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  • From: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] theophoric prefixes (YH~YHW)
  • Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:46:50 +0200


----- Original Message ----- From: "Joel Stucki" <joel AT stucki.ws>

I have to admit the term "Israelean" is kind of cute. Israelite and
Israeli just don't work for you?

"Israelite" refers to the whole 12-tribe nation of Israel. The term "Israelean" was coined by H.L. Ginzberg to refer to the northern kingdom. "Israeli" is a totally modern term, coined by Ben-Gurion, to refer to citizens of the modern state of Israel (of whom 20% are not "Israelite").



The forms given in the Bible are no proof of anything, since the Bible is
Judahite, and even the "pre-exilic" books were as least heavily edited in
the post-exilic period.

All this was noted by Tur-Sinai decades ago, when he published the Lachish
ostraca found in the 1930's.

Seems like a sweeping generaliziation Yigal. There is such a large
corpus of data and many different origins. I would find it
unbelievable to say it is all just Judahite. Surely some of the books
originated from the north and would have preserved some of their
character as such. I would agree though that it might be quite a
jigsaw puzzle at this point to decipher dialects in the recieved text.
I believe some studies have been done on proper names from the Israel
and Judah kingdoms in the Tanakh and some trends were noted.
Unfortuately, I don't have a reference on hand.

Joel Stucki

Joel, this is more than a generalization - it is the only way to explain the evidence at hand. Scholars such as Gary Rendsburg have been attempting to isolate Northern texts (as opposed to traditions) in the Bible for years, all inconclusively. Yes, traditions about Elijah and Elisha may be of Israelean origin, but they are worked into the Deuteronomistic History in such a way as to serve Judahite literary and theological interests - those of the authors of the DH (without getting into a debate of whether these are Josianic, exilic or post exilic). The same is true of northen traditions in Joshua, Judges and Samuel. And if the stories themselves have been re-written, certainly the orthography would have been up-dated in keeping with the conventions of their intended readers.
The Tanakh as we have it is pure Judahite, albeit incorporating older traditions, some from the north.

Yigal Levin




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