Introduction
In this study I survey the history of the concept of Volksetymologie in ancient Near Eastern studies, demonstrating that it is, by and large, an inadequate description of the kind of philological speculation encountered in Judean literature. Similarly, aesthetically oriented approaches to the Bible’s etymologies are also heuristically lacking. Taking into consideration recent studies on the craft of writing and ancient Near Eastern hermeneutics, I examine three biblical passages in particular (Gen 16:11; 22:14; Exod 17:15–16). These admittedly limited examples offer possible avenues forward that better situate narrative etymologies firmly within the scope of Judean scribalism.Footnote 1
The Invention of Volksetymologie
In 1852, in a groundbreaking article published in the first issue of the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, the Prussian scholar Ernst Förstemann coined the term Volksetymologie.Footnote 2 Seeking to help distinguish the methods and conclusions of modern linguistic science from the speculations of previous generations, Förstemann offered a “history of etymology,” which fell, like all good historical categorizations, into three distinct periods and characters: first, the popular (volksthuemliche); second, the scholarly (gelehrte); and lastly, the scientific (wissenschaftlich). “The first,” noted Förstemann, “is the oldest and lowest level; the third is the newest and highest level.”Footnote 3
Additionally, for Förstemann, these three forms of etymology found their origins with different social groups. Popular etymology originated among the ignorant masses who desired to know the origins of words, but did not possess the intellectual apparatus to accurately accomplish the task. This low, populist level of etymologizing could only occur among populations “where the people’s spirit of creative linguistic freedom still moves, because the formation of new expressions and the investigation of the origin of existing ones are in some measure two opposite activities that complement and support each other.”Footnote 4 Folk-etymologies arise naturally only in quick and evolving linguistic environments, verbal landscapes in which novel words wildly and thoughtlessly spring forth from verdant and elastic minds. In contrast to this romantic populism, scholarly etymologies are offered by a different group—namely Greek, Roman, and later German and Hebrew grammarians—who, uncritically applying a vast knowledge, create a feral assortment of well-informed but haphazard notes, a sort of accordion book of gnarled linkages. Finally, scientific etymology became possible only in the nineteenth century with the discovery of phonetic laws and comparative linguistics. Despite their dreamy ignorance, for Förstemann, in the philological speculations offered by folk-etymologies was the germ of scientific philology, in the sense that their goal was to reveal the genuine origin of the thing to which a word referred.
It took some time for the concept to be picked up in the English-speaking world. When it did, the concept lost none of its intellectually disapproving tenor; the first English monograph on Volksetymologie was the curmudgeonly and encyclopedic book entitled Folk-Etymology: A Dictionary of Verbal Corruptions or Words Perverted in Form or Meaning, By False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy by the Rev. A. Smyth Palmer in 1882.Footnote 5 For such an empirical and imperial lexicographical obsessive as Smyth Palmer, popular derivations were a “verbal pathology,” the result of “the reluctance generally felt to acknowledge one’s ignorance,” and other types of “infirmities of mind,” typical of “the uneducated” who “shrink from novelties.”Footnote 6 Surprisingly, given his clerical credentials, the author even describes examples from the biblical text as the result of “quaint humour of primitive times.”Footnote 7
The Reception of Volksetymologie in Biblical and Assyriological Scholarship
A. Volksetymologie in Biblical Studies
Despite its base characterization, biblical scholars greedily adopted the concept of folk-etymology. Immanuel Casanowicz, in his Paronomasia in the Old Testament of 1894, described folk-etymologies as the result of a “spontaneous, psychological process,” while in the same year, J. Benzinger described them as “wild” (wilden Etymologien), “naïve or tendentious attempts at etymologizing” (naiven oder tendenziösen Etymologisirungsversuche).Footnote 8 In short, Förstemann’s terminology and concept carried over into the study of the Hebrew Bible.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the term found a hearty home in the work of Hermann Gunkel. The father of form-criticism was quick to label the numerous biblical passages that displayed, from the perspective of scientific philology, naïve and childlike ignorance of the factual origins of the names of people, places and things.Footnote 9 Gunkel wrote:
Israel was convinced that names must have some relationship to the things named. The ancient people was entirely unable to give the correct explanation in many cases. Both for other peoples and for Israel, names are the oldest material in the language. They stem from vanished peoples or from an earlier phase in one’s own language. … Because of this very oddity, these words will have attracted the attention of the ancient people. Of course, ancient Israel explains such names, unscientifically, in relation to its current language. It associated the old name with a modern, more or less phonetically similar word, and it recounted a brief narrative to establish why this word was spoken here and then remained as a name. We know such popular etymologies, too. In order to recognize the great naiveté of most of these etymologies, one must consider that … very crude assonances often satisfy.Footnote 10
Gunkel was charmed by the innocence and sincerity of the Hebrew folk-etymologies, even if he was not to be convinced by them. They could be described as “very beautiful, when considered aesthetically” (künstlerisch betrachtet, sehr schön), and “very childlike” (sehr kindlich).Footnote 11 In his influential Genesis commentary, Gunkel would turn to this label and concept repeatedly to describe and explain the many accounts of naming included in that biblical text.Footnote 12 The desire to know the origin of a name ultimately led to the creation of the corresponding story.
While biblical folk-etymologies contained no factuality, they provided evidence for the spontaneity and orality underlying many biblical accounts. Indeed, the simple, even romantic, nature of folk-etymologies was testimony to the biblical narrative’s oral and vibrant roots around Hebrew campfires, where parents naïvely responded to naïve questions posed by their naïve children.Footnote 13
Gunkel’s lasting influence in this matter is naturally quite considerable, and led down several interpretive paths.Footnote 14 Some scholars, such as Johannes Fichtner and Friedemann W. Golka, adopted Gunkel’s form-critical approach and elaborated on it, but hardly addressed the idea that the narratives came about from attempts to explain the names associated with them.Footnote 15 Others, such as Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth, readily accepted the label of “popular etymology” together with its necessary socio-linguistic implications.Footnote 16
B. Aesthetics and Biblical Etymologies
Not all critical biblical scholars, however, embraced the heuristic value of the folk-etymology. William F. Albright, though admitting that such popular etymologies do occasionally give rise to stories, was rather skeptical that such a phenomenon could explain the majority of biblical examples, since the result would be, of course, that key pericopes in the biblical accounts of the patriarchs would be useless to a historian. Instead, Albright empowered them historically. They were not merely silly stories told by simple people: “the practice of giving aetiological explanations originated as a mnemonic and didactic aid”; they, thus, had a real historiographic function that could also serve the needs of the modern scholar who sought to reconstruct the real events of the past.Footnote 17 Brevard Childs, similarly, maintained that the mythological nature of etiological narratives (he barely mentions etymological narratives in particular) on which Gunkel analogized were fundamentally different from the historical character of the biblical text. Etiologies in the former offered alterations of “the structure of reality” that legitimated “a cultic practice,” while the latter, merely and much more sensibly, “established a precedent which assumed authority for later generations.”Footnote 18 For Childs, as it was for many of his contemporaries, Israel had a distinctively historical mindset among (indeed, against) the peoples of the ancient Near East. Therefore, one could not posit the same kind of generative mythical causality within Israelite written narrative as one did for Babylonian narratives.Footnote 19
If Childs’s critique of Gunkel’s approach and its implications was broadly condemning of all etiological narrative, James Barr’s critique was much more pointed and was invariably entangled with his response to the etymological methods of the contemporaneous school of Biblical Theology.Footnote 20 Barr maintained that the biblical authors did in fact offer popular etymologies, and placed most of their interest on names that were, due to their antiquity or foreign origin, the most opaque.Footnote 21 Often, however, the etymologies those writers offered did “not so much seek to ‘explain’ the name in itself as to link it with some legendary feature already present in the narrative tradition.”Footnote 22 He writes:
Etymology was a play on word-similarity, rather than a serious analysis of root meanings. … the etymology (so-called) of the men of the Bible is more a kind of poetry, a kind of conceit, even a kind of humour, than something comparable with what we today call linguistic study. The appreciation of it may, accordingly, belong rather to literary criticism than to philology or linguistics.Footnote 23
Thus, for Barr, those who composed, redacted, and copied the Hebrew Bible were more artists than they were scholars. They certainly were not linguistic technicians. He thus summarily dismissed the possibility that the Bible’s etymologies were evidence that authors were engaged in any sort of serious philological speculation.
In recent decades, a number of approaches to the etymologies of the Hebrew narrative have largely assumed this aesthetic model. Andrzej Strus’s monograph focuses entirely on the stylistic use of names in the Pentateuch and, consequently, he rejects the term “folk etymology” (étymologie populaire) in his work.Footnote 24 Strus considers the term to be too restrictive to describe how such passages function in the biblical text: the authors’ etymologies are not merely answering the (naïve) questions of curious readers.Footnote 25 Instead, he prefers étymologisation, a word that he further qualifies based on the manner in which he perceives the individual etymologies to function stylistically within the overall narrative.Footnote 26
Moshe Garsiel, too, concentrates on aesthetics of names in biblical literature that he deems “midrashic name derivations,” which function on a purely aesthetic level.Footnote 27 Explicit etymologies (he avoids the term “folk” or “popular etymology”) are deliberately outside of his purview.Footnote 28 Nonetheless, Garsiel does offer this insight on them:
The explanations [explicit etymologies] function as a literary device and are designed to enrich the literary unit. What we see here is by no means a popular and shallow interpretation based on a lack of knowledge, but rather a deliberate deviation from the linguistic rules and norms of the time applied as a technique by subtle narrators in order to make a point.Footnote 29
In this evaluation, Garsiel is like both Barr and Herbert Marks (below) in claiming that the biblical authors deliberately ignored their own philological knowledge. However, similar to Marks (and unlike Barr), he suggests that this could be done for both aesthetic and rhetorical purposes.
Marks, as well, approaches the Bible’s etymologies aesthetically, but through a more sophisticated contemporary literary lens. Strikingly, he rejects the notion that the Bible’s writers partook of the common ancient assumption that names had the genuine potential of revealing a thing’s origin, character, or fate.Footnote 30 Offering instead a kind of Israelite literary exceptionalism, Marks suggests that the biblical authors “seem rather to exploit the myth of true meaning as a generic convention, subject to the most aggressive revision.”Footnote 31 In his own analysis, he eschews the term “folk etymology” altogether.Footnote 32
C. Volksetymologie in Assyriology
Beginning in the 1880s, Volksetymologie and its English language equivalents (“folk-etymology,” or, more commonly, “popular etymology”) were frequently used in Assyriological circles to describe ancient counterfactual philological explanations of names and words. In 1880, the orientalist Archibald Sayce noted that “popular” etymologizing is often the impetus for the creation of a myth.Footnote 33 George Smith, in the 1880 edition of The Chaldean Account of Genesis, uses the term “popular etymology” to describe specific examples of Akkadian and Israelite philological speculation.Footnote 34 Clearly, the concept had found a productive home within both biblical studies and Assyriology.
The concept was thus employed in important syntheses of Mesopotamian culture. Fritz Hommel’s 1885 presentation of Mesopotamian history utilizes the term four times.Footnote 35 In his 1887 Hibbert Lectures on Babylonian and Assyrian religion, A. H. Sayce mentions eight Akkadian, Hebrew, and Greek “popular etymologies,” while Morris Jastrow’s study of the same topic from a decade later also notes a few.Footnote 36 Within twentieth-century Assyriology, there was little hesitation to use the term, as a survey of citations from the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary shows: the lexicographers use the term “popular etymology” nineteen times in volumes published in the half-century between 1956 and 2006.Footnote 37 A number of similar turns of phrase with similar connotations are also utilized.Footnote 38 The term “folk-etymology” is even employed in one of the last published volumes.Footnote 39
While Gunkel found “popular etymologies” in the biblical text enchanting, some early Assyriologists were at least modestly appalled, as one notices when surveying how these same scholars utilize the adjective “popular” more broadly. In Sayce’s work, for example, “popular” is the opposite of “literary.”Footnote 40 Indeed, the “popular medicine” that the grubby Mesopotamian masses practiced was “ignorant and superstitious,” while “Babylonian gentlemen” chose to visit “scientific practitioners”—no doubt to the satisfaction of their Victorian social successors.Footnote 41 Jastrow was even more damning of the “popular,” which stood in tension with the “theological,” “literary,” and “scholastic.”Footnote 42 The “popular minds” had “popular beliefs” and “popular notions and fancies” that starkly contrasted with “theological doctrine,” “advanced theological speculations,” and “advanced scientific theories” that were the “product of schools.”Footnote 43 As to how he could recognize “popular” thought that, by necessity, was nonetheless recorded and handed down by the scholarly literati, Jastrow pointed to what he perceived as ignorance in any particular instance: “[t]he naïveté of the conception justifies us in regarding it as of popular origin, incorporated by the theologians into their system.”Footnote 44
Interestingly, both Sayce and Jastrow recognized that the ancient scholars themselves could be obviously fanciful and erroneous either in the writing or interpretation of names; both Assyriologists referred to such activity as “punning” or even “punning etymology.”Footnote 45 By labeling this “punning,” of course, Sayce and Jastrow asserted that the scribes were fully cognizant that they were offering incorrect philology, but were doing so for lighthearted, even playful, purposes. The resulting evaluation of these supposedly oppositional hermeneutics is that “popular” counterfactuality derives from ignorance; “scholarly” counterfactuality is just good, clean Babylonian fun.
“Popular etymology,” then, at least to a certain degree, assumed a pejorative thrust in Assyriological circles.Footnote 46 C. H. W. Johns, for example, when describing the development of personal names in Assyrian, noted that “in the process [of their development], some fancied resemblances suggest a popular etymology, and the name is further modified to support it.”Footnote 47 The “popular senses” of a particular name pattern identified by Johns might have appealed “to the popular fancy,” but had “no proper meaning,” and were thus a “waste of time” to research.Footnote 48 In 1915, Dyneley Prince, in his otherwise positive review of Delitzch’s pioneering Sumerisches Glossar, reproached the lexicographer himself for popular etymologizing in an attempt to explain a certain Sumerian lemma.Footnote 49
Volksetymologie and the Recovery of Babylonian Scholarly Hermeneutics
A. Babylonian Eigenbegrifflichkeit and Learned Etymologies
Perhaps I am being too harsh on our intellectual forebears for their palpable disdain of ancient counterfactualities. Indeed, the task they set out for themselves was situated in an extremely positivist intellectual climate that privileged a certain kind of analysis. We should not forget that this task was the genesis of modern linguistics, of course, and created a remarkably solid foundation for all of our work since. And despite their discomfort with philological irrationality, the groundwork laid in the nineteenth through most of the twentieth century has ultimately allowed modern scholars to challenge the application of Förstemann’s model. Particularly salient in this regard have been Jean Bottéro’s exegesis of the 50 names of Marduk as they are presented in the last two tablets of Enūma Eliš, as well as Alasdair Livingstone’s important publication of a number of ancient commentaries and explanatory texts.Footnote 50 Studies like these have demonstrated the sophisticated—though often clearly counterfactual—hermeneutics employed by the scholars of ancient Iraq.
The result is that Assyriologists seem to have become less and less comfortable with employing the term “popular etymology,” though they are sometimes at a loss as to what to label phenomena that take full advantage of both philological as well as graphic ambiguities to interpret names creatively. For example, in his 1999 article on Babylonian scribal hermeneutics, Stefan Maul discusses the particular—and peculiar—orthography used to write the Akkadian word iartu, “coral”:
The Sumerian word for the number “5” is /ia/. p a is the Sumerian word for “branch”; the common Akkadian equivalent is artu, “branch.” The scribe has thus divided the word iartu into the components ia and artu. For the syllable /ia/ he wrote the numeral 5, which is read in Sumerian í a. The second part of the word, artu, he interpreted as the Akkadian word for “branch” and wrote that word with the corresponding Sumerian word sign PA. The spelling 5-PA = ía-artu (PA) thus provides not only the phonetic word but also information: the intended object can be designated as “5-branch.” This is most likely playing on the branches of a coral. Such an explanation of the word iartu in a modern scientific sense is certainly not an etymology, but merely folk etymology. However, it is nevertheless etymology in the truest sense of the word: the Greek ἔτυμος initially means merely “according to the essence of the thing,” “true.” And with the orthography presented here, the learned scribe tried to show that the essence of “coral” was contained in the word for “coral.”Footnote 51
Here, Maul employs Volksetymologie, but primarily to indicate that the writing offered by the ancient scribe is erroneous in terms of what it reveals about the scientific derivation of the word iartu (or, really, what its orthography reveals). Clearly, however, Maul does not mean “ignorant” or “naïve,” and certainly not “childlike.” The definition of the term and its own etymology force him to qualify his use of Volksetymologie, such that it no longer jibes with the term’s sociolinguistic aspects—aspects that have been definitional facets of its character since its conception in the mid-nineteenth century.
Gebhard Selz, moving forward with the current intellectual momentum within Assyriology, offers the neologism “Babilism” (Babilismus) to refer to this kind of native hermeneutics in general.Footnote 52 Unlike Maul, Selz consciously engages the term Volksetymologie, together with its broader implications: “ ‘folk etymology’ … [is] often applied in order to dismiss Mesopotamian scholarly explanations as ‘obsolete.’ … Generally speaking, we would be well advised to hesitate to evaluate the ‘correctness’ of our sources from a purely modern point of view.”Footnote 53 Thus, counterfactuality from the perspective of modern scientific linguistics, Selz notes, is utterly beside the point: “And even when we accept the notion of incorrectness, such folk etymologies, which in our documents are mostly ‘learned etymologies,’ are indispensable for the reconstruction of the Mesopotamian epistemic world.”Footnote 54 Selz’s use of “learned etymologies” to a certain degree mirrors Förstemann’s second etymological category, the scholarly (gelehrte).Footnote 55 In any case, native philological speculation from ancient Iraq, however specious, rarely bothers modern Assyriologists, who are finally embraced by ancient Mesopotamia’s Eigenbegrifflichkeit when it comes to the hermeneutics offered by the heaps of dusty tablets.Footnote 56 Undoubtedly, the culmination of this new respect for the native etymological speculation of Babylonian scholars is the recent survey by Eckhart Frahm and the synthesis by Marc van de Mieroop.Footnote 57
Frahm categorizes and analyzes the entire spectrum of textual interpretation documented in the cuneiform record, broadly situating Mesopotamian explanatory practices into two categories, “literal and non-literal.”Footnote 58 Such a characterization aligns Babylonian hermeneutics with interpretive trajectories documented in other cultures from antiquity, including both Jewish and Christian. Frahm discusses etymology as a basic tool for ancient “commentators to arrive at non-literal interpretations of a given text.”Footnote 59 Furthermore, while he points to analogs in other interpretive models from the ancient world, Frahm nonetheless lets Babylonian praxis define its own categories. Closely paralleling etymological interpretation, Frahm suggests an adjacent category of etymographical interpretation in which it is not the sound of a particular word that is parsed for deeper meaning, but rather the manner in which a word is written.Footnote 60 In both cases, the deeper meanings of a particular word were considered to be revealed by etymology/etymography, rather than created by the scribe who offered it. Importantly for my purpose here, he synthesizes Babylonian etymological speculation, both philological and orthographic, without ever employing the problematic term Volksetymologie or its English equivalents.Footnote 61
Capitalizing on the same published data that allowed Frahm’s survey, van de Mieroop understands the epistemological enterprise in ancient Babylonian as essentially documentary. He resurrects the concept of “grammatology,” a term employed in the mid-twentieth century by Ignace Gelb—and later Jacques Derrida—to highlight the fact that the technology of writing is its own medium of communication that is not simply a mechanical proxy for verbal speech.Footnote 62 For van de Mieroop, the cuneiform writing system was not invented to record verbal language and, though it ultimately took on the ability to do so, Babylonian scribes never really lost sight of the written word’s semantic independence from speech.Footnote 63 Notably, his synthesis goes far beyond the expected targets of Mesopotamian epistemology (e.g., lexical lists, mantic texts, sapiential literature, commentaries), even wrangling the legal tradition into a singular documentary knowledge-building model.Footnote 64 Furthermore, he posits a point of origin for the rise of this model that hinges on the emergence of mantic texts and the eclipsing of law codes.Footnote 65
Whether van de Mieroop’s specific model in all its facets is convincing, he has nonetheless brought into form the emerging consensus regarding the epistemology of the scribes of ancient Iraq. As Selz states, “[m]ost scholars (not only Assyriologists) and scientists are today well aware that any specific knowledge is part of an epistemic world embedded in a given world-view. Any acquisition of knowledge takes place in such a framework.”Footnote 66 Mesopotamian scribal culture was its own epistemic culture, and the etymologies (and etymographies) exposed by scribes, however erroneous from a modern scientific perspective, constituted a method of acquiring culturally legitimate data.Footnote 67 These data were considered a form of acceptable knowledge that allowed scribes not only to derive and ascribe meaning to the documents they inherited (via written commentaries) but also to build meaningful explanatory models of the world around themselves (via novel compositions).
