Jim, I'll just comment on a few aspects of your exposition below... On Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:48:50 -0400 (EDT), [email protected] wrote: ... > The Achilles heel of using Akkadian cuneiform to record west Semitic > words and names is that Akkadian cuneiform heth/X had to be pressed > into service to represent many different Hebrew letters: “[I]n the > El Amarna tablets the h, ḥ, ǵ, and sometimes even ’ and ‘ are > represented by ḫ....” Yohanan Aharoni, “The Land of the Bible” > (1979), p. 113. Let me paraphrase that by saying that in final > position, Akkadian cuneiform heth could represent any one or more of > the following alphabetical Hebrew letters: regular h, emphatic H, > aleph, ayin, or heth. In looking at PR(H in the received text, what > we are seeing as the last letter there is either regular h or > emphatic H.
Or it serves as a mater lectionis. > As discussed in my prior post, emphatic H works very nicely: P R (H > = pA ra aH = “Palace of The Ra”, being a fine generic reference to the > king of Egypt/Pharaoh. I don't see p3-rʿ-ʿḥ as being possible in Egyptian. If I were to try to translate “Palace of The Ra” back into Egyptian, I'd probably come up with something like ʿḥ-n-rʿ or ʿḥ-n-p3-rʿ. Nor does assuming that it was formed in Hebrew seem to help. > But in my opinion the early Hebrew author of the Patriarchal > narratives also wanted us to consider the other possible endings to > this same Biblical Hebrew word, per the Akkadian cuneiform > rendering, as a series of deliberate and sophisticated puns as it > were. Akkadian cuneiform heth in final position could represent > Hebrew aleph/): now suddenly the scholarly interpretation of PR(H as > being Egyptian praA makes sense, for the first time. That final > Hebrew he/H in the received alphabetical text could just as easily > be Hebrew aleph/), because both such Hebrew alphabetical letters > were represented by the same Akkadian cuneiform sign in final > position: Akkadian cuneiform heth. We know from the Boundary Stelae > at Akhenaten’s new capital city that praA was sometimes used to > refer to Pharaoh in the mid-14th century BCE, so that meaning works > very nicely. Note also that “Great House”/praA has a quite similar > meaning to “Palace of The Ra”/pA ra aH, even though the Egyptian > spellings are totally different; the sounds in Egyptian may even > have been roughly similar, perhaps close enough for a natural pun. > But now, at long last, we get to the good part. Given that the last > letter in PR(H is Akkadian cuneiform heth, the last alphabetical > Hebrew letter in that Biblical Hebrew word could also have been > intended to be: Hebrew heth/X. On that third level of meaning, that > word could now be viewed as being P R (X, which is pA ra ax. The > final element in that name could be alternatively [and less > formally] transliterated as a-khe: it’s the a-khe in the name > “A-khe-n-aten”! This seems less reasonable if we consider the Egyptian form of this name, 3ḫ-n-ỉtn (i.e., divided Akh-en-Aten, but note the different consonants). > Whereas “Akhenaten” means “Devoted to Aten”, pA > ra ax : pA ra a-khe : P R (X means: “Devoted to The [One and Only] Ra”. > And remember that although Akhenaten named his first four daughters after > Aten, he then switched gears and named his last two daughters after Ra, > indicating that by Year 14, fairly late in his reign, his preferred > nomenclature no longer was Aten, but now was Ra. That is to say, “Devoted to > The [One > and Only] Ra”/P R (X is but a Biblically “updated” version of his older > historical name, “Devoted to Aten”/Akhe-n-Aten. > One big impediment to seeing the Patriarchal Age as being the Amarna Age > has heretofore been the claim that the name “Akhenaten” does not appear in > the Biblical text. But it does! Repeatedly. The name “Akhe-n-Aten” has > simply been updated to “Akhe-pA-Ra”, per Akhenaten’s switch after about > Year 12 or so to preferring Ra or pA ra to Aten [itn]. A Biblically updated > version of Akhenaten’s historical name is there, big as life, all over the > received text of the Patriarchal narratives, under the somewhat misleading > alphabetical spelling PR(H : “Pharaoh” : pA ra ax : pA ra a-khe : P R (X : “ > Devoted to The [One and Only] Ra” : Akhe-n-Aten : Akhe-pA-Ra. > The Patriarchal narratives are much older, and much more historically > accurate, than university scholars realize. We have just solved the > 3,000-year-old mystery of why the Biblical Hebrew word “Pharaoh” ends in > Hebrew he/H, > not in Hebrew aleph/). Just think Akkadian cuneiform, and the solution > to this 3,000-year-old problem is virtually self-evident. > When you see “P R (H, king of Egypt” at Genesis 41: 46, that’s “ > Akhenaten [Akhe-pA-Ra : P R (X], king of Egypt”, where the alphabetical > Hebrew he/H > in the received text reflects an original Akkadian cuneiform heth, which > could just as easily be [and be intended to be] alphabetical Hebrew > heth/X. > Yes! -- Will Parsons μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
