Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

At 18.09 20/06/00 +0100, Peter Kirk wrote:
>Ian, I did not intend to be rude. Sorry if I led you to take it that way.
>There are complex twists in your arguments, ones which I do not believe are
>justified. But, since I accept you were not deliberately being confusing, I
>have to conclude that you are confused. Maybe I am also.

Thanks for your clarification, Peter. I don't believe I am confused, but
you still might be right.

>What do you understand by "cognate" when speaking of words? How, in your
>understanding, can words (of similar form in different languages) be related
>but not cognate?

Cognates are words that come from the same source word but have developed
their own way in separate languages. "head" and "capo" are cognates, as are
"Haupt" and "huvud". "chief" however, although from the same source, is not
a cognate for it has jumped language -- it was borrowed from Old French (as
"chef" was borrowed much later), though originally from the Latin "caput"
which was a cognate. Cognates are therefore native to individual sibling
languages. What needs to be established for `rb (=evening, from "to become
dark") is how Hebrew got the word. If it was always in the language then it
could be a cognate with a related word in another language. And that could
be `rb (=go in) in Ugaritic. But still, even being cognates doesn't mean
that their significances need to be directly related. Haupt is "principal"
as in English "head office", but German also has another word originally
borrowed I think from the Latin, Kopf.

Are "have" and "avere" cognates?

>I suppose there could be some confusion somewhere in our thinking between
>the roots `rb and qrb. The latter means "draw near" in Hebrew, and includes
>the sexual meanings. Does it appear with ayin instead of qoph in Ugaritic?

ayin. And the verb `rb means "to enter" or "to go in". I checked it
yesterday in a volume of UF. What I couldn't find was a word for "evening".

>There are also at least two distinct roots `rb in Hebrew (corrseponding, I
>understand, to different pronunciations of ayin at least in early Hebrew);
>one, meaning "evening", is cognate with the Arabic gh-r-b as in Maghreb =
>west, place of the evening, and the other is cognate with the Arabic `rb as
>in `arab "Arab", which is both Arabic and Hebrew. Perhaps someone who knows
>more Hebrew and Ugaritic than either of us can put us right on which root
>underlies `rbt in the Ugaritic text in question.

Ugaritic `rb. This is what all the literature indicates.

>Meanwhile, I thought you might be describing this text as "infamous" because
>of the part it plays in David Rohl's proposed revised chronology, as set out
>in his book "A Test of Time" or "Pharaohs and Kings". For the benefit of you
>and others who have not read his book, I will describe briefly (and from
>memory for the moment) what he has to say about this text. He interprets it
>as a description of an eclipse at sunset (b++ "ashamed" as metonymy for
>"darkened"; `rbt as "setting"). 

This is where I first got to see the text. You can see the problem however.
There are many difficulties in the text. Dave has indicated how he would
approach it. Rohl has indicated how he did. Sawyer & Stephenson their way.
Aisleitner his. In UF 6, pp.464-5, M. Dietrich, O. Lorenz and J. Sanmartin
opted for this:

    Der Neumondtag des Monats Xjr        b++ . ym xd+ xyr .
                wurde zu Schanden.       
    Die Sonne ging unter,                `rbt $p$
    R$p war ihr Pfoertner.               +grh r$p

    Die Lebern ueberpruefte man:         kbdm tbqrn
    Gefahr.                              skn

I think we can discount the notion of `rbt $p$ as being "at sunset":
nothing in the text points to it being a temporal phrase. So the analyses
based on what seems an obviously unsupportable translation have little weight.

But this little text is full of traps. The last section for example was
seen as a warning, but now is related to extispicy. 

>He then compares this with results from
>modern astronomy which show that there was a total eclipse of the sun at
>Ugarit near to sunset only once in the whole 2nd millennium (eclipses are
>very rare!) and that was in (I think) 1004 BCE. That is of course more than
>200 years later than the conventional date for the end of Ugarit. Rohl makes
>this a major plank of his chronology. Of course, as you have pointed out
>before, Ian, Rohl's chronology conflicts with the evidence from Assyrian
>king lists. But I was interested to see evidence on this list last week that
>the chronology of those king lists has been deliberately falsified.
>Admittedly that falsification is a matter of 18 years, not more than 200.

I'm more interested in the text, Peter. 

(If you want a clear refutation of Rohl's supporters' attempts to
reconstruct Mesopotamian history I can give you one. Just contemplate now,
however, if we put aside Carchemish, how a northern Syria/eastern Anatolia
of 850 BCE (the time of Salmaneser III) was made up of such states as Bit
Adini, Gurgum, Sam'al, Bit Agusi, Kummukh, Que, and Tabal, could at the
same time have been made up of Hatti, Kizzuwatna, Alalakh, Ugarit, Nuhashe
and Ni'i (the time of Tudhaliya III). If you find that that is impossible,
you'll find that it is not sufficient to play with Egyptian chronology.)

>But it doesn't inspire great confidence in the use made of these lists as
>the major plank of conventional chronology and of counter-argument to Rohl's
>theories.

Another one, if you need one to get off this stuff: if the Mitannian king
Shaushtatar, who was only a few generations before Tushratta of Amarna
fame, held sway from Alalakh to Nuzi to the east of Assyria, thus
functionally surrounding Assyria, how could he have been around during the
late Assyrian hegemony?? Obviously he was around to raid the Assyrian
capital and come away with booty when Assyria was small fry before the time
of Ashur-uballit I, the king who broke from Mitannian vassalage, as
reported in the Amarna letters, so the Amarna letters were around 1350 BCE.
(And more on request.)

Back to our text: what I was interested in was 1) whether there was any
hope of getting some of the conflicts in it resolved, and 2) what are the
solid indications of actual eclipses in the OT/HB?


Ian