Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] GOSHEN was Micrayim vs Misr

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: chavoux AT gmail.com, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] GOSHEN was Micrayim vs Misr
  • Date: Thu, 2 May 2013 12:02:58 -0400 (EDT)

There’s no place in or near the eastern Delta with a name like “Goshen” in the Iron Age or earlier.  Yet there’s a perfect linguistic match to “Goshen” just southwest of Akhetaten/Amarna across the Nile River, in nome #14.  The word transliterated as “Goshen” is G$N in Hebrew.  The final -N is likely a west Semitic ending that effectively means “place”.  G$-N refers to the largely rural area in the general vicinity of G$.  To the best of my knowledge, the only Egyptian locale that fits Hebrew G$ linguistically is Qis, a name attested in the Late Bronze Age as the leading city in rural nome #14, south of Amarna on the west bank of the Nile River.

 

Qis in Egyptian consists of the following four hieroglyphic signs:  N29;  M17;  S29;  O49.  The final sign means “city” in Egyptian, so it would not be rendered in Hebrew.  The second sign is often transliterated by the English vowel i.  It is likely that an early Hebrew would have viewed this as being a vowel-type sound, and as such would not have rendered it by a separate Hebrew letter in the defective spelling of early Biblical Hebrew.  Thus the two relevant signs for our purposes are #1 and #3.

 

#1:  N29.  Item #104 on the Late Bronze Age Thutmose III list of places in Canaan starts with N29.  N29 is the first Egyptian letter in the Egyptian rendering of the city name that is Gazru/Gezer, with a G, in many Amarna Letters (e.g. EA 253: 22).  Likewise, that city name is GZR, with a gimel/G in Hebrew (e.g. Joshua 10: 33).  So it’s clear that N29, though transliterated as K or Q (or C) in Egyptian, comes over into Hebrew as gimel/G for this city name.

 

#3:  S29.  I find S29 only once on the Tuthmose III list, where it seems to be an auxiliary sibilant at item 28.  There is, however, a direct Hebrew equivalent of this item’s name:  ‘$TRT, at Genesis 14: 5.  Amarna Letter EA 197: 10 is A$tartu.  Thus we see that S29 can come over into Hebrew as shin/$.

 

Based on the foregoing, the Egyptian name “Qis” is a perfect linguistic match to the Hebrew word “Goshen”/G$-N that appears 10 times in the Patriarchal narratives.  [The single reference to “land of Ramses” at Genesis 47: 11 not only uses anachronistic terminology, but also is not the location of Goshen/Qis!  That is a bogus phrase that must have been added by a post-exilic editor who did not know what he was talking about.]

 

On a textual basis, Qis as Biblical Goshen fits the storyline of the Patriarchal narratives if and only if the Patriarchal Age is the Amarna Age.  If so, the fit is absolutely perfect.  But if the Patriarchal Age is not the Amarna Age, then there would be no reason for Hebrews to be portrayed as sojourning way down south in central Egypt.

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page