Lewis Reich:
I hope you were not replying to me off-list (because your comment is of general
interest), when you wrote: “The Masoretic pointing may have been set down in
the Middle Ages, but that doesn't mean the Masoretes simply sat down and came
up with pointing off the tops of their heads. They were the recipients of a
continuous oral tradition of reading that may have gone back as much as a
thousand years or more.”
The Masoretic pointing was done in the Middle Ages. Using your view that the
Masoretic pointing may reflect an oral tradition “that may have gone back as
much as a thousand years or more”, that would get us back to the late 1st
millennium BCE or so. But that’s over 1,000 years after (i) Ugarit went
extinct, (ii) the Hittites went extinct, and (iii) chapter 14 of Genesis was
composed (based on the majority view of mainstream scholars). Accordingly, for
a truly ancient Biblical text like that, the Ugaritic spelling is much more
relevant than is the medieval Masoretic pointing. We see letter-for-letter
spelling accuracy in comparing Biblical TD(L/Tudhaliya to the Ugaritic spelling
of that Hittite kingly name from the 14th century BCE or so.
This part of the Bible has incredible historical accuracy. If we look to
non-biblical sources from the Late Bronze Age, almost every aspect of Genesis
14: 1-11 checks out perfectly, once one realizes that a non-royal author would
be expected to use nicknames for living rulers, per the consistent practice
attested in the Amarna Letters. TD(L/Tudhaliya is an appropriate
n-i-c-k-n-a-m-e for an historical Hittite king who meets both of the following
two key criteria: (i) historically he did everything that Biblical TD(L is
portrayed as doing at Genesis 14: 1-11, and (ii) it would make complete sense
for an early Hebrew author to use “Tudhaliya” as this historical Hittite king’s
nickname (even though his name was nothing like “Tudhaliya”).
The letter-for-letter spelling accuracy here compared to the Late Bronze Age
Ugaritic source for this name also suggests that this ancient part of the Bible
may have been committed to writing much earlier than scholars have thought.
This part of the Bible is truly ancient, and very accurate. It pre-dates the
medieval Masoretic pointing by 2,000 years or more. That medieval pointing
should not be relied upon to try to undercut the pinpoint historical accuracy
of Genesis 14: 1-11. Nor should Ezra or Daniel. Rather, the way to check out
(and confirm) the pinpoint historical accuracy of this ancient Biblical text is
to compare it to the abundant non-biblical sources we have for the Late Bronze
Age.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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