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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Genesis 13:18 Appositional Phrase vs. Adjectival Phrase

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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: robacosta AT hotmail.com, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Genesis 13:18 Appositional Phrase vs. Adjectival Phrase
  • Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:30:02 EDT


Rob:

1. You wrote: “I stated , based on the works of others that13:18 means ‘
So Abraham moved his tents from place to place, then settled in Hebron’….”

Genesis 13: 18 does not say “from place to place”. Rather, Genesis 13: 18
simply says Y)HL, meaning “to move one’s tent”. Abram went down the
mountain after hearing YHWH’s words and promptly moved, without further ado,
to
the Patriarchs’ XBRWN. That’s what the Biblical text says, and that’s what
it means.

2. You wrote: “You claim Abraham did not actually obey God's command to
walk the land.”

On the contrary, an essential part of my theory of the case is that Abraham
d-i-d indeed “obey God's command to walk the land” (and, for that
matter, Abraham obeys all other divine commandments as well). The minute Lot
was
reduced to living in a cave, Abraham was off like a flash to far-off GRR.
Abraham could only perfect his claim to all of Canaan, and have Sarah bear
Isaac, by obeying the divine commandment of Genesis 13: 17 by walking all the
long way up north to GRR/Galilee and interacting with Abimelek.

3. The Genesis Apocryphon was composed well over a thousand years after
the composition of the truly ancient Patriarchal narratives, and is an
imaginative commentary. By that time, Biblical analysts were relying on the
post-exilic work of II Chronicles 14: 13-14 to think that the Patriarchs’ GRR
was
located in southwest Judah. On that southern Hebrew theory of the case,
Genesis did not appear to show Abraham as honoring the divine commandment of
Genesis 13: 17 to walk the length of Canaan, and so a grand trip around the
known world was dreamed up, having no Biblical basis whatsoever. Analysts
today teach that after splitting from Lot, Abraham never went north of Bethel
the rest of his long life, which is just as wrong as the Genesis Apocryphon
dreaming up a worldwide journey for Abram. Based on item #80 of the mid-15th
century BCE Thutmose III list of places in Canaan, and Amarna Letter EA
256, and the Akkadian word for “rolling”, GRR is the Late Bronze Age
rendering
of Galilee, which only after the Bronze Age came to be rendered as GLL or
GLYL, in all cases referring to the “rolling” hills of Galilee. On that
historical basis, we can see that Abraham did indeed obey the divine
commandment at Genesis 13: 17 in full.

4. If you’re interested in how today’s leading Genesis scholar explains
Abraham’s move to GRR, here it is:

“This is an astonishing episode. It seems incredible that Abraham should
make the same dreadful mistake again: visiting a foreign country, he passes
his wife off as his sister. …Indeed, when challenged by Abimelek, he
resorts to lying, claiming he described Sarah as his sister wherever they
went. …
Thus, this incident makes us realize that Abraham is not such a saint as we
might have concluded from chap. 18….” Gordon Wenham, “Genesis 16-50”
(1994), at p. 75.

So when scripture shows Abraham as righteously obeying the divine
commandment of Genesis 13: 17 by moving to GRR and interacting with Abimelek,
modern
analysts characterize that, believe it or not, as being a “dreadful mistake”
on Abraham’s part. Modern analysts in fact have no idea whatsoever why
Abraham moves to GRR the minute Lot is reduced to living in a cave.
Incredibly, they write it off as being “an astonishing episode” that is a
“dreadful
mistake”, when in fact the reality is exactly the opposite, as Abraham is
consistently righteous to a fault.

5. Note also that Abram never elbowed Lot aside, though Abram had the
power to do so. Abram did not use his 318 armed men at Genesis 14: 14 to
push
Lot out of Canaan. When Lot was taken as a hostage, Abram did not leave Lot
to his fate, but rather risked Abram’s own life to make a daring rescue of
Lot. And when YHWH tells Abraham of YHWH’s plan to destroy iniquitous
Sodom, Abraham goes out of his way (in the second half of chapter 18 of
Genesis,
where Prof. Wenham sees Abraham as acting like “a saint”) to make sure that
Sodom will not be destroyed if as few as 10 innocent people are living
there, with Abraham of course knowing that Lot and Lot’s family were living
in
Sodom. Abraham by this point knows that Sarah will not bear Isaac, and
Abraham will not be able to claim all of Canaan, until and unless Lot’s
provisional claim to the northern two-thirds of Canaan is eliminated. But
Abraham
admirably is unwilling to push Lot aside himself and, rather, properly waits
until YHWH determines that Lot’s lack of affirmative opposition to Sodom’s
turn to the dark side after chapter 14 of Genesis means that Lot has
forfeited any and all claim to Canaan. Lot is reduced to living in a cave by
divine
action, Abraham then immediately moves to GRR, and almost immediately Sarah
gets pregnant with Isaac. That’s all in the Biblical text, with no
creative, fanciful commentary being needed. Nor is that grand sequence a
“dreadful
mistake”! The reason why post-exilic and all subsequent analysts have
failed to see this is because they rely on II Chronicles as to its
post-exilic
ultra-southerly retroactive re-interpretation of the geographical locations
of
GRR and XCCN TMR, instead of looking to Bronze Age sources for the
historical meaning of those key geographical terms that in fact refer to
places way
up north.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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