Hi Jim, I don't feel knowledgeable enough to comment on most aspects of your thesis that Midian = Mitanni, but I will make a few remarks on the linguistic correspondence below...
On Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:22:42 -0500 (EST), [email protected] wrote: > ... > 2. The country name “Mitanni” is attested from the 15th century BCE > through the end of the 12th century BCE: not earlier, and not later. > Thus to the extent MDN and MDYN in the Patriarchal narratives and > the Book of Exodus are referring to historical Mitanni, that would > strongly suggest that such name was recorded in [cuneiform] writing > by an early Hebrew author in the Late Bronze Age. The Amarna > Letters that use Akkadian often spell this country name in > abbreviated form as mi-ta-ni, which corresponds to MDN. The Hebrew > scribe who, in the 7th century BCE, transformed the Late Bronze Age > Akkadian-style cuneiform writing into alphabetical Hebrew likely > consulted with families of Hurrian [“Jebusite”] heritage in > Jerusalem. The root of mi-ta-ni was probably viewed as being the > Hurrian verb mid- and/or the Sanskrit word midh, each of which means > “to pay”; accordingly, it would make sense to use Hebrew dalet/D to > render the second consonant. On the principle of one Hebrew letter > per one cuneiform segment, and using Hebrew dalet/D for the T, > mi-da-ni would be recorded in alphabetical Hebrew as: MDN. A > slightly longer, and more proper, form of the name “Mitanni” is > recorded in Hittite cuneiform as mi-ta-an-ni. Since Hebrew never > doubles consonants that have no intervening vowel, and with T being > rendered by Hebrew dalet/D per the above analysis, this name was > viewed by a Hebrew scribe as being: mi-da-a-ni. From names such as > XTY in the phrase “Uriah the Hittite”, it can be deduced that XTY is > Xuti-ia, an extremely popular name at Mitanni, and that the > non-Semitic true vowel A as its own separate segment would be > rendered in Biblical Hebrew as a yod/Y. Hence the Biblical > spelling: MDYN. The point is simply that each of MDN and MDYN is a > fine linguistic match to the country name “Mitanni”. From the little I know about Hurrian, I understand that that language did not make a distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants, so I don't have any problem with seeing a Hebrew ד/D as possibly representing a Hurrian /t/. I *do* however see the presence of Hebrew י/Y in מדין/MDYN as a problem with this correspondence. I'm afraid I'm unpersuaded that a foreign /a/ would be represented in Hebrew by yodh, since I don't see any evidence for this occurring, and it seems unlikely on a purely phonetic basis. So, while I would regard the similarity of MDYN with "Mitanni" to be intriguing, I would not regard it as an exact linguistic match. -- Will Parsons _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
