Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>]

Dear Jim,

(sorry if i reproduce your email in a somewhat repatched 
format, i had some problem with the computer)
I was just pointing at a very remote possibility. I do not even know if that 
place deer khobeyah has been dug at all.

In general, though, many arab villages maintain very old tradition. for 
example, the village where the shiloax

tunnel (jerusalem) is called silwan even today. same with the israeli places 
atlit, jaffa, safed, and

many others. the name of damascus, amman (rabat amon) was preserved, as well 
as many other towns in the

region. just in the damascus area i found the following places whose name i 
would not associate with typical

arabic:

khan DANNUN, KAMONAH (kenaanite/phoen./hebrew?), KHALKHALAH, beer el SABIL 
(?), ZIMRIN, SIMLIN (aramaic?),

as well as a name which might interest you: XARASTA (=xaro$et) which might be 
connected with hurrite iron processing.

however, i do not know anything about syrian archaeology to say anything more 
definite, and a casual look

at the internet did not make me any wiser. though it seems that they are 
digging all over, and there is a lot there to be found

yet.

as to der khabeyah, it is arab alright. the arab nikudless spelling is DYR 
XBYH. XBYH seems to be a reasonable arab form for

XWBH - this is all i have.

the word DYR for a place name usually indicates an old non-moslem site, 
anything like an old tomb or monastery or just a house

or a ruin. (earlier i wrote DER instead of DIR only since the map i used (a 
modern map of damascus i found in google)

used this transcription). again, i cannot attest to its antiquity, but the 
interesting is that i found it by following to the letter

the biblical instruction: "left of damascus".

only later did i notice that most BH versions interpret "left" as "north", 
consistent with "kedma"=ahead=east (a fact i had known

but forgotten along the years). however, the bible usually does not use 
"left/right" to designate north/south, so maybe my lay reading

is the correct one after all: as abraham was approaching damascus, he steered 
further left and hit ... DYR KBYH!! i would like

to test this guesswork of mine by actually digging; unfortunately, i dont 
have as many archaeologist friends as i would like to have,

certainly not in the damascus area. :)

>>> 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.

who am i to speculate. i think, though, that your identification UBI=XWBH 
might be correct even without the scribal error hypothesis.

for example, if some evidence could be brought that hurrians pronounced an 
initial vowel * as aspirant/guttural H* or X* or )*.

one corroborating evidence would be if too many names of hurrian origin in BH 
start with H,X,). (e.g.: XCCWN?, )OG?) and too

few start with a vowel.

best i can do is answer with a question: if both BH and ugarit agree on 
REFAIM, do they agree also on U-BI? in other

words, is there any name similar to UBI mentioned in ugarit texts? if so, is 
it similar to WBY? (even though they used

different writing systems, both hebrew and ugarit must have had a similar 
pronunciation).

Nir 
Cohen:----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>>>>> JimStinehart AT aol.com wrote:

>>>>>>  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

StinehartEvanston,

Illinois