Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Prof. Yigal Levin:

 

I hope I may be allowed to comment on this question that you posed to Karl:  “What evidence do you have that the Patriarchs wrote at all? Where does the Bible mention their writing? Why would you expect pastoral nomads to write? Or slaves, for that matter. If they wrote at all, the Patriarchs would have written in Canaanite and the Israelite slaves in Egyptian.”

 

We know from Amarna Letter EA 273 that tent-dwellers in the southeastern Ayalon Valley, who in my view were the immediate neighbors of the first Hebrews who were sojourning in the northeast Ayalon Valley at that very time, used writing.  They used writing [almost certainly using a scribe to write Canaanite words in Akkadian cuneiform] to communicate these tent-dwellers’ displeasure as to the succession, at the death of revered Amorite princeling Milk-i-Ilu [whose historical name is set forth at Genesis 46: 17, and whose Patriarchal nickname is “Mamre the Amorite”], of his firstborn son Yapaxu [the “iniquitous Amorite”, who was hated by tent-dwellers because he seemed to be planning to drive tent-dwellers out of the Ayalon Valley in Year 14]:

 

“May the king [pharaoh Akhenaten], my lord, take cognizance of his land, and may the king, my lord, know that the Apiru [tent-dwellers] wrote to Ayyaluna [Ayalon] and to Sarxa [Zorah], and the two sons of Milkilu barely escaped being killed.”

 

Your statement that “the Patriarchs would have written in Canaanite” is misleading on two important counts.  First, the Patriarchs used a scribe to write down the Patriarchal narratives.  [Based on similarity of styles as well as geographical proximity, that scribe likely was the former scribe of IR-Heba of Jerusalem.]  Secondly, although the language was “Canaanite” [which is remarkably close to Biblical Hebrew, by the way, except that all the endings are different], the writing medium used was Akkadian cuneiform.  No non-cuneiform alphabetical writing system was advanced enough in south-central Canaan to handle a long, sophisticated composition like the Patriarchal narratives until well into the 1^st millennium BCE.

 

Indeed, from the dawn of time to 7^th century BCE Jerusalem, the only significant amount of writing, as to letters or anything more substantial than that, that is historically attested as coming out of south-central Canaan consists of the Amarna Letters in the mid-14^th century BCE.  That’s the  o-n-l-y  time there were scribes in south-central Canaan who would be more than happy to sell their services, even [in hard times] to tent-dwellers like the first Hebrews.

 

Prof. Levin, can’t you see that the Patriarchal narratives as a written text are  m-u-c-h  older, and  m-u-c-h  more historically accurate, than is generally realized by non-religious scholars?  When you read Amarna Letter EA 273 above, a  w-r-i-t-t-e-n  document from south-central Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, you’re reading about “Mamre the Amorite” [historical Milk-i-Ilu], and his tentdweller-hating firstborn son Yapaxu, the “iniquitous Amorite”.   T-h-a-t  is why all 7 firstborn sons in the Patriarchal narratives -- Haran, Lot, Ishmael, Esau, Reuben, Er, Manasseh -- are in 7 out of 7 cases portrayed as properly getting the shaft.  Anybody as successor ruler in Year 14 but firstborn son Yapaxu!  That’s the Patriarchal narratives in a nutshell.  And it’s all fully verified by the Amarna Letters [and similar non-biblical sources].  The Patriarchal narratives have  p-i-n-p-o-i-n-t  historical accuracy in a Years 12-14 timeframe.

 

The Patriarchal narratives were  n-e-v-e-r  an oral tradition.  The confusion of gutturals in the exotic non-Hebrew proper names in the text, together with the otherwise letter-for-letter accurate spelling of those ancient non-Hebrew proper names, are the telltale hallmarks of a Late Bronze Age composition that was written down in Akkadian cuneiform at the end of the Amarna Age.

 

Prof. Levin, Amarna Letter EA 273 was written in the  s-a-m-e  year (Year 14) as the year in which the Patriarchal narratives were composed, being just four years before the Patriarchal narratives were recorded in Akkadian cuneiform using Canaanite/pre-Hebrew/Hebrew words.  The situation described in Amarna Letter EA 273 is  i-d-e-n-t-i-c-a-l  to what is being described throughout the Patriarchal narratives:  the  s-a-m-e  geographical location [the eastern Ayalon Valley] and the  s-a-m-e  year [Year 14] and the  s-a-m-e  succession of leaders [first the fine Amorite princeling Milk-i-Ilu, then his firstborn son -- the iniquitous Amorite, being tentdweller-hating Yapaxu] and the  s-a-m-e  historical concern:  that tent-dwellers like the first Hebrews might soon be driven out of their homeland in the eastern Ayalon Valley in Year 14 by the new princeling ruler Yapaxu.  S-a-m-e .  It’s all the same, and it’s all fully verified historically.  You see, it was all written down in the Patriarchal narratives, from the very beginning, using Akkadian cuneiform to write pre-Hebrew words.

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois