Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>

> 1) The argument from similarity of names is very weak.
>
> 2) Kitchen's argument for the date of Sheshonk I depends on an
> assumption that there were no co-regencies that we don't know about -
> which is highly improbable given that we know about quite a few
> co-regencies and we have very little information about most other
> changes of ruler. It also depends on an assumption that each ruler died
> in his last attested regnal year, which is also highly improbable.
>


Dear Peter,

The identification of Shishak and Sheshonq is based on more than the
similarity of names, although it is not "very weak". The fact is, that
Sheshonq is the only Egyptian king that we know of, who campaigned in the
Levant at any time between the 12th and the late 8th centuries. And Shishak
is the only Egyptian king that the Bible records campaigning in the Levant
before Tirhakah (2 kings 19:8-9), who invaded in 701, in support of the
rebelion against Sennacherib. True, both the biblical and what we have of
the Egyptian records might be incomplete. But in this case, it sounds like a
rose and smells like a rose.

If the dates proposed by Kitchen and others for Sheshonq are off by a few
decades, this would force Thiele, Tadmor, Galil etc. to reconfigure their
dates for the earlier kings of Israel and Judah, but there's not a lot of
leeway. The campaigns of Tiglath-pileser III, Shalmaneser V and Sargon II,
not to mention Sennachrib, are all dated independently, so that their
correlations to biblical chronology are firm.

Yigal