Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

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/