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  • From: JimStinehart AT aol.com
  • To: chavoux AT gmail.com, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Mighty
  • Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 09:55:10 EDT


Chavoux Luyt:

1. You wrote: “His father's relatives?? As I understood it, these men
would actually all have been slaves of Abram and in his service as herders
etc.
(since we know that he was very rich).”

No, they are described at Genesis 14: 14 as being “born into his household”
. This must be an idiom that means that Abram’s 318 armed men are Abram’s
father’s relatives, thus having a tribal affiliation of sorts to Abram,
rather than being anything like foreign mercenaries, or Amorites, or
Hurrians.
What people don’t realize is that those 318 men, and their families, were
not ordinarily in Abram’s camp. No, on a one-time basis, Abram musters his
father’s relatives, who are living throughout the Shephelah and the Jordan
River Valley and possibly elsewhere in Canaan. This is a one-time payback
for
the fact that Abram had managed to make his father’s tribal relatives, who
no longer had settled villages of their own but were now reduced to living
in tents, somewhat wealthy by selling the lapis lazuli the tribe had bought
in Ur for a huge price in Egypt, instead of settling for the modest prices
that Lebanese middlemen would have paid. Abram did not want to be the leader
of his father’s relatives, nor did they want Abram to rule them. But they
did appreciate the financial success of Abram’s unbelievably risky gambit of
taking the lapis lazuli directly to Egypt and Pharaoh’s royal buyers. As to
the nasty rumors that Sarah had even been introduced into Pharaoh’s harem,
pending Abram successfully getting a divine sign that divine notice had been
taken of Pharaoh’s infertility by his beloved Queen of Egypt, and the fact
that Pharaoh, though supposedly grateful to Abram, had nevertheless had
Abram personally escorted by armed guard out of Egypt, making it clear that
tent-dwellers could never bring lapis lazuli into Egypt again, well, Sarah
was
back with Abram now, she still had borne no child, and the whole tribe had
benefited from the gargantuan sales price paid by Pharaoh for that lapis
lazuli. Other than Lot’s wife, who would complain about the odd details that
had
led to that one-time, never-to-be-repeated financial success?

2. You wrote: “I would agree with you that Abraham would not be
restricted to a single area of the land. But Gen. 20:1 seems to me fairly
clear that
Gerar was in the Negev? Unless you understand the last part as a separate
sentence talking not of his time between Shur and Kadesh, but of a later
place
of sojourn somewhere in the North (cf. Gen.10:19) at another Gerar?”

I see H-NGB at Genesis 20: 1 as being the NGB in northern Canaan which is
at item #57 on the mid-15th century BCE Thutmose III list of places. This is
probably the same place as H-NQB at Joshua 19: 33, namely )DMY H-NQB in
eastern Lower Galilee: Adami. As to QD$, there is no place by the name QD$
attested south or southwest of Judah, but QD$ is attested out the wazoo in
eastern Upper Galilee. As to $WR, the early Hebrew author considered the
correct spelling of Tyre in northwest Upper Galilee, CWR or CR, to be
blasphemous, because it means “divine rock”, and hence effectively means
“God”. So
he sanitized that blasphemous name by calling it $WR, which has the neutral
meaning of “wall”, and sounds enough like CWR so that his contemporary
audience would know he meant Tyre. [$WR is a non-blasphemous Patriarchal
nickname for CWR.] Finally, GRR is KRR at item #80 on the mid-15th century
BCE
Thutmose III list of places in Canaan, being “Galilee”, as is GR [in the form
of Gari or Garu, with GRR being the Akkadian version of GLL in west Semitic,
both meaning “rolling”] at Amarna Letter EA 256: 23. Genesis 20: 1 says:
>From there [that is, from Bethel, where Abraham had gone to see Sodom’s
destruction], Abraham [went north along the Jordan River and] passed [through
eastern Lower Galilee via] H-NGB [referring to Adami, )DMY H-NQB, which is “
south”/NGB of Adamah], and then Abraham lived between QD$ [Qadesh of eastern
Upper Galilee] and $WR [that is, CWR/Tyre in Upper Galilee], and he
sojourned in Upper Galilee/GRR. That’s exactly what Genesis 20: 1 says, word
for
word.

