Judaism
Patriarchs 1.2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, October 08, 2001
The Patriarchal narratives are ideology not history.Professor P Kyle McCarter Jr
Names and Places
Abram and Abraham have been respectively interpreted as meaning “The Father is Exalted” and “The Father of a Multitude”. Abram could mean “Father of a High Place”, the High Places referring to Canaanite shrines, and the Father perhaps meaning a hierophant or priest, or maybe the god himself. Ramah was a town on the road to Jerusalem (Josh 18:25; Jg 4:5). It was a high place with a commanding view and used as a fortress. It was occupied by “returners” from captivity (Ezra 2:26; Neh 7:30;11:33)! An Egyptian text of the thirteenth century BC mentions two tribes in northern Palestine, the Tayaru and the Rahamu. The Rahamu could account for the name Abraham as “Father of the Rahamu”. Yet there is a better explanation.
Abram’s grandson was an Aramaean but, in terms of biblical chronology, Abram could not have been because his migration is supposed to have happened about a thousand years before any Aramaeans appeared in history. Abram could, however, have been an Aramaean if the “return” under the Persians was really the migration being referred to allegorically in the Patriarchal sagas.
Wherever the Aramaeans came from they were not called Aramaeans until they lived in the uphill regions of the Tur Abdin region of Mesopotamia, the source of the tributaries of the Euphrates. It is probably because they came to be associated with these highlands that they were called “Aramu” or “Highlanders”. However, what is high is exalted, so their name is also read as the “Exalted Ones”. Abram is therefore the “Father of the Aramu” meaning the “Father of the Highlanders”, or, as the Biblicists would have it, the “Father of the Exalted Ones”. Abram might have been a mythical founder of the Aramaeans before some of them were transported by the Persians to Palestine.
C H W Johns long ago published an Assyrian census of the Harran district, what he called an Assyrian Doomsday Book, the contents of a set of tablets from the seventh century BC, concerning the wealth and population of Harran and district. The main population of the city and its dependent villages, only about 200 years before the Persian conquest, was Aramaean.
The kinship of the Israelites and the Aramaeans can only have arisen in the first millennium BC and can be explained if the “returners”, or some of them, came from these Aramaean cities of north Syria and north west Mesopotamia. The west Semitic names Abram, Jacob, Ishmael and Israel simply reflect the names popular in these Syrian places. The Aramaean city states in the early centuries of the final millennium BC were often at loggerheads and in alliances alternately. The myths of the monarchical period seem to be built on Assyrian records and shows these vacillations, though romanticized, to suit the purposes of the Persian mythmakers. Thus the “returners” could honestly accept a myth in which they are shown as migrating from their Aramaean homelands to be the founders of a Persian district, while the history created out of genuine Assyrian records can show the Aramaean states often in conflict.
Nor does Abraham mean a “Father of the Multitude”. It is more likely to mean “The Wild Ox is our Father”. The wild ox was a favourite symbol of the Assyrians who often pictured in in bas-relief on their monuments. It is depicted as being shaggy coated and therefore distinguishable from a domestic ox. It was hunted by the Assyrian kings and nobles who regarded it as a prize as good as a lion because it was so strong and fierce. A broken obilisk at Nineveh has the Assyrian king, Tiglath-pileser I, boasting of destructive wild oxen that he slew at Ariziqi on the Euphrates, again in this Aramaean region. This is confirmed by his report on the same obilisk of a raid on the city of Shuppa in the land of Harran.
Of course, both Abram and Abraham can be read as beginning with the preposition Eber, “beyond”. They might simply be the “people beyond”, flattered into the “multitude beyond” because the remnant would be a multitude if they remained obedient. Abraham can, however, be read with less punning as “a sacred place beyond”, and that too is how the Promised Land was presented to the colonists. There is no reason why all of these puns could not have been intended and appreciated—it is the nature of these languages.
Rehum was a popular name among “returners” and might have referred to Aramu. Rehum is the name of a priestly family that returned with Zerubabel (Neh 12:13). A Rehum was a Levite building the walls and a leader of the people that signed the covenant with Nehemiah. It appears also many times among the “returners” of Ezra and Nehemiah as the variant “Harim”. Another variant is said to be Nehum (as in Nehemiah) meaning “compassion”. Thus the Rehum of Ezra 2:2 is the Nehum of Nehemiah 7:7. It seems to have been a Persian name because a Persian official of that name wrote an important letter to the Shahanshah to tell him to stop working on the temple (Ezra 4:8-9;17.23).
