The ARWR Debate

Dissecting the Arguments III

[Ebal, twenty-five of thirty]

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 arguments 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.

Note

This is the twenty-fifth post of my memorandum on the Mt. Ebal Curse Tablet.

If you have accessed this post from other than captivatingtwists.com and wish to start the journey from the beginning, click here.

Otherwise, continue below.

“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 that a Hebrew of before 1250 B. C. would have written.

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

Later, around the ninth century B.C., Hebrew changed. Writers began using consonants to replicate vowels. Particularly, this was rare within a word rather than at the end until the eighth century B. C.

This use of “Waw” to mimic the “U” vowel inside of “ARWR” is thus inappropriate. It is a four to six-hundred-year anachronism.

One, thus, cannot argue in good faith that “ARWR” forms a proto-alphabetic word. Instead, one should consider that 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’s #25-28. It is the “ARWR” we earlier discussed in Post #13.

Haughwout avers that happenstance dents caused our “ARWR”. This applies also to the rest of the inner tablet characters.

For this, he states a main reason. It is one of the underlying causes of his disillusionment with the tablet from the beginning. It is that one should not accept marks as human writing unless they coalesce to form words. “ARWR” is not a Hebrew word that a person of the proto-alphabetic era would have written, he concludes. Thus, those marks do not qualify as letters.

In essence, Haughwout declares that “ARWR” is not a word of the thirteenth century B. C. for one reason. It is because it has too many letters. As explained above, he insists that the proper spelling is “ARR”. A Hebrew of that time, he continues, would not have substituted the consonant “W” for a vowel sound. Especially, they would not have done this within a word.

Yet we argue something different. We argue that a reasonable person can genuinely dispute that “ARWR” is not proto-alphabetic Hebrew.

Here are several reasons why:

• 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 not possible. Why? We now have too few examples.

Rules for both syntax and vowel markers at that time are speculative at best.

• Exceptions litter languages

While this hardly needs illustration, it does merit remembering.

Exceptions are normal in language. We should expect likewise of proto-alphabetic.

• Phonetic Sense

Modern Hebrew pronounces the word for “cursed” as “ARUR”. Likely, the ancients spoke it alike.

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.”

They may not decide to do this with other words. They may not realize that they could do this.

They decided to go with “ARWR” as a better way to sound out their word for “cursed”.

• “ARWR” Persisted

What could best evidence that the “ARWR” spelling endured? It would be a positive answer to this question. Does it travel from the remote proto-alphabetic era through to a later age?

Obvious evidence would include similar examples in both epochs.

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

Compare this with a Jerusalem stone inscription. This allegedly marks the tomb of Shebnayahu, King Hezekiah’s royal steward. About this king’s aide, Isaiah prophesied. The scribe of his tomb used a consonant to represent the “U” vowel sound of the Hebrew “cursed” in the eighth century B. C.

On both, the spelling is similar. Each uses four letters with a consonant substituting for the “U” sound.

We can thus surmise about the spelling of “ARUR”. Between our tablet and the Shebnayahu stone, it stayed constant. It was our “AR (consonant) R”.

Also, note this. Between these times, there are no instances of an “ARR” spelling’

Still, Haughwout insists that a “book spelling” of “ARR” constrained our scribe.

On what grounds do I surmise that there are no examples of the “ARR” spelling during that time? The reason is that Haughwout does not cite such. That he would have done had he known of one.

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 raise an issue about 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 Hebrew late Bronze Age literature is too sparse.
• Further, the tablet spelling matches an eighth-century one. Haughwout, however, produces no intervening examples of the Hebrew for “cursed” being “ARR”.

This part of the material fact thus fails to support Haughwout’s refutation claim.

Next up, we examine Haughwout’s arguments about the alleged Supreme name, “YHW”.

Thank you for engaging this topic with me thus far!

The next post I will title “The YHW Debate.”

I look forward to continuing with you there.

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Next post: The “YHW“ Debate