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  • From: "Walter Mattfeld" <mattfeld AT mail.pjsnet.com>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Tadmor
  • Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 20:54:30 +0100


Jason's request is reasonable, others on this list may have the same
reservations, so here's an excerpt from a manuscript I did last year. One
can obtain the work cited and check for one's self if my Point Of View has
misinterpreted the author's words:

Second Chronicles mentions that King Solomon was not only famous for
building the temple of Solomon, but also great chariot cities like Hazor,
Megiddo and Gezer and the great trading city of Tadmor in the wilderness (2
Chr. 8:4). Josephus understood Tadmor to be Palmyra. Although scholars have
found mention of Tadmor in the archives of the kings of Kanes, Mari, Emar
and Assyria, the 11th-9th centuries BCE (p.307, Vol.6, "Tadmor," David Noel
Freedman, Ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Doubleday, 1992), excavations at
Palmyra have failed to indicate any kind of a presence there, from those
periods, archaeologically. The earliest artifact bearing a date is from 44
BCE. Millar has concluded that on the basis of the excavations, that
Tadmor/Palmyra was probably founded in the early first century BCE and by
the second half of that century had acquired enough of a renown for its
wealth, as a great trade city, so as to attract a raiding party of Marc
Anthony's troops in 41 BCE seeking plunder:

"...Palmyra as an urban centre was a new creation, which did not go back
beyond the first century BC. The place had certainly existed and had been
referred to centuries before. But there is nothing in the archaeological
record to show that there was any settled occupation of the site through the
Hellenistic period...Suggestions of a phase of urban development in Palmyra
before the disturbances of the late Hellenistic period can only be
speculation. Inscriptional evidence does, however, now suggest, by the
reconstruction of a family tree, that the foundation of the first temple of
Allat went back to the earlier first century BC. We cannot at any rate
construct a picture of a Persian or early Hellenistic Tadmor from the fact
that the Chronicler took the city Tamar which Solomon built to be Tadmor in
the desert (II Chronicles 8.4). It is only Josephus who expands on this
brief allusion to give one of the best pictures of Palmyra- but as it was in
the first century AD." (p.320, Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East, 31
B.C.-A.D.337, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1993)

In order for Tadmor to have attracted the Chronicler's attention it must
have been a great and important city, worthy of being ascribed to Solomon's
prodigious building reputation. It would appear then, that based on the
archaeological evidence found at Tadmor, that 2 Chronicles 2:8, and thus
perhaps Chronicles itself, must have been written some time during the 1st
century BCE, probably in the second half of that century, 50 BCE or later.

All the best,

Walter

Walter Reinhold Warttig Mattfeld
Walldorf by Heidelberg
Baden-Wurttemburg
Germany




  • RE: Tadmor, Niels Peter Lemche, 02/26/2000
    • <Possible follow-up(s)>
    • RE: Tadmor, Dave Washburn, 02/27/2000
    • Tadmor, Walter Mattfeld, 02/27/2000
    • RE: Tadmor, Niels Peter Lemche, 02/27/2000
    • Tadmor, Walter Mattfeld, 02/28/2000

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