B. Babylonian Learned Etymology in Action: Enlil’s Weapon
In this section, I offer an example of the kind of speculation that Babylonian scribes produced that capitalized on the distinctive character of their writing system, their professional expertise in it, and their confidence in exploiting it. Babylonian scribes took great advantage of the polyvalent nature of the signs in the cuneiform writing system in order to reveal the potential meanings of a name. Most cuneiform signs have a value or values in the Sumerian language. These values might be logographic or merely phonetic.Footnote 68 For example, the AN sign indicates the sound /an/ in Sumerian, but it can also indicate the Sumerian word AN (“sky”).Footnote 69 The same sign can also have the Sumerian logographic value DINGIR, “god.” These same signs, as well, have Akkadian values derived from their Sumerian uses. Thus, AN can act phonetically, indicating the sound /an/ in Akkadian. But the Akkadian reading of AN can also be derived from the logographic Sumerian uses; thus, the AN sign can denote the Akkadian word šamû, “sky.” Or, reading the logograph AN as DINGIR, it can be read in Akkadian as ilum, “god.” As this single example demonstrates, the signs of the writing system can be quite polyvalent, and this polyvalence generates an ambiguity that is usually limited naturally by textual context.
Nevertheless, when they wished to do so, the scribes exploited this graphic flexibility. There are numerous examples of this practice in the literature from ancient Iraq. In the so-called Weapon Name Exposition, a Babylonian scribe reveals meanings of the names of various divine weapons.Footnote 70 For instance, one of these bludgeons bears the impressive Sumerian moniker gištukul.saĝ.50, literally “50-Headed Weapon.” As if this were not impressive enough, the Akkadian-speaking scribe, though fully aware of the basic meaning of the Sumerian name, decides to interpret this name by reading alternate logographic values of the Sumerian signs:
In line 13, the scribe writes the name of the weapon in Sumerian and, in the column next to it, how he is choosing to interpret it in Akkadian; the three lines that follow show just how he arrives at this Akkadian interpretation. First (line 14), the Sumerian word gištukul is read as it was intended by the creator of the name of the weapon, and is interpreted with one of the basic Akkadian equivalents that means the same thing as the Sumerian: kakku, “weapon.” In the next line (15), the scribe chooses to read the Sumerian word saĝ, “head,” not as its most basic Akkadian equivalent, rēšu, “head,” but rather as a related Akkadian word that can also be written orthographically with the same Sumerian sign: rēštû, “main, prime, preeminent.” In the last line, the scribe does not interpret the number 50 as the Akkadian cardinal ḫamšā, “fifty.” Instead, he interprets the number as one of the well-attested numerical orthographies assigned to the names of members of the Mesopotamian pantheon, in this case Enlil. In reading the Sumerian name gištukul.saĝ.50 as kakku rēštû ša Enlil, the scribe, who by virtue of the fact that he is copying this text indicates that he is well trained in Sumerian, is not indicating that he is unaware of its basic Sumerian meaning, nor is he arguing that that meaning is wrong. On the contrary, he is maintaining that the orthography of the Sumerian name for the weapon simultaneously bears multiple meanings that, when properly explicated, can expose the deeper reality that characterizes the thing to which the name refers.
It is important to note a number of aspects of this hermeneutic. First, the scribes who composed and copied such commentaries believed that a word in one language, Sumerian, could be interpreted by means of another language, Akkadian. Second, the deeper reality of the word was only accessed by the scribe by means of visual inspection of the name in question. Simply verbalizing the Sumerian gištukul.saĝ.50 and then translating it into Akkadian would not allow this kind of non-literal exegesis. In short, the scribe took full advantage of the writing system’s remarkable flexibility and was completely confident in its potential to yield otherwise inaccessible knowledge to his expert skills.
Before I move on to a number of biblical etymologies that I contend demonstrate an analogous learned speculation, I want to note that, by discussing Babylonian hermeneutics here alongside Judean, I am neither equating Judean scribal practice with Babylonian scribal practice, nor am I suggesting that Judean methods were reliant on Babylonian ones (though some sort of influence is certainly possible).Footnote 71 It is admittedly unclear just how the Judean scribal elite became familiar with Babylonian intellectual traditions. Nonetheless, it is clear that significant portions of the Hebrew Bible were composed and/or edited in Babylon, and the recently published cuneiform documents originating with the Judean community in Babylonian exile demonstrate that Judean elites were exposed to some level, at least, to the professional cuneiform scribal craft.Footnote 72 Still, my discussion is not meant to argue for any sort of intellectual dependence of one culture on the other. Rather, I am highlighting interpretive strategies that were employed among the contemporary intellectual equivalents of Judean literati as a means of demonstrating the potential ways in which non-scientific etymologizing operated among practitioners of craft scribalism.Footnote 73
Judean Learned Etymologies
If the etymologies suggested by Babylonian commentators need to be qualified as “learned” as opposed to “popular,” then it needs to be stated as well that, similarly, neither the biblical authors nor the etymologies they offer can be simply characterized as naïve or ignorant. The Judean scribes demonstrate significant philological knowledge: they were quite capable of inventing neologisms based on existing roots with whose fundamental meanings they were clearly familiar. They could formulate names out of whole cloth for narrative purposes, such as ןולחמ and ןוילכ (Ruth 1:2, 5; 4:9–10). Indeed, quasi-names such as תשׁביפמ, i.e., לעב בירמ (2 Sam 4:4; 1 Chr 8:34), and תשׁב שׁיא, i.e., לעבשׁא (2 Sam 2:8; 1 Chr 8:33) show that they were quite cognizant of a word’s religio-cultural significance as well. That the authors knew their exegesis of a name could be obviously counterintuitive is evinced by the etymology offered for the name לעברי (Judg 6:32; see also 2 Sam 11:21, which records the name as תשׁברי). All of this indicates that the individuals who composed these narratives, rather than advancing an ignorant and populist folk-etymology, consciously submitted to their readers interpretations that could actually run counter to a name’s socio-linguistically popular understanding. Assuming that the Judean scribes, analogous to their Babylonian counterparts, were in fact engaged in learned exegesis when they interpreted names allows us to pose different questions regarding these etymologies. If they were learned rather than popular, what were the rules employed by the scribes to unlock the data contained in words? In short, what were their onomastic hermeneutics? In what follows, I will offer a handful of examples that presume sophisticated interpretation and that take into account a scribe’s level of linguistic and graphic sophistication.
A. Synonymy: Genesis 16:11
The kind of etymologies offered by the biblical writers that have historically been the least troublesome to modern commentators are those derived from the basic constituent parts of a name and, most crucially, do not appear to conflict with modern scientific philological analysis. In Gen 16:11, for example, the messenger of Yahweh explains to Hagar that the child she will bear to Abram will be named לאעמשׁי (“Ishmael,” literally, “El has heard” or “May El hear”), כִּֽי־שָׁמַ֥ע יְהוָ֖ה אֶל־עָנְיֵֽךְ (“for Yahweh has heard your affliction”). The conspicuous parts of the name, the subject and the verbal predicate, are transparently reflected in the narrative’s explanatory statement: עמשׁ = עמשׁי and הוהי = לא.
While not overly complicated, the exegesis is not necessarily as literal as it might appear. First, the author equates the עמשׁי of the name (as it stands, an ambiguous prefixing form) with the perfect form עמשׁ; presumably, he is working from the (correct) assumption that the perfect can sometimes indicate the same temporality as the preterite, which seems to be how he is understanding עמשׁי.Footnote 74 Furthermore, the author considers the לא of the name as a synonym to the personal name of the Judean god הוהי. Of course, לא is a generic word for “god,” and as such is fairly ambiguous. But it is also the name of the high Canaanite god El. Without further discussing the religious history of the southern Levant by means of personal names,Footnote 75 we should remember that equating לא and הוהי is not necessarily a straightforward act without agenda. By reading the name לאעמשׁי as הוהי עמשׁ (as opposed to עמשׁי לעב, “may Baal hear,” for example) the biblical author has tightly limited the patriarch’s religious (and possibly ethnic) identity in a way that is not inherent in a strictly literal interpretation.Footnote 76 Nonetheless, his understanding of the name לאעמשׁי is a plausible one in that he has chosen to interpret the name from a spectrum of plausible synonyms. Examples of synonymic exegesis in Babylonian hermeneutics are quite common as well.Footnote 77
B. Homography: Genesis 22:14
While the West Semitic alphabet does not have the kind of robust polyvalency inherent in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, it does in fact possess a certain degree of polyvalency in that most vowels are not (indeed, cannot be) indicated in the script. While I am not willing to go as far as labeling the consonantal script of ancient Canaan a syllabary, as Gelb did, the script’s intrinsic equivocality meant that even the most explicit orthography offered the reader a variety of potential vocalizations.Footnote 78 Just as in the case of cuneiform, or any writing system for that matter, context normally constrains potential readings. The biblical authors, however, do appear to take advantage of even this modest ambiguity in their etymologizing.
For instance, Gen 22:14 etymologizes two things: the geographical name הוָהיְהאֶרְיִ (“Yahweh sees”) and the common expression, בְּהַר יְהוָה יֵרָאֶה (“on the mountain of Yahweh he appears,” which was perhaps added by a later commentator),Footnote 79 both of which are derived from Abraham’s answer to Isaac, that בְּנִ֑י אֱלֹהִ֞ים יִרְאֶה־לּ֥וֹ הַשֶּׂ֛ה לְעֹלָ֖ה, “God will see/find for himself the sheep for the burnt offering, my son” (Gen 22:8).Footnote 80 While the first name related in Gen 22:14, יְהוָה יִרְאֶה, agrees with the verb in Gen 22:8 (both qal imperfect, 3ms), the verb in the second phrase does not—it is a niphal imperfect 3ms. While one could argue that this second phrase refers to the story itself rather than Abraham’s utterance in verse 8, it should be noted that the pericope does not indicate that Yahweh actually appeared on the mountain, only his messenger.Footnote 81 Furthermore, the author makes clear that the second phrase is related to the first:ירֵָאהֶֽ׃ וַיִּקְרָ֧א אַבְרָהָ֛ם שֵֽׁם־הַמָּק֥וֹם הַה֖וּא יְהוָ֣ה׀ יִרְאֶ֑ה אֲשֶׁר֙ יֵאָמֵ֣ר הַיּ֔וֹם בְּהַ֥ר יְהוָ֖ה (“Abraham called the name of that place ‘Yahweh-Sees,’ of which it is said currently, ‘On the mountain of Yahweh he appears’”).Footnote 82 The second phrase seems to be offering a contemporary reading of Abraham’s utterance. In any case, the incompatibility of the vocalization of the name of the place יְהוָה יִרְאֶ with the vocalization of the phrase יְהוָה יֵרָאֶה is one that only exists when the words are actually vocalized—not when they are written. Like a kind of ethnophilological Schrödinger’s Cat, the polyvalent orthography bears both readings simultaneously. As in the reading of Enlil’s weapon, gištukul.saĝ.50, the writer has taken advantage of the writing system to reveal deeper, polyphonic associations.
C. Homoiography: Exodus 17:15–16
Highlighted in my discussion of Gen 22:14 is the important role that the orthographic, indeed the graphic, aspect of a word can contribute to a writer’s onomastic exegesis. And this leads to another potential avenue for Judean etymologizing. It is well recognized that several of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are very similar in appearance (with different letters similar in appearance at different times), and their confusion by scribes in the later copying of texts has produced no small number of textual variations. Surely the composers of the biblical narratives made similar mistakes in copying manuscripts and were aware of the potential these similarities had for etymologizing. If similar sounds have the potential to reveal deeper philological knowledge, so do similar sights. We might, as a matter of heuristic convenience, refer to similarly written words as homoiographs. Recognizing this as a phenomenon, I believe, can solve a number of previously unexplainable etymologies described by the biblical authors.
For example, after the conflict with the Amalekites at Rephidim, in which Moses’s raised arms determined the course of the battle, the Israelite leader builds and dedicates an altar to the god who granted him victory (Exod 17:15–16):
It appears that the author is deriving the name of the altar יְהוָה נִסִּי from כֵּס יָהּ, itself embedded in what appears to be an older text that has been utilized by the author of the overarching narrative as an epitome of Israel’s perpetual antagonism with the Amalekites.Footnote 83 Clearly, the הוהי of the altar’s name corresponds to הי of Moses’s explanatory utterance, and the hireq-yod ending of נִסִּי is a possessive suffix (that, importantly, obscures the altar’s character; see below). This means that somehow סנֵ is supposed to derive from סכֵּ; the two words rhyme, of course, but that is usually not enough to allow for etymologizing. More importantly, though they rhyme, they do not appear to bear similar or related meanings. The words, however, are homoiographic.Footnote 84 Indeed, in some of the ancient Hebrew scripts of both the Iron Age as well as in a number of post-exilic Aramaic scripts attested in Jewish use, the kaph and nun are quite similar in appearance.Footnote 85 As in Gen 22:14, in which the simultaneous etymology of יְהוָה יֵרָאֶה from יְהוָה יִרְאֶה only works when the operative phrase is seen but not uttered, in Exod 17:15-16 סנ can only said to be derived from סכ when the words are inspected and positively compared visually while their actual verbalizations are suspended from philological consideration.
The passage is tucked in at the end of a larger etiological tale explaining the origin of the animosity between the Israelites and Amalekites. The fact that, other than the final samekh, there is so very little resemblance between the words סכ and סנ from a modern philological perspective has meant that the etymology has long been especially vexing to commentators.Footnote 86 Scholars usually concentrate on one of two approaches that cause no small amount of trauma to the text, either in terms of its integrity or meaning.Footnote 87 The first approach has been to modify the consonantal text of verse 16, changing the kaph in סכ into a nun, thus aligning the etymology philologically with the name of the altar offered in verse 15.Footnote 88 The problem with this solution is that there is essentially no support from the versions to undergird such an emendation.Footnote 89 The alternative explanation, following traditional Jewish interpretation, is Yahweh’s utterance in verse 16 does not, in fact, elucidate the name of the altar, but is rather the utterance of an oath made by the deity on his own throne.Footnote 90 However, Childs has shown, drawing on the form-critical work on the Hebrew Bible’s etiologies by Fichtner and Long, that Exod 17:15–16 cannot be an oath and is undoubtedly an etymology, formally aligning with many other similarly phrased examples.Footnote 91
The non-literal, learned etymology I have suggested above, of course, obviates the need for either textual emendation or reading against the etiological form. However, the question remains as to why the biblical author would choose to read the name in such a way. Why would he have Moses name the place יְהוָה נִסִּי? And why does the explanation include what seems to be the archaic name כֵּס יָּה? I suggest that the archaic name and/or the etymology offered in verse 16 had some genuine antiquity to it—and the name of the altar in question, located somewhere in the Sinai was, in fact, כֵּס יָהּ. As many have noted, variations of that name, such as יְהוָה כּסִֵאּ, are not unusual in the Hebrew Bible.Footnote 92 Normally, if the location of Yahweh’s throne is identified, it is in Jerusalem (Jer 3:17; 14:21 [presumably]; 17:12; Lam 5:19 [Mount Zion specifically]); occasionally, authors mention it as being in Yahweh’s temple in Jerusalem specifically (Isa 6:1; Ezek 43:7), and a number of times it is located in the sky (Pss 11:4; 103:19; Isa 66:1; Ezek 1:26; 10:1).Footnote 93
Here lies the motivation for the use of the learned etymology in Exod 17:15–16: Yahweh’s throne cannot be said to be outside of his one temple, and the idea that Moses established such an explicitly identified altar to the god was theologically problematic, since it indicates Yahweh’s cultic presence. The apparent antiquity of the name, handed down (perhaps within a fragment of poetry as both Cassuto and Sarna suggested)Footnote 94 by way of previous scribes meant that it had an authority and could not be altered.Footnote 95 The theological problem could nonetheless be exegeted into religious conformity. A learned scribe could plainly see that סכ and סנ were related to one another, such that סכ need not be understood as such, but as the much more palpable סנ. A banner is a much more ambiguous symbol, and Moses’s naming of that altar in verse 15 (יְהוָה נִסִּי, “Yahweh is my banner”) does not imply Yahweh’s perpetual locality but merely Moses’s proclamation regarding his experience with the god. Indeed, in the explanation implied in the naming, the סנ no longer even belongs to Yahweh (as the הּיָ סכֵּ would). Instead, it (as a metaphor for the deity) belongs to the human commemorator, Moses.
Conclusion: The Epistemic Culture of Judean Scribes and Biblical Etymologies as Learned Etymologies
It is clear enough that the authors of the biblical text offered learned etymologies and incorporated them into the narratives they composed, edited, and commented upon. The question remains, what did they think they were accomplishing by including such material in their texts? The answer lies, I maintain, in the role played by philological analysis within the intellectual culture of the Judean scribes.
While issues of the precise nature and social locus of scribes in ancient Judah are unlikely ever to be completely settled,Footnote 96 what is clear is that there was a more-or-less defined set of practices and conventions employed by a limited group of people. These practices and conventions (both mental and instrumental) can be referred to as a scribal culture.Footnote 97 At its most basic level, this would have included the manufacture and maintenance of the physical tools of the craft, such as pens and ink, but also customary practices, including a more-or-less uniform script, as well as certain orthographic and stylistic standards.Footnote 98 In short, Judean scribal culture is, like its Mesopotamian counterpart, its own professional, technical culture.Footnote 99
Within scribal culture certain sources of knowledge were prioritized. The biblical authors are most explicit about oracular knowledge (הרות, רבד, ןוזח, etc.) obtained through “legitimate” mantics (prophets, oneiromantics, cleromantics, the priests who mediate this oracular data; e.g., Mal 2:7). Such oracles were clearly worthy of recording, and, in later generations, revisiting and reapplying to novel situations that begged for divine guidance.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the scribes considered themselves and the product of their craft a source of epistemic authority, regardless of specific speculation on that craft or its textual product’s relationship or origin with Yahweh. For the authors of Proverbs, pious behavior and attitude (הוהי תארי, Prov 1:7; 1:29; 9:10; cf. 22:12; Isa 11:2) is a prerequisite for receiving knowledge (תעד) in the form of traditional sage counsel, but is not necessarily identical to the knowledge itself (Prov 2:5–6; see also, 10:14; 11:9; 15:2, 7, 14; 17:27; 18:15; 21:11; 22:17).Footnote 100 Such knowledge, of course, could be tradited in writing (Prov 22:20). That the biblical authors admittedly drew upon (or at least cited) other texts indicates that the produce of other scribes carried some weight of epistemic authority, regardless of those texts’ perceived relationship with the deity (e.g., Num 21:14; Josh 10:13; 2 Sam 1:18; 1 Kgs 11:41; 1 Chr 29:29; 2 Chr 35:27). Indeed, works such as Genesis, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings make no special claim to divine authority. It seems, rather, that they are epistemically authoritative by virtue of their being scribal productions.
The etymologies in the biblical narrative, I have maintained, were the product of this scribal culture. As such, they served a deliberate, functional role in the narratives composed and handed down by the scribes themselves, for the scribes themselves. As the product of their philological training, how, then, did their etymologies actually function within the narratives they composed? The biblical authors included in their works etymologies that clearly served as epistemically legitimate data that, in turn, supported the narrative’s rhetoric. But in what specific ways?
Etymologies, as a source of epistemic authority among the makers and consumers of Judean documents, were utilized, it seems, for a number of rhetorical purposes. Among these, I suggest: etymologies verify geographical claims, cultural/religious identity, or divine involvement with important people and places. There may be more possibilities, of course, but these are the ones that seem rather evident in most narratives and I intend to explore them more fully in later research. However, within the immediate context of this study, I would also suggest that etymologies can provide solutions to theological problems, as seen in my earlier discussion of Exod 17:15–16.
My conclusion is that we should not assume that the etymologies offered by the biblical writers are folk-etymologies. While they are in many cases counterfactual, this does not mean that they originated among the illiterate masses. Looking at the Babylonian material helps us understand the multiple, often non-literal, ways in which ancient scholars might parse a word or name. I am suggesting that Judean scribes as well derived meaning from the written forms of names and that this process of interpretation should be understood within an intellectual rather than popular framework. Just as among modern philologists, ancient etymology, regardless of its method, was a source of knowledge. These etymologies were an epistemological resource created by and discernible to the educated, those skilled in philology and hermeneutics, that is, the trained scribes. Within this intellectual and epistemic context, the interpretation of names in narratives had enormous rhetorical potential, and could promote any number of narrative agendas. In short, the Hebrew Bible’s etymologies are, like their Babylonian counterparts, learned etymologies and should be treated as such.
