journal of Semitic Studies XXXVji Spring ippo

ARABIC VERSES
FROM THE FIRST/SECOND CENTURY:
THE INSCRIPTION OF 'EN 'AVDAT

JAMES A. BELLAMY

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR

In a recently published article,1 Avraham Negev, Professor of

Archaeology at the Hebrew University, presents an inscription
found in 1979 just above the gorge of 'En eAvdat, 4.5 km.
south of Oboda in the Negev. The inscription contains six
lines, four of which are in Aramaic, but the other two (11. 4 and
5) are in Arabic, written in the Nabataean alphabet. Negev
dates the inscription probably between 88/9 and 125/6 CE, and
in any case before the year 150.2 Arabists will greet this
discovery with enthusiasm since it is the earliest piece of Arabic
so far discovered, antedating the famous Namarah inscription
of 328 by about two centuries.
In the article referred to, Negev wrote the description of the
inscription and the segment on its historical and cultural
aspects; the reading, translation, and commentary were done
by J. Naveh and S. Shaked. A good photograph (Plate 11B) is
provided, together with a sketch by Ada Yardeni. The Arabic
part of the inscription, as the editors note, is fraught with
difficulties which result from the ambiguities of the Nabataean
alphabet and from a peculiar syntactic construction which
seems to have no counterpart in later Arabic. There is, conse-
quently, much room for speculation, and my reading, which
differs considerably from that of Naveh and Shaked, is presen-
ted with reservations. Furthermore, I shall try to demonstrate
that the Arabic portion is composed of verses.3
1
A. Negev, with a contribution by J. Naveh and S. Shaked, 'Obodas
the God', Israel Exploration Journal 36/1-2 (1986), 56-60.
2
Ibid., p. 60.
3
I am indebted to my colleague Prof. Charles Krahmalkov, who
suggested that I should take a closer look at the metrics of the passage.

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 ARABIC VERSES: THE INSCRIPTION OF 'EN 'AVDAT

To put the Arabic in context, I cite here the editors'

translation of the whole inscription.
1. May he who reads(?) be remembered in good (memory)
before Obodas the god, and may there be remembered
2. who(ever)...
3. Garm'alahi, son of Taym'alahi [set up] a statue before
Obodas the god
4. And he acts neither for benefit nor for favour. And if
death claim us let me not
5. be claimed. And if affliction seeks, let it not seek us.

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6. Garm'alahi wrote this with his own hand.
Here follows my romanization of the Hebrew transliteration by
the editors (p. 5 6) of the two lines of Arabic.
4. fyf'l T fd' wl' 'tr' fkn hn' yb'n' 'lmwtw 1'
5. 'b'h fkn hn' 'rd grhw 1' yrdn'
In my vocalized version which follows, I have transliterated the
ambiguous consonants as I believe they should be read. It will
be noted that I differ from the editors only on whether one
letter (in 'adada, 1. 5) should be read d or r.
4. fa-yafalu la fidan (or fida) wa-la 'atara fa-kana huna
yabglna 'al-mawtu la
5. 'abgahu fa-kana huna 'adada jurhun la yurdlna
Translation:
4. For (Obodas) works without reward or favour, and he,
when death tried to claim us, did not
5. let it claim (us), for when a wound (of ours) festered, he
did not let us perish.
I believe that these lines give Garmallahl's reason for raising
the statue to Obodas, and are not formulae to protect himself
for doing something unusual in religious practice, as Negev
(p. 60) suggests. The statue is a thank-offering to the god who
saved him from death by curing him of an infected wound.
Such inscriptions were common in antiquity. A strikingly
similar example occurs in the Anthologia Palatina, vi, no. 330, in
which an Athenian orator named Aischines records a miracu-
lous cure:
0V7)TCOV (iev Texvai? a7topoufievo<;, sic; 8£ TO OeTov

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 ARABIC VERSES: THE INSCRIPTION OF 'EN 'AVDAT

Ttaaav exo)V> tpoXiTtwv e&naiSat; 'A07Jva<;,

ia07)v eXBcov, 'AcrxXT)7tie, 7ip6<; TO aov txlaot;,
sXxo<; e^wv xe9aX9j? sviauatov, ev tpiai

Despairing of the skills of men, and placing all my hope

on the god, I departed child-blest Athens, and came,
O Asklepios, to thy grove, and was cured in three months
of a year-old festering head wound.4

Votive inscriptions of this sort are found in the Near East as

well, much nearer to 'En 'Avdat than the grove of Asklepios.

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A Thamudian inscription found near the temple on Jabal
Ramm in Midian, first published by M.-R. Savignac, is trans-
lated by H. Grimme, as follows:
Dieser hier ist (wieder) gesund.
Und er war totkrank und vernichtet.
Und er erhob sich in der Krankheit und Verlassenheit.
Und er iibernachtete an der (heiligen) Statte des 'Atar.
Dieser hat sich erbarmt uber diesen Leidenden.5
Beginning with the first sentence, it is not clear whom the
editors understood to be the antecedent of the pronoun 'he'.
On first reading, I assumed they intended it to represent
Garmallahl, who set up the statue with no desire for a reward,
but I am now not so sure. If Garmallahl was intended, the
statement appears to be contradicted by the rest of the inscrip-
tion, since, if the editors' translation is correct, Garmallahl
does, in fact, hope for the benefit or favour of being kept safe
from death and affliction. In any case, I take it to refer to
Obodas since, if the god acts without being propitiated or
insisting on a reward, this is a tribute to his generosity.
The main crux in the 'En "Avdat inscription is the word hn',
which occurs twice in the combination kn hn'. The editors take
kn hn' together as introducing a 'kind of conditional phrase,
with hn' functioning in a manner similar to Arabic 'in' (p. 58).
One can make a case, however, against taking the last two
sentences as conditionals. If /&»* functions as 'in in later Arabic,
we have the equivalent of the combination kana 'in, which as

4
The Greek eXxoi; means either 'wound' or 'festering wound'; here the
latter must have been intended since the wound was already a year old and
took three months to cure. Aischines is not identifiable; he is not the
famous Aischines, the opponent of Demosthenes.
5
H. Grimme, 'Thamudica', ZS 10 (1955), 180.

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 ARABIC VERSES: THE INSCRIPTION OF 'EN 'AVDAT
far as I have been able to determine, does not occur in Arabic.6
N. Nebes, in his study of the syntagma kdna jaf'a/u, gives no
examples of kdna 'in, but many of 'in kdna, the usual form of the
protasis. Most important, he cites many examples of hand 'idd
fa'ala yaf'alu, in which 'idd is temporal, and kdna indicates
repeated action in the past.7 Since the combinations kand 'idd
yaf'alu...fa'ala and kdna 'iddfa'ala...yaf'alu are both attested in
later texts, I believe that hn' here has the meaning of 'idd, with

6
A possible, but very doubtful, example of kdna 'in is found in Tabarl,

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Ta'rikb ai-Rusui wa 'l-muluk (Leiden 1879-1901) 1, 1922-3, as follows:
wa-law 'annahu lam ya'tinl lahu kitabun wa-la 'amrun thumma ra'aytu
fursatan fa-kuntu 'in 'a'lamtuhu fdtatniJam 'u'limhu hatta 'antabi^aha. In the
apparatus, de Jong notes that fa-kuntu is omitted from the version in Aghdni
(Dar al-Kutub, Cairo ed., xv, 300), cited from Tabarl.
H. Reckendorf, Syn. Verb., 689, in discussing conditional clauses with
'in, states categorically that 'das Gewohnliche ist die praeteritalisirung durch
kana...hier (in contrast to kdna 'idd) steht kdna nicht an der Spitze des
ganzen Satzes, sondern im Nebens[atz]'. In his later work {Arab. Syn., 486),
however, Reckendorf cites the passage italicized above, and notes that kdna
can stand before the whole sentence. He translates: 'falls ich ihn in
Kenntnis setzte, entging mir (die Gelegenheit)'. I suspect that this was the
only example of this curious construction that Reckendorf found; if correct,
it negates his earlier statement, so he doubtless kept his eye open for other
examples and would have cited them if he had found any. Th. Noldeke, Zur
Grammatik, 166, col. 1 (in a marginal note, ed. by A. Spitaler, Darmstadt,
1963) cites the passage law...hintu through 'u'limbu, and translates: 'wenn
mir dadurch, dass ich ihn benachrichtige, die Gelegenheit entginge, wiirde
ich ihn nicht benachrichtigen'.
Neither translation comes to grips with the peculiar fa-kuntu 'in. Recken-
dorf, because he took kuntu to mark the preterite, translates as a simple
condition in the past, although the context shows that it is used by the
speaker to explain what his behaviour would be in his present circum-
stances. Noldeke avoids the conditional "in by a circumlocution indicating
cause; his translation, however, is essentially correct.
I have not been able to find other examples of this syntagma, and, if the
sentence is correct, it would appear to be a syntactical bapax legomenon.
However, I believe that the passage is slightly corrupt, and that fa-kuntu
should be emended to read fa-^antu, or, less likely, fa-%anantu. Translate:
'Even if there had not come to me a letter or command of his, then I saw
an opportunity and thought, "If I (take the time to) inform him, it will
escape me", I would not inform him until I had taken advantage of it'. In
older hands the stroke of the tfo often slants upward to the right and is
sometimes mistaken by later copyists for the stroke of a kdf. The copyist of
Aghdni probably thought fa-kuntu looked strange, so he omitted it, making
the sentence grammatically unexceptionable.
7
N. Nebes, Funktionsanalyse von kdna yaf'alu (Hildesheim 1982),
I22fF.

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 ARABIC VERSES: THE INSCRIPTION OF 'EN 'AVDAT
one important difference, however. Although Obodas might
have saved Garmallahfs life on repeated occasions, the general
tenor of the inscription leads me to believe that a single act of
the god is referred to. It may be that kana in combination with
hn' was simply a marker of the past and did not indicate
repeated action as it does with 'idd in later times.
At the beginning of 1. 5, in order to make 'bgh a 1st. sg.
passive optative, the editors take it as Aramaic, a suggestion
they offer with due reservation (p. 5 8). We note, however, that
elsewhere in the inscription, Garmallahl refers to himself in the

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1st. pers. pi. This problem is eliminated by reading 'abgdhu, a
Form IV verb with the meaning 'cause to seek',8 and taking the
god as the subject and the obj. pron. as referring to death. The
causative sense of Form IV verbs often extends to the idea of
'permitting, enabling',9 so I have translated 'let claim'. The
same is true of the verb jurdmd in the following sentence.
Naveh and Shaked read the next verb 'ardda, which they
translated 'seek'. A much better reading, which is attested in
context with jurh 'wound', is 'addda. Zamakhsharl cites a
Bedouin conjuration: 'a\imu 'alayka 'ayyuhd l-jurhu 'an Id ta^tda
wa-ld tudtda, quoted and translated by Lane: 'I conjure thee, O
wound, that thou increase not nor breed worms'.10 Since
wounds do not really breed worms, this can only mean
'become infected, suppurate'; it probably reflects a Bedouin
superstition as to the nature of infection. The reading proposed
here makes it unnecessary to take jurh as a metaphor for
affliction in general, a sense not given by Zamakhsharl, who
regularly notes metaphorical usages.11 Nor is it necessary for
wound or affliction to be personified.
The use of Id to negate the perfect {'abgdhu), which is not
optative, has left faint traces in pre-Classical Arabic. In Surah
90:11 we find fa-Id qtahama l-'aqabata, 'and he did not strike out
on the difficult path', in which the verb cannot be optative; cf.
Reckendorf, who cites this passage, and also quotes a verse by
al-Farazdaq,yi-7» taku Hindun Id bakat-hii, 'and if Hind does not

8
Lane, Lexicon, 232.
9
Reckendorf, Syn. Verb., 46; Brockelmann, Vergl. Gramm., 1, 526.
10
Zamakhsharl, Asds al-balaghah (Beirut 1979), 197 (s.v. DWD); Lane,
929.
11
Zamakhsharl, 88 (s.v. JRH).

