In a brief paper published in BULLETIN, No. 85 (Feb. 1942), pp. 10-13 Professor EA Speiser made a new attack on the dialect problem involved in the Ephraimite pronunciation of 8ibb6le9, Jud. 12: 6. His solution at first seemed plausible to me but reconsideration has led me to reject it. I shall not deal here with the historical situation, of which, incidentally, I think Speiser's reconstruction is more ingenious than sound, but only with the linguistic aspect of the problem. Speiser assumes, in partial agreement with J. Marquart, that the word which the Ephraimites found difficulty in pronouncing was Gileadite Oubbultu. He writes," It is a fact, moreover, that the Aramaic for" ear of corn" may have either initial'(Sebaltd) or t (tubld). This points to a Proto-Semitic doublet with t (tubbultu) alongside the normal form with a sibilant." He adds that his argument differs from Marquart's in assuming that" ear of corn" and" flood" are semantically linked and that Marquart" went astray in trying to separate the two spheres of meaning on an etymological basis." Speiser is certainly right in assuming an etymological connection between the Hebrew and Arabic words with the consonants S/sb-1 meaning" ear of corn" and" stream,"" rain," etc. But his further assumption that Aramaic tubld is derived from a Proto-Semitic root Obl is almost as certainly mistaken. When we examine the occurrences of Aramaic tubld we find that the word is by no means as common in Aramaic as its Hebrew and Arabic cognates beginning with a sibilant. So far as I can discover from an inspection of the lexicons, tubLa occurs only in the so-called Jerusalem Targum to Gen. 41: 5 ff. If we examine the renderings of Hebrew 8ibb6le9 in the Synagogue Targums and in the Peshitta we find no trace of such a word. There are sixteen instances of Sibb6leO in the 0. T.; in twelve of these it has the meaning" ear of corn" or"(olive) branch"; in two it has the meaning" flood"; in two its meaning is ambiguous but probably" flood." In all but three of these occurrences the Synagogue Targums render the word by Subbalt4 or sibboltd; the three exceptions are homiletical paraphrases with no literal correspondence. Similarly the Peshitta renders Heb. bibb6le8 by 8ebbaltd when it means" ear of corn" except in Zech. 4: 12, where sawkd," branch" is used and in Ruth 2: 2 where it is paraphrased. Where Heb. Bibb6le9 means" flood," as in Ps. 69: 3 and 16, the Peshitta has semdrd," whirlpool" or hawtd," abyss." These renderings indicate that the Jerusalem Targum's tubld is not a general or an old Aramaic word but merely a secondary back-formation from Heb. Bibb6le9. Even if tubl4 should turn up as an old Aramaic doublet to Bubbultu, we should have good reason to derive it from Proto-Semitic tbl rather than PS Obl, because, as TH Gaster kindly reminded me when I voiced skepticism about the existence of PS Obl, Ugaritic, as well as Hebrew and Arabic, has' blt (five instances in Virolleaud's index