Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Chavoux Luyt wrote: “I also see no evidence that the Hebrew author created 
any names, butrather that he (some-times) used chance correspondence between 
a real person'sname and some (real) events in that person's life.”
 
That is a critically important issue.  University scholars generally hold 
that manyof the names in the Patriarchal narratives are very old, sometimes 
evenpossibly dating back to the Bronze Age, but that the stories told in 
thePatriarchal narratives are late, having been composed by JEP or other 
scribesliving in the 1st millennium BCE. On the scholarly view, the 
underlying meaning of the names often has norelationship to the storyline.  
Thus manyscholars say that “Terah” means “ibex”, “Nahor” means “snoring”, and 
“Haran”means “mountaineer”.  The fact that thosemeanings bear no relationship 
whatsoever to the storyline is viewed by scholarsnot as rendering their 
proposed etymologies nonsensical and wrong, but ratheras supposedly being 
evidence that JEP either didn’t know, or didn’t care, whatthe underlying 
meaning was of the old names they used in the stories theycomposed in the 1st 
millennium BCE.
 
That is why my proposed etymologies of names in thePatriarchal narratives are 
much more controversial to scholars than one mightsuppose.  Let’s use the 
four names in thefirst sentence of the Patriarchal narratives (Genesis 11: 
26) as a good exampleof what I’m talking about.  TRX does notmean “ibex”, but 
rather in Hebrew is T-)RX, meaning “you will go on a longcaravan trip”, and 
in non-Semitic is tu-ru-xi, meaning “coming from a man” [asall 7 Patriarchs 
and Matriarchs are descendants of Terah, and thus “come fromthe man”];  those 
two meanings deftly sumup Terah’s role in the Patriarchal narratives. HRN 
does not mean “mountaineer”, but rather means “mountain place”,referencing 
that the place where firstborn son Haran has his untimely death, inKassite 
southern Mesopotamia, was in the Patriarchal Age known by the name ofthe 
“mountain people” from the Zagros Mountains, the Kassites, who 
rulednon-mountainous southern Mesopotamia during the Late Bronze Age.  NXWR 
means in Hebrew “the neighing ofhorses”, referring to the fact that Nahor 
ends up spending most of his life inthe heart of Hurrianland at Harran, with 
the Hurrians being world-famous fortheir skills with horses and especially 
with horse-drawn chariots.  NXWR in non-Semitic means “dowry 
[fromHurrianland]”, reflecting the fact that Nahor’s key role in the 
Patriarchalnarratives is to provide the ultimate “dowry from Hurrianland”:  
all three successor Matriarchs are femaledescendants of Nahor, who while not 
being ethnic Hurrians are nevertheless bornand raised to adulthood in Harran 
in the heart of Hurrianland.  Finally, )BRM in Hebrew means “[the 
divine]father is exalted”, and in non-Semitic means “lord”;  that combination 
lets us know right away thatAbram is the one son of Terah who is destined for 
greatness.
 
Based on the foregoing linguistic analysis, we canalso surmise that Terah’s 
first wife was a native west Semitic speaker, withher son Haran’s name having 
only a Hebrew meaning.  Perhaps she died in childbirth.  Years later, Terah 
married a second wife, whowas a Hurrian, and so the two much younger sons, 
Nahor and Abram, have namesthat [like the name Terah] make good sense in both 
Hebrew and non-Semitic.  As to ages, note that such surmise alsonicely 
explains why Nahor is the right age to marry a daughter of Haran, sinceby age 
Nahor was more of a nephew to Haran than a brother, and it also explainswhy 
Lot is twice called Abram’s “brother”, since by age they were similar tobeing 
brothers, rather than Abram being in Lot’s father’s generation byage.  We 
even see that we can’t reallyfollow the storyline very well unless we do such 
linguistic analysis.  
 
In my opinion the same person, an early Hebrewauthor, both (i) 
created/selected the names Terah, Haran, Nahor and Abram, and(ii) composed 
the stories told about them in the Patriarchal narratives.  In my view the 
names in the text are notolder than the rest of the text, but rather were 
generated by the same authorat the very same time as that author composed the 
rest of the text.  The same analysis holds true for the names“Tamar” and 
“Mamre”.  [Note that “Moreh”at Genesis 12: 6 is often rightly thought to 
reference Amuri/Amu-ura, where like M-MR)there is no initial aleph when the 
word “Amorite” is used in a personal name.]  It is important to realize in 
particular thatthe underlying meaning of all of these names makes perfect 
sense in the contextof the role that each such person plays in the storyline 
of the Patriarchalnarratives.  As opposed to an ideaprovisionally floated by 
Isaac Fried, I think that in fact “the Hebrew bible isplaying word games.”  
The early Hebrewauthor of the Patriarchal narratives is utterly brilliant at 
these inspired“word games”, which indeed are not even limited to the Hebrew 
language.
 
Sorry that my ideas are controversial.  I am trying to show, in part by 
usinglinguistics as to Hebrew language etymologies as on this thread, that 
thePatriarchal narratives are much older than today’s university scholars 
realize.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois