Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Chris Watts:

 

You wrote:  “If someone might care to explain in laymans language please then I 
would be delighted.  I can not follow the thread due to complete lack of knowledge of ancient language and customs.  So I am curious though, what would be the outcome if Jim was right and the Hurian names and his argument was correct.  I simply ask because having read up about the Nuzi tablets and the story behind the fact that they confirmed a number of biblical textual customs that for many years ancient biblical scholars thought were highly improbable, I wonder what this would mean for biblical scholars if Jim were correct?”

 

The main issue is the critical question of how old the Patriarchal narratives are as a  w-r-i-t-t-e-n  text.  Scholars say that even if parts of the Patriarchal narratives may be truly ancient as an oral tradition, nevertheless the Patriarchal narratives could not possibly have been committed to writing prior to the 1^st millennium BCE, because alphabetical Hebrew writing was not advanced enough prior to that time to handle a sophisticated composition like the Patriarchal narratives.  The answer to that is that the Patriarchal narratives were reduced to writing in the mid-14^th century BCE by a scribe in south-central Canaan using cuneiform to write on clay tablets.  The writing was similar to the Amarna Letters, except that instead of using Akkadian common words, Canaanite/pre-Hebrew common words were written down [in cuneiform].

 

On that theory of the case, we would then expect letter-for-letter accuracy in the spelling of both Biblical Hurrian names and Biblical Egyptian names, except that we would also expect “confusion of gutturals and certain sibilants”, since cuneiform was generally unable to differentiate one guttural from another, and also did not always differentiate between certain sibilants.  As to Hurrian names, cuneiform heth/X could alternatively stand for any of the following three Hebrew alphabetical letters:  heth/X or he/H or ayin/(.  So what’s written as a Hebrew he/H in the name YHWDYT/“Judith” at Genesis 26: 34 may have originally been intended to be a Hebrew heth/X.  The root of this name then is not the inexplicable HWD, but rather was intended to be XWD, which is basically the same name as the attested Hurrian woman’s name Xu-ú-te at Nuzi.  [As to T vs. D, they are effectively interchangeable in these Hurrian names, as Xu-ti is alternatively rendered as Xu-di.  See p. 64 of Gelb and Purves, “Nuzi Personal Names”.]

 

It’s very important whether the name of Esau’s first XTY wife is or is not a letter-for-letter accurate spelling of a slight variant of a Late Bronze Age Hurrian name attested at Nuzi.  If so, then that’s fully consistent with the Patriarchal narratives being a written cuneiform text as of the mid-14^th century BCE, which 700 years later was transformed into alphabetical Biblical Hebrew in late 7^th century BCE Jerusalem.  But if not, then we’re stuck with the conventional very late dating of the Patriarchal narratives, at least as a written text, and perhaps as to its composition as well, per George Athas’s remark:  “Maybe we just have a text written in a time when there was a Judah?”

 

So you see how much is riding on this.  If Esau is portrayed as marrying a Hittite who was a lifelong resident of Canaan [per Genesis 27: 46, with there being no Hittites who were lifelong residents of Canaan historically], and who had a name that is both senseless and anachronistic, “Jewess”, then the Patriarchal narratives are late and lack historicity.  Note what a stark contrast that is to what I assert:  that Esau is portrayed as marrying a Hurrian [where XTY : Xu-ti-ia is an apt Patriarchal nickname for the Hurrians, who are thereby deftly nicknamed the “Praise Teshup people”, with Teshup being the Hurrians’ chief deity], who was a lifelong resident of Canaan [which applies to the Hurrians only in the mid-14^th century BCE and never applies to the Hittites], and that her name is a slight variant of attested Late Bronze Age Hurrian names and means either “Praise Teshup” or “Teshup, Praise Teshup”.

 

Historically, the concept of Esau marrying Hurrian women who are lifelong residents of Canaan, and of Abraham buying Sarah’s gravesite from a Hurrian landowner in south-central Canaan, makes sense in only  o-n-e  historical time period:  the mid-14^th century BCE.  That’s the only time when Hurrian charioteers dominated the ruling class of Canaan, and importantly that’s also the only time when cuneiform literacy is well-documented in south-central Canaan -- both of which we know from the Amarna Letters.

 

So in fact it makes a huge difference whether the first seven XTY names in the Patriarchal narratives all are letter-for-letter accurate renderings of attested Hurrian names [or of slight variants of attested Hurrian names] from the Late Bronze Age Hurrian province of Nuzi.  When university scholars tell us that it’s allegedly  i-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e  that the Patriarchal narratives as a written text could date all the long way back to the Late Bronze Age, because alphabetical Hebrew is not attested in sophisticated form that early, the answer to that is this.  These are bona fide Late Bronze Age Hurrian names that were recorded in cuneiform writing on clay tablets by a scribe retained by the first tent-dwelling Hebrews, in south-central Canaan in the mid-14^th century BCE.  That in turn opens the door for the Patriarchal narratives possibly having  p-i-n-p-o-i-n-t  historical accuracy as to what actually happened in Late Bronze Age south-central Canaan, since the Patriarchal narratives were recorded in [cuneiform] writing by a contemporary who lived in that time period.

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois