Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jim:

There are a few flies in your oatmeal.

There was no city named Carmel in the Bible, neither before Abigail, nor
after. There was a region, equivalent to an American county, named Carmel,
but no city. That does not rule out a town also named Carmel only not
mentioned in the Bible, as many cities were never named in the Bible, just
that such a town is never mentioned in the Bible.

Connected with the above, that the Bible mentions only a relatively few
cities out of the many that were built, it is very possible that there was a
city north of Judah that was named KRMWN or KRMN, meaning a place of
vineyards. Unlike the -L suffix from modern Swiss German which is not known
in Biblical Hebrew, the -WN suffix is known. Thus it is very possible that
there was a town KRMWN that was not mentioned in the Bible, yet appear on
the Thutmosis list.

As a person who has written a dictionary, I can state that there are some
four consonantal letter roots in the Hebrew language. Further, there are
loan words from other languages that had four or more consonants. Hence the
claim that KRML represents a three letter root with a -L suffix cannot be
substantiated.

Thus your insistence that Carmel is the same city as KRMN mentioned in the
Thutmosis list is illogical.

But then we long ago learned not to expect logic from you, as you repeatedly
attack the mainstream scholarship on Biblical archaeology, yet have
swallowed hook, line and sinker the mainstream scholarship on Egyptian
studies, even though that scholarship is on recognizably shakier ground.

I just looked at the home page of Evanston: it looks like a great place to
live; mountains visible in the background, clean air, nearby wildlife
(though you may have to watch out for moose), ranches just outside of town,
and so forth; with all that cleanliness and purity, who would want to live
in the dirt and grime of Cook County? Oh, by the way, that was Evanston,
Wyoming.

I give this as an example that just as we cannot assume that our town is the
only one in the States that has a particular name, so we cannot assume that
each place in ancient Israel had a unique name, especially since not all
place names were recorded in the surviving histories. And if you expand that
to similar sounding names, it is almost certain that most place names were
similar to other place names in other parts of the country.

Karl W. Randolph.