Ancient Place Names in the Holy Land.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Book review

Ancient Place Names in the Holy Land. By YOEL ELITZUR. Jerusalem and Winona Lake, Ind: MAGNES PRESS and EISENBRAUNS, 2004. Pp. xiii + 446. $59.50.

This well-researched work on biblical toponyms that have survived through the ages is based on the author's Ph.D. dissertation submitted in 1993 to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of the late outstanding Jerusalem Semitist, Shlomo Morag. It is multidisciplinary scholarship combining the best of linguistics, philology, archaeology, (pre)history, and geography, which seeks to discover the general rules of toponym preservation, based on the (near-)positive identification of the site in question. The author explains in his preface (p. xi) and introduction (p. 4) that his goal is to bring up to date the sole study on this topic, by Georg Kampffmeyer, first published in installments in the Zeitschrift des deutschen Palastina-Vereins 14-15 (1892-93: 1-116; 1-71), and later as a separate monograph. Kampffemeyer examined 150 toponyms, comparing them with their (putative) equivalents in Arabic dialects. Elitzur is justifiably critical of Kampffmeyer's work, citing faulty assumptions and false equations, such as biblical Tirzah with Arabic talluza. More specifically, he affirms: "Kampffmeyer generally leaps straight from the Bible to the Arabic name ..." (p. 7). This is all quite reminiscent of the "false friends" scenario in comparative-historical linguistics.

The corpus Elitzur chose for investigation was Eusebius' Onomasticon (fourth century A.D.). This was a very good choice for the toponyms since, as he correctly affirms, it "was relatively immune to copyists' errors" (p. 14). Two hundred of Eusebius' toponyms survive in Arabic, and after discarding those which are not in the Holy Land proper, 177 names remain. This book explores sixty of the 177, the full listing of which is given in Greek, the Hebrew equivalent, if known, and Arabic (pp. 16-18).

Turning to some toponymic details, let me first take up the name Palestine with the intention of gleaning something of the author's methodology (pp. 28-32). The Hebrew rendition of Palestine is [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Greek [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Samaritan falset [approximately] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Latin Palaestina, Egyptian prst [approximately] prst, Akkadian pa-la-as-[tu] (other variants), Syriac plstyna', Classical Arabic filastin, colloquial Arabic falastin. It is convincingly demonstrated that...