Lexical Isoglosses of Proto-Hebrew: פְּלִילִים (Deut 32:31) and כֵּן (Judges 5:15) as Case Studies

The recent research on the alphabetic writing in Late Iron Age in Canaan points at the last hundred and fifty years of the Southern kingdom of Judah as the possible tempus and locus of composing the early biblical writings (late 8^th – 7^th cent.). However some literary, particularly poetic, texts could have been transmitted orally for centuries in a relatively unaffected form. Some of them laid foundation of the corpus of the archaic poetry, preserving many literary and linguistic traits of the pre-classical stage. The comparative literary material confirms this assumption: there are many examples of archaic poetic compositions that survived centuries of oral transmission almost intact and demonstrate different language type, comparing to the contemporary vernacular. The corpus of Soqotri poetry will be shortly discussed as an illustration.

Some words and forms could have been misunderstood in the process of literalization. In this paper I deal with two terms that till now did not get sufficient attention of scholars. I will claim that the lexeme פְּלִילִים (Deut 32:31) is to be related to the Ugaritic root p-l-l ‘be cracked, parched’ in view of the cognate data in Hebrew and other Semitic languages. For כֵּן (Judges 5:15) I suggest that it is to be correlated with the meaning ‘to be’ of the verb k-w-n and represents a local vernacular isogloss considering the distribution of the lexemes for being in different cognate dialects.