Nir Cohen:
You wrote: “it is quite possible that SRH is simply the hebrew translation
of the aramaic SRY. and so, it may also be possible that ABRHM was merely
a BH translation of the aramaic AB-RM.”
But no Aramaic version of $RY could possibly mean what Genesis 17: 15-16
tells us the name %RH means: “And God said unto Abraham, As for $RY thy
wife, thou shalt not call her name $RY, but %RH shall her name be. And I will
bless her, and give thee a son also of her: and she shall be a mother of
nations: kings of people shall be of her.”
We need 4 elements for that meaning of %RH/“Sarah”:
1. She,
2. [a] Son [will bear],
3. [per] Divine [blessing],
4. [who will have a line of sons who are] King
(1) She (2) Son (3) Divine (4) King
Here are those 4 elements in the divinely-given name %RH:
1. -H = “She”. -H is the classic west Semitic feminine ending,
applying to a majority of women’s names in the Patriarchal narratives, and
thus
effectively meaning: “She”.
2. % = sA = “Son”. Where ssade is emphatic sin [so that “Isaac”
starts out being spelled with a ssade, but in later books of the Bible is
often
spelled with a sin, because the sounds were similar in Hebrew], ssade/C as
the first letter in Joseph’s Egyptian name = sA = the Egyptian word for “
son”. [The aleph/A that follows is not expressed by a separate Hebrew
letter in any of these Biblical Egyptian names.] Instead of the emphatic
sin/ssade/C that is in Joseph’s Egyptian name, we have regular sin/% in
Sarah’s
divinely-changed name. In the divinely-changed name %RH: % = sA = “Son”.
The same early Hebrew author who created the names “Abraham” and “Sarah”
also created Joseph’s Egyptian name and the name of Joseph’s Egyptian
master, so he knows what all of the elements in all of these names in his
composition of the Patriarchal narratives mean.
3. R = ra = “Divine”. As I noted previously, the final resh/R standing
alone at the end of the name of Joseph’s Egyptian master at Genesis 39: 1,
“Potiphar”, is agreed by all to be a divine reference, meaning “ra”. In
the Amarna Letters, the divine name ra [which occurs in Akhenaten’s
prenomen], although in Egyptian being spelled with an ending ayin/a, is
recorded
by the Akkadian cuneiform sign ri, which is R + generic vowel, with no
Akkadian cuneiform sign for ayin. The Biblical Hebrew equivalent of the
Akkadian cuneiform sign ri is simply resh/R, with the generic following vowel
not being represented by its own separate Hebrew letter in defective
spelling. So in the divinely-changed name %RH: R = ra = “Divine”.
4. %R = sA ra = “King”, being the grandest, and most famous, title of
kingship held by the pharaohs. Though literally meaning “son of Ra/God”,
the actual meaning is: “divinely-appointed King”.
In my opinion, the early Hebrew author of the Patriarchal narratives
created the names )B R HM and %R-H, and those names mean e-x-a-c-t-l-y what
he
tells us they mean at Genesis 17: 5, 15-16. In particular, %R as the
Egyptian phrase sA ra in the divinely-given name “Sarah” is but a different
rendering of C P NT [sA pA nTr, where per Amarna Letter EA 60: 10 “na-te” in
Akkadian cuneiform renders nTr/netjer/divine, with na-te being NT in
alphabetical Biblical Hebrew] in Joseph’s Egyptian name, with both literally
meaning “son of God”, but with the actual meaning being: “divinely-appointed
King”.
Don’t you see the early Hebrew author of the Patriarchal narratives as
being utterly brilliant beyond belief? I do.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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