The-Bible-Came-From-Arabia-by-Kamal-Salibi-2016.pdf

T h e B ib le C a m e f r o m A ra b ia Kamal Salibi was born in Beirut in 1929. He studied in Beirut and London and is currently professor of history at the American University of Beirut. He has had many articles published, including a series on Lebanese history in medieval and modern times, and among the books he has written are The Modern History of Lebanon, Crossroads to Civil War and A History of Arabia.

Kamal Salibi

THE BIBLE CAME FROM ARABIA

Pan B ooks in association with Jonathan Cape

First published in Great Britain 1 9 8 5 by Jonathan Cape Ltd This edition published 1 9 8 7 by Pan Books Ltd, Cavaye Place, London sw io 9 PG in association w ith Jonathan Cape Ltd 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

by Spiegel Verlag, H am burg English language © 1985 by Kamal Salibi ©

1985

is b n o 3 3 0 2 9 5 1 9 5

Printed and bound in Great Britain by C ox & W ym an Ltd, Reading This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by w ay o f trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated w ithout the publisher’s prior consent in any form o f binding or cover other than that in which it is published and w ithout a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

CONTENTS

K ey to H ebrew and A rabic transliteration C onsonantal transform ations Preface s Introduction 1 T h e Jew ish w o rld o f antiquity 2 A question o f m ethod 3 T h e land o f A sir 4 T h e search for G erar 5 N on-findings in Palestine 6 Starting fro m T eh o m 7 T h e Jo rd an question 8 A rabian Judah 9 Jerusalem and the C ity o f D avid 10 Israel and Samaria 11 T he itinerary o f the Sheshonk expedition 12 M elchizedek: clues to a pantheon 13 T h e H ebrew s o f the Asir w oods 14 T h e A rabian Philistines 15 T h e Prom ised Land 16 A visit to Eden 17 Songs from the Jizan m ountains Epilogue A ppendix: O n o m astic evidence relating to the tw elve tribes o f Israel in W est Arabia N otes Index

xi xiii xv 1

7 27 38

47 63 76 83 97 110

124

133 143 151

157 166 173

180 189 191 197 217

MAPS . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Io II

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T he N ear East in antiquity Palestine at the tim e o f the O ld T estam ent Asir: physical characteristics Asir: adm inistrative areas (provinces and districts), 1978 P rim ary routes and centres o f population Gerar in Palestine Gerar(s) in Asir T he ‘J o rd a n ’ and ‘E den’ and its ‘G arden’ T he itinerary o f Sheshonk I - in Palestine T he itinerary o f Sheshonk I ~ in Asir T he Prom ised Land

/

10 13 39 41 45 48 61 84 134 138 167

KEY TO HEBREW AND ARABIC TRANSLITERATION

Note: Biblical H ebrew has a form al consonantal alphabet o f tw e n ty -tw o letters, including the sem i-vow els w (l) and y (■>). C onsidering that one consonant, the s (©), is taken to stand either for the s (tf), pronounced as the English sh, or the s (ip), the total n u m b er o f recognised letters w ould therefore be tw enty-three. N o one know s h o w Biblical H ebrew was vocalised, its traditional vow elling being probably based on A ramaic. Even the original phonetic value (or variant values) o f som e o f the H ebrew consonants, including the tw o semi­ vow els, is uncertain. Classical Arabic has a form al consonantal alphabet o f tw en ty-eight letters, w hich also features the tw o sem i-vow els w (i) and y(ut for perpetuating it alm ost indefinitely. O ld stones are found all over the N ear East; dig almost anyw here and you will discover them . But, to dig is one thing; to interpret w hat one finds is another. Herein lies the difference between the scientific archaeology o f the N ear East and w hat is ( ailed Biblical archaeology. T he first represents a systematic, objective attem pt to study the ancient cultures and civilisations of the area and trace their developm ent, stage by stage, on the basis o f their material remains, taking into account, o f course, the lim itations o f the discipline and its m ethods. The second represents no m ore than a search for material findings in areas already m arked out according to preconceived notions ofB ibli protruding from the main range, and others standing here and there in isolation, but also o f low -lying wahd or wahdah land. Presum ably, it was from the latter that ancient Judah got its n am e.1 There are innum erable references to Judah in the Biblical text which support m y claim that it was the territory o f the Biblical Israelites as a people rather than o f a particular Israelite tribe (see Appendix). M ost o f them also substantiate m y claim that their lands com prised the m aritim e slopes o f geographic Asir, along w ith the southern Hijaz as far north as the T a if ridge. O ne excellent example comes from tw o accounts o f the return o f the descendants o f the Israelite exiles from Babylon to Judah in A chaem enid times, found in Ezra 2:3-63 and N ehem iah 7:8-6$. These tw o texts, w ith slight variations, list the returning Israelite groups or com m unities according to their tow ns and villages o f origin, n o t according to tribe or family, as has hitherto been th o u g h t.2 G oing through the tw o texts, w ith a good m ap o f peninsular Arabia and a dictionary o f Arabian

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place-names for further guidance - m ore than one to make the task foo lp ro o f - one can easily spot nearly all the tow ns and villages listed by Ezra and N ehem iah. Sometimes they are localities still existing by the same names. In other cases they exist in readily recognisable forms o f the same names. In all cases they m ay be found in the parts o f West Arabia extending, roughly, from the T aif region and the hinterland o f Lith in the north, to the hinterland o f Jizan in the south. Even those terms w hich have hitherto been assumed to denote ‘priests’, ‘Levites’, ‘singers’, ‘gate-keepers’, ‘tem ple-servants’, or ‘Solom on’s ser­ vants’ on closer analysis appear m ore readily to refer to groups com ing from particular areas o f the same general region and its broader Arabian neighbourhood (notably the N ajran region; see below). T o establish the facts o f the case, let me begin by examining the latter group. C onsidering the absurdity o f the large num ber o f ‘priests’, it is odd that the traditional interpretation o f this group, as well as o f the others, has been unchallenged for so long. H ow ever, consider the following: a ‘T h e P rie sts’ (h-khnym) are said to n u m b e r a to tal o f 4,289 (a b o u t o n e te n th th e n u m b e r o f th e re tu r n in g Israelites, w h ic h w as a b o u t 40,000), an d are d iv id e d as fo llo w s (Ezra 2:36-39; N e h e m ia h 7 :39- 42 ): 1 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f je d a ia h (yd'yh). 2 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f I m m e r (’mr). 3 T h e ‘so n s ’ o f P a s h h u r (pshwr). 4 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f H a r im (hrm).

T he Biblical khnym here cannot be interpreted as the plural o f the H ebrew khn, or ‘priest’, for that w ould mean one in every ten m en am ong the returning Israelites was a priest. Rather, khnym here m ust be regarded as the plural o f khny, the genitive o f khn as a place-name, to mean the ‘people o f khn. T he original hom e o f the khnym was apparently the present oasis o f Q ahw an (qhwn, essentially qhn, Arabicised form o f Biblical khn), in Wadi N ajran, in the neighbourhood o f the oasis o f Salwah. This supposition is borne out by the geographic distribution o f the khnym, w hose hom e tow ns or hom e regions (rather than families) are listed by Ezra and N ehem iah as fol­ lows:

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1 Jedaiah (yd'yh), which is today clearly the tribal territory of Wadi‘ah (wd'h), in Wadi Najran. Both Ezra (2:36) and Nehemiah (7:39) speak o f bny yd'yh l-byt ysw‘, commonly translated ‘the sons of Jedaiah o f the house of Joshua’, but actually meaning ‘the people of Wadi‘ah to byt ysw‘ (a place-name)’, since the prepositional I in Hebrew means ‘to’ and not ‘o f’. The community in question must obviously have been the inhabitants of an area extending from Wadi'ah, in the heart of Wadi Najran, to (not of) the oasis of Wasi‘ (wsy‘, cf. Biblical ysw“) south of Riyadh, at the eastern extremity of the Yamamah region o f Central Arabia. 2 Immer (’mr), which is today apparently the oasis of al-Amar (’rnr), in the Yamamah region of Central Arabia, northeast of the broader area of Wadi Najran. 3 Pashhur (pshwr), which is today clearly the oasis of al-Harshaf (hrsp), in Wadi Habuna, north o f Wadi Najran. 4 Harim (hrtn), which is today the oasis stretch of Wadi Harim (hrm), at the western extremity of the Yamamah region of Central Arabia. From this, it is clear that the khnym m ust have been a com m unity w hose hom eland extended from Wadi N ajran northw ards to Wadi H abuna, and northeastw ards into the Y am am ah region o f Central Arabia. The vast extent o f the territory involved m ight explain w h y the returning khnym, according to both Ezra and N ehem iah, were so large in num ber. Being located inland, the land o f the khnym was an appendage to the land o f Judah rather than an integral part o f it. b ‘The Levites’ (h-lwym ) are divided as follows (Ezra 2:40; Nehemiah 7:43): 1 The ‘sons’ ofjeshua (ysw“). 2 The ‘sons’ of Kadmiel (qdmy’l , or qdmy 7 ). 3 The ‘sons’ of Hodaviah (hwdwyh in Ezra; hwdwh, or ‘Hodevah’, in Nehemiah). T he Iwym (plural o f Iwy, genitive o f Iw or Iwh), rather than being priestly ‘Levites’, m ust have been a com m unity originally from Lawah (Iw, or Iwh) in W adi A dam . In the same W adi 4 A dam there is still today a village called H udayyah (hdyh), w hich is none other than the Hodaviah o f Ezra and the H odevah o f N ehem iah. In the Ezra and N ehem iah texts, the people o f H udayyah, in Wadi Adam, are distinguished from the other tw o groups o f Iwym, w ho

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are spoken o f jo in tly as the ‘sons o f Jeshua and K adm iel’. This is because ‘J eshua’ and ‘K adm iel’ were neighbouring places o f the Lith hinterland at som e distance downhill from W adi A dam , in the vicinity o f present-day Ghum ayqah. H ere ‘Jeshua’ is represented today by the village o f Sha'yah (s‘y , cf. Biblical ysw 1), while ‘K adm iel’ is represented by the village o f al-Q adam ah (’l-qdm, apparently 7 qdm, the ‘g o d ’ o f qdm, cf. Biblical qdmy 7 ). c ‘T h e S in g e rs’ (h-msrrym), in c lu d in g th o se o f ‘A s a p h ’ (’sp) (Ezra 2:41; N e h e m ia h 7:44).

These w ere no doubt a com m unity originally from the village o f M asarrah (msr, or msrr), in the Bariq (Bdriq) region, west o f the M ajaridah region. East o f M asarrah, in the Ballasmar re­ gion, stands the village o f Al Y u su f (ysp), carrying to this day the nam e o f the Biblical ‘A saph’. d ‘T h e G a te -k e e p e rs’ (h-s‘rym) are d iv id e d as fo llo w s (Ezra 2:42; N e h e m ia h 7:45): 1 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f S h allu m (slwm). 2 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f A te r (’tr). 3 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f T a lm o n ( tlmn). 4 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f A k k u b (‘qwb). 5 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f H a tita (htyt’). 6 T h e ‘s o n s ’ o f S ho b ai (shy).

