From the Aramaic raḥmānāʾ to raḥmānān and al-raḥmān

1 Aramaic and Hebrew

In Hebrew and Aramaic, only the form rḥm is known, the velar spirant /ḫ/ being reduced to the sound pharyngeal /ḥ/, as it was the case in Canaanite, as well as in a later stage of geʿez (), eliminated by confusion or assimilation. The root rḥm is well attested in all stages of the Aramaic language: Old, Persian imperial, Middle and Late-antique Aramaic.

In the ninth century BC, an Old Aramaic text employs the term raḥmān, “merciful” as epithet for the Mesopotamian god Hadad, spelled with the consonants rḥmn, “merciful”. This contains the most ancient Aramaic attestation of this epithet. The text is engraved on a basalt stele, discovered in 1979 in Syria, at Tell Fekheryeh, south of Raʾs al-ʿAyin, on the upper Khabur, near Tell Ḫalaf (ancient Gouzan, in the Bêt Bahiâni, Upper Mesopotamia).

On the front and on the back of the statue, which depicts the ruler Hadad-Yṯʾī (which may be translated as “Hadad is my savior,” whose name is rendered in Aramaic as Hdysʿy), two dedications are inscribed on his garment: one, cuneiform, vertically, in Akkadian language (of 38 lines) and, on the back and horizontally, in Aramaic language and alphabetic script (of 23 lines). The fifth line of the Aramaic text reads: ʾelah: raḥmān: zy: taṣlûtēh: ṭabāh: “merciful god [Hadad], to whom it is good to address his prayer”. This is an Aramaic strict translation of the Akkadian sentence, lines 6 – 7: ⁶ilu rēmēnû ⁷šá si-pu-šú ṭābu.

2 “Mercy”

Tracing back the Akkadian notion of “mercy” – either royal or divine – one may admit that it already had a Sumerian background. The Akkadian inherited the formulae from the Sumerian texts and transmitted them on.

In Neo-Assyrian dialect, in the annals of Assour-naṣirpal (883 – 859), the epithet, applied to the warrior god Ninurta, is employed in the recurrent expression found in the Akkadian literature: ilu rem-<nu>- ú ša sīpūšu ṭābū “the merciful god, whom it is good to pray to”, the same that was employed on the Tell Fekheryeh statue.^[5]

In the inscription engraved on the statue of Salmanazar III in the sanctuary of Kurbaʾil,^[6] the god Adad is described as ilu reminû šá nasḫuršu balāṭu^[7] “merciful god, to whom it is good to pray”.

The almighty power of a god was seen, for the believer of those times, in manifestation of opposed qualities, such as anger and goodness, destructive caprice and divine mercy. These contrasts are underlined in šu-ila type prayers:^[8] were Marduk is said to be [qar]rādu^dMardouk ša ezēssu abūbu [nap]šuršu abu rēmēnû “[War]rior Marduk, whose anger is a flood, (but) whose forgiveness is that of a merciful father”.^[9]

Divine mercy is a feature that adds an affective note to the image of the gods, and this human and familial metaphor “humanized” them. The rhetoric of praising the gods has become ordinary, celebrating the unpredictability of gods in wrath or mercifulness.

The Akkadian verb rêmu “to show pity”, “to have mercy”, said either of a king or of the gods, is also included in some theophoric names: Ilī-re-man-ni, ^dBēl-re-man-ni^[10], Rém-ni-ilu^[11] et ^fRe-me-ni.

On the divine model, mercy can temper the severity of a king whose rēmēnû provides a central argument for panegyrics. Thus, in a bilingual text in Sumerian and Old Babylonian, we read: ana šarrim re-me-ni-im […]-am […]-mu-[…] ana šarrim re-me-ni-im tajārim šēmi teslītim, “to the merciful king […], to the merciful, compassionate king who hears supplication.”^[12]Rēmēnu is accompanied in this text by the epithet tajāru, “compassionate”, which has a similar meaning and is formed on the root târu, “to return, to turn back”. It adds the idea of ultimate grace, granted in extremis.^[13] This epithet passed on to the later Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian tradition: šarru bēlni rēmānû šû “the king [Essarḥaddon], our lord, is merciful”.

These formulae were as well transmitted to Aramaic, as proven by texts going back to Persian times, in the Aramaic version translated from an Akkadian original, known as the Words of Aḥiqar, found at Elephantine (pap. Ber. P. 13446, Persian period). It is the only known Imperial Aramaic text to have used the epithet raḥmān, behind which it is easy to guess the original Akkadian formula: ʾesarḥaʾddon malkāʾ raḥmān hû kəmindaʿa (l. 53) “King Essarḥaddon is merciful, according to (his) reputation.”^[14]

More ambiguous is the sentence in line 91 (col. 6), melek kəraḥmān ʾap qōlēh gōbāh h[û] man hû zî yəqûm qadmôhî lahēn zî ʾēl ʿimmēh, where the adjective raḥmān is preceded by the comparative particle k-. This can be translated as “a king is merciful. His voice also is high. Who is (the man) who can stand before him but he who has God on his side!” (the comparative is here interpreted as kaf veritatis). The options are two: “Merciful, such as a king is”, which is our interpretation, or “the king is like the Merciful one”. In this last case, raḥmān is not a mere adjective, but a substitute for the divine name (this is Ginsberg’s option, “A king is like the Merciful; his voice is also loud: who is there that can stand before him, except one with whom is God?”).^[15]

As for the Hebrew root rḥm, the meaning “to show pity or mercy” is assigned to the two intensive forms of the verb, raḥem (*raḥḥēm) and ʾetraḥḥam (usually having God as subject).

In Syriac, the plural noun raḥmēʾ means “mercifulness”,^[16] along with the abstract derivative məraḥmonûthōʾ, which usually translates the Greek terms ἐλεημοσύνη “mercy” and φιλανθρωπία “benevolence” or “humanity”. In Syriac, məraḥmonōʾ, “merciful”, which is used to qualify God, sometimes accompanied by məraḥfonōʾ, translates the Greek words ἐλεήμων “merciful”, συμπαθής “sympathetic”, οἰκτίρμων “merciful”^[17]:

ʾalohōʾ məraḥmonōʾ waməraḥfonōʾ [Deus misericors et clemens].

In classical Hebrew, reḥem means “womb”, and the verb *rāḥam, riḥḥam means “to love with motherly love, to be merciful, to feel compassion”.

A few anthroponyms are formed with verbal derivatives of rāḥam: yərōḥām (1Sam 1, 1 and 1 and 2 Chronicles), ruḥāmāh (in the composed name lōʾ-ruḥāmāh, “uncompassionate”, Ho1, 6.8; 2, 25), rəḥum (late: Ez 2, 2, Ne 12, 3).

It is noteworthy that the name of a tribe from the Negev, yəraḥməʾēl, is compound of the verb rāḥam in association with the theonym ʾēl, which may be understood as “may (the god) ʾEl be merciful”: negeb hayyəraḥməʾēlî “The Negev of the Yəraḥmelites” (1Sam 27, 10).

Some verses from the biblical books of Exodus and Psalms may have been responsible for the wider diffusion of the idea of divine mercy and compassion, either in Hebrew, or in Aramaic, through the Aramaic Targums and the Syriac biblical version, the Peshiṭta.

God is said to be ‏רַחוּם‏‎‎ “merciful” and ‏חַנּוּן‏‎‎ “gracious” in four biblical verses:

3 Post-biblical Judaism

Post-Biblical Judaism, which inherited the Aramaic raḥmānāʾ from the religious vocabulary, added to it the biblical connotations peculiar to the corresponding Hebrew term, raḥûm, expressing maternal and compassionate feeling, and which was transmitted to the other biblical versions:

In the post-biblical Aramaic literature, at Qumrān (first BC to first AD), in the apocryphal Genesis (11QApGen), the verb ‏רְחַם / רַחֵם‏‎‎ means “to love, to desire”.^[18]

‏רַחִים‏‎‎ is “the beloved one” (speaking about Enoch) and ‏רַחְמַיָּא‏‎‎ are the “friends”,^[19] as well in an inscription on Jason’s tomb in Jerusalem: ‏כדנין קינא עלמא רחמיא למעבדא לך זי הוית שוא שלם‏‎‎ “Friends are joined to make an everlasting lament for you who were worthy (of it). Peace.”^[20]

The biblical meaning of “womb” for ‏רֶחֶם / רַחְמָא‏‎‎ is attested as well in 11QTgJob.^[21]

In some later Jewish-Aramaic prayers, the epithet ‏רַחְמָן / רַחְמָנָא‏‎‎ replaces the divine name, becoming a substitute for the unpronounceable name written YHWH.

The epithet, which originally could be applied equally to a sovereign, changed into a substitute of the divine name.

In other words, God will not be invoked by the name ‏רַחְמָנָא‏‎‎ if it is question of features contrary to the divine kindness or mercy, such as wrath or any other.

In Samaritan Aramaic and Christian-Palestinian Aramaic, liturgical formulas of blessing in the name of ‏רַחְמָנָא‏‎‎ prove the spread of the Jewish expression ‏בְּרִיךְ רַחְמָנָא‏‎‎, “blessed is the Merciful One”, adopted by both Christians and Samaritans in Palestine.

‏כָּל־זְמַן שֶׁאַתָּא רַחְמָן הָרַחמָן יְרַחֵם עַלֵךָ‏‎‎ “as long as you are merciful, the Merciful will be merciful to you” states a late Jewish invocation.^[22]

4 Jewish late antique epigraphy

In late antique Palestine, formulas stating the mercy of God appear, inscribed in Aramaic, on mosaic floors or carved on stone above the doors of synagogues.

The Aramaic epithet ‏רַחְמָן‏‎‎ and the substitute for the divine name ‏רַחְמָנָא‏‎‎ appear in two synagogue inscriptions of the fourth to sixth centuries, and, later, in various administrative documents of the ninth to tenth centuries.

The first one,^[23] discovered in 1965 and published in 1971, is part of an Aramaic and Hebrew inscription on a mosaic floor of one of the Byzantine synagogues of En-Gedi, near the Dead Sea (currently displayed in the Rockefeller Museum, East Jerusalem). The synagogue was built above a more ancient structure during the Severan dynasty, at the end of the second, beginning of the third century AD, judging from the type of clay lamps and the coins found in a favissa.^[24]

The building underwent modifications between the mid-third and early fourth centuries, and again in the middle of the second half of the fifth century, when the synagogue of stratum II bearing the inscription was built, a time of prosperity for the Jewish community there. A hoard was found in the courtyard of a house near the synagogue: it contained coins from the reigns of Anastasius I (491 – 518), Justin I (518 – 527) and the early reign of Justinian I. Among the ashes of the synagogue a seven-branched bronze menorah and burnt remains of a leather scroll were found.

The floor of this synagogue dated to the Byzantine period, which had a trapezoid plan, is covered with an ornamental mosaic. The five paragraphs of the mosaic inscription, written in Hebrew and Aramaic, are found in the western corridor.

The fourth paragraph of the mosaic of En-Gedi (l. 17 – 18), in Aramaic, is a blessing written in a rather clumsy script, which mentions two brothers, Rabbi Yose and Ḥezkiyo, sons of Ḥalfi.

‏רבי יוסה בר חלפי חזקין בר חלפי דכירין לטב‎

דסגי סגי הנון עבדין לשמה דרחמנה שלום‎‏‎

Rabbi Yose the son of Ḥalfi, Ḥezkiyo the son of Ḥalfi, may they be remembered for good for they did a great deal in the name of the Merciful One. Peace.

The second Aramaic inscription comes from the synagogue of Kokhab hayyarden.^[25] The remains of the synagogue were found in 1966 during the excavation of the Crusader castle of Belvoir, in the middle of the Issachar valley, on the edge of the Lower Galilee: a few stones from a third- to fourth-century synagogue were found, including a carved lintel in basalt stone, broken in two fragments, decorated with a menorah, flanked by two aediculae and an Aramaic inscription, the beginning of which is missing:

‏דשרן הדה‎

סכופתה מן‎

דרחמנה ומן דעמלי‎

אמן אמן סלה‎‏‎

1. […] who placed this

2. lintel / threshold^[26] from

3. what (belongs) to the Merciful One, and by his efforts.

1. Amen, amen. Selah!

The editors’ translation excludes the reading of ‏רחמנה‏‎‎ as a divine name or an epithet:

Who have established (1st. pl.) this

lintel out of

what (is) our own generosity and out of my own toil (Ben-Dov: “of their own and of public funds”)

Amen, amen! Selah!

5 Raḥmānāʾ in Jewish documents of the 11th and 12th centuries

Among the Jewish documents written in Aramaic found in the Geniza of Old Cairo, some of them name God Raḥmānāʾ, “the Merciful”, among other substitutes for the divine name. These documents include marriage contracts (ketubbot) dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries, in which the word ‏רַחְמָנָא‏‎‎ occurs almost always in the incipit ‏בשומיה דרחמנא‏‎‎, “in the name of the Merciful One”, or ‏בשומך רחמנא‏‎‎ “by your name, Merciful One,” instead of the more common ‏בשום ייי‏‎‎ (where the triple yod replaces the divine tetragrammaton).

This type of invocation has been practiced in the Levant for centuries, regardless of the god which was invoked. Rabbinic Judaism had cultivated the invocation of the holy name (‏השם‏‎‎), associated with other epithets or substitutes of the unpronounceable biblical tetragrammaton ‏יהוה‏‎‎. Palestinian Jewish-Aramaic or Babylonian Jewish-Aramaic, but also Syriac (Christian or Manichaean) and Mandaean texts, inscribed during the Sassanid dynasty, some of them on clay bowls, on amulets and scrolls, often used this kind of expression, which frequently appears as an opening formula, sometimes inside or at the end of the magic and religious texts:

1. bəšumayon ḏəhayya “in the name of the Life”

2. bəšumayon ḏəʿuthrayyāʾ “in the name of the ʿUthrayyāʾ”

3. bəšume ḏəyušāmîn dakiya “in the name of Yušāmîn, the pure one”

Here is a selection of such recurrent invocations “in the name of…” in Jewish-Aramaic incantation bowls:

1. ‏בשום אהיה אשר אהיה‏‎‎ “in the name of ‘I am who I am’”

2. ‏בישמיה דיהוה קדישה אילאה דישראל‏‎‎ “in the name of YHWH, the Saint, the God of Israel”

3. ‏בישמיה דמריא אסואתא‏‎‎ “in the name of the Lord of healing”

Another fixed expression in the Cairo geniza documents, ‏מן רחמנא‏‎‎ “from the Merciful One” or “by the Merciful One”, confers solemnity to the documents and guarantees a sacred dimension to the patrimony that the young bride brings under the husband’s roof, granted “by the Merciful One and by her parents”.

On the other hand, the vow, made by the young wife but not fulfilled (understood with its biblical implications by reference to Numbers 30:3), can be cancelled by the husband, according to the solemn formula ‏כולהון סולחן ומחלן מן רחמנא ומיני‏‎‎ “they are all forgiven and discharged by the Merciful One and by me, her husband […]”^[27]. In this particular case, the invocation of the divine name raḥmānāʾ is motivated by the request for forgiveness.

If the bride was formerly a captive, her freedom was credited to the Merciful God, whose invocation prevailed as well in situations where the young woman found herself in socially fragile state, for example if she was an orphan, a widow or a divorcee.##

1. ketubba from Damascus

   […] ‏דהות שבויתא ופרוקה רחמנא‏‎‎ […]

   […] (a woman,) formerly a captive, whom the Merciful One has redeemed […]^[28]

2. ketubba from Tyre

   ‏ה דאעלת הדה וליתא מן רחמהא ומבית אבהתה[…אלין מ‏‎‎] (of an orphan young girl)

   […] these are (the things) which this young girl brought with her from the Merciful One and from the house of her fathers […]^[29]

The same for

1. ketubba from Tyre

   […] ‏ואלין מה דאעלת עמה מן רחמנא ומן בית אבהתה‏‎‎ […]

   These are (the things) which this young girl brought with her, granted by the Merciful One and from the house of her parents.^[30]

2. ketubba from Egypt, Ṣā al-Ḥaǧar (of a divorced young woman)

   ‏וא]לין מה דאועלת כל[תא דא] מן רחמן [ומבית אבהתה‏‎‎…]

   These are the things which this bride has brought, granted by the Merciful One and from the house of her fathers.^[31]

6 Syriac

The Syriac Christian vocabulary is as well very rich in derivatives of rḥm. Syriac shares this semantic diversity with other Aramaic dialects and with classical Hebrew. Nevertheless, in opposite to what happens in Jewish Aramaic, in Syriac the adjective raḥmonōʾ “merciful” is very rare,^[32] while the verb rəḥem meaning “to love, to cherish”,^[33] is frequently employed. This is noteworthy, as it proves that it was not through Syriac that raḥmānāʾ reached South Arabian, despite the contacts between Syriac clergy or monastic communities and Christians of southern Arabia.

7 Palmyra

Almost half a millennium after the Tell Fekheryeh inscription, in Palmyra, dedications made to the gods were written for the most part in Palmyrene-Aramaic language and script. These inscriptions bear witness – despite a certain discontinuity in the Aramaic paleographic traditions – to the persistency through centuries of the association of the three recurrent divine epithets, raḥmānāʾ, tayārāʾ and ṭābāʾ, transmitted to the Aramaic formulae via the Akkadian texts. These Aramaic texts are mainly carved on altars and are most often dated.

The frequency of this epithet in Palmyra is probably to be explained as a local survival and not due to new cults brought there, whose origin is to be sought in the northern deserts of Arabia. However, a divine name, derived from the same root, raḥīm “beloved”, which may reflect a North Arabian loan, being equivalent to the Aramaic raḥmān, appears clearly in a Palmyrene inscription dated from March 129 AD: the god Raḥīm, not attested as such elsewhere, is mentioned in the company of Šamaš and ʾAllāt.^[34]

Meanwhile, some Greek names, attested in Dura-Europos (coming from the “house of Lysias”), which seem to be transcriptions of Semitic theophoric names, are formed by combining the word raḥīm with a theonym: Ῥαχιμναῖος (Raḥīm-Nanai “Nanai is beloved”) or Ἀβιδνηράκιμος, (“servant of Nê-the beloved”).^[35]

The adjective raḥmān does not seem to be exclusive to any particular god in Palmyra, which would have gradually substituted for the name itself.

In the Aramaic dialect of Palmyra, the epithet raḥmān most often accompanies dedications to a god whose inscriptions do not give a precise name, but who is invoked by a formula as recurrent as it is laconic, “He whose name is blessed forever.” This god has been improperly called “anonymous god” and his incognito has led to much speculation about a possible monotheistic tendency in Palmyra.

This interpretation was encouraged by the discovery of a Greek inscription engraved on a pyreus, published by Henri Seyrig, which is a dedication to the “god one, alone and merciful”, ἑνὶ μόνῳ ἐλεήμονι θεῷ.^[36] Apart from this case, where the epithet ἐλεήμον seems to reflect the Aramaic epithet raḥmānāʾ, in the bilingual (Greek-Palmyrene) inscriptions from Palmyra, dedicated to the god lbryk šmh lʿlmʾ “to Him whose name is blessed forever” corresponds generally, in Greek, Διῒ ὑψίστῳ καὶ ἐπηκόῳ “to Zeus, the most high and helpful”.^[37]

The epithet raḥmān is also attested in inscriptions where it qualifies other major Palmyrene gods, such as Baʿalšamîn and ʿAzizû.

Another point I would like to stress concerns the meaning to be given to the word raḥmān in Palmyra, where this epithet is highly valued. It seems to me inappropriate to take the Aramaic term raḥmānāʾ, as used in Palmyra, in the sense of “merciful”. If the notion of divine mercy was inherent in some way in the ancient Semitic fund, an abstract entity of “mercy”, proper to receive honors, seems to have been forged in Palmyra, presumably on the model of certain allegories or personifications of qualities and virtues (and even vices or adversities), from Greco-Roman culture. However, in Palmyra, qualities, moral notions and virtues are most meaningful when they qualify the ancestral gods and it seems difficult to see them as distinct personifications or deities, receiving the same marks of veneration as the gods themselves, replacing them.

