Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Dr. Fournet:
 
You wrote:  “Is there not a possibility that the text was composed orally, 
earlier or much earlier than the time when it got written on paper?”
 
It wasn’t written on “paper”.  But it does seem that the names in the story 
of Biblical Tudhaliya were written down from the very beginning, way back in 
the Late Bronze Age.  How else account for the letter-for-letter accuracy in 
the Biblical spelling of TD(L as compared to the Ugaritic spelling?  
Similarly, scholars have been amazed by the match between )RYWK and 
essentially the same name that is attested at Nuzi in the Late Bronze Age:  
“As for Arioch ('rik), the phonetic equivalence with the Hurrian name Ariukki 
(cf. RA XXIII [at Nuzi]…) is perfect.”  “The Annual of the American Schools 
of Oriental Research”, Benjamin Wisner Bacon and Henry Joel Cadbury (1931), 
at p. 45.  
http://books.google.com/books?id=CZYSAAAAIAAJ&q=Ariukki&dq=Ariukki&hl=en&ei=jzFhTN6ZAcSinQfi3e2ODw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBg
 
Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite inscriptions in and near Canaan show that 
alphabetic writing was known and used prior to the mid-14th century BCE time 
period of the Biblical story of Hittite King “Tudhaliya” [the nasty Hebrew 
nickname for feared historical mighty Hittite King Suppiluliuma I, who seized 
the Hittite throne by the dastardly expedient of murdering his own older 
brother named “Tudhaliya”, so that such nickname in context here effectively 
means “Murderer”, and who historically led a coalition of four attacking 
rulers who in Year 14 [of Akhenaten’s 17-year reign] destroyed a league of 
five rebellious princelings -- “four kings against five” -- in the Great 
Syrian War in western Syria].  Scholarly accounts of early alphabetic writing 
include:  [1] J.C. Darnell, F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, M.J. Lundberg, P. Kyle 
McCarter, B. Zuckerman and C. Manassa, “Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions 
from the Wadi el-Ḥôl: New Evidence for the Origin of the Alphabet from the 
Western Desert of Egypt”, AASOR 59 (2005), pp. 63, 65, 67 -71, 73-113, 
115-124.  [2] G.J. Hamilton, “The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in 
Egyptian Scripts”, CBQ Monograph Series #40 (2006), Washington.  [3] O. 
Goldwasser, “Canaanites Reading Hieroglyphs”, Ägypten und Levante 16 (2006), 
pp. 121-160.  [4] W.E. Albright, "The Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from 
Sinai and their Decipherment", BASOR 110 (1948), pp. 6-22 and a long string 
of other articles.  [5] F.M. Cross, “The Evolution of the Proto-Canaanite 
Alphabet”, BASOR 134 (1954), pp. 15-24 and a long string of other articles.  
[6] S.L. Sanders, “What was the Alphabet for? The Rise of Written Vernaculars 
and the Making of Israelite National Literature”, Maarav 11 (2004), pp. 
25-56. 
    
The pinpoint accuracy of this ancient Biblical text suggests that the names 
were committed to writing from the very beginning.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois

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