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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] 1 Kings 20:14 Who are the young men, princes of the districts?

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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] 1 Kings 20:14 Who are the young men, princes of the districts?
  • Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 15:38:19 EDT



James Christian:

You wrote: “Turning back from the mountains of Seir to an oasis/settlement
in Wadi Paran makes perfect sense. I see absolutely no reason to hypothesis
the Gulf of Aqaba and this just sounds ridiculous.”

You’re missing the point here. Both Seir and El-Paran appear in Genesis
14: 6. Then the next word of the text is the first word of Genesis 14: 7,
which is $WB. So a-f-t-e-r being at El-Paran, the troops of the 4
attacking
rulers “return”.

I agree with your intuition that trying to make “Great Desert”/El-Paran be
a navigable body of water, the Gulf of Aqaba 100 long miles south of the
Dead Sea, “just sounds ridiculous”. But how else can the troops “return”
/$WB by way of Kadesh-barnea in the Sinai Desert?

The real answer, of course, is that QD$ has nothing to do whatsoever with
any Kadesh-barnea in the Sinai Desert, but rather is referring to the
historical QD$ that was located in Upper Galilee.

But if you’re going to stick with the traditional and scholarly view, and
ignore all inscriptions from ancient history, and claim that QD$ is
Kadesh-barnea in the Sinai Desert, then you’ve got to claim to see the troops
going
w-a-y south of the Dead Sea, all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba or
thereabouts, or else you’ve got no hope with $WB/“return”.

Why force $WB to try to have a meaning it never has anywhere else in Hebrew?

Why force El-Paran to be a navigable waterway?

Why force the Amorites to allegedly be non-historically portrayed as living
south of the Dead Sea?

Why force the meanings of all those Hebrew words? To what benefit? After
forcing the meaning of all of those words, both common words and proper
names, what one ends up with is what Prof. Yigal Levin’s mentor, Anson
Rainey,
says at p. 114 of “The Sacred Bridge”: there is a “total lack of any link
with known Ancient Near Eastern sources” for the military conflict reported
in chapter 14 of Genesis.

Why not instead go with the natural meaning of all the words at Genesis 14:
1-11? Why fight the text? Look to historical inscriptions from the Bronze
Age, not to Ezra’s post-exilic Chronicles, and virtually every single word
at Genesis 14: 5-7 can be verified historically, with specificity.

Why force the meaning of all those words, when that just ends up with
fiction?

$WB means “return”. El-Paran means “Great Desert”. And the Amorites
historically never lived south of the Dead Sea. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g is
north
of the Dead Sea. And it’s all historical. My view does not require the
meaning of a single word in the Biblical text to be forced. That’s one of
the
great strengths of my view.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois







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