Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

As to the key question of the Biblical spelling of “Ra” that Will Parsons raised, please consider that “Potiphar” is a different name than “Potiphera”.  I hope and expect that everyone on the b-hebrew list will reject the scholarly claim that two different Biblical authors, who did not know each other or each other’s work, somehow on a non-miraculous basis allegedly managed to come up with the same name, though spelled somewhat differently, for two different characters:  “Very early, before P wrote, the figure of Joseph became connected with the Egyptian name P3-di-p3-Ra [pA di pA ra], ‘Potiphar’;  but the connexion was never explicit.  One tradition ascribed the name to Joseph's father-in-law, another to Joseph's master.  An editor, plagued by a bent towards completeness, inserted them both.”  D. B. Redford, “A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph (Genesis 37-50)” (1970), pp. 136-137.

 

In fact, with ra being spelled by the sole Hebrew letter resh/R in Biblical Hebrew, as in the name “Potiphar” [Joseph’s Egyptian master who is Captain of the Guard], the resh-ayin/R( at the end of the name “Potiphera”, as Joseph’s Egyptian priestly father-in-law, cannot mean ra.  Rather than having anything whatsoever to do with pA di pA ra, which is a 1^st millennium BCE style of Egyptian name that would be out of place in the ancient Patriarchal narratives and which in any event so conspicuously does not in fact match the Hebrew letters here at all, let’s look at what the Biblical Egyptian name “Potiphera” actually means in Egyptian.  The name “Potiphera” should exemplify Akhenaten’s peculiar, unattractive theology found in his Great Hymn to the Aten, if I am right that the Patriarchal Age is the Amarna Age.

 

1.  P = pA.  The Hymn to the Aten features pA itn and pA nTr wa. So we should expect pA + deity name.  The first letter in “Potiphera” is peh/P, and just like the second peh/P in that same name, that Hebrew letter, by itself, renders the Egyptian word pA, meaning “the”, but at Amarna implying “the one and only”.

 

2.  W = wA.  On four occasions in the Hymn to the Aten, Akhenaten refers to Ra/Aten as being the “distant”/wA.ti god, and on one further occasion he uses this same Egyptian word in a more generic sense, referring to a “distant”/wAt land.  Just as peh/P = pA, so also vav/W = wA.  Both with pA and wA, the Egyptian aleph/A is not represented by a separate Hebrew letter.  [There’s no way that Hebrew vav/W is Egyptian aleph here, so that PW = pA, as scholars would have it.  Not.  Hebrew aleph is directly equivalent to Egyptian aleph, whereas Hebrew vav/W has nothing to do with Egyptian aleph.  Moreover, based on the second half of this name, we know that peh/P alone renders the Egyptian word pA.  So the Hebrew vav/W here is not part of the Egyptian word pA, but rather starts a new word, and is a consonantal vav/W.]

 

3.  + = t.  What’s attested regarding Hebrew teth/+ is that it represents Egyptian regular t [not d or dj].  For example, the t in wAt in the Great Hymn to the Aten is Gardiner hieroglyphic sign X1, being a regular Egyptian t.  At item #22 on the mid-15^thcentury BCE Thutmose III list of places in Canaan, the place name “Tob” begins with Gardiner sign X1, being a regular Egyptian t.  That is Akkadian cuneiform teth for this name Tob at Amarna Letter EA 205: 3 (being the exact time period of the Great Hymn to the Aten).  This same geographical place name, Tob, appears at Judges 11: 3, 5 spelled with alphabetical Hebrew teth:  +WB.  [Hebrew tav/T was not available for regular Egyptian t, because the special Egyptian Tj in nTr/netjer is rendered by tav/T:  NT [where by New Kingdom times the final R was no longer pronounced], in Joseph’s Egyptian name and in the name of Joseph’s Egyptian wife.  I see little or no basis for the scholarly claim that Hebrew teth/+ in the name “Potiphera” supposedly represents Egyptian d or Egyptian dj, which would be needed for the Egyptian word “gift”, pronounced dji;  surely Hebrew dalet/D would be used for such d-type sounds.]

 

So the name of Joseph’s Egyptian priestly father-in-law, the priest of Ra from On, starts out P W+, rendering pA wAt in Egyptian [where neither of the Egyptian alephs/A is represented by a separate Hebrew letter].  The meaning is “the [one and only] distant [god]”, that is, Ra.  O.K. so far?

 

4.  Y = xireq compaginis.  Just as the -Y- in the middle of the Amorite name Milk-i-Ilu from the Amarna Letters at Genesis 46: 17, MLK -Y- )L, is a dash or xireq compaginis, so also is the interior yod/Y in the name “Potiphera”.  Both IR-Heba’s scribe at Jerusalem, and the Patriarchal narratives, use xireq compaginis.

 

5.  P = pA. The second peh/P is like the earlier one in this name, meaning pA, that is: “the”.

 

6.  R + ending = rx.  Ra would be just resh/R alone, as we know from the ending of the name “Potiphar” of Joseph’s Egyptian master [and which is consistent with the Akkadian cuneiform rendering of “Ra” in pharaohs’ names, per Amarna Letters coming out of mid-14^th century BCE Canaan].  But here we see R + ending, with ayin being the ending in the received text.  In order for this Year 14 theology to be in the Patriarchal narratives with such incredible accuracy, it must have been written down in the Amarna Age, and that could only have been by way of Akkadian cuneiform.  The Achilles heel of Akkadian cuneiform is that in final position, Akkadian cuneiform heth could represent virtually every Hebrew letter we don’t have in English:  ayin or heth or emphatic H or he or even archaic ghayin.  Here, the scribe in 7^thcentury BCE Jerusalem who transformed the Akkadian cuneiform signs from the original tablets held in the Temple into alphabetical Hebrew made a fully-understandable mis-recognition mistake.  He saw Akkadian cuneiform heth and guessed ayin, but in fact alphabetical Hebrew heth was actually intended here.  So the end of the name “Potiphera”was supposed to be RX, being rx in Egyptian, meaning “to know”.  pA rx means “the one and only [person] who knows”.

 

The theology behind the name of this priest of Ra from On makes sense only in the Amarna Age.  Akhenaten’s name wa-n-ra means “sole one of Ra”, and in his Great Hymn to the Aten, Akhenaten famously and outrageously says near the end:  “there is none other who knows [rx] you”.  The Biblical name of this priest of Ra from On duly conveys that this priest of Ra affirms that supposedly Akhenaten is the only person who knows God/Ra.

 

* * *

 

P W+   -Y-   P RX = pA wAt -- pA rx = “the one and only person who knows the distant God”, being a reference to Akhenaten.  That simultaneously (i) distills the essence of Akhenaten’s theology per his Great Hymn to the Aten, while also (ii) showing the Hebrew author’s distaste for Akhenaten’s outrageous claim that supposedly only Akhenaten “knew”/rx“the”/pA “distant”/wAt God.  Note the pinpoint letter-for-letter historical accuracy of this Egyptian priestly name in a Year 14 context.  Yes!

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois