The ARWR Debate

The Mt. Ebal Curse Tablet

Arguments II

[Ebal, twenty-five of thirty-two]

Here, I examine the second part of Haughwout’s material fact. It is that the tablet does not contain the proto-alphabetic word “ARWR”.

There must be no genuine dispute about this. Otherwise, this part of Haughwout’s argument fails to pass our test. It cannot support his “refutation”.

I ponder this in these steps:

• First, I outline Haughwout’s position. Find this below the magenta banner.
• Against that, I push back. You find this below the yellow.
• Last, I announce my findings below the purple banner.

“ARWR” Is Not a Word

Haughwout identifies one way to distinguish a coincidental mark from an actual letter. A letter will usually coalesce with other letters to form a word. Coincidental marks likely will not.

Galil identified “ARWR” six times on the inner tablet. This word equals the modern Hebrew word pronounced: “ARUR”. It means “cursed”.

Haughwout counters that this is not a word a Hebrew before 1250 B.C. would have written.

Why? Ancient Hebrew had no vowel indicators. Thus, “ARR” would have been the proper spelling, not “ARWR”.

Later, around the ninth century B.C., Hebrew changed. Writers began using consonants to mimic vowels. They did this normally at the end of a word. In the eighth century B.C., using consonants to represent vowels inside a word became more common.

Using “Waw” to represent the “U” vowel within “ARWR” is therefore incorrect. It represents a four- to six-hundred-year-old anachronism.

Hence, it is not reasonable to assert in good faith that “ARWR” is a proto-alphabetic word. Instead, one should consider it as a combination of cracks, scratches, or dents.

“ARWR” Pushback

For simplicity, we examine here only one of the six “ARWR” iterations Galil identified. It is Figure 7, #25-28, the “ARWR” we earlier discussed in Post #13.

Haughwout avers that happenstance dents caused our “ARWR”. Why? One should not accept marks as writing unless they coalesce to form words. “ARWR” is not a Hebrew word that a person of the proto-alphabetic era would have written. Thus, those marks do not qualify as letters.

He insists that the proper spelling is “ARR”. Hebrews of the thirteenth century B.C., he continues, would not have substituted the consonant “W” for a vowel sound. They especially would not have done this within a word.

A reasonable person, however, can genuinely dispute thus,

These are four reasons:

• Sparse Corpus

Arguing in his article a point about syntax, Haughwout declares:

“However, we do not currently have a large enough corpus of second-millennium texts from the land of Canaan for comparison.”

What is a takeaway? Solid premises about writing in Canaan before 1000 B.C. are impossible. Why? We now have too few examples.

Rules for both syntax and vowel markers, then, are speculative.

• Exceptions and languages

While this hardly needs illustration, it does merit remembering.

Exceptions are normal in language. We should expect the same of proto-alphabetic languages.

• Phonetic Sense

Modern Hebrew pronounces the word for “cursed” as “ARUR”. Likely, the ancients did likewise.

So, imagine an ancient scribe spelling the word he knew sounded like “ARUR”. Could he have reasoned, “I hear something else in that word? What about adding the consonant ‘W’? ‘ARWR’ sounds a little closer to ‘ARUR’ than does ‘ARR ‘- the spelling Haughwout would saddle him with.

Would someone back then have pulled out a grammar book and said, “You cannot do that!”?

The answer is not likely.

More likely, the inscriber would have said, “I like this. I am going to stick with it.”

• “ARWR” Persisted?

Did the “AR(consonant)R” spelling endure after the tablet’s era? One can construe the evidence as supporting this.

Our tablet provides evidence for the “ARWR” spelling in the proto-alphabetic era.

Compare this with a Jerusalem stone inscription. This marks the tomb of Shebnayahu, King Hezekiah’s royal steward. (Note: Scripture records Isaiah’s prophecy about this aide.)

The scribe of Shebnayahu’s tomb used a Hebrew consonant in the word “cursed”. He did this to represent the “U” sound in the eighth century B.C.

Both spellings are similar. Each uses four letters, with a consonant substituting for the vowel “U”.

One could thus surmise that the spelling of “ARUR” remained constant across centuries. That spelling was our “AR (consonant) R”.

Also, note this. Between these times, Haughwout cites no instances of the spelling ” ARR “.

It is thus reasonable to determine that “AR (consonant) R” endured.

Thus, a reasonable person could doubt Haughwout’s material fact here. One can genuinely dispute that the tablet does not exhibit the Hebrew word for “cursed.”

This second part of Haughwout’s material fact fails.

ARWR” Finding

A reasonable person can doubt this part of the material fact. They can genuinely dispute that the word “cursed” does not appear on the tablet,

These are the reasons:

• Bookish grammatical and usage norms for our proto-alphabetic text are speculative and tenuous. The corpus of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Hebrew literature is too sparse.
• Further, the tablet’s spelling matches an eighth-century one. Haughwout, however, produces no intervening examples of the Hebrew for “cursed” being “ARR”.

So far, Haughwout has not substantiated his refutation.

Now, our question: Why do you think Haughwout failed to cite an example of “ARR” before the Eighth Century B.C.?

Let me know in the comments.

Next post: The “YHW“ Debate