Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Isaac Fried:
 
You wrote:  “I tend to think that the defining portion of NAXOR is XOR or 
XUR, 'noble' (see 1 R 21:8-11 etc.).”
 
There is no word XR like that in the Hebrew Bible.  It’s only in the 
plural, XR-YM.  
Yes, XR-YM is at I Kings 21: 8, 11, where it’s customarily translated as “
nobles”.  But that same word XR-YM is at Deuteronomy 2: 12, where it’s 
often thought to mean “Hurrians”.  An earlier version of the same word, 
namely 
XR-Y, is at Genesis 14: 6, where it clearly means “Hurrians”.  XR is the 
two-letter root for the Hebrew word for “Hurrians”.
 
Gesenius tries to tell us that XR-YM at I Kings 21: 8, 11 means “nobles”, 
and comes from the Hebrew root word XRR, which means “to burn”.  Are “
people who burn” supposed to be “nobles”?
 
Isaac Fried, when you chop off the N in NXWR, and then you cut out the 
interior vav, you’re left with XR, the root of the Hebrew word for “Hurrian”. 
 
Your attempt to find a west Semitic root for the non-Semitic name NXWR 
results in the cure being worse than the disease.
 
The reason why you cannot find a west Semitic cognate for NXWR that makes 
sense is because NXWR is a non-Semitic name, being the Hurrian word for “dowry
”:  ni-xa-a-ri.  The main role that Nahor plays in the Patriarchal 
narratives is to provide female descendants, in the heart of Hurrianland in 
Naharim, 
that become the brides of Abraham’s successors as Patriarchs.  That’s Nahor
’s #1 role:  providing a “Hurrian Dowry”, as it were.  The Hurrian word 
for “dowry” is ni-xa-a-ri, whose letter-for-letter expected spelling in 
Biblical Hebrew, in order to reproduce this 4-syllable Hurrian name, is 
exactly 
what we see in the received text:  NXWR.
 
There are many Hurrian names in the Patriarchal narratives, including NXWR, 
and XBR-W-N, and ‘PR-W-N.  The presence of an interior vav is one key to 
spotting a Hurrian name.  There’s no way that a 1st millennium BCE editor 
jammed an interior vav into those three names, as a way of updating the 
spelling 
of those ancient names.  What would be the point of that?  Rather, that 
interior vav was in those three names from day #1.  And when was day #1?  The 
only time when the Hurrians were present in Canaan was in the 14th century 
BCE.  All these Hurrian names we keep seeing in this text are dating the 
composition of the Patriarchal narratives to the mid-14th century BCE.  No 
later 
editor put those interior vavs into those names.  No, those are vintage 
Hurrian names, being non-Semitic names, that had that interior vav from day 
#1.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois