From: Mark Odegard
Message: 406
Date: 1999-12-03
If we're to accept Goliath as historic, then it's not improbable he was Indo-European -- Greek even. Think of him as the biblical Big Ajax.
One question I've never had answered:
What was Uriah the Hittite's mother-tongue: Hittite? Luvian? Lycian? Carian? Phrygian? Proto-Armenian? Indo-Aryan?
The tale of Uriah, David and Bathsheba is found in 2nd Samuel, Chapter 11 (Catholics call this book 2nd Kings).
To say there is an Indo-European adstrate/substrate in biblical Hebrew, well, you can always point to the Persians; strict monotheism seems to have become normative in Babylon during the Exile, and their thinking must have had influences from the state Zoroastrianism of Cyrus et al.
But to suggest that Hebrew has a serious IE substrate ... well; we'd have heard about it long ago. At the same time, only a fool would deny that the Hebrews of the first half of the 1st millennium BCE were familiar with IE-speakers, and that somewhere, someplace, a stray borrowing might be adduced -- but again, I think we would have heard of this. It's the kind of thing that certain of the less respectable Christian groups would have bored our ears off with.
Mark.