Page 33 - Arabiab Studies (IV)

Temporary Marriage in Prc-Islamic South Arabia 23
13 n ‘mgd/‘dy/hr\vnni/ws1 tml 't/b*m
14 ’lmqh/wh V[fh]tbhw/wr’/kwqh
15 [l]hqnynh w/hyt/$lm tn/
The second part of this is straightforward: This woman N‘MGD
entered into HRWN and besought the favour of the deity, and the
latter responded favourably to her, and bade the dedication of this
statuette to Himself. But 1 cannot bring myself to credit
Rhodokanakis’ rendering of the earlier part as, ‘indem er [the
anonymous man] ihnen zurief, als sich beide weigerten, zu kaufen
diese Statuette. Darauf aber beschlossen sie sich beschenkcn zu
lassen von diesem Mann und von ihn loszukommen. Die Statuette
also schenkte er ihnen’. This sequence of events sounds wholly
implausible. The subject of yqr'n must surely be the same as that
of the preceding main clause, namely the deity, and not the
anonymous man. *kr is attested in the juristic formula ’hnmw/*kr
which has normally been rendered ‘if there be any legal objection’,
and in a quasi-juristic sense Jamme 643/11 mngt/y'km/mlk/
hdunwt/tbltn/b'm/mlk/s'b’ ‘the eventuality whereby the king of
Hadramawt might refuse to acknowledge the embassy from the
king of Saba’. Such an interpretation is not easy to fit into our
context. If the view here proposed of part (b) is accepted, I cannot
help feeling that the most probable way of dealing with "krw is to
render it as ‘be pregnant’: cp Arabic 4akira ‘be turbid, feculent (of
water)’, and the semantic link between Latin faeces ‘dregs’ and
fecundus ‘pregnant’. Account must also be taken of Ry.522/2
bCI/wttmrn/w'tkrn/wtfm, rendered by G. Ryckmans as ‘a et6 mis
en possession et fructifie et revendique et s’accroisse’. The frag­
mentary nature of this text and the lack of context makes any
interpretation uncertain, but the rendering does seem slightly
inconsistent in that such a list of verbs is hardly capable of having
one common subject; a possible alternative would be to assume a
non-personal subject, ‘it should receive non-artificial irrigation [cf.
‘£>a‘a/-land’] and bear crops and be fertile and increase’, where ‘be
fertile’ is on the same lines as I propose above. It seems likely that
both women had intercourse with the man, though in the event it
was only N‘MGD who actually bore a child.
The Corpus treats the reading hbrrw as certain, and although
the photograph is not entirely clear, this is the only attested
verb-form which will fit the space. It occurs otherwise only as a
military technicality, ‘come out into the open, evacuate a position’,
and is then a denominative of a noun meaning ‘open country’ (Ar.
barr). Of other meanings of the root, ‘wheat’ (burr) is obviously
inappropriate here, but ‘dutifulness’ (birr) does seem promising
after mention of the deity’s ‘instruction’, gtzh is again a hapax, but