quote:
jar:
I'm sorry but your authority is simply full of shit. The Armana tablets mention Habiru but that has nothing to do with Hebrews. It is a generic term used much like the term gypsy for people from all over the area that were mainly gangsters for hire. The term Hebrew does not appear in any of the Armana Tablets and the term Habiru or Apiru does not appear in Genesis 14:13.
Further, in the Armana Tablets the Habiru are not a conquering army but rather mercenaries available for hire by either side.
The term habiru is both a generic usage of the region, identified with the exact spacetime of the Hebrews - and that they were a wondering peoples; as well as a reference of the hebrews which identifies with it. The difference in pronounciation is due to differing languages, while the alphabetic consonants are the same; the hebrew was alphabetic and the other writings were not. The references of a lawless peoples is either directed at the area generically, or else is a standard mode of disdain by the ancient egyptians towards the hebrews - which is easilly evidenced as an historical tradition of dispute and disdain: ancient egypt was notorious for erasing any negative references and in one tablet mentions destroying Israel - which is clearly false. You have selected one item while disregarding the entirety, as well as condoned the traditional discrpencies of egyptian writings against a long historical thread of far more verifiable Hebrew writings spanning 2000 years. This renders your scientific depictions as faulty as your historical understandings.
However, this singular and limited variation, or contrived variation, does not negate a host of other factors which clearly evidence that the Hebrews were in canaan and in Egypt: the armana tablets are 1 of a parcel of some 60 other documents, and in its entirety fully negates your use of BS here. The operative question is that one variance does not negate 100s, and so you have to identify the premise you are wrong, and what this means in terms of the Israelites in Canaan for a period of 1000 years - until the invasion of Babylon - which was over-turned 70 years later, and then prevailed until the destruction by Rome in 70 CE?
The Name ”Hebrew’ in Archaeology and in Scripture
http://www.geocities.com/genesiscommentary/hebrews.html
In the ancient Biblical world of the Ancient Near East there are constant references in texts to persons known as SA.GAZ (in cuneiform), as Hapiru/Habiru in Mesopotamia and as ”prw in Egypt ( the ” is a hard H and the w is a plural ending). While the SA.GAZ are not necessarily specifically Hapiru/Habiru (for they are never to our knowledge treated as equivalent in the lists of ancient lexicographers) they are often identified with them. Thus the terms are not synonymous but the SA.GAZ can be Hapiru in certain circumstances.
The ”prw are identified with the Hapiru in the Amarna letters from the king of Jerusalem and with the SA.GAZ by other correspondents. We are not, however, to think of these Hapiru/Habiru/”prw as a specific race or nation, but rather it appears to be a name for stateless peoples as they come into contact with the major civilisations, and can mean different things in different contexts as it is a useful way of describing people with no other identity. They are witnessed to from the third millennium BC down to the tenth century BC.
The SA.GAZ indicates two cuneiform signs giving no recognised meaning. The term is found in Sumerian literature but has no meaning in Sumerian. It is equated in literature with the Akkadian habbatu which means a ”brigand’ or ”highway robber’, but is probably derived from the Akkadian word saggasu which means ”aggressor’. The SA.GAZ are therefore seen as fierce and ”lawless’ people, i.e. not obeying the laws of others.
In the third dynasty of Ur they are described as ”these unclothed people, who travel in dead silence, who destroy everything, whose menfolk go where they will, --- they establish their tents and their camps --- they spend their time in the countryside without observing the decrees of my king Shulgi’. They are therefore people who live on the edge of society and are a law to themselves.
The word also appears in the nineteenth century BC in administrative texts in Southern Mesopotamia where one text calls them the Hapiri. Here they are soldiers with a chief, and receive supplies of food. In a similar text in Susa in Elam they are recorded as having sheep supplied to them as well as to other groups, they and the others being identified as ”soldiers of the West’. They would appear therefore in these cases to be mercenaries.
In the sixteenth/fifteenth century BC they are again equated with the Hapiru, but this time more fully, and here they are soldiers, or even quarrymen, under the orders of SA.GAZ leaders. One SA.GAZ from Tapduwa has 15 soldiers under him, a SA.GAZ chief from Sarkuhe has 29, and another has 1,436. They can form separate groupings by themselves. By now therefore the term SA.GAZ equates to Hapiru.
