Chavoux Luyt wrote: “I also see no evidence that the Hebrew author created any
names, butrather that he (some-times) used chance correspondence between a real
person'sname and some (real) events in that person's life.”
That is a critically important issue. University scholars generally hold that
manyof the names in the Patriarchal narratives are very old, sometimes
evenpossibly dating back to the Bronze Age, but that the stories told in
thePatriarchal narratives are late, having been composed by JEP or other
scribesliving in the 1st millennium BCE. On the scholarly view, the underlying
meaning of the names often has norelationship to the storyline. Thus
manyscholars say that “Terah” means “ibex”, “Nahor” means “snoring”, and
“Haran”means “mountaineer”. The fact that thosemeanings bear no relationship
whatsoever to the storyline is viewed by scholarsnot as rendering their
proposed etymologies nonsensical and wrong, but ratheras supposedly being
evidence that JEP either didn’t know, or didn’t care, whatthe underlying
meaning was of the old names they used in the stories theycomposed in the 1st
millennium BCE.
That is why my proposed etymologies of names in thePatriarchal narratives are
much more controversial to scholars than one mightsuppose. Let’s use the four
names in thefirst sentence of the Patriarchal narratives (Genesis 11: 26) as a
good exampleof what I’m talking about. TRX does notmean “ibex”, but rather in
Hebrew is T-)RX, meaning “you will go on a longcaravan trip”, and in
non-Semitic is tu-ru-xi, meaning “coming from a man” [asall 7 Patriarchs and
Matriarchs are descendants of Terah, and thus “come fromthe man”]; those two
meanings deftly sumup Terah’s role in the Patriarchal narratives. HRN does not
mean “mountaineer”, but rather means “mountain place”,referencing that the
place where firstborn son Haran has his untimely death, inKassite southern
Mesopotamia, was in the Patriarchal Age known by the name ofthe “mountain
people” from the Zagros Mountains, the Kassites, who rulednon-mountainous
southern Mesopotamia during the Late Bronze Age. NXWR means in Hebrew “the
neighing ofhorses”, referring to the fact that Nahor ends up spending most of
his life inthe heart of Hurrianland at Harran, with the Hurrians being
world-famous fortheir skills with horses and especially with horse-drawn
chariots. NXWR in non-Semitic means “dowry [fromHurrianland]”, reflecting the
fact that Nahor’s key role in the Patriarchalnarratives is to provide the
ultimate “dowry from Hurrianland”: all three successor Matriarchs are
femaledescendants of Nahor, who while not being ethnic Hurrians are
nevertheless bornand raised to adulthood in Harran in the heart of Hurrianland.
Finally, )BRM in Hebrew means “[the divine]father is exalted”, and in
non-Semitic means “lord”; that combination lets us know right away thatAbram
is the one son of Terah who is destined for greatness.
Based on the foregoing linguistic analysis, we canalso surmise that Terah’s
first wife was a native west Semitic speaker, withher son Haran’s name having
only a Hebrew meaning. Perhaps she died in childbirth. Years later, Terah
married a second wife, whowas a Hurrian, and so the two much younger sons,
Nahor and Abram, have namesthat [like the name Terah] make good sense in both
Hebrew and non-Semitic. As to ages, note that such surmise alsonicely explains
why Nahor is the right age to marry a daughter of Haran, sinceby age Nahor was
more of a nephew to Haran than a brother, and it also explainswhy Lot is twice
called Abram’s “brother”, since by age they were similar tobeing brothers,
rather than Abram being in Lot’s father’s generation byage. We even see that
we can’t reallyfollow the storyline very well unless we do such linguistic
analysis.
In my opinion the same person, an early Hebrewauthor, both (i) created/selected
the names Terah, Haran, Nahor and Abram, and(ii) composed the stories told
about them in the Patriarchal narratives. In my view the names in the text are
notolder than the rest of the text, but rather were generated by the same
authorat the very same time as that author composed the rest of the text. The
same analysis holds true for the names“Tamar” and “Mamre”. [Note that
“Moreh”at Genesis 12: 6 is often rightly thought to reference Amuri/Amu-ura,
where like M-MR)there is no initial aleph when the word “Amorite” is used in a
personal name.] It is important to realize in particular thatthe underlying
meaning of all of these names makes perfect sense in the contextof the role
that each such person plays in the storyline of the Patriarchalnarratives. As
opposed to an ideaprovisionally floated by Isaac Fried, I think that in fact
“the Hebrew bible isplaying word games.” The early Hebrewauthor of the
Patriarchal narratives is utterly brilliant at these inspired“word games”,
which indeed are not even limited to the Hebrew language.
Sorry that my ideas are controversial. I am trying to show, in part by
usinglinguistics as to Hebrew language etymologies as on this thread, that
thePatriarchal narratives are much older than today’s university scholars
realize.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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