Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

  Hi George,
  I included a rather full quote for convenience.    

   George Athas wrote, yesterday, inter alia:

"....I don't think there is any evidence that the authors
 of the Torah had any particular Pharaoh in mind for the
 Exodus narratives. If they did, they would have named him,
 just as Pharaohs are named in the book of Kings. Instead,
 the monarch of Egypt in the Exodus narratives is anonymous.
 He just goes by the title 'Pharaoh' or 'King of Egypt'."

   K.A. Kitchen, the Egyptologist, wrote in 1998 in response
 to Dever, the 'biblical' archaeologist, who had raised the
 exact same point then:

        
    "...If Dever had ever read through the vast mass of
 New Kingdom documentation that we DO have (several score
 of administrative and narrative-literary papyri, and
 several thousands of ostraca, besides a variety of
 relevant private texts on stone), as this writer has
 done, he would have known the answer to such a question.
 Such a biblical writer or writers might well have known
 the king's name, but in everyday intercourse and
 documentation (outside of official datelines, which
 the biblical writers had no need of), people in the
 Ramesside period customarily spoke of their ruler as
 'Pharaoh' of 'Pharaoh our good lord, LPH" and the like
 - not by name! This is not perverse vagueness, but a
 minor marker of authenticity in the Exodus narrative.
In much later times,in the 1st mllenium BCE, kings ARE
 named..[K. gives examples]..Again, Egyptian and
 biblical usage marched together through changing times."
 
                      
                         
 The Origin of Early Israel - Current Debate, pp 105-6
         ed. by Sh. Ahituv and E. Oren

   note: italics in the original were changed into CAPS
in the quotation


    Uri Hurwitz                               Great Neck, NY
  






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