Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

 Shortly after the sensational claim of the earleist proto- Canaanite 
inscription ever discovered was made - see below - what appears as complete 
refutation by an Egyptologist appeared :

In response to the announcement of the alleged discovery 
of 
Proto-Canaanite spells in the Pyramid Texts by Richard 
Steiner 
distributed via the EEF and Agade lists (a pdf-file in 
Ivrit is 
available at 
<http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/PDF/steiner.pdf >), 
I think it is imperative to be extremely cautious.

As far as I see, the author did not account for the most 
recent 
Egyptological treatment of the spells in questions (C. 
Leitz, Die 
Schlangensprüche in den Pyramidentexten. Or 65 (1996): 
381-427) and 
not all the lexemes pretended to appear in the spells can 
be 
assumed to have existed around 2500 BC within a single 
dialect 
(e.g. Hw "snake" is Old Aramaic and more recent; with a 
chronological gap of 1500 years). Most notably, the sound 
correspondences postulated by the author would in many 
instances 
not be possible in the Egyptian transcription systems of 
the 2nd 
millennium, and seem to be outright impossible for the 3rd 
millennium. These IMPOSSIBLE correspondances include:

- Eg. <k> for Semitic /q/ (line 5, 8, 12 on p. 3f.) (the 
correct 
correspondance would lead to kbb "to burn" instead of qbb 
"conjure" 
etc.)
- <t> for /Tet/ (line 7)
- <t> for /Dalet/ (line 7) (possible from the 2nd mill. 
onward; 
around 2500 the Eg. Ayin-grapheme still represented the 
voiced 
dental)
- <T> (t with diacritic stroke) for /t/ or /Tet/ (line 13, 
14, 18) 
(<T> represents a palatalized /k/)
- <Ayin> for <Ayin> (line 18) (possible from ca. 2000 BC)
- <S> for emphatic sibilants/interdentals (line 18) (never 
possible).

This makes the assumptions put forward by the author 
highly 
unlikely.

Best regards,
Thomas Schneider
-- 
Prof. Dr. Thomas Schneider
Chair in Egyptology
Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology
University of Wales Swansea
Singleton Park
Swansea SA2 8PP Wales, United Kingdom

tel. ++44 1792 513538 (office)
++44 1792 202804 (home)
==============================================================

The above post has been put up (temporarily) on the EEF 
Website:
<http://www.egyptologyforum.org>

  
  
---------------------------------
     

On 1/25/07, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:    >..... "Proto-Canaanite-Spells in  > 
Hieroglyphics: An Initial Review of the Development of Hebrew in the  > 3rd 
Millenium BCE"  ......<  
   
   

 
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>From joel AT exc.com  Fri Jan 26 12:20:03 2007
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Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:06:25 -0500 (EST)
From: "Dr. Joel M. Hoffman" <joel AT exc.com>
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] numbering of 10 commandments (Exodus 20)
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Thank you to everyone who has written about the (lack of) the 10
commandments in Exodus, and about the root d.b.r.  (BTW, I have a
short chatty essay about DBR and its various meanings:

    http://www.lashon.net/JMH/Publications/Davar.pdf

on-line.)

But still, does anyone know where the two numbering traditions come
from in Exodus 20?

Many thanks.

-Joel

Joel M. Hoffman, PhD
http://www.lashon.net/JMH