Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Arnaud:

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 10:20 PM, Arnaud Fournet
<fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>wrote:

> …
> ***
> I don't know much Hittite but I don't think Uwrihi could be Hittite
> (=Anatolian Indo-European).
> It can be a Hurro-Urartian person name without much difficulty. The shape
> fits well and this name is attested.
> This would mean that "Hett-" is rather loosely applied to any kind of Non
> Semitic people in the north.
>
> Arnaud Fournet
>
> Even back when I was in college, my professors told me that it was well
known among scholars that “Hittite” did not necessarily refer to Hittites
alone, but include what I have recently learned are now called the Hatti and
the Hatti apparently included Hurrian and Urartan peoples, among others, in
an apparently loose confederation of several peoples. Thus Jim’s objections
are moot. Thus your identification of )WRYH as a Hurrian name is possible.

One of the problems we have in reading the text is that we don’t have vowels
written (those that we have are from a tradition far later, not original,
and demonstrably sometimes wrong), thus the apparent Semitic sounding names
may be mispronunciations of non-Semitic names.

One of the problems of analyzing Biblical Hebrew is that the vowels were not
included, which leads to that often different words would be written the
same, though likely pronounced differently. There is no reason that does not
extend also to names, making it possible that )WRYH the priest named in
Kings had a different pronunciation than did )WRYH the Hittite mentioned in
2 Samuel.

Karl W. Randolph.