Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Arnaud:

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 4:30 AM, Arnaud Fournet
<fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
>
>
>  Add to the difficulties is that the surviving records of history seem to
>> be
>> all messed up.
>>
>> For example, the archaeological indications of the Exodus are centuries
>> prior to the historical records. Other examples abound.
>>
>> So when was the library at Ugarit composed? When was the fall of Sumaria?
>> An
>> honest historian would have to admit that those dates are uncertain.
>>
>> Likewise the dates that loan words could have come from the languages
>> involved are uncertain.
>>
> ***
>
> What's the point of repeating ever and ever again that a number of things
> are "uncertain", whatever that word means ?
>
> What's at stake here ?
>
> Arnaud Fournet
>

What’s at stake here is that in this thread and in others, you are asking
when certain words entered the Biblical Hebrew language. You mentioned in
particular HYKL as being from Sumarian. If Sumarian was still spoken as a
native tongue as late as the nineth century BC, then there is no problem of
borrowing when Israel was building palaces. Because history is all messed
up, we can’t say when Sumarian ceased being a natively spoken language.

The same with Ugaritic—I have seen dates as late as roughly 800–600 BC for
when the library was composed and it is possible that Ugarit was destroyed
by the Babylonians around the same time as Judea was exiled.

In this thread, “uncertain” is a synonym for “we don’t know”.

Karl W. Randolph.