Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Yitzhak Sapir:
 
1.  You wrote:  “Jim, you're misleading the readers here when you say there 
is no evidence that Ka&dim was used for the Chaldeans.  (I do not suggest 
it was a "forerunner") .  The word Ka&dim does not occur in a vacuum.  We 
have plenty of evidence that Ka&dim was used for the 1st Millenium 
Babylonians 
-- as in 2 Kings 24-25.  Also, the letter &in is (based on comparative 
knowledge) a lateral.  It was in Proto-Semitic, and in Biblical Hebrew as 
well, 
the voiceless counterpart of the lamed, just like Dad was the emphatic 
counterpart.”
 
You just made my point.  Outside of the Bible, there’s  n-o-t-h-i-n-g  in 
the secular history of the ancient world that documents use of the word 
Kasdim, or anything similar to Kasdim, to refer to the Kaldu/Chaldeans.  
That’s 
my point exactly.  If people learn nothing else from this thread, this thread 
will have done invaluable service.
 
Isn’t it a bit scary that scholars consistently “forget” to mention that 
there is no inscription from the ancient world [outside of the Bible] that 
refers to the Chaldeans as Kasdim?
 
2.  You wrote: “It is also unlikely that the Hebrew author of Genesis chose 
to encode the Kassite name Karduniash in such a way that only you would 
recognize it.”
 
Every single Hebrew in the Late Bronze Age would see that K-$ as the first 
two letters in K$DYM suggests the Ka$-$u people of Kassite Babylonia, not 
the Sumerians of ancient Ur.  It’s not overly subtle, in a Late Bronze Age 
context.  
 
By contrast, by the time, 700 years or so later, in the mid-1st millennium 
BCE, when we get to the author of II Kings, the Kassites were largely 
forgotten.  At that point, K$DYM had come to be viewed by later Biblical 
authors 
as simply being the Hebrew way of referring to rulers of southern Mesopotamia 
generally, and hence could be applied in later books of the Bible [like II 
Kings, Jeremiah and Daniel] to the Chaldean rulers of southern Mesopotamia.  
The fact that later books in the Bible do not understand the pinpoint 
accurate, vintage Late Bronze Age nomenclature of the Patriarchal narratives 
does 
not show 1st millennium BCE authorship of the Patriarchal narratives.  
Rather, it just shows that those later books of the Bible were composed many 
centuries after the truly ancient Patriarchal narratives, at a time when many 
specific Late Bronze Age historical facts had been long forgotten.
 
3.  To the best of my knowledge, no scholar has ever attempted a serious 
comparison of K$DYM at Genesis 11: 28, 31 to Karaduniash [as I set forth on 
this thread].  Isn’t that a bit scary?
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois