Rolf Furuli:
You wrote: "[I]f I understand Jack correctly, he would say that this language definitely was not Hebrew because the ancestors of the later Hebrew-speaking people did not yet live in Canaan."
The Hebrews always lived in Canaan. Most historians agree that the Hebrews are indigenous to Canaan, and that there is no evidence of the Hebrews as a people spending any considerable time in Egypt. Just look at the language of Biblical Hebrew, which is this list's long suit. The Northwest Semitic words found in the Amarna Letters are for the most part words that are found in the Bible (though naturally the form often varies). There's precious little Akkadian influence on Hebrew. And there's also very little Egyptian influence on Hebrew. By contrast, Canaanite and Moabite, to the extent we can reconstruct those languages, and the vast corpus of Ugaritic literature, have a very similar vocabulary to Biblical Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew has only 70 loanwords from Akkadian (per Paul V. Mankowski), and only 40 certain loanwords from Egyptian (per T.O. Lambdin's classic study in 1953). Yet one cannot even talk about the concept of "loanwords" in Hebrew from Canaanite or Ugaritic, because the vocabulary is so similar.
If we look at the language of early Biblical Hebrew in the Patriarchal narratives, the history of the Hebrews is staring us in the face. The Hebrews did not originate in Mesopotamia. The word (BR-Y/"Hebrew" does not mean "the crossing a boundary people". Rather, the Hebrews are indigenous to Canaan, as the author of the Patriarchal narratives knows and reflects in his composition. The language of the rest of the Bible confirms that the Hebrews did not spend their formative years in Egypt, because there is so little influence of Egyptian on Biblical Hebrew.
Some scholars say that NYXX at Genesis 8: 21, meaning "sweet" in Hebrew, comes from the Egyptian word for "eternity", NXX, but that seems a big stretch to me. Of course, "pharaoh" obviously comes from Egyptian, as would be expected. Interestingly, going the other direction, Egyptian has a large number of Semitic loanwords. But that is not surprising, considering all the Canaanites who wandered into Egypt over the centuries, and the period of Hyksos rule over Egypt.
You know Hebrew. It's difficult to distinguish Hebrew from Canaanite and Ugaritic and Moabite. Yet it's hard to find many Akkadian or Egyptian loanwords in Biblical Hebrew. The language of Biblical Hebrew itself is telling us that (i) the Hebrews are indigenous to Canaan, and (ii) the Hebrews did not spend their formative years in Egypt. The Hebrews were always in beloved Canaan. That's what the Patriarchal narratives say, and that's what both history and linguistics confirm.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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