What Language Did Abraham Speak?

The world known to the early Hebrew.

Alice C. Linsley

The best evidence to date suggests that Abraham and his Hebrew ancestors spoke the languages of the peoples among whom they lived. Some of Abraham's ancestors spoke early Nilo-Saharan languages, some of which are now extinct. Abraham and his immediate family would have spoken Ancient Akkadian, the oldest known Semitic language. This explains why Akkadian roots are found in the oldest layers of the Genesis material. 

Abraham probably spoke more than one language and had men in his household who were scribes and translators. He would have known the Akkadian of Mesopotamia where he grew up, and he would have been familiar with the related languages of his Hebrew kinsmen living in Anatolia, Canaan, Arabia, and the Nile Valley.

The evidence of linguistics, history, archaeology, anthropology, and the Book of Genesis suggests that Abraham's Hebrew ancestors were widely dispersed in the Fertile Crescent and the Ancient Near East. Much is known about these ruler-priests. They are called the "mighty men of old" because they were kingdom builders who regarded themselves as divinely appointed to disperse and populate the earth. They spread out of Africa along major water systems and mountain ranges. They built fortifications at high elevations near permanent water systems. These royal complexes included palaces, temples, treasuries and housing for priests and warriors. They established trade, married only within their caste (caste endogamy), spread belief in the High God though he was known by different names. 

The Hebrew were a ruler-priest caste in the service of kingdom builders such as Nimrod (Gen. 10), a son of Kush. Nimrod left his homeland in the Nile Valley and established a territory in Mesopotamia. Abraham is one of his descendants.

Common roots found among many Ancient Near Eastern and East African languages.

Genesis 11:1 says that the peoples of the Afro-Asiatic Dominion spoke “one language” and the dispersal suggested by the Tower of Babel story did not change this. This explains the linguistic similarity between names and titles found in Genesis and in among populations among who the early Hebrew scribes lived. Examples include Jochi (biblical Joktan/Yaqtan), Malik, and Khan (biblical Kain or Kayan). Khan means king, and in the Bible, Kain is the archetypal earthly ruler (see Book of Jude). Today Khan is a common surname in Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Mongolia. Some Pashtun tribes adopted Malik as the title for ruler instead of Khan. Malik is equivalent to the Hebrew Melek, meaning king.

Consider the following correspondences:

The Hebrew rison adam = ancestral man is adamu orisa = ancestral Adam in Hahm/Hausa languages of Nigeria and Niger. The Hausa word for human being is dan adam. Related is the Babylonian word for blood: dhama. The Sanskrit word for male human is manu which resembles the African word adamu.

The Hebrew bara = to begin, is related to the Yoruba/Hahm word bere = to begin. There is a relationship between the verb "to begin" and the Hebrew word for Creator which is Bore and the African Twi dialect is Borebore (a reduplication) indicating the Most High God. The Sanskrit kr = ‘to create/to make is related to the Igbo kere = created.

The Hebrew hay = “living being” is related to the Hausa/Hahm word aye = life, created world. Likewise, the Hebrew iya = mother, corresponds to the Dravidian ka ayi = mother, and the Hausa/Hahm eyi = gave birth.

The Hebrew hayah = "Let there be…" is related to the Igbo haa ya = "Let it be…/let there be"

The Hebrew amar = "commanded" is related to the Igbo hamara = "commanded"

The Hebrew abba = father, corresponds to the Hausa/Hahm baba = father, to the Dravidian appa/appan = father, and to the Mundari apu = father. The original root is likely AP.

The Hebrew ha’nock = the chief, corresponds to the Hahm word nok = “first ancestral chief”. The original root is likely NK and suggests the royal title Enoch.

The Semitic word wadi = river, corresponds to the Sanskrit nadi = river. The original root is likely AD.

The Semitic root mgn = to give, is the same as the Sanskrit mgn = to give.

The Hausa word for hunter is maharba. Compare this to the Hebrew word that appears in the Targum nah shirkan = hunter. Note the similarity to the Hausa word sarkin maharba = lead hunter.

The Sanskrit svah = sky or heaven, corresponds to the Semitic svam or samyim = sky or heavens. The Semitic resembles the Proto-Dravidian word van = heaven. The Arabo-Spanish desvan (attic or upper room) is likely related to the root SVN.

The Hebrew yasuah = salvation, corresponds to the Sanskrit words asvah, asuah or yasuah = salvation. Yashua means salvation in the Urdu language also.

The Hebrew root thr = to be pure, corresponds to the Hausa/Hahm toro = clean, to the Amarigna (Ethiopia) anatara = pure, and to the Tamil tiru = holy. All are related to the proto-Dravidian tor = blood. In some Kushitic languages mtoro means rain and toro refers to God. The Egyptian ntr = deity may be related.

The Hebrew echad or ehat = one, corresponds to the Nilotic Luo achiel, the Syrian eka, the Sanskrit eca, and to the Ethiopian Gonga ikka. In the Proto-Saharan, ikki is a directional element, meaning toward or to. In the ancient world, primacy or the first position or number one was reserved for the deity. This is evident in the Luo word for one: achi-el. El is a very ancient reference to God.

The number six in Proto-Dravidian is caru. This correlates to koro in Proto-Saharan, a directional element; to karkia in some Chadic Languages; and to korci in Meidob (a language of eastern Sudan). The most striking similarity is between the Kanembu (another language of Sudan) araku and the Dravido-Tamil aarru.

We can verify the connection between the Nile and Indus Valley by comparing the ancient Egyptian and Indus pottery inscriptions in which 17 figures are virtually identical (see below).

(Found on p. 330 in The First Lords of the Earth: An Anthropological Study, available at Amazon.)

Hebrew is a relatively recent language.

Abraham did not speak Hebrew. Hebrew emerged as a distinct language about 1000 years after Abraham's time. 

Hebrew is largely triconsonantal and, as with the older Arabic, has no vowels. This is why a word may appear with various spellings: hur, heru, hor, har. The root is HR which in ancient Egyptian refers to Horus and means "Most High One".

The Hebrew triconsonantal root system consists of only about two hundred roots. When a certain vowel pattern is placed over these roots, a wide range of related meanings can be assumed (polysemic). Over the centuries translators have guessed at some of these vowels, but rarely has this affected the meanings. Where accuracy has been compromised it is often means that the translators have not cross-checked the Hebrew or Aramaic against the older cognate languages such as Akkadian, Ancient Egyptian, and Old Arabic.

The Danish linguist Holger Pedersen (1867-1953) explained in The Discovery of Language that “Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian languages had all undergone significant linguistic degeneration. Only Old Arabic, due to its relative isolation in the Arabian Peninsula, remained closer to the old stratum of the ‘Semitic’ form of the language.”

There are various textual clues that enable us to determine the general nature of the language spoken by Abraham. These involve words that reference shrines, temples, and place names associated with numbers and water systems.

Houses of God

In the ancient Egyptian and Ugaritic languages, the word piru meant house, shrine, or temple. These were Sun temples in royal complexes at the Sun cities such as Heliopolis. The Sun temples were served by priests, among them the Hebrew ruler-priests caste, called abrutu, from the Ancient Akkadian word abru, meaning priest.

The Hebrew were devotees of God Father and God son. The oldest known site of Horite and Sethite Hebrew worship was at Nekhen on the Nile (4200 B.C.). At the Horus temple of Nekhen votive instruments were ten times larger than the mace heads and bowls found elsewhere, suggesting that this was a very prestigious shrine. Horite Hebrew priests placed invocations to the HIgh God and his son HR at the summit of the fortress as the sun rose. This is the likely origin of the sun blessings in Hinduism (the Agnihotra morning ritual) and in Judaism (the Birka Hachama, or “Sun Blessing” ritual performed every 28 years).

Another Horite shrine was at Heliopolis (biblical On). The Harris papyrus speaks of 'apriu of Re at Heliopolis, the shrine of the Sun. Joseph married into this royal priest line when he married Asenath, the daughter of the priest of On. Asenath was probably Joseph's cousin.

