Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Rob:
 
1.  You wrote:  “I stated , based on the works of others that13:18 means ‘
So Abraham moved his tents from place to place, then settled in Hebron’….”
 
Genesis 13: 18 does not say “from place to place”.  Rather, Genesis 13: 18 
simply says Y)HL, meaning “to move one’s tent”.  Abram went down the 
mountain after hearing YHWH’s words and promptly moved, without further ado, 
to 
the Patriarchs’ XBRWN.  That’s what the Biblical text says, and that’s what 
it means.
 
2.  You wrote:  “You claim Abraham did not actually obey God's command to 
walk the land.”
 
On the contrary, an essential part of my theory of the case is that Abraham 
 d-i-d  indeed “obey God's command to walk the land” (and, for that 
matter, Abraham obeys all other divine commandments as well).  The minute Lot 
was 
reduced to living in a cave, Abraham was off like a flash to far-off GRR.  
Abraham could only perfect his claim to all of Canaan, and have Sarah bear 
Isaac, by obeying the divine commandment of Genesis 13: 17 by walking all the 
long way up north to GRR/Galilee and interacting with Abimelek.
 
3.  The Genesis Apocryphon was composed well over a thousand years after 
the composition of the truly ancient Patriarchal narratives, and is an 
imaginative commentary.  By that time, Biblical analysts were relying on the 
post-exilic work of II Chronicles 14: 13-14 to think that the Patriarchs’ GRR 
was 
located in southwest Judah.  On that southern Hebrew theory of the case, 
Genesis did not appear to show Abraham as honoring the divine commandment of 
Genesis 13: 17 to walk the length of Canaan, and so a grand trip around the 
known world was dreamed up, having no Biblical basis whatsoever.  Analysts 
today teach that after splitting from Lot, Abraham never went north of Bethel 
the rest of his long life, which is just as wrong as the Genesis Apocryphon 
dreaming up a worldwide journey for Abram.  Based on item #80 of the mid-15th 
century BCE Thutmose III list of places in Canaan, and Amarna Letter EA 
256, and the Akkadian word for “rolling”, GRR is the Late Bronze Age 
rendering 
of Galilee, which only after the Bronze Age came to be rendered as GLL or 
GLYL, in all cases referring to the “rolling” hills of Galilee.  On that 
historical basis, we can see that Abraham did indeed obey the divine 
commandment at Genesis 13: 17 in full.
 
4.  If you’re interested in how today’s leading Genesis scholar explains 
Abraham’s move to GRR, here it is:
 
“This is an astonishing episode.  It seems incredible that Abraham should 
make the same dreadful mistake again:  visiting a foreign country, he passes 
his wife off as his sister.  …Indeed, when challenged by Abimelek, he 
resorts to lying, claiming he described Sarah as his sister wherever they 
went.  …
Thus, this incident makes us realize that Abraham is not such a saint as we 
might have concluded from chap. 18….”  Gordon Wenham, “Genesis 16-50” 
(1994), at p. 75.
 
So when scripture shows Abraham as righteously obeying the divine 
commandment of Genesis 13: 17 by moving to GRR and interacting with Abimelek, 
modern 
analysts characterize that, believe it or not, as being a “dreadful mistake”
 on Abraham’s part.  Modern analysts in fact have no idea whatsoever why 
Abraham moves to GRR the minute Lot is reduced to living in a cave.  
Incredibly, they write it off as being “an astonishing episode” that is a 
“dreadful 
mistake”, when in fact the reality is exactly the opposite, as Abraham is 
consistently righteous to a fault.
 
5.  Note also that Abram never elbowed Lot aside, though Abram had the 
power to do so.  Abram did not use his 318 armed men at Genesis 14: 14 to 
push 
Lot out of Canaan.   When Lot was taken as a hostage, Abram did not leave Lot 
to his fate, but rather risked Abram’s own life to make a daring rescue of 
Lot.  And when YHWH tells Abraham of YHWH’s plan to destroy iniquitous 
Sodom, Abraham goes out of his way (in the second half of chapter 18 of 
Genesis, 
where Prof. Wenham sees Abraham as acting like “a saint”) to make sure that 
Sodom will not be destroyed if as few as 10 innocent people are living 
there, with Abraham of course knowing that Lot and Lot’s family were living 
in 
Sodom.  Abraham by this point knows that Sarah will not bear Isaac, and 
Abraham will not be able to claim all of Canaan, until and unless Lot’s 
provisional claim to the northern two-thirds of Canaan is eliminated.  But 
Abraham 
admirably is unwilling to push Lot aside himself and, rather, properly waits 
until YHWH determines that Lot’s lack of affirmative opposition to Sodom’s 
turn to the dark side after chapter 14 of Genesis means that Lot has 
forfeited any and all claim to Canaan.  Lot is reduced to living in a cave by 
divine 
action, Abraham then immediately moves to GRR, and almost immediately Sarah 
gets pregnant with Isaac.  That’s all in the Biblical text, with no 
creative, fanciful commentary being needed. Nor is that grand sequence a 
“dreadful 
mistake”!  The reason why post-exilic and all subsequent analysts have 
failed to see this is because they rely on II Chronicles as to its 
post-exilic 
ultra-southerly retroactive re-interpretation of the geographical locations 
of 
GRR and XCCN TMR, instead of looking to Bronze Age sources for the 
historical meaning of those key geographical terms that in fact refer to 
places way 
up north.
 
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois