Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Dr. Arnaud Fournet:
 
In determining whether G%-N/“Goshen” is Qis, we start with the fact that 
Qis is spelled with the following four Egyptian hieroglyphs:  
N29-M17-S29-O49.  
_http://hieroglyphs.net/000501/cgi/lookup.pl?ty=en&ch=q&cs=0_ 
(http://hieroglyphs.net/000501/cgi/lookup.pl?ty=en&ch=q&cs=0) 
 
1.  N29 comes out as Hebrew gimel/G on the T III list for GZR/Gezer.  You 
characterize that as being “a dialectal highly divergent pronunciation”, but 
another way of saying the same thing is:  “historically attested”.
 
2.  M17, a single plume, originally had been a Y, but:  “The "y" in 
Egyptian was so weak that it was rarely pronounced.”  _http://www.friesian
.com/egypt.htm_ (http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm)   Thus in the Late Bronze 
Age, 
M17 would have sounded like a nondescript vowel indicator:  perhaps I or E, 
or 
maybe A, but definitely not U or O.  Though technically M17 is not a vowel, 
as an unpronounced Y it effectively functioned as a vowel indicator of 
sorts.  As such, the defective spelling of early Biblical Hebrew simply left 
it 
out, as it did all vowels.  That’s why XBR-W-N is so super-exciting, because 
the interior vav/W is not a post-exilic vowel indicator.  Dr. Fournet, you 
are one of the few people on earth who can interpret XBR-W-N, if only you 
would give up your reliance on the medieval Masoretic pointing.  The classic 
case of letter-for-letter accuracy in the Late Bronze Age, but with the 
medieval Masoretic pointing guessing the wrong vowel, is TD(L at Genesis 14: 
1, 
which matches the Ugaritic rendering of “Tudhaliya” letter for letter.  See 
pp. 536-537 at:  
http://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=334&Itemid=158
 
Why should we care that the medieval pointing done in the Middle Ages by 
the Masoretes got the first vowel sound completely wrong in TD(L?  That’s 
utterly irrelevant.
 
3.  S29, which is S, appears at item #44 on the T III list, KNT JSN.  As I 
noted in my prior post, per Egyptologist Paul James Cowie the Hebrew 
equivalent is GT )$N, in which case this Egyptian hieroglyph is sin/shin in 
Biblical Hebrew.
 
4.  O49 is the crossroads hieroglyph, which is an ideogram for “place” or “
city” or, in context, “nome”.  The west Semitic equivalent of the 
crossroads hieroglyph was the suffix -N, which is ubiquitous on the T III 
list.  
Though the crossroads hieroglyph had no sound, it had the same meaning as 
west 
Semitic -N:  “place” or “city” or, in context, “nome”.
 
5.  We see that there is letter for letter accuracy in comparing Qis to 
G%-N.  The Q in Qis is G in Hebrew, per GZR on the T III list.  The I in Qis 
is 
effectively a vowel indicator, which naturally is omitted in the defective 
spelling of early Biblical Hebrew.  The vowel sound here definitely is not 
long U!  The S in Qis is S in G%.  And the crossroads ideogram meaning “city”
 or “place” or “nome” is the -N west Semitic suffix.  That is 
letter-for-letter accuracy.  
 
When Genesis 45: 10 tells us that Joseph lived near G%-N, that means that 
Joseph lived at Amarna, just north across the Nile River from the nome of 
Qis/G%-N/“the land of Goshen”.  So in coming from the south to see his 
family, 
Joseph first (LH/“goes up” north to Qis/G%-N/Goshen to see Jacob, and then 
Joseph continues to “go up”/(LH north to see Pharaoh.  Note that 
everything makes perfect sense in the historical context of the mid-14th 
century BCE. 
 By contrast, the traditional and scholarly east Delta locale for Goshen 
will not work on any level in any time period.
 
One really cannot appreciate the incredible, letter-for-letter Late Bronze 
Age accuracy of the Patriarchal narratives until one analyzes its renderings 
of non-Semitic words, such as TD(L, XBR-W-N, and G%-N.  That’s 
letter-for-letter accuracy regarding three different non-Semitic languages in 
the Late 
Bronze Age.  Is that amazing or what?
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois