Once more into the valley of the shadow of death : a reconsideration of Semitic compound nouns including MT

Abstract

Every occurrence ofצלמות in the Hebrew Bible is associated in its context with imageryof death, suggesting that the Versions, which overwhelmingly rendered it with “shadowof death”, correctly understood the intention of the original authors. This essay alsodiscusses six different terms in Ugaritic that are most plausibly explained as compoundnouns involving mt, “death”, and suggests that an analogy to theophoric divine namesled all these terms to be transmitted as compound nouns in W. Semitic scribal traditions.The alternative theory, that there was a nounצַלְמוּת/צַלְמוֹת, “darkness”, cannot bedisproven, but the fact that the root ṣlm does not seem to have been productive in IronAge West Semitic languages makes it unlikely.