Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

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