Dr. Fournet:
You wrote: “Is there not a possibility that the text was composed orally,
earlier or much earlier than the time when it got written on paper?”
It wasn’t written on “paper”. But it does seem that the names in the story of
Biblical Tudhaliya were written down from the very beginning, way back in the
Late Bronze Age. How else account for the letter-for-letter accuracy in the
Biblical spelling of TD(L as compared to the Ugaritic spelling? Similarly,
scholars have been amazed by the match between )RYWK and essentially the same
name that is attested at Nuzi in the Late Bronze Age: “As for Arioch ('rik),
the phonetic equivalence with the Hurrian name Ariukki (cf. RA XXIII [at
Nuzi]…) is perfect.” “The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental
Research”, Benjamin Wisner Bacon and Henry Joel Cadbury (1931), at p. 45.
http://books.google.com/books?id=CZYSAAAAIAAJ&q=Ariukki&dq=Ariukki&hl=en&ei=jzFhTN6ZAcSinQfi3e2ODw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBg
Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite inscriptions in and near Canaan show that
alphabetic writing was known and used prior to the mid-14th century BCE time
period of the Biblical story of Hittite King “Tudhaliya” [the nasty Hebrew
nickname for feared historical mighty Hittite King Suppiluliuma I, who seized
the Hittite throne by the dastardly expedient of murdering his own older
brother named “Tudhaliya”, so that such nickname in context here effectively
means “Murderer”, and who historically led a coalition of four attacking rulers
who in Year 14 [of Akhenaten’s 17-year reign] destroyed a league of five
rebellious princelings -- “four kings against five” -- in the Great Syrian War
in western Syria]. Scholarly accounts of early alphabetic writing include:
[1] J.C. Darnell, F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, M.J. Lundberg, P. Kyle McCarter, B.
Zuckerman and C. Manassa, “Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi
el-Ḥôl: New Evidence for the Origin of the Alphabet from the Western Desert of
Egypt”, AASOR 59 (2005), pp. 63, 65, 67 -71, 73-113, 115-124. [2] G.J.
Hamilton, “The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts”, CBQ
Monograph Series #40 (2006), Washington. [3] O. Goldwasser, “Canaanites
Reading Hieroglyphs”, Ägypten und Levante 16 (2006), pp. 121-160. [4] W.E.
Albright, "The Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from Sinai and their
Decipherment", BASOR 110 (1948), pp. 6-22 and a long string of other articles.
[5] F.M. Cross, “The Evolution of the Proto-Canaanite Alphabet”, BASOR 134
(1954), pp. 15-24 and a long string of other articles. [6] S.L. Sanders, “What
was the Alphabet for? The Rise of Written Vernaculars and the Making of
Israelite National Literature”, Maarav 11 (2004), pp. 25-56.
The pinpoint accuracy of this ancient Biblical text suggests that the names
were committed to writing from the very beginning.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
=
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
