Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Chris Watts:

 

 

You wrote:  “Dear Jim, am I misunderstanding you when you use the term non-semitic? because...Amalek was the son of a princess Timna who was Lotan's sister also a semite who was concubine to Eliphaz who was the son of Esau who was jacob's brother who was a semite....if I have then sorry.”

 

 

I am so delighted that you asked that question, because it suddenly dawned on me that that’s probably the main reason why people on the b-hebrew list have never thought of Amalek as being Hurrian.

 

 

1.  Here’s the short answer [for people who want to skip the lengthy linguistic analysis at #2 below].  Genesis 36: 20- 22 outright tells us that Amalek’s mother was a Hurrian/XRY:  (i) per Genesis 36: 20, Lotan is the son of Seir [a Hurrian name] the Hurrian/XRY/“Horite”, and at Genesis 36: 21 Lotan is said to be a Hurrian/XRY leader [see also Genesis 36: 29-30];  and (ii) per Genesis 36: 22, one of Lotan’s children was XRY/Hurrian/“Hori”, and Lotan’s sister was Timna.  In a prior post, I showed that “Amalek” itself is a Hurrian name.  Amalek’s maternal grandfather is explicitly stated to be a Hurrian/XRY at Genesis 36: 20, Amalek’s maternal first cousin is explicitly stated to be a Hurrian/XRY at Genesis 36: 22, and the name “Amalek” is a Hurrian name.  Yes, Amalek’s father is Esau’s son Eliphaz, per Genesis 36: 12, who was a Hebrew [or pre-Hebrew] native speaker.  But note that chapter 36 of Genesis makes explicit that Amalek’s maternal ancestors are Hurrians/XRY.  As you rightly point out, Amalek’s paternal grandfather Esau was a Semite whose native language was Hebrew [or pre-Hebrew, etc.].  But Amalek’s mother was a Hurrian.  As discussed in detail in #2 below, if a man has a Hurrian mother, then both Biblically and historically, it is predictable that the man will either have a Hurrian name, or a name that makes sense both in Hurrian and in the language of the man’s father.

 

 

Thus the short answer is that despite the fact that Amalek’s paternal grandfather [Esau] was a native Hebrew-speaking Semite, nevertheless “Amalek” is a Hurrian name.  That is no real surprise, since chapter 36 of Genesis bends over backwards to tell us specifically and explicitly that Amalek’s maternal ancestors were Hurrians, including Amalek’s mother, Timna.

 

 

2.  Your question, however, raises one of the most super-exciting and most controversial questions in the entire Hebrew Bible.  Though unnoticed by scholars, the fact of the matter is that most of the married couples throughout the Patriarchal narratives are portrayed as being like Amalek’s parents:  a native west Semitic-speaking man marries a woman whose mother is a Hurrian.  In particular, that pattern applies to Abraham and Sarah, to Isaac and Rebekah, and to Jacob and both Leah and Rachel.  Sarah’s birth name, Sarai, is never attested as a west Semitic name, but is well-attested as a classic Hurrian woman’s name.  Note that all of Rebekah, Leah and Rachel come from the Hurrian heartland in eastern Syria.  Yes, the paternal ancestors of Rebekah, Leah and Rachel are [like Amalek’s paternal ancestors] native west Semitic speakers, but their mother’s mother is in every case a Hurrian.

 

 

The premise of your question, which articulates what most people on the b-hebrew list doubtless think but which is historically inaccurate, is that if a Hebrew-speaking man [like Esau’s son Eliphaz] married a Hurrian woman [like Timna], their children would have names that make sense solely in Hebrew, not in Hurrian.  But that is false.  As you know, I have shown in a prior post that “Amalek” is a Hurrian name.  And historically, if a Hurrian woman married a non-Hurrian man, the Hurrian woman would insist that their sons either have Hurrian names, or names that make sense in both the language of the father and the Hurrian language of the mother. 

 

 

As a key historical example of that latter phenomenon [which is well-documented historically but will come as a shock to most people on the b-hebrew list, but which is of critical importance in trying to understand the Patriarchal narratives historically and is not blasphemous, and which is fundamentally a question of historical linguistics, which is this list’s long suit], in the Amarna Letters Yapaxu has a native west Semitic-speaking father, the Amorite princeling Milk-i-Ilu, but his maternal grandfather is the Hurrian princeling Tagi, meaning that Yapaxu’s mother was a Hurrian.  The name Yapaxu is routinely analyzed as being a west Semitic name, and on one level it is.  But it also works perfectly as a Hurrian name as well, and that’s no accident:  the name “Yapaxu” works beautifully both as a west Semitic name, honoring Yapaxu’s Amorite father, and as a Hurrian name, honoring Yapaxu’s Hurrian mother.

 

 

The b-hebrew list is primarily concerned with language issues that directly affect the Hebrew Bible, which I myself interpret as including distinguishing from purely Hebrew names both names that are not Semitic at all, and names that work well both in Hebrew and in the non-Semitic language of Hurrian.  So please bear with me as I set forth a fairly detailed linguistic analysis showing that when a Hurrian woman [like Timna] marries a man [like Esau’s son Eliphaz] whose native language is a west Semitic language like Hebrew, it is predictable that their sons [like Amalek] will have Biblical names that will either be Hurrian names, or will make perfect sense in both Hebrew and Hurrian.  

 

Although Richard Hess, Wm. Moran and other leading scholars always transliterate the name “Yapaxu” with a heth/X, which they do per the Akkadian cuneiform heth/X that was used to record this name in the Amarna Letters, nevertheless (for reasons discussed immediately below) they both analyze such name by treating such Akkadian cuneiform heth/X as representing a west Semitic ayin/‘, in their west Semitic/Amorite analysis of the name ia-pa-xi/“Yapaxu”.  But bear in mind that Akkadian cuneiform heth/X could also render a heth/X (instead of an ayin/‘on the Amorite analysis), in which case, as we shall now see, ia-pa-xi makes perfect sense in Hurrian as well.  [The name “Timna” has that same ending.] 

 

Here let’s start first with the Hurrian analysis of the name “Yapaxu”/ia-pa-xi.  As to the ia-pa at the beginning of this name, compare the Hurrian word a-a-pi, which is a “sacrificial pit for summoning the underworld gods”.  Sara E. Kimball, “Hittite Historical Phonology” (1999), p. 65.  See also George C. Heider, “The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment” (1985), p. 249, which deals with Leviticus 20: 6 in particular:  “Hittite/Hurrian a-a-pi (a pit connecting one with the underworld)”.  [’WB (or the form ’BT) is used in 16 different verses in the Bible.  With B and P often being interchangeable within Hurrian, many Biblical scholars, such as those noted above, view ’WB as being the Biblical Hebrew rendering of the Hurrian word a-a-pi.]  Just as the classic Hurrian theophoric can be spelled either -ia or -a-a, the a-a- at the beginning of the Hurrian common word a-a-pi could alternatively be spelled as ia-, which gives us ia-pi as an alternative spelling of this Hurrian common word.  As to the final element in the name ia-pa-xi, that -xi is a ubiquitous Hurrian suffix that has the literal meaning of “coming from”.  So in Hurrian, where Akkadian cuneiform heth/X is treated as representing heth/X (not ayin/‘), ia-pi-xi would mean:  “coming from a pit connecting one with the [gods of the] underworld”.  Nozadze’s  Hurrian dictionary reports the following divine name, which likely is referring to this well-known phenomenon:  A-a-pi-.  The point is that to the Hurrian mother of Yapaxu, where Hess spells this name ia-pa-xi, such name would certainly recall a Hurrian meaning of “coming from a pit connecting one with the [gods of the] underworld”:  a-a-pi-xi or ia-pa-xi.  

 

Now we’ll move on to the west Semitic analysis of the name “Yapaxu”.  To Yapaxu’s Amorite father, Hess’s standard all-west Semitic explanation makes sense:  “[God] has appeared”, where Akkadian cuneiform heth/X is viewed as representing west Semitic ayin/‘.  See Hess’s analysis of the name “Yapaxu”/ia-pa-xi at p. 84 of “Amarna Personal Names”, where the west Semitic root of this name is viewed as being yp‘ [YP(], with an ayin, and with there being no west Semitic heth/X involved. 

 

Recognizing that Akkadian cuneiform heth/X in final position could represent either ayin or heth [as Shlomo Izre’el in particular has demonstrated is the case in the cuneiform of the Amarna Letters], we see that the name “Yapaxu” works equally well in both languages:  on an all-west Semitic analysis (using ayin), and on an all-Hurrian analysis (using heth).  That reflects the historical fact that Yapaxu, like Isaac, Jacob and Esau and Amalek, had a native west Semitic-speaking father and a mother whose mother was Hurrian.  Accordingly, in all such cases, instead of stopping with an all-west Semitic analysis of such a person’s name (as has heretofore routinely been done, both Biblically and non-Biblically), we should rather go on to ask whether, in addition, the name “Yapaxu” also works well on an all-Hurrian basis as well.  And indeed it does, per the above analysis, just as do the names “Isaac”, “Jacob” and “Esau”.  In my view, the names “Isaac”, “Jacob”, “Esau” and “Yapaxu” are ingeniously devised to make perfect sense in both west Semitic and Hurrian, reflecting the fact that the man had a native west Semitic-speaking father and a mother whose mother was Hurrian.  Accordingly, it is neither an accident nor blasphemous that the names “Isaac”, “Jacob” and “Esau” (like the historical name “Yapaxu”) make just as good sense in Hurrian as they do in Hebrew.  Please note that the  o-n-l-y  historical time period when such a marital pattern was commonplace in Canaan was the Amarna Age in the mid-14^th century BCE.

 

I am  n-o-t  alleging that the Hebrew Patriarchs were Hurrians.  They weren’t.  But each Hebrew Patriarch is portrayed as marrying a woman whose mother was a Hurrian.  What’s super-important about that is that historically, that marital pattern makes sense in Canaan solely in the mid-14^th century BCE, when for a brief moment in time we know that, per the Amarna Letters, Hurrian charioteers temporarily dominated the ruling class of Canaan.  The Patriarchal narratives as a written cuneiform text are much older, and much more accurate historically, than university scholars realize.  When chapter 36 of Genesis explicitly asserts and reiterates that Amalek’s maternal ancestors were Hurrians, though his paternal ancestors [including Esau] were native west Semitic speaking Semites, that is hearkening back to a marital pattern that is well attested in Canaan only in the Patriarchal Age of the mid-14^th century BCE.

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois