Editing Shibboleth (section)

===Phonetics of the biblical test===
''Shibboleth'' has been described as the first "password" in Western literature<ref name="Lennon">{{cite journal|last=Lennon|first=Brian|year=2015|title=Passwords: Philology, Security, Authentication|journal=Diacritic|volume=43|issue=1|pages=82–104|doi=10.1353/dia.2015.0000}}</ref>{{rp|93}} but exactly how it worked is not known; it has long been debated by scholars of Semitic languages.<ref name="Hendel">{{cite journal|last=Hendel|first=Ronald S.|year=1996|title=Sibilants and šibbōlet (Judges 12:6)|journal=Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research|volume=301|pages=69–75|jstor=1357296}}</ref><ref name="Emerton">{{cite book|last=Emerton|first=John|year=2014|author-link=John Emerton|editor-last1=Davies|editor-first1=Graham|editor-last2=Gordon|editor-first2=Robert|chapter=Some Comments on the Shibboleth Incident (Judges xii 6)(1985)|title=Studies on the Language and Literature of the Bible|pages=250–257|publisher=Brill|doi=10.1163/9789004283411_018|isbn=9789004283411}}</ref> It may have been quite subtle: the men of Ephraim were unlikely to be "caught totally napping by any test that involved some gross and readily detectable difference of pronunciation";<ref name="Woodhouse">{{cite journal|last=Woodhouse|first=Robert|year=2003|title=The Biblical Shibboleth Story in the Light of Late Egyptian Perceptions of Semitic Sibilants: Reconciling Divergent Views|journal=Journal of the American Oriental Society|volume=123|issue=2|pages=271–289|jstor=3217684}}.</ref>{{rp|274}}  On a superficial reading the fleeing Ephraimites were betrayed by their dialect: they said ''sibbōleth''.  But it has been asked why they did not simply repeat what the Gileadite sentries told them to say<ref name="Hendel"/>{{rp|250}} — "they surely would have used the required sound to save their necks",<ref name="Speiser"/> since peoples in the region could say both "sh" and "s".<ref>According to Speiser, "We have no knowledge of any West Semitic language that fails to include both ''š'' and ''s'' as independent phonemes": Speiser (1942), 10-11.</ref><ref>"The phonemic distinction of ''š : s'' is preserved in all known Northwest Semitic dialects of the Iron Age": Hendel (1996), 70.</ref>  "We have yet to learn how the suspects were caught by the catchword".<ref name="Speiser">{{cite journal|last=Speiser|first=E.A.|year=1942|author-link=Ephraim Avigdor Speiser|title=The Shibboleth Incident (Judges 12:6)|journal=Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research|volume=85|pages=10–13|jstor=1355052}}</ref> A related problem (akin to [[false positive]]s) is how the test spared neutral tribes with whom the Gileadite guards had no quarrel, yet pinpointed the Ephraimite enemy.<ref name="Marcus">{{cite journal|last=Marcus|first=David|year=1992|title=Ridiculing the Ephraimites: The Shibboleth Incident (Judg 12: 6)|journal=Maarav|volume=8|issue=1|pages=95–105}}</ref>{{rp|98}}

[[File:The Ford of River Jordan.jpg|thumb|Shepherds fording the river Jordan (old postcard).  The men of Ephraim could not cross without saying the password.]]
[[Ephraim Avigdor Speiser]] therefore proposed that the test involved a more challenging sound than could be written down in the later biblical Hebrew narrative, namely the [[phoneme]] {{angbr IPA|θ}} (≈ English "th").  Present in archaic Hebrew (said Speiser) but later lost in most dialects, the Gileadites, who lived across a dialect boundary (the river Jordan), had retained it in theirs.  Thus, what the Gileadite guards would have demanded was the password ''thibbōlet''.  The phoneme is difficult for naive users — to this day, wrote Speiser, most non-Arab Muslims cannot pronounce the classical Arabic equivalent — hence the best the Ephraimite refugees could manage was ''sibbōlet''.<ref name=Speiser />  Speiser's solution has had a mixed reception,<ref>David Marcus said it was "virtually the norm in Biblical scholarship" (Marcus, 1992, 96), while Woodhouse did not even include it in his list of proposals deserving serious consideration: Woodhouse (2003).  It has been criticised for lack of evidential support in [[cognate]] Semitic languages (Emerton, 2014, 251) and for not tackling the false positives problem, since neutral Hebrew-speaking tribes could not have said "th" either (Marcus, 1992, 98).</ref> but has been revived by [[Gary A. Rendsburg]].<ref name="Rendsburg">{{cite journal|last=Rendsburg|first=Gary A.|year=1988|author-link=Gary A. Rendsburg|title=The Ammonite Phoneme /Ṯ/|journal=Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research|volume=269|pages=73–79|jstor=1356953}}</ref>

[[John Emerton]] argued that "Perhaps [the Ephraimites] could pronounce ''š'', but they articulated the consonant in a different way from the Gileadites, and their pronunciation sounded to the men of Gilead like ''s''".  There is a range of ways of pronouncing the two phonemes.  "An old clergyman of my acquaintance used to say 'O Lord, save the Queen' in such a way that it sounded [to me] like 'O Lord, shave the Queen'", and analogies could be found amongst Hebrew users in modern Lithuania and Morocco.<ref name="Emerton"/>{{rp|256}}  [[University of California, Berkeley|Berkeley]] scholar Ronald Hendel agreed, saying the theory was supported by a document recently dug up near modern [[Amman]].  It tended to show that, across the Jordan, the pronunciation of the phoneme "sh" was heard as "s" by Hebrew speakers from the opposite side of the river. "This is why Gileadite ''šibbōlet'' is repeated by the Ephraimites as ''sibbōlet'': they simply repeated the word as they heard it".<ref name="Hendel"/>  Other solutions have been proposed.<ref>They are mentioned in the sources cited in this section.</ref>

David Marcus has contended that linguistic scholars have missed the point of the biblical anecdote: The purpose of the later [[Judea]]n narrator was not to record some phonetic detail, but to satirise the incompetence of "the [[Tribe of Ephraim#Character|high and mighty northern Ephraimites]]".  "The shibboleth episode ridicules the Ephraimites who are portrayed as incompetent nincompoops who cannot even repeat a test-word spoken by the Gileadite guards".<ref name="Marcus"/>