Page 31 - Arabiab Studies (IV)

Temporary Marriage in Pre-Islamic
South Arabia

A. F.L. Bees ton

The Sabaic votive text C.581 has not hitherto received a convincing
interpretation. The Corpus rendering does violence both to good
sense and to the stylistic and syntactic principles of the language,
and is not worth discussing; but the rendering offered by
Rhodokanakis1 is also unsatisfactory. The problems are occasioned
by several hapax legomena, together with a couple of terms
otherwise known in juristic formulae, which are somewhat obscure
in themselves and afford little insight into the use of the terms
outside the stereotyped formulae. Consequently, we can hardly
hope at present to achieve anything more than a very tentative
solution; but the attempt should at least produce something
plausible.
The text displays the organization regular in votive texts, into (a)
record of the dedication, lines 1-5; (b) summary statement of the
immediate motive for the dedication, lines 6-8; (c) a more
extended circumstantial account of the background events, lines
9-15; (d) aspirations for the future, lines 16-20.
Part (a) records the dedication of a female statuette ($/fljjt) to
’LMQH THWN and TWR B‘L/n, lords of the sanctuary HRWN.
The dedicants are listed as n‘mgd/[bnt/’lt]/thy[‘]z/w[h]n’t[\v]n/
wn'mt/bnt/’lt/tlhyYz, who are described as female vassals of
S'T^MS1 the Kibsitc. One problem in this passage is the
verb-form hqnyy, superficially a masculine dual. The gender
perhaps need not occasion great difficulty, since in this and other
texts of the period -hw is used as a common-gender form2 and in
the present text (line 9) one can hardly avoid concluding that *krw
has the women as subject. It is also the case that these texts often
have plural concords with dual antecedent,3 but the inverse
phenomenon, of a dual form with plural antecedent is less easy to
accept. Hence, in spite of the fact that HN’TWN occurs as an
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