Kinahhi is attested in the Tell El Amarna letters and at Bogazkoy.

No. 3 is my personal favorite.

I was hoping you might clarify a couple points. In your paper you write,

>>‘El qoneh “El the Creator.” This would be a hypocoristic form of the well attested Canaanite epithet ‘l qn ars, “El, Creator of the Earth,” which is itself a shorter version of the later and longer form of the epithet found at Gen. 14:19, 22: ‘el ‘elyon qoneh shamayim we’arets “EI Most High, Creator of the Heaven and the Earth.”37 In a Hittite myth borrowed from Canaan prior to 1200 B.C.38 El is called “Elkunirsa” (the Hittite spelling of West Semitic ‘I qn ars). This El was the husband of the goddess Asherah (=Ashertu) and lived in a tent at the headwaters of the Euphrates (=Mala) River.39

…

>>Kinahhi itself is attested earlier than number six, and this proposal does not require that we posit a hypocoristic form.

Two questions:

1) Is the hypocorism el qoneh ever attested that you are aware? I gather from your article that it is not. Wouldn’t that significantly reduce the likelihood that this is the epithet intended? I also wonder whether an opponent of the deity (i.e. Abraham) would apply to it an optional epithet intended to convey its sovereignty as creator of heaven and earth.
2) You mention that Kinahhi is attested earlier than ‘l qn ‘ars. Can you give us an idea as to how early each of these is attested?

I do like number 5. While we know absolutely nothing about this mysterious Mesopotamian deity, it is at least attested in basically the form the BoA leads us to expect (which seemingly can’t be said for either 3 or 6), and that form is given as if it is the deity’s proper name, rather than El + a fawning epithet. On the other hand, we have no reason to think that this relatively unknown god would have the sort of preeminence attributed to Elkenah in the BoA (“gods of Elkenah,” for example).

Number 3 appears to me to be the best of your options. I’d feel better about it if it were attested, though. The BoA repeats the name Elkenah over and over, like it’s a coherent unit, a proper name. It doesn’t switch between epithets the way a lot of Syrian texts seem to do.

-Chris

I should send a copy to Brent. People have his email?

In turn, there were four other kings mentioned in the narrative: Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and Pharaoh. Figurative images of their gods are conveniently located under the Lion Couch. Bear in mind, however, the images under the couch are simply Egyptian proxies and are not the literal image of the gods they represent.

Anyway, that’s my opinion.

Paul Osborne

http://www.myegyptology.net/file/id140.htm
http://www.myegyptology.net/file/id527.htm

What I mean is that while a few details of transcription, coloration, and chemical ink analysis are not clear/possible from the black-and-white photocopies, those photocopies (coupled with other historical data) are adequate for discerning the purpose of the documents. They are even more adequate for discerning what their purpose was not– namely, a reverse-engineering experiment. I agree with you, though, that analysis of the documents is far from over, and that nobody from either side has yet published a really thorough study.

By the way, you should run your paper by Brent Metcalfe before submitting it for publication. He’d probably have some good feedback and he’d undoubtedly appreciate having access to an advance copy of the article while writing his book.

-Chris

Thanks, Jonathan, I appreciate your expert advice. I tossed that in merely as an etymological curiousity, so I’ll delete it upon further publication. J. Stapley already mentioned that KEP means Kirtland Egyptian Papers. I also happened to write the FAIR Wiki article J. links to. It has some errors in it and does not reflect the latest research, but it conveys the basic idea of what these documents are.

1. What does KEP stand for? Is it the papyrus used for the Book of Abraham?

2. Your paper would be better off without the sentence “This word actually is a distant ancestor of English ‘knee’ (by way of Greek gonu, gnu).” While there are some loan words from Semitic into Indo-European daughter languages by way of Greek, the PIE root for “knee” is attested all over Indo-European, including the dialects far off the beaten path, and knees aren’t really the kind of cultural innovation where one might expect to find a loan word for the latest fad in the Levant. There are theories that posit a common ancestor for PIE, Semitic, and other language families, but they are still largely the province of loons, crackpots, and statisticians. Your paper would be better off if it didn’t appeari to involve itself in that argument.