Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »The Commentators did not know what to make of it. Ṭab. tells us that some took it to mean ‘water’, others ‘death’, others ‘a torrent of rain’, others ‘a great storm’,¹ and so on, and from Zam. we learn that yet others thought it meant ‘smallpox’, or the ‘rinderpest’ or a ‘plague of boils’. / Fraenkel, Vocab, 22, recognized that it was the Rabbinic ṭwpnʔ which is used, e.g., by Onkelos in Gen. vii, and which occurs in the Talmud in connection with Noah’s story (Sanh. 96a). Fraenkel’s theory has been generally accepted,² but we find ṭwpʔnyʔ in Mandaean meaning ‘deluge’ in general (Nöldeke, Mand. Gramm., 22, 136, 309),³ and Syr ṭūpānā is used of Noah’s flood in Gen. vi, 17, and translates kataklusmós in the N.T., so that Mingana, Syr Influence, 86, would derive the Arabic word from a Christian source.
The flood story was known before Muḥammad’s time, and we find the word ṭūfān used in connection therewith in verses of al-ʔAʕshà and ʔUmayya b. ʔAbī ṣ-Ṣalt,⁴ but it is hardly possible to decide whether it came into Arabic from a Jewish or a Christian source.«
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1. It can hardly be connected, however, with the Grk tufôn. 2. Hirschfeld, Beiträge, 45; Horovitz, KU, 23; Massignon, Lexique, 52; Wellhausen, ZDMG, lxvii, 633. 3. Also on the incantation bowls, cf. Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts, Glossary, p. 290. 4. Al-ʔAʕshà in Geyer, Zwei Gedichte, i, 145 = Dīwān, xiii, 59; Umayya, xxvi, 1; xxx, 10 (ed. Schulthess).

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