Apart from a few mythological representations of classical culture, confined to private domestic spaces, the deep devotion and fidelity of the Palmyrenians to the local gods left little room for abstract exogenous categories, such as the divine qualities of the mythology of the Greco-Roman world, where the deified virtues could be the object of worship, with associated iconography, dedications, temples, priests, celebrations. Only one text is known from Palmyra, dating from the year 182, in which the abstract name rḥmnytʾ is invoked – whether it means “mercy” or “clemency” remains to be clarified. In the same dedication another abstraction, tšʿytʾ, of still uncertain meaning in the present state of knowledge, is invoked.^[38]

(dkyr Blg br Mʿyr) byrḥ ʾyr šnt 493 ḥgbʾ wmṣbʾ ʿbd Whblt br Zbydʾ Whblt Qmylʾ ltšʿytʾ wrḥmnytʾ ʿl ḥywh wḥyʾ ʾḥwh wbnwh wdkyr qdm ʾln ʾnš ʾnš kd šwʾ mn tnn lšlmyt qynyn mšṭ[h/t/ḥ/r/d/ʿ…] (ʾrbʿʾ)

(Let Balag, son of Mʿyr, be remembered.) In the month of May 182. The idol and the statue which Wahballāt Zabîdāʾ (son of) Wahballāt Qamîlāʾ made for tšʿytʾ and for Clemency, for his life and for the lives of his brothers and his sons; and be remembered before these whoever is suited from this place for the appeasement of wrath […]. (Four)^[39]

Roman political, religious and philosophical doctrines had a strong impact on Eastern society in general and Palmyrene one in particular, and the success of the concept of the new clementia changed the perception of the Aramaic notion of raḥmān.

In the classical period, several Greek terms referred to the mercy or generosity of men and gods: φιλανθρωπία “benevolence”, πραότης “mildness”, ἐπιείκεια “reasonableness”, ἔλεος “compassion”. Of all these, only ἔλεος seems to have received the status of a divine quality and to have been worshiped. The Greek idea of mercy, however, lacks some nuances compared to the Roman clementia, as it was developed after Caesar used it in the civil wars.

After controversial beginnings at the end of the Roman Republic, clemency, until then considered as an act of weakness, opposed to the ideal of warrior heroism, gradually became a virtue in the public domain. Clemency was first and foremost a political tool and a rhetorical means of asserting power by offering forgiveness to wrongdoers and enemies. The development of an imperial ideology of clementia, outside of any private ethics, gave it a sacrality that gradually reached the divine sphere.

Cicero’s praise for Caesar’s clementia sets the tone for a reconsideration of this still quite human quality, which will become divine not by ascribing this epithet to a god, but by deifying it and establishing a cult. Close to indulgentia or mansuetudo, clementia is opposed to saevitia, which is “savagery”, to crudelitas and to ultio “revenge”.

Cicero advocates that she be “invoked in prayers, proclaimed publicly, by letters and monuments”.^[40] The senate voted in 44, still during Caesar’s lifetime, to erect a tetrastyle temple to Clementia Caesaris, which was dedicated after his death.^[41]

In his treatise De clementia, Seneca opposed clementia and misericordia, which for the Stoics was, along with pain, a pathological state (derived from miser “unhappy”: misericordia vicina est miseriae).^[42]

To sum up, the old Aramaic formulae that employ the epithet raḥmān or the noun raḥmanāʾ reappear in the dialect of Palmyra but reactivated by the model of the Roman imperial ideology. It is also interesting to notice the existence of the abstract word raḥmanythāʾ, a term that translates the Roman entity of clementia.

In Palmyra, the idea of a god raḥmān coincides with the Roman idea of a merciful, forgiving judge and may be translated by the “clement one”.

Although the few Jewish inscriptions from Palestine that name God Raḥmānāʾ shortly precede or are roughly contemporary with the Ḥimyarite inscriptions that bear the divine name raḥmānān and despite the great distance from Palestine to Arabia, it is reasonable to assume that the name entered Arabia, carried by Judaism and charged with the biblical connotations of mercy.

In Palmyrene Aramaic, the name is amply attested at an earlier time, where it might suggest a form of henotheism. The term, when used in formal expressions, can be traced back to Akkadian formulae and does not seem to have been adopted in Palmyra under the direct influence of Judaism, although Judaism is attested in Palmyra and may have played a role in the rise of a henotheistic doctrine.

Whether Arabic has assimilated the Aramaic epithet raḥmānāʾ through the Ḥimyarite rḥmnn or, in the Syrian desert, from the dialect spoken by the population of Palmyra, is still an open question until further discoveries.