Per Genesis 13: 17, Abraham is divinely commanded to sojourn throughout the
length and breadth of Canaan after splitting from Lot at Bethel. Unless
Abraham was prepared to directly contravene YHWH’s divine Will [never!],
Abraham was divinely r-e-q-u-i-r-e-d to spend considerable time sojourning
up
north in Galilee after splitting from Lot at Bethel. The great tension in
the story that everyone has missed is that Abraham cannot perfect his claim
to
all of Canaan by sojourning in Galilee, and Abraham cannot sire his proper
heir by Sarah either, until and unless Lot first forfeits Lot’s entire claim
to any part of Canaan, and is reduced to living in a cave. That’s why
chapters 18 and 19 of Genesis are much more important than people have
realized.
Abraham cannot perfect his claim to all of Canaan or sire Isaac until Lot
first proves himself unworthy to have any claim at all to the Jordan River
Valley, the Jezreel Valley, and points north in Canaan, to which Lot
provisionally was entitled when Abram and Lot split at Bethel. If we could
just get
the underlying geography right, the story practically tells itself.

3. You wrote: “At least in the later narratives of the wells being dug
close to Gerar, it would better fit the South where open water would be
scarce, than the North with fountains and streams.”

If we take the text seriously and literally, here is what it says. After
leaving Abimelek’s place, each of Abraham and Isaac digs a series of 4 wells,
located about 5 miles or so apart, and with the last well being “up” at a
Beersheba. Genesis 26: 16-23. [If the wells were closer together, Abimelek’
s men would not have lost interest after the 2nd well. If the wells were
farther apart, Abimelek’s men would not have retained interest in the first 2
wells.]

That is an e-x-a-c-t description of western Upper Galilee and Beersheba of
Galilee! Per the Amarna Letters, historical Abimelek lived on an island
[Tyre] just off the coast of the northwest corner of Upper Galilee. The best
place on planet Earth to dig a series of wells is along the base of the
mountains of western Upper Galilee. The mountains of Lebanon keep a lot of
rain
in Upper Galilee, yet only the east border of Galilee has a river worthy of
the name. So huge amounts of water have collected underground in western
Galilee, and every Israeli knows that the ideal place to dig wells is along
the base of the mountains of western Upper Galilee, where that water has
collected. But by the time one gets close to the 4th well [just under 20
miles
south of the northern border of Upper Galilee], a huge forest [MDBR P)RN,
where Ishmael lives and is an archer in the second half of chapter 21 of
Genesis, and where Esau as an archer routinely bags savory game for his
doting
father Isaac in chapter 27 of Genesis -- Yes, t-h-a-t historical forest
near
Beersheba of Galilee] impeded the Patriarchs’ progress in the Bronze Age.
So Abraham and Isaac then turned east and went “up” to Beersheba of Galilee.

Meanwhile, the foregoing is impossible south of Canaan. There are no wells
between an unattested place between Gaza and Beersheba of the Negev, which
is the traditional locale of Gerar, and Beersheba of the Negev. Moreover,
Beersheba of the Negev is located at the bottom of a drainage basin, and so
one cannot go “up” to Beersheba of the Negev, as required by Genesis 26: 23.
Everything checks out perfectly for western Upper Galilee and Beersheba of
Galilee [located “up” in the foothills of the mountains of western Galilee
on the border between Upper and Lower Galilee, fairly near the coast],
whereas nothing at all checks out for the area near Beersheba of the Negev.
[Perhaps it goes without saying that there never was a forest, or good
hunting,
near the arid, low-lying Beersheba of the Negev. MDBR P)RN means “a forest
of trees, that abounds in foliage”. Such a forest historically adjoined
Beersheba of Galilee, while needless to say there was never a forest of trees
anywhere in the general vicinity of Beersheba of the Negev.]

4. You wrote: “That is, unless you exclude the mention of the Oaks close
to Hebron in Genesis. In this case, oak trees in an area with few trees
would be much more memorable than oaks in an area with abundant forests.”

Based on Biblical testimony, there were no memorable oak trees in southern
hill country, since not a single village, city or valley there is named
after “oak trees”. By stark contrast, three villages [I Samuel 10: 3;
Joshua
19: 43; I Kings 4: 29] and one valley [I Samuel 17: 2] in the Shephelah are
named after “oak trees” [excluding the famous city of “Aijalon”, which
may or may not be a play on “oak tree”]. The Biblical testimony is clear,
as are non-biblical sources as well. If you want prominent oak trees that
give rise to the names of various places that refer to oak trees, per Genesis
13: 18, 14: 13 and 18: 1, and an ideal locale for a huge flock of sheep and
goats, which does not require any seasonal changes of location, then the
Shephelah west of Bethel is the place, not southern hill country.

If we pay close attention to what the Patriarchal narratives actually say,
the only reasonable conclusion is that when in southern Canaan, the
Patriarchs sojourned in the rural paradise of the eastern Aijalon Valley, not
in
rugged, mountainous, southern hill country.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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