Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 14:1 (Nov 1951)
Article: אגאלתי (Isaiah 63:3)
Author: Cyrus H. Gordon

אגאלתי (Isaiah 63:3)

Cyrus H. Gordon

Edward J. Young

Tas̆appartā (Rib-Addi 102:10) “you sent” with both the prefix of the imperfect and the suffix of the perfect (to use the terminology of Hebrew grammar) is of a type well attested in the Amarna letters from Canaan. F. Böhl has collected about twenty such forms in Die Sprache der Amarna Briefe, Leipzig, 1909, pp. 58–60. These “mixed”1 forms reflect a living Canaanite construction also found in the Hebrew Bible. Thus eppus̆tþ (Šuwardata 280:12) “I made” and errubâtþ (Labaya 253:21; 254:21) “I entered” are matched by אֶגְאָלְתִּי (Isaiah 63:3) “I defiled”, insofar as they comprise the affixes of both אקטל and קטלתי.

It is interesting to note that this construction appears at least thrice with the frequent verb בוא: 2 f. sg. וַתָּבֹאתִיִ (I Samuel 25:34) “and you had come”, 3 f. sg. תָּבוֹאתָה (Deuteronomy 33:16) “she has come” and with acc. suff. added תְּבוֹאָתְךָ (Job 22:21) “(she) comes to you”.2

The cuneiform evidence coupled with the independent biblical evidence confirms the reality of the construction in Canaanite and disproves both the view among Assyriologists that the Amarna forms are simply wrong,3 and the view among Hebraists that the Hebrew examples are scribal errors in need of emendation.4

The fact that these mixed forms are more frequent in the Amarna letters than in the Bible indicates that the construction was more current in the second millennium than in the first B. C. Its origin antedates our earliest Canaanite records, and its history, as far as we can trace it in extant documents, is one of gradual extinction. As is so often the case, again with these mixed forms the lectio difficilior of the actual texts is to be preferred to the smooth readings created by scholarly emendation.