Nir Cohen:
Continuing our discussion as to whether the Patriarchal narratives are a
late composition by multiple authors in the 1st millennium BCE, none of whom
knew much of anything about the Bronze Age, as opposed to my own view that
this Biblical text has pinpoint spelling accuracy as to non-Semitic proper
names attested in the Late Bronze Age, let’s now consider Esau’s first wife.
The scholarly analysis is that Esau’s first wife is a “Hittite”, who
nevertheless has a west Semitic name, and that the west Semitic meaning of that
allegedly west Semitic name of Esau’s first wife is [are you sitting down?]:
“Jewess”.
If you think I’m making that up, let me quote verbatim the leading scholar
in the world on the book of Genesis:
Gordon Wenham, “Genesis 16-50” (1994), pp. 204-205, re Genesis 26: 34: “
Esau marries two Hittite women. …‘Judith’ only used here as a proper name
in the OT. In later texts it means a female Judean, i.e., Jewess.”
Nir Cohen, do you think that Genesis 26: 34 is telling us that Esau married
a Hittite woman with a west Semitic name that means “Jewess”? [How can
university scholars publish analyses like that?]
Shouldn’t we at least a-s-k whether XT-Y means “Hurrian”, not “Hittite”
, and whether YH – WD – Y – T is a perfectly good non-Semitic woman’s name
with an appropriate meaning, with each element of such name being attested
in the Late Bronze Age?
How can we possibly decide whether the Patriarchal narratives are or are
not old and accurate, and whether they record attested Late Bronze Age
spellings of non-Semitic names in w-r-i-t-i-n-g in the Late Bronze Age with
letter-for-letter spelling accuracy, if not a single scholar in the world will
even a-s-k those questions about the name of Esau’s first wife?
And remember, if Esau married a non-Semitic woman, then you can bet your
bottom dollar that she and her non-Semitic parents would have insisted on
there being a binding marriage contract, specifying future inheritance rights,
i-n w-r-i-t-i-n-g . So even if Esau didn’t use writing in tending his
sheep and goats, nevertheless he couldn’t get to first base with those
prospective non-Semitic wives of his unless he first “put it in writing”. The
claim
that the tent-dwelling Patriarchs were allegedly ignorant of writing, and
that the Patriarchal narratives could not possibly have been reduced to
writing in the Late Bronze Age, is falsified by the substantive content of the
story itself! Show me a story about someone like Esau marrying a non-Semitic
woman, and I’ll show you a character [Esau] and an author [the author of the
Patriarchal narratives] who knew darn well that not only were Hurrian women
legendary for their incredible beauty [Sarah and Tamar, and on their mother’
s side Rebekah and Rachel], but also those knock-dead gorgeous Hurrian
brides were ruthlessly consistent in always insisting from their prospective
bridegrooms: “put it in w-r-i-t-i-n-g ”.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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