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  • From: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
  • To: <JimStinehart AT aol.com>, <if AT math.bu.edu>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Vav Nun Suffix
  • Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 17:25:11 +0100


----- Original Message ----- From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
To: fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr ; if AT math.bu.edu
Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 4:24 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Vav Nun Suffix


Dr. Fournet:

1. In response to my statement that “A final vav is the classic non-Semitic way to turn a name or word into a geographical place name (as was frequently the case at Nuzi, for example).”, you wrote: “For example?”

Here are two quick examples of city names from Nuzi ending in vav: city of $uriniwe, at p. 129, and city of Silliyawe, at p. 96, of David I. Owen and Ernest Rene Lacheman, “General Studies” (1995), here: http://books.google.com/books?id=8SYu_c7mu78C&pg=PR7&dq=david+owen+nuzi+96&hl=en&ei=dBHtTJjcBYOlnQfN3PTYAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

By my unofficial count, about 30% of the geographical place names at Nuzi end with a vav (followed by a vowel, naturally, as the vav was a consonant). By contrast, personal names at Nuzi rarely end in vav.
****
Interesting reference.

Maybe things would be clearer if you provide a list of these place names.

There is some absurdity in stating that a name ends with a waw when in fact it ends with a vowel, no?
A.
***


2. You wrote: “Are you aware that cuneiform would never be able to write something like Xurw-? What we have is hur-ru-u-he2 and hur-wu-u-he2 "Hurrian". “

Where you write “hur-wu…”, I write XURW. The key is the consonantal vav/W after the root of the word.
***
The root/stem is actually hurwu- possibly archaic and hurru-
and it cannot be further analyzed.
A.
****


3. In response to my statement “The Egyptians were deliberately insulting the people of Canaan by calling greater Canaan X3RW, emphasizing that Canaan had, in the 14th century BCE, been taken over by non-Semitic people from eastern Syria as the new ruling class. Not surprisingly, the people of Ugarit and the Hebrews did not look at things that way, so neither in Ugaritic nor in Hebrew does one ever see that awful name XRW.”, you wrote: “Why should it be an insult? “

95% of the human beings in Canaan in the mid-14th century BCE were indigenous west Semitic speakers, including the early Hebrews, who truly loved Canaan.
***
Well,
Semitic people are not indigenous in that area.
They are intruders coming from the South, so the possibility exists that other people were still there.
Cf. rtn-u in Egyptian.
A.
***


The Egyptians deliberately insulted all of such west Semitic persons by referring to greater Canaan as X3RW,
***
There is no basis for this claim.
Kharu is an ethnonym for Syrian (=Hurrian) people.
A.
***

rubbing it in that in the mid-14th century BCE, many of the ruling princelings throughout greater Canaan, including at Jerusalem and at the city of Hebron (then called Qiltu), were non-Semitic people from eastern Syria.


We should recognize that deliberate insult, and take umbrage at it. No wonder you never see XRW in Hebrew or Ugaritic! Much, much more importantly, however, the consonantal vav in all these Biblical vav nun suffixes is showing that the Bible is much older, and much more historically accurate, than scholars have realized. The vav disappears from the non-biblical record in the 1st millennium BCE. There’s no vav in the jar handles at Gibeon, the LMLK seals for Hebron, or in the name Horon on Sheshonq’s list. That’s because that vav was a non-Semitic consonant. With the non-Semitic people having vanished from Canaan, their old-fashioned ending consonantal vav had now become inexplicable and hopelessly archaic. That’s precisely why the heavy concentration in the Bible of common words and personal names with a vav nun suffix in the Patriarchal narratives is confirming both the antiquity and historical accuracy of the last 40 chapters of Genesis. What you see as a ubiquitous -we-ni- component of the insanely long suffix sequences in written non-Semitic, the rest of us see as -WN in Biblical Hebrew. It’s especially obvious in personal names in the Patriarchal narratives, where the names of 3 non-Semitic people from eastern Syria, and the names of 2 of Jacob’s sons who were born in eastern Syria and were named by their mother who to that point had lived her entire life in the non-Semitic heartland of eastern Syria, feature -we-ni/-WN. Dr. Fournet, can’t you, of all people, see it’s the s-a-m-e?!
***
All this strikes me as completely unsupported and undocumented in the first place.
Arnaud Fournet
***



There are few things in life more exciting than an interior vav in a Biblical vav nun suffix. That interior vav tells all. It literally reeks of the world of the mid-14th century BCE -- the historical Patriarchal Age.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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