Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

In response to my question “In determining the date of composition of the 
Song of Deborah, how much weight, if any, should be given to the proper names 
in the received text?”, Dr. Reinhard G. Lehmann responded:

“Nothing.  What's in a name?  Names are long-living, even if they contain 
long-vanished Gods as theophoric.  Names are worth almost few if anything 
when pondering the age of a text. With names, you can only prove that a text 
is young….”

By contrast, Dora Smith wrote:  “OF COURSE the Song of Deborah was written in 
the post-exilic period like the entire rest of the foundation of the Old 
Testament.”

My own fear is that if we ignore proper names, we may have little defense 
against Dora Smith’s view that the entire Bible is post-exilic.

Let’s check out Dr. Lehmann’s scholarly advice that proper names should be 
ignored in dating the Song of Deborah.  Per Dr. Lehmann’s suggestion, we’ll 
look at a “long-vanished god”.  And we’ll start with a west Semitic proper 
name [or title]:  BN (NT/ben Anat, which appears at Judges  5: 6 in the 
phrase “Shamgar ben Anat”.  

Anat is a Canaanite warrior goddess.  Contrary to Dr. Lehmann’s approach, to 
me it is implausible that a post-exilic Jew in Jerusalem could come up with 
the name/title “ben Anat”, which is redolent of the Late Bronze Age and early 
Iron Age Canaan:

“The fact that the goddess Anat…is known as the warrior goddess and patroness 
of the soldier…leads one to assume that these seals could be linked to the 
warrior class known as the Beth-Anat both in Late Bronze Age Ugarit and Egypt 
and in early Iron Age Canaan….  About two dozen arrowheads from Lebanon and 
el-Hadr, near Bethlehem, dated to the eleventh century…apparently belonged to 
the members of the warrior class Ben-Anat.”  Othmar Keel, Christoph 
Uehlinger, “Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel” (Continuum 
International Publishing Group: 1998), p. 126

“This explanation of ‘son of Anat’ as an honorific military title in the name 
of ‘Shamgar ben Anat’ has been followed by such scholars as R. Kittel, C.H. 
Gordon, A. Van Selms, O. Eissfeldt, P.C. Craigie, and N. Shupak.”  John Day, 
“Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan” (Continuum International 
Publishing Group: 2002), p. 135.

>From the Late Bronze Age through the 11th century BCE, but not later, we 
>have a warrior class that had the honorific military title “ben Anat”.  So 
>even before we get to the name Shamgar itself, which is well-attested in the 
>Late Bronze Age but is not attested thereafter, one has to wonder how a 
>post-exilic Jew in Jerusalem could be thought to come up with the grand name 
>“Shamgar ben Anat”.

The magnificent name “Shamgar ben Anat” seems perfectly at home in the Late 
Bronze Age and early Iron Age, but would seem impossible for anyone to 
conjure up in the mid-1st millennium BCE.  And what about the following 
seemingly old names at Judges 5: 24:  H-QYNY and XBR and Y(L?  Nor have we 
yet considered that the Hebrew gimel/G in $MGR may represent ɣ, a voiced 
velar fricative, which other peoples may have recorded as a type of heth/X. 

If the names H-QYNY and XBR and Y(L and $MɣR BN (NT don’t get your motor 
running, what does?  All of those proper names are nicely attested in the 
Late Bronze Age, but most of them would have been entirely unknown [at least 
in my opinion] to post-exilic Jews in Jerusalem.  I myself see the Song of 
Deborah as being really, really old, only slightly post-dating the even older 
Patriarchal narratives.  Both texts deal with H-QYNY and XBR, as part of 
their shared vocabulary of truly ancient proper names.

To me, one of the best ways to date a Biblical text is on the basis of its 
proper names [especially, but not exclusively, its non-Semitic proper names 
like Shamgar].

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois