Deciphering the Biblical Text – 6

The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History? – Historicity Thesis (2)

References to Egypt. Biblical references to Egypt provide additional evidence for dating the patriarchs to the Middle Bronze Age. Abraham and Jacob both encounter Egyptian pharaohs. Abram (as he then was) sojourns in Egypt during a famine (Genesis 12:10–20); Jacob, with his family, visits Joseph in Egypt during another famine, remaining there until he dies 17 years later (Genesis 45:28–47:28). Jacob, we are told, settled in Goshen, in the eastern Nile delta; there is no reason to believe Abraham went further into Egypt. Both Abraham and Jacob thus encounter Pharaoh and the Egyptian government in the eastern Nile delta.

The hieroglyphics in the center of this beetle-shaped seal spell out Y‘qb-HR, the Egyptian transliteration of the Semitic name Yaqub, one form of “Jacob.” Found near Haifa, Israel, and dating to the 18th century BCE, this scarab—probably used to seal papyrus scrolls or as a piece of jewelry—is thought to have belonged to a Canaanite king named Jacob. A number of similar Jacob scarab seals have been found, suggesting not only the close connections between Canaan and Egypt (the Bible describes the Israelites as descendants of Jacob, who moved from his native Canaan to Egypt, where he lived out the latter part of his life), but also the commonness of the name Jacob in the first quarter of the second millennium—the period assigned by Kenneth Kitchen [1]  to the patriarchs. Jacob and other names in Genesis (Isaac, Ishmael, Joseph) are what scholars call Amorite imperfectives—a group of certain names beginning with “i” or “y” (the name Jacob, for example, is the English form of Ya‘akov).

Such names, Kitchen points out, while common in Genesis and extra-Biblical Near Eastern sources dating to the early second millennium BCE, become increasingly rare later on; they are almost absent from Near Eastern archives of the first millennium BCE and later. The names of all the patriarchs but Abraham had general currency only in the era from about 2000 to 1750 BCE—suggesting that their stories derive from that period and not, as many scholars believe, from more than a thousand years later.

Under the 12th and 13th Dynasties (20th to 17th centuries BCE), Egyptian pharaohs had a palace and temples in the eastern Nile delta—named (at least in part) Ro-waty, “Mouth of the Two Ways”—where the coastal road from Canaan met the road from Wadi Tumilat, in the eastern delta. The 13th dynasty was followed by the Hyksos period in the 17th and 16th centuries BCE. The Hyksos kings took over the old Egyptian center in the eastern Nile delta and rebuilt it as their summer capital, Avaris. Therefore, from the 20th to the 16th centuries BCE, the timespan we have on other grounds assigned to the patriarchs (19th to 17th centuries BCE), the Egyptian government had a royal presence in Goshen in the eastern Nile delta.

Prior to this period, there was no royal delta outpost, since the Old Kingdom pharaohs built only as far as Bubastis. After the Hyksos rulers were expelled, native Egyptian power was resumed under the 18th Dynasty, which manned its expeditions to Canaan basically from Memphis, 100 miles south of the Sinai border. During the period between about 1550 and 1300 BCE, there was no royal residence in the delta. Only the last king of the 18th Dynasty, Haremhab (1327–1295 BCE), showed interest in renewing the temple of the god Seth at Avaris.

The new 19th Dynasty, however, originated in the eastern delta and had a summer palace there, finally moving its capital to Pi-Ramesse, built by Ramesses II. This was the theater for the events of the Exodus (Exodus 1:11, 12:37).

In the 12th century BCE, after Ramesses VI, Pi-Ramesse was given up and its magnificent buildings became a stone-quarry. During later periods (1070–300 BCE.) Tanis/Zoan in the eastern delta served as Egypt’s gateway to the Levant, as is indicated by references in the Psalms and the later prophets. Psalm 78:12, 43 gives an “Iron Age” view of the Exodus, citing its miracles in “the land of Egypt, the region of Zoan.” Isaiah scorns Pharaoh’s officials in Zoan as fools (19:11, 13); and, later, Ezekiel announces the imminent destruction of Zoan and other Egyptian cities (Ezekiel 30:14 ff.).

