Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Tory Thorpe <torythrp AT yahoo.com>]

Karl:

Not a second of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty can belong to the 15th century BCE. I'm not saying Moses did not know "Hebrew" but there was no large body of Hebrew high literature produced in the 15th century BCE or earlier. Where did Moses obtain high Hebrew literature writings as his examples to go by? Or did this begin with him?

Proto-Sinaitic, proto-Hebrew, proto-Canaanite, whatever, characters have to be "inscribed". No narrative history in high literature was composed like that in that part of the world except in the Egyptian. The Torah is a set of "books" written with ink and reed brush pen, i.e. a cursive script, and with enough space being left over at the end of the "book" for Joshua to add additional words. If it was a large composition of high literature, and short one-line inscriptions and some graffito marks "inscribed" on stones here and there do not constitute high literature, then we are talking about papyrus or leather and a readily available cursive not non-cursive script.

Hieroglyphic is consonantal writing system (bi- and tri-consonants) with hieratic being a cursive and much faster way to do it. It can be used to "write" Hebrew easier than Akkadian cunieform -- which is where I jumped in to disagree with Jim. Hieratic is also just as easy to use as the method for writing Hebrew adopted on this b-hebrew list: i.e. ")" for aleph, "B" for beth, and "G" for gimel, and "$" for shin, etc. Hieratic writing is also much faster than carving or chiseling proto-Sinaitic or proto-Hebrew unto stone which takes time. Are there any examples of this other than the non-perishable types? So maybe the "ten commandments" were written this way on two tablets of stone in the non-cursive script, but not the larger Pentateuch in books which needed a cursive script, not if all of it was written down in the 15th century BCE and then copied and updated in the centuries that followed.

How old are the Egyptian words like "ink" and "pen" in Hebrew? Old and older than the Middle Kingdom. Your notion that no Hebrew upon leaving Egypt would ever use hieratic again even if he was literate in Egyptian appears to be projecting a prejudice into the past which does not square with known facts. For example, hieratic was (continued to be) used during the monarchy period; see Aharoni, Yohanan (1966). "The Use of Hieratic Numerals in Hebrew Ostraca and the Shekel Weights". 

Tory Thorpe
Tel Aviv, Israel