Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryan Rocine" <596547 AT ican.net>]

Happy New Year Ian! 

you wrote:
> Pardon my ingenuousness, but I can't fathom whether Bryan is arguing from
a
> purely literary position in this post or a "historical" one based only on
> the internal evidence of the biblical accounts.

actually you have caught my point.  i am not arguing at all, really, just
saying that it seems to me there is not conclusive support in the Tanak for
an Egyptian influence on the burial ritual of the Hebrews.  my query
restated:  is there corroborating support outside the Tanak that E
influenced the burial customs of the Hebrews?

> How knowledge regarding Abraham or any of the patriarchs could have
reached
> later times could at best have been through oral transmission, at worst
> through cultural creativity. Written records were normally maintained in
the
> courts of substantial powers, not in the hands of "wandering Arameans".
The
> earliest possible times for such written records is to the period when
the
> united kingdom existed. However, the archaeological evidence shows that
> Jerusalem was only a village in the ninth/eighth century, leaving little
> hope for a court there of the stature to be able to support a scribal
> tradition that maintained, beside the economic necessities of that court,
> its cultural history. The first datable exemplars of the genre of
historical
> chronicles -- to my knowledge -- are those of the Babylonian kings, which
> are from the 6th century BCE.
> 

you must have a very limited sense in
mind for what makes a historical chronicle.  Don't the Egyptian expedition
journals count? e.g., the Weni inscription(24th Century BCE),  the
Khu-Sebek stele(19th Century BCE), the AH-mose tomb inscription(c. 1550
BCE), etc.  How about the papyri? e.g. The tale of Sinuhe(20th Century BCE)
or the taking of Joppa by Thut-mose III(13th Century BCE), etc.  how about
the execration texts, the El Amarna letters?  if you want to go to
Mesopotamia there's less, but how about Gilgamesh(2000 BCE) or the Mari
tablets(18th Century BCE)?  i think all the examples i have mentioned
relate to the history of palestine in one way or another.

you mention that Israel didn't have the national leisure to support a
literary tradition from early on.  that makes sense.  you'd think the
archaeologists would have found more evidence of a literary tradition if
one existed.  they were, after all, able to find just such evidence in
Egypt and Mesopotamia.  but then again it's always tenuous to try and prove
something by a lack of evidence.  there is quite a bit that is unique about
the Hebrew history, culture, faith, that there may also be something unique
about their literary tradition.  sometimes i think the archaeologists and
anthropologists over-stretch in their efforts to "normalize" a unique
people.  best to say we suspect but don't really know, right?

Shalom,
Bryan


B. M. Rocine
Associate Pastor
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13208

315-437-6744(w)
315-479-8267(h)