Was There an 'bl II 'be dry' in Classical Hebrew?

Was There an 'bl II 'be dry' in Classical Hebrew?
Published in
On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays 1967-1998, Volume 2
(JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 585-94
open footnotes

1. Evidence for 'bl II 'be dry'

The older lexica of Biblical Hebrew (e.g. BDB, Gesenius17) recognized only one root 'bl, meaning 'to mourn, lament', as occurring in verbal forms in the Bible./2/ The verb occurs 42 times in the Hebrew Bible, 17 times in the qal. However, in more recent lexica (KoehlerBaumgartner, KoehlerBaumgartner3, Gesenius18),/3/ there also appears an 'bl II 'be dry', postulated for Classical Hebrew on the basis of Akkadian abålu 'be dry'./4/ The proposal of this homonym of 'bl 'to mourn' was Þrst made by G.R. Driver in 1936./5/
The following list shows the eleven texts in which Driver believed the root 'bl II 'be dry' was to be found, plus one further proposal made more recently (Ezek. 31.15), together with an indication of which proposals have been adopted by the various lexica:

Isa. 24.4 KB3 Ges18
Isa. 24.7 KB3 Ges18
Isa. 33.9 KB3 Ges18
Jer. 4.28
Jer. 12.4 KB KB3 Ges18
Jer. 12.11
Jer. 23.10 KB KB3 Ges18
Ezek. 31.15
Hos. 4.3 KB3 Ges18
Joel 1.10 KB3
Amos 1.2 KB KB3 Ges18
Job 14.22

The list shows of that of the twelve places where it has been suggested that the verb 'bl II 'be dry' is to be found, KoehlerBaumgartner accepted three, KoehlerBaumgartner3 eight, and Gesenius18 seven. The proposal is an attractive one, for it offers a concrete meaning for a number of passages. If all proposed occurrences were to be adopted, the subjects of the verb 'bl II 'be dry' would be:

'rß 'earth' (Isa. 24.4; 33.9; Jer. 4.28; 12.4; 23.10; Hos. 4.3)
'dmh 'earth' (Joel 1.10)
n'wt hr'ym 'pastures of the shepherds' (Amos 1.2)
thwm 'the deep' (Ezek. 31.15)
np¡ 'throat' (Job 14.22)
tyrw¡ 'wine' (Isa. 24.7)
krm 'vineyard' (Jer. 12.10-11, with the nearer subject lqt mdty 'my pleasant portion').

To put it plainly, it seems more likely to supporters of this proposal that a Hebrew author would mean that the earth or the shepherds' pasture, for example, 'dried up' rather than 'mourned', since mourning is more naturally ascribed to human subjects. Or, as Driver put it, 'There are several passages in which the Hebr. lba "mourned" strikes a strange note and it cannot but be suspected that it means something different'./6/
We may note that in most of these places the neb, no doubt under the inþuence of G.R. Driver, and, following it, the Revised English Bible (reb),/7/ translate the verb as 'wither, dry up, wilt, lie parched, be scorched, be waterless, fail'. The only cases where it does not see 'bl II 'be dry' in any of these twelve places is: Jer. 4.28, where it has 'mourn'; Hos. 4.3, where it has 'be desolate' (though this perhaps represents 'bl II 'be dry'/8/); Joel 1.10, where it has 'the parched earth mourns' for 'blh 'dmh (taking the verb both as 'bl I and 'bl II!);/9/ Ezek. 31.15, where it has 'I closed the deep over him as a gate', following Driver's view that here there is yet another 'bl 'close'./10/ By contrast, the rsv always has 'mourn'.
Apart from the comparative philological evidence, there is also some internal evidence provided by context and parallelism within some of the texts. For example, in Jer. 23.10, 'blh h'rß yb¡w n'wt mdbr, 'the land mourns, and the pastures of the wilderness are dried up', 'bl is in parallelism with yb¡ 'dry up' (so also in 12.10 and Amos 1.2); so there is a prima facie case that here 'bl also means 'dry up'. In Isa. 24.4 'bl seems to be parallel to nbl 'fall, fail'; in 33.9 the 'bl of the land is in proximity to Sharon's becoming 'like a desert' (k'rbh); and in Joel 1.10 the 'bl of the ground is associated with the grain being destroyed and the wine failing.
A further type of evidence is provided by the fact that the Targum renders the verb 'bl in several of these passages by a verb meaning 'be dry' (rb) (so at Isa. 24.4; 33.9; Jer. 4.28; 12.4; Hos. 4.3; Joel 1.10; Amos 1.2). The argument can then be advanced that the Targumists knew of a Hebrew verb 'bl 'be dry', distinct from the usual 'bl 'mourn', and that they correctly identiÞed its presence in these places.

2. The Issue of Homonymous Verbs

The verb 'bl II thus becomes an interesting test case for how we are to proceed when confronted with a proposal for a new Hebrew homonym. Some of the general principles that can be borne in mind can be brieþy sketched./11/ First, it is not enough to argue that the newly proposed meaning 'works', that is, renders a number of texts satisfactorily or even 'better' than the established meaning. For it is not difÞcult in many circumstances to think, even arbitrarily, of a meaning for a word that seems to suit the context better than the established meaning does. If a cognate in another Semitic language can be found, that is certainly better than inventing new meanings arbitrarily, but not always so very much better-as the history of comparative Semitic philology in recent decades has shown. The question rather is whether the price for the new proposal can be afforded; that is to say, the price of the resultant ambiguities in the classical Hebrew language that have to be postulated if the proposal is accepted.
Second, it is a characteristic of natural languages that homonyms that give rise to ambiguity tend to be displaced in the course of time. When speakers of a language Þnd they have available to them (because of the historical development of their language) two homonymous words that can often be confused, they tend to eliminate one of the words in favour of the other./12/ So, even if a pair of homonyms existed within that period in which Classical Hebrew was spoken, it is likely that they existed concurrently for only a relatively brief time within that longer period. It is therefore relatively unlikely that an ambiguous pair of homonyms will be found in a single literary text.
Third, homonyms that do not give rise to serious ambiguity cause no difÞculty to speakers of a language, and may continue in use indeÞnitely. In the following circumstances serious ambiguity does not usually result: when the homonyms are of different parts of speech and therefore are serving different syntagmatic functions within sentences;/13/ when the homonyms belong to distinctly different semantic Þelds and are therefore speciÞed by the general topic of the discourse;/14/ when the transitivity of the verbs differs;/15/ when the homonyms manifest themselves in different morphological forms (e.g. in Hebrew, in different 'voices' of the verb), and are therefore homonyms only to the lexicographer and not to the user of the language, who may not be aware of any homonymity.
Fourth, the case for a particular pair of homonyms in Hebrew is always stronger if the same pair can be shown to exist in one or more other Semitic languages. That is, if the existence of the pair of homonyms did not apparently create intolerable ambiguity in Akkadian or Arabic, for example, it is more credible that the same pair of homonyms could have existed in the Classical Hebrew.
Fifth, the evidence from the ancient versions is not as straightforward as has sometimes been thought. It is certainly possible that the Targumists, for example, knew of the existence of homonymous roots in classical Hebrew that were later forgotten. But there are two factors that militate against that possibility which need to be borne in mind. The Þrst is that if we adopt that view we are asserting that the post-Targumic Jewish exegetical tradition, which we know to have been rigorous and learned, went on ignoring evidence that it was at the same time preserving; that is to say, it was failing to recognize in its lexicography and exegeses the signiÞcance for the Hebrew language of the testimony to it provided by the Targums. Such a failure in particular instances is of course possible, but not often to be thought likely. The second factor is that the evidence of the ancient versions is, as is well known, not always evidence of what the translators saw before them, but of what they wanted to convey to their audience or readership.

