Kabbir in Biblical Hebrew: evidence for style-switching and addressee-switching in the Hebrew Bible.

• Author: Rendsburg, Gary A.

The word kabbir "strong, mighty" appears in the Bible in the following passages: Isa 10:13, 16:14, 17:12, 28:2, Job 8:2, 15:10, 31:25, 34:17, 34:24, 36:5. Because the root kbr is relatively common in Samalian,(1) Old Aramaic,(2) and Middle Aramaic,(3) and yet rare in Biblical Hebrew (BH), one might be inclined to view kabbir as an Aramaism in the Bible.(4)

Biblical scholars still are not agreed as to what constitutes an Aramaism.(5) But as most use the term, namely, as a lexical or grammatical influence from Aramaic in Hebrew, in the case of kabbir this is not a perfectly accurate appellation. Instead, the word kabbir is used in the Bible for specific rhetorical purposes.

The examples in Job are part of a much larger picture of this book. A recent development in the field of Hebrew studies is the discovery of style-switching or code-switching. S. A. Kaufman noted that in a number of famous instances the speech of Transjordanians is tinged with unusual grammatical forms and rare lexical items, many of which typically are classified as Aramaisms.(6) He undoubtedly is correct that in these texts "we have not to do with late language or foreign authors, but rather with the intentional stylistic representations of Trans-Jordanian speech on the part of Hebrew authors within Hebrew texts."(7) Among the key texts that Kaufman used to illustrate this point was the book of Job. I am in complete agreement with this approach, and I would posit the six-fold use of kabbir in Job as further evidence for the technique of style-switching in this composition.

Moreover, the root kbr is especially productive in Arabic,(8) and the Arabic component in the language of the book of Job is also considerable.(9) In an earlier article I suggested that two dialectal features in the book of Job--the prepositions ly, ly, dy; and the prepositions bemo, lemo--were used to add an Arabian flavor to the diction of the characters.(10) The same would be true of the author's employment of the word kabbir. If it appears that I am arguing on the one hand for Aramaisms in Job and on the other hand for Arabisms in Job, let me again quote Kaufman in this regard: "the dialects of the early 'Arabs,' which by and large are what our authors are trying to replicate here, were much closer to Aramaic.... 'Arabs' in our earliest sources, as Eph'al has demonstrated, are the Beduin not only of northern Arabia, but of the entire Syrian Desert as well, well placed geographically to have an Aramaic or Aramaic-like language."(11) In short, my view, and Kaufman's too as I understand it, is that the denizens of the Syrian Desert in the first millennium B.C.E., that is, people like Job and his friends, spoke a language with strong links to both Aramaic and Arabic.(12)

At first glance, the four-fold presence of kabbir in Isaiah appears to run counter to the above approach. But upon closer examination, it is revealed that in each instance Isaiah utilized the word kabbir in sections where either...