Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Tory Thorpe <torythrp AT yahoo.com>]

Jim Stinehart:

You wrote: Genesis 37: 14 in fact says that the Patriarchs’ XBRWN is “a low tract of land of wide extent, fit for corn land…, and suited for battlefields” : (MQ.  Sadly, that geographical misunderstanding has prevented university scholars from seeing the one-to-one match between the world of IR-Heba’s Amarna Letters and the world of the Patriarchal narratives.

Fascinating. I too question some conventionally accepted sites with places named in the biblical narratives. Have you considered that even tent-dwelling Asiatics living within and just outside Egypt's borders in Canaan may have been just educated enough to read and write hieratic? I find it a bit difficult to picture nomads moving about laden down with so many clay tablets in Akkadian. On the other hand, "Sinuhe" was presumably popular and perhaps available to them. Hebrew can be written in Akkadian cuneiform. It can also be written in hieratic, much easier. I would think if the patriarchal narratives were composed as early as the 14th century BC by "Hebrews" near Egypt, hieratic was the script used and parchment or leather was the writing material most of the time.

Tory Thorpe

Tel Aviv, Israel