§See the Hebrew dictionaries, s.vv. JIN, WN, 928, ΝῚΣ, Jan, DOM, ph, a, ἈΝ), AN, 132, 3D, 52), 2, ΝΘ), 703, 5D, ΠΏ», PY, 7B, WS, Ws, wp, Pr, Pm, yer, nnw, 32”, 02, ypn. Specially interesting identifications are those of the Heb. o’np ‘men,’ agp>> (2 K 10%), niyndp (Ps 587). With the familiar Heb. 127 ‘he told,’ perhaps Eth. aghada should be compared ; with y7> ‘a paranymph’ mar adwi=nuptiator ; with Syn ‘to rebel’ ma’ let =defectio.
180, e.g., the preposition W2y3, and abn (with the same meaning as in Eshmunazar’s epitaph) in the glossary to Mordtmann’s article in Mitthetlungen des K. Museums zu Berlin, 1893.
be affected by their long exile from Canaan, and that their literature would show traces of Egyptian, which other Canaanitish monuments would tail to exhibit. This expectation is not fulfilled. If the hieroglyphic vocabulary* be collated with the Hebrew, the cases in which they show any cor- respondence are extremely rare, and these cases seem to belong to a period prior to the separation between the Egyptian and Semitic races: in any case, the fact that they are mostly Semitic and not specifically Hebrew words, shows that they were not learned by the Israelites in Goshen. The Coptic vocabulary is indeed far more illustrative of Hebrew; but this is due mainly to the exten- sive borrowing of Canaanitish by the Egyptians at a period to which reference has been made ; and in many cases the words are Semitic with purely Canaanitish forms, and words which, while isolated in Coptic, belong to extensive families in Semitic. The few words in Hebrew which may be justly regarded as Egyptian are such as may easily have been brought by travellers.t+ It is, however, surprising that the historians of the Egyptian episode in Exodus are acquainted with scarcely any of the Egyptian technicalities which we should have expected them to introduce, e.g. the words for taskmasters, magicians,} pyramids, and that one of the writers excerpted should sup- yee that the Egyptians spoke Hebrew (Ex 2"),
ne of the authors copied in Gn is better in- formed on this point (42%), but even his employ- ment of Egyptian words is inconsiderable. Mere different is the amount contributed to Canaanitish by the language of Assyria. We learn from the Tel el-Amarna tablets that in the 15th cent. B.C., while Palestine was under Egyptian suze- rainty, the official language of communication was Assyrian, albeit the Canaanites had a language of their own. The employment of Assyrian as an official language points, however, to a yet earlier [5506 of Assyrian supremacy. The language
nown as Assyrian is indeed Semitic, but greatly mixed with foreign elements, and with the con- sonantal system seriously deranged: it is there- fore probable, where Canaanitish and Assyrian have words in common which are unknown to the other Semitic languages, that the former has borrowed from the latter. These words have been the subject of some classical monographs ; § and they are such as attect the whole character of the syntax, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions,
* Pierret, Vocabulaire Hieroglyphique, Paris, 1876.
t One of the few philological observations of interest in the Haggadah is the suggestion of R. Nehemiah (first occurring in Pesikta, ed. Buber, p. 1090) that ‘33x 1s the Coptic anok : God, he thought, addressed the Israelites (Ex 20?) in Egyptian because they had forgotten Hebrew. This view appears for the dast time, perhaps, in Peyron’s Lex. Copt. Egyptian words occurring as such in the OT were collected in the last century by Jablonski (Opuscula, vol. i., republished Leyden, 1805) ; Wiedemann’s Sammlung Algyptischer Worter (1888) reduces the list to meagre dimensions. A great collection of kindred Egyptian and Semitic words was made by Schwartze in his Altes Aigypten, 1842 (p. 1000 sqq.) ; whereas Uhlemann, de Vet. Egypt. lingua (1851), endeavoured to collect those which might reasonably be supposed to have been borrowed by the Hebrews. If we take no account of (a) proper names, (δ) words of pre-Semitic antiquity, (c) words borrowed by the Egyptians, the number left is small; x}, Copt. taro; ony (Gn 413), Hier, ἄχι, Copt. αχὶ; 137 (a shrine), Hier. feder, Copt. tabir, Abel, Kopt. Untersuchungen, 422; if the theories expounded in that work be correct, it will be difficult to deny Dip (Ex 216 etc.; cf. Copt. kros) and 13> an Egyptian origin ; and the last has been regarded as Egyptian by good authorities. yw of Gn 2612 seems to be rightly compared with Copt. shaar, and 73 ‘a species’ with Copt. mini (a native Egyptian word according to Abel, lc. 28). De Rougé (Chrestom. i. 56) sug- gests that *x ‘island’ is Egypt. ag, and (ἰδ. 40) identifies snehem with BY?) (Ly 112).
1 Wiedemann, while offering an Egyptian etymology for ὈΘΠ, allows that it is probably Hebrew.
§ Frd. Delitzsch, Hebrew and Assyrian and Prolegomena,
30 LANGUAGE OF THE OLD TEST.
numerals, familiar adverbs, as well as political, commercial, legal, and religious terms.* It is not improbable that one of the most characteristic of the Hebrew idioms is due to the influence of Assyrian.t| The study of the Assyrian monarchs’ annals and letters also reveals phrases which form part of the rhetorical capital of the Hebrew authors,t which it is probable were originally imitations of the Assyrian style. The Aramaic language has also inherited some of the Assyrian wit which the Canaanites did not adopt.§