The Significance of the Newly Found Amorite- Akkadian Bilinguals for Hebrew Lexicography

The article explores the implications of newly discovered Amorite-Akkadian bilingual texts for Hebrew lexicography, shedding light on the linguistic relationship between Amorite as the oldest attested West Semitic language of the early second millennium BCE and Hebrew. The study reviews existing debates over the antiquity of Hebrew and its earliest alleged attestations, including the Gezer Calendar and the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription, and contrasts them with evidence from the Amarna letters, which some scholars have classified as “pre-biblical Hebrew.” Contrary to putative attestation of Hebrew in the second millennium BCE, the Amorite texts provide reliable lexical, morphological, and syntactic data that goes beyond the West Semitic data of the Amarna texts. The bilingual texts also offer rare phonological information on Amorite, a crucial advantage over other ancient West Semitic texts that lack vocalization. Several lexical items common to Amorite and Hebrew are analysed, and, inter alia, new arguments for the West Semitic etymological origin of the noun yayn ‘wine’ are suggested. The findings challenge previous assumptions about the linguistic landscape of the early second millennium BCE and provide new insights into the historical development of Hebrew vocabulary.