An important area of research in our field has been the relationship between Qur??nic and Islamic terminology and their cognates in other Semitic languages, particularly those of the Jews and Christians of the Near East. The value of these studies cannot be overstated. The investigation of the relationship between “Arabic” speakers and their neighbors at the dawn of Islam has significant implications for our knowledge of the formation and rise of Islam. However, the work in this area has not explored the material as thoroughly as it could. The identification of cognates is usually done by consulting dictionaries, which does not take the diachronic development of a given Semitic root’s meaning (i.e., the meaning of some words date to after the rise of Islam). Additionally, the Qur??n and later legal texts have served as the primary material for comparison; the large corpus of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, an important source, has been left untouched in this area. If we are to better understand the emergence of a specific religious lexicon with the Qur??n and Islamic legal works in relation to the function of non-Arabic cognates, we must examine how all of these words and terms function in the poetic corpus. To address this problem, I will select a small sample of technical terms from the category of ?ib?d?t (rituals: zak?t, ?awm, ?al?t, ?ajj, ?ah?ra), develop a diachronic map of the development of the trilateral roots of these terms in a number of Semitic languages (Hebrew, numerous Aramaic dialects, Old South Arabic, and Ancient North Arabian). I will then compare the development of these roots and the diversity of their meanings to a number of derivatives found in pre-Islamic poetry. My sources include the digital archives of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (http://cal.huc.edu), the Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (http://dasi.humnet.unipi.it), and several canonical collections of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry (Al-Mufa??al al-?abb?’s Mufa??aliyy?t, Al-A?ma??’s A?ma?iyy?t, Qurash?’s Jamharat ash??r al-?arab, and the ?am?sas of Ab? Tamm?m and Bu?tar?). I will argue that a conceptual familiarity with the ?ib?d?t (in their proto-Islamic forms) can be found in pre-Islamic poetry. This familiarity suggests that the ?ib?d?t were not imported whole-cloth from Jewish and Christian practices at the moment of Islam’s appearance. Rather, the poetry suggests that those who produced this poetry had an understanding of the ?ib?d?t that, while certainly connected to Jewish and Christian practices, informed their development during Islam’s emergence.