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On the origins of the god Ruḍaw and some remarks on the pre-Islamic North Arabian pantheon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2021

AHMAD AL JALLAD Open the ORCID record for AHMAD AL JALLAD [Opens in a new window]
AHMAD AL JALLAD*
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Ohio State [email protected]
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Abstract

This contribution proposes an interpretation of a newly attested divine title of the ancient Arabian deity Ruḍaw, mkśd ‘(the one) from Chaldea’. It explores what sense this title could have had and its implications on our understanding of Ruḍaw's position in the ancient Arabian pantheon, especially in relation to Allāt. It also examines mentions of Ruḍaw in Islamic-period narrative sources and concludes that his cult likely disappeared by Islamic times; tales of the destruction of his cult site reflect the use of the ‘smashing idols’ topos to narrativize the passage from pre-Islam to Islam.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 559 - 571
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Asiatic Society

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Footnotes

I thank Hythem Sidky for a lovely afternoon of perusing through the Arabic sources for information on Ruḍaw and al-Mustawġir with me. I thank Jérôme Norris, David Kiltz, Benjamin Suchard, and Harald Samuel for their helpful comments and improvements on a draft of this paper; all errors are my own.

References

1 See ibn Hišām (d. 213 ah/ 833 ce), as-sīrah an-nabawiyyah (M. Al-Saqā and I. Al-Shibli, (eds.)), (Cairo, 1955), p. 87.

2 Ibn Hišām, as-sīrah an-nabawiyyah, p. 88; The details are repeated in Kathīr, Ibn, Al-Bidāyah wa-n-Niyāhah (al-Mannān, Ḥ. ʿAbd (eds), (Beirut, 2004), p. 292Google Scholar.

3 Note that ibn Hišām say that some attribute these lines to Zuhayr b. Ǧanāb b. Hubal.

4 al-Kalbī, Ibn, Kitāb al-ʾAṣnām, Bāšā, A. Z. (ed.), (Cairo, 1913), p. 30Google Scholar.

5 For example, in most modern dialects of Arabic the two sounds have merged to /a/: Levantine Arabic sama < *samāʾun ‘sky’ and bana < *banā < *banaya ‘he built’. It is unclear how old this particular change is; it is possible that some dialects already experienced it by the 8th c. ce. The spelling rḍʾ, however, is occasionally attested in the pre-Islamic inscriptions. We shall discuss this further in the next section.

6 The destruction of idols is one of the great topos of monotheism in a polytheistic setting, common in the Hebrew Bible and Christian iconography, where saints are often depicting destroying images of pagan deities; for a discussion of this phenomenon and further references, see Leone, M., “Smashing Idols: A Paradoxical Semiotics”, Signs and Society 4.1 (2016), pp. 30–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The tales collected by ibn al-Kalbī are reminiscent of the account of young Abraham in Chapter 38 of Genesis Rabba, where he smashes the idols with a stick, save for the largest whom he frames for this act of vandalism. Following Hawting, G. R., The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 95–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar, I would submit that most of ibn al-Kalbī's reports belong to this genre of storytelling—the details he describes must be examined against the archaeological and epigraphic record rather than being taken at face value. A work with this as its goal is in preparation by the author.

7 BM 121005; https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1929-1012-1.

8 On the pronunciation of this name, see al-Jallad, A., “New evidence from a Safaitic inscription for a late velar/uvular realisation of *ṣ́ in Aramaic”, Semitica 58 (2016), pp. 257–270Google Scholar. Note that the cluster ld does not require us to assume a voiced pronunciation. The cuneiform sign DA signifies both /da/ and /ṭa/.

9 Dumaitic is a modern label given to a small number of texts associated with the oasis of Dūmat; the corpus traditionally consisted of only three texts (WTI 21-23), but has grown slightly in recent years to about 20 texts; for the most recent discussion of the corpus, see Norris, J., “A survey of the Ancient North Arabian inscriptions from the Dūmat al-Jandal area (Saudi Arabia), in Macdonald, M. C. A. (eds), Languages, scripts and their uses in ancient North Arabia. (Supplement to volume 48 of the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies), (Oxford, 2018), pp. 71–93; pp. 75–79Google Scholar. Note that Herodotus mentions an Arabian deity called Οροταλ/Οροταλτ (Histories III, 8), whom he calls the main deity of the Arabs. Most scholars have made the reasonable connection with Ruḍaw, Healey, Religion of the Nabataeans, p. 94, but its surviving form is far too garbled to inform the reconstruction of the pronunciation of Ruḍaw. If the identification is correct, the presence of the l at least confirms the lateral pronunciation of Arabic ḍ in this period.

