“Who Created this Earth, Who Created Yonder Heaven, Who Created Man” – The Understanding of Creation in Old Persian Royal Inscriptions and the Old Testament

Contact between Old Persian and Hebrew? A Rejoinder to A. Wilson-Wright

Vetus Testamentum ◽

10.1163/15685330-12341394 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 70 (2) ◽

pp. 298-315

Author(s):

Harald Samuel

Keyword(s):

Direct Contact ◽

Recent Article ◽

Biblical Hebrew ◽

Linguistic Interference ◽

Royal Inscriptions ◽

Complex Picture ◽

Old Persian

Abstract In his recent article “From Persepolis to Jerusalem: A Reevaluation of Old Persian-Hebrew Contact in the Achaemenid Period”, Aren Wilson-Wright reexamines the list of proposed Persian loans in Biblical Hebrew as well as their distribution, specifically in relation to the distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew. He seeks to demonstrate direct contact between speakers of Old Persian and Hebrew and proposes two further Old Persian calques. This paper reevaluates Wilson-Wright’s proposals on both methodological and philological levels, and offers a fuller dataset for several phenomena. While allowing the principal distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew, questions of textual genesis and transmission are combined with sociolinguistic considerations to explore the possible ramifications of the proposed linguistic interaction: What do we know about the use of Old Persian apart from royal inscriptions? What do we know about Iranians, locals and their use of language in the Achaemenid administration? The result is a much more complex picture of multiple linguistic interference with many unknowns.

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Assyrian and Babylonian Sources

The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190261160.013.5 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 19-33

Author(s):

Martti Nissinen

Keyword(s):

Social Environment ◽

Old Testament ◽

Forced Migration ◽

Living Conditions ◽

Historical Information ◽

The Social ◽

Royal Inscriptions ◽

Biblical Texts

This article introduces the Assyrian and Babylonian sources relevant to the Old Testament historical books. The corpus of Assyrian sources consists mainly of royal inscriptions between the mid-ninth and mid-seventh centuries bce, pertaining to the period narrated in 1 Kgs. 16 to 2 Kgs. 21. In general, when the same events are described, the biblical accounts appear to be in basic agreement with the Assyrian sources, even though some episodes mentioned in the Assyrian sources are not included in the biblical texts and vice versa. It is plausible that the writers of 2 Kings had source-based knowledge of past events. In both cases, the historical information must be filtered through the ideological purposes of the Assyrian scribes as well as the deuteronomistic editors. The Babylonian sources confirm the conquest of Jerusalem in 597 bce and the forced migration of the Judeans, including King Jehoiachin and his entourage. Otherwise, there are no direct links between the Babylonian sources and the Old Testament historical books. Nevertheless, the Babylonian sources, especially those from Al-Yahudu, contain important information on the social environment and living conditions of the Judean population in a certain part of Babylonia in the sixth to fifth centuries bce.

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Parthisch uzbar(i) und georgisch zvari

Iran and the Caucasus ◽

10.1163/157338408x406074 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 295-306

Author(s):

Roland Bielmeier

Keyword(s):

Old Testament ◽

17Th Century ◽

1 Samuel ◽

Old Persian

AbstractThis paper shows that Georgian zvari, Old Georgian zwari "large vineyard, wine-growing estate" is a direct loan, without Armenian transmission, from Sasanian Parthian *(i)zßar going back to Arsacid Parthian uzbar(i) with the meaning "subject to taxation, profitable" and denoting a certain category of vineyard of an estate in the Parthian Economic Documents from Nisa of the 1st century B.C. Its Old Persian correspondence was also current as a loan in Late Babylonian with the meaning "crown land". The Georgian form is documented twice in the Old Testament: 1 Samuel 22,7 showing that a zwari consisted of several venaq'i "vineyard"; and in 1 Samuel 8,12 mezware "guard or keeper of a zwari", misread in the Mc'xet'a Bible but correct in the Oški Bible. A further mistake in the Mc'xet'a Bible shows that its Georgian translator misinterpreted the Armenian model. Again, the differring text in the Oški Bible is correct. The word is mentioned by Sulxan-Saba Orbeliani in the 17th century and was explained by Niko Č'ubinašvili and his nephew Davit' Č'ubinašvili by a folk etymology connecting it with mzvare "sunny place", an erroneous explanation, which has also crept into modern publications.

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