Nir Cohen:
1. You wrote: “in fact, i suspect the name you quote is abdi-heba, not
ir-heba. this is
significant: while "heba" is (perhaps!) related to a hurrian goddess, but
maybe not, "abdi" is (quite certainly!) semitic.”
The name “IR-Heba” appears in the Amarna Letters 17 times. The made-up
name “Abdi-Heba” never appears a single time in the Amarna Letters. IR-Heba
’s Amarna Letters contain Hurrian common words and the quintessential
Hurrian number 318. IR-Heba associates mostly with Hurrian princelings:
$uwardata, Endaruta and Surata (per Amarna Letter EA 366). IR-Heba’s Amarna
Letters contain logograms. There is an attested Hurrian name that, like the
name “IR-Heba”, starts with the logogram IR, so we know that the use of the
logogram IR does not mandate that IR-Heba is a Canaanite, rather than being
a Hurrian princeling. A majority of the princelings in Canaan in Years
12-14 were Hurrian, not Canaanite. At p. 176 of “Amarna Personal Names”
(1993), Richard S. Hess, the leading scholar of Amarna names, expressly
states that “IR-Heba” is a Hurrian name. Why on earth would a Canaanite have a
name that honors the Hurrians’ chief goddess?
But on this thread, I want to talk about early H-e-b-r-e-w words, not
about the Hurrians.
2. You wrote: “anyway, since i suspect you are referring to the amarna
letters, please
check if they were written in hurrian. to the best of my knowledge, they
were mostly written in a unique mixture of akkadian and NW semitic
[see many papers by moran and others]….”
Why are you and Prof. Yigal Levin talking about the thousands of
substandard Akkadian words that IR-Heba’s scribe wrote? Who cares about that?
This
thread is focusing, rather, on the only 9 west Semitic words that IR-Heba’s
scribe ever wrote. I’m asking if those 9 west Semitic words are indeed “
Hebrew”.
On this thread, I am talking about early H-e-b-r-e-w words.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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