Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>]

I find your response rather incredible, Karl. I've pointed to documentation 
and yet you insist I haven't shown documentation and need to produce it. 
There's so much more I could point to, but I only picked a handful of 
examples for my previous post. There's no need for me to reproduce the texts 
of the Ancient Near East across the millennia. I'll refer you to the standard 
reference works, like Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Context of Scripture. 
This will show you the ubiquity of henotheistic thinking across the Ancient 
Near East prior to the Persian Era. Your proposal sees Salem during the 
lifetime of Abraham as the one exception. This would make Melchizedek a kind 
of Akhenaton figure, though using a well established deity, El Elyon (who 
everywhere else was seen as president of the gods), and talking about him in 
classic henotheistic terms, rather than making up a new deity from scratch 
(which is what Akhenaton did). I don't think I need to find specific 
documentation signed by Melchizedek to support my view. I think, rather, that 
you need find that documentation to prove yours. Your request for 
documentation in this case is extremely minimalistic in that it resembles the 
same standard that some scholars demand to demonstrate that there actually 
was a David or Solomon. I somehow doubt that you apply the same standard to 
them, in which case you need to rethink your entire evidential methodology.

The other problem I have with your comments on this is that you seem to be 
committing a reading fallacy, which conflates the world of a person mentioned 
in a text with the world of the author and assumes that the two are one and 
the same. This has to be proved. Yes, in the context of Gen 1, I can see how 
one reads Genesis monotheistically. No argument there. But Genesis seems to 
come from a Persian milieu, or a monarchic milieu at the earliest stretch. 
This is much later than the supposed lifetime of Abraham. Even if, as I think 
you are, going for an early Exodus and Mosaic authorship, this is still much 
later than Abraham. So how does the Salemite understanding of El Elyon as a 
universal deity, yet who is spoken of in terms that are consistent with the 
classic henotheism of the Ancient Near East across many, many centuries, 
continue from the Abrahamic era to the era of the author of Genesis (whenever 
that is)? Or is there a cessation of this worldview after Salem, only to be 
taken up again in the time of the author? How does this fit into the mindset 
of people and the world of ideas in the Ancient Near East? I'm not sure that 
you can actually hold these two things together. You're fighting an uphill 
battle with the evidence on this one, Karl.

All in all, I would say the onus is on you to show that (1) Abrahamic Salem 
was the exception to the rule of henotheism, which would also make it largely 
out of step with things even in the monarchic era of Israel and Judah, and 
(2) the worldview of the author of Genesis (esp. Gen 1) was the same as that 
of Salem in the Abrahamic era (whenever that was). These two points that you 
are going for are in contradistinction with what we know from the Ancient 
Near East, and therefore the case for it has to be made.



GEORGE ATHAS
Director of Postgraduate Studies,
Moore Theological College (moore.edu.au)
Sydney, Australia