These s'rym, far from being ‘gate-keepers’, were a com ­ m unity o f the T aif region, w here their place o f origin was present Sha‘ariyah (s‘ry). All the hom e villages o f the s'rym, as listed by Ezra and N ehem iah, can still be found in the same general vicinity. T hey are Shum ul (smwl, Biblical slwm, ‘Shallum ’); W atrah (wtr, Biblical ’tr, ‘A ter’); M antalah (mntl, Biblical tlmn, ‘T a lm o n ’); ‘U q u b {‘qwb, Biblical ‘qwb, also, ‘A k k u b ’); al-H uw ayyit (hwyt, apparently an Arabicised form o f the Biblical htyt’, ‘H atita’); and Thaw abiyah (twby, cf. Biblical sby). e ‘T h e T e m p le - s e rv a n ts ’ (ntynym) are listed as bein g th e ‘so n s ’, o r p eo p le, o f th irty -fiv e d iffe ren t places (no t fam ilies; E zra 2:43-54; N e h e m ia h 7:46-56).

Certainly, these cannot have been ‘Tem ple-servants’. T hey were, I believe, a com m unity o f the Jizan region and the adjacent Rijal A lm a1, B ahr and Birk regions. Their place o f origin was probably one o f tw o villages called today Tanatin (tntn), in

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the Jizan region. Here are the thirty-five villages they came from: 1 Z ih a (syh’ in E zra; sh’ in N e h e m ia h ): S ak h y ah (shy) o r Sakhi (shy), in Rijal Alma*. 2 H a s u p h a (hswp’): H ash a fa h (hsp), in th e B irk reg io n . 3 T a b b a o th (tb'wt ): ‘A tib iy y a h (‘tbyt), in th e Jiz an region. 4 K e ro s (qrs): K irs ( krs), a n y o f n in e villages b y th e sa m e n a m e in th e Jiz an reg io n ; unless it is K u ru s (krs), in th e sa m e reg io n . 5 Siaha (sy'h’ in E zra; sy”, in N e h e m ia h ; in e ith e r case w ith th e su ffix ed A ra m a ic d efin ite article, le avin g th e n a m e as sy'h o r sy'): al-S a‘i (s'y, w ith th e p re fix e d A ra b ic defin ite article), in th e Jizan reg io n . 6 P a d o n (pdwn): F ad an ah (pdn), in th e Jizan reg io n . 7 L eb a n ah ( Ibtih): L u b a n a h (Ibnh) in th e Jiz an reg io n . 8 H a g a b a h (hgbh): H u q b a h ( hqbh), in th e Jiz an reg io n . 9 A k k u b (‘qwb): A l ‘A q lb a h (' qb), in th e jiz a n re g io n (as d istin ct fro m th e ‘U q u b o f th e T a i f reg io n , see above). xo H a g a b (hgb): H u q b a h (hqb), in t h e j i z a n reg io n , unless it is th e H u q b a h o f ad jacen t Rijal A lm a ‘. 11 S h am lai (smly): S h a m u la ’ (sml [), eith er o f tw o villages b y th e sa m e n a m e , in t h e j i z a n reg io n . 12 H a n a n (hnn): H a n ln a h (hnn), o r p o ssib ly H a n in l (him), in th e Jiz an reg io n . , 13 G id d el (gdl): Ja d al (gdl), in th e B a h r reg ion . 14 G a h a r (ghr): J u h r (ghr), o r p o ssib ly J u h r a h (ghr), in t h e j i z a n reg io n . 15 R eaiah (r’yh): R a y a h (ryh’, stric tly r’yh), in th e jiz a n reg ion . 16 R ezin (rsyn): a m o n g several possibilities, m o s t p ro b a b ly R a d w a n (rdwn), in th e j i z a n reg io n ; unless it is R a zin ah (rzn ), in Rijal A lm a ‘. 17 N e k o d a (nqwd’, o r nqwd i f th e suffixed A ra m a ic defin ite article is d isc o u n te d ): N a jid (ngd), in t h e jiz a n reg io n . 18 G az za m (gzm ): Ja z a y im (gzym ), in t h e j i z a n reg io n , unless this is th e n a m e o f j i z a n (gzn) itself. 19 U i:za (‘z ’): G h a z a w a h (gzw ), in t h e j i z a n reg io n ; unless it is ‘U z z (‘z), in th e B irk regio n. 20 Pasea (psh): Safah (sph), e ith e r o f tw o villages b y th e sa m e n am e, in t h e j i z a n reg io n . 21 B esai (bsy): B a sw a h (bsw), in th e jiz a n reg io n . 22 A sn a h (' snh): W asan (wsn), in th e B a h r reg io n . 23 M e u n im (m'wnym, tra d itio n a lly vocalised as a plural, b u t p o ssib ly also a d u al o f m ‘wn o r m'wny): M a a n i ( m ‘n), t w o villages b y th e sa m e n a m e , in Rijal A lm a ‘; un less th e referen ce is to th e valley

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o f W ad i M a 'a y in (A rabic p lu ra l o f m'yn, vocalised ma'yan), in th e Jiz an re g io n , w h ic h is th e less likely. 24 N e p h is im (npysym, p lu ral o f th e g en itiv e npys): N asifa n (nspn, A ra b ic sin g u la r nsp), in W a d i A d a m . T h e Israelite in h a b ita n ts o f this village m u s t h a v e o rig in a lly a rriv e d th e re f ro m a place b y th e sa m e n a m e in th e Jiz a n re g io n w h ic h n o lo n g e r exists. 25 B a k b u k (bqbwq): J u b ju b (gbgb), in th e Jiz an reg ion . 26 H a k u p h a (,hqwp’, w ith th e suffixed A ra m a ic definite article): al-H a jfa h ( hgp, w ith th e p refix ed A ra b ic definite article), in th e Jizan re g io n .3 27 H a r h u r (hrhwr): u n id e n tifia b le as th e n a m e o f o n e place, b u t p o ssib ly K h a r r (hr), B iblically id entified in rela tio n to n e ig h b o u rin g K h lra h (hr), in Rijal A lm a ‘. 28 B a z lu th (bslwt): p o ssib ly a tribal n a m e o f th e fem in in e p lu ral ty p e , e x tre m e ly c o m m o n in A rab ic, f ro m th e p la ce -n a m e bsl; cf. al-B alas (bis), in Rijal A lm a ‘. T h e r e is also th e tribal te rrito ry o f th e S ulab (sib) in Rijal A lm a 1. O th e r w is e S u lb iyah (slbyt), in the Jiz an reg io n . 29 M e h id a (mhyd ’): H a m ld a h (hmyd, p o ssib ly b y o rig in H a m ld a , o r hmyd’, w ith th e su ffix ed A ra m a ic d efin ite article, as in th e B iblical n a m e ), in th e Jiz a n reg ion . 30 H a r s h a (hrs’, w ith th e suffixed A ra m a ic d efin ite article): a l-K h u r s h (hrs, w ith th e p refix ed A ra b ic definite article), in th e Jizan reg io n . 31 B a rk o s (brqws): e ith e r K irb as (krbs) o r K a rb u s (krbs), in the Jiz an reg io n . 32 Sisera (sysr’): p r o b a b ly S irr Z a h ra (sr zh r’, a c o r r u p tio n o f th e o rig in a l n a m e , b u t p re se rv in g th e suffixed A ra m a ic definite article), in th e Jiz a n reg io n . 33 T a m a h ( tmh): T a m a h a h (tmh), in th e Jizan reg ion . 34 N e z ia h (nsyh): N a d u h (ndh), in th e Rijal A lm a 1. 3 5 H a tip h a (htyp ’): K h a tfa (htp ’, p rese rv in g th e suffixed A ra m a ic d efinite article), in th e Jiz an reg io n .

Ju d g in g by these identifications o f the hom e village o f the ntynym, w hich are concentrated in one area o f southern Asir, m ostly in the Jizan, it is clear that they were not ‘tem pleservants’, but a com m unity which derived its nam e from a location in that general area (see above). The same applies to the com m unity that follows: f ‘S o lo m o n ’s s e rv a n ts ’ (‘bdy slmh), listed as b ein g th e ‘so n s ’, o r p eop le, o f te n d ifferen t places (n o t families).

Rather than being ‘Solom on’s servants’, the bny ‘bdy slmh, or ‘sons’ o £ ‘bdy(m) slmh, were a com m unity originally from what

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is t o d a y t h e v il la g e o f ‘A b d a n ( ' bdn), in t h e j i z a n r e g i o n , th is v il la g e b e i n g B i b lic a ll y id e n t i f i e d in r e l a t i o n t o a n e i g h b o u r i n g

v il la g e c a lle d S i l a m a h (slmh). T h e s e w e r e t h e i r h o m e s : 1 Sotai (sty): Al S ut (st), in t h e j i z a n regio n . 2 H a s s o p h e r e th (h-sprt): R asafah ( rspt), in th e Jiz an re g io n , a p p a re n tly co n fu sed , te x tu ally , w ith A l-S afarah (sprt), in th e B allasm a r reg io n . 3 P e r u d a (prwd’, w ith a su ffixed A ra m a ic defin ite article): p o s ­ sibly a l-F ard ah (prd, w ith th e p refix ed A ra b ic d efin ite article), in Rijal A lm a ‘; m o r e likely al-R afda ( rpd’, p re se rv in g also th e su ffix ed A ra m a ic d efin ite article), in th e B a lla s m a r reg io n . 4 Ja ala h (y ‘lh): p o ssib ly ‘A liy ah (‘lyh), e ith er o f t w o villages b y th e sa m e n a m e in t h e j i z a n reg io n ; m o r e likely a l-W a ‘lah (w ‘lh), in th e Q u n f u d h a h h in te rla n d . 5 D a r k o n (drqwn): p r o b a b ly a l-D a rq (drq), in t h e j i z a n reg io n , te x tu a lly co n fu se d w ith Q a r d a n (qrdn), in the T a i f reg io n . 6 G id d e l (gdl): Ja d a l (gdl) in th e B a h r re g io n (see above). 7 S h e p h a tia h (sptyh): S h u ta y fiy a h (stypyh), a n y o f th re e n e ig h ­ b o u r in g villages b y th e sa m e n a m e in th e j i z a n reg io n . 8 H a ttil (htyl): a p p a re n tly Sahil a l-H u lu tl (hit), cited as a v a ria n t n a m e fo r Sahil A b i ‘A llu t, in th e j i z a n region. 9 P o c h e re t-h a z e b a im (pkrt h-sbym, sbym b e in g tra d itio n a lly v o ­ calised as a du al o f sby, ‘gazelle’, see C h a p te r 4): F aq arah (pqrt), id en tified in rela tio n to th e tw in t o w n s o f S abya (sby’, Aramaicised f o rm ofh-sby) an d a l-Z a b y a h (zby, A rab icised f o r m ofh-sby), all three places b e in g in close n e ig h b o u r h o o d , in t h e j i z a n reg io n . 10 A m i (’my in E zra; ’mwn in N e h e m ia h ): th e co n fu sio n is b e tw e e n Y a m iy a h (ymy) a n d Y a m a n i a l-M a r w a (ymn), b o th in th e Jiz an reg io n . It w o u l d s e e m t o m e t h a t t h e i d e n t i f i c a t i o n o f t h e h o m e t o w n s o r v il la g e s o f w h a t h a v e h i t h e r t o b e e n a s s u m e d t o b e t h e r e t u r n e d ‘s o n s ’ o f ‘p r i e s t s ’, ‘L e v i t e s ’, ‘s i n g e r s ’, ‘g a t e - k e e p e r s ’, ‘t e m p l e - s e r v a n t s ’ a n d ‘S o l o m o n ’s s e r v a n t s ’, b u t w h o w e r e i n r e a l i t y s ix tr ib a l g r o u p s k n o w n a f te r t h e i r r e s p e c t i v e p la c e s o f o r i g i n , is i n i t s e l f s u f f i c ie n t t o in d i c a t e w h e r e t h e B i b lic a l l a n d o f J u d a h r e a lly w a s . E v e n so , f u r t h e r e v i d e n c e is p r o v i d e d b y t h e i d e n t i f i c a t i o n s o f t h e r e m a i n i n g p la c e s m e n t i o n e d in E z r a 2 a n d N e h e m i a h 7 as t h e o r i g i n a l h o m e s , all i n W e s t A r a b i a , o f t h e I s ra e lite s r e t u r n i n g f r o m B a b y l o n . F o r c o n v e n i e n c e , t h e p la c e s w i l l b e i d e n t i f i e d a c c o r d i n g t o r e g i o n , f r o m s o u t h t o n o rth :

