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  • From: jimstinehart AT aol.com
  • To: jimstinehart AT aol.com, fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr, leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] words with the same root letters: XCC-N TMR
  • Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:30:03 -0500


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







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