Let us now move on to geographical place names with a vav nun suffix. At
first glance, the situation seems totally different than for common words and
personal names. There is only one geographical place name in the
Patriarchal narratives that has a vav nun suffix: XBRWN. But a startling 27
geographical place names outside of the Patriarchal narratives feature a vav
nun
suffix [counting only place names that occur at least 10 times in the Bible].
One unique aspect of geographical place names, of course, is that unlike
any other type of word or name, they can routinely contain archaic elements,
as geographical place name changes were relatively rare in Canaan from the
Late Bronze Age through Roman times. As we will now see, the vav in a van nun
suffix may be an archaic element in a geographical place name.
Although the example of Megiddo, whose Biblical name, MGDW, ends with a vav
in all but one case, may seem unique in the Bible, in my view it may well
have been the norm. In the Late Bronze Age, many places dominated by
non-Semitic people from Naharim ended in –W, being a vav as a consonant. By my
unofficial count, almost 30% of geographical place names at Nuzi end in –W,
where a final vav [as a consonant] was technically the genitive case marker,
but was often used to indicate a place name. In the rendering by Egyptologist
Paul John Cowie of the Thutmose III list of places in greater Canaan in the
mid-15th century BCE, 13 geographical place names are shown as ending with
the English letter W. In many cases, these are places where non-Semitic
people from Naharim were present, and thus this may be a vav ending, where the
vav was a true consonant. But then these non-Semitic people from Naharim
suddenly disappeared from greater Canaan, shortly after their fellow countrymen
’s disastrous series of military defeats by the dreaded Hittites in the
Great Syrian War in the mid-14th century BCE. Almost overnight, as it were,
all those –W endings on geographical place names now seemed strange and
old-fashioned, if not inexplicable. About the only case where the archaic vav
ending was retained intact was MGD-W. But in one case even for Megiddo, at
Zechariah 12: 11, and for all of the other places whose names had formerly
ended with a vav, a west Semitic standard –N ending was now added. Thus at
Zechariah 12: 11 we see MGD-WN, and 26 other geographical place names in the
Bible have that –WN/vav nun suffix ending. The vav nun suffix created by
adding a west Semitic –N to a pre-existing non-Semitic –W ending did not seem
terribly strange to the Hebrews, because in the truly ancient Patriarchal
narratives 7 people’s names end in –WN, both non-Semitic and Hebrew names, and
also there are are several common words in that text that end with a vav nun
suffix as well.
The author of Joshua likely was looking at three different sets of
spellings for geographical place names. He had some truly ancient city lists,
which
would have had the archaic –W ending. He also had old city lists with a –
WN ending. And then in his own day, the vav had for the most part been
dropped, as we will see in a moment, so he also knew that a –N ending could be
used. The author of Joshua decided to use –WN endings most of the time.
That archaic vav fit in with his stories of days of old, yet as long as the nun
was there too, everyone could easily recognize these names as being
geographical place names. So in the Bible, -WN endings predominate for
geographical place names, although there are also plenty of –N endings as well,
sometimes as alternative endings for the same place name [for example, XR-N vs.
XR-WN].
But it is important to note that in non-biblical sources from the 1st
millennium BCE, that archaic vav drops out completely. At least that’s the
case
in the mid-1st millennium BCE for GB(N, with no interior vav on jar handles,
and XBRN, with no interior vav on LMLK seals, even though LMLK seals for
other cities often have plene spelling. In non-biblical sources, why did the
vav nun suffix go out of date after the 10th century BCE or so? Why would
the vav nun suffix disappear in non-biblical sources at precisely the time
when plene spelling for Hebrew was being invented and used heavily in the
later portions of the Hebrew Bible? The secular historical record seems
precisely backward from what one might have predicted: a vav suffix is
well-documented in the Late Bronze Age [per 13 –W endings on the T III list],
but
consistently missing in the mid-1st millennium BCE.
We are beginning to see that the vav nun suffixes in the Bible have almost
nothing to do with the plene spelling issue. Except as to geographical
place names, vav nun suffixes are found in greater abundance in the Patriarchal
narratives than anywhere else in the Bible, even though plene spelling is
less prominent in the Patriarchal narratives than in much of the rest of the
Bible. In non-biblical sources, the place to find a vav as a geographical
place name suffix is prior to the 1st millennium BCE. By contrast, in the 1st
millennium BCE, when plene spelling was invented for Hebrew, the vav in a
Biblical vav nun suffix is not found in non-biblical sources. That’s because
the vav in those vav nun suffixes was originally a consonant, and a
non-Semitic consonant at that, coming out of the non-Semitic homeland of
Naharim in
Late Bronze Age eastern Syria. The presence of all those vav nun suffixes
in common words and personal names in the Patriarchal narratives is dating
the composition of that ancient text to the mid-14th century BCE, when
non-Semitic people from Naharim, with their consonantal vav suffixes, ruled
Canaan.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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