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 ARABIC VERSES: THE INSCRIPTION OF 'EN 'AVDAT

weep for him', though in his Diwdn this has been regularized to
read/*-7» Id takun Hindun bakat-hu.n
The negative md is not found in any Semitic language except
Arabic, and therefore must be a later development, so one can
posit an early stage in Arabic in which Id was the only negative
adverb in use. The inscription may date from a time before
negative md had evolved or before it had become as common
as it was later on.
A few points of orthography are worth mentioning. Final
dammah is written n> in 'Imwtw; in jurhun, -un is written w,

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following the Nabataean practice with triptotic Arabic personal
names. Medial long vowels are not written, but consonantal n>
is. Alif maqsiirah is written with a/if as infidanotfidd (not Jidd'),
and ham^ah of the article has already become ham^at al-wasl
(both assured by the metre, see below).

II
Arabists have always been convinced that Arabic poetry must
have gone through a long period of development before the
earliest extant texts (ca. AD 500) were composed, but in support
of this common-sense view, based on the complexity of the
known poetry, they could point only to the statement by the
Byzantine historian Sozomen that the Arabs in the early fifth
century were still singing odes in honour of queen Mawlyah,
who had lived in the preceding generation. Before the discov-
ery of the 'En 'Avdat inscription, no proof positive - that is,
no poetic texts - had been found, so the opinions of scholars
were mainly speculation.
Now happily all uncertainty is removed, since the 'En
'Avdat inscription shows us that not only was Arabic poetry
being composed around the turn of the first and second
centuries, but also that it was much like the poetry that is
familiar to us from four centuries later.
The Arabic part of the 'En 'Avdat inscription, as shown
below, consists of three hemistichs in tawil, the most commonly
used of the classical metres. Syllables marked ! show a false
quantity.
1. fa-yaf'alu la fidan (or fida) wa-la 'atara

12
Reckendorf, Arab. Syn., 43, n. 2.

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 ARABIC VERSES: THE INSCRIPTION OF 'EN 'AVDAT

2. fa-kana huna yabgina 1-mawtu la 'abgahu

w — w | w — — — I — ! — *—*! — • — — —
3. fa-kana huna 'adada jurhun la yurdlna
\j — V-»|N-< — yy — | w I — !

These three hemistichs contain twelve feet, eight of which

are in accord with the later canons of Arabic metrics. It would
be quite impossible for anyone attempting to write prose to
produce accidentally eight sound feet in the correct order. In
the first hemistich there is a minor deviation from the classical
norm; in the final foot one would expect another long syllable

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to make the verse catalectic, or two syllables, o r u - to
make it acatalectic. This, however, I do not regard as signi-
ficant, since, as far as it goes, the verse is sound, and one can
expect some differences in the metrics of verses as old as these,
especially in a final foot. Moreover, if, as I believe, the verse
was chanted or sung, the last vowel could be prolonged at will.
It is also possible that the verse is not quoted in full; another
phrase beginning with wa-la would complete the foot.
In my opinion this first hemistisch is from a hymn to
Obodas,13 cited by Garmallahl to stress a particular quality of
the god he is honouring. Next, Garmallahl composed two
acatalectic hemistichs in the same metre to describe his personal
crisis, in which Obodas preserved his life. The three metrical
irregularities in these two hemistichs are significant since they
are, in their own way, regular. Each consists of a long syllable
at the beginning of a foot, where, according to the later
rules, one should expect a short syllable. From this systematic
lengthening, which occurs nowhere else, and from the other
feet, in which the first syllables are short, we can conclude that
at this early period such syllables were anceps and that the hard
and fast rule that they should always be short had not yet
evolved.

13
We know that the Nabataeans sang hymns to their gods in Arabic.
Epiphanius (d. 403) notes that in Petra 'Apapixfj SiaXex-rtd E^ufivouoi -rfjv
TOxp6£vov, xaXouvre? auT7)v 'ApafJuTTt Xaafiou TOUT£(JTIV K6pir)v, 'they sing
hymns to the virgin in the Arabic language, calling her in Arabic Chaamou,
that is "maiden"'. For a discussion of the text, see J. Starcky, 'Petra et la
Nabatene' Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement VII (Paris 1966) col. 992. For
the reference to Epiphanius I am indebted to Prof. G. Bowersock of the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

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