The Origin and Meaning of Mandaic ‫עותרא (original) (raw)

The most characteristic figures in the Mandaean religion are the beings known as the eutria. Unlike the Great First Mind and Its various emanations, who remain largely aloof from the material world, the eutria repeatedly intervene in the affairs of mankind to protect the Mandaeans and punish those who threaten them. Even though the Mandaeans worship the Great Life as their supreme being, the eutria, and particularly the triad Hibel, Shitel, and Ennosh, are ever present in their thoughts and prayers. The eutria are so quintessentially Mandaean that the term is entirely absent from the vocabulary of other contemporary religions, although the category of beings to which they refer is routinely compared to the angels of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the aeons of western Gnostic traditions. As a consequence, the origin and precise meaning of the term eutra has been the subject of some debate. In this brief communication, I shall challenge the scholarly consensus that has developed over the past fifteen decades, namely that Classical Mandaic eutra is cognate with Aramaic ˁuṯrā ‘riches’ and therefore means ‘riches’, citing internal evidence from the Mandaic literature and the comparative evidence from the other Semitic languages. By comparing its contemporary form, Neo-Mandaic oṯrɔ, with related words in all other branches of Semitic, I shall demonstrate that Classical Mandaic eutra clearly derives from the PS root *w-t-r ‘to exceed’, that it is one of an extremely small class of relic C-stem deverbal adjectives in Aramaic, that its original meaning with reference to divine beings is ‘excellent’, and that in Classical Mandaic (and only in Classical Mandaic) it secondarily came to be used as a proper noun referring to an entire category of supernatural beings (‘the excellencies’).