Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

George:

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 11:31 PM, George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au> wrote:

Karl,

The incursion of Sea Peoples into Egypt is one of the best documented and datable events in ANE history. No one puts it in the 7th or 6th century BC, without massive incredible chronological reconfiguration of fantastic proportions. The pereset are almost certainly Philistines. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

Au contraire, the dating is connected to the reigns of certain pharaohs, and I have seen three different dates for those pharaohs, all of which originated from people who do not trust the Bible as accurate history (so my response cannot be construed as a believer vs. non-believer issue). Two of those dates are from professional Egyptologists, the third date from a polymath who was looking at a broad sweep of all ANE history.

And why couldn’t the Pereset have been Persians, one of the peoples then under Babylonian rule?

One clue, Jeremiah 43:9 mentions a brick making structure. More than one source that I checked mention that only Raamsis II used fired bricks in ancient Egypt before the Greco-Roman period. I have lived in an area where the traditional sun-baked, mud bricks with straw were still being made, and yes it was here in the U.S. (labor costs have since stopped that practice). The traditional way of making adobe bricks was simply to set up the forms on the building site, then make the bricks in the open air. When the building was completed, pick up the forms and move them to the next site. There was no brick making structure. But there is a brick making structure to make fired bricks, so that’s a clue that the one pharaoh who built using fired bricks was either the pharaoh of Jeremiah’s time, or just preceding him.

Others have pointed to parallels between the actions of Raamsis II and pharaoh Necho who killed King Josiah, suggesting that those were two names for the same pharaoh.

As for hoplite, you're dealing again with possibilities that seem to have no evidence behind them. The term is Greek. Do you have evidence to the contrary? Do you have evidence for the word dating before 500 BC? If not, your proposal, as much as I like it and would enjoy affirming it, is actually nothing but pure speculation. These basic evidential distinctions between evidence, possibility, and probability, which are crucial for determining knowledge, don't seem to be something you consider, while most (!) of the rest of us do.

Do you have any evidence that hoplite isn’t a loan word into Greek, that by the fifth century had been in the language so long that its foreign roots were forgotten? Just like “pork” and “beef” have been in English so long that we don’t consider them as loan words brought into English by foreign invaders?

I don’t deny that it possibly was originally Greek, or it could have been another Indo-European language, all I say is that it appears to be a loan word into Hebrew to refer to an elite fighting force, possibly came into Hebrew through the Philistines. Further, almost an identically formed word appears in another ANE language to refer to an elite soldier. It’s possible that that’s just a coincidence. Or it could be an example of linguistic borrowing. Too little evidence remains to answer these questions.

You are arguing from silence, which is recognized as poor methodology, my response is that silence means that we don’t know, and possibly can never know.

Karl W. Randolph.

GEORGE ATHAS

Dean of Research,

Moore Theological College (moore.edu.au)

Sydney, Australia

From: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, 16 April 2013 12:21 AM

To: George Athas <george.athas AT moore.edu.au>
Cc: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>

Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew was linguistically isolated?

George:

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 6:14 PM, George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au> wrote:

Yes, the Philistines are generally understood to have come from an original Aegean area. I believe it's surmised that Cretans were probably settled in the areas of the Negev by the Egyptians who repelled the attacks of the Philistines and other Sea People in 1175 BC, and then settled them as mercenaries and a kind of 'buffer' people throughout the Levant.

The identity and date of the Sea Peoples’ attack is open to question, some historians date it as late as late seventh century, early sixth century BC. The Philistines predate even your early date given above.

So you're identifying the Pelethites as 'hoplites', taking the ה as part of the noun, rather than the article?

I’m taking this as a possibility, not a fixed. What seems pretty clear that this is a loan word into Hebrew from another language, most likely from Philistine. Was it a loan word into Philistine? If so, from where? As far as Greek is concerned, was it a loan word into Greek? Possibly as early as Linear B?

 

Interesting. It does break the symmetry with Cherethites, though, which evidently does have the article, but that's no big deal.

Were these names of peoples hired as mercenaries, or divisions of David’s army according to specialized skill?

 

The problem, though, is that 'hoplite' is a Greek word, not Semitic, and I don't think you find any hoplites before about 600 BC at the earliest. I don't think Homer mentions hoplites at all, does he? And if he doesn't, it would suggest there were no hoplites before the 8th century BC. So the suggestion, as much as I like it, would appear to be quite anachronistic. The only alternative is to suggest that the text is written at a time when hoplites were known throughout the wider region, which would probably be the Persian Era.

It’s hard to date terms, as the surviving literature is somewhat sparse. For example, I was told that Dionysios is mentioned in Linear B texts, but not again until fifth or fourth centuries BC, yet there’s no reason to believe that the term was not used continuously during the intervening period. So likewise, with hoplite, we have no earliest date, all we have is the earliest date of a surviving text. 

GEORGE ATHAS

Dean of Research,

Moore Theological College (moore.edu.au)

Sydney, Australia

Karl W. Randolph.