Theophoric Personal Names in Ancient Hebrew: A Comparative Study (review)

Hebrew Studies 31 (1990) 141 Reviews social, from the simplest conventions which direct reading activity to the most sophisticated interpretive communities. In the final note to the previous chapter Fishbane himself had remarked that "study is always social-in the interpersonal and cultural sense" (p. 148, n. 17). In this sense, reading is always study. The Garments of Torah is difficult reading, as the passages quoted above may suggest. I, therefore, cannot agree with Clifford Flanigan's statement on the dust jacket that the text is "readily accessible to educated readers of every sort." Nevertheless, the book does have much to offer to readers who are prepared to "disrobe" Fishbane's text. Much of the author 's vast erudition is packed into this slim volume. Although the book has an index, readers should be cautioned not to depend on its entries for biblical books. In many cases only a smattering of the verses cited by Fishbane are listed for a specific book, in spite of the fact that the omitted verses receive as much attention in the text as those listed. In other cases page numbers are given after the name of the book without any chapter-verse listings. Other biblical books cited in the text are missing from the index altogether. Stuart Lasine Wichita State University Wichita, KS 67208 THEOPHORIC PERSONAL NAMES IN ANCIENT HEBREW: A COMPARATIVE STUDY. By Jeaneane D. Fowler. JSOT Supplement Series 49. pp. 410. Sheffield: JSOT, 1988. Cloth. The goal of this study is first to describe Hebrew personal names, both formally and semantically, and second to determine what concepts of God are revealed in these names and the degree to which those concepts may be distinct from those found in other Semitic onomastica (Ugaritic, Phoenician, Amorite, Aramaic, Old Akkadian, Akkadian, and Palmyrene onomastica are compared).The here noire here seems to be A. Caquot of the College de France who has suggested that the "piete" observable in Semitic personal names might reflect a "religiosite semitique" (Syria 39 [1962]:256). The first part of the book is divided into major sections such as "nominal sentence names," "verbal sentence names," "construct form names," Hebrew Studies 31 (1990) 142 Reviews etc., with many sub-categories introduced only by full sentences (i.e., without sub-headings). This format is to some extent endemic to the subject: there are hundreds of names, each slightly different from the other, and any discussion of them tends to be a sequence of individual remarks. But the format does leave the reader often feeling adrift on a sea of disparate data. I will leave the minutiae of the discussion on proper names to experts in onomastics, but will point out two rather minor details that deserve criticism . One reflects a widely held position to which I have taken exception (see D. Pardee, UF 10 [1978]:249-288; Les textes para-mythoLogiques de La 24e campagne [Paris, 1988] p. 207, n. 30); the assertion that mrr means "strong" appears frequently with no mention of phonetic difficulties (e.g., mer6y6h showing no trace of the geminate root), nor of the comparative Semitic ones. At least a bibliographical reference would have been in order-at most a full-scale refutation of my position. The second detail shows a lack of familiarity with conventions used by some epigraphers: on p. 92 P. Bordreuil and A. Lemaire are accused of confusion for transliterating the proper name c.§yhw with shin rather than with ~/n. Since all of the West Semitic alphabets had only one graph for shin and ~/n, many scholars use shin conventionally to transliterate that graph, whatever the underlying phoneme may be. When attempting a normalization, of course, most would transcribe according to the norms of Biblical Hebrew. The "confusion" is not, therefore, Bordreuil's and Lemaire's, but Fowler's. On the topic of Hebrew religion as revealed by the proper names, one finds what might charitably be termed a predisposition for monotheism. This is visible in at least three areas of the discussion. (1) Despite a section on non-Yahwistic theophoric elements (pp. 63-69), when one arrives at the conclusions in chap. 5, it is assumed that Hebrew religion was monotheistic. (2) There...