by
Damien F. Mackey
Albright … published a more satisfactory
translation than had hitherto been
possible by discerning that its author had
used a good many so-called ‘Canaanite’ words
plus two Hebrew proverbs! EA 252 has a
stylised introduction … and in the first 15 lines utilises only two ‘Canaanite’
words. Thereafter, in the main body of the text, Albright noted (and later
scholars have concurred) that Lab’ayu used
only about 20% pure Akkadian, “with 40% mixed or ambiguous, and no less than
40% pure Canaanite”.
“W.F. Albright, in
full William Foxwell Albright,
(born May 24, 1891, Coquimbo,
Chile—died Sept. 19, 1971, Baltimore, Md.,
U.S.), American biblical archaeologist and Middle Eastern scholar, noted
especially for his excavations of biblical sites”.
I find that professor Albright - although a scholar working within
the restricting confines of the conventional model of archaeologico-history -
had the unusual ability sometimes to burst through the seams of that model and
make some very insightful new observations.
One of his (as Dr. Albright’s) most remarkable forays beyond the
tight walls of convention was his important synchronisation of the first
pharaoh of Egypt, Menes, or Min (conventionally dated to c. 3100 BC), with the
latter’s conqueror, Naram-Sin (conventionally dated to c. 2250 BC), of the
famous Sargonid dynasty of Akkad. See my article:
Dr. W.F. Albright’s Game-Changing Chronological Shift
This synchronisation
by Dr. Albright involved a massive shift in time of conventional dating to the
tune of about a millennium.
It all at once
brought into synthesis, the First Dynasty of Egypt; the Akkadian Dynasty; and
the era of Abram and everything associated with that Patriarch, more accurately,
though, to be dated to c. 1900 BC:
Narmer a Contemporary of Patriarch Abraham
Narmer a Contemporary of Patriarch Abraham. Part Two:
Narmer as Naram Sin
Albright also was
an early one to suggest a location, not in southern Mesopotamia (Sumer), for
the biblical land of Shinar. This may perhaps, in part, have prompted Dr. Anne
Habermehl’s important re-location of Shinar, a suggestion that I have
enthusiastically embraced. See my:
Tightening the Geography and Archaeology for Early Genesis
Some early voices had dissented from the idea that Shinar was in the
south. Fraser (1834, pp. 216–217) opined that putting the Tower of Babel in the
same place as Babylon (Fraser refers to Beke 1834, pp. 24–26) was a novel idea
and “an erroneous notion” because then Ararat would have been north of Babel
and not east of it. Later on, Albright (1924) wrote a paper to show that Shinar
was basically the ancient kingdom of Hanna, a territory in Northern Syria,
bordered by the Euphrates on the west. Gemser (1968, pp. 35–36) thought that
“Sanhara . . . seems to have been one of the four major powers in
Northern Syria after the fall of the state of Mari.” We will further discuss
locating Shinar in this northern area later on in this paper. ….
And Albright even
went rather close to realising that some of the El Amarna [EA] correspondents
were writing in Hebrew. Here is what I wrote about it in my university thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah
of Judah
and its Background
(Volume One, pp.
87-88):
Lab’ayu’s
Speech
Lab’ayu
is thought to have been no timid lackey of pharaoh, at least
according to Albright:221 “The truculence of
Labaya’s tone in writing to the court contrasts oddly with the grovelling
subservience of most Palestinian chieftains”. Most grovelling of all
perhaps was Abdi-Ashirta
himself, who had written to pharaoh during a time of crisis:
LETTER
64: To the king, my lord, say. Thus says Abdi-Ashtarti [Ashirta],
the servant of the king: At the feet of my king, my lord, I have fallen seven
times ... and seven times in addition, upon breast as well as back. May the
king, my lord, learn that enmity is mighty against me ....
Like Lab’ayu,
the biblical Ahab could indeed be an outspoken person, bold in
speech to both fellow kings and prophets (cf. 1 Kings 18:17; 20:11). But Lab’ayu,
like all the other duplicitous Syro-Palestinian kings,
instinctively knew when, and how, to grovel …. Thus, when having to protest his
loyalty and readiness to pay tribute to the crown, Lab’ayu
really excelled himself:222 “Further:
In case the king should write for my wife, would I refuse her? In case the king
should write to me: “Run a dagger of bronze into thy heart and die”, would I
not, indeed, execute the command of the king?”
Lab’ayu
moreover may have - like Ahab - used Hebrew speech. The language
of the EA letters is Akkadian, but one letter by Lab’ayu,
EA 252, proved to be very difficult to translate.223
Albright,224 in 1943, published a
more satisfactory translation than had hitherto been possible by discerning
that its author had used a good many so-called ‘Canaanite’ words plus two
Hebrew proverbs! EA 252 has a stylised introduction in the typical EA formula and
in the first 15 lines utilises only two ‘Canaanite’ words. Thereafter, in the
main body of the text, Albright noted (and later scholars have concurred) that Lab’ayu
used only about 20% pure Akkadian, “with 40% mixed or ambiguous,
and no less than 40% pure Canaanite”. Albright further identified the word nam-lu
in line 16 as the Hebrew word for ‘ant’ (nemalah),
נְמָלָה, …the Akkadian word
being zirbabu. Lab’ayu had
written: “If ants are smitten, they do not accept (the smiting) quietly, but
they bite the hand of the man who smites them”. Albright recognised here a
parallel with the two biblical Proverbs mentioning ants (6:6 and 30:25).
Ahab likewise
was inclined to use a proverbial saying as an aggressive counterpoint to a potentate.
When the belligerent Ben-Hadad I sent him messengers threatening: ‘May the gods
do this to me and more if there are enough handfuls of rubble in Samaria for
all the people in my following [i.e. my massive army]’ (1 Kings 20:10), Ahab
answered: ‘The proverb says: The man who puts on his armour is not the one who
can boast, but the man who takes it off’ (v.11).
“It is a
pity”, wrote Rohl and Newgrosh,225 “that
Albright was unable to take his reasoning process just one step further
because, in almost every instance where he
detected the
use of what he called ‘Canaanite’ one could legitimately substitute the term ‘Hebrew’.”
Lab’ayu’s
son too, Mut-Baal - my tentative
choice for Ahaziah of Israel (c. 853 BC) …- also displayed in one of his
letters (EA 256) some so-called ‘Canaanite’ and mixed origin words. Albright noted
of line 13:226 “As already
recognized by the interpreters, this idiom is pure Hebrew”.
Albright even went very close to admitting that the local speech was
Hebrew:227
...
phonetically, morphologically, and syntactically the people then living in the district
... spoke a dialect of Hebrew (Canaanite) which was very closely akin to
that of
Ugarit. The differences which some scholars have listed between Biblical Hebrew
and Ugaritic are, in fact, nearly all chronological distinctions.
But even these
‘chronological distinctions’ cease to be a real issue in the Velikovskian context,
according to which both the EA letters and the Ugaritic tablets are re-located
to the time of the Divided Monarchy.
