The Pronominal Suffix of the Second Feminine Singular in the Aramaic Texts From the Judean Desert

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine one grammatical feature of the Aramaic documents from the Judean Desert: the 2nd feminine singular pronominal suffix on singular nouns and prepositions. In general, forms of the 2nd feminine singular are attested poorly, if at all, in early Aramaic sources. Thus, it is not surprising that there are no examples in inscriptions dating from the Old Aramaic period.' Although the suffix does occur in Official Aramaic in the papyri from Egypt (Elephantine and Hermopolis), it is absent from Biblical Aramaic. 2nd feminine singular pronominal suffix is found in Middle Aramaic, though there, too, it is not frequent and is not attested in all corpora. There are some dozen examples in targums Onqelos and Jonathan, but to the best of my knowledge, the suffix is attested only once in Palmyrene and not at all in Nabatean or Hatran. Judean Desert texts contain several additional examples of the suffix and, for this reason, provide important evidence for its history. 2nd feminine singular suffix is represented orthographically in documents from the Judean Desert by 9:-, ',-, I-, and 1J-. Do the four spellings reflect only one underlying realization of the suffix, or do the different orthographies represent the different phonetic realizations that are known elsewhere in Aramaic from vocalized texts: [-*1 in targums Onqelos and Jonathan, and [-ek] in Syriac? Cf. also -[eki], which is reflected in the Syriac ketiv. Few scholars have discussed the pronunciation underlying the orthographies. One is K. Beyer, who, without elaborating, has reconstructed [-eki] for the forms I-, 'I-, and (1%).2 Another is T. Muraoka, who, in discussing the forms 'Dand 'in the Genesis Apocryphon, cautiously remarks that The