Ghost archival patterns and Yahwistic names

Levavi, Y. ^[1]
1. [1] Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  
  Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  
  Israel
Localización: Aula Orientalis: Revista de estudios del Próximo Oriente Antiguo, ISSN 0212-5730, Vol. 42, Nº. 1, 2024, págs. 41-52
Idioma: inglés
Enlaces
- Texto completo (pdf)

Resumen
- In his 1978 study, Elias J. Bickerman attributed the higher percentage of Yahwistic names of Judean sons in the Murašû archive than their fathers to a revival of national Yahwistic sentiments among the Judean communities. However, this theory became unattainable once the same pattern was observed in the AlYahudu texts. A consistent intergenerational discrepancy cannot be explained by any cultural, historical, or socio-economic diachronic phenomenon; therefore, it is a ghost pattern. This paper presents a different approach, according to which the higher percentage of Yahwistic names among Judean protagonists compared to their patronyms results from two phenomena: a “first-born bias” regarding the protagonists in first millennium cuneiform archives and a tendency within the Judean communities to name their firstborn with a Yahwistic name.