Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
To: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2004 2:49 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Machir and the Exodus ?


> Yigal:
>
> You are making assumptions that the text doesn't necessarily support.
>
> For example, in verse 21, which land? Any reason why it couldn't have been
Egypt? When were Ephraim's sons killed, after at least one of them had
children and his children named for several generations? And while the text
mentions the daughter building three towns, is there any reason to suggest
that they were other than small settlements only for as long as Israel was
in Egypt, hence were not mentioned in Egyptian records?
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
>

Karl, you are totally ignoring the way in which the genealogical genre
works. Segmented genealogies often take one branch down for several
generations and then go back to the "stem". In this case, of course,
Beth-horon is in Israel, right on the border of Ephraim's territory - so why
claim that it is "another" unknown Beth-horon. As for Gath, as you know,
there where several towns by that name. Note that in 1 Chr. 8:13, Beriah,
this time a descendant of Benjamin, is also associated with a war against
Gath. Since this is not a "different" Beriah, I'd look for Gath somewhere on
the border between Ephraim and Benjamin - I can think of who in the general
area of the Aialon Valley: Gath-rimmon and Gath-gittaim. B. Mazar and others
have dealt widely with both.
Notice that Beriah is also a son of Asher, in 1 Chr. 7:30, but also in Gen.
46:17 and Num. 26:44. Now while Asher is usually seen as a northern tribe,
note that here, Beriah's sister, Serah, has the same name as the town in
Ephraim in which Joshua, an Ephraimite, was buried, Timnath-serah/heres.
Also note that Beriah's grandson, Birzaith, is the same as a town in
Ephraimite territory (Birzeit, near today's Ramallah). Several others of his
descendants also have names similar to towns and regions along the
Benjamin-Ephraim border.
Since I (and many others) see the genealogies as NOT being intended to
represent "real people" but rather eponyms of tribes, clans and phratries,
and the Chronicler's genealogies being a composite of several different
traditions from different times, I read this as meaning that at one time,
the Beriah branch of Asher lived in the central hill country. As Ephraim and
Benjamin spread into the area, maybe after a war with the "native" Githites,
some clans of this group married into these tribes, reflected in their
secondary and tertiary position in their genealogies. Once again, this has
been widely discussed in scholarly literature.

Yigal