Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

In a nutshell the whole lot. Genesis is the accurate history of how Yhwh's
people ended up in Egypt. It is the preamble to the Exodus. I don't think
you could find anything more fundamental to the Jewish religion than the
passover. But you aren't even willing to engage in discussion about the
Exodus.

You yourself seem to agree that the Amarna letters describe a period before
a nation of Israel (the view I find most inviting at the moment). So where
did the kingdom of Israel come from? Where did the Israelites come from? All
of these questions are sastifactorily answered with the Torah read in
context. Your Dan Brown style analysis answers none of these questions and
brings nothing of benefit to our understanding.

My suggestion to you is to stop composing essay length emails that repeat
the same points over and over again and deal with things in bite size
chunks. You need to come up with at least some sensible theory of the
beginnings of the nation of Israel and an origin of the passover festival
before your theories can even begin to have a basis. But you don't seem to
be willing to do any of this. You just keep repeating the same things over
and over and over again no matter how many times your lines of evidence are
debunked.

In fact, now we're on the subject Genesis 14 shows strong signs of being
older in composition than the Amarna letters because of its reference to
Melchizedek the King of Salem. Salem is evidently an older name for
Jerusalem and yet in the Amarna letters we see the newer urusalem. For your
theory to be right you would then have to postulate that AbdiHeba was
Melchizedek the King of Salem that came out to Abraham and to whom Abraham
paid tithes.

James Christian

On 12 May 2010 22:27, <JimStinehart AT aol.com> wrote:

>  James Christian:
>
> The first historical monotheistic leader of a people in the Bible is
> Jacob.
>
> The first historical monontheist in the Bible is Abraham.
>
> In secular history, Akhenaten was both, though Akhenaten's brand of
> semi-monotheism was, so unlike Judaism, very unattractive and totally
> unsuccessful, while also having a completely different deity from Judaism.
> Having said that, however, many of the terrible problems that Akhenaten
> struggled with in his tortured reign seem to have been endured by the
> Biblical Patriarchs as well.  Both had to deal with an aggressive ruler of
> Shechem who was trying to entice tent-dwelling people into making that
> upstart ruler the greatest power in central Canaan.  Both had to cut off all
> relations with their irate father-in-law from far-off Naharim on the upper
> Euphrates River.  And most importantly of all was that truly unnerving "four
> kings against five", involving a powerful attacking ruler with a Hittite
> kingly name, which potentially seemed to threaten to destroy everything
> for everyone.  And "the iniquity of the Amorites" didn't help.
>
> Now let me ask you a question.  What story in the Patriarchal narratives
> would you suggest as being a story that has no correspondence to Years 12-14
> at Amarna, unlike the foregoing key four foreign policy issues?
>
> Jim Stinehart
> Evanston, Illinois
>