Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

On 6 Feb 2009 at 9:09, Gabe Eisenstein wrote:

> When I was young I read Robert E. Howard's "Conan" books, which featured 
> a map in which countries like Kush and Cimmeria were fit together in 
> ways that had nothing to do with anything historical. He simply used 
> names that the reader might vaguely recall from somewhere, without 
> attaching specific data. Similarly in the Fantastic Four, Dr.Doom was 
> king of "Latvia", but "Latvia" was a mountain kingdom that had nothing 
> to do with the Baltic state. It seems that the author of Gen.21&26 
> operated in much the same way with the name "Philistines".

The post-Conan narratives in the books suggest that those places, after 
several geological 
upheavals, became the places that we know from history, so he didn't just 
pull the names 
out of the air.  As for Dr. Doom, his kingdom was called Latveria, not 
Latvia.  I hope these 
aren't indicators of how carefully you read texts.

Dave Washburn
in my alter ego as 
Sir Nitpick