The original home of the Persian colonists of Yehud
Some of the names in the story of Abram are the names of towns near Harran in the Assyrian district “beyond the river” (Eber-nari, Eber-niri) from the turn of the second millennium—places where the moon god, Sin, was worshipped. Garbini deduces that the Jews during their exile were sucking up to Nabonidus (who was confused with the Nebuchadnezzar of the bible in some instances) by writing a myth that would please the king and thus gain his favour. Nabonidus, though, did not seem the sort of king to try to impress. After restoring the temples of Ur and Harran devoted to his favourite god, Sin, he virtually abdicated while he spent years seeking antiquities, or pursuing the god Sin, in Arabia Deserta. His son Belshazzar is mistaken for the monarch in the bible because Nabonidus had effectively abandoned his duties. In short, Nabonidus was a crank, if not actually insane.
Nabonidus did not initiate the worship of the god, Sin, at Harran. Nabonidus, whose father was a governor of Harran, chose Harran as the centre of worship of the god, Sin, which he favoured. Sin was the local god of the city, but Nabonidus deported people there to institute the the worship of the god the way he wanted. He transported there people whose ancestors, he claimed, had been originally its inhabitants, and persuaded them that their proper god was Sin. He also rebuilt the ancient ziggurat of Ur, the temple of Sin, and made his daughter the High Priestess of the god.
In burningly hot climates, the cool and darkness of the evening comes as a relief. Darkness was seen as primal and light came out of it. This is the biblical order of creation. It means the original god was the god of the night—the moon. Other gods were secondary, including the sun! For people who followed a lunar calendar, the moon was also the god of time, and so therefore was Sin. Three stelae found at Harran in the 1950s had been erected by Nabonidus declaring Sin to be the “king of the gods”. Expressed in more Persian style of words, this would be “god of gods” and “lord of lords”.
The connexion of the “returners” with Nabonidus is that the Persian colonists of Yehud came from these cities in northern Syria—Harran and Urfa—that devoted themselves to Sin. Terah, Laban, Sarah and Milcah are all names associated with the moon. The implications are that the “returners” from Babylon came from these districts in Syria—places where the god worshipped was the great god Sin, the Semitic moon god, the precursor of Allah and evidently the precursor of Yehouah in the sense that the “returners” came from these places where Sin was worshipped. Their biblical myth was actually a somewhat allegorized account of their travels from Harran to Yehud as colonists, but set in the distant past to give them a spurious history.
Harran seems to have been the home of Abram (Gen 12:1,4), not Ur, though Ur, according to Cyrus Gordon, was the nearby town later called Edessa (Urfa) but which was called Urfu, at that time, not the Ur near the junction of the two rivers much further south. Apollonius Molo, even in the first century BC, tells a different story about the origin of Abraham from Genesis. The Patriarch was born in the mountainous edges of Syria, fringing on the northern steppes, after his ancestors had fled from Armenia. This description fits the same place—it is the neighbourhood of Urfa and Harran, a place known as Beth Eden (Bit Adini)! Biblicists have always know where Eden was, but they did not care to say.
Pseudo-Eupolemus, seeming to speak of Genesis 14, says the enemies are not Mesopotamian but Armenian. Both Philo and Josephus refer to this Genesis passage but they place it in Assyria, both adding a detail not now in the bible but which must once have been well known. That the biblical setting in the Arabah by the Dead Sea is wrong is suggested by Abraham abusing the enemies of Dan and Hobab, both north of Damascus. Garbini says other old chroniclers also made Abraham a king in Syria. Nicolaus of Damascus, for example, Herod’s historian, said Abraham was the fourth king of Damascus and Israel its fifth king.
Though European and American schoolchildren continue to be taught that Abraham came from Ur in southern Mesopotamia, people in the area know that the birthplace of Abraham was Urfa. We can read in Harpers and Queen magazine in a travel piece on south eastern Turkey by the travel writer, Philip Marsden, that “the birthplace of Abraham, Urfa, is sacred, like Jerusalem, to the three monotheistic religions of the region—Judaism, Christianity and Islam”.
Ur of “the Chaldees” is a misreading of the Hebrew—Ur Chasdiyim—meaning “Ur of the Holy Ones”. The word “Ur” was simply Sumerian for city, and the word lived on in Semitic languages, though the Sumerians had long gone. So, if the meaning “city” was still understood by the word Ur, “Ur of the Chaldees” could have simply meant “City of the Holy Ones”. If this Ur really was the old Sumerian City, it was a centre of the worship of the moon god, Sin, as was Harran.
Jacob, declared in the scriptures to have been a wandering Aramaean, returns to his kinfolk in Harran, presumably after 1000 BC since the Aramaeans were not there before then—probably not before the ninth century BC. Isaac and Jacob both return east for their wives because Zoroastrians and therefore the “returners” from “exile” had to do so to get wives of their own faith, again showing that the circumstances applied to the fifth not the eighteenth century BC. Ezra is most definite that worshippers of Yehouah could not have Canaanite wives, and those that had were made to abandon them. Why should displaced Canaanites returning to their own homeland be denied the chance of marrying wives of their own race? The ban was not ethnic but religious—Zoroastrian.
The traditions concerning Yehouah in the scriptures are contradictory. Yehouah was God even before the Flood (Gen 4:26 (J)) but God first revealed his name to Moses (Ex 3 (E) and Ex 6 (P)). Elsewhere, the Patriarchs used to worship other gods:
Joshua said unto all the people, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they served other gods. (Josh 24:2)
Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the Lord. (Josh 24:14)
The people were being cajoled into putting away the “other gods” that their fathers had “served”. Joshua is saying this about 1200 BC in the myth and the fathers being referred to are the Patriarchs supposedly from 1800 BC, but it all applies far better to the natives of Palestine being asked by the Persian administrators—the returners—to accept the Persian God. If more proof is needed and proof too of dishonest translation intended to mislead, the Assyrian expression Ebir-nari appears again in Hebrew (Eberhanahar) but is translated as “beyond the flood” in both these passages. Joshua is really saying that their fathers lived in a particular part of the world called (in Assyria) “beyond the river”. Note that Abraham’s brother’s name is Nachor (Nahor), Flood or River! Sure enough in this district we find the places he mentions!
The “returners” had at some previous stage had “other gods” but had been told by the Persians that their true god was Yehouah and had been obliged to convert and proceed to Palestine as a new privileged priestly and administrative class. On arrival, they were missionaries to the native Israelites who were depicted as apostates to the true Yehouah that the “returners” had brought with them—the God of Heaven. Coming from Harran, their god had been Sin!
The indirect way the God of the Patriarchs is often referred to suggests they had different gods from Yehouah but, instead of being named, they are called “the god of my father” (Gen 31:5; Ex 15:2), “the god of your (his) father” (Gen 31:29; 46:1;50:17), “your god and the god of your father” (Gen 43:23), “the god of Abraham and the god of Nahor” (Gen 31:53), “the god of your father Abraham and your father Isaac” (Gen 28:13), “the god of your father Abraham” (Gen 26:24). Elsewhere (Gen 31:42,53), Jacob swore by “the terror (or fear) of Isaac his father” where “terror” seems to be a mistranslation of a word that really means family god or tribal god. Another circumlocution for the name of the god is “the mighty one of Jacob” (Gen 49:24).
Some Assyrian texts have references to Assur, the Assyrian national god—possibly the model for Ahuramazda at least in iconography—but also to “the god of your father”. It seems to be a polite way of referring in general to anyone’s personal or family god in a society in which there were many. Assur was everyone’s god in Assyria but they had personal gods too. This might have been the initial system used by the “returners”, allowing a degree of retention of earlier gods while people were weaned on to the local Assur—Yehouah. In a generation, of course, “the god of your father” would come to mean the adopted god.
Hebrew?
Abarnahara, Persian Province.
The word “Hebrew” is taken to be synonymous with “Israelite” and “Jew”, but the scholars cannot decide what it means or why it came into usage when these people already have two names. The Hebrews must have lived in Palestine when Abraham and Jacob and their families were nomads. In Genesis 14:13, the word Hebrew occurs in the bible for the first time in a reference to “Abram the Hebrew”. Then Joseph explains that he had been abducted from “the land of the Hebrews (Gen 40:15)”. Hebrews are normally equated with the Israelites who escape from Egypt. Yet, in 1 Samuel 14:21, the Hebrews side with the Philistines against the Israelites, but then swap sides! Hebrews were obviously not necessarily Israelites. Hebrew was the name of the people of whom Abram and Joseph were a part confirming that it was in use hundreds of years before the Exodus, if the biblical chronology is to be believed. The alternative is that these are anachronistic usages in Genesis showing a later date of composition than usually believed.
“Apiru” or, in Egyptian, “’pr”, is a word found in the El Amarna letters, referring to raiders of the Egyptian colonies in Canaan and thought by some to be the invading Israelites. They say therefore that “Apiru” is the origin of the word “Hebrew”. But why then is the term Hebrew never found in Joshua and Judges in which the entry and settlement of the “Hebrews” into Canaan—long after the word “Apiru” first appeared in history—is described in detail?