3. Evaluation of the Proposal

By these standards, it must be said that the case for 'bl II 'be dry' is not very strong. For it belongs to a semantic Þeld that is not very distinct from 'bl I 'mourn', it is used in the qal like 'bl I, it is intransitive just as 'bl I is, both verbs occur mostly in the poetical language of the pre-exilic prophets, and there is no other Semitic language, to my knowledge, where both the homonyms appear as verbal forms./16/
Quite apart from these more general considerations, the evidence of the particular texts in which the supposed 'bl II occurs needs to be reconsidered. Above, we noted the contexts in which 'bl II was used in connection with terms for 'dryness'; but to make the study more complete it is necessary to examine also the cases where 'bl II is used in connection with terms for 'mourning', which is the sense of 'bl I.
In six texts, 'bl is used in parallel with 'umlal, 'languish' (or some similar sense from the semantic Þeld of human emotions); so in Isa. 24.4, 7; 33.9; Jer. 14.2;/17/ Hos. 4.3; Joel 1.10. In particular we should note Isa. 24.4:

'blh nblh h'rß 'mllh nblh tbl
The earth mourns, falls/fails; the world languishes, falls/fails.

Here the parallelism of the whole line (a, b // a, b) shows that we should regard 'blh as parallel with 'umlal, not with nbl, even though it is nbl that is immediately adjacent to 'bl./18/ The parallelism is with a word from the Þeld of human emotions rather than of physical decay. Similarly, in Isa. 33.9, with the land as the subject, 'bl is parallel with pr hiphil 'be ashamed'; in Jer. 4.28,/19/ with the land as the subject, and in 14.2, with Judah as the subject, it is parallel with qdr, which must mean in the context 'mourn' rather than, literally, 'be dark'. And in Job 14.22 the 'bl of the nepe¡ is parallel with the k'b 'be in pain' of the båår.
The internal evidence from parallelism and context is therefore roughly balanced as between a connection with dryness and a connection with mourning: on the one side we have six passages where 'bl is associated with dryness, and on the other nine passages where it is paralleled with mourning. There is therefore nothing on this front to settle Þrmly whether 'bl has the one sense or the other.
The comparative philological evidence, for its part, shows that the supposition of an 'bl II 'be dry' is perfectly possible, although, in my opinion, it faces a rather difÞcult set of problems on the score of ambiguity.
As for the evidence from the Targums, it can be argued that it supports little more than the mere possibility of an 'bl II. For it is no more likely that the Targumists said and wrote 'was dry' because they knew of a Classical Hebrew 'bl 'be dry' than that they did so because they wanted to explain in what sense it was possible to say that the earth 'mourned'. And the evidence of the Targums is in any case not unambiguous. For while it is true that in seven of our texts containing 'bl the Targum has rb 'be desolate, dry', we should also note the following points: 1. in two of these places it also has a word for 'mourn' (so Isa. 24.4 and 33.9 where we have 't'blt rwbt 'r'' 'the desolation of the earth mourns'-which does not suggest that they thought 'bl meant 'be dry' but rather that they were explaining what it was about the earth that was mourning. 2. In Amos 1.2, where the mt has w'blw n'wt hr'ym 'and the pastures of the shepherds will mourn/be dry', the Targum has wyrb tqwp krkyhwn 'and the power of their cities will be destroyed'-in which context it is difÞcult to think that rb means 'be dry', for 'power' can hardly be 'dry', though it can no doubt be 'desolated'. 3. In Isa. 24.7, where the mt has that the wine will mourn ('åbal tªrô¡), the Targum has that 'all the drinkers of wine will mourn' ('t'blw kl ¡ty mr)-which suggests that they found the idea of wine 'mourning' a little odd and in need of explanation, but did not think they had here a word for 'dry up'. 4. It remains unclear whether in any of the places where the Targum has rb for 'bl the meaning is 'be dry'; for Aram. rb means 'destroy' as well as 'dry up',/20/ and there is no way of telling which sense is intended. Certainly, the Targums never use the verb yb¡, which certainly means 'be dry', to represent Heb. 'bl, so it is possible that they did not know that meaning for 'bl.

