Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

James:

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 10:59 AM, James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com
> wrote:

> I'm not necessarily concluding that Joshua is the nomadic skirmishes that
> were referred to. I see a limited number of possibilities.
>
> 1) The pleas to the King of Egypt are about nomads in general invading
> towns before Joshua appeared on the scene
> 2) The pleas to the Pharaoh are from the beginning of the conquest
> 3) During the kingom of Israel some Canaanite towns still thought they were
> in control of Canaan and wrote to the King of Egypt
> 4) Israelites now already in control wrote to the King of Egypt in Akkadian
> as a lingua franca
>
> The letters are archaeology that cannot simply be ignored they have to be
> explained in some way.


Of course. The question is, what is the best way that makes most sense?

#1 means nothing, because it could refer to times both before and after
Joshua, because the depredations of nomads occurred many times over long
periods of time.

#2 requires that most of the letters were written within a year, because the
picture given in Joshua is that organized resistance to his invasion was
mostly ended in two major battles, and the rest of the time was basically
mopping up.

But with #2, how do you explain the Exodus 40 years earlier?

#3, for me, doesn’t make sense. Neither Biblical nor historical.


> Of the 4 variations I listed above personally I find 3 and 4 highly
> unlikely and am leaning towards 1 or 2 which would place the nation of
> Israel as not yet formed in the time of the 18th dynasty Pharaohs. In order
> to support a 13th dynasty we would need to start looking at some kind of
> interpretation like 3 or 4. Are they interpretations you would be
> comfortable with?
>
> James Christian
>

If there was a 13th dynasty Exodus, then there was no powerful Egypt for
letters to be written to during the conquest by Joshua. Even if the Exodus
took place at the end of the Hyksos period, there still would have been no
powerful Egypt in control of Canaan by the time of Joshua’s invasion.
Therefore, the Tell Amarna letters cannot refer to the time of Joshua.

David Rohl theorizes that the Tell Amarna letters refer to the time of King
Saul, 11th century BC, when, after reverses recorded in Judges where Israel
had been driven from the cities, that King Saul was in the process of
reconquering the cities for Israel, a process that King David finished.

Another option is that the Amarna letters referred to ninth to eighth
century BC Canaan, when Israel had been broken up into at least two parts,
and each part vastly shrunken by invasion from other peoples, hence cities
that were previously listed as being under Israelite control were no longer
so. This would mean that even the two main parts of ancient were vassals of
Egypt (the Bible neither confirms nor denies this possibility). This would
fit your option #4 above.

The Egyptian dating is messed up, as even people who do not believe the
Bible but look at archeology claim. So the question then becomes, when were
they written? Around 1400 BC is off the table, not believable. I don’t know
the answer yet.

Karl W. Randolph.