Why We Need Akkadian (and the Humanities)

The following is from my PhD supervisor Jim Davila’s blog, PaleoJudaica.blogspot.com.  I hope he doesn’t mind me reproducing the entire post, but I feel that it is an important topic and he makes a good argument.

WHY WE NEED AKKADIAN is explained in a book review in The Forward:

Why We Need Akkadian
How One Semitic Language Sheds Light on Another

By Jerome A. Chanes
Published August 11, 2010, issue of August 20, 2010.

An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew: Etymological- Semantic and Idiomatic Equivalents With Supplements on Biblical Aramaic
By Hayim ben Yosef Tawil
KTAV Publishing House, 456 pages, $125

Reading the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, is tough. For one thing, it’s very, very old, and not refracting the text through our 21st-century prism is difficult. For another, it’s written in two odd languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, in such a way that even those familiar — even fluent — in these tongues find that the simplest passages beg analysis.

“What’s the p’shat?” — the basic meaning of the text — is the toughest question of all.

Where does Akkadian fit into this question? What indeed is Akkadian? The word itself comes from the place name “Akkad,” which is found in the Bible and is a reference to an ancient city of Mesopotamia and also to a third-millennium BCE Mesopotamian dynasty. Akkadian, written in cuneiform — Mesopotamian wedge writing — left to right, on clay tablets, is actually a generic term for the languages spoken by the Babylonians and the Assyrians. These two peoples dominated the Tigris-Euphrates region of Mesopotamia, and far beyond, for centuries, and developed a vast literature. The narrative portions of the Tanach contain many references to Assyrians and Babylonians, mostly as enemies, and almost always in terms of wars, conquests and exiles.

From Abraham (an erstwhile resident of Ur in Mesopotamia) onward, Ashur and Bavel are a constant trope in the Hebrew Scriptures, and Akkadian, as a Semitic contemporary of biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, is a truly invaluable — and underused — resource in the understanding of biblical words, expressions, usages and concepts. Now Hayim ben Yosef Tawil’s “Akkadian Lexical Companion,” directly compares the Akkadian and biblical Hebrew in an effort to explicate difficult words, idioms, phrases and whole verses in the Bible. And the book succeeds. The paradoxical fact is that Akkadian lexicography is further advanced than that of biblical Hebrew, and Tawil exploits this discrepancy for our benefit.

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