Nir Cohen: 1. You wrote: “i do not see any biblical pattern where a word with a final letter X (or, for this matter, any final letter) indicates association with the same word without that letter. SARAY/SARAH and SERAX could well be mere coincidence.” As opposed to your “mere coincidence” theory of the case, consider the following. $LX at Genesis 11: 15 is a non-Semitic name, $a-al-xi, meaning “coming from a house”, where the root $ali means “house”, and the final heth/X means “coming from” or “like”, in non-Semitic. TRX at Genesis 11: 26 is intentionally designed to be a pun in non-Semitic, where TR/turu means “man”, and TRX/turu-xi means “coming from the man”. $RX at Genesis 46: 17 means “like Sarah” or, more literally, “coming from Sarah”, where $-R are the first two letters in Sarah’s birth name $RY/$aru-ya, and -X/heth in non-Semitic means “coming from” or “like”. 2. You wrote: “if you look at the entire biblical genealogical text (chapters like the one we are discussing), you will discover great variability of names, clearly belonging to different cultures and still mostly without extra-biblical confirmation.” That’s true for the Patriarchal narratives only if one does not look at non-Semitic attested names and words in non-biblical sources from the Late Bronze Age. $RY is attested in non-Semitic as $aru-ya. TRX is a deliberate pun on the attested non-Semitic name Tu-ru-ux-xe. NXWR is a deliberate pun on one of the best-known non-Semitic words, ni-xa-a-ri, meaning “dowry”. Nahor’s role is to provide the “dowry”, that is, all three successor Matriarchs come from Harran and are Nahor’s female blood descendants. Though most people do not realize this, in fact )BRM is not well-attested in non-biblical sources; the well-attested west Semitic name is, by contrast, )BYRM. West Semitic speakers cannot pronounce consonant clusters, so )BRM is something of a tongue-twister, whereas )BYRM is very easy to say. The reason for choosing a rare variant of this west Semitic name is so that it would work as a non-Semitic pun: a-ba-ri-im, meaning “lord”, as Abram is the finest of Terah’s three sons. A-ba-ri [without the final suffix] is an attested non-Semitic name in the Late Bronze Age, and though using differing spelling conventions [I for A, and W for B], the name I-wa-ru-um is an attested non-Semitic name from an earlier day. So each of $RY, TRX, NXWR and )BRM is in fact attested in Late Bronze Age non-biblical sources, if we’re willing to look to non-Semitic names. 3. You wrote: “it is for this reason that i deliberately avoided discussing ethnicity in relation to names like SERAH. even if the name is not semitic, its bearer could very well be "kosher" jewish.” That is very relevant to this discussion. $RY/$aru-ya was born to non-Semitic parents. But native west Semitic-speaking TRX [whose mother, however, was non-Semitic] adopted $RY for the purpose of having her marry TRX’s blood son )BRM, pursuant to a written contract guaranteeing that any son or sons that $RY bore would be the sole heirs of )BRM. That was the non-Semitic way of doing written marriage contracts. $RY later received the divinely-given name “Sarah”, and she thereby became as “kosher jewish”, in effect, as you can get. $RY was adopted by a pre-Hebrew man, she married a Hebrew man, and she was given the name $RH by YHWH. I agree that Sarah was 100% “kosher jewish” after her marriage to Abraham. But it’s also true that her parents were non-Semitic, that her birth name $RY/$aru-ya is non-Semitic, and that she is only Terah’s daughter by adoption. $RY was not Terah’s blood daughter, just as $RX is only Asher’s daughter by adoption, not being Asher’s blood daughter. Same. I agree with your statement completely. Rather than trying to undercut Sarah’s jewishness, I on the contrary fully affirm it. What I’m trying to do here is to show that the Patriarchal narratives were recorded in writing in the Late Bronze Age [centuries before JEPD were born]. The presence of all those accurately-spelled non-Semitic names is testimony to the Patriarchal narratives being truly ancient and having been, the non-Semitic way [like the written marriage contract that historically would have been insisted upon by $RY’s non-Semitic parents], written down from day #1. Jim Stinehart Evanston, Illinois
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