Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Hi George,

Thanks for your post.

>> This is making it a coincidence that the two groups had basically the same
>> self name. So by this logic, one could argue that the Elam referred to in
>> Gen14 wasn't the Elam in south west Iran, but some Elam we hadn't heard of
>> before much closer to the Dead Sea. Likewise with Shinar.
>
>Well, there do seem to be two regions called Kush in the Bible!!! 

You've got me curious. Where is this other Kush? (And of course what are
your sources? I had a quick look around through doubt and couldn't find
anything, but you never know.)

>It's certainly not impossible to have two groups of Heth's. 

It is not impossible. What relatively contemporary source would you like to
put forward as suggesting there was such a second group? 

>It may even be a euphemism for something. Or,
>it's just plain possible that there was a clan of Hittites in the region
who had
>migrated from further north. Why is this such an impossibility?

Are you postulating these reasonable ideas purely because they are more
likely than the possibility that the text refers to the group we normally
call the Hittites?

>As per the Philistines, they probably actually had the roots in S-W
Palestine to begin
>with! It is very unlikely that they were Greek Indo-Europeans since, for
all intents
>and purposes, they used Semitic languages. There is no evidence for them
using any
>other language. 

Naturally the Germanic Franks were actually Latin after all. The Kassites
were really Semites as well because they used a semitic language (at least
to leave records). Sorry, George. I'm being a little facetious. I don't know
of any archaeological evidence from the earliest period that gives any
indication of language used. Do you?

The earliest Philistine pottery seems (from my memory) to have been the same
style as that used in other more northerly conquests. The archaeology
showing the movement I didn't think was particularly ambiguous.

>The various names of some Philistines in the Bible are foreign, but
>that's a common enough practise amongst just about every people in the Near
East. They
>may have been augmented by Sea Peoples from the Aegean, but the roots of
the majority
>were definitely in S-W Palestine. Fresh analysis of the archaeological
evidence has
>led to that conclusion.

The indications from the mortuary temple of Ramses III are that this pharaoh
wanted to be remembered for his feats, the most important of which was
stopping the Sea-Peoples. This conflict is graphically represented at the
temple: it's hard to make little of the series of events in the reliefs. I
don't remember seeing any Semitic peoples represented in the battle scenes.
Letters from Ugarit help to make the strength of these peoples rather clear
in that the Philistine groups could not be resisted by the Hittites, and
neither by the Ugariti either. Nevertheless, it would be extremely unlikely
that the Philistines totally surplanted the "indigenous" population, merely
took control of the population found there, as the Hittites and the Mitanni
did in their realms. This does not, however, change the situation that
peoples referred to as Philistines were not in Palestine prior to the
twelfth century.


Ian