Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Also, please note that whatever was meant by tereminthos in the Greek it was
most definitely in the singular.

James Christian

On 5 May 2010 18:15, James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>