Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jim:

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 1:09 PM, <JimStinehart AT aol.com> wrote:

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.

The Bible concentrates on the Divided Kingdom, with Labaya (a good Hebrew name) prominent in the Northern Kingdom, while for a while there was Abdi-Heba (the first part of the name Hebrew) in Jerusalem. You are changing the latter’s name to fit your presuppositions. Labaya fits the profile of King Ahaz of Samaria. Indications are that we are dealing with Israelites in Samaria and Jerusalem, even in the Amarna Letters. 

 

 

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.

That’s no evidence for when Joseph’s birth occurred. If accurate, that’s only evidence of Egyptian ignorance. It could also be a case of loss of prior Egyptian records that named that place.

Again, this is an argument from silence. Given the fragmentary state of ancient records, an argument from silence is no argument.

 

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.

When a place has a common English name, I see no need to affect a pseudo-scholarly attitude and call it by its local name when speaking English. After all, we talk about Cologne, not Köln, Lake Lucerne and not Vierwaldstädtersee of William, not Wilhelm, Tell fame, Lake Geneva and not Lac Leman, Moscow and not Moskva, and so forth. Even personal names, e.g. Rebecca not Rivka, Jesus instead of what could have been Yi-hay-sue at that time, Jacob instead of Ya-a-qo-be, and so forth. I see no reason to affect a snooty attitude so as not to give common English names when speaking English.

 

  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”.

Incidentally, it was the translators of the LXX who called it the land of the Chaldeans. They knew the Hebrew name, yet they chose to use a different name. What did they know that our modern scholars don’t, or don’t want to, know?

 

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.

Where is your evidence for this so-called confederate relationship? What evidence from written sources that name both Abraham and this Milk-i-Ilu as being contemporaries and in a confederate relationship? Where is Abraham listed by name in any document from the period you concentrate on? Look, you need evidence, not speculation, to convince us.

We have historical evidence that Abraham lived probably during the first dynasty of Egypt, and his great-grandson Joseph was sold to Egypt during the third dynasty. Centuries later, during the 13th dynasty, “Asiatic” slaves, Israelites, left the country leaving it in such a shattered state without an army (drowned in the Red Sea) that the Hyksos a few years later were able to invade and take over the country unopposed, “without a battle”. This is the historical picture given in Genesis and Exodus with a couple of references to archaeology and Egyptian history.

This is the documentation. If you want to claim that this documentation is wrong, you need other documentation. So far you have presented only speculation, often speculation on very shaky basis. Why should we believe your speculation when we have documentation saying otherwise?

 

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.

This has nothing to do with that verse in Genesis.

 

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,

Nonsense! Others on this list have shown that this is a perfectly normal Hebrew derivative from its Hebrew root.

You said you want to hear our response, but when you refuse to listen to it, why should we bother?

 

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.

The words contained in the received text in their contexts point to far greater antiquity than what you are arguing  for. This is based on the linguistic analysis of the text as it has been preserved. Right now, I’ll remain with the text as understood by standard linguistic analysis. 

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois

 

Right now, we have documentation on one side, and your often baseless speculation on the other. Which is more believable?

Karl W. Randolph.