Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Nir Cohen:
 
You wrote:  “i found your account of the name xwbh very interesting. but i 
also suspect that wbh would hardly be used to denote U in semitic.  
meanwhile, near damaskus, a bit to the south-west, i localized a small town 
called 
der khabeyah.
 
1.  Is “Der Khabeyah” a modern name?  [Is it modern German???]  If it’s a 
modern language, it has little relevance to understanding XWBH at Genesis 
14: 15.  For example, “Ham” is a modern name, that starts with he/H.  But 
there is no such city name in greater ancient Canaan that starts with he/H.  
I 
see HM at Genesis 14: 5 as meaning “these”, rather than being a proper 
name.  Do you have an ancient cite for “Der Khabeyah”?  Perhaps it’s a German 
rendering of a modern Arabic town name??
 
2.  Of critical importance to the analysis here is your statement that “i 
also suspect that wbh would hardly be used to denote U in semitic”.  I 
completely agree that 1st millennium BCE scribes could not imagine a word in 
the 
Bible beginning with a vav/W, where that vav/W represented a vowel that was 
its own separate syllable.  Though such a construction is commonplace in 
Hurrian, it’s impossible in Hebrew.
 
But consider now how an early Hebrew would have recorded the Hurrian name 
Ubi.  The east Semitic name for the Damascus region was Api, and the west 
Semitic version would have aleph/) for that initial A.  But in the Late 
Bronze 
Age, the Canaanite Shift made the pronunciation Opi.  We know from Amarna 
Letter EA 197 that Hurrian princelings ruled the Damascus area in the 14th 
century BCE.  To a Hurrian, Opi sounded a lot like the Hurrian word U-bi, 
meaning “barley”, and the Damascus area was a good barley growing area.  So 
the 
Hurrian version of )A-pi was sometimes Ubi.  In Akkadian cuneiform, Obi or 
Ubi would be U2-bi [which is indistinguishable in Akkadian cuneiform writing 
from U2-pi].  At Amarna Letter EA 189 rev. 12 from Hurrian princeling 
Etakkama, there is a complaint about rival Hurrian princeling Biryawaza that 
mentions “U2-bi”.
 
There is not a single word or name in the Hebrew Bible that begins with a 
vav/W as a vowel.  But how would you represent the Hurrian name for the 
Damascus area:  U-bi?  Perhaps the Hebrew vav/W does not represent the sound 
U 
here.  But the Hebrew vav/W was the only Hebrew letter available to represent 
a vowel that is functioning as its own separate syllable in a non-Semitic 
language (Hurrian).  The original Biblical rendering was H-WBH, where the 
vav/W was its own separate syllable, U2 in Akkadian cuneiform, and U2 in 
Hurrian 
as well.  [As a region, the he/H at the beginning was needed, meaning “the”
.  Cf. “the Mizpeh”.]
 
The first letter in the received text, X/heth, is a fully understandable 
scribal error, that was virtually certain to happen.  H-WBH seemed impossible 
to 1st millennium BCE copyists, because no Hebrew word starts with vav/W as 
a vowel, whereas XWBH seemed possible, meaning “hiding place”.  So the 
inexplicable H-WBH in the original became XWBH due to a one-letter scribal 
error.
 
3.  In the ancient world, there is no XWBH in the Damascus area, to the 
best of my knowledge.  I am guessing that the “Der Khabeyah” you found is a 
modern name [unless you have an ancient source you can cite for such name].
 
If chapter 14 of Genesis was composed in the Late Bronze Age [as many 
scholars think it was], then after mentioning “Damascus”, one would 
definitely 
expect a reference to either A-pi or U-bi.  We should see Genesis 14: 15 as 
referencing H-WBH, which obviously would be “the U-bi”, the Hebrew rendering 
of the Hurrian name for the Damascus area.  Unfortunately, the received 
text has XWBH, which matches to nothing in non-biblical documents, due to 
that 
one-letter scribal error.  Whereas the received text has XWBH, in my view we 
should see that as having originally been H-WBH.  It’s a fully historical 
reference to U-bi, being the Damascus area in the Late Bronze Age.
 
4.  Nir Cohen, how would you write “the U-bi” in early Biblical Hebrew?  
Remember, you don’t want “the A-pi”, which is the older Akkadian version of 
the name for the Damascus area.  I submit that the only way to record the 
Hurrian name “the U-bi” was what was originally at Genesis 14: 15:  H-WBH.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois