Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryant J. Williams III" <bjwvmw AT com-pair.net>]

Dear Rolf,

You said:

Regarding the Egyptian material I will
add that the two occurrences of the name of God
YHW(W) have been found in in Soleb in the reign
of Amenhopis III (14th century B.C.E.) and one
occurrence i Amarna West in the temple of Raamses
II (13th century). The name is associated with
nomads living in an area including the later land
of Israel. As for the Amarna letters, to the
Canaanite glosses we can add some West Semitic
grammatical elements.  So, people speaking a West
Semitic language definitely lived in the land of
Canaan in the 14th century. And they even may
have worshiped YHWH. And as you say, it is
obvious that their language did not originate
suddenly in that century.

Bryant:

Please send references to the above including links (if possible).

Rev. Bryant J. Williams III
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2010 1:01 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Aramaic to Hebrew language switch?


Dear Uri,

I agree with you in everything you have written
in your post. During the last five years I have
taught 4 semesters Ugaritic and 4 semesters the
Amarna language, so I am familiar with the
material. Regarding the Egyptian material I will
add that the two occurrences of the name of God
YHW(W) have been found in in Soleb in the reign
of Amenhopis III (14th century B.C.E.) and one
occurrence i Amarna West in the temple of Raamses
II (13th century). The name is associated with
nomads living in an area including the later land
of Israel. As for the Amarna letters, to the
Canaanite glosses we can add some West Semitic
grammatical elements.  So, people speaking a West
Semitic language definitely lived in the land of
Canaan in the 14th century. And they even may
have worshiped YHWH. And as you say, it is
obvious that their language did not originate
suddenly in that century.

However, if I understand Jack correctly, he would
say that this language definitely was not Hebrew
because the ancestors of the later
Hebrew-speaking people did not yet live in
Canaan. I, on the other hand,  see few problems
in the account of Exodus, which tells that the
ancestors of Israel lived in Egypt and spoke
Hebrew, and that they entered the land of Canaan
in the 15th century and continued to speak
Hebrew. I am aware of a massive scholarly denial
of this, but I find the assumptions behind and
the evidence presented to be inconclusive.  An
old, but still valuable work criticizing the
traditional views is "Redating the Exodus and
Conquest," J. J. Bimson, 1981.

I would use the opportunity to qualify something
I wrote in my last post to Jack Kilmon. I find
that comparative philology used in connection
with the Dead Sea Scrolls and other old
manuscripts in order to establish and text and
its age is very fine and give good results. But
when comparative philology is applied to small
texts like the one from Kirbet Keifaya the
results are highly questionable.


Best regards,


Rolf Furuli

University of Oslo


>     Rolf,
>
>     Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic about existing
>  linguistic evidence for NW Semitic in the second millenium.
>   Following are a few points that may shed some light -
>  certainly not enough - on the situation in Canaan and
>  surrounding areas in the second half of the second millenium.
>
>   The Canaanite glosses in the Amarna letters demonstrate
>  clearly that a  living west-Semitic language was known to
>  the authors, and that such a language was in use. Aren't
>  some of these glosses words which are found in the Hebrew
>  bible? Surely they are few a number, but sufficient to
>  indicate the linguistic background of the HB.
>
>   This is evidence from the second half of the fourteenth
>  century. It would be methodologically wrong to assume
>  that such NWS dialect had started only during the period
>  of the EA.
>
>    Ugarit's case may have some relevance here. It is of
>  course commonly accepted that the language used there
>  cannot be considered a NWS dialect. Yet there are
>  dozens and dozens of identical idiomatic pairs of
>  words common to Ugaritic and biblical Hebrew. Lexically
>  BH shares more words with Ugaritic than Phoenician.
>
>   It is hard to believe that an ancient Hebrew speaker
>  would have found an Ugaritic speaker totally unintelligible.
>  True, no one on this list was there to validate this
>  statement. But some instances in  modern times of people
>  speaking different dialects of the same language, say Arabic,
>  come to mind. They may have initial difficulty in understanding
>  each other, such as an Egyptian and a Tunisian, but soon
>  enough they manage.
>
>   Ugarit was destroyed in the middle of the thirteenth century,
>  and no written material after its destruction survived.
>
>
>    Another lesson altogether can be drawn from the existence
>  of a large number of NW Semitic loan-words in the Egyptian
>  of the New Kingdom. Considering the vast amount of
>  written Egyptian material in existence by then, and
>  the sophitication of the culture, this phenomenon is
>  not easy to understand. However, such borrowing could
>  not occur had there not been a living, functioning languge
>  to serve as a linguistic lender.
>
>    This, again, is an example from the second half of the
>  second milenium.
>
>    Uri Hurwitz                           Wilmington, VT
>
>
>
>
>Rolf Furuli , has written, inter alia:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>Dear Jack,
>
>   Old Aramaic is witnessed from around 900 and
>Hebrew from 1 100 B.C.E. Between these dates and
>the 17th century B.C.E. there are 800 and 600
>years respectively.  From the area where we later
>find the West Semitic languages we have almost
>nothing that can tell us what the situation
>regarding languages was during all these years.
>And please note, absence of evidence is not
>evidence of absence.
>
>When discussing the origin of Hebrew and Aramaic,
>an important question is: "What can be subsumed
>under  "Hebrew," and what can be subsumed under
>"Aramaic"? For example, the Baalam text from Deir
>Alla from the 8th or 9th century have several
>forms  resembling biblical Aramaic and other
>forms resembling biblical Hebrew and Moabite. Can
>we draw any conclusions from these linguistic
>characteristics regarding the origin and
>development of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Moabite?
>Absolutely not! We simply do not know if the
>scribe was responsible for some of the mentioned
>characteristics, and we do not know if a small or
>big group used such a language. And further, we
>do not know whether other groups used a language
>which to a great extent or in part resembled
>biblical Hebrew or biblical Aramaic. To say that
>the few words from Kirbet Keifaya "*clearly* (my
>emphasis) shows Hebrew in the mid 11th to late
>10th centuries was still formative" is a very
>bold statement indeed. Except for hypotheses and
>speculations that the people whose descendants
>became the nation of Israel, adopted their
>language from the Canaanites, I am not aware of a
>single scrap of evidence excluding the
>possibility that small or big groups spoke a
>language which to a large or minor extent was
>similar to biblical Hebrew, and that other groups
>spoke a language which to a large or minor extent
>was similar to biblical Aramaic. I do not say
>that such groups existed, because I have not
>archaeological evidence in favor of it. But to
>deny the possibility is very strange to my
>thinking.
>
>We find the same scientific fundamentalism in
>paleontology and historical geology as we find
>among those studying the origin of Hebrew and the
>Hebrews, Aramaic and the Arameans.  In a
>Norwegian textbook for students of historical
>geology, we find the following very interesting
>account: At Kolsos outside Oslo we find about 15
>layers of sediment, consisting of volcanic ash,
>red sediments and black sediments, all on top of
>each other in a particular pattern. At
>Sundvollen, about 50 kilometers away, we find the
>same sediments with the same colors with exactly
>the same pattern. These two groups of sediments
>were correlated and believed to be of the same
>age. Professor Brgger led an excursion with his
>students to Kolsos, and he found one single
>fossil!  On the basis of this lone fossil he
>dated the sediments at Kolsos to be sixty million
>years older than those at Sundvollen!  Why?
>Because of the fossil's theoretical place in the
>Geologic column, which again is based on the
>assumption that the theory of evolution is true.
>So perhaps some Cretaceous fossils are found in
>the Triassic after all.  I say this because "the
>Cretaceous" and "the Triassic" are not clear-cut
>references. From the middle of the 19th century
>when the Geologic column started to be
>constructed, to a great extent, Cretaceous rocks
>were identified because they contained Cretaceous
>fossils, and Cretaceous fossils were identified
>because they were found in Cretaceous rocks. And
>the same was true with the Triassic. True, in
>some places, such as the Grand Canyon, several
>periods occur on top of each other. But in most
>places of the world this is not the case  (Please
>note that I am not a creationist, but I simply
>apply the critical attitude that was so much
>stressed in my introductory course in to the
>Philosophy of Science, to areas which seldom are
>questioned). So, there is a lot of circular
>reasoning in historical geology and comparative
>anatomy. And the same circularity that we find in
>comparative anatomy do we find in comparative
>philology, in the comparison of ancient inscribed
>artifacts.
>
>It is fun to discuss all this, but we should
>avoid sweeping statements that this or that is
>impossible. Rather we should take a more humble
>standpoint, being open for different
>possibilities.
>
>
>Best regards,
>
>Rolf Furuli
>University of Oslo
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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