Yigal Levin wrote on B-Hebrew fifteen years ago: “The Midianites are absolutely unknown except from the Bible. We’re not even sure where they lived. We certainly have no way of knowing their language. We can guess that they were Arabs, and spoke an Arabic dialect, but even that’s just a guess.” (Source)Chris Watts wrote: ↑Fri Oct 29, 2021 4:22 am1. Hallo Jordan, thankyou for your reply. I would lie to make sure I understand this absolutely. Therefore would you say that around 700BC the Language spoken by those referred to as Cush in scripture would be as different from the Egyptian and Hebrew language as say German is from Russian. In other words there was no relation between them and utterly unintelligable to an Egyptian and Hebrew speaker? So they could not be compared to say the similarity between Dutch and German? I know I added in Hebrew but just wanting to be clear.
How can we make comparisons between languages that left written evidence and languages that are complete speculation? I would assume that Midian had some kind of Semitic language, whereas Egyptian language was not Semitic (at least, not at that time). It would certainly not be similar to the case of German and Dutch (or Spanish and Portuguese).
As far as I’m aware, Midian is known only from the Bible (מִדְיָן or Μαδιάμ) and Qurʾān (مَدْيَن). What extra-biblical evidence are you referring to?Chris Watts wrote: ↑Fri Oct 29, 2021 4:22 am2. On a side note, Moses obviously had a relationship with his Father-in-law who was a Midianite priest, his first wife a Midianite,and there is evidence both scripturally and extra-biblical to make the assumption that Cush and Midian shared a common culture and language and were closely related in that much of the population could have been Cushite. If you ask for evidence I will have to spend a few days looking it all up because it was something I read about many months ago and it was a surprise to read this.
Jason