166 HEATH DEWRELL though, that the two types of women who are explicitly excluded from wearing a veil in the Middle Assyrian laws were prostitutes and con- cubines, i.e., women whose sexual status was viewed as less “re- spectable” than either full wives or virgin daughters. In Tamar’s case, Amnon’s rape had likewise altered her sexual status from more to less “respectable”, i.e., from virgin to violated. This similarity becomes even more striking when one observes that the verb used in reference to “veiling” in the Middle Assyrian Laws is paṣānu, the Assyrian form of the Akkadian verb pasāmu (√psm) 15. This root is phonetically quite similar to the problematic He- brew ~ysp in ~ysp(h) tntk. Indeed, if one considers the possibility that Hebrew ~ysp is not the plural of a qall-type noun from √ssp, as previ- ous interpreters have assumed, but is instead a qaṭṭîl-type noun 16 from √~sp, then not only do the Middle Assyrian Laws provide an interest- ing conceptual parallel for Tamar’s garment, but they do so using a direct lexical cognate! That is to say, both the Middle Assyrian Laws and the Hebrew Bible would refer to garments that served to indicate sexual and social status via the term √psm. That these two texts refer to garments that served remarkably similar functions, using identical lexical roots, is unlikely to be mere coincidence. Thus, based on both the explicit claim of 2 Sam 13,18a and the comparative Assyrian evi- dence, one can posit that the meaning of ~ysp(h) tntk was something like “the garment of veiling” and that this garment’s function was to indicate the sexual and social status of high-born women. II. Joseph’s ~ysp(h) tntk If the argument above is sound and ~ysp(h) tntk was a type of gar- ment worn to mark the virginity of royal daughters, then the obvious question is: What on earth is Joseph doing wearing one in Genesis 37? After all, there is no evidence that a such a garment would have been appropriate for a young man to have worn, and it is rather unlikely that there are two different garments called ~ysp(h) tntk mentioned in the Hebrew Bible — a “veiling garment” that Tamar wears in 2 Samuel 15 See GAG3 §30c and the bibliography there, as well as CAD P 217-218. The same word is attested in ugaritic in the phrase lbš psm rq “a fine psm garment” (CAT3 4.205:5); see DULAT 685, which translates psm as “veil or gauze”, and even connects it to Hebrew ktnt psym, albeit without further comment. 16 This pattern is relatively common in Hebrew. For examples see J. FoX, Semitic Noun Patterns (Winona Lake, IN 2003) 268-269.