Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

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=dBHtTJjcBYOln
QfN3PTYAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q
&f=false_ 
(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&resn
um=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.
 
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.
 
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.  The Egyptians deliberately insulted all of such west Semitic persons 
by 
referring to greater Canaan as X3RW, 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?!
 
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