4. A Possible Resolution

Is it possible to reach a more deÞnite conclusion about the existence of 'bl II? There are, I think, four texts that perhaps enable us to do so. It must be acknowledged that some of the force of the proposal for 'bl II comes from the quite reasonable and common sense view that it is more likely that the earth should be said to 'dry up' rather than 'mourn'./21/ But before we accept that view we need to consider the following texts.
In Isa. 3.26 the gates (ptym) of a city mourn ('bl), and in Jer. 12.10-11 'my desired portion' (lqt mdy), which is Yahweh's vineyard, mourns ('bl). In Lam. 1.4 the roads to Zion (drky ßywn) are 'mourners' ('ablôt), and in 2.8 Yahweh has made the rampart and the wall of Jerusalem to 'mourn' ('bl hiph.) by demolishing them. In all these cases it is an inanimate object that 'mourns', and in none of them can the verb mean 'be dry'. For, in the Þrst case, it cannot be a sign of divine displeasure that gateways 'dry up', for the gateways of a city are usually dry-and, we imagine, the inhabitants of any city would prefer to keep them that way. And, in the second case ('blh 'ly ¡mmh, 'desolate, it mourns unto me'), the verb 'bl is followed by the preposition 'l, which can only mean 'mourn unto, before'; 'blh 'ly ¡mmh can hardly mean 'desolate, it is dry before me'. In the third case, the roads are not 'dry' because of the absence of pilgrims, for travellers do not make roads wet; and in the fourth case the city walls cannot be 'dry' now that they are destroyed, for they are not damp when they are in good shape.
In all these texts, inanimate things are undoubtedly said to 'bl 'mourn'; and if that is true for some texts, there can be no objection in principle to its being true in other texts; the case for recognizing an 'bl II 'be dry' consequently becomes very much weaker. However commonsensical it may seem to have earth and pastures being dry rather than mourning, Hebrew writers in some cases plainly thought of gates, paths, walls and earth as capable of mourning; so common sense is not the best criterion here.
It is a quite separate matter to ask Þnally why the term 'mourn' is being applied to inanimate things like the earth and a city's walls and gates, or, to put the question differently, what it is about the state of the earth or of the city gates that would lead a poetically minded observer to remark that they were 'mourning'. A certain caution is in order here. It would be tempting to suggest that a thing is thought to 'mourn' when it is deprived of something that normally accompanies it; thus we might feel that gateways mourn when they are deprived of or are bereaved of the people who usually throng them, and that the earth mourns when it is bereaved of the vegetation that is its offspring. But if that were so, how would new wine 'mourn', and how would the destruction of walls and ramparts cause them to 'mourn'? Of what would they have been bereaved?
Perhaps it would be better to say that 'mourning' is a normal response to calamity or death, and everything that 'mourns' has its own way of doing so. For the earth, mourning may be a withering up, while for a wall mourning may be lying broken on the ground. It is the same for people: for some 'mourning' involves tearing clothes and putting on sackcloth (Gen. 37.3-4), for others it is fasting (Ezra 10.6), for others it is not anointing themselves (Dan. 10.2), for others it is sitting and weeping (Neh. 1.4).
So there is no doubt that in several of the texts that we have examined the 'mourning' of the earth consists of its being dried up and withered. It is dry and it mourns, and its being dry is the sign that it is mourning. But that does not mean that the verb for 'mourn' is really a verb for 'be dry'. To use the familiar distinction in linguistics, 'be dry' can be the referent of 'bl, as can many other states and actions, but that does not make it the denotation.
I conclude that there was in Classical Hebrew only one verb 'bl, meaning 'mourn',/22/ and that it was used of animate and inanimate subjects alike; inanimate things are several times said to 'mourn' because of drought, but also because of various other calamities, and not necessarily because they are dried up./23/
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