Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Someone wrote to me [in a communication that I’m not sure was intended to be 
off-list or not]:  “If you read widely you will find that characters in a 
story often have native names, even if they are foreign. There is no reason 
why a Hebrew writer could not have silently changed Akkadian names to a 
Hebrew name that was, in some way, equivalent.”
 
1.  If by “reading widely” is meant spending years pouring over the proper 
names in the Patriarchal narratives, that’s me.
 
2.  The charge that the author of the Patriarchal narratives “changed 
Akkadian names to a Hebrew name” rings hollow.  There’s almost no Akkadian in 
the entire Bible!   The classic work on Akkadian loanwords in the Bible is 
“Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew” (2000), by Paul V. Mankowski, based 
on his Harvard dissertation.  He finds a mere 70 Akkadian loanwords in the 
entire Bible, of which 26 (including month names) entered late Biblical 
Hebrew through Aramaic.  Objective evidence like that is why you get 
scholarly statements such as the following:  “[T]he North-West Semitic 
dialect…is of a very conservative character….”  A. Murtoen, “Early Semitic” 
(1967), at p. 1.  Outside of the post-exilic parts of the Bible, there’s 
precious little Akkadian influence on the older parts of the Bible, 
especially the truly ancient Patriarchal narratives.  The virgin pure west 
Semitic character of early Biblical Hebrew is telling us that the Hebrews 
were indigenous to Canaan, rather than being transplants from 
Akkadian-speaking southern Mesopotamia.
 
3.  In the Patriarchal narratives, every person has an appropriate name.  
Joseph’s Egyptian priestly father-in-law doesn’t have a Canaanite name!  No 
way.  He’s got a vintage Egyptian name straight out of the mid-14th century 
BCE:  Pa-Ti Pa-Ra, meaning “the gift of the God”.  That second Egyptian word 
“pa” meaning “the” is so ultra-blasphemous, attributing a monotheistic bent 
to the Egyptians of Joseph’s day, that not a single university scholar is 
willing to even consider that the second peh/P in the name PWTY PR( is the 
Egyptian word “pa” for “the”.  The name TRX is based on the Ugaritic verb TRX 
because TRX was indigenous to Canaan.  The word TRX is unknown in Akkadian, 
because other than that one-time caravan trip way out to Ur in Kassite 
Babylonia [Ur Kasdym] to buy lapis lazuli at wholesale, no one in the family 
of TRX or )B-RM ever was in southern Mesopotamia.  The name )B-RM is the most 
blatantly virgin pure west Semitic name that anyone could possibly think of.  
That’s telling us that )B-RM was born in west Semitic-speaking Canaan, not in 
Akkadian-speaking southern Babylonia.  Why fight the text?  The text has 
pinpoint historical accuracy, and it means precisely what it says.  (NR is a 
Hurrian princeling [in the Shephelah, like historical Milk-ilu in the Amarna 
Letters at Gezer, who likewise associated with Amorite princelings], so he 
has a Hurrian name:  (N-R.  Every single name in the Patriarchal narratives 
is perfect like that.  The reason why so many of the names of TRX’s 
descendants are west Semitic, even though they were born in NHRYM in eastern 
Syria and many of them never left there, is because they all spoke pre-Hebrew 
at home as their native language [TRX having been born in Canaan, where 100% 
of his ancestors were born and died].  They only spoke Hurrian [as a second 
language] when talking to Hurrian princelings in NHRYM.  None of them spoke 
Aramaic, a language that isn’t attested as being in existence until the 9th 
century BCE, long after the Patriarchal Age.  Sahduta spelled with a 
sin/shin, as it appears in the received text of Genesis 31: 47, as opposed to 
being spelled the normal Aramaic way with a samekh, isn’t attested in Aramaic 
until about 200 BCE or so, in the days of the Nabateans.  In fact, $H-DT) 
[without the later-added vav/W] is Sanskrit, not Aramaic, with Sanskrit names 
being much beloved by the Hurrians in the Late Bronze Age.
 
There’s virtually no Akkadian in the Bible because the Hebrews are, and are 
accurately portrayed in the Patriarchal narratives as being, indigenous to 
Canaan.  The proper names in the text tell the story.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois