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Orthography in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions

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Orthography in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions ANES 36 (1999) 5-35 Orthography in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions Francis I. ANDERSEN Centre for Ancient and Classical Languages University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia The recovery of the phonetic shapes of Hebrew words attested in inscriptions from the biblical period is often confounded by uncritical retrojection of Masoretic orthoepy onto ancient spellings. Sound empirical method works with the expectation that ancient Hebrew spelling was phonetic, at least in intention. On the basis, the development of various word classes can be traced with more precision. The recent publication of a grammar of inscriptional Hebrew1 promised to meet a long-felt need. The results, however, are disappointing. In partic- ular, the discussion of spelling — under the rubric of “phonology”! — rep- resents a step backward rather than progress. The section “Matres Lectionis in Epigraphic Hebrew” (#2.3 [pp. 49-74]) is very confused. Ancient Hebrew Vowel Letters Without going into all the details, we observe that the use of the term matres lectionis is anachronistic, and gets medieval Masoretic spelling poli- cies mixed up with the ancient use of consonants — three only, waw, yod, and he∞ˆ, not alef — as vowel letters. We are not aware of a single specimen of the ancient use of alef distinctively as a vowel letter in the strict sense, that is, where it is not etymological. To assume any etymological alef was silent after a vowel in a particular instance begs the question by projecting Masoretic pronunciation backwards one thousand years or more. Even though Dr. Gogel calls alef a mater lectionis, already in use in epigraphic Hebrew, she equivocates, conceding that “all of these are apparently histor- 1 Gogel 1998. 6 F. I. ANDERSEN ical writings”.2 In early Aramaic the attestation of haz in the Tell Fakhariyeh bilingual statue inscription was a surprise; but there is no way of proving that the alef in such words was not pronounced as a glottal stop.3 Zevit’s statement that alef is “not etymological” in al4 is probably true in the strict historical sense.5 But that does not means that the alef in that word was introduced as a vowel letter and never represented a consonant sound. The almost universal spelling of this negative particle in Hebrew and Aramaic is al. All known instances in ancient Hebrew inscriptions have alef.6 The form of this particle in cognate languages, such as Ugaritic, without alef, does not necessarily prove that the consonant was not etymological. But, even if it points that way, it does not follow that a secondary alef can only be a vowel letter. Whatever the history of the vowel in *la — whether it was lengthened to a in time to experience the Old South Canaanite sound shift to o or whether the short vowel was preserved by using a glottal stop to close the syllable, so that the change to o occurred at a later stage after the lengthening followed (compensated for) the eventual loss of the word-ter- minal alef — one has to explain why they used alef in just this case as far back as we can go with Hebrew and Aramaic, and not the otherwise ubiq- uitous he∞ˆ to spell the word-terminal vowel. In the analogous case of the post-vocallic alef used with the postpositive Aramaic determination marker (the so-called definite article), this distinctive ending was helped out in articulation by the glottal stop; the sign is consonantal.7 The same must also be said about the numerous West-Semitic person names that end with alef. In some instances the consonant could be ety- mological; in other instances it could be the reflex of an ancient Semitic suffix -a, abundantly attested at Ebla, especially in god names, the ancestor, in all likelihood, of the status determinatus of Aramaic;8 Lipinski explains this -a as a marker of “the predicate state of the noun”.9 In some instances it seems to be a hypocoristic ending in its own right, its use encouraged by analogy with the proper nouns that inherited the primal -aˆ. In all cases, at least in the early stages, when etymological alef was still being pronounced at the end of words, the balance of probability is that all alefs written at the 2 Gogel 1998, p. 65. Strictly speaking these are “historical spellings.” 3 Andersen and Freedman 1989, pp. 3-14. The literature on the Tell Fakhariyeh inscription is now so extensive that we simply refer to the entry in Fitzmyer, et al. 1992, pp. 36-37. 4 Zevit 1980, pp. 22, 29. 5 Lipinski 1997, pp. 455-58. 6 Gogel 1998, p. 344. 7 Lambdin 1971, p. 317, n. 3. 8 Kienast 1987. 9 Lipinski 1997, p. 48. ORTHOGRAPHY IN ANCIENT HEBREW INSCRIPTIONS 7 end of a word represented the glottal stop, including the secondary intro- duction of that consonant to safeguard a word-terminal vowel. Zevit’s assertion that alef is a mater lectionis in haz10 introduced by anal- ogy with ‹ar falls under the same objections. Along with its attestation in Old Aramaic and in Moabite,11 the consistent spelling of this word in North-west Semitic attests that its alef represents an ancestral consonant phoneme.12 The editors of the editio princeps of the Tell Fakhariyeh inscrip- tion immediately and correctly concluded that alef in haz was a consonant in the Aramaic text.13 Hitherto is had been plausible to infer, from various forms of demonstrative and determinative particles in Semitic languages (in particular Ugaritic dt, Arabic zat and Ge’ez zatti), that the alef in Hebrew haz is not etymological. The historical spelling is neutral as evidence for the presence or absence of the glottal stop when the word was said. It is the nature of a historical spelling that it once represented the actual pronunci- ation and later did not. Its continued use does not permit us to establish the date when its phonetic significance changed. It would not have changed overnight, and it would not have changed everywhere at the same time. When the transition was happening, both pronunciations might have been heard in the same comunity at the same time, a contrast between careful and sloppy speech. Statements about the loss of a consonant such as alef can be too sweep- ing. To legitimate them would require every attested alef in ancient inscrip- tions to be assayed. Thus the spelling *hz would be better evidence that the sound of the original phoneme was no longer heard. As already conceded, there is no way for those who identify any alef as a mater lectionis to know that a reader of that text would not make the sound of the glottal stop at that point; and it is just as impossible for those who think that alef was not used as a vowel letter in the early days to demonstrate that it represented only a consonant sound. It seems to be a stand-off. But the balance is not equal. There can be no doubt that the Phoenician alphabet originally made no provision for writing any vowel sound, and it is equally certain that the letter alef represented a consonant sound that was part of the ancestral 10 Zevit 1980, p. 18, note 8. 11 Blau 1980. 12 Paul Joüon (Grammaire de l’Hébreu biblique [Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1947]) said “probably not” (p. 28), “does not seem to be” (p. 86); but the first statement was dropped from Muraoka’s translation, and the second was replaced by “The a of haz may be etymo- logical rather than a mere mater lectionis” (A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew. subsidia biblica 14/I, II. Translation and revision of Joüon 1923 [Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1991], p. 115). 13 Abou Assaf, et al. 1982. 8 F. I. ANDERSEN Semitic phoneme repertoire. Furthermore, it has long been contended that the use of the vowel letters waw and yod to represent long back and front vowels respectively was the outcome of historical spelling of monophthon- gized diphthongs. We no longer think that this is the whole story of the use of those vowel letters. It has long been suspected that the original impulse for the move from the Phoenician use of strictly consonantal spelling to the selective use of vowel letters came from Aramaic scribes. The evidence from Tell Fakhariyeh shows that the use of waw and yod to represent vowel sounds, when the spelling is not historical, was much earlier than previously thought. Muraoka has made the plausible suggestion that it was precisely in the cir- cumstances of making a bilingual inscription that Assyrian scribal practice prompted Aramaean scribes to make provision for the writing of vowels. “In particular, scribes who were employed to translate Assyrian texts cannot have failed to notice the nature of the heterogeneous writing system of Akkadian in which vowels were fully represented and long vowels were from time to time represented by their own special symbols”.14 In so far as it is true that the use of vowel letters was not at first the out- come of historical spelling, but a deliberate innovation of the scribes, the retention of otiose letters in historical spellings was following the analogy of already established practice. This shows that the monophthongization of ancestral *aw and *ay took place after consonantal spelling came into use. This conclusion modifies the long-held belief that it was the survival of his- torical spelling of words that contained a long vowel as the result of monophthongization of a diphthong that gave to waw and yod their new significance as vowel letters. But it is precisely because that development gave to these two letters two possible significations that, when we come across a waw or yod at a place in a word where it is plausible to believe that there was originally *aw or *ay, we don’t know whether to read aw or ô (ay or ê).
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