The Horite Hebrew priests of Heliopolis were known for their meticulous devotion to the Creator and his son, and for their sobriety and purity of life. Plutarch wrote that the “priests of the Sun at Heliopolis never carry wine into their temples, for they regard it as indecent for those who are devoted to the service of any god to indulge in the drinking of wine whilst they are under the immediate inspection of their Lord and King. The priests of the other deities are not so scrupulous in this respect, for they use it, though sparingly.”

Abraham's Hebrew ancestors believed in the High God and his son HR who Hathor conceived miraculously by divine overshadowing. This is the probable origin of Messianic expectation. This very ancient narrative is the proto-Gospel, the foretelling of Jesus Christ's conception by Virgin Mary's who conceived by divine overshadowing, as the Angel Gabriel explained.

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God."

Related reading: Belief in the High God; Horite and Sethite Mounds; The Hebrew Were a Caste; Hebrew Names and Titles; Joseph and Asenath; Sun Cities of the Ancient World

African Context of Biblical Material

The Bible tells us that Kushites moved out of Africa into Mespotamia. One kingdom-building Kushite is specifically named: Nimrod. He established his kingdom "in the land of Shinar," which included the cities "Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh" (Genesis 10:10). Babylon and Erech have been identified with certainty, and consistent with the kingdom-building pattern of Abraham's ancestors these are on a north-south axis.  Nimrod is not the first African to build cities. Kain is said to have built a city in honor of his first-born son, who would rule after him.  This settlement was probably what has become the city of Kano in northern Nigeria (directly north of the prehistoric site of Nok/Enoch, where Kain's cousin-wife dwelt.)

Archaeologist Thomas Strasser (Providence College) and his team have found 130,000 year old stone hand axes on Crete that are identical to 800,000 year double-edged axe heads found in African, suggesting that humans left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago and traveled on seagoing vessels to Europe and the Near East via larger islands in the Mediterranean.

In his 20 years of work on Crete, Strassser has discovered several hundred double-edged cutting implements at nine sites in southwestern Crete that date to 130,000 years ago and earlier. Strasser reported that hand axes he found on Crete were made from local quartz but are identical to those fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago. (Read more here and here.)

It is clear that peoples from Africa were migrating eastward to Pakistan, southern India, and Sri Lanka. The Sudra (Sudanese) who inhabited these areas were black. The Sudra Kingdom, mentioned in the epic of Mahabharata, was one of the ancient Saraswati Valley kingdoms. Herodotus referred to the Sudra/Dravidians as the “eastern Ethiopians” and described them thus: “The Eastern Ethiopians differed in nothing from the other Ethiopians, save in their language, and the character of their hair. For the Eastern Ethiopians have straight hair, while they of Libya are more woolly-haired…”

The Indus civilization had several large cities, including Mohenjo-daro and Harrapa. That civilization is known by the name “Harappa” and the people of this civilization were Dravidians. The Indian archaeologist, B. B. Lal, contends that the Dravidians came from southern Egypt and Sudan (Nubia). This would explain their dark complexion. Lal writes: "At Timos the Indian team dug up several megalithic sites of ancient Nubians which bear an uncanny resemblance to the cemeteries of early Dravidians which are found all over Western India from Kathiawar to Cape Comorin. The intriguing similarity extends from the subterranean structure found near them. Even the earthenware ring-stands used by the Dravidians and Nubians to hold pots were identical." The Nubian megaliths of which Lal speaks date from around 1000 B.C.

Evidence of much older connections between Africa and India comes from the Onge of the Andaman Islands at the eastern edge of the Bay of Bengal. They are believed to have migrated from Africa around 60,000 years ago. They resemble African pygmies. Analysis of the Y-chromosome of 46 Onge men revealed an ancient genetic trait of African races, especially the Pygmies. The initial research was done by Dr. Lalji Singh, Director of India's Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad and was annoucned in 2001. Dr. Singh's findings paralleled those of Dr. Erika Hagelberg, a Cambridge scientist, who analysed Andaman hair samples which had been stored in Cambridge since 1907. She found that clusters of DNA from the hair were most similar to those in southern African pygmies.
 

Onge woman and child

 
This corresponds to the evidence in linguistics which connects the languages of southern India with the languages of the Upper Nile Valley and the Lake Chad region. Consider these examples:
 
Chief is "neb" in Egyptian and "nab" in Dravidian. This may be the origin of the semitic nabi = prophet.
 
