AWS 218

OCIANA 1: trans. 'O Rḍw help Nʿm and bḏḍrwyhbrk'

Al-Jallad 2015: trans. 'may Rḍw help him through divine favor because there is
danger here and may he (Rḍw) bless him’

b{r}k: The reading is secure even though the r has a very shallow arc, much less pronounced than the r of rḍw and ḍr. But the r's of the latter two are also not identical indicating that there was graphic fluctuation in the hand of this particular writer. The letters appear to become more elongated towards the end of the text, which might have been motivated by the shape or texture of the stone in this area. 

The final clause can be interpreted in two ways. Al-Jallad 2015 took the yh as fronted object pronoun, wa-yyā-h bārek 'and him may you bless', referring back to the god Ruḍaw. However, this would be the first and only attestation of the independent object pronoun. The syntax and context also permit understanding yh as a divine name, perhaps yahū or yahō, reflected in the transcription of YHWH in Greek as ΙΑO (for example, in a septuagint manuscript of Leviticus from Qumran produced during the Hasmonaean period) and the shortened Hebrew form יָהּ. The nomads east of Ḥawrān were wont to worship the gods of their neighbors and there is abundant evidence for interaction between them and the Jews; see Al-Jallad 2021a. One piece of evidence may favor understanding yh as a foreign divine name - the use of the verb brk 'to bless.' This root is not otherwise attested in Safaitic or ANA and appears to be an Aramaic borrowing (Al-Jallad and Sidky 2022). As such, it may signal that the god and associated blessing were drawn from an Aramaic-speaking culture, namely, that of the neighboring Hasmonaeans or Herodians. It is my opinion that no strong conclusions should be drawn from this single attestation. While circumstantial evidence slightly prefers taking yh as a divine name, the reading of the element as a topicalized object pronoun is equally valid. Moreover, this text is only known from a poor hand copy, and while the letters are clearly drawn, we should await the discovery of more inscriptions with the sequence yh in a different context in order to arbitrate between these competing understandings.