FROM PROFESSOR DR. FRITZ HOMMEL.
As an Arabist as well as an Assyriologist, and as a bright thinker and learned scholar, in various departments of knowledge, Dr. Fritz Hommel, Professor of Semitic Languages in the University of Munich, has a deservedly high standing. His great illustrated “History of Babylonia and Assyria” is a marvelous treasure-house of information concerning the history of the earlier civilizations of the East; and his later studies in connection with the researches of Dr. Edward Glaser in South Arabia have poured a flood of light on the influence of ancient Arabia in the Oriental world. In the realm of Semitic philology Dr. Hommel is acute minded, and peculiarly alert and suggestive.
Having read the earlier pages of “The Threshold Covenant,” Professor Hommel wrote briefly of his interest in the main thought of the work, and promised further comments when he has completed its examination. The necessity of putting these pages to press forbids the waiting for his valued conclusions. His first comments are:
“I am now reading with great interest the proof-sheets of your new book, which you were kind enough to send me. Although at this moment overburdened with other work, I have already got as far as page 70, and hope in the course of a fortnight to be able to send you my judgment.
“To page 60 I wish now to note that already in the time of Hammurabi disputes were settled at the gate, and, indeed, of the gate of the temple. See Strassmaier’s Warka Tablets, 30 (B. 57) in Meissner’s Beiträze zum Altbabylonischen Privatrecht, p. 42 f.
“An interesting discovery, of which perhaps you still may make use, I made yesterday. It is that the Babylonian suppû (‘to pray,’ ‘to entreat’) is originally merely the verb formed from the noun sippu, ‘a threshold.’ The first sense, indeed, of suppû is ‘to sacrifice,’ because that was done at the threshold. To find a parallel for this transference from the meaning ‘to offer’ to the meaning ‘to pray,’ compare the Arabic ‘ătără, to sacrifice,’ with the Hebrew ‘ātăr, to pray.’[[713]] To this discovery I, of course, came through your deductions with regard to the importance of the threshold.”