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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Jacob-El
  • Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:31:09 EST


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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