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Yahweh in Hamath in the 8Th Century Bc: Cuneiform Material and Historical Deductions1

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Yahweh in Hamath in the 8Th Century Bc: Cuneiform Material and Historical Deductions1 YAHWEH IN HAMATH IN THE 8TH CENTURY BC: CUNEIFORM MATERIAL AND HISTORICAL DEDUCTIONS1 by STEPHANIE DALLEY Oxford Cuneiform clay tablets are a rich source of personal names, and they often give valuable details of location or nationality in precisely dated records. Because many names take the form of a phrase or short sentence which incorporates the name of a god or goddess, we can trace the popularity of deities at different times over a span of some two thousand years, and we can sometimes assign a person to a particular city-state on the basis of that divine element. In the case of Judah and Israel, we know from the Old Testament that the cult of Yahweh under that name was central to Hebrew worship in Jerusalem and Samaria, from some point early in the Iron Age. Therefore when a name compounded with Yahweh is written in a cuneiform text of the Iron Age, whether the man is based in Palestine or whether he is far from home, he is assumed to be an Israelite. J. H. Tigay's recent study2 of personal names from Palestine has shown clearly and convincingly that Judah and Israel were relatively monotheistic early in the Iron Age. In general the god name is the most easily recognized element; but in the case of the name Yahweh written in cuneiform there are some unusual possibilities for ambiguity.3 In 8th and 7th century names the element that may be interpreted as Yahweh is written 1 The author is grateful to Professor E. W. Nicholson and Dr J. Day for their help. A draft of the argument was presented at an OT seminar in Oxford in November 1986, and a fresh version to the 64th meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study in Oxford in July 1988. You Shall Have No Other Gods (Atlanta, 1986). 3 J. Boardman et al. (ed.), CambridgeAncient History III/1 (3rd edn, 1982), p. 472; pp. 489-90; M. Weippert in E. Meissner et al. (ed.), Reallexikonder Assyriologie,s.v. "Jahwe". 22 IA, and i-u.4 The sign IA can be read as ia, ii and iu, and so the first two spellings can be taken either as Yu, correspond- ing to the later from Y6 in Hebrew, or as Ya'u. The lengthened writing ia-a-u contains the vowel a which acts as a mater lectionis for the ambiguous IA sign, and may either be an explicit writing for the shorter forms, or an alternative to them, just as Hebrew has alternatives Yahu and Y6. In the first position, as in Yau-bi'di, the divine name takes the divine determinative, but in the second posi- tion as in Izri-Yau it does not. In the informal military lists from Nimrud the element Yau never takes the divine determinative. This inconsistency is very common among divine names which are written phonetically;5 Kubaba the goddess of Carchemish gets the same treatment; so do Si' and Allaya.6 At this period hypocoristic endings are written almost invariably as for a-a, with which there is no possibility for confusion. By contrast, in names of the 2nd millennium BC, the hypocoristic ending ia is eminently confusible, and this ambiguity led to some ill-founded claims that Yahweh had been discovered in texts of that period. Therefore, various attempts to find Yahweh-bearing names in the Bronze Age tablets from the archives of Ebla,' Mari, Rimah,8 Alalakh and Ugarit have foundered and none has found general acceptance. No such names have been found among the Amarna letters, which give the names of many rulers and high officials in Palestine. There is no reason from cuneiform material to question the view that the worship of Yahweh began in Sinai or southern Palestine in the very late Bronze Age and spread northwards around the turn of the millen- nium. Surprisingly, however, most scholars accept a close com- 4 See Reallexikon,s.v. "Jau-bi'di", and s.v. "Izri-Yau", and Dalley, "Foreign chariotry and cavalry in the armies of Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II", Iraq 477 (1985), p. 32. 5 G. R. Driver, in his Appendix to S. R. Driver, The Bookof Genesis(12th edn, London, 1926), pp. 440-4, thought the Assyrians did not recognize Yau as a divine element in names because it usually lacked the divine determinative; and that where is is found, the text would have been written by a Jewish scribe. 6 S. M. Dalley and J. N. Postgate, CuneiformTexts fromNimrud III, Tablets from Fort Shalmaneser(Oxford, 1984), Kubaba-ilaya and Kubaba-suri, Si'-ramu and Si'- qatar ; Ubru-Allaya in nos 47 and 48. ' See H.-P. Muller, "Gab es in Ebla ein Gott Ja?", ZeitschriftjürAssyriologie 70 (1980), pp. 70-92. 8 F. Pomponio, review of S. Dalley et al., The Old Babyloniantablets fromTell al Rimah, in OriensAntiquus 16 (1977), pp. 335-6. .
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