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The Jizan region

1 A ra h (’rh): R a h (rh); unless it is R ah a (rh) o r W a rk h a h (wrh), in th e T a i f reg io n . 2 Z a t t u (z tw ’, w ith th e suffixed A ra m a ic definite article): p o s ­ sib ly a l-Z a w iy a h (m etath esis o f z tw ’, w ith th e p refix ed A ra b ic definite article). 3 A te r ( ’tr, o n ly in Ezra): W a ta r ( wtr); unless it is W a tra h ( wtr) o r W a tira h (wtr), in th e T a i f regio n . 4 Bezai ( bsy): B a s w a h (bsw), B asah (bs) o r B u z ah (bz, e ith er o f tw o villages b y th e sa m e n am e); unless it is B a d a (bd’), in th e T a i f reg io n . 5 H a r im (hrrn): K h u r m (hrm); unless it is ‘A ra b a t H a r im (the ‘b r o o k ’ o f hrm), in th e M u h a y il district. 6 T e l-h a rs h a (tl hrsh, th e ‘h ill’ o f hrsh) an d T e l-m e la h (tl mill): Ja b a l a l-H a s h r (the ‘m o u n t a i n ’ o f hsr) an d th e p r o m o n to r y (tl) o f H a m ll (hml), th e la tte r in th e H u r r a th hill co u n try . 7 A d a n (’dn, in E zra) o r A d d o n (’dwn, in N e h e m ia h ): the c o n fu s io n is a p p a re n tly b e tw e e n t w o villages o f n e ig h b o u rin g dis­ tricts, o n e called U d h n (’dn) an d th e o th e r W a d a n a h (wdri). 8 H a r ip h (hryp , o n ly in N e h e m ia h ): H a r f (hrp), an y o f five villages b y th e sa m e n a m e . T h e r e is also a H a r f in Rijal A lm a ‘; a n o th e r in th e B a lla sm a r reg io n ; a n d y e t a n o th e r in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n . A lso p o ssib le is K h arfa (hrp), in th e T a i f regio n . 9 A n a th o th (‘ntwt): ‘A n tu ta h (' ntwt). 10 A z m a v e th (‘zm w t, in E zra) o r B e th -a z m a v e th (byt ‘zmwt, th e ‘te m p le ’ o f ‘zmwt, in N e h e m ia h ): al-‘U s a y m a t (‘smt, o r ‘sytnt), in th e H u r r a t h hill co u n try . 11 A d o n ik a m (’dnyqm, a p p a re n tly ’dny qm, ‘m y lo r d ’ o f qm): any o f a n u m b e r o f villages in th e re g io n called a l - Q a ’im (q’m), a p p a re n tly th e n a m e o f an an cien t local g o d .

b

The Rijal Altna‘ region 1

N e to p h a h ( ntph): Q a ‘w a t Al N a t i f (the ‘hill’ o f th e ‘g o d ’

ntp). 2

B e th e l (byt ’I): B atilah (btl), alread y id en tified in C h a p te r 7. 3 A i (h-‘y): A l- G h a y y (gy), already id en tified in C h a p te r 7. 4 B arzillai th e G ilead ite (brzly h-gl'dy, b o th in th e gen itiv e, th e n a m e s in th e n o m in a tiv e b e in g brzl an d gl'd): al-B arsah (app aren tly 7 brs, m e tath esis o f brzl), id entified in relation to n e ig h b o u rin g al-Ja‘d (’1-g‘d, m e tath esis o ig l‘d\ see C h a p te r 1).

106

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The Bahr and Birk regions

1 A z g a d (‘zgd, a p p a re n tly ‘zgd): p o ssib ly ‘A zz (‘z), in th e B irk re g io n , id e n tifie d in rela tio n to n e ig h b o u rin g HabTs a l-Q a d (qd) in th e ad jac en t M u h a y il reg io n . 2 H e b a ia h (in Ezra) o r H o b a ia h (in N e h e m ia h , in e ith er case hbyh): H a b w a h (hbwh ), in th e B a h r reg io n , unless it is the village b y th e sa m e n a m e in th e B ani S h ah r reg io n , o r K h a b y a h (hbyh) in th e Jiz an re g io n . Less likely are th e H a b w a (hbw) a n d K h a b w a (hbw) o f W ad i A d a m .

d

The Muhayil region

1 A d in (' dyn ): ‘A d ln a h (‘dyn). 2 E la m (' ylm): ‘A la m a h ( 7 m); unless it is A l a l- ‘A la m ( 7 m), th e T a n u m a h re g io n o f th e Sarat.

e

in

The Ballahmar-Ballasmar region

1 C h e r u b (krwb): K a r b a h ( krb); unless it is a l-Q a rlb a h (qrb) in th e Jiz a n re g io n , o r a n o th e r Q a r ib a h in th e T a i f reg io n . 2 B eb ai (bby): B a b ( bb), o n th e rid g e o f j a b a l D irim . 3 T h u m m i m (tmym): Al T a m m a m (tmm). f

The Bariq region

i P a ro s h (pr's): p o ssib ly al-Ja‘afir (g‘pr , m e tath esis o f pr‘s, v o ic­ ing th e fricativ e s in to a g)\ unless it is al-Ja‘afir in th e n e ig h b o u rin g Q u n f u d h a h reg io n ; ‘A jrafah (‘grp) in th e B a h r reg io n ; o r al-‘A rafijah (‘rpg) in th e G h a m id h ig h lan d s.

g

The Majaridah region 1 Gibeon (gb‘wn , only in Nehemiah): A ljab‘an (gb‘n). 2 N e b o (nbw)\ N ib a h (nb); unless it is N a b a h (nb), w h ic h is th e

N e b o o f M o se s ( M o u n t N e b o ) in th e T a i f re g io n (see C h a p te r 7, n o te 5), o r a n o th e r N a b a h o n th e isolated rid g e o f Jab al D ir im , in th e B a lla sm a r reg io n .

h

The Qunfudhah region

1 G ib b a r (gbr, o n ly in Ezra): Q a b r (qbr); unless it is J u b a r (gbr), in th e sa m e re g io n , o r a n y o f several places b y th e sa m e n am e, o r v aria n ts o f it, in o th e r p arts o f W e st A rabia. 2 H a d id (hdyd): H a d h ld h (hdd, strictly hdyd)-, unless it is H a d a d (hdd), in th e T a i f re g io n , o r W ad i H a d id (hdd, stric tly hdyd), in the Jiz an reg io n .

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3 U r i m (’wrym): a l-R iy a m (rym); unless it is a l-R iy a m a h (rym) in th e B a n i S h a h r reg ion . 4 K iria th -Je a rim (qryt y'rym), C h e p h ira h ( kpyrh ) and B e e ro th (1b’rwt ): th e c o n te x t o f j o s h u a 9:17, w h e r e these th re e pla ce -n a m e s are also m e n tio n e d to g e th e r an d in association w ith G ib e o n (see abov e, u n d e r th e M a ja rid a h reg io n ), clearly p o in ts to th e b ro a d e r Q u n fu d h a h h in te rla n d . In this v ic in ity th e re is a K iriath -Je arim ( Q a ry a t ‘A m ir, o r qryt ‘mr) a n d a C h e p h ir a h (Q ifarah , o r qprh), a n d a R a b th a h (rbt) , w h ic h is p e rh a p s B e ero th . i

The Wadi Adam region

1 P a h a th - m o a b (pht m w’b): F atih (pth), id en tified in relation to n e ig h b o u r in g U m m al-Y ab (’m yb), th e B iblical M o a b (see C h a p ­ te r 5). 2 J e s h u a (ysw‘, cited b y E zra an d N e h e m ia h as a d e p e n d e n c y o f P a h a th -m o a b ) : S h a ‘y a h (s‘y) (for th e o th e r d ep e n d en c y , ‘J o a b ’, see u n d e r th e T a i f reg io n ). 3 J o r a h (ywrh , o n ly in Ezra): W a ry a h ( wryh). 4 B e th le h e m (byt Ihm, o r ‘te m p le ’ o f Ihm, literally ‘b read , fo o d, p r o v is io n ’; a p p a re n tly th e n a m e o f a d eity o f p ro v isio n ): U m m L a h m (’m Ihm, m e a n in g ‘m o t h e r ’, i.e. ‘g o d d e s s ’ o f ‘bread , food, p r o v is io n ’) .4 5 R a m a h (h-rmh, w ith th e d efin ite article): D h a a l-R a m a h (the ‘o n e ’ o f rmh, h e re w ith th e A ra b ic definite article, m e a n in g th e ‘g o d ’ o f th e ‘h ill’) . 5 6 G e b a (gb‘, listed b y E zra a n d N e h e m ia h in asso ciatio n w ith ‘R a m a h ’): J a b ‘ (gb‘). 7 M ic h m a s ( mkms): M a q m a s (mqms) . 6 8 M a g b is h (mgbys, o n ly in Ezra): M ash ajib (msgb).

j

The broader hinterland o f Lith

1 T o b ia h ( twbyh): p e rh a p s B u w a y t (bwyt), in W ad i al-Ja’izah. 2 O n o (’wnw): A w a n ( V n ); unless it is W a y n a h ( wyn), in th e B ani S h a h r reg io n . 3 J o a b ( yw ’b): a l-Y a b (yb), in th e G h a m id re g io n n ea r B alju rashi. C ite d b y E zra a n d N e h e m ia h as a d e p e n d e n c y o f P a h a th -m o a b (see u n d e r W a d i A d a m ), a l-Y a b is lo cated in th e h ig h lan d s to the so u th e a st o f W ad i A d a m . A n o th e r possible Jo a b , closer to th e P a h a th -m o a b , is B u w a ’ (bus’), in th e T a i f reg io n . T h e n am es J o a b (yw’b) a n d al-Y ab, h o w e v e r, are abso lutely identical. 4 T h e ‘o th e r ’ E la m (‘ylm ’hr): th e reference is to t w o n e ig h b o u r ­ ing valleys o f th e Z a h r a n lo w la n d s, called W adi al-‘A lm a ’ ( 7 m) and W adi Y a h a r (yhr). N o ‘o t h e r ’ E la m is in qu estio n .

io 8

k

T H E BIBLE C A M E F R O M ARABI A

The T a if region

1 Z a c c a i (z k y ): Q a s y a (qsy); unless it is W a d i Q isI (qsy), in the Jiz an reg io n . 2 B a n i (bny, in E zra) o r B in n u i (bnwy, in N e h e m ia h ): th e c o n fu sio n is b e tw e e n tw o places in th e T a i f re g io n , th o se b e in g th e villages o f B in n i (bny) a n d B a n y a ’ (bny’). 3 L o d (Id): L id d (Id)-, u nless it is th e L id d a h (Id) o f W ad i al-Ja’izah, in th e L ith h in terlan d . 4 J e r ic h o (yrhw): W a r k h a h (wrh); unless it is th e sa m e as th e Je ric h o (yrhw) d iscussed in C h a p te r 7, w h ic h is W a r a k h (also wrh) in th e Z a h r a n h ig h la n d s.

A ltogether, o f the 130 recognised place-names in the E zraN ehem iah lists, which I have correlated w ith those West Ara­ bian villages cited above, the identification o f only a few remains uncertain. W hat is perhaps even m ore im portant, how ever, is that no m o re than a handful o f names have been identified w ith locations in Palestine (in Simons, only ten); m oreover, in only a few cases (notably Bethlehem , Lod, N ebo and Jericho) do the Palestinian nam es really fit w ith the Biblical original w ithout raising questions which are n o t readily answered (see Simons, par. 101 i f ) . This alone should lead one to conclude that the Biblical land o f Judah, as distinct from the Palestinian Judaea (or ‘land o f the Je w s’) o f R om an times, was to be found in West Arabia and now here else. Biblical Judah was, in fact, that region com prising the m aritim e slopes o f the southern Hijaz and Asir, from the Lith hinterland in the no rth to the Jizan region in the south, along w ith the T a if region across the w ater divide from the hinterland o f Lith. It w ould be possible to provide further evidence in support o f m y contention by identifying the names o f places cited as being in Judah in other Biblical texts, but I think m y p o in t has been made. Besides, I have no wish to tax the reader’s patience any further. If the relevant Biblical texts are read as they ought to be, in their original consonantal H ebrew , w ith o u t regard to any misleading tradition about them , there is no evidence w hatso­ ever to suggest that ancient Judah was anyw here other than w here I have located it. T he onom astic p ro o f is so overw helm ­ ing that it seems hardly to w arrant archaeological substan­ tiation. N evertheless, as I m entioned at the outset, the issue

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is unlikely to be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction before archaeological evidence is produced to support m y claim. In the m eantim e, it w ould seem quite in order to suggest that on the basis o f w hat inform ation I have adduced, Judah is, at least, far m ore likely to have been in West Arabia than in Palestine.

JERUSALEM AND THE CITY OF DAVID T o say that Palestinian Jerusalem, sacred to Jews, Christians and M oslem s alike, is n o t really the place m ost people think it is, seems an im pudent assertion, bound to inflame the hearts o f all true believers o f these three great religions. I do n o t deny, o f course, that the city o f Jerusalem as the w orld know s it deserves its reputation as the H oly City. I do suggest, how ever, that there was another Jerusalem in West Arabia, whose exis­ tence predates that o f the one in Palestine, and that the history o f ‘J erusalem ’ rightly begins there. T he H ebrew Bible tells us that the K ingdom o f ‘All Israel’ in the days o f King Solom on stretched ‘from D an even to Beersheba’ (i Kings 4:25). It has com m only been assumed that Beersheba is actually the present tow n o f BIr Sab‘ in southern Palestine, while D an has been identified as having been on the same site as the ruins o f Tall al-Qadi, near the headwaters o f the Jordan river, m ainly on the grounds that the w o rd qadt in Arabic means ‘j u d g e ’ (H ebrew dn). H ow ever, as I have already dem onstrated in C hapter 4, Beersheba is m ore likely to have been on the same site as the present-day village o f Shaba‘ah in the highlands o f Asir, near the to w n o f Khamis M ushait. As for the Biblical Dan, this probably survives in West Arabia by nam e as the village o f Danadinah (Arabic plural o f dn), in the Z ahran lowlands, south o f W adi Adam, as I will demonstrate further in Chapters 10 and 14. S olom on’s capital, Jerusalem , m ust have been situated som e­ w here betw een these tw o settlements, m ore likely at w hat is

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today an obscure village called Al Sharim ( 7 srym), near the tow n o f N im as, along the crest o f the West Arabian Sarat. Alternatively, it could have been several kilometres further south in the vicinity o f Tanum ah. ‘Jerusalem ’ m ay survive there in the nam e o f the village o f A rw a (’rw), identified in relationship to the neighbouring village o f Al Salam (slm), which w ould yield the com pound nam e A rwa-Salam (’rw slm; cf. the Biblical yrwslym, for Jerusalem). After the death o f Solom on, his kingdom o f ‘All Israel’ was divided am ong his descendants, w ho continued to reign in Al Sharim as kings o f ‘J u d a h ’; another succession o f rulers evi­ dently called themselves kings o f ‘Israel’. Eventually, the latter established their capital in Samaria (Biblical Shomeron, or smrwn), w hich I have identified as the village o f Shimran (smrn), in the low lands o f the Q unfudhah region, downhill from the Sarat. From their capital, the kings o f ‘Israel’ controlled a territory w hich dovetailed into the northern parts o f the terri­ tory o f ‘Ju d a h ’, as far as the region o f Taif. For the tim e being, how ever, m y main concern is Jerusalem; the m ore complicated question o f the placement o f ‘Judah’ and ‘Israel’ will be dealt w ith in the following chapter. The H ebrew Bible tells us that D avid capturedjerusalem and the ‘stronghold’ o f Z ion from the Jebusites, m oving his capital there from H ebron during the eighth year o f his reign as king over Judah (2 Samuel 5:5-10). O f the five H ebrons (hbrwn) which survive by the nam e o f Khirban (hrbn by metathesis) on the m aritime slopes o f Asir, I w ould suggest that D avid’s first capital was m ost probably the K hirban o f the M ajaridah region, which had once been the H ebron o f A bram , or Abraham (see Chapter 13). Certainly, D av id ’s H ebron could hardly have been in Palestine, where no such place appears to exist. True, Jew s and Christians have traditionally located Biblical H ebron in the tow n o f al-Khalll, in the hill country south o f Palestinianjerusalem. M oreover, because the place is associated with the career o f A braham , w ho is described in the Koran (4:125) as the friend (Arabic hlyl, vocalised halil, or ‘Khalil’) o f ( lod, M oslem s have also accepted the Jew ish and Christian identification o f al-Khalll w ith A braham ’s H ebron. N everthe­

1 12

T H E BIBLE C A M E F R OM ARABI A

less, it is unlikely that the place-name, al-Khalil, means ‘friend’ at all. Probably, it is an Arabicised form o f an earlier Semitic place-name, hlyl (from hll in H ebrew , ‘hollow o u t’, cf. Arabic hll, ‘pierce, get inside’), m eaning ‘cave’. This being so, the Palestinian to w n m ust surely have derived its nam e from a w ell-know n cave in the vicinity (m entioned by Arab geo­ graphers), w hich was consecrated by later tradition as the tom b-shrine o f A braham . In Asir, how ever, w e find further corroboration that the K hirban o f the M ajaridah region, in the Q unfu d h ah hinterland, was the first capital o f David, because w e find there several place-names which are associated w ith it. These are: Gibeon (gb'wn), today Al-Jib‘an (gb‘n) and H elkathhazzurim (hlqt h-srym), today al-Halq (hlq) and al-Siram (srm), all o f w hich lie in the same general area (see 2 Samuel 2:16). All these identifications neatly support m y belief that Jerusa­ lem m ust have been Al Sharlm, which is located som e distance from K hirban, uphill to the east, in the heights o f N im as, ju st across the Asir escarpment. As for the Jebusites (h-ybwsy, genitive o f ybws), w ho originally held the tow n, they are likely to have been one o f m any tribes o f folk w h o inhabited West Arabia in antiquity (see C hapter 15).'Three places there, am ong others, continue clearly to carry their name: the village o f Yabasah (ybsh), in Wadi Adam ; the valley o f Wadi Yabs (ybs) or Y ubays (ybys), on the m aritim e side o f the G ham id region; and the village o f Yabs (ybs), in the Q unfudhah region. If I have been able to carry the reader thus far in m y trans­ position o f the H ebrew Bible from Palestine to West Arabia, it is m ainly because I have been able to identify n o t one but several places m entioned in specific Biblical passages as being close to one another, in the same region w here I m aintain the Biblical story ran its course. W ith respect to Jerusalem, how ever, the reader is likely to dem and m ore convincing evidence than m ere toponym ies can supply. Therefore, let us begin w ith D avid’s capture o f Jerusalem as told in the H ebrew text o f 2 Samuel 5:6-10. So far, Biblical scholars have deplored w hat they m ain­ tain is the paucity o f inform ation provided by this text, con­ sidering that it treats o f an event o f the first im portance in the history o f the Israelites (e.g., see Kraeling, pp. 195-197). The

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fault, how ever, is not w ith the text, but w ith the way it has been traditionally read and interpreted. T h e RSV, for example, renders it as follows: A nd the king and his m en w ent to Jerusalem against the Jebusites ( 7 h-ybwsy), the inhabitants o f the land, w ho said to D avid, ‘Y ou will n o t com e in here, but the blind and the lam e will w ard you o f f ’ —thinking, ‘D avid cannot com e in here’ (I’ tb w ’ hnh k y ’m hsyrk h -‘wrym w-h-pshym l-’mr I’ y b w ’ dwd hnh). Nevertheless, David took the stronghold o f Z ion ( w -ylkd d w d ’t m sdtsyw n), that is, the city ofD avid. And David said on that day, ‘W hoever w ould smite thejebusites, let him get up the w ater shaft to attack the lame and the blind, w ho are hated by D avid’s soul’ (w -y ’mr dwd b-ywm h -h w ’ kl mkh ybw sy w -yg ‘ b-snwr w -'t h-pshym w - ’t h -‘wrym sn’w nps dwd).

T herefore it is said, ‘the blind and the lam e shall not come into the house’ ( 7 kn y ’mrw ‘wr w-psh I’ y b w ’ 7 h-byt). A nd D avid dw elt in the stronghold (b-msdh), and called it the city o f David. A nd D avid built the city (sbyb ) round about from the M illo inw ard (mn h m lw ’ w-byth, conventionally read mn h -m lw ’ w-byth). A nd D avid became greater and greater, for the Lord, the G od o f hosts, was w ith him (w -yhw h ’Ihy sb’w t ‘mw).

U nlike the translation, the original H ebrew version does not say that D avid and his m en w ent to Jerusalem ‘against’ the Jebusites w h o were there; it sim ply says that they w ent ‘to ’ the Jebusites ( 7 h-ybwsy). This suggests, perhaps, that David did n o t have to conquer Jerusalem ; it had already been conquered by the Israelites before him , in the days o f the ‘J udges’. A t the tim e o f its conquest, the Jebusites living in Jerusalem were allowed to rem ain there, and they were still there w hen the B ook o f Judges was being w ritten, which was long after the tim e o f D a v id (seeJudges 1:8, 21, 21:25). Hence, w hat David conquered after going ‘to ’ (not ‘against’) Jerusalem was not Jerusalem at all. It was another place altogether, in H ebrew msdt syw n, usually translated as the ‘stronghold’ o f Zion. It was this msdh, rather than Jerusalem , which was renam ed the C ity o f

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David. Clearly, this msdh was part o f the Jebusite territory. O nce he had captured it, D avid said ‘on this day the conquest o f the Jebusites is com pleted’ (literally, ‘on this day is all the Jebusite defeat’). This is clearly the meaning o f the original H ebrew : w -ylkd d w d ’t msdt syw n w -ym r dwd b-ywm h -h w ’ kl mkh ybwsy).

Actually, the Israelites before the tim e o f David, having captured Jerusalem , had sought to subdue the ‘so u th ’ (h-ngb ), along w ith the ‘hill co u n try ’ (h-hr) and the ‘low land’ (h-splh ) o f the Canaanites (Judges 1:9), but apparently w ithout success. N o w h e re is m entioned actual subjugation o f these areas at that time. This explains w h y D avid, w hen he conquered msdh, was able to proclaim: ‘on this day the conquest o f the Jebusites is com pleted’. T he msdh in question features in other Biblical texts as hr syw n (M ount Zion, or the ‘hill’ o f Zion). As I see it, the place could hardly be other than the ridge o f the Rijal A lm a‘ region, w est o f Abha and south o f N im as, w hose nam e is carried to this day by one o f its villages, Q a ‘w at Siyan (the ‘hill’ o f syn, spelled essentially as in the Biblical form ). O n that same ridge there are today tw o villages, one called Samad (smd) and the other U m m Samdah (’m smdh, the initial ’m being the attested definite article in the local Arabic dialect). The msdh o f syw n, w hich became the C ity o f David, was probably the second o f the tw o. O n that same ridge, also, there is another village called today al-Ham il (hml). This was certainly ‘the M illo’ (hm lw ’) o f the text w e are discussing, the suffixed Ara­ maic definite article o f the Biblical nam e o f the place being Arabicised into a prefixed definite article in the present form o f the same name. In the RSV translation cited above, the H ebrew w-ybn dwd sbyb mn h m lw ’ w-byth is rendered ‘and D avid built the city round about from the M illo in w a rd ’. N o w , the Millo is com m only th o u g h t to have been the ‘acropolis’ o f the Palestinian Jerusalem, ju st as Z ion is generally taken to have been the ‘stronghold’ o f that same Jerusalem, ‘stronghold’ here being the standard translation o f msdh. H ow ever, the H ebrew sbyb actually means ‘w all’, n o t ‘the city round a b o u t’. W hat D avid built, after conquering w hat is today U m m Samdah on the Siyan ridge o f

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Rijal A lm a‘, was ‘a wall from hmlw” , i.e. a wall extending ‘in w a rd ’ (w-byth) from the present village o f al-Hamil. It is possible also that the wall was built ‘from al-Ham il and byth’, byth being another place close to al-Ham il w hose nam e does not survive today (cf. al-Ba’thah, or b’th, in the M edina region; al-Batah, or b’th, in Wadi Adam; Bathyah, or btyh, northeast o f Lith); pending further evidence it is impossible to be m ore precise. Clearly, D avid was intent on turning present U m m Samdah, on the ridge o f Q a ‘w at Siyan (or M ount Zion), into a second capital subsidiary to Jerusalem - a com plex o f fortifications, including U m m Samdah along w ith al-Hamil, to defend his kingdom from the south. This is h o w the place is described in Psalm 48:12-13: W alk about Zion, go round about her, n u m ber her towers, consider well her ram parts, go through her citadels; that you m ay tell the next generation.1 I m ust point out here that, contrary to the com m on im ­ pression, the H ebrew Bible now here says that Zion, or the C ity o f D avid w hich was certainly there, were part o f Jerusalem. T he m ention o f Z ion alongside Jerusalem in a num ber o f Biblical passages (e.g. Psalms 102:21, 125:1, 2, 135:21, 147:12) does n o t necessarily im ply geographic proxim ity or identity betw een them . From the text o f various Psalms (e.g. 65:1, 74:2, 76:2, 132:13, 135:21), one gathers that Z ion o r ‘M o u n t’ Zion, apart from being the ridge on which the C ity o f David was located, was also established by D avid as a sacred shrine, apparently to replace that o f ‘Salem’ (slm, see C hapter 12, not ‘J erusalem ’; see Psalm 76:2). Therefore, the site o f the Z ion shrine, as distinct from the C ity o f David, m ust have been the elevation w here the present village o f Q a ‘w at Siyan is located. Finally, I w ish to consider a possible alternative to the tra­ ditional reading o f ‘wr and the ‘wryn in Samuel 5:6-10, usually understood to m ean the ‘blind’, a n d psh and th e pshym, meaning the ‘lam e’. According to standard translations o f the Bible, the Jebusites taunted David, boasting that they w ould leave the defence o f Jerusalem to the blind and the lam e am ong them;

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suggesting that Jerusalem was actually defended by such dis­ abled people and by no one else. Then David ordered a charge against them by w ay o f a water shaft (b-snwr), and we are told further that D avid had a special hatred for the blind and the lame, w hich is w h y they were forbidden to enter ‘the house’ (taken to mean the Jerusalem temple) - a regulation w hich is not attested to elsewhere in the H ebrew Bible. C o m m o n sense alone should lead one to question such a reading, therefore it is hardly surprising that the H ebrew text relates the m atter in a different way. The ‘wrym and pshym, in this context at least, are not the ‘blind’ and the ‘lam e’, but the tribal inhabitants o f tw o m ountain districts in the northern part o f th ejiza n region south o f Rijal A lm a‘ - apparently the same tribes which the Israelites had failed to subdue after their conquest o f Jerusalem before the tim e o f D avid (see above). Furtherm ore, in the territory o f the ‘wrym, w hich m ust have been called W , today the ridge o f Jabal ‘A w ara’ (W ), north o fja b a l H arub, there is today a village called Sarran (sra, metathesis o f Biblical snwr), a w o rd w hich translators have mistakenly called a ‘w ater shaft’. It follows that the territory o f the pshym, which w ould have been psh, was the area around the present village o f Suhayf (.shyp), on the ridge o f ja b a l al-Hashr, south o f ja b a l Harub. This being so, one m ust interpret the events that followed the arrival o fD a v id at Jerusalem in this way: W hen D avid came to Jerusalem, the local Jebusites told him he m ust not establish him self there before subduing the tribes o f the ‘A w ra ’ and Suhayf regions o f Rijal A lm a‘. W hat they gave him was sound advice, and the original H ebrew appears to have rendered it in verse: T hey said to David, ‘D o not come here; Unless you do away w ith the ‘wrym and the pshym, D avid does not come here.’2 This p rom pted D avid to m ove southw ards to complete the conquest o f the Jebusite territory by seizing present U m m Samdah, on the Siyan ridge o f Rijal A lm a‘. From there he continued further south ‘and reached Sarran (w-yg‘ b-snwr),

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alongside th tp sh y m and the ‘wrym (w -’t h-pshym w -’t h-‘wrym)'. O f these tw o troublesom e tribes, there was apparently an uncom plim entary popular saying that they ‘were not welcome in the house’ (literally, “wr and psh shall not enter the house’: H ebrew ‘wr w-psh I’ ybw ’ 7 h-byt). According to the H ebrew text, it w ould seem that they had no great love for David: T h ey hated the person o f David (sn’w tips dwd); For this reason it is said ( 7 kn y ’mrw), “wr and psh do not enter the house’. Significantly, the text also speaks o f the establishment and fortification o f the C ity o f David on M o u n t Zion directly after relating the expedition o f D avid against the ‘wrym and the pshym, i.e. against the tribes o f the hill country o f Jabal ‘A w ra ’ and Suhayf, south o f Rijal A lm a‘. This implies that his ex­ pedition there was a show o f force which did not result in outright conquest. It was no doubt to keep the recalcitrant tribes o f the south country at bay that David, as already ob­ served, built for him self a second capital in Rijal A lm a‘. N o w the p o w er o f D avid could become ‘greater and greater’. The G od o f sb’wt (not ‘hosts’, but the present village o f Sabayat, or sbyt, in the N im as region, see C hapter 12) ‘was w ith h im ’ (w-yhwh (here ‘w as’ n o t ‘Y ahw eh’ or the ‘L o rd ’) . . . ‘mw). In the light o f this interpretation, one should search for the Biblical Jerusalem (H ebrew yrwslym, parsed yrw slym)3 in som e area to the north o f the ridge o f Siyan (M ount Zion) in Rijal A lm a‘. M ost probably, this Jerusalem (as distinct from the Palestinian Jerusalem, see C hapter i) is a settlement som e thirty-five kilom etres no rth o f the to w n o f N im as, along the crest o f the Asir range no rth o f Abha. In fact, I w ould suggest that it is the village called today Al Sharim ( 7 srym), whose nam e involves only a slight Arabicised corruption o f the original yrw slym (the transposition o f the r and the / between the tw o parts o f the com pound nam e).4 At an elevation o f approxi­ m ately 2,500 m etres, the N im as region, as the suggested site o f the Biblical Jerusalem , is located in a strategic position to dom inate both the inland and the m aritim e slopes o f Asir.

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Furtherm ore, an ancient highw ay, running above the escarp­ m ent along the Sarat w ater divide, connects it to Abha and Kham is M ushait in the south, and to the G ham id, Zahran and T a if regions to the north, i.e., to the full length o f the ancient land o f Israel and Judah. I m ight add that this area is particularly rich in archaeological remains, which have yet to be explored. H ere, in Biblical times, stood countless sanctuaries and shrines (see C hapter 12), am ong them the shrine o f the so-called ‘G od o f H osts’ (the G od o f Sabayat, see above). T o reach this Jerusa­ lem in the N im as region, from his original capital H ebron in the M ajaridah region (see above), David did n o t have to travel far uphill along the course o f the valley o f W adi Khat. As a capital for a kingdom including m ost o f Asir, Jerusalem was strategically far better placed than H ebron. A lthough D avid apparently considered Jerusalem, near the venerated shrine o f Sabaoth (present Sabayat, see above), as his official capital, he probably resided m ost o f his time in his second capital, the C ity o f David, keeping close w atch over his southern borders. It was there that he died; at least it was there that he was buried (1 Kings 2:10). His son and successor Solom on, w h o appears to have been w ith him at the tim e o f his death, continued to reside in the C ity o f D avid (i.e. U m m Samdah, in Rijal A lm a‘) ‘until he had finished building his ow n house and the house o f the Lord and the wall around Jerusalem ’ (1 Kings 3:1). It was only then that he w ent to offer sacrifices at Gibeon (today Al Jib'an, or gb‘n, in the M ajaridah region), after w hich he proceeded to enter Jerusalem (1 Kings 3:4, 15). Incidentally, the jo u rn e y o f Solom on from the C ity o f David to Jerusalem by w ay o f Gibeon makes complete geographic sense. A road leading from Rijal Alma* to the N im as region actually passes through the M ajaridah region, w here the present village o f Al J ib ‘an is located. M oreover, the story o f S olom on’s succession, as related in 1 Kings, clearly suggests that the C ity o f D avid and Jerusalem w ere tw o different places, at some distance from one another. Actually, the flying distance betw een U m m Samdah in Rijal A lm a‘, and Al Sharim in the N im as region, is approxim ately eighty or ninety kilometres, the travelling distance by the

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various m ountain roads betw een them being considerably longer. U nlike his father David, Solom on embellished and fortified Jerusalem and m ade it his perm anent residence. W ith respect to the C ity o fD a v id and Jerusalem being tw o different places, the ‘stairs’ in Jerusalem that ‘go do w n from the C ity o f D av id ’ (h-m ‘lwt h-ywrdwt m-‘yr dwd) m ust not confuse the issue, as those w ere really the ‘altars’ or ‘podia’ (m ‘lwt) which had been ‘b rought ov er’ (ywrdwt) from the C ity o f David to Jerusalem (N ehem iah 3:15), possibly in the tim e o f Solomon. Therefore, assum ing that the Biblical Jerusalem was not the Palestinian Jerusalem , but probably the present village o f Al Sharim in the N im as region o f Asir, or som e other place nearby (see note 4), then it is possible to identify w ith varying degrees o f certainty m uch o f w hat is associated w ith Jerusalem in the Biblical text. T he ‘gates’ (H ebrew singular s‘r) o f Jerusalem are a case in point; they can be identified according to the places after w hich they were called, which probably indicate the directions onto w hich they opened: 1 T h e ‘B e n ja m in ’ (bn ymn) G ate (Jerem iah 37:13, 38:7; Z e c h ­ ariah 14:10): a m o n g several possibilities, p ro b a b ly D h a t Y u m i n (ymn), in th e B a lla sm a r-B a lla h m a r reg io n . 2 T h e ‘C o r n e r ’ (h-pnh) G a te (2 K in g s 14:13, cf. 2 C h ro n ic les 25:23; 2 C h ro n ic le s 26:9;J e re m ia h 31:38; Z e c h a ria h 14:10): ap p a ren tly a l-N a y a f a h (nyph, w ith th e A ra b ic definite article), in th e B a n u ‘A m r r e g io n o f th e Sarat. 3 T h e ‘D u n g ’ (h-’spt) G a te (N e h e m ia h 2:13, 3:13, 14, 12:31): a m o n g sev eral possibilities, p e rh a p s Fatish (pts), in W adi A d a m , o r S h atfah (stp), in th e T a i f reg io n . 4 T h e ‘E a s t’ (mzrh, rea d m-zrh, ‘f ro m th e place o f risin g ’) G ate (N e h e m ia h 3:29): A l- M u h riz (mhrz), o n e o f t w o villages b y this n a m e in th e B a n i S h a h r a n d B a lla h m a r regio n s, w e s t o f N im a s. 5 T h e ‘E p h r a im ’ (’prym) G ate (2 K in g s 14:13, cf. 2 C h ro n ic les 25:23; N e h e m ia h 8:16, 12:39): W a fra y n (wpryn, like ’prym in the dual), in th e B an i S h ah r reg io n . 6 T h e ‘F ish ’ (h-dgym) G a te (2 C h ro n ic les 33:14; N e h e m ia h 3:3; Z e p h a n ia h 1:10): a m o n g m a n y possibilities, m o s t p r o b a b ly A l Q a d lm (qdm), o n th e w e s te r n side o f W a d i B ishah, d irectly east o f th e Sarat. 7 T h e ‘F o u n ta in ’ (h-'yn) G a te (N e h e m ia h 2:14, 3:15, 12:37): th e referen ce c o u ld b e to a local sp rin g ; o th e rw ise to th e p rese n t village o f a l-‘A y n (‘yn, w ith th e d efin ite article), in th e Sarat, in th e B allasm ar re g io n , w h ic h is th e closest village b y this n a m e to N im a s.

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8 T h e ‘H o r s e ’ (h-swsytn) G a te (N e h e m ia h 3:26; J e re m ia h 31:40): th e referen ce co u ld b e to th e p re se n t village o f al-S u siy y a h (A rabic r a th e r th a n H e b r e w p lu ral o f sws), in th e Z a h r a n reg io n ; m o r e likely, it is to a l-M a su s (mss, m e tath esis o f swsym, also w ith th e definite article), in Rijal A lm a ‘. 9 T h e ‘In s p e c tio n ’ (h-mpqd) G ate (N e h e m ia h 3:31): m o s t p r o b ­ ab ly th e p re se n t h a r b o u r o f a l-Q u n f u d h a h (qnpd, w ith th e definite article), w h ic h is th e closest h a r b o u r to th e N im a s re g io n a n d its vicin ity , a n d w h o s e n a m e seem s to b e an A rab icised c o r r u p tio n o f

h-mpqd. 10 T h e ‘M id d le ’ (h-twk ) G ate (Jerem iah 39:3): al T u q (tq, w ith th e d efin ite article), in Rijal A lm a ‘. 11 T h e ‘J e s h a n a h ’ (h-ysnh) G a te (N e h e m ia h 3:6, 12:39): Y asln ah (ysnh), in th e Q u n f u d h a h h in te rla n d , w e st o f th e N im a s region. 12 T h e ‘P r is o n ’ o r ‘G u a r d ’ (h-rntrh) G ate (N e h e m ia h 12:39): ap p a re n tly M a tir (mtr), in th e M u h a y il regio n . 13 T h e ‘S h e e p ’ (h-swn) G ate (N e h e m ia h 3:1, 32, 12:39): Al Z a y y a n (zyn, p h o n o lo g ic a l eq u iv a le n t o f swn), in th e B a lla h m a r reg io n . 14 T h e ‘U p p e r B e n ja m in ’ (bn ymn h-‘lywn) G a te (Jerem iah 20:2): n o d o u b t A l Y a m a n i (ymn), in th e B a lq ran re g io n , n o r th o f N im a s , iden tified in rela tio n to n e ig h b o u rin g ‘A ly an ( 7 y«). 15 T h e ‘V a lle y ’ (h-gy’) G a te (2 C h ro n ic le s 26:9; N e h e m ia h 2:13, 15, 3:13): a m o n g several possibilities, m o s t p r o b a b ly al-Jiyah (gy, w ith th e d efin ite article), in th e N im a s regio n ; u nless it is al-Ja w w (gw , also w ith th e definite article), in th e B a lla sm a r re g io n w e s t o f N im a s . 16 T h e ‘W a te r ’ (h-mym) G ate (Ezra 8:1; N e h e m ia h 3:26, 8:1, 3, 16, 12:37): p o ssib ly a l-M u m iy a h (mmy, w ith th e d efin ite article), in the B a h r re g io n , in th e fo oth ills o f Rijal A lm a ‘; p o ssib ly also a l-M a y a y n (myyn, A ra b ic du al o f my, ‘w a te r ’) in th e M e d in a reg io n , alo n g th e m a in W e st A ra b ia n ca rav an h ig h w a y to Syria; unless th e reference is actually to a local ‘w a te r ’. 17 T h e g ate ‘b e h in d th e g u a rd s shall g u a rd th e p lace’ (’hr h-rsym w-smrtm ’t msmrt h-byt msh, 2 K in g s 11:6): tran slate d w ith m o r e ac cu ra cy as ‘th e ’hr o f h-rsym a n d smrtm beside th e w a tc h to w e r o f byt msh’, a referen c e to fo u r places w o u ld b e o b ta in ed . T h o s e are th e f o llo w in g , all o f th e m in th e Q u n f u d h a h h in terlan d : Y u h u r (yhr); S a ru m (srm, m e tath esis o f rsym); ‘th e ir ’ S am a ra h (smrt, th e final m in th e B iblical smrtm b e in g th e th ir d p e rso n p lural p ossessive p ro n o u n ); an d H illat M a s w a (the ‘s e ttle m e n t’, h en ce H e b r e w byt, o r ‘h o u s e ’, o f msw, cf. B iblical msh). 18 T h e g ate ‘b e h in d th e t w o w a lls’ (byn h-hmtym, 2 K in g s 25:4, cf. J e re m ia h 39:4, 52:7): th e reference is to th e ‘r e g io n ’ (attested

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arch aic sense o f th e A ra b ic byn, vocalised bin) o f Al H a m a ta n (hmtn), in th e Z a h r a n h ig h lan d s (as in th e H e b r e w hmtym, sin g u lar hmt, th e A ra b ic ised f o r m o f th e n a m e is in th e d u a l).5 19 T h e g a te o f ‘S h allech e th ’ (slkt, 1 C h ro n ic le s 26:16): S h aqlah (sqlt), in th e Q u n f u d h a h h in te rla n d . 20 T h e g a te o f ‘S u r ’ (h-yswr, 2 K in g s 11:6; 2 C h ro n ic le s 23:5): A l Y a sir ( 7 ysr), in th e T a n u m a h reg io n , s o u th o f N im a s in th e d ire c tio n o f A b h a. 21 T h e gate o f ‘J o s h u a th e g o v e r n o r o f th e c ity ’ (yhws' sr h-‘yr, 2 K in g s 23:8): h ere th e p re se n t village o f S h u 'a h (sw“), in th e B a h r reg io n , ap p e ars to b e iden tified in relatio n to th e villages o f al-S irr (sr) a n d a l-G h a r (gr, p h o n o lo g ic a l eq u iv ale n t o f ‘yr) in n e ig h b o u rin g Rijal A lm a ‘ (read ‘th e S h u 'a h o f th e S irr o f a l-G h a r ’). 22 T h e g ate o f ‘th e p o ts h e r d s ’ ( h-hsrwt, Je re m ia h 19:2): alK h a riz a t (hrzt, m e tath esis o f hsrwt, also in th e fem in in e plural), in the H ali v ic in ity o f th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n . 23 T h e ‘n e w g ate o f Y a h w e h ’ (s’r yhwh h-hds, J e re m ia h 26:10), o r th e ‘n e w g a te o f th e h o u se o f Y a h w e h ’ (s'rbyt yhwh h-hds, J e re m ia h 36:10): th e referen ce app ears to b e to an ancien t sh rin e d e d ica ted to Y a h w e h in th e p re se n t village o f a l-H a d lth a h (hdt, w ith th e d efin ite article, b e in g th e A ra b ic tra n sla tio n o f H e b r e w h-hds, ‘n e w ’), in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n . 24 T h e ‘u p p e r g ate o f th e h o u s e o f Y a h w e h ’ (s‘r byt yhwh h-‘lywn, 2 C h ro n ic le s 27:3, b e tte r tra n sla te d as ‘th e g a te o f th e h o u se o f Y a h w e h o f h-'lywn’): th e s a n c tu a ry in q u e s tio n w as th a t o f Al ‘A ly a n ( 7 ‘lyn, th e ‘G o d ’ o f 7 y n ) i n th e N im a s re g io n (see C h a p te r 12). 25 T h e ‘f o r m e r ’ gate (s‘r h-r’swn, Z e c h a ria h 14:10): p ro b a b ly R a w s h a n (rwsn), in W ad i B ish ah ; less likely RTshan (rsn) o r R u s a n (rsn), in th e T a i f r e g io n .6

O n e could go on m uch further, identifying the m any places m entioned by nam e in the H ebrew Bible in connection w ith Jerusalem (wall-sections, tow ers, springs, fields, buildings or burial places) in term s o f the names o f locations which are still there, m ostly w ithin direct reach o f Al Sharim, in the N im as region o f Asir. B ut I have no wish to tax the reader’s patience w ith the addition o f w hat w ould appear to be superfluous inform ation. Suffice to say, there is only one place which I have not been able to locate as yet by name and that is ‘the M o u n t o f Olives (hr h-zytym), w hich lies before Jerusalem on the east’ (Zechariah 14:4, as traditionally interpreted). O n the other hand, there are tw o other places whose names are associated in the Biblical text w ith Jerusalem which are not in the im m ediate

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vicinity o f the city but, significantly, texts that m ention them do n o t say that they were: 1 T h e V alley o f H in n o m o r o f th e ‘s o n ’ o f H in n o m (gy’ bn hnm). R e a d th e n a m e as h-nm, w ith th e initial h as th e definite article, a n d th e n a m e o f this ‘v a lle y ’ ( H e b re w gy') m a y b e read ily identifiable as th a t o f a l- N a m a h (nm, w ith th e A ra b ic d efin ite article), in th e B a lla h m a r re g io n , b e tw e e n th e B an i S h ah r re g io n a n d Rijal Alma*. T h is is e x a ctly w h e r e th e te x t o f J o s h u a 15:8 w o u ld lo cate th e place: ‘at th e s o u th e rn s h o u ld e r o f th e Je b u s ite (that is, J e ru s a le m ) ’ (RSV). A c c o rd in g to 2 K in g s 23:10, th e re w as a place in this valley called T o p h e t h (htpt, m is ta k e n ly read h-tpt). T h is, to d a y , is n o n e o th e r th a n th e v illage o f a l-H a ta fa h (htpt), in th e sa m e v ic in ity (cf. S im o n s, par. 3 6 ). 2 T h e b r o o k o f K id r o n (nhl qdrwn): this m u s t b e th e valley o f B a n i ‘U m a r a l-A sh a ‘ib, o n th e m a ritim e slopes o f th e Z a h r a n reg io n , w h e r e a village called Q id r a n (qdm) stand s to this day. In 2 K in g s 23:4, 6, th e H e b r e w m-hws l-yrwslym b-sdmwt qdrwn, an d m-hws l-yrwslym ’I nhl qdrwn, h a v e b ee n trad itio n a lly re n d e re d ‘o u tsid e J e ru sa le m in th e fields o f K id r o n ’, a n d ‘o u ts id e je ru s a le m to th e b r o o k o f K id r o n ’. H e re , h o w e v e r, hws is th e n a m e o f a place, to d a y th e v illage o f H a w w a z (hwz), in th e sa m e valley o f th e Z a h r a n re g io n w h e r e Q id r a n is to b e fo u n d . R e co n sid ered in this lig h t, th e a b o v e ­ cited H e b r e w f r o m 2 K in g s 23 w o u ld read: ‘f ro m H a w w a z to J e ru sa ­ le m , in th e fields o f Q i d r a n ’, a n d ‘f r o m H a w w a z to j e r u s a le m , to the b r o o k o f Q i d r a n ’. T h is re c o n sid e re d tran slatio n fits th e c o n te x t well: b y th e o rd e rs o f K in g jo s ia h , all th e id o latro u s fetishes, n o t o n ly f ro m Je ru sa le m , b u t f r o m th e w h o le area b e tw e e n H a w w a z a n d je r u s a le m , w e r e collected a n d ta k e n to th e fields o f Q id r a n , o r to th e b r o o k o f Q id r a n , w h e r e th e y w e r e b u r n t (fo r th e trad itio n a l id en tific atio n o f K id r o n o u tsid e th e P alestin ian Je ru sa le m , see S im o n s, par. 139).

O ne day, archaeology m ay confirm the suggested identifica­ tion o f the Biblical Jerusalem as the present village o f Al Sharim, in the N im as highlands. W hat is certain, however, is that the C ity o fD a v id , w hich is today U m m Samdah, in Rijal A lm a‘, was n o t the Jerusalem we think it is but another place altogether. As m entioned earlier, the C ity o f D avid was built as a fortress-tow n to guard the southern reaches o f D avid’s kingdom . A part from being a m ountain fastness, Al Sharim, D av id ’s ‘J erusalem ’, occupied a central position betw een Wadi A dam and the T a if region in the north, and Rijal A lm a‘ in the south, as the territory o f the kingdom extended betw een these tw o areas. Therefore, it was ideally suited to serve as D avid’s

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capital. It should also be noted that the location o f the to w n along the principal m ountain highw ay east o f the Asir escarp­ m ent connects it at several points w ith the inland caravan routes to the east as well as to the coastal route to the west. This highw ay still exists today as the main line o f com m unication in the region. O nce he had established him self in this ‘Jerusalem ’, D avid no longer reigned over Judah alone, but over ‘All Israel’ (2 Samuel 5:5), as did his son, Solomon, after him.

ISRAEL AND SAMARIA If Judah, or yhwdh, was the land o f gorges and ravines along the m aritim e side o f the southern Hijaz and Asir, Israel (ysr’l) m ust originally have been the land o f the higher elevations in the same area. M uch has been w ritten about the etym ology o f ysr’l, or ‘Israel’, but the results have been m ore confusing than illuminating. T he suggestion in Genesis 32:28 that it means ‘he strives w ith G o d ’, or ‘G od strives’ (ysrh 7 ), is typical folk etym ology. T hat the nam e is a contraction o f ysrh 7 is certain; here, how ever, ysrh is not the imperfect form o f srh in the attested H ebrew sense o f ‘strive, fight’, but an archaic substan­ tive o f the same verb in the sense o f the Arabic srw or sry (vocalised sara), ‘be high, lofty, elevated, highly placed’. Hence the name, m eaning ‘the height o f G o d ’, is directly related to Sarat (collective plural o f srw or sry, vocalised sarii, or san, ‘m ountain height’), which survives as the nam e o f the West Arabian highlands, especially in w hat is today Asir (see Chapter 3 ).

As an expression m eaning ‘the height o f G o d ’, the name ysr’l, or ‘Israel’, m ust have been a geographic nam e before it became the nam e o f a people, and ultimately o fa West Arabian kingdom distinct from that o f Ju d a h .1 Actually, ysrh 7 , m ostly in variants o f the inverted form 7 ysrh, ‘god o f height, elevation’, does survive as a place-name, n o t only in Asir but elsewhere in the Hijaz. Here is the list: 1 A l-Y a sr (’l-ysr) in th e M u h a y il district. 2 A l-Y a sra (’l-ysr) in th e N im a s reg io n . 3 A l-Y a sra (also ’l-ysr) in th e T a i f reg ion . 4 Y asrah (ysrh) in th e A b h a vicinity.

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12$

5 Al Y aslr ( 7 ysr) in th e T a n u m a h vicinity. 6 A l-Y a slra h (’l-ysrh) in th e M e d in a (al-MadTnah) reg io n , as th e n a m e o f tw o villages. 7 Y aslr (y5r) in th e M e cc a reg ion . 8 Al Y aslr ( 7 ysr) in th e Q u n f u d h a h regio n . 9 A l S irah ( 7 srh, p re se rv in g th e H e b r e w f o rm o f the ro o t) in th e A b h a reg io n . 10 A l-S a ry a h ( ' l-sry) in K h a m is M u sh a it, east o f A bh a. 11 A b u S ary ah ('b sry) in th e T a i f reg ion . 12 A l-S a ri (’l-sry), lo c a tio n u n d e te rm in e d .

O th e r names m ay be added to the above which derive from srw as a variant o f sry, in the sense that I have suggested. An alm ost exact equivalent o f the H ebrew ysr’l (with the 7 suffixed rather than prefixed) m ay be represented by SuraywTl (srywyl, apparently a corruption o f sry 7 ), the nam e o f an Arabian village in N ajd (Nagd), once part o f the Y am am ah region.2 T he Biblical ‘people o f Israel’ (bny ysr’l) m ust have been originally a confederation o f tribes in the West Arabian high­ lands. Reportedly, these tribes were twelve: Reuben (r’wbn), Sim eon (sm'wn), Levi (Iwy), Judah (yhwdh), Gad (gd), Asher (’sr), Issachar (ysskr), Zebulun (zblwn, essentially zbl), Dan (dn), N aphtali (nptly), Joseph (ywsp) and Benjam in (bn ymyn, essentially ymyn). T he names o f tw o o f them , in readily recog­ nisable Arabic form , denote tw o historical W est Arabian tribes called the L u’ayy (I’y, cf. Iwy, or Levi) and the Yashkur (yskr, cf. ysskr, or Issachar). T he rem aining ten are still identifiable as the nam es o f W est Arabian tribes which survive to this day. These are: the Raw abln (rwbn, or Reuben); the Sama'inah (sm‘n, or Simeon)3; the W ahadln (singular WahadI, or whd, for Judah); the Zabbalah o r Zubalah (both zbl, for Zebulun); the D uw aniyah, the D anayw l or the D andan (all three essentially dn, for Dan); the Falatin (pltn, for Naphtali); the Judan (singular Judi), Judah, Ju d i or Jadi (all four gd, for Gad); the D haw l Shari (the folk o f Shari, or sr, for Asher); the B anu Y u su f (ysp, for Joseph); the Yam na, Yam anah or Yam am (all three ymn, for Benjamin). M oreover, am ong the twelve Israelite tribes, that o f Joseph reportedly existed in tw o branches: Ephraim (’p rym) and M anas­ seh (mnsh). A stonishingly enough, the present West Arabian

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tribe o f the Banu Y u su f is actually called the ‘T w o Branches’ (Arabic al-Far‘ayn). T he tribal nam e Ephraim survives in West Arabia as FIran {pm) and M anasseh as M ansi (mns). M ore detailed onom astic evidence relating to the W est Arabian origins o f the tw elve tribes is presented in the Appendix. T h e H ebrew Bible tells us that these twelve tribes eventually settled in the land o f Judah, that is to say on the m aritim e side o f geographic Asir, w here they established for themselves a k ingdom by the late eleventh or early tenth century B.C. B oth political and econom ic circumstances at the tim e were favour­ able to the emergence o f such a kingdom in W est Arabia. There had been a tem porary recession o f imperial claims on Arabia from the direction o f M esopotam ia, N o rth ern Syria and E gypt after ca. 1 2 0 0 , which opened the w ay for the emergence o f independent local states in the peninsula. Som etim e between 1 30 0 and 1 0 0 0 B.C., there had also been a bo o m in the transArabian caravan trade, reflected by the large-scale introduction o f the camel to replace the ass as the preferred beast o f burden. T he K ingdom o f ‘All Israel’ (see C hapter 9), how ever, did not m aintain its political unity for very long. B y the second half o f the tenth century B.C., its territory was already being run by rival lines o f kings: the kings o f ‘Ju d a h ’, w ith their capital at Al Sharim (the suggested site o f the Biblical ‘Jerusalem ’), and the kings o f ‘Israel’. N e w bids for the imperial control o f West Arabia, first from E gypt, then from M esopotam ia, were no doubt instrum ental in creating and perpetuating this division (see C hapter 1). Biblical scholars, thinking in term s o f Palestine, have tra­ ditionally spoken o f the rival kingdom s o f ‘Ju d a h ’ and ‘Israel’ as being in the south and north, respectively, the latter assumed to have centred around the north Palestinian tow n o f Nablus. Actually, as w e shall see, in W est Arabia, ‘Israel’ did have its original centres o f p ow er to the north o f ‘J u d ah ’. Theirs, how ever, w ere not territories w ith clear boundaries between them . R ather they involved a political division w ithin the same territory, based on rival loyalties reinforced by religious schism. T he kings o f ‘J u d a h ’ and ‘Israel’, it appears, controlled tow ns and villages w ithin the same regions, often in close proxim ity

