Endnote 19 – Should the Exodus and the Israelite Settlement Be Redated?

Velikovsky states that the name in the letters was read originally as Ebed-Tov (“Good Servant” in Hebrew) and that this reading is probably correct (Ages in Chaos, p. 235). But while the first part of the name is written with the ideograph for “servant” or “slave” (which would be read abdu in Akkadian or ’ebed in Hebrew), the name of the goddess Hepa is consistently spelled out syllabically, He-pa. The sign he can be used as an ideograph for “good,” but then the pa (or ba) at the end would have to be taken as a determinative indicating an accusative ending for the word written ideographically. This is linguistically unacceptable. The name of the goddess Hepa has now been found in many other texts, and the reading and meaning of the name Abdu-Hepa in the Amarna letters is almost universally recognized among Assyriologists.