparently meaning “harvest” appears in the Tell Šiouḫ Fawqani inscription: מנ יהב מגל בחצד י?נ?פ? . . . “whoever gives a sickle at the harvest will. . . .”68The verb is found later in Middle Aramaic dialects,69 and the noun חצד “harvest” is found borrowed into post-biblical Hebrew. The contract Naḥal Ḥever 46 reads, in part: These I have leased from you: the date palms and the rest of the trees in them, the “white dust” and the good palm and the harvest (חצד) that is in the village—everything that was in the possession of Ḥananiah b. Ḥayyāṭa until this point.70 The verb was apparently borrowed into Arabic, as well.71The suggestion is, then, to translate Gezer’s פשת עצד as “harvesting flax,” taking עצד to be related not to Hebrew מעצד, “adze,” but to Aramaic חצד “to harvest.” Since flax was not harvested by cutting it with a sickle or other tool, but pulled up by hand, this text would show that חצד (> עצד) could refer also to harvesting done that way.Related to Aramaic חצד—but not, etymologically, to Hebrew עצד—is Akkadian eṣēdu. Although a priori derivable from a root *ḥṣd or a root *ʿṣd,72 Healey pointed out that the meaning is precisely that of Aramaic תצד, and that there is no reason to doubt that equation from an etymological or semantic perspective.73 It is worth noting, too, that the Akkadian text of the Tell Faḫariya inscription has līriš lū lā eṣṣede where the Aramaic has ולזרע ואל יחצד.74 This semantic correspondence says nothing directly about the etymological question, but this Akkadian cognate is important because it establishes that the ח in דצח is the pharyngeal /ḥ/, not the uvular /x/.It may be suggested that the scribe of the Gezer calendar may have written ע for etymological ח, and thus עצד for etymological חצד. The ʿayin and the ḥet share a place and manner of articulation—they are both pharyngeal fricatives—and differ only in the voicing. Is it possible that the scribe simply wrote עצד because that is what the word sounded like to him?If it could be established that the writer of the Gezer calendar was not a professional scribe, or that he spoke a dialect in which /ḥ/ and /ʿ/ had merged—or both—this suggestion would be plausible. Both options are, in fact, possible. Even to the untrained eye, the scribe of the text does not seem to have been professional: note, for instance, that the stance of the ḥets varies widely throughout the inscription, and the ḥet in l. 5 is actually sideways; the yods, too, are notably heterogeneous. Albright already pointed out that “in favor of the exercise-tablet interpretation is the scribe’s hand, which is slow and extremely awkward.”75 Indeed, in Macalister’s original publication of the text, he described it as “rudely scratched.”76 Although a trained scribe might simply have lousy handwriting, this particular paleography may suggest that the writer was not a professional scribe. This text is not a type we would expect a professional scribe to have written at all: it seems, on the contrary, to reflect the emergence of scribal practices outside of the professional bureaucracy.77As for the origin of the text, there are good reasons to associate the text with Phoenician rather than Hebrew.78 It is well-known that in northern Israel of later centuries, either the ח was sometimes realized with voicing and written as ע or, conversely, ע was occasionally de-voiced and written as ח—or both. These phenomena, referred to in the literature on occasion as the “weakening of the gutturals,” are attested in both Galilean and Samaritan Aramaic,79 and according to Rabbinic sources (Yerushalmi Berakhot 4d), this phenomenon was most prominent in the lower Galilee.80In order to be relevant for the Gezer Calendar, of course, it would have to be shown that ח and ע had merged much earlier than it is usually said to have done. Indeed, there is evidence for the interchange of ח and ע in Late Bronze Age Semitic already, which has for the most part gone unremarked in the Semitic literature. To be specific, there is evidence from Late Egyptian transcriptions of Semitic words that in some cases, etymological /ḥ/ was realized with voicing, as an /ʿ/. For example, the word חטין “wheat” was written ʿa-di-na(-ya) in three Late Egyptian texts, and בחר “sea” (known from Arabic ) was written b-ʿ-r(a).81 The word “beetle, grasshopper,” was written ʿ-p-ši-ya-t (and with other comparable spellings).82The Egyptian transcriptions of Semitic words have proven to be invaluable to Semitists for the reconstruction of the phonology of Northwest Semitic dialects in the Late Bronze Age. Although long available, these transcriptions became eminently more useful after they were systematically collected and judiciously analyzed by James Hoch, as emphasized by Hoch himself as well as some of the reviewers of his book and more recent scholars.83The examples just seen suggest that sometimes Semitic /ḥ/ was voiced, and heard as an /ʿ/ by the Egyptian scribes. Locating this phonetic development is less simple. As Hoch points out, בחר () is attested only in South Semitic (South Arabian, Ethiopic, and Arabic),84 but the other two are plausibly Aramaic: חיפושית seems to be a native Aramaic word, and the plural ending -īn on the word for “wheat” suggests that it, too, is Aramaic or Arabic in its origins. No single locale suggests itself as the origin for all of these words, but the northern part of the Levant is a strong candidate for at least two of them.It should be emphasized, of course, that this evidence does not stand alone. The partial merger of ח with ע is well-known from a millennium or so later. The value of the Egyptian transcriptions is to enable us to move back the date of the beginning of that process to the Late Bronze Age, rather than seeing it as a new phenomenon in Hellenistic or Roman times. It is the combination of the early and late evidence that makes this suggestion worth entertaining.It may also be worth considering the suggestion, then, that the form עצד in the Gezer text represents *חצד rather than *עצד. It has long been noted that the Gezer text reflects northern Hebrew (or Phoenician); the clearest evidence for this is the contracted diphthongs in the words “measuring” (SBH ) and “summer” (SBH ).85 On the lexical level, the use of ירח rather than also provides an isogloss between this text and Phoenician (and Proto-Hebrew) against standard Biblical Hebrew.86 (This is a result of an inner-Hebrew development, in which the term for “new moon,” חדש ירח*, spread to mean “month” through abridgement and synecdoche.)87 The form פשת for flax is also a marker of the northern Hebrew dialect: it is paralleled in Phoenician and Ugaritic, as well as in Hosea 2:7, 11.88Now perhaps we can add that the scribe pronounced the ח in the root חצד with voicing, thus yielding a sound equivalent to that of the צ. This, too, was not a feature of the dialect of the south which became Classical Biblical Hebrew, but of certain dialects to the north and east, as seen in the Egyptian transcriptions of the words baḥr, ḥiṭṭīn and ḥīppūšīt discussed above. This voicing may also have been a feature of the dialect in Gezer (or wherever the writer of the text came from).Some linguists have suggested on the basis of other data (such as the use of the anticipatory pronoun in ירחו) that the text is Phoenician.89 Regarding the issues at hand, however (the contractions of the diphthongs and the lexical form פשת), the Northern dialect of Hebrew shared these isogloss
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