Father is "abba" in Hebrew, "baba" in Hausa/Hahm, "appa" in Dravidian, and "apu" in Mundari.
 
The Hebrew root "thr" = to be pure, corresponds to the Hausa/Hahm "toro" = clean, and to the Tamil "tiru" = holy. All are related to the proto-Dravidian "tor" = blood.

Small is "sr" in Egyptian and "siru" in Dravidian.
 
The prefix ke or ki denotes smallness: "ke" in Coptic, "kenna" in Dravidian and "kina" in Nubian.

Woman, daughter is "asa" in Dravidian and "as" in Cushitic/Nubian.
 
Day is "ulla" in Dravidian and "ul" in Nubian.
 
Stone or rock is "kal" in Dravidian and "kulu" in Nubian.
 
Mountain is "male" in Dravidian and "mule" in Nubian. (Read more examples here and here.)

As we explore the African context of Abraham's ancestors we uncover possible explanations for the names found in Genesis. Consider the name of Abraham's barren wife, Sara, who is said to have laughed when she received the news that she would bear a son in her old age. The association of laughter with the name Sara is suggested by several Afro-Asiatic languages. The verb to laugh in Hausa, a Chadic language, is dara. Dara and Sara may be regarded as cognates since the letters d and s are interchangeable in Dravidian and many African languages.

Sara might also be related to the Amharic sak', meaning to laugh, which is a cognate to the eastern Chadic Kambaata word osalut, meaning ‘laughter’.

It is interesting to note also that the largest population group in Chad is called the Sara. Sara society is organized by patrilineal descent from a common male ancestor. There is a 3-clan confederation such as characterizes Abraham's people. The qir ka are the eastern Sara, the qin ka are those living in central Chad, and the qel ka are the western groups. According to legend, there were giants among the Sara.

Closer examination of the African cultural context of Abraham's ancestors promises to bring greater understanding of the older layers of the biblical material. It is time for biblical scholars to turn their eyes to Africa.

Climate Cycles and Noah's Flood

Alice C. Linsley


People are talking about the heat and strange weather this summer. Stephen Hawking thinks that it is time to abandon earth because of global warming and the threat of the Sun devouring Earth. You hear weather specialists talk about El Niño and La Niña, about ocean temperatures, about wind currents, and about the shrinking Arctic ice cap, but nobody is talking about the expanding Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina and Pio XI glacier in Chile.

There's plenty of talk about how humans have caused atmospheric pollution leading to the greenhouse effect, but the magnitude of the gas emissions involved in the atmospheric warming by greenhouse gases is inadequate to account for the magnitude of temperature increases. Total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28% of the "greenhouse effect". So what causes the up and down cycles of global climate change?

One factor that nobody is talking about is the cycle of Earth's Great Year which brings fluctuation in the great river systems and affects sea levels. "The expansions and contractions of those environments have pretty profound effects on life on Earth," says Shanan Peters, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of geology and geophysics. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the world's oceans and rivers have expanded and contracted in response to climate change and the shifting tectonic plates.

About 150,000 years ago there was a major uplift of the Angolan ridge in the area of the equator in Africa. This meant a permanent supply of water running to the Upper Nile and prompted migration to that area and the building of a great Nubian (Sudanese) civilization.

Between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago all of the region between Lake Chad and the Nile was wet. The climate had changed, ushering in years of persistent, heavy rains. The Nile was transformed from a slow stream into a roaring river with mile-deep gorges. This was the beginning of the wet period that would turn the Sahara into vast grasslands able to support elephants, antelopes, gazelles, ostriches, giraffes, and hyenas.

Lakes formed in the basins, large enough to support fish, crocodile and hippopotamus. Early hunters camped along the lakes, as evidenced by heaps of domestic refuse at many sites along the lakeshores. Lake Chad filled and merged with the Mega-Chad Sea, creating a body of water comparable in size to the state of Sudan. The overflow spilled southwest out the Benue River to the Atlantic.

The flood of Noah likely occurred during the peak of the rainy period when Mega-Chad would have been 5 times the size of Lake Superior. The surrounding land was spongy and there was great flooding at the confluence of the Niger, Benue, Yobe and Osimili Rivers. The floodwaters created a disaster of such proportions that it is still remembered. Rainbows would have been a common sight over the region due to rising mists.

A black mahogany dugout from this period was found in the Land of Noah buried at a depth of 16 feet under clays and sands whose alternating sequence showed evidence of deposition in standing and flowing water. The Dufuno dugout (shown below) is 8000 years old. By comparison, Egypt's oldest boat is only about 5000 years old.

About 12,000 years ago, the Nile connected to the Chadic and Niger water systems through a series of shallow lakes in the Sahara Desert. Because of this, a common plant and animal species is found in all three river systems.

The Lake Chad region is the location of Noah's flood, and the area is called "Bor-Nu", which means Land of Noah. Today the area is dry, but rains are returning to the Sahara. West Africa is receiving abundant convective rainfall also.

Now that Earth's Great Year is beginning a new cycle, the great water systems of Noah's day may again approach the size they once were, as indicated by their footprints seen from space.

This year the Indus River in Pakistan seems to be seeking its old boundaries. NASA photos reveal that in a matter of a few months the Indus has swollen to the proportions it was known to have 10,000 years ago.   See the contrast from one year ago.

Indus River August 2009

Indus River August 2010

Since the close of Earth's Great Year in July 1998, global temperatures have dipped.  This fact primarily reflects the sudden spike in land and sea temperatures around the time that the precession of the equinoxes formed a perfect erect cross in July 1998. Subsequent temperatures have been lower. Even the highest temperatures of 2010 have not reach the temperatures that occurred at the the close of the 25,000-28,000 year sidereal cycle.

(To see other graphs that confirm this, go here.  To read more about axial precession, go here.)

There appears to be a reversal of hemispheric norms as we enter the new sidereal cycle.  The global south appears to be growing cooler and drier and the global north appears to be growing warmer and wetter. This explains the flooding in Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa where it appears that the Great Lakes are seeking a return to their ancient boundaries visible from satellite photos.

We are seeing verifiable climatic changes that involve wide distribution of water in what are today some of Earth's driest regions. With the close of the sidereal cycle dry places that were formerly under water may be returning to wet conditions.Such fluctuations can explain Noah's flood in the area of Lake Chad and suggest a factor in the decline of the ancient Afro-Asiatic Dominion.  As the major river systems of the ancient Near East and Africa shrank, the Afro-Asiatic rulers found it more difficult to control larger territories that were once joined by water.

If the picture given us in Genesis is taken seriously, we must recognize that the swelling and shrinking of earth's major water systems brings political as well as ecological change. The ancient Afro-Asiatic rulers lost control when the great river systems they controlled began to shrink. It was no longer possible to control huge areas of land since they were no longer connected by the water ways that made swift movement possible. Today the devastation in Pakistan is of such huge proportion that it could easily bring down that government. Katrina continues to have political impact on American leaders 5 years later. There is a good reason for the world's leaders to be concerned about global climate change, but they are foolish to think that they can control a 25,000-28,000 year cycle like Earth's Great Year.

END


Editor's Note
Nature News reported on recent studies that cast doubt on a comet as the cause of the Younger Dryas Ice Age, which took place 13,000 years ago. A study posted in the journal Nature has found that the period may have actually been one of warming and thawing of glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere. While the change in ocean temperatures at the time did block the Gulf Stream, preventing warm water from reaching the colder north, it seems that other climate altering currents, known collectively as the conveyor belt, were also stopped from bringing enough deep, cold water to the south, resulting in a thaw.

An international team led by Michael Kaplan of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, studied a part of New Zealand called Irishman Stream, an area littered with soil deposits and boulders displaced by glaciers during the ice age, to see what effects the Younger Dryas period had on the area. By doing chemical analysis on the rocks in the area, the team found that the rocks were deposited as the glaciers were retreating. Further analysis of the isotope beryllium-10 found that the rocks were first exposed to open air between 11,100 and 13,700 years ago, meaning these glaciers were melting away well within the Younger Dryas period that sent much of the Northern Hemisphere into a near-glacial freeze. For more, see the report from ScienceNOW.



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