Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

What was “Hebron”?
 
Was the Hebron of Jacob/“Israel” a city?
 
Was the Hebron of Jacob/“Israel” the highest altitude place in all of Canaan 
where any substantial number of people lived?
 
Was the Hebron of Jacob/“Israel” located at the same location, or at least 
at about the same location, as the Hebron that is referred to in the books of 
the Bible after Genesis?
 
As to #1, Genesis 37: 14 says that the “Hebron” of Jacob/“Israel” was a 
valley, not a city:
 
“So he [Jacob] sent him [Joseph] out of the vale [Valley] of Hebron, and he 
[Joseph] came to Shechem.”
 
As to #2, the Valley of Hebron was certainly not the highest altitude place 
in all of Canaan where any substantial number of people lived.  There is a 
city 
that the text references as being very near the Valley of Hebron, presumably 
being on a hill overlooking the Valley of Hebron.  The name of that city is “
Arbe”/aleph-resh-bet-ayin.  With Kiriath being a poetic word for “city”, this 
town’s name is often set forth in English as Kiriatharbe (though I myself 
would prefer “city of Arbe”).  Although this is usually taken to mean “City 
of 
Four”, we will see below that this town’s name may originally have been 
“Great 
City”.  In the days of Jacob/“Israel”, the city of Arbe almost certainly 
would have been on a hill overlooking the Valley of Hebron, if what the 
Patriarchal narratives are saying is accurate about Hebron and Kiriath Arbe.
 
A later editor twice tried to claim that the city of Arbe and Hebron were one 
and the same place, in which case “Hebron” would have been a city.  Genesis 
23: 2;  35: 27.  But the phrase “now Hebron” is an openly disclosed editorial 
footnote, a later gloss that likely was added into the text many centuries 
after the original composition of the Patriarchal narratives.  In every case 
in 
the Patriarchal narratives, a phrase “…hiy/he-vav-aleph geographical name #2” 
is a later gloss, with such phrase not having been in the original text.  The 
original text had only the immediately preceding geographical reference #1, 
which invariably is a Late Bronze Age city.  Here is Genesis 23: 2, with the 
suspect phrase in brackets:
 
“And Sarah died in Kiriatharba [--the same is Hebron--] in the land of Canaan…
.”
 
Originally, that sentence had simply read:  “And Sarah died in Kiriatharba in 
the land of Canaan….”
 
So Kiriatharba, or the city of Arbe, is a city, but “Hebron” was the Hebron 
Valley, not a city, in the Patriarchal Age, according to the original version 
of the Patriarchal narratives.
 
As to #3, if the Bible was always talking about the same Hebron, where the 
modern city of Hebron is located, why then wasn’t there any Late Bronze Age 
occupation there?  Here is what Biblical Maximalist Kenneth Kitchen says:
 
“Hebron…is in the general area of modern Hebron;  the oldest site is that on 
Jebel Rumeida.  Work has (so far) not yielded habitation of the Late Bronze 
Age, but one burial cave nearby was used more or less continuously from the 
Middle through the Late Bronze Age into (seemingly) Iron I.  As the excavator 
observes, this may indicate a small Late Bronze occupation not yet detected 
by 
site excavation.”  K.A. Kitchen, “On the Reliability of the Old Testament” 
(2003), at p. 184
 
So in the days of Jacob/“Israel” what was “Hebron”?  Where was Hebron?  
What are the clues in the text that tell us where to look for Hebron in the 
well-documented secular history of the 2nd millennium BCE?  There’s no 
“Hebron” in 
the Thutmosis III list of mid-15th century BCE of cities in Canaan.  And there
’s no “Hebron” in the mid-14th century BCE Amarna Letters either.  But wait. 
 On the foregoing analysis, “Hebron” was merely a valley back in those days. 
 It’s the city (Arbe) we should be looking for, not the Valley of Hebron.
 
We have to do a little thinking before we going looking for the city name “
Arbe”/aleph-resh-bet-ayin.  If “arbe” means “four”, which is the traditional 
view, note that for the number 4, the aleph is a prosthetic, which disappears 
in all the variants on the number 4.  So we really can’t count on that aleph. 
 
And the variants sometimes have a different ending as well, so we cannot rely 
on the ayin either.  What we’ve really got, then, is resh-bet/R-B.  We can 
rely on R-B, if the Patriarchal narratives are historically accurate.  That’s 
the 
city (R-B) we should be looking for.  But then we must consider suffixes, and 
even the possibility that the original name of the city was based on a 
different root.  R/resh-bet/bet looks like the word “to be great”, or 
R-B-H/resh-bet-he.  Prior to the days of the Hebrews, an archaic way to turn 
that verb into 
a noun fitting to be a place name would be to drop the he/H and add a tav/T 
as a suffix, giving us R-B-t.  In that case, the original name of the city 
was “
Great City”, not “City of Four”.  So we must be alert to all of these 
various possibilities.  On the Thutmosis III list we might find “RBT”.  In 
the 
Amarna Letters, we might find “Rubutu” (since Akkadian cuneiform is notorious 
for 
sticking in U’s everywhere in place names, which U’s never are there in the 
Biblical Hebrew;  the consonants are R-B-t).  And in a later book of the 
Bible, such as Joshua 15: 60, we might see R-B-h, or even “the Great 
City”/h-R-B-h 
(instead of a-R-B-e at Genesis 23: 2;  he-resh-bet-he instead of 
aleph-resh-bet-ayin).  But no matter what the suffix, and regardless of 
whether the 
prosthetic aleph is there as a prefix or there is some other prefix, we can 
definitely count on R-B as the heart and soul of this town’s name.
 
If the original name was “Great City” in the Late Bronze Age, then we would 
certainly expect Late Bronze Age archeological remains.
 
As to location, it cannot be at the site of modern Hebron, because there was 
no Late Bronze Age city there.  Since the Patriarchal narratives never once 
mention Jerusalem, we cannot count on the R-B city to be near, much less 
south 
of, Jerusalem.  Our only real clue is that Arbe is mentioned in connection 
with 
Bethel.  So somewhere in the general neighborhood of Bethel is where we may 
find historical Arbe.
 
If the Patriarchal narratives are historically accurate as to names of cities 
near which the Patriarchs are portrayed as sojourning, then the city of Arbe 
must be there in the secular historical record.  It likely won’t be at the 
site of modern Hebron.  But it should be somewhere in the general 
neighborhood of 
Bethel.  We’re looking for Arbe or RBT or Rubutu or Rabbah or some other play 
on the key consonants R-B.  Let’s see if we can find the historical “Hebron” 
of Jacob/“Israel”. 
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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