Dear Jim, (sorry if i reproduce your email in a somewhat repatched format, i had some problem with the computer) I was just pointing at a very remote possibility. I do not even know if that place deer khobeyah has been dug at all.
In general, though, many arab villages maintain very old tradition. for example, the village where the shiloax tunnel (jerusalem) is called silwan even today. same with the israeli places atlit, jaffa, safed, and many others. the name of damascus, amman (rabat amon) was preserved, as well as many other towns in the region. just in the damascus area i found the following places whose name i would not associate with typical arabic: khan DANNUN, KAMONAH (kenaanite/phoen./hebrew?), KHALKHALAH, beer el SABIL (?), ZIMRIN, SIMLIN (aramaic?), as well as a name which might interest you: XARASTA (=xaro$et) which might be connected with hurrite iron processing. however, i do not know anything about syrian archaeology to say anything more definite, and a casual look at the internet did not make me any wiser. though it seems that they are digging all over, and there is a lot there to be found yet. as to der khabeyah, it is arab alright. the arab nikudless spelling is DYR XBYH. XBYH seems to be a reasonable arab form for XWBH - this is all i have. the word DYR for a place name usually indicates an old non-moslem site, anything like an old tomb or monastery or just a house or a ruin. (earlier i wrote DER instead of DIR only since the map i used (a modern map of damascus i found in google) used this transcription). again, i cannot attest to its antiquity, but the interesting is that i found it by following to the letter the biblical instruction: "left of damascus". only later did i notice that most BH versions interpret "left" as "north", consistent with "kedma"=ahead=east (a fact i had known but forgotten along the years). however, the bible usually does not use "left/right" to designate north/south, so maybe my lay reading is the correct one after all: as abraham was approaching damascus, he steered further left and hit ... DYR KBYH!! i would like to test this guesswork of mine by actually digging; unfortunately, i dont have as many archaeologist friends as i would like to have, certainly not in the damascus area. :) >>> 4. Nir Cohen, how would you write “the U-bi” in early Biblical Hebrew? >>> Remember, you don’t want “the A-pi”, which is the older Akkadian version of the name for the Damascus area. I submit that the only way to record the Hurrian name “the U-bi” was what was originally at Genesis 14: 15: H-WBH. who am i to speculate. i think, though, that your identification UBI=XWBH might be correct even without the scribal error hypothesis. for example, if some evidence could be brought that hurrians pronounced an initial vowel * as aspirant/guttural H* or X* or )*. one corroborating evidence would be if too many names of hurrian origin in BH start with H,X,). (e.g.: XCCWN?, )OG?) and too few start with a vowel. best i can do is answer with a question: if both BH and ugarit agree on REFAIM, do they agree also on U-BI? in other words, is there any name similar to UBI mentioned in ugarit texts? if so, is it similar to WBY? (even though they used different writing systems, both hebrew and ugarit must have had a similar pronunciation). Nir Cohen:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >>>>> [email protected] wrote: >>>>>> You wrote: “i found your account of the name xwbh very interesting. but i also suspect that wbh would hardly be used to denote U in semitic. meanwhile, near damaskus, a bit to the south-west, i localized a small town called der khabeyah.1. Is “Der Khabeyah” a modern name? [Is it modern German???] If it’s a modern language, it has little relevance to understanding XWBH at Genesis 14: 15. For example, “Ham” is a modern name, that starts with he/H. But there is no such city name in greater ancient Canaan that starts with he/H. I see HM at Genesis 14: 5 as meaning “these”, rather than being a proper name. Do you have an ancient cite for “Der Khabeyah”? Perhaps it’s a German rendering of a modern Arabic town name??2. Of critical importance to the analysis here is your statement that “i also suspect that wbh would hardly be used to denote U in semitic”. I completely agree that 1st millennium BCE scribes could not imagine a word in the Bible beginning with a vav/W, where that vav/W represented a vowel that was its own separate syllable. Though such a construction is commonplace in Hurrian, it’s impossible in Hebrew. But consider now how an early Hebrew would have recorded the Hurrian name Ubi. The east Semitic name for the Damascus region was Api, and the west Semitic version would have aleph/) for that initial A. But in the Late Bronze Age, the Canaanite Shift made the pronunciation Opi. We know from Amarna Letter EA 197 that Hurrian princelings ruled the Damascus area in the 14th century BCE. To a Hurrian, Opi sounded a lot like the Hurrian word U-bi, meaning “barley”, and the Damascus area was a good barley growing area. So the Hurrian version of )A-pi was sometimes Ubi. In Akkadian cuneiform, Obi or Ubi would be U2-bi [which is indistinguishable in Akkadian cuneiform writing from U2-pi]. At Amarna Letter EA 189 rev. 12 from Hurrian princeling Etakkama, there is a complaint about rival Hurrian princeling Biryawaza that mentions “U2-bi”. There is not a single word or name in the Hebrew Bible that begins with a vav/W as a vowel. But how would you represent the Hurrian name for the Damascus area: U-bi? Perhaps the Hebrew vav/W does not represent the sound U here. But the Hebrew vav/W was the only Hebrew letter available to represent a vowel that is functioning as its own separate syllable in a non-Semitic language (Hurrian). The original Biblical rendering was H-WBH, where the vav/W was its own separate syllable, U2 in Akkadian cuneiform, and U2 in Hurrian as well. [As a region, the he/H at the beginning was needed, meaning “the”. Cf. “the Mizpeh”.] The first letter in the received text, X/heth, is a fully understandable scribal error, that was virtually certain to happen. H-WBH seemed impossible to 1st millennium BCE copyists, because no Hebrew word starts with vav/W as a vowel, whereas XWBH seemed possible, meaning “hiding place”. So the inexplicable H-WBH in the original became XWBH due to a one-letter scribal error. 3. In the ancient world, there is no XWBH in the Damascus area, to the best of my knowledge. I am guessing that the “Der Khabeyah” you found is a modern name [unless you have an ancient source you can cite for such name]. If chapter 14 of Genesis was composed in the Late Bronze Age [as many scholars think it was], then after mentioning “Damascus”, one would definitely expect a reference to either A-pi or U-bi. We should see Genesis 14: 15 as referencing H-WBH, which obviously would be “the U-bi”, the Hebrew rendering of the Hurrian name for the Damascus area. Unfortunately, the received text has XWBH, which matches to nothing in non-biblical documents, due to that one-letter scribal error. Whereas the received text has XWBH, in my view we should see that as having originally been H-WBH. It’s a fully historical reference to U-bi, being the Damascus area in the Late Bronze Age.4. Nir Cohen, how would you write “the U-bi” in early Biblical Hebrew? Remember, you don’t want “the A-pi”, which is the older Akkadian version of the name for the Damascus area. I submit that the only way to record the Hurrian name “the U-bi” was what was originally at Genesis 14: 15: H-WBH. Jim StinehartEvanston, Illinois _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
