No, I didnt say that at all. Someone posted that hebrew had no loan words from Egyptian, which would be expected after generations of being slaves. I pointed out they did. I never claimed that slaves didnt learn the language of their masters That is your idea, claiming I said that.
In general, Israel was a vassal state of one regional superpower or another for the entire period prior to, potentially, the creation of the modern nation of Israel. Maybe there was some brief period under King Saul and his direct descendants that they were a distinct entity, and possibly some other moments like after Egypt’s regional powers wained but before being taken by the Akkadians, etc.
But certainly the kingdoms of Israel and Judea were subject of Egypt for centuries, if not greater. It would be strange if there wasn’t an amount of word borrowing. (I’d probably back the idea that Exodus is largely an allegory for their time, nationally, as a vassal state.)
As I recall the original Semitic script was a variant of one of the Egyptian scripts.
This is you saying the Hebrews didn’t necessarily have to learn Egyptian - my emphasis. Unless you meant something entirely different by “that area”.
Then when asked :
You didn’t say “No”, you said :
Which is ambiguous, but either “they” are the Egyptians and you’re alleging they didn’t speak Egyptian, or “they” are the slaves and you’re alleging the Egyptians would speak in the slave’s language. Both of those are on their face ridiculous statements. And that’s where the rest of it took off.
No, that’s your own words. If you meant something different when you said the slaves in Egypt did not have to learn much of the dominant language, you at no point corrected that statement subsequently. Instead you tried to Gish Gallop your way to Egyptians speaking Nubian…
You recall correctly. Hieratic, IIRC.
Let’s not confuse cognate with synonym. I’ll need a cite that a majority contests the cognate status. Exonyms can shift around. For example, the “gypsy cab drivers” in New York are not Romani.
Here’s a Bible verse showing that Israelite and Hebrew were not synonyms.
The Hebrew word for “Hebrew” derives from “crossed from the other side of the Euphrates River.”
The Bible connects this to the progenitors of Israel:
Note that the Hebrew language doesn’t seem to have been called called “Hebrew” until the 2nd century BC.
Of course they aren’t. Israelis are supposed to be descendants of Jacob (Israel). Hebrews are… somewhere further up (or down?—I mean a step closer to the base of) the imaginary genealogical tree. It’s Old Testament Genealogy 101 (like, literally the story of Genesis).
But that’s confusing the issue. It’s not a matter of whether Hebrew and Israeli are synonymous or cognates, it’s a matter of whether Apiru and Hebrew are.
You’re thinking of descendants of Eber – a fictitious ancestor invented for this “just so” story.
I intended the separation between “israelite” and “Hebrew” as just a further clue to refute the claim that Hebrew and Habiru are unrelated terms.
And here I thought that the genealogies in Genesis might have a kernel of truth! (Obviously not really)
Who’s doing that? The commonly accepted etymology of Apiru is from “dust”, the accepted etymology of Hebrew is from “across (the river)”. They are in no way cognate.
You just quoted my cites that say exactly that:
The term was first discovered in its Akkadian version “ḫa-bi-ru” or “ḫa-pi-ru”. Due to later findings in Ugaritic and Egyptian which used the consonants ʿ, p and r, and in light of the well-established sound change from Northwest Semitic[ʿ] to Akkadian ḫ, the root of this term is proven to be ʿ-p-r. This root means “dust, dirt”, and links to the characterization of the ʿApiru as nomads, mercenaries, people who are not part of the cultural society.
The most generally accepted hypothesis today is that the text intends ivri as the adjective (Hebrew suffix -i) formed from ever (עֵבֶר) ‘beyond, across’ (avar (עָבַר) ‘he crossed, he traversed’)
What does later exonym shift have to do with cognacy? Absolutely nothing.
Naah, I’m good, thanks.
Don’t take the two million bit seriously. In the literary conventions of the day, that’s just their way of saying “a lot of people” It’s the same as Methuselah living nine hundred years. That’s just a colourful way of saying that he lived a long time. Ditto for Egyptian stelae showing every war Pharaoh fought as a glorious victory, when quite a few of them probably weren’t.
Naah. Not when it’s more specific than that - 967, not a round 900 - and the writers also go into detail about it like how old he was when he fathered Lamech. This was clearly not intended just as “a very long time”, but a specific amount of time. It’s just mythical long-lived ancestry for contemporary political purposes, just like the Sumerian Kings List.
Yep - propaganda.
If you get vague enough everything is true, right? Of course, this means that if you get vague enough everything van be considered false. Not very useful when studying anything, including the Bible.
I doubt it has anything to do with politics. AFAICT the scholarly consensus is that numbers like that in the Bible had some mystical numerological meaning that’s been forgotten.
It’s not like Methuselah is some heroic figure; he’s just one name in a long list of impossibly long-lived people, who is well-known only because his lifespan happens to be the very longest.
Claiming an unbroken chain of descent to solidify claims of nationhood is explicitly political. That’s what the King List is for, and OT genealogies are no different, just patriarchs instead of kings.
One might even argue the same of the modern nation of Israel. Oh, there’s no formal vassalship structure, but it’s still closely tied to the US, and the US is clearly the stronger of the two.
There probably is significance to Methuselah’s 967 years. First, that works out to 12000 months, or 1000 purely-lunar years, and there are other Middle Eastern cultures that use a purely lunar calendar. So it might be a translation from a tradition of 1000 years in a different culture or an earlier version of the culture.
Second, if you count out all of the generations, Methuselah’s time of death would have been at the Flood, or very close to it, suggesting that that was maybe his cause of death, which seems relevant.
Wrong thread
As a rule of thumb, I just divide by ten, so the old guy maybe lived to be 96. Which in the ancient time was pretty damn good. This vague “rule” works well with numbers of armies and such .
Vassals pay tribute/taxes to their suzerain. I think that would make the US a vassal of Israel, not the other way around. 
Moderating:
We have countless threads to discuss USA’s and Israel’s complicated relationship. But I don’t think a comparison of the relationship of the modern state of Israel and the USA has any bearing on the factual nature of the exodus from Egypt and wandering in the desert for 40 years.
For a continued discussion of the modern relationship, please seek any one of the recent threads, or spin off a new one, otherwise, no more posting on this subject in this thread.
How to Reply as a linked Topic
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
Which raises an interesting question: nowhere does it say that the pre-Deluge patriarchs actually died of old age. Has anyone ever hypothesized that the pre-Deluge humans were not merely long-lived, but short of getting killed actually were unaging?
ETA: do any other Patriarchs get suddenly cut off at approximately the same date?