10 There does not seem to be any trace of Ruḍaw's worship in the other categories of Thamudic so far.

11 These two are spelled dNu-ḫa-a-a and dA-tar-sa-ma-a-a-in, respectively.

12 This shared formula in part motivated me to suggest a developmental relationship between these script categories. I would see Thamudic B – a ‘Desert North Arabian’ script as having developed from an Oasis North Arabian prototype. Both Dumaitic and Thamudic B can plausibly be dated at least to the middle of the 1st millennium bce, and possibly older, while Safaitic is best situated at the end of the 1st millennium bce, gradually developing from Thamudic B in the Syro-Jordanian Ḥarrah. See Al-Jallad, A. and Jaworska, K., A Dictionary of the Safaitic Inscriptions, (Leiden, 2019), Chapter 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 WTI = Thamudic inscriptions in Winnett, F. V. and Reed, R. L., Ancient Records from North Arabia, (Toronto, 1970)Google Scholar.

14 The term wdd is most often interpreted as ‘love’, but its use with the invocation ʾtm(n) ‘fulfill’ suggest that it should be better understood as related to wudd/widd ‘desire’, ‘wish’, a meaning which continues into the modern Arabic vernaculars of north Arabia (and ultimately giving rise to the pseudo-verb ‘to want’ in Levantine Arabic bidd < bi-widd ‘in the wish of’). On the formula ʾtm(n) wdd, see Winnett, F.V., “Studies in Ancient North Arabian,” JAOS 107 (1987), pp. 239–244; p. 240Google Scholar.

15 This particular example is extremely interesting as the letter shapes more closely resemble the Taymanitic script but the contents and language are clearly Thamudic B. The text was published on OCIANA under the siglum Anon Tay. The OCIANA edition translates the prayer as: “help Bddh to find advantage”.

16 KRS = Safaitic inscriptions collected by G. M .H. King on the Badia Rescue Survey from Northeastern Jordan and published on OCIANA.

17 The short high vowels, *u and *i, were realized slightly lower in Safaitic than in the conventional pronunciation of Classical Arabic, as /o/ and /e/, respectively. See al-Jallad, A., “Graeco-Arabica I: the Southern Levant”, in al-Jallad, A. (ed.), Arabic in Context (Brill, 2017), pp. 99–188; pp. 142–145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See al-Jallad, A., “New evidence from a Safaitic inscription for a late velar/uvular realization of *ṣ́ in Aramaic”, Semitica 58 (2016) pp. 260–263Google Scholar; Norris, J., “Dushara dans une Inscription Thamoudique B de la region du Wādī Ramm (Jordanie du sud),” Topoi 22 (2018), pp. 185–223; pp. 206–207Google Scholar. For a summary of previous opinions, see F.V. Winnett and R. L. Reed, Ancient Records from North Arabia, pp. 75–76; Healey, J., The Religion of the Nabataeans: A Conspectus (Leiden, 2001), pp. 94–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Note that in Old Ḥigāzī and indeed in other forms of pre-normative Classical Arabic, these two words would have been pronounced distinctively—the former as [ruɮˁē] and the latter as [ruɮˁā]; see van Putten, M., “The development of the triphthongs in Quranic and Classical Arabic”, Arabian Epigraphic Notes 3 (2017), pp. 47–74Google Scholar.

20 The inscription was found near Sakākā, in the region of Al-Ǧawf, Saudi Arabia, but its exact location is not known. The OCIANA record is Al-Ǧawf Dum 1.

21 See A. al-Jallad, “The Seven Stars, Allāt from ʿmn and Dusares from rqm: a new Safaitic astronomical texts”, Semitica et Classica (forthcoming).

22 See Healey, Religion of the Nabataeans, pp. 110–112, for a discussion of these texts and further bibliography.

23 A. al-Jallad, “The Seven Stars”, §2.2.

24 For example, מֶלֶךְ כשדיים (2Chron 36:17) vs. מֶלֶךְ-בָּבֶל (Ezr 5:12), both referring to Nebuchadnezzar II. For a summary of this material, see the discussion in Beaulieu, P.-A., “Arameans, Chaldeans, and Arabs in Cuneiform Sources from the Late Babylonian Period”, in Berlejung, A. and Streck, M. P. (eds.), Arameans, Chaldeans, and Arabs in Babylonia and Palestine in the First Millennium B.C. (Wiesbaden, 2013), pp. 31–55Google Scholar, and the references there.

25 Jeremiah 49:28–33; on Nebucahdnezzar's Palestinian campaigns, see Malamat, A., “A New Record of Nebuchadrezzar's Palestinian Campaigns”, Israel Exploration Journal 6.4 (1956), pp. 246–256Google Scholar.

26 See the early Sabaic inscription B-L Naqš, see C. Robin and A. de Maigret “Le royaume sudarabique de Maʿīn: nouvelles données grâce aux fouilles italiennes de Barāqish (l'antique Yathill). With appendix by S. Anthonioz: "Note complémentaire sur la guerre entre la Chaldée et l'Ionie"”. Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (2009), pp. 57–96, with the most recent discussion in Multhoff, , Anne, . “Merchant and marauder—The adventures of a Sabaean clansman”. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 30.2 (2019), pp. 18–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The term also occurs in Qatabanic; see Maraqten., M. “On the relations between Bilād al-Shām and Yemen in the pre-Islamic period”. in Mohammed, M.. A pioneer of Arabia. Studies in the Archaeology and Epigraphy of the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula in Honor of Moawiyah Ibrahim. (Edited by) Kafafi, Zeidan. (Rome, 2014), pp. 97–114Google Scholar.

27 This occurs in the narrative of MKMR 91 w-ʿny-h h-kśdy ‘the Chaldaean(s) caused him suffering’; see al-Jallad, A. and Jaworska, K., A Dictionary of the Safaitic Inscriptions, (Leiden, 2019), p. 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The inscription is undated and the great uncertainties regarding the chronological limits of Safaitic documentation caution against assigning a more precise date. On the problems of dating Safaitic, as a whole, see al-Jallad, A., An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions, (Leiden, 2015), pp. 17–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 On these texts, see Hayajneh, H., “First evidence of Nabonidus in the Ancient North Arabian inscriptions from the region of Taymāʾ”, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 31 (2001), pp. 81–95Google Scholar; Müller, W. W. and al-Saʿīd, S. F., “Der babylonische König Nabonid in taymanischen Inschriften,” Biblische Notizen 107–108 (2001), pp. 109–119Google Scholar.

29 P.-A. Beaulieu, “Aramaeans, Chaldeans, and Arabs”, pp. 39–42.

30 Eph'al, I., “Arabs in Babylonia in the 8th c. bce”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 94.1 (1974), pp. 108–115; p. 113CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Bron, F., “Sur quelques sceaux à légendes sudarabiques et proto-arabes”. Syria 62 (1985), pp. 337–341CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porada, E. & Buchanan, B., Corpus of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in North American Collections. 1 The Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, Part 1: Text, Part 2: Plates. (Washington, 1948), p. 93Google Scholar Plates: CXV: 762 Number: 762; B. Sass. Studia Alphabetica. On the Origin and Early History of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic and Greek Alphabets. (Freiburg; Göttingen, 1991), pp. 48–49, Fig. 24, 25 [Seal-Ward]; Ward, W. H., The seal cylinders of Western Asia. (Washington D.C., 1910), p. 352Google Scholar.

32 Biggs, R. D., “A Chaldean Inscription from Nippur,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 179 (1965), pp. 36–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; G. Garbini, “Le iscrizioni proto-arabe,” Annali dell'Istituto Orientale di Napoli 36 [N.S. 26], (1976), pp. 165–174; B. Sass, Studia Alphabetica, pp. 41–42, Fig. 14 Plates: 14.

33 P.-A. Beaulieu, “Aramaeans, Chaldeans, and Arabs”, p. 48.

34 On the Kenite theory, namely that Yahweh had a southern origin, see van der Toorn, K., Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible 2nd edition, (Leiden, 1999), pp. 910–919Google Scholar; see also F. Pfitzmann. Un YHWH venant du Sud? De la réception vétérotestamentaire des traditions méridionales et du lien entre Madian, le Néguev et l'exode (Ex-Nb ; Jg 5 ; Ps 68 ; Ha 3 ; Dt 33). (Tübingen, 2020).

35 For a detailed discussion, with a special focus on the relation with Dusares, see J. Healey, The Religion of the Nabataeans: A Conspectus” (Leiden), pp. 93–97.

