Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Nir Cohen:

 

You wrote [in part]:  “i do not necessarily agree with your tracing the amarna texts to specific hebrew influence. it is quite possible that SR, LBYT, BNT were used in tyre as well as in jerusalem.  …ALL the nws dialects used in canaan shared a common vocabulary.  KPR, BWR, $DH, YM, THWM, (C, YYN, YLD/WLD, BYT, KWKB, $MYM, KLB, )B, )M, WSB/Y$B, )KL, )X, BN, BT/BNT, $M$, (BD etc etc.  …your basic conclusion that yoshiahu was able to read hebrew text written 700 years earlier seems very plausible.”

 

Yes.  The old west Semitic words recorded in cuneiform in the Amarna Letters are common to many different northwest Semitic languages including, but by no means limited to, Hebrew.

 

Accordingly, we have now established one realistic means by which the Patriarchal narratives could have been recorded in writing by an early Hebrew in the Amarna Age.  A scribe was hired to record a comprehensive outline of the Patriarchal narratives, using cuneiform to write west Semitic words.  [Per the Amarna Letters, we know that was possible.]  If such physical writing then survived until, say, the time of King Hezekiah in the early 7^th century BCE, (i) his scribe would have had no problem with the cuneiform writing system, since cuneiform was still used in Jerusalem for the narrow purpose of corresponding with Assyria and Babylonia [albeit the languages were Assyrian and Akkadian, but it’s the same cuneiform writing system], and (ii) King Hezekiah’s scribe would also have had no problem with the vocabulary, for as we have been seeing, the underlying vocabulary of west Semitic didn’t seem to change much during those 700 years.

 

In the early 7^th century BCE, on that hypothesis, the detailed outline of the Patriarchal narratives, which had been written in cuneiform using west Semitic words in the Amarna Age, would have been transformed for the first time into narrative prose using alphabetical Hebrew.  It was not a translation from a foreign language, since most of the vocabulary was the same.  But the writing system had to be changed from cuneiform to alphabetical Hebrew, and instead of a detailed outline, it was now turned into the narrative prose that we see in the received text.  For the most part, the writing style on that theory of the case would look quite a bit like 7^th century BCE Jerusalem classic Biblical Hebrew, as to spelling and grammar.  Yes, there would be some archaic words and archaic phrasings, but for the most part the non-poetic common words in the Patriarchal narratives in alphabetical Hebrew would look fairly similar to their counterparts in I Kings [although obviously having a different author].  Indeed, as to the issue of the spelling and grammar of non-poetic common words in the Patriarchal narratives looking a lot like the rest of the Bible, let me quote here from Rolf Furuli’s recent post:  “Regardless of our view of the Classical Hebrew verbal system we must study the text that we have. There are many orthographical variations, but if we accept the dates given in the different books; thus accepting that the text was written down over a period of several hundred years, the text is remarkably uniform.”

 

One key point I am making here is that just because the non-poetic common words in the received text of the Patriarchal narratives embody a writing style that in many respects seems redolent of I and II Kings, as to grammar and spelling, that does not necessarily mean that there was not an Amarna Age comprehensive written outline of the Patriarchal narratives, which was closely followed in coming up with the alphabetical Hebrew text in the 7^th century BCE.  Thus as to all of the following, we need to  a-s-k  if they do or do not match to the late Amarna time period, since it is by no means impossible that they could match:  (i) the numbers;  (ii)  proper names;  and (iii) substantive content.

 

However, in my next post I would like to turn to an important corollary of the above.  In order to bring a key linguistic issue into focus, let’s now assume for the moment that, for sake of argument, I may be right that the three above items -- numbers, proper names and substantive content -- are all redolent of the late Amarna period.  If so, would it then have been possible for the first written version of the Patriarchal narratives, done in the Amarna Age, to have been written using the alphabet, rather than cuneiform?  I believe that the famous Qeiyafa Ostracon may give us a pretty definitive answer to that question.  So I would like to turn now to taking a quick look at the first alphabetical writing that some scholars have called “Hebrew”, in order to ask whether alphabetical writing was a reasonable alternative to using cuneiform, if the first written version of the Patriarchal narratives was recorded in writing in the mid-14^th century BCE.

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois