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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Initial Consonant Clusters in Biblical Hebrew

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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Initial Consonant Clusters in Biblical Hebrew
  • Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:53:17 EDT


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




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