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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: uhurwitz AT yahoo.com, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] xiram
  • Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 17:45:14 -0400 (EDT)


Uri Hurwitz:

You wrote: “What about regular declensions of 'ax' and 'ab' - 'axykha'
'axyv' etc, or 'avykha' 'avyw' etc. Note the letter "Yud" is preserved
throughout the declension, and is also retained in the construct, e.g.
'axy-hamelekh' or 'avy-hayeled'. Clearly this points an early PS vowel
following the
two consonants of these nouns. Cf. with 'abw' (abu) in Arabic. However,
this ancient vowel was not preserved in all names of this type, e.g. 'Axav',
'avram'.”

That’s a very good point. )BRM is an unusual spelling of this name. I
believe that the version of this name that is most frequently attested
outside
of the Bible in the ancient world is )BYRM, with an interior yod/Y. [The
matter is complicated and ambiguous, however. For example, the Ugaritic
spelling abrm is often thought to imply a hireq in the middle, though the
matter
is not free from doubt.]

This type of interior yod/Y has long puzzled scholars: “An obscure
phenomenon…is…the suffixes of connection…, otherwise debated and unexplained
-i….
[T]he hireq compaginis is most common on nouns serving a nominative
function, and similar forms at Amarna suggest that the i is not a genitive
ending.”
P. 127, with many Biblical Hebrew examples of this strange, controversial
phenomenon set forth at p. 128, of Bruce K. Waltke and Michael Patrick O’
Connor, “An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax” (1990).
http://books.google.com/books?id=jZlwYGilLW0C&pg=PA127&lpg=PA127&dq=hireq+definition&source=b
l&ots=_AhJAuh9rk&sig=D0-SBm0lOr2lzgxIJUpondq0rU0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PMoJULeEDZH9r
AGly_SgCg&sqi=2&ved=0CFMQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=hireq%20definition&f=false

If that interior yod/Y is viewed as being a “suffix of connection”, that
to me sounds quite similar to my suggestion that it’s a mere name divider,
having no semantic content, and in particular not meaning “my” or “of”.

The name “Ahab”/)X)B is somewhat different, in my opinion, because the
heth/X there is followed by a vowel-type sound of sorts.

The unusual name is )BRM, where the bet/B is immediately followed by a true
consonant, resh/R. You write avram, but where a Hebrew bet/B is not
inter-vocalic, why do you see such a bet/B as having the sound V? By
contrast,
)BYRM would be aviram or avirum, with the bet/B sounding like V, and with
that
standard spelling being very easy to pronounce.

The Bible of course knows the common name )BYRM, such as at Numbers 16: 1,
etc. But that normal spelling is not what we get for Abraham’s birth name.
In my opinion, it’s possible that the name )BRM, with that non-standard
spelling, was deliberately designed to evoke, on one level, the following
common word: a-ba-ri-im. That non-Hebrew common word, which probably means
“lord
” [and as such would be appropriate as one meaning of Abraham’s birth
name], is attested in the Late Bronze Age. The early Biblical Hebrew
rendering
of the non-Hebrew common word a-ba-ri-im would be expected to be )BRM, which
is precisely the [non-standard] spelling we see in the received text of
Genesis.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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