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September 14, 2007
"Blessed Among the Nations" and Other Divine Appellatives
In a comment to my last post, John correctly pointed out that in the spirit of the 99 names of Allah "adjectives and participles, plus or minus a complement, qualify as divine names if they are stand-alone descriptors of deity" and that, "there might be a few of these in the epigraphic material that would be worth looking at." Well, I am a crude fellow, so my post reflected the less subtle names of various gods. But John is correct; I should have looked for "names" more in the spirit of his posts on the subject. So now, I have taken another look at the same set of inscriptions and found two and a half examples of some interest. In truth, only one of them, as written, is a "stand-alone" expression.
The two examples come from lines 4 and 5 of the Judean Cave Inscription found near Ein Geti. The context of the two examples, if you dare call it a context, is as follows:
ברך יהוה []נ[]
ברך בגין ש[ ]ימלך
Blessed is Yahweh ??
Blessed among the Nation(s) ?? he may reign?
Yahweh is "Blessed" and he is "Blessed among the Nations." Among the many places one can find בָּרוּךְ יְהוָה in the Hebrew Bible is Genesis 9:26, Exodus 18.10, and Psalm 28:6.
But our other expression "Blessed among the nations" seems in some slight tension with passages like בָּרוּךְ יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל from Psalm 28:6 or the oft-repeated יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (Psalm 72:18 to pick one example almost at random) and the like. Zevit, 356, noted Psalm 96:10, אִמְרוּ בַגּוֹיִם יְהוָה מָלָךְ, "Say among the nations, 'Yahweh is king.'" as an interesting parallel from the Hebrew Bible. It might even be more interesting if we could read every letter of the inscription. The full significance of his references to Psalm 22:9 and I Chronicles 16:3 eludes me. It is true that they may have grammatical structures similar to what we may be seeing in the inscription.
[As an aside, I find Psalm 135:21, בָּרוּךְ יְהוָה מִצִּיּוֹן שֹׁכֵן יְרוּשָׁלִָם, "Blessed is Yahweh from Zion, who dwells in Jerusalem," interesting when compared with יהוה התימן and יהוה שמרן from Kuntillet Ajrud on the one hand and with אל ירשלם from Khirbet Beit Lei on the other. Perhaps I will look into this more in a later post, perhaps not.]
Turning to the Kuntillet material for the half example, a line from one of the wall inscriptions reads in part בזרח אל, "In the rising (shining forth) of El." I found Isaiah 61:1, קוּמִי אוֹרִי כִּי בָא אוֹרֵךְ וּכְבוֹד יְהוָה עָלַיִךְ זָרָח, "Rise and shine for your light has come and the glory of Yahweh is shining forth upon you," of abnormal interest in this regard. We are not exactly dealing with a "name" of god in the inscription or the Biblical Hebrew passage when we consider זרח but we are dealing with an attribute of the gods. Both the inscription and the Biblical Hebrew passages, there are several more than the one I cited above (Deuteronomy 32:2, for example), serve to identify the function of El or Yahweh with that of Shemesh. See, for example, the Ugaritic text KTU 1.6 II:24, nrt . ilm . špš. Ugaritic nrt is a near semantic equivalent of Hebrew זרח.
Please go to the previous post for the full reference to Zevit's book. I'm too lazy to reproduce it here. John also noted in the same comment. "Another set of divine names are known from the Elephantine papyri." Yep, but I still need to finish horsing around with KTU 1.85 which, by the way, is a completely godless text.
Posted by Duane Smith at September 14, 2007 4:38 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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