George Athas: In Year 15 of the Amarna Age, there were three ways to refer to northeast Syria:
1. The non-Semitic locals there called it mi-ta-na or mi-ta-a-ni. With T and D often being interchangeable in going between ancient languages, Hebrew MDN at Genesis 25: 2 renders mi-ta-na, and with the early Hebrew author consistently using Hebrew yod/Y to render the non-Semitic vowel A, Hebrew MDYN at Genesis 25: 2 renders mi-ta-a-ni. 2. In the Amarna Letters, the most common name for northeast Syria is Naharim. That name appears at Genesis 24: 10. 3. Finally there’s Paddan Aram. John van Seters at pp. 30-31 of “Abraham in History and Tradition” (1974) shows that the northeastern Syria area was sometimes referred to in the 14th century BCE as “the fields of the Arameans”: “[A] few possible references to individual Arameans occur in the Ugaritic texts along with a reference in a fourteenth century cuneiform text to eqleti aramima, ‘the fields of the Arameans’. This expression probably points to the steppe region in northeastern Syria…. It may correspond to a reference in a text from the time of Amenophis III [Akhenaten’s father] which mentions pA Armw, ‘the land of the Arameans’.” So Paddan Aram at Genesis 28: 2 is also vintage Year 15 nomenclature for “the fields of the Arameans”/eqleti aramima, that is, northeast Syria in the Amarnha Age. The Hurrian state of Mitanni/Naharim went extinct at the end of the 14th century BCE. Logically this vintage Year 15 nomenclature for northeast Syria in the Patriarchal narratives must have been composed and written down in the Amarna Age, before Mitanni/Naharim went extinct. We know that a tent-dwelling early Hebrew [similar to Apiru, as it were] living in the Ayalon Valley in the Amarna Age would have known to have his composition recorded in writing, per Amarna Letter EA 273: 15-24: “[M]ay the king [pharaoh Akhenaten], my lord, know that the Apiru wrote to Ayyaluna and to Sarxa, and the two sons of Milkilu barely escaped being killed.” Based on the foregoing objective evidence, why do you make fun of my assertion that MDN and MDYN at Genesis 25: 2 are deliberately designed to reference northeast Syria in the Amarna Age? By the same token, XBRWN [“Hebron”] is xa-va-ru-u-ne, and (BR-Y [“Hebrew”] is E-bi-ir-ya. All of those non-Semitic names are well-attested in the Amarna Age, and they match, letter for letter, with what we see in the received text of the Patriarchal narratives. How could multiple first millennium BCE authors like JEP be thought to come up with that vintage Year 15 non-Semitic nomenclature? Wouldn’t you agree that most of the names at Genesis 15: 19-21 and Genesis 14: 2 are non-Semitic? Why are you so certain that the Patriarchal narratives were composed centuries after the Amarna Age by multiple authors in the 1st millennium BCE, given the presence of dozens of non-Semitic names in the last 40 chapters of Genesis, being names that make sense in the Amarna Age and in no other time period in Canaan? You don’t think that a Hittite from Anatolia with a west Semitic name meaning “Fawn” sold Abraham Sarah’s gravesite in chapter 23 of Genesis, do you? Isn’t that more likely a Hurrian lord with a Hurrian name meaning “[Hurrian] lord”, all of which makes perfect sense in Amarna Age Canaan but not in any other time period? With scholars not being able to agree as to the origin of the word “Hebrew”/(BRY, why not ask if that name, like dozens of other names in the Patriarchal narratives, is an Amarna Age non-Semitic name, being E-bi-ir-ya and meaning “God Is Lord”? For a scholar like you who proudly bears the title “Dean of Research”, doesn’t that seem to be a fruitful avenue for conducting research regarding the historicity and antiquity of the Patriarchal narratives? Jim Stinehart Evanston, Illinois _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
