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  • From: Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>
  • To: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>, b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] 1446 BCE Exodus ? Aper = Apiru ?
  • Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 16:11:42 -0700 (PDT)



Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il> wrote:
> Yigael wrote, inter alia:
>
"> As a historian, all I can hope for is to date the
Israelites'
> > appearance (by whatever means) in Canaan. All of the evidence for that
> seems
> > to point at about 1200: the Merneptah inscription, the destruction of
many
> > Canaanite cities (though admittedly not all of those mentioned in Josh.
> > 1-12), the arrival of the Philistines and other "sea peoples", the many
> > small settlements that dot the hill country etc. ....">

Yes, but now let us reexamine the Mernepah term 'Israel", which follows a
determinative for non-settled people. It stands to reason that the formation
and existence of any group with a given name preceeded its mention in a
stella of another, different power. For such a group to coalesce and attain a
status of a recognized ethnicon by neighbors or conquerors must have taken
some generations.

For this reason some have recognized that non-sedentary Israelites, or
Hebrews, must have been in existence before 1200.The historian cannot perhaps
state much more than that; we are dealing here with earliest period of
Israelite history, which can only be desribed in outline, cf. A. Malamat..

It is an important point, and has ramifications in that five, six
generatioins backwards one gets to the Amarna period. And that of course
opens various possiblities; but we have already discussed those elusive
A'biru (I'm using the transliteration from the tablets originating in
Jerusalem ).

Uri

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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] 1446 BCE Exodus ? Aper = Apiru ?
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In a message dated 7/25/2004 4:12:07 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
uhurwitz AT yahoo.com writes:


> Yes, but now let us reexamine the Mernepah term 'Israel", which follows a
> determinative for non-settled people. It stands to reason that the
> formation
> and existence of any group with a given name preceeded its mention in a
> stella of another, different power. For such a group to coalesce and attain
> a
> status of a recognized ethnicon by neighbors or conquerors must have taken
> some
> generations.

My sentiments exactly. That's just it--no mention of Israel as a people
until the late 19th Dynasty and prior to that only "Aamu, Apiru, Shosu", etc.
But
now, this one time, we get the very name that a certain people called
themselves. Since the day of Akhenaten, when the Apiru caused so much
difficulty for
the Egyptian emperor, more than a century had now passed to this Year 5 of
Merneptah, the date of the stela. Now Clement of Alexandria was a Christian
theologian who believed that the exodus had occurred at the time of the
routing
of the Hyksos. He added up all the dates given in Joshua and Judges and came
to the conclusion that 463 years and 7 months had elapsed from the time of
Moses down to Saul, the first king of all Israel.
If one follows the math of Clement, and assumes the datum of 1570 BCE for the
expulsion of those Hyksos, then by ca 1210 BCE should have been the time of
the great battles in the highlands of Ephraim (this contingent led by Tola)
who
fought the Gileadites, casualties amounting to 42,000 men. And, by Clayton's
Chronology (which I largely follow), 1207 should have been Year 5 of
Merneptah. Under the circumstances, I hardly think it surprising that the
Egyptian
king would say "Israel is laid waste. It's seed is no more". How could a
pharaoh, himself, have perpetrated a greater slaughter than this--even had he
tried?


>
> For this reason some have recognized that non-sedentary Israelites, or
> Hebrews, must have been in existence before 1200.The historian cannot
> perhaps
> state much more than that; we are dealing here with earliest period of
> Israelite history, which can only be desribed in outline, cf. A. Malamat..
>
> It is an important point, and has ramifications in that five, six
> generatioins backwards one gets to the Amarna period. And that of course
> opens
> various possiblities; but we have already discussed those elusive A'biru
> (I'm
> using the transliteration from the tablets originating in Jerusalem ).
>
>
My opinion would be that all this goes back farther than Akhenaten. Judges
11:26 gives a pretty good hint that, by the time of the oppression of the
Ammonites, the Hebrews had already been in Canaan for 300 years since leaving
Egypt. It seems pretty clear to me that Joshua and Judges encompasses
centuries--from Bronze to Iron Age. Plus, don't forget, the Iron Age was
already going at
least in the reign of Tutankhamun, a dagger with an iron blade having been
found in his tomb. For me, the Hebrews came out of Egypt in waves--not in
one
fell swoop--but they ultimately had to wait, no matter what were their
victories and defeats in the interim, for Egypt to grow so weak that it no
longer had
any holdings in the Levant before Israel could establish itself as a united
kingdom. Also helpful was the fact that, by then, the Hittites had ceased to
amount to much--the only other "super power" that had posed any real threat
to
Egypt during the 18th Dynasty. Ramesses II of the 19th Dynasty had gone to
very great lengths to cement a treaty with the Hittites, these powers
dividing
the Levant between them like a loaf of bread-- and by the era of his
successor,
Merneptah the treaty was still in full force. But, by the end of the 20th
Dynasty, both these great nations were reduced to a very low status in the
ANE.
And so arose Saul as ruler. For David Rohl to maintain that the Lebayu of
the Amarna Letters is none other than Saul is, in my opinion, a ridiculous
assertion

Marianne Luban




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