Oseas (Hastings' Dictionary)

The form in which the name of the ee Hosea is given in 2 Es 189 (both AV and ). OSNAPPAR (Aram. 15)>x ; B’Acevvagddp, A Ναφάρ; Lagarde, Sad\uavacedpns).—Only in Ezr 4°, The word occurs in a letter written in Aramaic, and sent by the chancellor and the scribe of the Samaritans to Artaxerxes, king of Persia (B.c. 464-424), to urge him to stop the building of the walls of Jerusalem by the Jews.

Among the Samaritans who inspired this letter were ‘the Babylonians, the Shushanchites, the Dehaites, the Elamites, and the rest of the nations whom the great and noble Osnappar brought over, and set in the city of Samaria, and in the rest (of the country) beyond the river.’ This name does not appear in the inscriptions as the name either of any Assyrian king or of any high official of any people.

The connexion seems to require that Osnappar was invested with authority to transport penile from their homes to i ong these peoples we see ‘Shushanchites,’ and we are well aware that the only Assyrian king of the last period of Assyrian history who conquered Susa was Assur- banipal (cf. WAZ v. (Rassam Cyl.) col. ν. 128- vi. 76). This last great king (B.C.

668-626) wrought frightful destruction upon this strong and rich capital city, and carried large numbers of its popu lation captives to Assyria. Following in the wake of the policy already established by is predeces- sors, Tiglath-pileser, Sargon (2 K 17%, and Sargon’s Annals, 95-97) and Esarhaddon (Ezr 43), Assur- banipal doubtless distributed many of his captives in the a asad of the empire which were sparsely ulated.

oh ‘he unlikeness of ‘Osnappar’ to ‘ Assurbanipal’ has left room for doubt as to their identification. Now, we must note that the letter in which this name occurs originated about 200 years after the occurrence mentioned; and also that the name now appears in a different language from that in which it was native. Gelzer (‘Die Colonie Osnappars,’ in Zeits. f. d. ne Sprache, 1875, 78-82) supposed that 75:08 is a degeneration from Spy[ajjox.

To represent this by a different division we have $=3270x. By a change of the 7 of 7px into 3 (ef. the scribal error Nebuchadnezzar for Nebuchadrezzar), an ellipsis of the middle element of the name, and the change of the final ‘1’ to ‘r’ (cf. ‘Porus’ in the canon of Ptolemy, Smith, Eponym Canon, p. 102f., where the Bab. Chron. reads ‘ Pulu’), we arrive at the name 75:0x. The identification of Osnappar with Assurbanipal is now conceded by most authorities (Schrader, COT li.

65; Delitzsch, Paradies, p. 329; Hommel, Ges. Bab.-Assyr. p. 740; E. Meyer, Ges. d. Alterthums, p. 477, and Fintat, d. Judenth. p. 29f.) Halévy (REJ ix. 12), however, does not agree with the above authorities. Taking into account (1) the period in which Omappet is said to have lived, (2) the particular peoples he transported, (3) the prob- able scien een of the name with eae!

of the last great king o syria, we can scarcely escape the conelnsion that Osnappar was the ἊΣ ἘΡῚ of the last period of Assyrian history (so Driver in Hogarth’s Authority and Archeology, p. 112). Tra M. PRICE.