Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Tory:

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 2:58 AM, Tory Thorpe <torythrp AT yahoo.com> wrote:

Karl:

Not a second of the Egyptian XIIth dynasty can belong to the 15th century BCE.

Which is more trustworthy: the warmed over “history” of a hellenistic era Egyptian priest (Manetho) who padded his “history” to make it older, hence more to be “honored”; or the findings of archeology supported also by written records of other lands that contradict that “history”?

I’ll not argue this point further.

 

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?

You’re asking me to repeat myself here.

Okay, okay, there’s evidence that Moses used older documents to compile Genesis. How much he may have edited those documents is unknown today. 

Proto-Sinaitic, proto-Hebrew, proto-Canaanite, whatever, characters have to be "inscribed".

Nope. Many of the earliest Hebrew letters have rounded shapes that are harder to inscribe than the later angular characters of archaic Hebrew of the Iron Age.

 

No narrative history in high literature was composed like that in that part of the world except in the Egyptian.

You have no evidence to back up this declaration.

 

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.

I agree with you that the thought of ancient nomads schlepping around hundreds of pounds of cuneiform tablets makes no sense, when ink on velum scrolls were readily available and one donkey could carry several scrolls. Velum was made from sheepskins, and these nomads were shepherds.

There’s no question that Hebrew was written in its own alphabet long before Moses, so there’s no need to assume that Moses used hieratic in writing Torah. Further, that alphabet with several of the letters quite rounded, is more attuned for writing with pen and ink than inscribing on rocks. I’ll turn the question around, which is more likely—Moses used hieratic to compose Torah, or that he used the already extant alphabetic system already in use to write Hebrew?

How old are the Egyptian words like "ink" and "pen" in Hebrew? Old and older than the Middle Kingdom.

My question was, how early are these words in Egyptian?

 

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".

Is this available online? I’d like to see that. What is his evidence? What is the context? Were these used for tribute to Egypt during the Amarna age, i.e. the Divided Kingdom era?

Tory Thorpe
Tel Aviv, Israel

Karl W. Randolph.