Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Nir Cohen:
 
1.  You wrote:  “i do not see any biblical pattern where a word with a final 
letter X (or, for this matter, any final letter) indicates association with 
the same word without that letter. SARAY/SARAH and SERAX could well be mere 
coincidence.” 
 
As opposed to your “mere coincidence” theory of the case, consider the 
following.  $LX at Genesis 11: 15 is a non-Semitic name, $a-al-xi, meaning 
“coming from a house”, where the root $ali means “house”, and the final 
heth/X means “coming from” or “like”, in non-Semitic.  TRX at Genesis 11: 26 
is intentionally designed to be a pun in non-Semitic, where TR/turu means 
“man”, and TRX/turu-xi means “coming from the man”.  $RX at Genesis 46: 17 
means “like Sarah” or, more literally, “coming from Sarah”, where $-R are the 
first two letters in Sarah’s birth name $RY/$aru-ya, and -X/heth in 
non-Semitic means “coming from” or “like”. 
 
2.  You wrote:  “if you look at the entire biblical genealogical text 
(chapters like the one we are discussing), you will discover great 
variability of names, clearly belonging to different cultures and still 
mostly without extra-biblical confirmation.”
 
That’s true for the Patriarchal narratives only if one does not look at 
non-Semitic attested names and words in non-biblical sources from the Late 
Bronze Age.  $RY is attested in non-Semitic as $aru-ya.  TRX is a deliberate 
pun on the attested non-Semitic name Tu-ru-ux-xe.  NXWR is a deliberate pun 
on one of the best-known non-Semitic words, ni-xa-a-ri, meaning “dowry”.  
Nahor’s role is to provide the “dowry”, that is, all three successor 
Matriarchs come from Harran and are Nahor’s female blood descendants.  Though 
most people do not realize this, in fact )BRM is not well-attested in 
non-biblical sources;  the well-attested west Semitic name is, by contrast, 
)BYRM.  West Semitic speakers cannot pronounce consonant clusters, so )BRM is 
something of a tongue-twister, whereas )BYRM is very easy to say.  The reason 
for choosing a rare variant of this west Semitic name is so that it would 
work as a non-Semitic pun:  a-ba-ri-im, meaning “lord”, as Abram is the 
finest of Terah’s three sons.  A-ba-ri [without the final suffix] is an 
attested non-Semitic name in the Late Bronze Age, and though using differing 
spelling conventions [I for A, and W for B], the name I-wa-ru-um is an 
attested non-Semitic name from an earlier day.
 
So each of $RY, TRX, NXWR and )BRM is in fact attested in Late Bronze Age 
non-biblical sources, if we’re willing to look to non-Semitic names.
 
3.  You wrote:  “it is for this reason that i deliberately avoided discussing 
ethnicity in relation to names like SERAH.  even if the name is not semitic, 
its bearer could very well be "kosher" jewish.”
 
That is very relevant to this discussion.  $RY/$aru-ya was born to 
non-Semitic parents.  But native west Semitic-speaking TRX [whose mother, 
however, was non-Semitic] adopted $RY for the purpose of having her marry 
TRX’s blood son )BRM, pursuant to a written contract guaranteeing that any 
son or sons that $RY bore would be the sole heirs of )BRM.  That was the 
non-Semitic way of doing written marriage contracts.  $RY later received the 
divinely-given name “Sarah”, and she thereby became as “kosher jewish”, in 
effect, as you can get.  $RY was adopted by a pre-Hebrew man, she married a 
Hebrew man, and she was given the name $RH by YHWH.  I agree that Sarah was 
100% “kosher jewish” after her marriage to Abraham.  But it’s also true that 
her parents were non-Semitic, that her birth name $RY/$aru-ya is non-Semitic, 
and that she is only Terah’s daughter by adoption.  $RY was not Terah’s blood 
daughter, just as $RX is only Asher’s daughter by adoption, not being Asher’s 
blood daughter.  Same.
 
I agree with your statement completely.  Rather than trying to undercut 
Sarah’s jewishness, I on the contrary fully affirm it.  What I’m trying to do 
here is to show that the Patriarchal narratives were recorded in writing in 
the Late Bronze Age [centuries before JEPD were born].  The presence of all 
those accurately-spelled non-Semitic names is testimony to the Patriarchal 
narratives being truly ancient and having been, the non-Semitic way [like the 
written marriage contract that historically would have been insisted upon by 
$RY’s non-Semitic parents], written down from day #1.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois