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

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  • From: Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
  • To: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org, chavoux AT gmail.com
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] GOSHEN was Micrayim vs Misr
  • Date: Thu, 02 May 2013 21:51:08 -0400 (EDT)

Hi Jim,

On Thu, 2 May 2013 12:02:58 -0400 (EDT), JimStinehart AT aol.com wrote:
>
> 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”.

I know you've brought up this -N suffix in previous posts, but I'm not
so sure it can be dismissed in so cavalier a manner as to reduce
"Goshen" to "G$".

> 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.

The Egyptian sign M17, conventially transliterated "ỉ", is a consonant
in Egyptian, so I don't think it would be viewed aa a vowel in
Hebrew. Exactly how it *would* be represented is uncertain, but my
guess would be by (a consonantal) yodh, thus גיש (/gyš/).

> #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.

The correspondences between Egyptian & Hebrew are a bit uncertain, but
I think a correspondence between Eg. <q> and H. <g> is reasonable.

> #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/$.

I have no problem with that.

> 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.

As indicated above, I don't think the match is "perfect", but it's
reasonable provided we dispose of that pesky final nun in the Hebrew
form. But even if we do that, we end up by comparing two Hebrew
consonants with three Egyptian consonants, and that's a frail basis
for making a conclusion that qỉs = גשן.

--
Will Parsons
μὴ φαίνεσθαι, ἀλλ' εἶναι.



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