Bibliotheca Polyglotta

Like ↗nabiyy ‘prophet’, nubuwwaẗ ‘prophethood, prophecy’ does probably neither belong to the root ↗NBW (see also ↗nabā ‘to remove, withdraw’) nor to NBʔ in the sense of ‘to be high’, but rather to the homonymous Sem root NBʔ ‘to name, proclaim, summon’, treated s.v. ↗nabaʔ ‘news, message’. Although also the var. nubūʔaẗ (with ‑ʔ‑) occurs, for the value ‘prophethood, prophecy’ the form with ‑w‑ instead of ‑ʔ‑ seems to be the older one in Ar, a fact that supports the theory of an inner-Sem borrowing, most probably from lHbr nəḇūwāh ‘prophecy’, which denotes the ‘office’ of a Hbr nābî(ʔ) ‘prophet’. The latter is obviously a PP from Hbr < Sem *NBʔ ‘to name, proclaim’. The latter took form perhaps as an extension in ‑ʔ from a biconsonantal nucleus *NB ‘to call, cry’ (which, according to some, goes back to an AfrAs vb. *nab‑ ‘to call by name’, which in turn may have dissimilated from the Nostr n. *‘nimʔ˅‑ ‘name’).

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▪ eC7 Q 57:26 (prophethood) wa-ǧaʕalnā fī ḏurriyyati-himā ’l-nubuwwaẗa wa’l-kitāba ‘and We established for their descendants prophethood and revelations’; see also Q 3:79, 6:89, 24:27, 45:16 ‘prophecy’

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▪ Zammit2002: Ø [!].
▪ Jeffery1938: Hbr nəḇūwāh; cf. also JA nəḇūʔəṯā Syr nəḇīyōṯā ‘prophecy’.
▪ For the wider context, cf. ↗nabiyy, ↗nabaʔ, ↗NBʔ, ↗NB.

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▪ Jeffery1938, 277 [na buwwaẗ]: »The word occurs only in late Meccan passages (but see Ahrens, Christliches, 34), and always in connection with the mention of the previous Scriptures with which the Arabs were acquainted. It is thus clearly a technical word, and though it may be a genuine development from ↗nabiyy, there is some suspicion that it is a direct borrowing from the Jews. – In late Hbr nəḇūwāh is used for ‘prophecy’ (cf. Neh. vi, 12, and 2 Chron. xv, 8), and in one interesting passage (2 Chron. ix, 29) it means a prophetic document. In Jewish Aram nəḇūʔəṯā also means ‘prophecy’, but apparently does not have the meaning of ‘prophetic document’,¹ nor is the Syr nəḇīyōṯā so near to the Ar as the Hbr, which would seem to leave us with the conclusion that it was the Hbr word which gave rise to the Ar, or at least influenced the development of the form (Horovitz, JPN, 224).«
▪ Pennacchio2014:162 follows Jeffery and Horovitz in regarding nubuwwaẗ as a loan from lHbr nᵊḇûʔâh ‘prophecy’, taken from the Jews of the Ḥiǧāz.
▪ Cf. also ↗NBW, ↗nabiyy, ↗NB and ↗NBʔ.

1. Horovitz, KU, 73, says it does, and refers to Bacher’s Die exegetische Terminologie der jüdischen Traditionsliteratur, ii, 123, but Bacher gives this meaning of ‘prophetischer Abschnitt’ only for nəḇūʔāh and does not quote any example of it for nəḇūṯā.

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