shaneh

The lexica agree on the sense. BDB glosses "year (as a revolution of time)" and files the noun under the verbal root שׁנה; HALOT supplies the comparative Semitic cognates; DCH treats the word synchronically by sense and collocation. BDB also notes that the feminine-pattern plural שְׁנוֹת belongs "in poetry and late" texts (first at Deut 32:7, then in the Psalms and Isaiah) alongside the ordinary prose plural שָׁנִים, a small stylistic and diachronic marker that the grammars discuss under gender discord in plural formation. Comparative Semitists reconstruct Proto-Semitic *šanat-, reflected in Akkadian šattu (with šanat and šanātu preserving the unassimilated n), Ugaritic šnt, Aramaic šattā, and Arabic sana; on this basis TDOT (vol. 15, p. 325) judges the noun primary, derived from neither the "repeat" nor the "change" sense of the verbal root, while conceding that the two verbal meanings may share an origin. The Aramaic contrast between t-n- "repeat" and š-n- "change" is the crisp datum that the verbal roots were themselves originally distinct. Counters differ on the total (roughly 871 to 880; BDB gives 877). The word's weight in the literature falls on calendar and chronology: the sabbatical year and Jubilee of Lev 25 (Milgrom, Levine; Bergsma on the Jubilee's history of interpretation, with the Mesopotamian mīšarum and andurārum edicts as parallels and Akkadian andurārum widely held to lie behind דְּרוֹר in Lev 25:10); the regnal formulae of Kings, where Thiele's accession and non-accession systems plus postulated coregencies remain the influential but sharply contested baseline (Hughes reading the chronology as an artificial theological scheme); the schematic 364-day year of Jubilees, 1 Enoch and the Qumran calendrical texts (VanderKam, Talmon, Ben-Dov; Ratson and Ben-Dov on 4Q324d); and the reinterpretation of Jeremiah's seventy years as seventy weeks of years in Dan 9 (Fishbane, as a paradigm case of inner-biblical exegesis; Collins). The large year figures of Gen 5 and 11 diverge substantially between MT, SP and LXX (Hendel arguing MT priority in the primeval chronology), so the numbers are text-critically unstable, and readings of them range from literal (Thiele, Steinmann) through schematic or symbolic (Westermann, Wenham, Sarna) to derivation from Babylonian sexagesimal mathematics (D. W. Young), with the Sumerian King List as the standard comparison. In the Septuagint the word is rendered chiefly by ἔτος and ἐνιαυτός, without a consistently maintained distinction. Iron Age epigraphy supplies the dating formula outside the Bible: the Samaria ostraca date jar deliveries to the ninth, tenth, fifteenth and seventeenth years of an unnamed king, and the Gezer calendar lays out the agricultural round a year tracks.