36 Healey, Religion of the Nabateans, p. 95. Most of the material assembled to support the identification of Rḍw/y as female is of this nature; see Lundin, A.G., “Die arabischen Göttinnen Ruḍā und al-ʿUzzā”, in Steigner, R. G., Al-Hudhud. Festschrift Maria Höfner zum 80. Geburtstag (Graz, 1981), pp. 211–218Google Scholar.

37 See al-Jallad, “Evidence for a velar/uvular *ṣ́ in Aramaic”, pp. 259–260.

38 This inscription is known only from a hand copy and is partially restored. The text reads: l ʾ{n}{ʿm {w} h {g}{d}{ʿ}w{ḏ} f h rḥm w h ymyt w h rḍw q{r} {h-} qm ‘By ʾnʿm and O Gaddo-ʿAwīḏ and Raḥīm and Yomayyet, and Roḍaw, may the people be established (in this place)’. The phrase qr h-qm, however, is very tentative. The tracing has qwqm, which is also possible to interpret as /qawwū qawma/‘strengthen (the) people/army’. On the meaning of the female figures presented in the rock art see M. C. A. Macdonald, “Goddesses, dancing girls or cheerleaders? Perceptions of the divine and the female form in the rock art of pre-Islamic North Arabia”, Dieux et déesses d'Arabie images et représentations Actes de la table ronde tenue au Collège de France (Paris) les 1er et 2 octobre 2007, in I. Sachet and C. Robin (eds.), (Paris, 2012), pp. 7–118. Macdonald importantly demonstrates that none of the depictions of female figures in the Safaitic inscriptions can be identified with certainty as representations of a goddess.

39 C 5011: l mṯl bn qn bn ʾmr bn ʾṣd w-ʿwdt rḍw ‘By Mṯl son of Qn son of ʾmr son of ʾṣd and may Roḍaw grant a (safe) return’.

40 al-Jallad, A., “Safaitic”, in Huehnergard, J. and Patel, N. (eds), The Semitic Languages, 2nd edition (New York, 2019), pp. 342–366; pp. 362–363CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 KJC = Hismaic inscriptions in G.M.H King, Early North Arabian Hismaic, PhD Dissertation, (London, 1990).

42 AWS = Ġ.M.Y. ʿAlūlū [Alulu], Dirāsat nuqūš ṣafawīyyah jadīdah min wādī al-sūʿ ǧanūb sūrīyyah. Unpublished M.A. thesis, (Yarmouk, 1996).

43 The divine name in cuneiform transcription is dA-tar-sa-ma-a-a-in /ʿAttar-Šamayn/, suggesting that the Arabian attestation reflects a different vocalisation; see M. C. A. Macdonald, M. al Muʾazzin, and L. Nehmé, “Les inscriptions safaïtiques de Syrie, cent quarante ans après leur découverte.” Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres (1996), pp. 435–494; pp. 479–480. We can probably exclude an Arabicisation of the name as ʿAttar-Samāy, as in such a case we would expect the writing of the final glide, or a glottal stop if the sound change āy > āʾ had operated as in Classical Arabic. Another possibility is to regard the second element as reflecting Akkadian šamê ‘sky, heaven’, producing ʿAttar-Samē or perhaps ʿAttar-Samī. It remains curious though that the transcription of this name in the Essarhaddon prism corresponds to the Aramaic form, which is not attested in Arabia.

44 Huber, Hu = C., Journal d'un voyage en Arabie (1883 -1884). (Paris, 1891), pp. 136, 221, 222, 626EGoogle Scholar; Winnett, F.V. and Reed, W. L., “An Archaeological-Epigraphical Survey of the Ḥāʾil Area of Northern Saʿudi Arabia”. Berytus 22 (1973), pp. 53–113 and 13 plates; p. 88Google Scholar Number: 203 e. Reading and interpretation follows the OCIANA edition.

45 This argument has been made for Palmyra; see, for example, Krone, S., Die altarabische Gottheit al-Lāt. (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), p. 331Google Scholar. See also, I. Rabinowitz, “Aramaic Inscriptions of the Fifth Century bce. from a North-Arab Shrine in Egypt. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 15.1 (1956), pp. 1–9.

46 This text is JSLih 277, which is only known from a hand copy: ḏʿlm ʾfkl lt ‘Ḏʿlm ‘priest of Allāt’. JSLih = A. Jaussen & M. R. Savignac, Mission archéologique en Arabie. I. (Mars-Mai 1907) De Jérusalem au Hedjaz, Médain Saleh. II. El-ʿEla, d'Hégra à Teima Harrah de Tebouk. Texte et Atlas. III. Les châteaux arabes de Quṣeir ʿAmra, Ḫarâneh, et Tûba. (5 volumes). (Publications de la Société Française des Fouilles Archéologiques, 2). [Reprinted Cairo: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, 1997]. (Paris, 1909–1920), Volume: II, p. 506 Plates: CXXXV. On her presence here, see Caskel, W., Lihyan und Lihyanisch. (Cologne/Opladen, 1953), p. 104Google Scholar.

47 J. Healey, Religion of the Nabataeans, p. 114.

48 Herodotus. Herodotus. Historiae I. (Leipzig, 1987), I, 131; III, 8. See the cautious remarks of A. Hämeen-Anttila and R. Rollinger, “Herodot und die arabische Göttin ‘Alilat’. G. R. Hawting suggests that the identification of Allāt as Venus, or some other celestial body, obtained among the audience of the Quran in the early 7th c. ce; see G. R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History, p. 147.

49 MSSaf = A. Al-Manaser and A. al-Saʿdūn, “Nuqūš ʿarabiyyah šamāliyyah qadīmah (ṣafāwiyyah): rasāʾil qaṣīrah mina l-bādiyah al-ʾurdunniyyah”, al-Maǧallah al-ʾUrdunniyyah li-l-tārīḫ wa-l-ʾāṯār 11.1 (2017), pp. 25–40.

50 Note, however, that the Pleiades were likely called sbʿt ʾgm ‘seven stars’ in Safaitic; see A. al-Jallad, “Seven Stars”.

51 I. Rabinowitz, “Aramaic Inscriptions”, p. 8.

52 Knauf, Ismael (Wiesbaden, 1985), p. 85.

53 On the background and development of the deity ʿAṯtar, see Wilson-Wright, A., Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age (Tübingen, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the gender of ʿAṯtar in South Arabia, see Prioletta, A., “Evidence from a new inscription regarding the goddess ʿṯ(t)rm and some remarks on the gender of deities in South Arabia”, PSAS 42 (2012), pp. 309–318Google Scholar.

54 On the emergence of monotheism in Ancient South Arabia and the disappearance of the old cults, see Gajda, I., “Remarks on Monotheism in Ancient South Arabia” In Bakhos, C. and Cook, M. (eds.), Islam and its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur'an (Oxford, 2017), pp. 247–256Google Scholar; Robin, C., “Ḥimyar, Aksūm, and Arabia Deserta in Late Antiquity” In Fisher, G. (ed.) Arabs and Empires before Islam, (Oxford, 2015), pp. 227–270Google Scholar. The picture is less clear in the other parts of the Arabian Peninsula due to huge gaps in documentation, but a similar trend is apparent. The Arabic inscriptions of the late 5th and 6th c. ce, so far spanning from Nagrān to northern Syria, are all of a monotheistic character, and usually Christian. The texts from Nagrān are published by C. J. Robin, A. I. Al-Ghabbān, S. F. Al-Saʿīd “Inscriptions antiques de la région de Najrān (Arabie séoudite méridionale): nouveaux jalons pour l'histoire de l’écriture, de la langue et du calendrier arabe.” CRAI (2014), pp. 1033–1128. A 6th c. ce Christian Arabic inscription from Dūmat al-Jandal is published by L. Nehmé “New dated inscriptions (Nabataean and pre-Islamic Arabic) from a site near al-Jawf, ancient Dūmah, Saudi Arabia.” AEN 3 (2017), pp. 121–164. Nearly a dozen new texts from the Ḥigāz have also recently been discovered and published informally on the internet. These texts invoke only one deity ‘the god’, spelled in various ways—al-ʾilāh, illāh, and once as Allāh. A number of these texts have been published here: http://alsahra.org/?p=17938. The 6th c. ce Arabic inscriptions of the Levant are Christian as well; see the contribution of Macdonald, M. C. A. in Fiema, Z., al-Jallad, A., Macdonald, M. C. A., and Nehmé, L.. “Provincia Arabia: Nabataea, the Emergence of Arabic as a Written Language, and Graeco-Arabica.” In Fisher, G. (ed.) Arabs and Empires before Islam, (Oxford, 2015), pp. 373–433Google Scholar.