Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

TD(L is the letter-for-letter alphabetic spelling (per Ugarit) of the Hittite 
kingly name “Tudhaliya” from the Late Bronze Age.  Scholars generally agree 
that the Biblical story about Tudhaliya is truly ancient, being older than 
most of the rest of the Bible, with its composition likely dating all the 
long way back to the Late Bronze Age.  Furthermore, the letter-for-letter 
accuracy of the spelling of this Hittite name suggests that the names in the 
Biblical story about Tudhaliya may have been committed to writing very early. 
 Could the Biblical story about Tudhaliya have been written down in a 
language similar to Hebrew as early as the mid-14th century BCE?
 
Three different alphabetic spelling systems in and near Canaan pre-date the 
14th century BCE time period.  “By the beginning of the second millennium 
B.C.E. (the late Middle Bronze Age in Canaan), the scribes of Ugarit began to 
use a new script based on twenty-seven cuneiform characters.  The southern 
Canaanites also developed new scripts of their own, two variations in fact – 
Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite – both of which were also based upon the 
use of acronyms (Albright 1966;  Cross 1967;  Naveh 1982).  …Today 
archaeologists know of some thirty to forty Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions that 
have been found [in the Sinai]….  [T]he Sinai inscriptions have been dated to 
the…Middle Kingdom [approximately 19th – 18th centuries BCE]…(Gardiner 1962;  
Sass 1988).  …Further north, another version of this new script began to 
emerge.  Current knowledge of the script, Proto-Canaanite, is based on some 
twenty-five inscriptions, the earliest dating to the Middle Bronze Age and 
the latest appearing at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age.  These 
inscriptions, most of which were found in a relatively small area in the 
southern Shephelah, span much of the second millennium B.C.E…..”  Jonathan 
Michael Golden, Ancient Canaan and Israel:  New Perspectives (2004), 
ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California, at pp. 243-244.  There are many more 
detailed scholarly treatments of this subject.  The trend is to push the 
first alphabetic writings ever further back in time. 
 
So it is possible that from the very beginning, way back in the Late Bronze 
Age, the names in the Biblical story about a Hittite king nicknamed 
“Tudhaliya” may have been written down in pre-Hebrew.  That would explain how 
the various non-Semitic words and names in that Biblical story have such 
great accuracy.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois