Facts Matter: Language of the Earliest Alphabetic Inscriptions.

• Author: Wilson-Wright, Aren M.
• Position: The World's Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script - Book review

Douglas Petrovich's recent book The World's Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script proposes several sensational claims about both the origin of the alphabet and biblical history. In it, Petrovich argues that the Israelites invented the alphabet and recorded their language in a series of inscriptions from Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, at places such as Serabit el-Khadem, Wadi el-H61, Lahun, and Bir en-Nasb (pp. 11-13). He then systematically analyzes and translates fifteen early alphabetic inscriptions as Hebrew: Sinai 377, Wadi el-Hol 1, Wadi el-H61 2, the Lahun ostracon, Sinai 376, 345, 346, 349, 351, 353, 357, 360, 361, 375a, and 378. The content and language of these inscriptions, he claims, provide concrete evidence for the biblical description of the Exodus and the Israelite sojourn in Egypt (pp. 195-99). At root, however, Petrovich's historical arguments rely on his claim that the early alphabetic inscriptions record the Hebrew language. In this review, I will show that this claim is fundamentally flawed. I will also consider two important issues in the classification of the Canaanite languages, and point out some general problems with Petrovich's book.

THE MAIN ARGUMENT

The premise of Petrovich's argument is that one must first identify the language of a text before being able to decipher it (p. 191). (1) Accordingly, Petrovich explicitly suggests three pieces of evidence for identifying the language of the early alphabetic inscriptions as Hebrew: 1) The word "Hebrews" (ibr) appears in the Egyptian inscription Sinai 115 from the Egyptian turquoise mining installation at Serabit el-Khadem; 2) acrophonic Hebrew names can be found for all of the original alphabetic letters; 3) the early alphabetic inscriptions record three personal names that are found exclusively in the Hebrew Bible (p. 191). He also alludes to two additional diagnostic features found in the early alphabetic inscriptions: 4) the use of the comparative min', and 5) the nouns tali 'quiver' and 'ema 'terror' (pp. 43, 113-14). In the current section, I will show that this evidence does not stand up to scrutiny.

I will begin with Petrovich's reading of "Hebrew" (ibr) in Sinai 115, a reading that runs into epigraphic and linguistic difficulties. Epigraphically, it relies on an unlikely interpretation of the eighth pictograph on Sinai 115. This sign consists of a rough square in outline form (fig. 1), which resembles both a hieroglyphic p (fig. 2) and early alphabetic b (fig. 3). Similar looking p's appear on contemporary Egyptian inscriptions from the vicinity of Serabit el-Khadem (e.g., Sinai 516; see fig. 4) and, since the remainder of Sinai 115 is written in Egyptian, (2) it seems likely that the eighth pictograph represents a hieroglyphic p. Petrovich, however, opts for an alphabetic reading of this sign because the eighth sign differs from more common renderings of the hieroglyphic p, which are executed in bas relief (fig. 3) (pp. 18-19). Yet the outlined form is a valid variant of the p hieroglyph, which occurs in other Egyptian inscriptions, and cannot be dismissed as an anomaly.

Also problematic is Petrovich's reading of a hieroglyphic r following pictograph eight (p. 19). It is unclear from the available photographs whether the roughly oval shape following the eighth pictograph is a letter or damage to the surface of the stele, and Petrovich does not acknowledge the second possibility. Given these problems with Petrovich's reading, I would follow T. Schneider in seeing the name ipn--perhaps the Semitic hypocoristic ?abnu 'stone' (cf. KTU 4.33:24; 4.335:25; 4.370:3; 4.423:21; 4.658:13; 4.715:2)--as the final word of 1. 1 of Sinai 115. (3)

Even if we accept Petrovich's reading, it is unlikely that ibr renders the word "Hebrew." Normally, we would expect "Hebrew" to be written with an initial ? on the basis of other writings of this name and its cognates: Akkadian habiru, Egyptian ?pr(w), and Biblical Hebrew ?ibri. Petrovich suggests three possible solutions to this problem: 1) As the first recorded instance of the name Hebrew, ibr was not subject to the later orthographic conventions for rendering Semitic speech in Egyptian script; (4) 2) the articulation of Hebrew ? was closer to that of Egyptian i than Egyptian ?; and 3) Akkadian h and Biblical Hebrew ? are reflexes of a third consonant, which was preserved in early Hebrew and transcribed ? in Egyptian. (5) The first solution represents an argument from exceptionalism and cannot be sustained. The other two falter on linguistic evidence. In Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 BCE) transcriptions of Semitic names, Semitic ? is always rendered by Egyptian ? and never by i, which shows that Semitic ? was closer to Egyptian ? than Egyptian i. (6) Conversely, Egyptian ? always corresponds to Hebrew ? in Egyptian loanwords into Hebrew. (7) The third solution assumes that Akkadian habiru and Hebrew ?ibri are cognates displaying an irregular correspondence between h and ?, which would warrant the hypothesis of a third consonant lying behind them. But this is not the case, habiru is an Akkadian transcription of West Semitic ?apiru. The mismatch between the initial phonemes reflects a larger mismatch between the phonology of Akkadian and the phonology of the West Semitic languages: Due to contact with Sumerian, Akkadian lost almost all of the Proto-Semitic "gutturals," including the voiced pharyngeal fricative '?. h was the only guttural to survive and so it was used to transcribe all of the other West Semitic gutturals. Furthermore, we would need far more than a single cognate set to establish Akkadian h and Biblical Hebrew ? as reflexes of a third, hypothetical phoneme since a single cognate set could be the result of chance or borrowing. J. Huehnergard. for example, musters approximately sixty cognate sets to argue for the existence of a Proto-Semitic phoneme x' that actualized as h in East Semitic and h in West Semitic. (8)

Even if we accept Petrovich's reading and translation of Sinai 115, the appearance of the word "Hebrew" in a Middle Kingdom Egyptian inscription from Serabit el-Khadem does not demonstrate that the alphabetic inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol, Lahun, and Bir en-Nasb, and New Kingdom Serabit el-Khadem were written in the Hebrew language. In fact, it is unclear whether all of the early alphabetic inscriptions even record the same Semitic language, and Petrovich does not offer any evidence to show that they do. (9) At most, Petrovich's reading--bracketing for a moment its epigraphic and linguistic drawbacks--shows that individuals known as Hebrew may have been present at Serabit el-Khadem during the Middle Kingdom and that the Egyptians wrote about them in a single stele.

The appeal to acrophones also proves problematic. In the second appendix to...