Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Jim.

both the LXX and the vulgate support an understanding of El-Paran being a
place in the desert.

 ἕως τῆς τερεμίνθου τῆς *φαραν ἥ ἐστιν ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ
 ad campestria Pharan quae est in solitudine

Also I don't know what your source for translation of tereminthos is but the
Vulgate quite clearly shows an understanding of 'plains of Pharan'.

Also, just a couple of weeks ago I trod many of the places the bible refers
to as MDBR, what you translate as marginal pasture land. They look very much
like desert to me. Although, yes, you are right, they do have a few blades
of grass in them that the livestock of the local Bedouine regularly chew on.
I don't think this warrants your proposed translation, though. If we were to
take a random sample of native speakers of English show them these places
and ask them to spontaneously categorise the panorama I'm placing my bets
that they would call them deserts rather than 'marginal pasture land'.

James Christian

On 5 May 2010 16:28, <JimStinehart AT aol.com> wrote:

>  James Christian:
>
>
>
> 1.  If you are going to cite the Septuagint, then note that the Septuagint 
> sees El-Paran as referencing terebinthes or oak trees of Paran.  There are 
> no oak trees south of the Dead Sea!  But there were plenty of oak trees in 
> the Transjordan north of the Dead Sea.  So the Septuagint helps me here, 
> while hurting your traditional view that the Horites are an unattested 
> people portrayed as living south of the Dead Sea, instead of being the 
> historical Hurrians who historically lived, and are accurately portrayed in 
> the Biblical text as living, in the Transjordan.
>
>
>
> But before we leave the Septuagint, note that the scholarly view that 
> El-Paran/Great Desert means a navigable waterway, namely the Gulf of Aqaba, 
> is greatly undermined by the Septuagint.  There are no oak trees near the 
> Gulf of Aqaba!  It’s hard to believe that Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt 
> would have confused oak trees with the Gulf of Aqaba, as university 
> scholars would have it.  By contrast, oak trees and the Transjordan are a 
> natural match.
>
>
>
> 2.  Your translation manages to get everything after El-Paran completely 
> wrong.  You leave out )$R entirely.  That’s not right.  You translate (L as 
> “in”, yet (L has the exact opposite meaning!  (L means “against” or “up to” 
> or “by”, but  n-e-v-e-r  “in”.  When the author wants to tell us that the 
> Hurrians lived “in” the hill country that is north and south of the city of 
> Seir/Jazer in the Transjordan, he naturally uses the word B near the 
> beginning of Genesis 14: 6, meaning “in”.  Finally, MDBR is rarely 
> translated as “desert” here, because that’s not its normal meaning.  M is a 
> prefix meaning “place”.  DBR means “to drive”, that is, to drive flocks 
> across land that is very marginal pastureland, being land which could never 
> be farmed, but not usually meaning a true desert, across which flocks would 
> not ordinarily be driven.  The ordinary translation is “wilderness”, but 
> that’s a little misleading, because the MDBR is not necessarily “wild”.
>
>
>
> Although )$R usually means “which” or “that”, it can have the meaning of 
> “that is”, where it’s function is to clarify what came before.  (L can mean 
> “up to”, and MDBR can mean “very marginal pastureland”.  Genesis 14: 6 is 
> telling us that the troops sent by the 4 attacking rulers “forcefully 
> pressured”/NKH the Hurrians throughout the Transjordan, from where they 
> lived “in the hill country of Seir, to as far as El-Paran/the Great 
> Desert/the Syro-Arabian Desert, that is, up to the very marginal 
> pastureland (that borders the eastern Transjordan, on the west edge of the 
> Great Desert/Syro-Arabian Desert)”.  That is to say, the Hurrians 
> throughout the entirety of the Transjordan were forcefully pressured in 
> Year 14 to become Hittite partisans.  Here is how Biryawaza, with a 
> Hurrian-type name, got forcefully pressured by the Hittites in Year 14 (of 
> Akhenaten’s reign) in the Transjordan:
>
>
>
> “Biridaswa [the pro-Hittite princeling ruler of Ashteroth] [and his 
> confederates] keep saying, ‘We are servants of the king of Hatti,’ and I 
> [Biryawaza] keep saying, ‘I am a servant of the king of Egypt.’  …When the 
> king of Busruna [Biblical Bezer, far south of Ashteroth, near Kiriathaim] 
> and the king of Halunnu [very likely a city near Ashteroth] saw this, they 
> waged war with Biridaswa [of Ashteroth] against me [Biryawaza, the Hurrian 
> *maryannu* faced with the unenviable task of trying to keep the Transjordan 
> and nearby territory safely within Egypt’s sphere of influence], constantly 
> saying, ‘Come, let’s kill Biryawaza….’”  Amarna Letter EA 197: 13-30
>
>
>
> 3.  Genesis 14: 6 is fully historical.  All the Hurrians throughout the 
> Transjordan were forcefully pressured to become Hittite partisans in Year 
> 14.  That means the Hurrians from the well-wooded hill country of Seir on 
> the west, all the way over to the marginal pastureland on the east of the 
> Transjordan that borders the Great Desert/the Syro-Arabian Desert.  That’s 
> exactly what Genesis 14: 6 says, and that’s exactly right.  That’s what 
> indeed happened in the Transjordan in Year 14.  Read all about it in Amarna 
> Letter EA 197.
>
>
>
> The pinpoint historical accuracy of Genesis 14: 6 is truly breathtaking.
>
>
>
> Jim Stinehart
>
> Evanston, Illinois
>
>
>
>