The reason is the derivation of Hebrew is not from “Apiru” but from “eber” meaning “beyond” or “across” the “nahar”, the shores or banks of The River—the shores or banks of the Euphrates—and was not used until after Joshua and Judges had been written! This was the view of T C Mitchell writing in Leonard Cottrell’s Concise Encyclopedia of Archaeology fifty years ago. Needless to say, the Hebrews were the people who lived in Eber-niri, Eber hanahara or Abarnahara. When Abram is called “the Hebrew” in Genesis 14:13, the Septuagint renders it as “Perates”, meaning Euphrates. In other words the translators of Genesis into Greek knew that Eber had something to do with crossing the river Euphrates. Egyption ’pr, Babylonian Hapiru/Habiru, Hebrew Eber/Ibri all refer to the river Euphrates, in the sense of those who have crossed it. It is as clear an indication we shall get that people over 2000 years ago connected Hebrew with crossing the river Euphrates. The word “Hebrew” refers to people that lived in the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara, literally “Beyond the River” to the Persians, an administrative unit of the Persian empire not set up until the fifth century BC. Herodotus (Histories 3:91) calls Syria and Palestine the fifth satrapy, though it does not appear in lists, unless it is Arabia. This must be Abarnahara which was founded as an independent satrapy in the time of Xerxes.
“Eber” can also mean the opposite bank or shore and the hinterland beyond. The expression, Eber-niri, appears in 1 Kings 14:15 where the Israelites would be scattered by God “beyond the river” for apostasy—a suggestion that they would be transported back whence they came. In Isaiah 7:20, the same expression is used to designate a country of the king of Assyria, across the river to those looking from the west. In Numbers 24:24, Eber is used as an equal or parallel of Ashur! They are respectively the west and east banks of the Euphrates.
Possibly the name of the province of Abarnahara was an ancient one, and then so too would the name Hebrew be. That would allow the Egyptians, and Hittites, people who lived on the west banks to call invaders or refugees from the east who crossed the river, the “Apiru” or “Habiru”[†]Habiru as refugees. It was the view of J Jaynes: “The word for refugees in Akkad, the ancient language of Babylon, is the word khabiru, and this becomes our word Hebrew.”. The expression “Ebir-niri” meaning “beyond the river” was the Assyrian diplomatic designation of the regions west of the Euphrates—“beyond the river” to the Assyrians, who lived further east on the banks of the Tigris.
In Hittite texts, Habiru served the conquerors, the Hittite kings. The references in the El Amarna letters to the raids of Habiru have been noted and Apiru were still evident in the time of Rameses IV. But “Habiru” also appears in Babylonian tablets before Hammurabi, a half a millennium earlier. They are also mentioned in the Mari tablets of the time of Zimri-lim, a contemporary of Hammurabi. Other tablets from Arrapha, east of the Euphrates, says that Habiru sold themselves into slavery there.
Ebrum was the third and greatest of the six kings of the Ebla dynasty between 2400 and 2250 BC. Sargon I, the Great, of Akkad, after a punitive expedition in which Ebla was subjugated, put Ebrum on the throne of Ebla as a puppet, but after Sargon died (c 2310 BC), Ebrum reduced Akkad’s cities to vassalage. Only sixty years later in 2250 did Sargon’s grandson, Narum-Sin (Narum-Suen), reconquer Ebla and burn it down. It is unlikely to be coincidence that Ebrum means Eber, the eponymous founder of the Hebrews, suggesting that Sargon gave him the title of the name of the province, just as British nobility have the name of their demesne. Eber might have meant “beyond” (the Euphrates river) even in those days just as it did later. So Ebrum was the name given him by Sargon after the place he ruled. It was not his birth name.
So, the mention of Hebrews might not be conclusive of a late date, but we are left with the puzzle of why it was not used in books like Joshua and Judges that might have been expected to use the word, if it was earlier. The solution might be that Eber was a general name for anyone crossing the river—a name for transients from the east of any racial group but seen as undesirable and disruptive until the Persians began to use it exclusively for the settled people in their province of Abarnahara.
The region meant by the Assyrian expression was the region where the modern boundary of Syria and Turkey is cut by the river Euphrates. Several major tributaries of the Euphrates as well as its main channel and several rivers running into the Mediterranean, make this the lands of the “banks of the rivers” which might be the best interpretation of Ebir-nari. It is the same region near Urfa and Harran, important for Abram and his children!
Harran was the centre of Paddan Aram (Gen 28:2) as is known from inscriptions and Tell Feddan remains near Harran into modern times. Til Nahiri was another ancient town nearby identifiable with Nahor. The Assyrian census confirming that the area was occupied by Aramaeans has been mantioned.
Arpachshad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah (Gen 10:22; 11:10; 1 Chr 1:17), is nothing less than Persia, and Arpachshad’s grandson is Eber, the founder of the Hebrews in this legend. The descendents of Eber were these places near Harran whence Abram began his “return” to Canaan.
Thomas L Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (BZAW, 133; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974).
John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale, 1975).
