Let's make the following clear: we really don't know what "Amorite" was! The term is used by scholars, both linguists and historians, to cover the wide range of Northwestern Semitic dialects used in what the Mesopotamians called "Amurru" - everything west of the Euphrates - during the second millennium BCE. However, we have no actual inscriptions in this language - most of what we know about it is based on the "bad grammar" and various glosses in Akkadian texts, written by scribes who were not Akkadian-speakers, in places such as Mari and Amarna. We can assume that there were lots of "Amorite" dialects - I don't know whether a person from Gaza and one from Damascus in, say, 1500 BCE could understand each other - we just don't have enough texts to work with.
Surely when one considers that the Amorite dialect must have been very
widely spoken (a from of Aramaic) amongst Babylonia and around 2400-1800 in
Canaan when they moved in, and Abraham allying himself with them in a
momentous battle, alludes to some common understanding with them. And EARLY
aramaic had more in common with the canaanite tongue than did later aramaic?
Maybe upon this there is some thought that the SPOKEN hebrew during the
Egypt years was a kind of independently forming Aramaic. After all, Moses
fled to Midian and not the place of his ancestral beginnings in Canaan.
Midian being of course of Family kindred and similar tongue to Moses?
Otherwise surely a man who was lonely and in need of feeling secure would
try to find a place where he was most at home, both in language and belief?
Which would not have been Midian - just a thought! chris.
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