Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

In this post I will set forth my final thoughts on “Jacob-El”.  Then next 
week I will give a linguistic response to the broader questions Karl has 
recently raised about the accuracy, and antiquity, of the Joshua city lists 
in 
general.
 
In the prior posts on this thread, I noted that the second version of item 
#102 on the Thutmosis III list was no longer “Jacob-El”, but rather seems to 
have become YQB-(M, meaning “Winepress People”.  It is that later version of 
the town name that had started out as “Jacob-El” that we may be able to find 
in 
the Bible.  
 
We have previously noted that several cities listed at Joshua 15: 52-60 
appear to have historically been located a few miles west of hill country, 
though 
Biblical analysts have previously thought that most or all such cities were 
located in hill country proper.  That is the first place to look in the Bible 
for 
the Biblical Hebrew equivalent of YQB(M.
 
The Masoretic text has YQD(M at Joshua 15: 56, which is transliterated into 
English as “Jokdeam”.  We immediately see that 4 of the 5 letters in the 
Masoretic text version of this city name match the 5 significant letters in 
the 
second version of item #102 on the Thutmosis III list: YQB(M.
 
Several considerations suggest that the one differing letter, the dalet/D in 
the Masoretic text, has been transcribed incorrectly here.  For starters, if 
this city name is YQD + (M, that would mean “Burn People”!  That hardly seems 
an appropriate Canaanite name for a city.  
 
When we look at the oldest manuscript of the Septuagint, the Vaticanus Codex 
(which is 600 years older than the oldest Masoretic text manuscript), we see 
Iarikam.  We immediately note that the suspect dalet/D is not present in this 
old Septuagint version.  Since the Septuagint is not translating an old 
Hebrew 
text here, but rather is merely transcribing a city name from that old Hebrew 
text, the oldest extant version of this Biblical city name in the Septuagint 
is significant.  
 
We also note that no “Jokdeam” ever appears in secular history.  We 
therefore should rightly suspect that a bet/B may have gotten written down 
incorrectly 
as a dalet/D in the Masoretic text.
 
In that connection, it should be noted that one easy transcription error to 
make, in an 8th century BCE context (or thereabouts), would be for a scribe 
to 
start writing down a bet/B, but then get distracted, so that instead of 
completing the bet/B as planned, all that got written down was a dalet/D.  If 
one 
looks at the Old Hebrew alphabet from the 8th century BCE (which might be one 
of 
the time periods in which a transcription error took place regarding Joshua’s 
Late Bronze Age sources, which themselves came from a much earlier period), a 
bet/B and the initial portion of a dalet/D looked the same in writing at that 
point.  Each started out with a sideways triangle.  Nothing more was added to 
a dalet/D, whereas a bet/B had a long stroke added beneath the triangle. 
_http://www.ancientscripts.com/old_hebrew.html_ 
(http://www.ancientscripts.com/old_hebrew.html)   If a scribe was called away 
from what he was doing in the 
middle of writing a bet/B, having completed only the triangle at that point, 
then 
when he went back to the job, the scribe might have started with the next 
letter in this strange city name, not realizing that he should have added a 
long 
line under the dalet/D triangle to make it into a bet/B.  If that mistake was 
made once, in about the 8th century BCE or so, then soon there might have 
been 
two competing versions of this obscure city name, with no one knowing which 
version was older or more accurate.  If Jokbeam was a small, unimportant town 
that went extinct at the end of the Late Bronze Age, as seems very likely, 
then 
no Hebrew scholar would now have been able to figure out what the better 
version of that obscure city name was.  A third version might later have 
appeared 
that deleted the suspect letter altogether (with such third version perhaps 
being the basis for the Septuagint rendering).  In sum, it would have been 
easy 
for there to be this one letter transcription error in this obscure city 
name, 
where an original bet/B first got incorrectly recorded as a dalet/D (with the 
long line inadvertently not being written under the triangle to create a 
bet/B), and then in some subsequent versions the now suspect letter was 
deleted 
altogether.  Once the mistake was made, it could never have been corrected by 
anyone, because absent access to the Thutmosis III list from the mid-15th 
century 
BCE, there is no way that anyone in the 1st millennium BCE would any longer 
have known the correct spelling of the name of this long-extinct, unimportant 
town in the Shephelah.
 
Finally, there may possibly have been some confusion between two different 
towns in the Shephelah whose names were vaguely similar.  Version #2 of item 
#102 on the Thutmosis III list is spelled Y(QBJMR.  Item #119 on the 
Thutmosis 
III list is spelled JKTMS.  Egyptian T often represents dalet/D in Biblical 
Hebrew.  (Thus Megiddo is MKT at item #2, where Egyptian T = dalet/D.  See 
also 
items #4 and #8.)  If the final letter in each city name is viewed as being 
an 
optional suffix that would routinely be dropped in the Biblical Hebrew 
equivalent, Joshua’s Late Bronze Age sources could well have reported Y(QB(M 
and (KDM 
[or )KDM].  With both of those obscure towns in the Shephelah being long 
extinct, the final editor of Joshua might have viewed Y(QB(M as being the 
long 
version of, and/or an alternate spelling of, (KDM.  Accordingly, these two 
obscure 
city names may have become conflated in the Masoretic text, coming out as 
YQD(M.  Note also that bet/B and dalet/D have vaguely similar sounds, 
especially 
as the third consonant in a name.  All these various factors support the 
notion that there may have been a one-letter transcription error in the 
Masoretic 
text version of this obscure city name.
 
If the dalet/D in the text at Joshua 15: 56 was mistakenly written down for 
the bet/B that should be there, which is a very understandable one-letter 
transcription error considering all of the above factors that applied over a 
period 
of many centuries, then everything makes sense.  The city name at Joshua 15: 
56 is then rightly YQB(M, which is YQB + (M = “Winepress People”.  Likewise, 
the significant consonants of the second version of item #102 on the 
Thutmosis 
III list can be viewed as being the identical 5 letters:  YQB(M, which again 
is YQB + (M = “Winepress People”.
 
As we are slowly but surely seeing, the Bible has much more accurate, deta
iled information from Late Bronze Age Canaan than today’s scholars realize.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois

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