Cool countersemitic theories (bro)

Everyone was out at my company except for me, so I've had time to collect some thoughts. I was considering some recent countersemitica - I can't think of a better word for these weirdnesses. We'll start with Palamedes, who's been cropping up on my Google Scholar searches.

Kosmas Theodorides floated revisiting the tradition of Palamedes as inventor of the alphabet. This Academia Letter claims that although a mixed abecedary was in use in Egypt as Hieratic, and although Ugaritic took that idea and ran with it; the first true alphabet was done when Palamedes adapted Linear B. The epic poets including Homer remembered Palamedes. There's a proto-Canaanite alphabet at Serabit el-Khadim in southwest Sinai but that's the far side of the desert.

But then one Madeleine Mumcuoglu, tilting this ivory lice comb with an older iPhone, detected Canaani writing. The comb had been found at Lachish but that doesn't mean it was carved then - or there.

The inscriber had a sense of humour: he imagined this as the "tusk" of an elephant now doing its job against we remember as the Third Plague, of כִּנָּם. You'd think a modern Jewish wit might refer to that plague instead (as Psalm 105:31 עָרֹב כִּנִּים, tho' not Psalm 78:31). Hence: not Hebrew, but Canaani. Also the script itself parallels the Sinai alphabet presently dated from 19th century BC on. I don't know if the Canaanite Shift was in play yet, or if the language be ancestral to Aramaic too. But that doesn't matter for Greece.

What we are seeing is a wider range for the Canaani script, as far as Lachish. Given other inscriptions in Late Bronze Lachish, under Egyptian rule; it's Theodorides' burden to show that the comb was both inscribed and brought to this city after the Greek Age Of Heroes. Til then, the standard textbooks remain in force as far as Greeks having direct access to Canaan's merchants in the Iron Age, not just being "inspired" by Ugarit in the Late-Helladic-IIIB archaeology and adapting, I dunno, Cypriote Linear C.

And then there's... sigh... Russell Gmirkin. This rests on the idea that some Ptolemaic Platonist wrote Genesis in Hebrew and Greek, before allowing it forth into Judaea. But then I read Ron Hendel. Hendel agrees that Genesis One in the Greek relies upon a Hebrew Vorlage. Hendel further agrees that the Greek translator, not being a sixth-century-BC mercenary sergeant in Naucratis-Heracleion, but in fact being a subject of the Ptolemies, owned some grounding in Greek philosophy. Maybe the Hebrew source owed something to post-Hellenistic thought. But.

Comparing the Greek version, even as extrapolated, to the MT/4QGen texts, show that the Greek version has altered the meaning. Walton was right; Gmirkin and Vridar and TOO are wrong.

We appear to be in yet another, modern, phase of an ancient argument: Greeks claiming priority against those darn Phoenicians. At least Greeks have the excuse of national pride. What's everyone else's excuse?