Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Karl:

 

1.  You wrote:  “What makes you think that Hurrians dominated the ruling class?”

 

A majority of the names of princelings in Canaan in the Amarna Letters are Hurrian-type names.  Hurrian princelings only began to be favored near the end of the reign of Akhenaten’s father.  By the time of Akhenaten’s death, the Hurrians in Syria had been decimated by the Hittites and were on the road to virtual extinction by the end of the following century.  So the only time when Hurrian princelings dominated the ruling class of Canaan was during the Amarna Age.

 

2.  You wrote:  “[T]he fate of Abdi-Heba parallels that of wicked King Jehoram, a native Jewish king in Jerusalem 2 Chronicles 21. With the archaeological data indicating a late date for the Amarna latters, why shouldn’t we consider that these were just two different names for the same king, a common practice in those days?”

 

“Heba” is a Hurrian name, being the Hurrian name of the Hurrians’ chief goddess.  IR-Heba uses Hurrian common words in his Amarna Letters, he allies mainly with fellow Hurrian princelings like Endaruta and Surata and $uwardatu, and he uses the Hurrian number 318:  just as appears at Genesis 14: 14.  IR-Heba is as Hurrian as the day is long:  he bears a Hurrian name, he uses Hurrian common words, he associates primarily with fellow Hurrians, and he uses the quintessential Hurrian number 318.  By stark contrast, King Jehoram has nothing whatsoever to do with the Hurrians.

 

3.  You wrote:  “Jews continued calling that area Naharaim long after Genesis, even after the Babylonian Exile in 1 Chronicles 19:6, therefore this is no indication of the date.”

 

Yes, Jews continued to use the word “Naharim”, but they got it from the truly ancient Patriarchal narratives.  In non-biblical literature, the name “Naharim” is confined to the Late Bronze Age:

 

“The general region in which the ancestral home of Harran is situated is called Aram-Naharaim in the Old Testament.  The last element in this name occurs first in the Eighteenth Dynasty in the Egyptian sources as Nxrn, and in the Amarna letters as Naxrima.”  John van Seters, “Abraham in History and Tradition” (1975), p. 58.

 

Thus the geographical place name “Naharim” at Genesis 24: 10 is one important linguistic indication that Joseph’s birth is portrayed in the Bible as occurring in or about the 18^th Dynasty during the Amarna Age, not substantially earlier.

 

4.  You wrote:  “Why do you think that Genesis was careful to indicate that Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldeans, if not to distinguish that city from Ur of the Sumarians?”

 

Karl, why would you, of all people, follow the scholarly route of changing the second letter in K$DYM to a lamed/L?  Scholars do that so that they can claim that a reference is being made to the mid-1^st millennium BCE Chaldeans.  I would think you would stick to what the letters actually are in the received Masoretic text.  The first two letters are K$, which reference the Kassites.  The second letter dalet/D is an abbreviated form of the Kassite word for “country”, which is duniash, and/or it’s the Akkadian word for “country”, which is tu.  Note that the Patriarchal narratives and IR-Heba’s scribe in the Amarna Letters refer to southern Mesopotamia in the same peculiar way, as being “Kassite land”.

 

5.  You wrote:  “A great-great-grandson of Abraham was “the most important princeling in the lives of the first Hebrews”?C’mon!”

 

The early Hebrews appreciated the historical Amorite princeling Milk-i-Ilu so much, with whom Abram had had an invaluable confederate relationship, that the name Milk-i-Ilu is honored by being set forth as one of the names of the 70 Hebrews who are portrayed as leaving Canaan for Egypt at Genesis 46: 17.

 

6.  You wrote:  “I’m stunned that Jacob asking Joseph to check up on his brothers, expecting that everything is going well, can be called “traumatic events that happened in the first Hebrews’ valley”. The illogic of this idea floors me.”

 

Actually, by the phrase “traumatic events that happened in the first Hebrews’ valley”, I was thinking primarily of the succession crisis when Milk-i-Ilu died in early Year 14.  If his awful firstborn son, Yapaxu, became and remained the new ruler of the valley, the Hebrews might well be driven out of the valley, because unlike his younger brother, Yapaxu hated tent dwellers.  T-h-a-t  is why 7 of 7 firstborn sons in the Patriarchal narratives are portrayed as getting the shaft and properly so:  Haran, Lot, Ishmael, Esau, Reuben, Er, Manasseh.

 

7.  You wrote:  “I see you’ve abandoned trying to make a linguistic argument for your thesis, relying instead on a highly speculative historical argument, which makes it off limits for this discussion group.”

 

On the contrary, this thread has focused on SLM being a mysterious hapax legomenon that is inexplicable on a Hebrew linguistic analysis, but that makes perfect sense on a Hurrian linguistic analysis.  “Heba” is a Hurrian goddess name that is the basis for the “Hivites” in Genesis.  Each of “Naharim” and “Kassite land” is a stunning match in nomenclature between the Patriarchal narratives and IR-Heba’s Amarna Letters.  And finally, it’s a great linguistic discovery to find the name “Milk-i-Ilu” spelled in full at Genesis 46: 17, since on my theory of the case that was the historical name of the princeling who was most important to the first Hebrews. 

 

The words and names in the received text of the Patriarchal narratives are testament to its great antiquity and unparalleled historical accuracy, in a Years 12-14 historical context.

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois