Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>]

From: K Randolph

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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
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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
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Actually the word is heykhal.
A.
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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.
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It's probably not a direct loanword from Sumerian into Hebrew.
Some intermediary semitic probably transmitted the word.
There's a huge cultural wave radiating from central Mesopotamia in the 19th 
and 18th centuries BCE and the word possibly entered Hebrew at that time.
A.
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Because history is all messed up,
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There are clearly three things I disagree with :
1. your replacement of words like heykhal by skeletons like HYKL
This amounts to destroying information.
2. your claim that everything is "uncertain"
This is not acceptable
3. your claim that history is a mess
I disagree
A.
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we can’t say when Sumerian ceased being a natively spoken language.
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I disagree.
Probably sometimes around -1800 BCE at the very last.
A.
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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”.
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I disagree.
This "we" does not include myself.
This is your decree.
You don't want to know or acknowledge what is known or knowable.
I disagree with that stance.

Arnaud Fournet