In a message dated 8/20/2004 10:40:25 AM Pacific Daylight Time, peterkirk AT qaya.org writes:
...That is the hypothesis which you tried to deny. Harold and I are trying to show that your falisification is invalid, so we have to work with the hypothesis. That there is other evidence in favour of the hypothesis is just at the moment irrelevant.
That the BOG was written a thousand years before the Septuagint is a huge assumption--based on what? ...
Here, wait! You talk as though I were the only person ever to have claimed a late authorship for the Torah. But you should know that I am not. And there is evidence for that, too, or scholars would never have suggested it. Leave Harold out of it--and speak for yourself. Where is your evidence that my "falsification is invalid"? ...
...OK. Well, I accept that there are anachronisms in Genesis. I have never argued that the text as we have it is exactly as written by Moses; in fact few people have. The obvious answer to this objection is that the original author used another title for this Pharaoh, or his name, and a later redactor (or Moses himself for those who hold to a 19th dynasty Exodus) substituted the then current title.
Except that as argued below these may not actually be names but titles. The king of Egypt is called "Pharaoh" as if this were a name. It is of course a title, not a name. The words PR(H, PW+YPR and PW+Y PR( [+ = TET, note how similar they are] may actually all be titles which are used in Genesis as if they are names.
Here we go again. I have some more bad news. The king of Egypt was not referred to as "pr a3" at all until quite late in Egyptian history. Not until the 18th Dynasty and then but rarely. It only became a common name for the king in the 19th and 20th Dynasties--and following that. "pr a3" actually means "Great House". The rationale is that the king was the "Great House" from which came all benefices. It is rather like saying "The White House issued a statement today"--when it really comes from the president, himself. So to write "pharaoh" in Genesis is but another anachronism.
...
Hold on, and look at the Hebrew forms I gave above. Pharaoh is spelled PR(H, with ayin [and a final silent he], and this presumably corresponds to Egyptian pr-a3, even if your 3 is nominally alef rather than ayin.
The /a/ is the ayin--and /3/ is an alef only in syllabic orthography, group writing. ...
... Believe me, it is no accident that the word for pharaoh survives as "faraon" in Egypt today. ...
...But could not the same person be a priest and an officer?
No priest was ever referred to as "an officer of pharaoh"--and not in the Bible, either. An officer is an officer--even in ancient Egyptian. Priests had titles, too, but these were different.
Maybe. But your imagination sometimes seems just as fertile as this one.By the way, I have seen it suggested that Potiphar and Potiphera are not just the same name but the same person: Joseph's former master, having perhaps been appointed priest of On while Joseph was in prison, gave his daughter in marriage to Joseph when the latter became important, hoping to win back the favour of the one he had wronged and now had to submit to. The problem with that is that the text of Genesis seems to present them as different people.
Does this come from some midrash--or what? Just someone's imagination?
The weak phoneme may always have been written as n in *Egyptian*, but it is probable that those writing the names in *Hebrew* would have written what they heard rather than trying to represent every written hieroglyph. So, if the /n/ was silent, in Moses' or Joseph's day, it would not have been written in the Hebrew text.
True--but see again what I said about the timeframe of the designation "pr a3". It certainly wasn't in use during the Hyksos period--or before. ...
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