Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Nir Cohen:

 

For sake of argument [and per what you wrote], why don’t “we assume that the hebrews did keep a written version of their history and faith,” either in Akkadian cuneiform or alphabetical writing.  In either case, the language would be Canaanite/pre-Hebrew/Hebrew.  But what writing system would be used?  The question thus becomes whether the received text of the Patriarchal narratives indicates that the original was written down in Akkadian cuneiform and not transformed into alphabetical Hebrew until many centuries thereafter, or does it indicate that right from the beginning the Patriarchal narratives were written down in alphabetical writing?

 

Here is how to go about resolving that key issue:

 

(a)  Way back in 1897, A.H. Sayce aptly observed at p. 301 of “The Early History of the Hebrews” (2004) that as to the Song of Deborah: “Had it been written in cuneiform there would have been a confusion between aleph, het and ayin, which cannot be detected in it.”

(b)  “[I]n the El Amarna tablets [written in Akkadian cuneiform] the h [he],  ḥ [emphatic H], ǵ, and sometimes even ’ [aleph] and ‘[ayin] are represented by ḫ [heth]....”  Yohanan Aharoni, “The Land of the Bible” (1979), p. 113.

 

That’s why it’s important to give careful consideration to the examples of confusion of gutturals as to foreign proper names that I set forth on an earlier post on this thread.  Those examples support my view that the Patriarchal narratives were originally written down in Akkadian cuneiform [which cannot differentiate one guttural from another] in the late Amarna time period, and were not transformed into alphabetical Biblical Hebrew until late 7^th century BCE Jerusalem:

 

1.  XWBH at Genesis 14: 15.  [The first guttural was intended to be he/H, not heth/X.]

 

2.  The -R( ending of the name of Joseph’s Egyptian priestly father-in-law at Genesis 41: 45.  [The last guttural was intended to be heth/X, not ayin/(.]

 

3.  PR(H at Genesis 12: 15, etc.  [The last guttural was intended to be heth/X, not he/H.]

 

4.  BR( and BR$( at Genesis 14: 2.  [Chapters 14 and 49 of Genesis were transformed into alphabetical Biblical Hebrew 300 years before the rest of the Patriarchal narratives was transformed from Akkadian cuneiform into alphabetical Biblical Hebrew (which is why, uniquely in the Patriarchal narratives, those two chapters have many archaic elements regarding Hebrew common words).  The non-Indo-European language represented by the names BR( and BR$( has no ayin.  The final guttural ayin/( is a Semiticization.  But centuries later, in names otherwise of that same general type, that same final letter was customarily rendered alphabetically in Hebrew as he/H, rather than as ayin/(, such as )WRYH at II Samuel 11: 3.]

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois