[b-hebrew] Ayin and Ghayin
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org
Tue Nov 8 18:27:56 EST 2005
On 08/11/2005 20:00, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
>On 11/8/05, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>
>>On 08/11/2005 16:05, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
>>
>>
>>>There are no historical claims in the Bible that it was written
>>>centuries before Ugarit. ...
>>>
>>>
>
>If you look in the original message, "it" refers to "Biblical Hebrew",
>not to the Bible. This isn't clear from the above quote, and evidently
>even most of the Bible was not written down "centuries before
>Ugarit." I think everyone will agree to that. ...
>
Indeed. I did realise that the "it" was "biblical Hebrew". But if Moses
did indeed write down much of Deuteronomy before he died, as is claimed
in the remaining part of Deuteronomy (31:9,24), then the presumption is
that he wrote in biblical Hebrew. Of course the text could have been
translated, which is unlikely, or perhaps adapted into a rather later
form of Hebrew, which is more probable - with the poems e.g. the song of
Moses (also said to have been written down by Moses, 31:22) perhaps
remaining much closer to the original written form. If these claims are
true (which is of course far from certain), at least one biblical Hebrew
text was written down before the Ugaritic texts.
>... The earliest reference in
>my history books that I found to some datable historical text in
>Ugaritic is a text by Niqmaddu/Niqmahaddu, that relates him as a
>contemporary of Suppiluliuma I (1370-1330), king of Mitanni, in a
>treaty that he made with him. ...
>
This is an interesting claim, because I have read elsewhere claims that
the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet was used only in the last 50 years or so
of Ugarit, so not until the second half of the 13th century BCE on
standard datings - so about two centuries after the possible date for
Deuteronomy. But I also remember some mention of texts in Ugaritic
written in Mesopotamian cuneiform script, so maybe these include the one
you refer to. I don't remember now if Karl's argument related more to
the Ugaritic language or to its alphabet.
>... Ugaritic as a language is then spoken
>at best contemporary with and very likely earlier than the possible
>15th century Exodus date. ...
>
I don't think anyone has doubted that the Ugaritic language, or an early
form of it, was spoken in or around Ugarit before the Exodus. The
discussion is explicitly about written texts.
>... The 15th century Exodus date is by
>no means the best -- there are problems connecting the Exodus to
>the Hyksos expulsion since the Hyksos are expelled in the 16th
>century BCE, and Raamses is unlikely to have been a city name
>prior to Ramesses I. ...
>
I agree that there are problems with such connections - but not with
this last one, because the name Raamses appears also in Genesis 47:11,
where it must be an anachronism like Dan in Genesis 14:14 - and so why
not also in Exodus? Of course here I am accepting that the text of the
Torah was edited after Moses' time, although Karl might not accept this
possibility.
>... Now the question that is left is whether the
>original language was Biblical Hebrew or not. It could have been
>written in Canaanite. In fact, I don't think the Hebrew Bible never
>mentions Hebrew as a "language." It refers to the language as
>"Judaean" or "language of Canaan." So that, it's quite possible
>that in the eyes of the Israelites, the Amarna Canaanite glosses
>or even Ugaritic would be identified as something akin to "Old
>Hebrew."
>
>
I would consider the name of the language to be irrelevant. It was
probably called different things by different people, perhaps partly
corresponding with minor dialect differences (cf those between biblical
Hebrew and the "Moabite" of the Mesha stele). The point is, as you say,
whether the texts which might have been written down at the time of the
Exodus would be recognised by us as biblical Hebrew. Well, the song of
Moses and some other early poems are recognised by modern scholars as
being in "early biblical Hebrew", which is presumably accepted by Karl
and all others as a version of biblical Hebrew, and actually many
scholars date these poems to the 2nd millennium. There is surely a
reasonable chance that these poems really do date back to the time of
the Exodus (or to a century or so later in the case of Judges 5) and
have been preserved in more or less their original form - whereas any
prose portions which survive from that time have very likely been
updated into a later form of the language. And, if this is true, these
"early biblical Hebrew" poems may very well predate (whether in written
or oral form) at least the alphabetic Ugaritic texts, although maybe not
by centuries as originally claimed.
--
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
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