▪ Jeffery1938, 107-108 follows Zimmern1914 in assuming an Aram (< Akk?) origin of the Qur’ānic
ḥabl ʻrope’ : »The original meaning of ‘cordʼ occurs in cxi: 5, ‘a cord of palm fibre,ʼ and in the Aaron story in xx: 66; xxvi: 44; all of which are Meccan passages. In L:16, it is used figuratively of a ‘veinʼ in the neck, and in the Madinan Sūra, iii, the ‘cord of Godʼ, ʻcord of menʼ, apparently means a compact. – Zimmern,
Akkad. Fremdw, 15 (cf. also his
Babylonische Busspsalmen, 93 n.), declares that the Akk
ḫbl is the source of the Hbr חֶבֶל; Aram חבלא; Syr
ḥablā, and that this Aram form is the source of both the Ar
ḥabl and the Eth [Gz]
ḥabala . – While there may be some doubt about the ultimate derivation from Akk (see
BDB, 286), the Ar verb
ḥbl is obviously denominative ʻto snare a wild beast with a halterʼ, and we may accept its derivation from the Aram as certain.
1
– The Syr
ḥablā seems to have been the origin of the Arm
hałrk’,
2
and we may suspect that the Ar word came from the same source. In any case it must have been an early borrowing as it occurs in the old poetry.« – Jeffery’s conclusion is contested by Pennacchio: »In the Qur’ān, the word
ḥabl means both ‘rope’ and ‘link’ in the figurative sense, in the same way that the BiblHbr term
ḥeḇel designates both ‘a rope’ (Josh 2:15) and ‘a territory, a region’ (Josh 19:9 and Deut 3:4). The origin of the Hbr
ḥeḇel and of the Aram and Syr
ḥblʔ could well be the Akk
naḫabalu meaning ‘rope, trap’. For Jeffery, the Ar
ḥabl may come from Aram or from Syr; the scholar is certain that the Ar vb.
ḥbl is a loanword because it is a denominative. Jeffery relies on Zimmern, who nonetheless doubts the Aram origin of the loanword. It seems that the Akk vb.
ḫabâlu first meant ‘to oppress, to deceive (s.o.)’. The word then evolved to mean ‘to tie, to trap’, then ‘to capture, to take’, and finally ‘to damage, to destroy’. The word
ḥabl appears in pre-Isl poetry, which points to its ancient existence in the Ar language, a hypothesis further supported by the fact that the Ar broken pl.
ḥibāl ‘ropes’ is mentioned twice in the Qur’ān. However, the Ug m.n.
ḥbl ‘rope, string’ has the same form as the Ar term, which could mean that it is a common Sem word. Nothing proves that it was borrowed from Aram, as Jeffery suggests« (2011: 6).
▪ Any connection with ↗
ḥabila ‘to be(come) pregnant’? – Schulthess does not think so: »Mit […] ʻSeil’ werden die eben besprochenen Wörter [to be\become pregnant, conceive, labor pain] kaum zusammenhängen« (1900: 25). Militarev&Kogan2000, too, keep ʻrope’ apart from Ar
ḥabal ʻfoetus’ (
SED I #110) and
ḥabila ʻconcevoir, devenir enceinte, grosse (d’un foetus) [BK]’ (
SED I #21ᵥ), but think that some contamination may have happened between the two values, producing a meaning like ʻumbilical cord’. Nevertheless, Kogan2015 would not exclude that a relation »perhaps« exists.
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