Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Kenneth Greifer:
 
You wrote:  “You did not answer my question the other day.  Did you check 
this email about the 318 porters in the Amarna letters? Do you still say this 
is the 318 soldiers with Abraham?”
 
I remember that fascinating exchange with Yitzhak Sapir very well.  But I 
think you are misinterpreting what he said.
 
1.  As to the number 318, on the tablet in its current shape, the only 
number that can be read there today is an 8.  But there is a blank space 
preceding the number 8, where formerly something was written in, and 
preceding that 
blank space is the number 5,000.  As Wm. Moran, the editor of the Amarna 
Letters, aptly notes, the first reader of the tablet, working in 1915 when 
the 
tablet may likely have been in better physical shape than it is today, 
thought he saw the number 318:
 
“Before '8', Knudtzon saw traces that he tentatively identified as '318.'"
 
Most English translations of Amarna Letter EA 287 from Abdi-Heba of 
Jerusalem set forth the number 318.
 
As to the narrow issue of the number, Yitzhak Sapir basically agreed with 
the standard analysis, as he wrote:  “As you can see from the tablet in the 
photo site I gave -- which is really in good resolution -- there is no 
certain text in the broken section [which occurs after the number 5,000, and 
before the number 8], although the space to the right of ‘five thousand’ is 
reasonably clear of all text.”
 
However, that was not the exciting part of the discussion.  (See #2 below.) 
 The original reader of the tablet in 1915 saw 318, and today we cannot 
make out what was there before the 8.  To the best of my knowledge, everyone 
agrees with that.
 
So the number 318 is not certain, yet it’s likely.
 
2.  As I recall, the very exciting part of the discussion was in a 
different post by Yitzhak Sapir.  As I remember it (though I did not search 
for the 
exact post), Yitzhak Sapir came up with the nifty idea that what most 
scholars were reading as “porters”, taking the word literally, was actually 
referring to “porters” in a figurative sense, meaning “taxpayers”.  That is 
to 
say, this Amarna Letter is reflecting the fact that Jerusalem at the time 
apparently had 318 taxpaying citizens, or “porters” -- people who carried 
(like porters) the tax burden of Jerusalem.
 
There’s no way that I could have come up with that brilliant analysis on my 
own.  As I remember it, in a later post Yitzhak Sapir came up with that 
brilliant analysis.  I adopted that analysis and have maintained it ever 
since.
 
3.  In any event, that Amarna Letter is not referring to Abraham’s 318 
armed retainers.  But consider the overall situation.  The word for “armed 
retainers”, XNYKYW, used at Genesis 14: 14 is never attested in the secular 
history of the ancient world after the 15th century BCE, and is never used 
again 
in the Bible.  That’s giving us a Late Bronze Age feel for chapter 14 of 
Genesis.  And what a peculiar number 318 is!  If the early Hebrew author of 
chapter 14 of Genesis had heard Amarna Letter EA 287, which dates to Year 13, 
recited orally while he was temporarily a guestworker at Amarna, then he 
might have recalled that number when, in Year 15, he composed the Patriarchal 
narratives.  True, we cannot be certain that the number 318 is there in that 
Amarna Letter, but based on what the original reader of the tablet saw in 
1915, the number 318 is probably there. 
 
The entire ambience of chapter 14 of Genesis is totally redolent of Years 
13 and 14 at Amarna in every way, big and small.
 
I well remember being amazed that in an exchange on the b-hebrew list, of 
all places, Yitzhak Sapir made a truly brilliant analysis of a word in the 
Amarna Letters that has baffled all other scholars.  Let me say “thank you” 
once again to Yitzhak Sapir for that superb insight.  It was, and is, much 
appreciated.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois