From: "Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>
To: JimStinehart AT aol.com, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hobah
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2011 21:28:29 -0300
Dear Jim,
(sorry if i reproduce your email in a somewhat repatched
format, i had some problem with the computer)
I was just pointing at a very remote possibility. I do not even know if that
place deer khobeyah has been dug at all.
In general, though, many arab villages maintain very old tradition. for
example, the village where the shiloax
tunnel (jerusalem) is called silwan even today. same with the israeli places
atlit, jaffa, safed, and
many others. the name of damascus, amman (rabat amon) was preserved, as well
as many other towns in the
region. just in the damascus area i found the following places whose name i
would not associate with typical
>>>>>> You wrote: “i found your account of the name xwbh very interesting.
but i also suspect that wbh would hardly be used to denote U in semitic.
meanwhile, near damaskus, a
bit to the south-west, i localized a small town called der khabeyah.1. Is
“Der Khabeyah” a modern name?
[Is it modern German???] If it’s a modern language, it has little relevance
to understanding
XWBH at Genesis 14: 15. For example, “Ham” is a modern name, that starts
with he/H. But there is no
such city name in greater ancient
Canaan that starts with he/H. I see HM at Genesis 14: 5 as meaning “these”,
rather than being a proper name.
Do you have an ancient cite for “Der Khabeyah”? Perhaps it’s a German
rendering of a modern Arabic town
name??2. Of critical importance to the analysis here is your statement that
“i also suspect that wbh would hardly be used to denote U in semitic”. I
completely
agree that 1st millennium BCE scribes could not imagine a word in the Bible
beginning with a vav/W, where that vav/W
represented a vowel that was its own separate syllable. Though such a
construction is commonplace in Hurrian, it’s impossible in Hebrew. But
consider now how an early Hebrew would have recorded the Hurrian name Ubi.
The east Semitic name for the Damascus region was
Api, and the west Semitic version would have aleph/) for that initial A. But
in the Late Bronze Age, the Canaanite Shift made
the pronunciation Opi. We know from Amarna Letter EA 197 that Hurrian
princelings ruled the Damascus area in the 14th century
BCE. To a Hurrian, Opi sounded a lot like the Hurrian word U-bi, meaning
“barley”, and the Damascus area was a good barley growing area. So the
Hurrian version of )A-pi was sometimes Ubi. In Akkadian
cuneiform, Obi or Ubi would be U2-bi [which is indistinguishable in Akkadian
cuneiform writing from U2-pi]. At Amarna Letter
EA 189 rev. 12 from Hurrian princeling Etakkama, there is a complaint about
rival Hurrian princeling Biryawaza that mentions “U2-bi”. There is not a
single word or name in the Hebrew Bible that begins with a vav/W as a vowel.
But how would you represent the Hurrian name
for the Damascus area: U-bi? Perhaps the Hebrew vav/W does not represent
the sound U here.
But the Hebrew vav/W was the only Hebrew letter available to represent a
vowel that is
functioning as its own separate syllable in a non-Semitic language (Hurrian).
The original Biblical rendering was H-WBH,
where the vav/W was its own separate syllable, U2 in Akkadian cuneiform, and
U2 in Hurrian
as well. [As a region, the he/H at the beginning was needed, meaning “the”.
Cf. “the
Mizpeh”.] The first letter in the received text, X/heth, is a fully
understandable scribal error, that was virtually certain to happen.
H-WBH seemed impossible to 1st millennium BCE copyists, because no Hebrew
word starts with vav/W as a vowel, whereas
XWBH seemed possible, meaning “hiding place”. So the inexplicable H-WBH in
the original became XWBH due to a one-letter
scribal error. 3. In the ancient world, there is no XWBH in the Damascus
area, to the best of my knowledge. I am guessing that the “Der
Khabeyah” you found is a modern name [unless you have an ancient source you
can cite for such
name]. If chapter 14 of Genesis was composed in the Late Bronze Age [as many
scholars think it was], then after
mentioning “Damascus”, one would definitely expect a reference to either A-pi
or U-bi. We
should see Genesis 14: 15 as referencing H-WBH, which obviously would be “the
U-bi”, the Hebrew rendering of the Hurrian name for the Damascus area.
Unfortunately, the received text has XWBH, which matches to nothing in
non-biblical documents, due to that one-letter scribal error. Whereas the
received
text has XWBH, in my view we should see that as having originally been
H-WBH. It’s a fully historical reference to U-bi, being the Damascus area in
the Late Bronze
Age.4.
Nir Cohen, how would you write “the U-bi” in early Biblical
Hebrew? Remember, you don’t want “the A-pi”, which
is the older Akkadian version of the name for the Damascus area. I submit
that the only
way to record the Hurrian name “the U-bi” was what was originally at Genesis