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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Re: Eden's Four Rivers (article)

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Karl Randolph <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Re: Eden's Four Rivers (article)
  • Date: Fri, 13 May 2005 13:34:56 +0100

On 13/05/2005 07:18, Karl Randolph wrote:

...

Precisely. There is no evidence for you to rule out him being from Sumer, and no evidence for others to rule out him being from Edessa/Urfa. There is insufficient evidence either way.


The strongest evidence is the name of the place listed as Abraham’s birth
place. That it is connected with a Semitic people argues against it being
Sumer. Even a Sumer with a Semitic underclass.


You misunderstand the situation. The Semites in the southern Ur were not an underclass. If, as many do, we date Abraham to the Ur III period of revival following the period of domination by the Gutians, this was in fact a period of revival of Sumerian culture, but only after a period in which Ur and all of southern Mesopotamia had been dominated by the Semites of Akkad/Agade. Perhaps Terah and Abraham, as Semites, felt unwelcome in an Ur where Sumerians had regained dominance, and so moved to more clearly Semitic lands to the north west.

As for the connection with a Semitic people, who were the Kasdim? Unless this is an anachronistic reference to the neo-Babylonians of Nebuchadnezzar's time, we have no reason to suppose that they were Semites rather than Sumerians.

...

Don’t be ridiculous! The reason the teacher picked on him was because he was
ethnic Chinese. That he was born in Canton, Ohio rules out that he was
immigrant Chinese, opposite of what the teacher expected.

The connection here to Abraham is that he was ethnic Semite. ...


Yes, he was an ethnic Semite, but that doesn't prove that he was born in a Semitic city rather than as an immigrant in a largely Sumerian city. A precise parallel to your ethnic Chinese.

... Walter Mattfeld just argued that history places many ethnic Semites
living in Ur of the Sumerians, so the ethnicity argument is weakened. But
from the article you linked http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/Ur.htm
apparently there were several places with a name that would be written as
Aleph Waw Resh in Hebrew, the locations of which today are unknown or can
only be guessed at, so the question becomes which place was Abraham from?
That it was a place connected with a Semitic people is a pretty strong
argument against Ur of the Sumerians. ...


Where does this "Ur of the Sumerians" come from? Of course the fact that your student was ethnic Chinese is a pretty strong argument against him coming from Canton, Ohio (presumably there are many more ethnic Chinese born in Canton, China), but the argument happened to be wrong. A better parallel might be whether an ethnic Hispanic was from Los Angeles, California, or a small town called Los Angeles in Mexico. At first sight a Mexican Los Angeles sounds more likely, but there are actually more Hispanics born in Los Angeles, California, than in any small town anywhere in the world. The southern Ur was one of big cities of the ancient world, and had a large, perhaps even majority population of Semites. So there is no way that it is improbable that any one wandering Semite originally came from there. The possible northern Urs were probably much smaller places.

... By naming several places as having the same name, the article explains
why the place wasn’t just called “Ur” rather “Ur of the Chaldeas”. Further,
looking at the Hebrew pronunciation of Chaldean, K#DYM, it sounds like it
indicates a people who in Abraham’s time probably lived north of Babylon,
while Sumer was to the south.


What evidence do you have for who the K#DYM were in Abraham's time? That is a serious question, I would be interested in any evidence for this people in this period.


...

What you or anyone who argues that Abraham was from Sumer needs to do is to
find an original reference (in other words, ancient from about the time of
Abraham, not modern after archeology uncovered Ur or the Sumerians) that
refers to Ur of the Sumerians ...


Correction, not Ur of the Sumerians, possibly Ur in Sumeria but Ur of the Semites as well as the Sumerians.

... as )WR K#DYM or the equivelant. ...


No, because I suspect that this name is an anachronism, and because if it is not no one knows who the K#DYM were.

... Right now, the name of the locale pretty much rules out Ur of the
Sumerians.


But it does not rule out Ur of the Semites as well as the Sumerians, which is a better description of the southern city.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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