footnotes to
Was There an 'bl II 'be dry' in Classical Hebrew?
Originally published in Vetus Testamentum 42 (1992), pp. 1-10, and reprinted with the permission of E.J. Brill.
1. Francis Brown, S.R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907); Frants Buhl, Wilhelm Gesenius' hebräisches und aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 17th edn (Leipzig: F.C.W. Vogel, 1915). BDB, p. 5b, has an 'bl II as the hypothetical root of 'åbl 'meadow', but that is not relevant to the present enquiry. Gesenius17 has another 'bl meaning 'shut up' (at Ezek. 31.15), but that also lies outside the scope of this study, which considers only the possible meanings of 'bl I and II. The new Spanish dictionary by Luis Alonso Schökel, Diccionario bíblico hebreo-español (Valencia: Institucion San Jeronimo, 1990), p. 15b, notes that 'algunos distinguen dos verbos', but it itself does not, registering all occurrences as examples of 'bl I.
2. Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti libros (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1958); Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, Hebräisches und aramäisches Lexikon zum Alten Testament, Lieferung 1 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 3rd edn, 1967); Rudolf Meyer and Herbert Donner, Wilhelm Gesenius' hebräisches und aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, Lieferung 1 (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 18th edn, 1988).
3. Cf. CAD, I/1, pp. 29-31, s.v. abålu B, not to be confused with the common abålu A 'bring, carry'; Wolfram von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965), I, p. 3.
4. G.R. Driver, 'Confused Hebrew Roots', in B. Schindler (ed.), Occident and Orient, Being Studies in Semitic Philology and Literature, Jewish History and Philosophy and Folklore in the Widest Sense, in Honour of Haham Dr M. Gaster's 80th Birthday. Gaster Anniversary Volume (London: Taylor's Foreign Press, 1936), pp. 73-82 (73-75).
5. Driver, 'Confused Hebrew Roots', p. 73.
6. At Job 14.22 reb has reverted to 'mourn'.
7. In Jer. 12.11, where reb has 'they have made it a desolation, to my sorrow', it is hard to see how the translators have understood 'blh. 'To my sorrow' represents 'ly (as in BDB, p. 753b §II.1.b), but 'blh does not seem to be rendered at all. The neb had '[made it] waterless' for 'åbelâ.
8. reb has apparently seen the problem here, and has simply 'the ground mourns'.
9. Driver, in G.R. Driver and John C. Miles, The Babylonian Laws, II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 181 n. 1, following H.P. Chajes. He regarded the following verb kisstî 'I covered' as a gloss explaining he'ebaltî from 'bl 'close'. reb has 'I dried up the deep', seeing here 'bl II 'be dry'.
10. On the general point, see, for example, D.F. Payne, 'Old Testament Exegesis and the Problem of Ambiguity', ASTI 5 (1967), pp. 48-68; James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament. With Additions and Corrections (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987), esp. ch. 6 ('The Distribution of Homonyms').
11. Interestingly, Driver's article was entitled 'Confused Hebrew Roots'. Of course, he had in mind 'roots which have been confused in the dictionaries' (p. 73), and, writing as a philologist rather than as a linguistician, he did not consider the implication of possible confusion by the speakers of the language.
12. So the English 'bear' (verb), 'bear' (noun) and 'bare' (adjective).
13. Thus, for example, there was was probably no confusion between 'åbl 'mourner' and 'åbl 'meadow', for it is hard to think of any sentence in which the one could be mistaken for or confused with the other, especially when 'åbl 'meadow' seems to occur only in place-names.
14. Thus, for example, Akkadian can tolerate abålu A 'bring, carry', which is transitive, alongside abålu B 'be dry', which is intransitive.
15. Friedrich Delitzsch's rather outdated Assyrisches Handwörterbuch (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1896), p. 7, did indeed register a verb abålu 'mourn', but only hesitantly, and only for a single passage. Neither von Soden nor the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary recognizes such a verb.
16. This is not a passage where anyone has proposed to see 'bl II.
17. In this respect the statement of Gesenius18, that 'bl is here parallel to nbl, should be faulted.
18. No lexica have proposed to Þnd 'bl II here.
19. The Hebrew dictionaries differ over whether to recognize two homonyms, rb I 'dry up' and rb II 'destroy' (so BDB), or to regard these two meanings as senses of one verb (so KoehlerBaumgartner3). For Aramaic, both Gustaf H. Dalman, Aramäisch-neuhebräisches Handwörterbuch (2nd edn, Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1922), and Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim (repr. New York: P. Shalom Publishers, 1967), register only one verb rb.
20. The difÞculty about ascribing mourning to inanimate objects may not be only a modern one, if G.A. Moore was right about Ezek. 31.15. Here the verb he'ebaltî 'I made [the deep] to mourn' is, suspiciously, followed immediately (without any waw) by kisstî 'I covered'. lxx has nothing corresponding to kisstî, and the verb, thought Cooke, 'may have been added by a reader . . . who thought that Tehôm might be "covered" (cp. 2619), but could not be made to mourn' (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Ezekiel [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936], p. 343).
21. The reader of Driver's paper may at one point think that he also does not wish to distinguish two separate verbs; he writes that 'the Acc. abålu = the Hebr. lbæa; "was dried up" is at bottom the same verb as the Hebr. lbæa;; = Aram. lybea} "mourned" and . . . there is a gradual transition from the physical meaning to its application to a mental state' (p. 75). Everything depends on the phrase 'at bottom', by which I think he means to signify proto-Semitic, not some common underlying meaning within Hebrew itself. From the point of view of the lexicographer or the translator, there are, in Driver's view, two different verbs in Hebrew; such must be the implication of the title of his paper, 'Confused Hebrew Roots', and his practice of offering distinctive translations for verses where he believed he had identiÞed a new meaning. It is interesting, however, that his distinguished pupil, D. Winton Thomas, my own teacher, in the unpublished revision of BrownDriverBriggs which he was working on at the time of his death, apparently took Driver to mean the opposite. For, in following Driver by recognizing the meaning 'be dried up' in Driver's 11 texts, he nevertheless regarded these cases as constituting merely a distinct sense of the one verb 'bl; he did not register two verbs 'bl I and 'bl II. I am grateful to Oxford University Press, and in particular Ms Hilary Feldman, for making available to me Professor Winton Thomas's manuscript (which extends from aleph to kaph).
One might be permitted to register a certain surprise, incidentally, that such an experienced orientalist as Driver could regard 'mourning' in the East as a 'mental state' (p. 75): contemporary practice and the evidence of the texts alike show that it is a physical and vocal activity.
22. The research for this paper arose out of work on the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew being prepared in ShefÞeld. I am grateful to Dr David Talshir of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, who was a Research Associate for the Dictionary during 198889 and who drafted the article on 'bl, for the beneÞt of several discussions about this word; he does not agree with all my views, I think, and cannot be held responsible for this present article.