Thursday, April 13, 2017

Proto-Siniatic "Hebrew" again

THE ASOR BLOG: Hebrew as the Language behind the World’s First Alphabet? (Douglas Petrovich).

To be honest, I am surprised that ASOR published this essay. Dr. Petrovich's theory has never been published in a peer-review venue and it has nevertheless been refuted informally in detail by specialists in Northwest Semitics and Egyptology. The very statement that the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were written in "Hebrew" doesn't make any sense to specialists. There was no "Hebrew" in the early second millennium BCE. There were various dialects of Northwest Semitic, some of which would someday develop into Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Moabite, etc.

Past PaleoJudaica posts on Douglas Petrovich's claims are here, here, here, and here.