Later they are clearly equated with the Hapiru in the Amarna letters where some call them the SA.GAZ while the king of Jerusalem calls them the Hapiru. SA.GAZ is seen as a somewhat pejorative term. They are seen as operative not only in Syria, but also in Phoenicia, near Sumur, Batrun and Byblos, in Upe near Damascus, and further South as far as Jerusalem.
Around the fifteenth century BC six hundred SA.GAZ are elsewhere ”given’ to the ”god of the temple’ just as Rameses III will later give the ”prw to the Egyptian temples of the Delta.
A century or so later Mursilis II (c.1334-1306 BC), in an arbitration treaty between Duppi-Teshub of Amurru amd Tudhaliya of Carchemish, recalls that the town of Jaruwatta in the land of Barga had been captured by the king of the Hurrian country and had been given to ”the grandfather of Tette, the SA.GAZ’. Mursilus returns the town to Abiradda whom the SA.GAZ had dispossessed.
So they have now become among other things mercenary soldiers or marauding bands of soldiers, and can enjoy a partially settled existence.
While in post Old Testament times ”the Hebrew language’ means the language of the Jews, and everyone thus relates the term ”Hebrews’ to the Jews, this is a late identification. In the Old Testament Israelites were Israelites, not Hebrews, except, rarely, when viewed in relation to external peoples. The one possible exception to this is the ”Hebrew servant’, of which more later (Exodus 21.2; Deuteronomy 15.12 compare Jeremiah 34.9, 14).
Apart from this latter use, and a single use related to Abram, the term is limited to three sections, two relating to servitude in Egypt and one relating to dealings with the Philistines who were non-Semites. There is one further exception to this and that is the use by Jonah to describe himself to foreign sailors.
The description Abram ”the Hebrew’ - in Genesis 14.13 - is contained in a covenant narrative confirming the covenant between Abram and Melchizedek. Abram is called ”Abram the Hebrew’ as a (potential) leader of a military force who is part of a confederation. As Abram was stateless (contrast ”Amre’ who is called ”the Amorite’) this method of identifying him may be seen as of some significance, as it ties in with the use of the terms ”apiru and habiru elsewhere of stateless military leaders. In adminstrative texts in Southern Mesopotamia the SA.GAZ or ”Hapiri’ are independent soldiers under a chief who receive supplies of food, as Abram does in Genesis 14, as are the ”Hapiru’ from texts from Mari (to the West of Babylonia). Melchizedech may well therefore have seen him as an Hapiru.
Joseph the Hebrew The next use of the term is in Genesis 39.14, 17; 41.12 where Joseph is called ”an Hebrew’ or a ”Hebrew servant’ by Egyptians. And Joseph himself uses the term when identifying himself to Egyptians when he says ”I was stolen from the land of the Hebrews’ (Genesis 40.15). The ”land of the Hebrews’ is ”the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites’ (Exodus 3.8), a land without political unity.
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The 60 Tablets
As it is, the documents are chosen with care and explained with concise text, exemplifying what we know of the several cultures within and against which the dramas of the bible were played out. The introduction is an enlightenment in itself, and one section is outstanding, being a short description and explanation of the scripts in which the ancient texts were written. It de-mystifies a great deal of the obscure notations used to translate ancient scripts into the modern alphabet (eg, how syllabic signs, logograms, determinatives, and phonetic complements work), and explains the terminology used in all serious books in this area.
The 60 documents are presented chronologically: eg, the ziggurat at Ur (still there!); clay tablets of Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, Armana letters, and the Cyrus cylinder; stone obelisks, sphinxes, carved walls, stelae, seals and weights; and papyri, ranging from a Thutmosis III war campaign in cursive hieroglyphs to a personal letter in colloquial (koine) Greek from a wife to her husband, dated c.150BC. Certain articles stand out: the four-page summary of the development of the alphabet; the Merneptah stela (earliest mention of the Israelite people); the Moabite Stone mentioning Omri (king of Israel 885-874BC) and his God Yahweh; the Lachish ostracon war report (ink on pottery), with discussion of his use of the name of Yahweh; the Rosetta Stone; the koine Greek papyrus letter of Isias to Hephaestion (a lonely wife asks he husband to come home), the vernacular shedding light on the Greek of the New Testament; and the Codex Sinaiticus.
T.C. Mitchell, is Keeper of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum."
Michael JR Jose, Resident Scholar
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