TD(L is the letter-for-letter alphabetic spelling (per Ugarit) of the Hittite kingly name “Tudhaliya” from the Late Bronze Age. Scholars generally agree that the Biblical story about Tudhaliya is truly ancient, being older than most of the rest of the Bible, with its composition likely dating all the long way back to the Late Bronze Age. Furthermore, the letter-for-letter accuracy of the spelling of this Hittite name suggests that the names in the Biblical story about Tudhaliya may have been committed to writing very early. Could the Biblical story about Tudhaliya have been written down in a language similar to Hebrew as early as the mid-14th century BCE? Three different alphabetic spelling systems in and near Canaan pre-date the 14th century BCE time period. “By the beginning of the second millennium B.C.E. (the late Middle Bronze Age in Canaan), the scribes of Ugarit began to use a new script based on twenty-seven cuneiform characters. The southern Canaanites also developed new scripts of their own, two variations in fact – Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite – both of which were also based upon the use of acronyms (Albright 1966; Cross 1967; Naveh 1982). …Today archaeologists know of some thirty to forty Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions that have been found [in the Sinai]…. [T]he Sinai inscriptions have been dated to the…Middle Kingdom [approximately 19th – 18th centuries BCE]…(Gardiner 1962; Sass 1988). …Further north, another version of this new script began to emerge. Current knowledge of the script, Proto-Canaanite, is based on some twenty-five inscriptions, the earliest dating to the Middle Bronze Age and the latest appearing at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. These inscriptions, most of which were found in a relatively small area in the southern Shephelah, span much of the second millennium B.C.E…..” Jonathan Michael Golden, Ancient Canaan and Israel: New Perspectives (2004), ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California, at pp. 243-244. There are many more detailed scholarly treatments of this subject. The trend is to push the first alphabetic writings ever further back in time. So it is possible that from the very beginning, way back in the Late Bronze Age, the names in the Biblical story about a Hittite king nicknamed “Tudhaliya” may have been written down in pre-Hebrew. That would explain how the various non-Semitic words and names in that Biblical story have such great accuracy. Jim Stinehart Evanston, Illinois
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