Tag: Hezekiah

Objective Analysis III

[Ebal’s Plea, twenty-five of thirty]

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

I ponder this again in these steps:

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

“ARWR” Is Not a Word

Haughwout announces that one of the best ways to distinguish a coincidental mark resulting from cracks, scratches, or dents from an actual letter is this: A letter will usually coalesce with other letters to form a word. Coincidental marks likely will not.

Six times on the inner tablet Galil identified “ARWR”, the alleged ancient equivalent of the modern Hebrew word pronounced “ARUR” meaning “cursed”.

Haughwout counters that “ARWR” 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”.

Much later, around the ninth century B. C., Hebrew writers began using occasional consonants to replicate vowels. Particularly this was rare within a word rather at the end until the eight century B. C.

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

One therefore cannot reasonably argue for “ARWR” forming a word. One should consider that combination as happenstance cracks, scratches, or dents.

“ARWR” Pushback

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

Haughwout avers that happenstance dents caused our “ARWR” and the rest of the inner tablet characters.

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

In essence, the reason that Haughwout declares that “ARWR” is not a word of the thirteenth century B. C. is that 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 the understood “U” vowel sound within a word until four to six hundred years later.

The next section offers contradictory observations.:

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 take away? It is that currently you can only put limited faith in assumptions about the proto-alphabetic corpus. We just have too few examples.

Rules for both syntax and vowel markers should be deemed speculative and tenuous at best.

• Exceptions litter languages

While this hardly needs illustration, it does merit remembering.

Exceptions are normal in language. The same should be expected of ancient proto-alphabetic.

• Phonetic Sense

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

So, imagine an ancient inscriber faced with 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.”

Maybe they did not decided to do this with other words. Maybe they did not realize that this is something that they could do with other words.

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

• “ARWR”, a Time Traveler? (The strongest reply!)

What could better evidence that the “ARWR” spelling traveled from the remote proto-alphabetic era through to a subsequent age?

Obvious evidence would include similar examples in both epochs.

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

Compare this with a Jerusalem stone inscription allegedly marking the tomb of Shebnayahu, King Hezekiah’s royal steward about whom Isaiah prophesied. That eight century B. C. inscriber similarly used a consonant to represent the “U” vowel sound of the Hebrew “cursed”.

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

Evidently between our tablet and the Shebnayahu stone no other Hebrew variant other than our “AR(consonant)R” is known. Specifically, in the interim between these two examples there is no example of “ARR” having been written for the word “cursed”.

Nevertheless, Haughwout insists that a “book spelling” of “ARR” would have constrained our inscriber.

On what grounds do I suggest that there are no examples of the “ARR” spelling for the word cursed between the Late Bronze Age and the eighth century B.C.? The reason is that Haughwout does not cite such. Surely he would have to support his argument had he known of one.

It thus remains reasonable for a person to determine that the “AR(consonant)R” spelling remained constant between the two ages.

Therefore, for this reason and the others above, a reasonable person could genuinely dispute that the tablet does not exhibit the Hebrew word for “cursed.”

Therefore this second part of the Haughwput’s material fact fails to support his refutation” claim.

ARWR” Finding

The evidence shows that there is a genuine dispute about the material fact portion scrutinized here. In other words, a reasonable person could genuinely dispute that the ancient proto-alphabetic word for “cursed” does not appears on the tablet.

These are the reasons:

• Bookish grammatical and use norms for our proto-alphabetic text one should deem speculative and tenuous. The corpus of Hebrew late Bronze Age literature is just too sparse.
• Further, the “AR(consonant)R” spelling of the tablet matches the spelling of an eight century B. C. example. Haughwout, on the other hand, produces no intervening examples of the Hebrew for “cursed” being spelled “ARR”.

This material fact portion thus fails to support Haughwout’s refutation claim.

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

Next post: “YHW?”