Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

I would agree with just about everything Kitchen said with the main
exception that it doesn't explain well what we see in the Merneptah Stele.
Merneptah being the successor of Rameses II it is hard to imagine how an
Isreal in Canaan could already be referred to so soon. Rameses II is not a
particularly good identification.

James Christian

2010/2/12 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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