Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Chavoux Luyt:
 
1.  You wrote:  “[T]he narratives make it fairly clear that the Patriarchs 
were primarily semi-nomadic lifestock farmers and not permanently settled 
planters of fields, vineyards and trees. And the kind of veld most favorable 
for lifestock farming is not the same as for other kinds of farming. E.g. 
forests do not provide the best grazing for sheep! More water does not always 
equal better grazing.”
 
(a)  The Shephelah did not have forests.  Rather, its various valleys were 
lined by low ridges on which oak trees were very prominent.  One sees three 
villages, and one valley, in the Shephelah named after “oak trees” because 
oak trees were so prominent there, not because there was a forest there.  
The Shephelah was the best place for sheep and goats in the dry Late Bronze 
Age, which I see as being the Patriarchal Age.
 
(b)  The Patriarchs’ were not “semi-nomadic”.  After splitting from Lot 
and settling at the Patriarchs’ XBRWN in the northeast Aijalon Valley, the 
only other place Abraham lives in his long life is GRR/Upper Galilee.  
Genesis 
13: 17 required Abraham to leave XBRWN and move far away to GRR, so that 
Abraham would follow the divine commandment of walking all the way through 
Canaan.  Not a single time in the text does a Patriarch ever move the flock 
on a 
seasonal basis.  Several moves are instigated by a drought/famine, which is 
a classic indication that the time period is the abnormally dry Late Bronze 
Age.  In fact, the Late Bronze Age was so dry that regular farming was not 
routinely done in the Shephelah in that time period, with the Amarna Letters 
making very clear “the power of the Apiru”, that is, tent-dwelling people, 
in the Aijalon Valley during that unusually dry time period.
 
2.  You wrote:  “Do you really think the abundance of "XBRN lmlk" seals in 
the Shephelah is sufficient evidence for the claim that XBRN is a nickname 
for the Shephelah?”
 
What I think is that the presence of over 300 XBRN lmlk seals in the 
Shephelah, and only 7 at the mountainous site 20 miles south of Jerusalem, 
means 
that it makes no rational sense whatsoever to consider XBRWN at Genesis 13: 
18 to be a mandatory, unequivocal reference to southern hill country.  What I 
am advocating is that we look at how the Patriarchal narratives describe 
the Patriarchs’ XBRWN in seeking to determine its locale, instead of 
assuming, 
erroneously and irrationally, that XBRWN in all events can only be the 
mountainous city northwest of the Judean Desert in the Patriarchal Age.  When 
you look at what words are actually in the Biblical text, you never see “hill”
 or “up” or “city”, but rather you see the opposite from “east” of 
Bethel, “oak trees”, villages named after “oak trees”, “Mamre” [the Amorite, 
with an Amorite princeling dominating the Aijalon Valley in the Amarna 
Letters], and “valley”.  That is to say, the words that are in the received 
text 
are a perfect description of the eastern Aijalon Valley in every way, and do 
not fit the locale of the city of Hebron at all.  There’s nothing “wrong” 
with Abram deciding to sojourn in the rural paradise of the Shephelah, west 
of Bethel, which is in the heart of the Promised Land.  After all, Abraham 
was divinely promised all of Canaan, and he could muster 318 armed men, so 
why not choose the best place for a huge flock of sheep and goats?
 
3.  You wrote:  “Only if you insist on "East" excluding the fact that Lot 
actually went South-East to Sedom. And that Abram going West can be just as 
plausibly be seen as going West relative to Lot rather than West relative to 
Bethel.”
 
At the time Lot and Abram split, they had traversed precisely two places 
together in Canaan:  the Jordan River Valley, and the Shephelah.  When the 
two 
men make a provisional division of Canaan between them [which YHWH will 
override 12 years later], naturally one picks the Jordan River Valley, and 
the 
other gets the Shephelah.  There was international trade and regular farming 
in the Jezreel Valley, which locale connects to the Jordan River Valley, 
and hence more money to be made there, if one was willing to give up the 
virtuous life of living in tents and live in a city in a house with a 
roofbeam.  
Lot’s wife made certain that Lot chose the Jordan River Valley, while 
treating the Jezreel Valley as a tributary to the Jordan River and hence 
provisionally as being a part of Lot’s share of Canaan as well.  And that was 
fine 
with Abram anyway, who preferred sojourning in a rural paradise away from 
international traffic:  the Shephelah.  However, on a provisional basis, note 
that Abram had temporarily ceded to Lot all claim to the northern two-thirds 
of Canaan.  Thus on a provisional basis, Galilee was temporarily off-limits 
to Abram, until Lot forfeited Lot’s claims to any part of Canaan (per chapter 
19 of Genesis), though Genesis 13: 17 foreshadows that in due course, all 
of Canaan [including Galilee] will rightly be Abraham’s.
 
There’s no way that Lot, seeking the soft life and big bucks, would have 
weirdly decided to head out south after going to the Jordan River, and go to 
an unknown locale southeast of the Dead Sea.  Lot was not an adventurer like 
that.  His wife insisted that he take the sure thing:  the soft life of 
living at Rehov, near Beth Shan, on the east end of the Jezreel Valley.  
Remember, Lot made his choice after looking out from a mountain near Bethel, 
per 
Genesis 13: 10.  It’s the Jordan River Valley,  n-o-r-t-h  [not south] of the 
Dead Sea that dominates the view from a mountaintop near Bethel:
 
"I have  wandered all over the Bethel hills.…  [W]hat can there be seen is 
the northern  end of the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley, and the river running 
like a blue thread  through the green plain. The hills of Engedi shut out 
completely all view of the  southern end of the [Dead] sea; but as I before 
said, the northern end, where  the Jordan runs in, and about two or  three 
miles of the sea, can be seen. I have wandered all over the Bethel hills and 
tested  this question."  Henry A. Harper, in  “A Handbook of Scientific and 
Literary Bible Difficulties”, edited by Robert  Tuck (1891), at p. 323.
  
By going east to the Jordan River, Lot provisionally claimed the entire 
Jordan River Valley [through which Abram and Lot had recently traveled], with 
Abram thus being limited to Canaan west and southwest of Bethel [being the 
other part of Canaan through which Abram and Lot had recently traveled, per 
Genesis 12: 9 and Genesis 13: 3, which effectively reference the Diagonal 
Route through the Shephelah].  Neither man knew or cared anything about (i) 
the 
oases and desert southeast of the Dead Sea, or (ii) rugged southern hill 
country;  neither of those two locales can be seen from a mountaintop near 
Bethel, whereas both the Jordan River Valley and the northeast corner of the 
Shephelah can be seen from such vantagepoint [as well as the city of 
Jerusalem, 
though neither Abram nor Lot cared anything about Jerusalem, which was a 
totally pagan city at the time, whose ruler had the Hurrian name of IR-Heba]. 
 
No one in the Patriarchal narratives is ever southeast of the Dead Sea or 
in southern hill country.  Why should they be?  Rather, Lot lives the soft 
city life at Rehov, next to the best “fields”/%DYM in Canaan for farming, the 
good “fields”/%DYM of the Jezreel Valley, with %DYM being one of the bases 
for the Biblical nickname CDM.  Abraham for his part sojourns in the rural 
paradise of the eastern Aijalon Valley, until YHWH changes everything [in 
Abraham’s favor] with the destruction of Sodom, at which point Abraham 
immediately moves north to GRR/Galilee, thereby perfecting his claim to all 
of 
Canaan.
 
If we can get the geography right, these stories practically tell 
themselves.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois