?סופית בפפירוס נחל צאלים 13 ē < ī כלום משתקף המעתק

The Aramaic document Naḥal Ṣeʾelim 13, published in 1995 by Ada Yardeni and Jonas C. Greenfield, has aroused considerable debate. It has been described alternatively as a receipt for a marriage contract (kəṯubbā), a divorce document written by the wife (geṭ), and a waiver of claims from a wife to her husband. No less controversial is the interpretation of some spellings with final heh for expected yod: מנה, בעלה, עין, גדה and עלה. Whereas Yardeni and Greenfield analyzed the forms as ʿEn Gəḏē 'Ein Gedi', minnah 'from her', baʿlah 'her husband', and ʿălah, 'upon her', Hannah M. Cotton and Elisha Qimron argue that the context and plain sense of the documents requires first-person singular forms, and that the orthography of these words must reflect a word final shift ī>ē in the speech of the scribe. This paper reexamines the proposed shift of final ī>ē as well as the Aramaic and Hebrew parallels to such a shift that Cotton and Qimron cited in support of their argument.