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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] What Is "Hebron"
  • Date: Mon, 5 May 2008 09:27:10 EDT


What was “Hebron”?

Was the Hebron of Jacob/“Israel” a city?

Was the Hebron of Jacob/“Israel” the highest altitude place in all of Canaan
where any substantial number of people lived?

Was the Hebron of Jacob/“Israel” located at the same location, or at least
at about the same location, as the Hebron that is referred to in the books of
the Bible after Genesis?

As to #1, Genesis 37: 14 says that the “Hebron” of Jacob/“Israel” was a
valley, not a city:

“So he [Jacob] sent him [Joseph] out of the vale [Valley] of Hebron, and he
[Joseph] came to Shechem.”

As to #2, the Valley of Hebron was certainly not the highest altitude place
in all of Canaan where any substantial number of people lived. There is a
city
that the text references as being very near the Valley of Hebron, presumably
being on a hill overlooking the Valley of Hebron. The name of that city is “
Arbe”/aleph-resh-bet-ayin. With Kiriath being a poetic word for “city”, this
town’s name is often set forth in English as Kiriatharbe (though I myself
would prefer “city of Arbe”). Although this is usually taken to mean “City
of
Four”, we will see below that this town’s name may originally have been
“Great
City”. In the days of Jacob/“Israel”, the city of Arbe almost certainly
would have been on a hill overlooking the Valley of Hebron, if what the
Patriarchal narratives are saying is accurate about Hebron and Kiriath Arbe.

A later editor twice tried to claim that the city of Arbe and Hebron were one
and the same place, in which case “Hebron” would have been a city. Genesis
23: 2; 35: 27. But the phrase “now Hebron” is an openly disclosed editorial
footnote, a later gloss that likely was added into the text many centuries
after the original composition of the Patriarchal narratives. In every case
in
the Patriarchal narratives, a phrase “…hiy/he-vav-aleph geographical name #2”
is a later gloss, with such phrase not having been in the original text. The
original text had only the immediately preceding geographical reference #1,
which invariably is a Late Bronze Age city. Here is Genesis 23: 2, with the
suspect phrase in brackets:

“And Sarah died in Kiriatharba [--the same is Hebron--] in the land of Canaan…
.”

Originally, that sentence had simply read: “And Sarah died in Kiriatharba in
the land of Canaan….”

So Kiriatharba, or the city of Arbe, is a city, but “Hebron” was the Hebron
Valley, not a city, in the Patriarchal Age, according to the original version
of the Patriarchal narratives.

As to #3, if the Bible was always talking about the same Hebron, where the
modern city of Hebron is located, why then wasn’t there any Late Bronze Age
occupation there? Here is what Biblical Maximalist Kenneth Kitchen says:

“Hebron…is in the general area of modern Hebron; the oldest site is that on
Jebel Rumeida. Work has (so far) not yielded habitation of the Late Bronze
Age, but one burial cave nearby was used more or less continuously from the
Middle through the Late Bronze Age into (seemingly) Iron I. As the excavator
observes, this may indicate a small Late Bronze occupation not yet detected
by
site excavation.” K.A. Kitchen, “On the Reliability of the Old Testament”
(2003), at p. 184

So in the days of Jacob/“Israel” what was “Hebron”? Where was Hebron?
What are the clues in the text that tell us where to look for Hebron in the
well-documented secular history of the 2nd millennium BCE? There’s no
“Hebron” in
the Thutmosis III list of mid-15th century BCE of cities in Canaan. And there
’s no “Hebron” in the mid-14th century BCE Amarna Letters either. But wait.
On the foregoing analysis, “Hebron” was merely a valley back in those days.
It’s the city (Arbe) we should be looking for, not the Valley of Hebron.

We have to do a little thinking before we going looking for the city name “
Arbe”/aleph-resh-bet-ayin. If “arbe” means “four”, which is the traditional
view, note that for the number 4, the aleph is a prosthetic, which disappears
in all the variants on the number 4. So we really can’t count on that aleph.

And the variants sometimes have a different ending as well, so we cannot rely
on the ayin either. What we’ve really got, then, is resh-bet/R-B. We can
rely on R-B, if the Patriarchal narratives are historically accurate. That’s
the
city (R-B) we should be looking for. But then we must consider suffixes, and
even the possibility that the original name of the city was based on a
different root. R/resh-bet/bet looks like the word “to be great”, or
R-B-H/resh-bet-he. Prior to the days of the Hebrews, an archaic way to turn
that verb into
a noun fitting to be a place name would be to drop the he/H and add a tav/T
as a suffix, giving us R-B-t. In that case, the original name of the city
was “
Great City”, not “City of Four”. So we must be alert to all of these
various possibilities. On the Thutmosis III list we might find “RBT”. In
the
Amarna Letters, we might find “Rubutu” (since Akkadian cuneiform is notorious
for
sticking in U’s everywhere in place names, which U’s never are there in the
Biblical Hebrew; the consonants are R-B-t). And in a later book of the
Bible, such as Joshua 15: 60, we might see R-B-h, or even “the Great
City”/h-R-B-h
(instead of a-R-B-e at Genesis 23: 2; he-resh-bet-he instead of
aleph-resh-bet-ayin). But no matter what the suffix, and regardless of
whether the
prosthetic aleph is there as a prefix or there is some other prefix, we can
definitely count on R-B as the heart and soul of this town’s name.

If the original name was “Great City” in the Late Bronze Age, then we would
certainly expect Late Bronze Age archeological remains.

As to location, it cannot be at the site of modern Hebron, because there was
no Late Bronze Age city there. Since the Patriarchal narratives never once
mention Jerusalem, we cannot count on the R-B city to be near, much less
south
of, Jerusalem. Our only real clue is that Arbe is mentioned in connection
with
Bethel. So somewhere in the general neighborhood of Bethel is where we may
find historical Arbe.

If the Patriarchal narratives are historically accurate as to names of cities
near which the Patriarchs are portrayed as sojourning, then the city of Arbe
must be there in the secular historical record. It likely won’t be at the
site of modern Hebron. But it should be somewhere in the general
neighborhood of
Bethel. We’re looking for Arbe or RBT or Rubutu or Rabbah or some other play
on the key consonants R-B. Let’s see if we can find the historical “Hebron”
of Jacob/“Israel”.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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