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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Ayin and Ghayin

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: B Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Ayin and Ghayin
  • Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 23:27:56 +0000

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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