Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

In trying to understand the pronunciation of Late Bronze Age samekh and tsade 
in early Biblical Hebrew, it’s helpful to look at Phoenician and Egyptian.
 
A.  Phoenician
 
Scholars who focus on Phoenician seem to see tsade as TS and samekh as s:
 
(1)  “Tsade is superfluous [in the Phoenician alphabet], since it represents, 
not an elemental sound, but a combination of sounds, t and s.  …[There are] 
two [forms] for s, namely samech and shin.”  George Rawlinson, “History of 
Phoenicia” (1889), at p. 379. 
 
(2)  “In the Phoenician list were:  samekh, with a sharp-S sound about like 
our S in "Silly!";  tsade for the TS sound….”  Keith Gordon Irwin, “The 
Romance of Writing: From Egyptian Hieroglyphics to Modern Letters, Numbers & 
Signs” (1961).
 
B.  Egyptian  
 
(1)  First a Hebrew scholar, who is reviewing the literature on the subject 
generally, including Egyptian comparisons:
 
“Z, [underdotted] Z, and [underdotted] tsade are rendered by Egyptian 
[underlined] d = /dj/ [though Rainey, below, uniquely uses underlined s].  
…Canaanite samekh (s) is represented by [underlined] t.  It has been 
suggested that this may have been realized as a palatal or pre-palatal stop 
(like /ty/) or an affricate (like /ts/).  …Steiner (1983) argues that the 
affricate pronunciation of tsade in Hebrew and Aramaic is not a late 
Ashkenazic development but is an ancient variant of the fricative /s/ 
pronunciation….” Nahum M. Waldman, “The Recent Study of Hebrew” (1989), at 
pp. 19-20.
 
(2)  The mid-15th century BCE Thutmose III list of places in Canaan:
 
(a)  Samekh.  Of the 119 items on the mid-15th century BCE Thutmose III list 
of places in Canaan, only  o-n-e  has a samekh.  Guess what one that is?  
It’s item #3, xa-Si-ya [where I myself am using capital S for samekh].  Most 
scholars, such as Anson Rainey, see this as being Hasi in the Beqa Valley, 
which Rainey transliterates at Amarna Letter EA 175: 4, EA 185: 43, and EA 
186: 62 as xa-si.  At least in this one key case, Rainey and other scholars 
are seeing samekh as being reflected in the Amarna Letters as s, not as the 
affricate TS.  
 
In many other cases, samekh represented the CH sound in “church” in Egyptian, 
at least in the Middle Bronze Age.  Samekh is tj in Egyptian, with the 
Egyptian hieroglyph being the tj3 bird.  In fact, last year Prof. Rainey was 
gracious enough to send me an E-mail, in which he said regarding item #3 on 
his rendering of the T III list [which appears at p. 72 of “The Sacred 
Bridge”]:  “The ‘s’ with a grave accent (backwards) represents the tj 
consonant of Egyptian.  The hieroglyph is the tj3 bird.  The tj always stands 
for samech which has its own pronunciation, not a simple ‘s’ in the Bronze 
Age.”  True, Prof. Rainey doesn’t say what sound the samekh has here, and he 
specifically says it’s not sin/%/s.  But we nevertheless do see samekh relate 
to s in Hasi here, per the Amarna Letters.
 
(b)  Tsade.  Rainey sees only 2 items on the T III list as being identified 
in Hebrew by a name that includes a tsade.  In both cases, items #32 and 
#116, the Egyptian hieroglyph is the flame, U 28.  In the Middle Bronze Age 
that had been a cobra [or snake], usually viewed as being DJ or DZ or DA.  In 
one other case [item #79], the flame hieroglyph is tsade in the Amarna 
Letters, as is also the case for item #32.  A fourth case, item #60, has the 
flame hieroglyph as being a Z in the Amarna Letters.  
 
The last case where the flame hieroglyph has a counterpart, item #69, is 
particularly fascinating:  it’s a samekh under Amenhotep II!  [Amenhotep II 
was Thutmose III’s successor, reigning at the end of the 15th century BCE.]  
This may indicate that as late as the 15th century BCE, it was somewhat 
unclear whether samekh or tsade should be used for the affricate TS.  Yet by 
the mid-14th century BCE in the Amarna Letters, the only samekh on the T III 
list is s in the Amarna Letters, and in three cases tsade on the T III list 
is tsade in the Amarna Letters.  From the 14th century BCE through the 9th 
century BCE, samekh seems to be have been between a zayin and a sin, starting 
out as closer to zayin than to sin.  Beginning in the 8th century BCE, samekh 
had become identical in sound to sin.
 
C.  Conclusions   
 
We continue to see evidence that in the 15th and 14th centuries BCE, samekh 
was not a TS affricate [even if samekh might arguably have had that sound 
earlier], or at least, samekh was not always a TS affricate in the Late 
Bronze Age.  Per Richard Steiner, tsade may have been a TS affricate from day 
#1.  We see the flame hieroglyph on the T III list routinely being a tsade 
and, unlike the samekh, never being an s.
 
My own view is that the various sibilants routinely get confused in going 
from one ancient language to another.  There is not only the issue of what 
the precise sound of the sibilant was, but equally importantly, there is the 
issue of how various peoples represented various sibilant sounds in writing.  
My point is that we should “widen the strike zone” in comparing words in 
various different languages against each other as to the various sibilants 
that are rendered in writing in the different languages.  I’m not sure 
there’s a majority view of scholars on any of these issues;  I have not been 
able to discern one.  At a minimum, many different scholars have many 
different views as to how various sibilants were pronounced and written in 
the Late Bronze Age.  
 
In a Late Bronze Age setting, tsade may or may not be emphatic, and it may or 
may not be a TS affricate, in comparing various different ancient languages 
against each other.  I do not think that a proposed match of a Biblical 
Hebrew name to a Hurrian name should be ruled out on the grounds that the 
sound in Hurrian was tsi, and that a Hebrew tsade in the mid-14th century BCE 
allegedly could not have been a non-emphatic TS affricate, with the assertion 
then being that the early Hebrew author would have only used a non-emphatic 
TS affricate to represent tsi in Hurrian, which would have to be Hebrew 
samekh.  To me, that’s a highly speculative position to take.  More 
reasonable is that if the sound was tsi in Hurrian and was spelled either zi 
or si in Hurrian [which is what the Fournet/Bomhard website says], then such 
sound  m-i-g-h-t  well come over into Biblical Hebrew in chapter 14 of 
Genesis as tsade.  Thus on linguistic grounds, I do not think it is proper to 
rule out XCC as being an early Biblical Hebrew rendering of xa-tsi-tsi in 
Hurrian.  As to the issue of spelling, I have previously quoted Gelb and 
Purves on tsade alternating with Z at Nuzi, as they refer to “the interchange 
of tsade and z values”.  They show 18 Hurrian names beginning with tsade, 
interspersed among a much larger number of Hurrian names that begin with Z.  
 
So if the Hurrians pronounced it tsi and spelled it zi, then I see early 
Biblical Hebrew tsade as being the most likely Hebrew letter to represent 
that combination of sound and spelling in a mid-14th century BCE time period. 
 XCC-N TMR at Genesis 14: 7 is xa-tsi-tsi-ni tam-ri in Hurrian. 
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois