Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Karl:

 

You wrote:  “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?”

 

I thought the question we were discussing is whether the unpointed received  H-e-b-r-e-w  Masoretic Text of the Patriarchal narratives has pinpoint historical accuracy in the historical context of Years 12-14, having been recorded in cuneiform, using west Semitic pre-Hebrew words, shortly after Akhenaten’s death.  I certainly will not vouch for changes to the Masoretic Hebrew text made by Greek-speaking Jews in the Septuagint, umpteen centuries after the fact.

 

One unfortunate aspect of the first written version of the Patriarchal narratives having been recorded in cuneiform, rather than in alphabetic Hebrew, is that the T sound [tav/T] was not always distinguished in written cuneiform from the D sound [dalet/D].  So the people who changed the cuneiform text into alphabetic Hebrew centuries later often had to guess, when dealing with strange foreign proper names, as to which of those two Hebrew letters had been intended: 

 

“[T]he scribe of Jerusalem [that is, IR-Heba’s scribe] will use the same sign for both /te/ and /de/….”

Shomo Izre’el, “Vocalized Canaanite:  Cuneiform-Written Canaanite Words in the Amarna Letters”, DS-NELL V, N.R. 1-2 (2003), 13-34, at p.17.  http://www.academia.edu/230041/Vocalized_Canaanite_Cuneiform-Written_Canaanite_Words_in_the_Amarna_Letters_Some_Methodological_remarks

 

Thus when we see K%DYM in the received Masoretic text in alphabetic Hebrew, that dalet/D may originally have been a T sound.  Consequently, the Akkadian feminine ending that after a country name effectively meant “country” or “land”, namely “tu” [as in “Elamtu”, for example], could come out in alphabetic Hebrew as either dalet/D or tav/T, because the original cuneiform recording of this foreign proper name may not have distinguished between those two sounds in cuneiform writing.  Thus where K% means “Kassite”, the next letter, dalet/D, may originally have been meant to render a tav/T;  that would be the expected alphabetic Hebrew rendering in defective spelling of the Akkadian ending “tu”.

 

So I see K% as being “Kassite”, with the Kassites being the Late Bronze Age rulers of southern Mesopotamia.  Dalet/D was originally intended to render tav/T, and as such is the Akkadian ending “tu”, in context effectively meaning “land” or “country” [in lieu of the logogram sequence KUR…KI].  And of course the ending -YM is a standard west Semitic ending meaning “people”.  So K%DYM refers to the “Kassite land people”.  Similarly, IR-Heba’s scribe in Jerusalem in Year 13 at Amarna Letter EA 288: 36 refers to southern Mesopotamia by the phrase “land of the Kassites” or “land of the Kassite people”, namely “KUR…ka-a-si.KI”, being essentially the same phrase as we see at Genesis 11: 28, 31;  15: 7.  These are the only two texts from Canaan that use such a phrase to refer to southern Mesopotamia during the Late Bronze Age.  The match in nomenclature is indeed quite stunning. 

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois