Hebrew Philological Notes (I)

HEBREW PHILOLOGICAL NOTES (I) 1. n,., "Ruth" Oary A. Rendsburg Cornell University In a recent article, E. A. Knauf suggested that the name nl, "Ruth" should be correlated with the root rwt that underlies such words as Moabite ryt "offering," Sabaic rwt/ryt "decision."l Knauf also put forward the evidence of a Moabite toponym, f arut (attested in an 18th Dynasty Egyptian text) as additional support. Thus, according to Knauf, we have triple Moabite evidence: the name of Ruth, the common noun ryt attested in the Mesha Stele line 12, and the toponym farilt. With this bounty of evidence from a language so little known, Knauf stated that there is no need to look to Hebrew for an explanation of the heroine's name. The Hebrew evidence most commonly cited is the root ill' "refresh." Knauf, however, saw a grammatical problem in such a derivation because he claimed that this root could not produce a noun m, (possible products are *rewut,~, (Job 37:11), and *riyyah, but not n", according to Knauf). In this estimation he erred, however. A morphological parallel to m, in Hebrew is the common noun n,o "garment," attested only in Oen 49:11. Already Abraham ibn Ezra in the twelfth century C.E. realized that the root of this noun is swy and he pointed to the noun il19Q "veil," attested three times in Exod 34:33-35, as another noun derived from the same root.2 Cognate evidence for the correctness of ibn Ezra's view is forthcoming from Phoenician, where the forms nlO "garment" and n~'o "veil" (1) are attested.3 Since Phoenician orthography represents only consonants and not vowels, the waw in these Phoenician forms must be consonantal, and yet in the corresponding Hebrew form n,o, the waw serves merely as a mater lectionis.4 In short, based on the analogy of the derivation of "'0 "garment" from a root swy, the proper noun n" "Ruth" clearly may derive from a root rwy 1E. A. Knauf, "Ruth la Moabile." IT 44 (1994) 547-548. 2 Modem dictionaries such as BDB. p. 691; and KB, pp. 541,651.654, similarly list both vocables from the same root 1110 (=swy). 3 R. S. Tomback, A Comparative Semitic Lexicon of the Phoenician and Punic Languages (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978), p. 226; and J. Hoftijzer and K. Jongeling, Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions, Pan Two, M-T (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 780-781. 4 For a thorough discussion see C. Cohen, "Elements of Peshat in Traditional Jewish Bible Exegesis," Immanuel 21 (1987) 30-42, in panicular pp. 35-36. Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 28 Rendsburg: Philological Notes "refresh." The evidence put forward here does not mean that Ruth's name therefore must mean "refreshment" or the like, but the possibility of such an understanding cannot and should not be dismissed so readily. 2.1,r,'~t "Zebulun" The tribal name 1,",:n zebU/un "Zebulun" (written here doubly plene, for the sake of clarity, though it never appears that way in the Bible) contains an atypical suffix. The normal suffix on both place names and personal names is -on (as in Hebron, Gibeon, etc.; Samson, Gideon, etc.), but in the case of "Zebulun" the suffix is -un. This suffix is to be explained via Phoenician evidence. As Joshua Fox demonstrated in great detail, a sequence of vowel shifts in Phoenician includes a> 0 and 0 > u.s Because he was working with Phoenician vowels, for which actual vocalic length is not known, Fox did not include the diacritical marks used to distinguish such vowels in Hebrew (or so I assume). To equate these vowels with their Hebrew parallels, we would mark them as a> (j and 0 > U. That is to say: 1) tone long Ial shifts to 10/; and 2) etymological long 10:1, whether derived from long la:1 via the Canaanite shift or from reduction of the diphthong lawl, shifts to long lu:/. The latter shift, which concerns us the more here, can be illustrated by the last vowel in alonuth "gods" (Poenulus 930), the Hebrew equivalent would be -ot, of course; and by the...