Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Prof. Yigal Levin and Dave Washburn:

Here is a scholar who interprets this story differently than you two do.  Please consider if his interpretation is more convincing than yours.

In 1911, an Egyptologist pointed out a critically important facet of King Josiah’s Biblical discovery in the Temple:

 “Naville…believes the narrative [of II Kings 22-23] implies that Hilkiah [the priest] was unable to decipher the book [Deuteronomy], and therefore gave it to Shaphan [the scribe] to read out to him.  This was because it was in a script no longer employed in Judah at the time -- perhaps cuneiform -- but a script which Shaphan, as correspondent on State affairs with the Assyrians and Babylonians and others, could read.”  Cited in a 1951 article by Donald W.B. Robinson:  “Josiah’s Reform and the Book of the Law”.  http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/josiah_robinson.pdf  At pp. 32-33 of that article, Robinson cites this source, an Egyptologist in 1911:  The Discovery of the Book of the Law under King Josiah. An Egyptian Interpretation of the Biblical Account, by Edouard Naville, Hon. D.C.L., Ph.D., Litt.D., Member of the Institute of France.  46 pp.  (S.P.C.K., London, 1911).

To me, that is the most plausible explanation of this famous story.  Neither the priest nor King Josiah could read what had been discovered in the Temple, because although it used west Semitic pre-Hebrew words that they both knew, the writing system was cuneiform.  By sharp contrast, the scribe had to deal with original correspondence from Assyria and Babylonia in cuneiform, so he could read this new discovery immediately.  The scribe quickly transformed the writing format into alphabetical Hebrew, and now King Josiah could effortlessly read it to all of Judah.

This is the “missing link” -- cuneiform.  Cuneiform can get us all the long way back to the Amarna Age [per the Amarna Letters from south-central Canaan written in cuneiform, containing dozens of west Semitic words] as the time when the oldest part of the Torah was written down (not merely being an oral tradition), which alphabetical Hebrew cannot do.  That in turn frees us up to look at the substantive content of, and the proper names in, the Torah, in determining the antiquity of various parts of the Torah.  A careful consideration and examination of substantive content and proper names discloses that only the Patriarchal narratives go all the long way back to the mid-14^th century BCE.  The fact that classic Hebrew and alphabetical Hebrew did not yet exist in the Amarna Age is immaterial.  And the 1^st millennium BCE writing style of the non-poetic common words in the received text of the Patriarchal narratives is no longer a problem either, much less an insurmountable drop-dead problem, because that’s simply a product of at what late date the cuneiform original was transformed into alphabetical Hebrew.

Writing down west Semitic words in cuneiform, as is done for dozens of west Semitic words in the Amarna Letters from the Late Bronze Age, is the “missing link” to discovering the incredible antiquity of the Patriarchal narratives as a written text, whose substantive content for the most part never changed over the centuries.  To me, the famous story of King Josiah’s alleged discovery of an ancient text in the Temple strongly implies that only the scribe could read it, which would make sense if and only if that ancient religious text were written in cuneiform (using west Semitic words).  Even if that story is a mere legend, the mere existence of that story is evidence that Jewish wisemen in the 7^th century BCE thought, probably correctly, that some of the oldest parts of the Torah had originally been written in cuneiform (using west Semitic words).

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois