Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Nir Cohen:

You wrote:  “in canaanite, as far as i know, there was a single word for city, QRT/QRYT. and we have enough written material to discard other synonyms with some certainty. so, your argument that the canaanite name was YRW-$LM = city of peace, is unlikely since one should expect QRT-$LM or QRYT-$LM instead.  you are positing a canaanite word which, as far as we can tell, did not exist.”

No, I do not see the first half of the name “Jerusalem” as being a Canaanite word.  That is not my theory of the case.

In the beginning, the Canaanites probably called this city “Peace”:  $LM.  So far, so good.  [We know that the ancient west Semitic common word $LM could be used as a proper name, because in the Bible upwards of 14 different Israelites have as their personal name $LM or some slight variant thereon.]

But by the time we get to the first attested spelling of this city name, in the Amarna Letters, it has gotten tied up with the Sumerian logogram URU, which is very frequently used in Akkadian cuneiform to mean “city”.  We always see úru as the first half of this city name in the Amarna Letters, and on one famous occasion we see:  URU úru$lm.

Rather than being a Canaanite word for “city”, I see the úru element of the first attested writing of the city name “Jerusalem” as being a sub-standard, corrupted version of the well-known Sumerian logogram URU.

By the time the Hebrews came along, úru$lm was “just a name”.  As with many city names, it was a corrupted form of a name that had originally made good sense.  The original Canaanite name of this city, $lm, had, by the time the Hurrians came to dominate the ruling class of Canaan in the Amarna Age, become corrupted to úru$lm.  URU $lm would have been correct, but instead the name got corrupted to úru$lm, to the point that in the Amarna Letters we sometimes see:  URU úru$lm.

All that the Bible does is to passively record this city name, which to the early Hebrews was “just a name”.  Either the Hebrews started out with WRW$LM, which then naturally morphed into YRW$LM [if I am understanding Will Parsons correctly], or else the Hebrew version of this city name started out from day #1 as YRW$LM.  In either case, I see the Hebrew rendering of YRW as being the Hebrew version, by sound, of úru, which originally was a Sumerian logogram meaning “city” that was used very frequently in Akkadian cuneiform.  I do not see YRW as reflecting any ancient Canaanite word.  If the underlying meaning of the city name of Jerusalem was by this point a little obtuse, or even very obtuse, who cares?  It functioned just fine, thank you, as a unique city name.  In my opinion, to the early Hebrews this city name was “just a name”, so who cared what its underlying meaning was or originally had been, or whether the original city name had become quite corrupted?

Indeed, one of the important, controversial points I am trying to make is as follows.  To the Hebrews, YRW$LM was “just a name”.  It may have been semi-incomprehensible, but who cares?  In my opinion, the Hebrews did  n-o-t  think of YRW$LM as meaning “City of Peace”, being a name which could naturally be shortened to just “Peace’, so that $LM would then be an expected shorthand version of YRW-$LM.  Rather, all six Hebrew letters were “just a name”, so that unless you see such six letters, you are not seeing a name of Jerusalem, in my controversial opinion, at least not in the truly ancient Patriarchal narratives.  When $LM appears in the Patriarchal narratives, it is  n-o-t  a shorthand rendering of YRW$LM, in my opinion, and indeed has nothing whatsoever to do with Jerusalem.

Whether the Patriarchal narratives are truly ancient [my view], as opposed to being ginned up by multiple authors [JEP or whoever] in the 1st millennium BCE [the scholarly view], depends in no small part on whether Jerusalem is mentioned in the text.  If no city name of Jerusalem is ever mentioned in the text [my view], then that likely reflects a truly ancient text, since the Patriarchs often sojourn in south-central Canaan, in the general vicinity of Jerusalem, so that if Jerusalem were special to the Hebrew author, it would be sure to be mentioned.  If JEP are ghost-writing the Patriarchal narratives at a time when Jerusalem had become the be-all and end-all to the southern Hebrews, then there’s no way that those ghost-writers would fail to allege that beloved Jerusalem had supposedly been vouchsafed to the Patriarchs with particularity, and hence to the Hebrews for all eternity.  In my view, there is no city name of Jerusalem in the entirety of the Patriarchal narratives, which is one strong argument for the great antiquity of this text.  At the time of the composition of the Patriarchal narratives, Jerusalem was ruled by virulently anti-tent dweller Hurrian princeling IR-Heba, and no Hebrew had ever stepped foot inside that awful place.  The early Hebrew author of the Patriarchal narratives had no positive feeling for Jerusalem whatsoever, precisely because he lived long before Jerusalem began to become the holy city of the Hebrews.

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois