Dr. Fournet:
1. In response to my statement that “A final vav is the classic
non-Semitic way to turn a name or word into a geographical place name (as was
frequently the case at Nuzi, for example).”, you wrote: “For example?”
Here are two quick examples of city names from Nuzi ending in vav: city of
$uriniwe, at p. 129, and city of Silliyawe, at p. 96, of David I. Owen and
Ernest Rene Lacheman, “General Studies” (1995), here:
_http://books.google.com/books?id=8SYu_c7mu78C&pg=PR7&dq=david+owen+nuzi+96&hl=en&ei=dBHtTJjcBYOln
QfN3PTYAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q
&f=false_
(http://books.google.com/books?id=8SYu_c7mu78C&pg=PR7&dq=david+owen+nuzi+96&hl=en&ei=dBHtTJjcBYOlnQfN3PTYAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resn
um=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)
By my unofficial count, about 30% of the geographical place names at Nuzi
end with a vav (followed by a vowel, naturally, as the vav was a consonant).
By contrast, personal names at Nuzi rarely end in vav.
2. You wrote: “Are you aware that cuneiform would never be able to write
something like Xurw-? What we have is hur-ru-u-he2 and hur-wu-u-he2
"Hurrian". “
Where you write “hur-wu…”, I write XURW. The key is the consonantal vav/W
after the root of the word.
3. In response to my statement “The Egyptians were deliberately insulting
the people of Canaan by calling greater Canaan X3RW, emphasizing that Canaan
had, in the 14th century BCE, been taken over by non-Semitic people from
eastern Syria as the new ruling class. Not surprisingly, the people of Ugarit
and the Hebrews did not look at things that way, so neither in Ugaritic nor
in Hebrew does one ever see that awful name XRW.”, you wrote: “Why should
it be an insult? “
95% of the human beings in Canaan in the mid-14th century BCE were
indigenous west Semitic speakers, including the early Hebrews, who truly loved
Canaan. The Egyptians deliberately insulted all of such west Semitic persons
by
referring to greater Canaan as X3RW, rubbing it in that in the mid-14th
century BCE, many of the ruling princelings throughout greater Canaan,
including
at Jerusalem and at the city of Hebron (then called Qiltu), were
non-Semitic people from eastern Syria.
We should recognize that deliberate insult, and take umbrage at it. No
wonder you never see XRW in Hebrew or Ugaritic! Much, much more importantly,
however, the consonantal vav in all these Biblical vav nun suffixes is
showing that the Bible is much older, and much more historically accurate, than
scholars have realized. The vav disappears from the non-biblical record in
the 1st millennium BCE. There’s no vav in the jar handles at Gibeon, the LMLK
seals for Hebron, or in the name Horon on Sheshonq’s list. That’s because
that vav was a non-Semitic consonant. With the non-Semitic people having
vanished from Canaan, their old-fashioned ending consonantal vav had now
become inexplicable and hopelessly archaic. That’s precisely why the heavy
concentration in the Bible of common words and personal names with a vav nun
suffix in the Patriarchal narratives is confirming both the antiquity and
historical accuracy of the last 40 chapters of Genesis. What you see as a
ubiquitous -we-ni- component of the insanely long suffix sequences in written
non-Semitic, the rest of us see as -WN in Biblical Hebrew. It’s especially
obvious in personal names in the Patriarchal narratives, where the names of 3
non-Semitic people from eastern Syria, and the names of 2 of Jacob’s sons who
were born in eastern Syria and were named by their mother who to that point
had lived her entire life in the non-Semitic heartland of eastern Syria,
feature -we-ni/-WN. Dr. Fournet, can’t you, of all people, see it’s the
s-a-m-e?!
There are few things in life more exciting than an interior vav in a
Biblical vav nun suffix. That interior vav tells all. It literally reeks of
the
world of the mid-14th century BCE -- the historical Patriarchal Age.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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