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Loanwords in the Language of Archaic Biblical Hebrew Poetry: A Case for Akkadianisms

What it is about

The paper asks how much Akkadian left in the vocabulary of the archaic poems of the Pentateuch and Former Prophets (Gen 49, Ex 15, Num 23–24, Deut 32, Deut 33, Judg 5, 2 Sam 22). It first sets explicit criteria for calling a word an Akkadianism: no good Northwest, Central or West Semitic etymology; wide spread within Akkadian itself; regular sound correspondences (sibilants, gutturals); a Sumerian source; or Hebrew usage that follows the East Semitic meaning against its West Semitic cognates. It then sorts the candidates into direct loans, indirect loans via Old Canaanite, wandering culture words (מַס corvée, סוּס horse), loan translations and shared idioms, semantic loans and phono-semantic matching. The result: the archaic poems are very conservative, far more than Isaiah; Ex 15, Deut 32 and 33 show almost nothing, Judg 5 indirect borrowing, Num 23–24 and 2 Sam 22 a few direct loans, and Gen 49 (the Blessing of Jacob) stands apart with the most lexical and semantic borrowings, a sign that the corpus is not one layer.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 goes into macula dict (the Torah dictionary, a column filled by hand from cited sources) and The lexicon (loanwords). I2 is text for 10-lexicon.md. I3 is a flag per verse range in the trees or verses.tsv, used by the counts in 08-syntax.md and 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md (stages and dating).

Topics: Akkadian and cuneiform NLP

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.33063/os.v74.782

@inproceedings{notarius2025loanwords,
  title = {{Loanwords in the Language of Archaic Biblical Hebrew Poetry: A Case for Akkadianisms}},
  author = {Notarius, Tania},
  booktitle = {Orientalia Suecana},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.33063/os.v74.782},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.33063/os.v74.782}
}

References

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