KELEBH 'DOG': ITS ORIGIN AND SOME USAGES OF IT IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 1)

by

D. WINTON THOMAS

Cambridge

- This paper, as its title indicates, consists of two parts. In the first - the shorter part I shall consider the origin of the Hebrew word 'dog', and I shall indicate where I believe its most likely origin is to be found. And in the second part of the paper I shall discuss some usages of ?55 in the Old Testament which are, I think, of con- siderable interest when they are studied in the light of available comparative material. To begin with, two preliminary remarks about the word First, it occurs also in Akkadian, Phoenician, Ugaritic, Arabic, Aramaic and Syriac, and Ethiopic 2). It is thus gemein.remiti.rch, very probably iir.remiti.rcb 3). And secondly, classical Hebrew has no femin- ine form though Akkadian, Ugaritic, Arabic, Aramaic and Syriac, and post-biblical Hebrew possess it 4), and Egyptian has the word kmn-t, which is said to be the equivalent of klb-t 5). The absence of the feminine form from the vocabulary of ancient Hebrew is doubtless purely accidental, unless we care to think that, in the case of as in the case of some other names of animals, like bgj 411 the two genders were expressed by the same word in the masculine form 1). According to CHEYNE 2) and BROWN-DRIVER-BRIGGS 3), the origin of the word is unknown. Attempts have to be sure been made from time to time to explain its origin. I may mention first the French Protestant pastor Samuel BOCHART (1599-1667), who, in his Hiero- zoicon 4), devotes several columns to the word Some, he says, without specifying who, explain the word as meaning quasi cor (i.e. faithful), i.e., others explain as totunz cor, i.e., bb, while others again explain as siciit leo, i.e., All these explanations he rightly dismisses, as being not so much the origins of the word as what he calls frigidae allusiones to it. His own explanation is hardly more acceptable. It is that may have been so called from the strength of its teeth, which hold so firmly in biting that they could seem like , ,-o- hooks or forceps, or iron fetters, and he compares the Arabic or He adds, however, 'unless you prefer forceps and - hooks and fetters as named from a dog'. We may reply we do so prefer. was not, we may believe, derived from a word meaning - forceps and the like. The reverse is the case these latter received _ o- their names from

BOCHART, as I have just mentioned, refers to some who think that is to be explained as kaph being the kaph of comparison. C. J. BALL, in the Hilprecht Anniversary VolutlJe 6), offers an explanation along similar lines. His suggestion is that the origin of is a biliteral and a root-formative kaph, which is identical with the kaph of comparison. According to him, the element 1b is the equivalent of