Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Tory Thorpe:

 

Let’s compare our two theories of the case as to the specific example of the name of Joseph’s Egyptian wife.  Genesis 41: 45 sets forth her name as:  )SNT.

 

If you are right that this name was originally written in Egyptian hieratic, then (i) there would be no confusion between Egyptian aleph and Egyptian ayin [no confusion of gutturals], (ii) Hebrew samekh would presumably represent Egyptian sin/%, and (iii) NT at the end would be the Egyptian goddess Neith [and would not be nTr, because the spelling in hieratic of netjer had an R at the end even after such R was no longer pronounced].  By sharp contrast, if I’m right that this name was originally recorded in Akkadian-style cuneiform, then the situation is entirely different.  Cuneiform could not distinguish between the gutturals ayin and aleph, so the first letter in this name could just as easily have been intended to be ayin, even though the received alphabetical text has aleph.  Cuneiform samekh often represents alphabetical Hebrew shin/$, rather than sin/%, as 7^th century BCE Jerusalem [when the cuneiform text was transformed into Biblical Hebrew] is known for “[t]he reception of Akkadian shin as samekh….”  James Maxwell Miller et al, “The Land That I Will Show You” (2001), p. 125.  Finally, the name pa-xa-na-te at Amarna Letter EA 60: 10 confirms that by the Amarna Age, the final R in netjer was no longer pronounced and was not rendered in Akkadian cuneiform, so NT/nun-tav = nTr/netjer.

 

Your theory of the case would have the unfortunate consequence of cementing in stone the traditional view that this name of the daughter of the high-priest of Ra from On means “she belongs to the goddess Neit”.  But that is  i-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e , as the high priest of Ra from On would not give his daughter a name that honors the goddess Neit, nor does such a name tell us the function of Joseph’s Egyptian wife in Genesis.

 

Per Genesis 48: 6, it is clear that in addition to bearing Manasseh and Ephraim to Joseph before Joseph’s father Jacob moved all the Hebrews from Canaan to Egypt, Asenath was “abundant” and bore Joseph many more sons after Jacob came to Egypt.  So the ideal meaning of the name of Joseph’s Egyptian wife would start with the Egyptian word for “abundant”, implying being abundantly fertile in being able to bear Joseph many sons, and then end with a generic reference to the divine.  In Akhenaten’s Great Hymn to the Aten, (i) “abundant” is aSA [in Egyptian, where capital S is used to represent shin/$, lower case a is Egyptian ayin, and upper case A is Egyptian aleph, but such aleph is not rendered by its own cuneiform sign or alphabetical Hebrew letter];  and (ii) nTr is a generic reference to the divine.  The )S in the received text reflects ($, per the Akkadian cuneiform analysis above, and NT is the attested cuneiform rendering of nTr.  So the actual meaning of the name of Joseph’s Egyptian wife is:  “Abundant [thanks to] the Divine”.

 

The reason why these Biblical Egyptian names near the end of Genesis are so exciting is because the confusion of gutturals in these names helps show that the Patriarchal narratives are  m-u-c-h  older as a written text than university scholars realize.  These Biblical Egyptian names were originally recorded in writing, but not in Egyptian hieratic [which, as with alphabetical Hebrew, would have no confusion of gutturals whatsoever], but rather in Akkadian-style cuneiform in the late Amarna time period.

 

The key to seeing that the Patriarchal narratives were originally recorded in Akkadian-style cuneiform way back in the Late Bronze Age is to note the confusion of gutturals in non-Hebrew proper names.

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois