George Athas wrote: “I think we can leave Hurrian out of this discussion. Stick to Hebrew, folks.” The question then is how early Biblical Hebrew handled the “Canaanite Shift” for the word that referred to the Damascus area. Genesis 14: 15 explicitly refers to “Damascus”, and then has a mysterious reference, unattested any place else in the Bible or in non-biblical sources, to XWBH. Here is what the leading scholar as to ancient Damascus has to say: “The shift of the first vowel from a to o in some areas of Syria-Palestine and in Egypt during the Late Bronze Age strongly suggests that the a-vowel was accented and long and shifted to o in those areas where the so-called Canaanite Shift took place, producing the pronunciation )opu. Since the orthography of the cuneiform script of the Amarna letters had no sign for the o sound, we find it written u-pi….[with acute accent over both vowels] …From Egyptian texts of the period comes the spelling )iwp3, which may be vocalized as )opa.” Wayne Thomas Pitard, “Ancient Damascus” (1987), at pp. 10-11. I don’t know if it’s permitted to mention the Egyptian spelling in analyzing XWBH at Genesis 14: 15, but use of vav/W for the sound O or U is historically attested in the Late Bronze Age in Egyptian, while U2 is used in the Akkadian cuneiform of the Amarna Letters. In testing my view that heth/X in the received text of Genesis 14: 15 is a 1st millennium BCE scribal copying error, and that the text of Genesis 14: 15 originally had H-WBH, the #1 issue seems to be how early Hebrew would have handled the Canaanite Shift. We know that the Amarna Letters wrote U2 in Akkadian cuneiform, and that the Egyptians wrote aleph-W: )iwp3. To me that supports the early Hebrew author of Genesis 14: 15 choosing Hebrew vav/W for the initial vowel, which is its own separate syllable, for )opa or U-bi: WBH. In Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew word for “the” must precede that, which should be he/H, not heth/X. So I see H-WBH as being the original reading of Genesis 14: 15. If I’m right, it’s the first time in over 3,000 years that we’ve understood what “Hobah” is referring to in this Biblical text. If chapter 14 of Genesis is really old, dating all the long way back to the Late Bronze Age, so that the early Hebrew author knows what he’s talking about, then after a reference to “Damascus”, we should properly expect to see a reference to A-pi or O-pi or U-bi. In fact it’s right there at Genesis 14: 15, once the scribal error is corrected, so that the first letter is he/H, not heth/X: H-WBH. Now, for the first time in over 3,000 years, the text makes perfect historical sense. Historical linguistics can solve a lot of Biblical mysteries like this as to Hebrew words in the Bible. The more one knows about ancient Damascus, the clearer it becomes that the XWBH in the received text of Genesis 14: 15 originally must have been H-WBH. Jim Stinehart Evanston, Illinois
-----Original Message----- From: George Athas <[email protected]> To: B-Hebrew <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Mar 1, 2011 5:55 pm Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hobah I think we can leave Hurrian out of this discussion. Stick to Hebrew, folks. EORGE ATHAS o-Moderator, B-Hebrew Sydney, Australia) ______________________________________________ -hebrew mailing list [email protected] ttp://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
