Nir Cohen:
For sake of argument [and per what you wrote], why don’t “we assume that
the hebrews did keep a written version of their history and faith,” either
in Akkadian cuneiform or alphabetical writing. In either case, the language
would be Canaanite/pre-Hebrew/Hebrew. But what writing system would be
used? The question thus becomes whether the received text of the Patriarchal
narratives indicates that the original was written down in Akkadian
cuneiform and not transformed into alphabetical Hebrew until many centuries
thereafter, or does it indicate that right from the beginning the Patriarchal
narratives were written down in alphabetical writing?
Here is how to go about resolving that key issue:
(a) Way back in 1897, A.H. Sayce aptly observed at p. 301 of “The Early
History of the Hebrews” (2004) that as to the Song of Deborah: “Had it been
written in cuneiform there would have been a confusion between aleph, het
and ayin, which cannot be detected in it.”
(b) “[I]n the El Amarna tablets [written in Akkadian cuneiform] the h
[he], ḥ [emphatic H], ǵ, and sometimes even ’ [aleph] and ‘[ayin] are
represented by ḫ [heth]....” Yohanan Aharoni, “The Land of the Bible” (1979),
p. 113.
That’s why it’s important to give careful consideration to the examples
of confusion of gutturals as to foreign proper names that I set forth on an
earlier post on this thread. Those examples support my view that the
Patriarchal narratives were originally written down in Akkadian cuneiform
[which
cannot differentiate one guttural from another] in the late Amarna time
period, and were not transformed into alphabetical Biblical Hebrew until late
7th century BCE Jerusalem:
1. XWBH at Genesis 14: 15. [The first guttural was intended to be he/H,
not heth/X.]
2. The -R( ending of the name of Joseph’s Egyptian priestly father-in-law
at Genesis 41: 45. [The last guttural was intended to be heth/X, not
ayin/(.]
3. PR(H at Genesis 12: 15, etc. [The last guttural was intended to be
heth/X, not he/H.]
4. BR( and BR$( at Genesis 14: 2. [Chapters 14 and 49 of Genesis were
transformed into alphabetical Biblical Hebrew 300 years before the rest of the
Patriarchal narratives was transformed from Akkadian cuneiform into
alphabetical Biblical Hebrew (which is why, uniquely in the Patriarchal
narratives, those two chapters have many archaic elements regarding Hebrew
common
words). The non-Indo-European language represented by the names BR( and BR$(
has no ayin. The final guttural ayin/( is a Semiticization. But
centuries later, in names otherwise of that same general type, that same final
letter was customarily rendered alphabetically in Hebrew as he/H, rather than
as ayin/(, such as )WRYH at II Samuel 11: 3.]
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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