Again, our knowledge of Egyptian residences in the eastern Nile delta is chronologically consistent with what we find in the Biblical narratives, regarding both the patriarchs in the early second millennium BCE and the Exodus in the late second millennium BCE—facts that would hardly be known to someone writing in the sixth or fifth centuries BCE.

Patriarchal Names.  To pursue a different line of argument, the form of the patriarchal names themselves can help us date the Patriarchal Age. Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and even Ishmael (Abraham’s son by Hagar) have names that in their original language (Yitzchak, Ya‘akov, Yoseph and Yishmael) begin with an i/y-prefix; scholars of Northwest Semitic languages call these “Amorite imperfective” names.

This was noticed long ago, as was the fact that Amorite imperfective names with an i/y-prefix are common in the Mari archives of the early second millennium BCE [2]  . More recently, however, one prominent scholar has questioned the use of this material to date the patriarchal period. According to P. Kyle McCarter,

“[T]here is no reason to believe that its use [Amorite imperfective names] diminished after the Middle Bronze Age; in the late Bronze Age, it is well attested in Ugaritic and Amarna Canaanite names [Late Bronze Age]. Thus, while it is true that the name ‘Jacob’ is very common in the Middle Bronze Age, it is also found in Late Bronze sources, and related names occur in both Elephantine (fifth century BCE) and Palmyrene (first century BCE through third century CE) Aramaic.” [3]

 But this is totally untrue. In the third millennium BCE, i/y-names are already known, for example, at Ebla. But no figures are yet available as to how frequently they appear. For the early second millennium BCE, however, we do have numbers. In a standard collection of over 6,000 names from the early second millennium BCE, 16 percent of the nearly 1,360 personal names beginning with i/y are of the Amorite imperfective type. This type constitutes 55 percent of all names beginning with i/y.

Compare this with the Late Bronze Age (late second millennium BCE), which includes the archives from Tell el-Amarna and Ugarit. At Ugarit, out of 1,860 names in alphabetic script, only 40 are Amorite imperfectives, a mere 2 percent. Of the syllabically written names, only 120 out of 4,050 names are of this type, a mere 3 percent. Of all names beginning with i/y, the figures for Amorite imperfectives are down to 30 percent and 25 percent—that is, about half of what they were in patriarchal times. These facts flatly disprove McCarter’s claim that the use of such names had not “diminished.”

In the Iron Age, things get even worse for McCarter’s position. Of all Phoenician names, Amorite imperfectives constitute only 6 percent, making up but 12 percent of all i/y-names. In Aramaic, the corresponding figures are just over 0.5 percent for Amorite imperfectives, these constituting barely over 12 percent of all names that begin with i/y. From Assyrian sources, only a dozen out of nearly 5,000 names from the first millennium are of the Amorite imperfective type, a miserable ¼ of 1 percent; and these Amorite imperfective names make up only 1.6 percent of all i/y-names.

Moreover, McCarter’s example of a Palmyrene name is that of a Jew called Jacob—hardly a persuasive argument for the name’s general currency!

So, once more, when a full roll call of available independent evidence is made, the result is the same: This type of name, that of all the patriarchs except Abraham, does belong mainly to the Patriarchal Age according to the chronology emerging here—the early second millennium BCE or Middle Bronze Age. Another point should be stressed. These names from the archaeological record are attached to ordinary people in the Near East in the third and second millennia BCE; they are not tribal, divine or geographical names, as is still wrongly alleged from time to time.

NOTES:

[1] Kitchen Kenneth A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. 2003.
[2]  Huffmon H. B.  Amorite Personal Names in the Mari Texts. A Structural and Lexical Study, Baltimore 1965
[3]  McCarter Kyle P.  Ancient Inscriptions: Voices from the Biblical World  Biblical Archaeology Society 1996