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Benjamin SuchardA friend of mine is planning to name her baby Itamar, a name I like very much. In the Bible, It(h)amar is the youngest son of Aaron, the first High Priest.The Internet and (some) Biblical Hebrew dictionaries alike will tell you that Itamar means ‘island of date palms’. Linguistically, this works out: אִי ʔī is ‘island’ or ‘coast’, תָּמָר tāmār is ‘date’ or ‘date palm’, so אִיתָמָר ʔīṯāmār is ‘date palm coast’. But this meaning seems strange to me. Modern Hebrew speakers love naming their children after natural features like gal ‘wave’, sháchar ‘dawn’, inbar ‘amber’, nir ‘plowed field’, and <a href="https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/people-are-trees-of-the-field-the-tree-names-israeli-jews-give-our-children/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">especially trees</a> like ilan ‘tree’, óren ‘pine tree’, érez ‘cedar’, rótem ‘broom tree’, and of course tamar ‘date’ and tómer ‘date palm’, but this is less common in Biblical Hebrew (the main examples that come to mind are ʔēlōn ‘terebinth’ and ʔallōn ‘oak’, both still popular names). Could Itamar have a different origin?Itamar?No dates?Apart from ‘island’ or ‘coast’, the syllable ʔī can also mean ‘no(ne)’, ‘not’. It features in this way in the names Ichabod (‘no glory’, a name given after the Ark of the Covenant was lost to the Philistines) and Jezebel (‘no prince’ or something like that), possibly a deformed version of a similar-sounding Phoenician name. In the same way, Itamar could be ‘no date’, ‘no date palm’. But honestly, this seems like an even less likely meaning than ‘date island’.Egyptian?A surprising number of Levites, including relatives of Aaron, have Egyptian names: Phineas (‘the Nubian’) is the least controversial example, but other candidates include Merari, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. Together with the absence of Egyptian names among other tribes, this could indicate that it was <a href="https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-historical-exodus" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the ancestors of the Levites in particular who sojourned in Egypt</a>, later spreading the story of the Exodus to the rest of the Israelites. Since Itamar is a Levitical/Aaronid name, and the -mār is reminiscent of the Egyptian verb mrj ‘to love’, we might suspect an Egyptian etymology here too. But I haven’t come across any, and I don’t know enough Egyptian to think of any myself.Akkadian?If we ignore some typically Hebrew vowel lengthening processes, ʔīṯāmār looks exactly like a word in Akkadian, the distant relative of Hebrew that was spoken by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and some other Mesopotamian peoples. In Akkadian, the root a-m-r doesn’t mean ‘to speak’ as in Hebrew, but ‘to see’, while there’s also a uniquely Akkadian verb form, the Perfect, that is formed by inserting -ta- into the verb stem. As a result, ītamar is Akkadian for ‘he has seen’. What kind of a name is that?Quite a sensible one, it turns out. Many Akkadian names form little sentences describing how one god or another has favoured the name bearer or the parents, things like aššur-uballiṭ ‘[the god] Ashur has brought to life’,1 sîn-ahhī-erība ‘[the moon god] Sin has replaced my brothers’ (Sennacherib), and so forth. This type of name was also extremely popular among the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorites" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amorites</a>, an originally nomadic people who spoke a language that was more closely related to Hebrew and who founded various dynasties spanning the Fertile Crescent in the early second millennium BCE. Many Amorite names are also Amorite in language, e.g. yasmaʕ-haddu ‘[the god] Hadad has heard’. But interestingly, we also find names that combine Amorite and Akkadian elements, like itūr-ʔasdu ‘the warrior (Amorite) has returned (Akkadian)’ (source: <a href="https://ugarit-verlag.com/products/005a6809846243139d594b4f4a6c238f" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Streck 2000</a>). Another possible example is ʕammī-ištamru, which Howard <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgac027" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">(2023)</a> explains as ‘I praised (Akkadian) my grandfather (Amorite)’. This last name is interesting because as discussed in the article I just cited, it spread west to areas where Akkadian was not spoken. So Amorite names could provide a vector for Akkadian verbs in names to spread to the Levant.One last thing to consider is that these sentence names are also well attested in Hebrew, especially in the Patriarchal period. In יִשְׂרָאֵל yiśrāʔēl ‘God has fought’ (Israel) and יִשְׁמָעֵאל yišmāʕēl ‘God has heard’ (Ishmael), the full sentence is preserved. But in many cases, the subject was left off: יִצְחָק yiṣḥāq ‘he has laughed’ (Isaac), יַעֲקֹב yaʕăqōḇ ‘he has protected’ (Jacob), and יוֹסֵף yōsēp̄ ‘he has added’ (Joseph) are all abbreviated versions of Bronze Age names we know from cuneiform sources with meanings like ‘God has laughed’, ‘God has protected’, and ‘God has added’. Interestingly, this kind of abbreviation is already attested in the third millennium: Buccellati (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110114263.1.8.856" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">1995</a>: 858) notes that in Eblaite (a Syrian dialect or sister language of Akkadian), it is precisely the ta-perfect that only occurs in names that leave the subject off, like irtakas ‘he has bound’.I don’t have easy access to a full overview of Amorite, Akkadian, and Eblaite names, but I think Streck’s (2000) index shows that a ta-perfect of a-m-r is attested in at least one Amorite name. That means that ītamar as a name element is not just hypothetical, but was certainly in use. So for now, my money is on Itamar being an etymologically Akkadian name, maybe mediated through Amorite, meaning ‘[God] has seen’. It’s no subtropical island, but placing your baby under divine supervision must also be worth something.<ol><li>I’m going to translate the Akkadian iprus and Amorite yaqtul forms as perfects, even though they normally express perfective events. See <a href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/10/31/stative-yvccvc-and-personal-names/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">this post</a>. ↩︎</li></ol><a href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/02/02/the-name-itamar/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/02/02/the-name-itamar/</a><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/akkadian/" target="_blank">#Akkadian</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/amorite/" target="_blank">#Amorite</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/bible/" target="_blank">#Bible</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/egyptian/" target="_blank">#Egyptian</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/genesis/" target="_blank">#Genesis</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/hebrew/" target="_blank">#Hebrew</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/linguistics/" target="_blank">#linguistics</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/modern-hebrew/" target="_blank">#ModernHebrew</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/tag/onomastics/" target="_blank">#onomastics</a>

World History EncyclopediaUr was a city in the region of Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, and its ruins lie in what is modern-day Tell el-Muqayyar, Iraq. <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/ur/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.worldhistory.org/ur/</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/History" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#History</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/Akkad" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Akkad</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/Amorite" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Amorite</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/City" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#City</a>

World History EncyclopediaThe Amorites were a Semitic people who seem to have emerged from western Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria) at some point prior to the 3rd millennium BCE. <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/amorite/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.worldhistory.org/amorite/</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/History" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#History</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/Amorite" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Amorite</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/Hammurabi" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hammurabi</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/Mesopotamia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Mesopotamia</a>

CheshireA Lost Language Translated From Ancient Tablets Reveals Names of Gods in Stunning Find <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/Assyriology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Assyriology</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/Akkadian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Akkadian</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/Amorite" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Amorite</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/ManfredKrebernik" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ManfredKrebernik</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/AndrewRGeorge" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#AndrewRGeorge</a>

Road Not TakenThis is pretty cool 😎<a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/Amorite" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Amorite</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/language" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#language</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/precursor" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#precursor</a> to Hebrew <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/Akkadian" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Akkadian</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/translation" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#translation</a><a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/ancientTablets" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#ancientTablets</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/ancientLanguages" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#ancientLanguages</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/extinctLanguage" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#extinctLanguage</a> <a href="https://universeodon.com/tags/lostLanguage" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#lostLanguage</a><a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no">https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find</a>

MotherboardOur knowledge of the Amorite language was so slight that some doubted its existence, and now we know the names of their gods. <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axjqm/a-lost-language-translated-from-ancient-tablets-reveals-names-of-gods-in-stunning-find</a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/tech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#tech</a>-science <a href="https://federated.press/tags/worldnews" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#worldnews</a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/archaeology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#archaeology</a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/amorite" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#amorite</a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/language" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#language</a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/History" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#History</a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/Ancient" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Ancient</a> <a href="https://federated.press/tags/Abstract" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Abstract</a>

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