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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: nir AT ccet.ufrn.br, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] yrw$lm
  • Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:00:13 -0400 (EDT)


Nir Cohen:
 
You wrote:  “[T]he only possible reason to have sumerian URU before the name would be by official babylonian nomination.”
 
Or, more likely, by mistake.
 
Consider for example the city name Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia.  I have been unable to find any scholarly etymology of the name Uruk.  But one naturally wonders if it might be URU, meaning “city”, plus the ending -K or -ka, which is prominent in many non-west Semitic languages [and often functions as a generic term of endearment].
 
Consider also the city name “Ura”, an ancient city located in southeast Anatolia, just west of northwest Syria.  I don’t know a scholarly etymology, but once again, one wonders if that place was referred to as URU, meaning “city” as a Sumerian logogram, and then the name stuck, in the form of Ura.
 
In fact, there are a fair number of names, both of places and of rulers, in the ancient world that start with Uru or a slight variant of Uru.  Perhaps some of them are corruptions of an original reference to URU as a Sumerian logogram meaning “city”.
 
IR-Heba was a Hurrian princeling ruler of Jerusalem in the Late Bronze Age who doesn’t seem to know any name for the city he ruled other than úru$lm.  He wasn’t a native west Semitic speaker, nor did he know much Akkadian or Sumerian.  Those were all esoteric foreign languages to him.  IR-Heba may well have been preceded by a succession of Hurrian rulers of Jerusalem, none of whom paid the slightest bit of attention to the underlying Semitic meaning of the name of the city they had come to rule.  To me, it’s easy to see how, through human error and/or sloppiness and/or not caring, URU $lm could become corrupted to úru$lm.  Indeed, I for one am surprised that mistakes like that weren’t made more often in the ancient world regarding place names.
 
But from the standpoint of Biblical studies, the only thing that is important regarding the name Jerusalem, in my opinion, is that by the time the Hebrews first come into existence, that city had the pre-existing non-Hebrew name of úru$lm.  We can speculate how such name may have come about originally, but the key is that the Hebrews only knew Jerusalem by that name.   The Hebrews never knew $LM as the original city name, and at least in the Patriarchal narratives I do not see $LM as being used as a shortened name for Jerusalem.  Úru$lm was “just a name” to the early Hebrews, who didn’t care at that point what the underlying meaning of that corrupted name might be or might have originally been.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois



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