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to one another. This was certainly the case in the central territories o fju d a h , that is to say, in the Q unfudhah hinterland. It was also the case further north, in the Lith and T aif regions (see below). T h e first man to establish him self as king o f ‘Israel’ after the death o f Solom on, was ‘J eroboam son o f N e b a t’, w h o is described as an ’prty mn h-srdh, traditionally taken to mean ‘an Ephraim ite o f Z aredah’ (i Kings 11:26). Significantly, David, the founder o f the dynasty which continued to rule ‘Ju d ah ’, is also described as the son o f an ’prty from ‘Bethlehem ’. T hat ’prty cannot mean ‘Ephraim ite’ is certain; an ‘Ephraim ite’, in H ebrew , w ould be an ’prymy, from ’prym (dual o f ’p r), today W afrayn (wpryn, dual o f wpr), in Bani Shahr. Actually, ’prth (o f w hich the genitive is ’p rty) survives as the nam e o f the village o f Firt (prt), in Wadi A dam , o f the Lith region. Bethlehem , as already observed, was another village o f the same Wadi A dam , today U m m Lahm (associated w ith ’prth also in M icah 5:2; R uth 1:2, 4:11). ‘Z aredah’, the hom e tow n o f Jeroboam in the Firt vicinity, is today al-Sadrah (sdrh, w ith the definite article as in the H ebrew ), also in the Lith region. T he quarrel betw een Jero b o am and the house o f David no doubt had its origins in old jealousies betw een rival families o f Firt chiefs in Wadi A dam , w hich were later played out on a grander political scale. Jeroboam began his political career in the service o f Solom on, then revolted against him before being forced to flee to Egypt, w here he sought refuge w ith King Sheshonk I (see C hapter 11). After S o lom on’s death, he returned to Judah to challenge the succession o f S olom on’s son Rehoboam , establishing him self as rival king o f ‘Israel’ (see 1 Kings 1 1 :2 6 - 1 2 :2 0 ) . Having made him self king, Jeroboam ‘built Shechem (skm) in the hill country o fE p h ra im (’p rym) and dwelt there’ (1 Kings 1 2:25). C onsider­ ing that the Biblical ‘E phraim ’, as already observed, is today W afrayn, in the Bani Shahr district o f the Q unfudhah hinter­ land, the ‘Shechem ’ he built and made his capital (as distinct from other Biblical ‘Shechem s’) could have been present Suqam ah (sqm), in W adi Suqam ah, on the southw estern slopes o f the Z ahran region, n o t far north o f Bani Shahr. M ore likely, how ever, it was al-Q asim (qsm), in the Q unfudhah hinterland.

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Soon after, Jeroboam proceeded to ‘build’ (probably ‘fortify’) the to w n o f ‘Penuel’ (jpnw’l), as described in I Kings 12:25, w hich was in all likelihood al-Naflah (npl ), in the T aif region, or perhaps a l-N a w f ( ’l-nwp ), the nam e n o w given to a forested ridge in the Z ahran highlands. T o deter his followers from going to w orship in ‘Jerusalem ’, he established new sanctuaries for them in ‘B ethel’ and in ‘D a n ’ (1 Kings I 2 \ 2 g { ) . ‘Bethel’ is alm ost certainly a place k n o w n today as Butaylah (btyl), in the Z ahran highlands (see below); ‘D a n ’ is no doubt present-day Danadinah, in the m aritim e lowlands o f the Zahran region, the Arabic nam e o f the place being the plural o f dny, the genitive o f dn (see C hapter 14). A lthough his capital was at ‘Shechem ’, Jeroboam appears to have also resided from tim e to tim e in ‘T irzah’ (1 Kings 14:7), w hich was uphill from a place called ‘G ibbethon’ (1 Kings 16:15f). ‘G ibbethon’ (gbtwn) m ust have been one o f the villages in w h at is today the range o f al-Naqabat (nqbt), in the Gham id highlands. A t a higher elevation to the north, there is a hamlet called al-ZIr (zr), w hich could have been Tirzah. The area there is particularly rich in archaeological remains. T he kings o f ‘Israel’, w h o succeeded Jeroboam , established capitals for them ­ selves first in ‘T irzah’, then ‘Jezreel’ (the ‘Esdraelon’ o f the Greek Septuagint), then in ‘Sam aria’ (1 Kings 15:33f, 18:45^ 20:43f) - the last, ‘Sam aria’, being a city they themselves built on a hill close to ‘Jizreel’, w hich they purchased from ‘Shem er’: hence the nam e they gave it. ‘J izreel’ (parsed y z r ‘ '/, ‘m ay God so w ’, or ‘sow ing o f G o d ’) m ust be present-day Al al-Zar‘I ( 7 z r 1), in the low er reaches o f W adi al-Ghayl, not far to the southeast o f Q unfudhah. Hence the famed ‘Plain o f Esdraelon’, far from being the depression separating Palestine from Galilee in Syria, could only have been the ancient nam e o f Wadi al-Ghayl. ‘Shem er’ (smr), the original ow ner o f the hill on which ‘Sam aria’ (H ebrew Shomeron, or smrwn) was built, was m ost probably n o t an individual at all, but a tribe whose name survives in West Arabia to this day as Shimran (precisely, smm). The present territory o f the Shimran comprises the hinterland o f Q unfudhah and stretches across the escarpm ent and water divide to W adi Bishah. ‘Sam aria’ was no doubt w hat is today

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12 9

the village o f Shimran in the Q unfudhah hinterland, some distance uphill from Al al-Z ar‘I, or ‘Jizreel’. T rue enough, present-day Shimran stands distinctly on a hill. O ne need hardly go into all the Biblical names o f places m entioned as belonging to the kings o f ‘Israel’. T o show how these kings, and their rivals o f ‘J u d a h ’, held sway over tow ns and villages in the same regions, it should be sufficient to dem onstrate h o w m ost o f the tow ns which R ehoboam report­ edly fortified for the defence o f his kingdom o f ‘J u d a h ’ survive by nam e in the area from the Q unfudhah hinterland no rth ­ wards, w here the kings o f ‘Israel’ had their main centres (see Chronicles 11:6-9). T he names o f these places are as follows: 1 ‘B e th le h e m ’, alread y iden tified as U m m L a h m in W adi A d a m , o f th e L ith re g io n (see above). 2 ‘E t a m ’ (‘ytm), p ro b a b ly G h u tm a h (gtm), in th e Lith reg io n . T h e r e are, h o w e v e r, o th e r p o ssib le ‘E ta m s ’ in g e o g ra p h ic Asir. 3 ‘T e k o a ’ (tqw‘, archaic su b sta n tiv e o f qw‘): W a q ’ah (wq‘t) in W a d i A d a m ; Y a q ‘ah ( yq‘t) o r Q a ‘w a h (q'wt) in Rijal A lm a ‘. 4 ‘B e th - z u r ’ (byt swr, ‘h o u s e ’ o r ‘te m p le ’ o f swr): p ro b a b ly th e Al Z u h a y r ( 7 zhyr) o f Rijal A lm a ‘, o r th a t o f th e B a lla sm a r region; p o ssib ly also al-S ar (sr) o r al-S u r (sr) in th e Lith reg io n ; al-S ur o r al-S u ra (b o th sr) in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg ion ; o r al-S u rah (also sr) in th e v ic in ity o f B a h r. 5 ‘S o c o ’ (swkw): Sikah (sk ), in the T a i f reg io n . O t h e r possibili­ ties in c lu d e Saq (sq), S h aq ah (sq) an d S uq ah (sq), in th e L ith reg ion , th e last b e in g in W ad i A d a m ; also S h aqah and S h aq iy ah (sqy), in the Jiz an reg io n . 6 ‘A d u lla m ’ (‘dim): D a 'a lim a h (d'lm), in th e T a i f reg ion . 7 ‘G a t h ’ (gt): al-G h a t (gt), in th e Jizan region. 8 ‘M a r e s h a h ’ ( tnrsh): M a s h a r (msr), in th e B ani S h ah r region; M a s h a ra h (tnsrh), called M a sh a ra t al-‘AlI, in Rijal A lm a ‘; M a sh ari (msr), also in Rijal A lm a ‘; o r a n o th e r M a sh a ri in th e Q u n f u d h a h h in te rla n d , n o t far f ro m S h im ran . 9 ‘Z i p h ’ (zyp): p ro b a b ly Sifa (syp), in th e Q u n f u d h a h region; p o ssib ly S iyafah (also syp), in th e N im a s reg io n . 10 ‘A d o r a i m ’ (’dwrym, tra d itio n a lly vocalised as a d u al o f ’dwr): a l-D a ra y n (dryn, A ra b ic d u al o f dr), th e n a m e o f th re e villages in the T a i f re g io n , a n d o f o n e in th e Z a h r a n highlands. 11 ‘L a c h ish ’ ( Ikys): certain ly n o t the P alestinian T all a l-D u w a y r (see C h a p te r 5). T h e asso ciatio n o f th e place w ith gb‘wn,mqdh, hbrurn, an d ‘g lwn (‘G ib e o n ’, M a k k e d a h ’, ‘H e b r o n ’ an d ‘E g lo n ’, J o s h u a 10

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passim), w h ic h are to d a y A l J i b ‘an (gb'n), MaqdT (mqd), K h irb a n (,hrbn) an d ‘A jla n (‘gin), in th e Q u n fu d h a h h in te rla n d (all fo u r exact tran slite ra tio n s), p o in ts d istin ctly to Al Q ay a s ( 7 qys) in th e sam e area. 12 ‘A z e k a h ’ (‘zqh ): ‘A zq a h (‘zqh), in th e Q u n f u d h a h regio n. 13 ‘Z o r a h ’ (sr'h): a m o n g several possibilities, th e m o s t likely is Z a r ‘ah (zr‘h), o n th e m a ritim e slopes o f th e Z a h r a n reg io n. 14 ‘A ija lo n ’ (’ylwn): e ith er A ly a n (’lyn), in th e L ith reg io n , o r A y la ’ (’yl), in th e Q u n f u d h a h regio n . 15 ‘H e b r o n (hbrwn): K h ir b a n (hrbn), in th e M a ja rid a h re g io n (see C h a p te rs 9 an d 13).

Clearly, the kingdom s o f ‘Israel’ and ‘J u d a h ’ involved w hat was at least to a certain extent one territory. T hey also com ­ prised one people, divided in their loyalty betw een the kings o f the house o f David in the suggested Al Sharim (or ‘J erusa­ lem ’) and a succession o f rival dynasties established elsewhere, often in relative proxim ity to Al Sharim, whose rulers defied the legitim acy o f the house o f David by calling themselves kings o f ‘Israel’. Side by side w ith this political division, as already suggested, there appears to have been a religious schism w hich pitted the orthodoxy o f ‘Ju d ah ’, which survives as Juda­ ism, against the heterodoxy o f ‘Israel’, which was perpetuated by the sectarianism o f the ‘Sam aritans’. A m ong the Jews o f ‘Ju d a h ’, the cult o f the G od Y ahw eh was developed into a sophisticated w orld religion by a succession o f prophets (the nby’ym). T he religious authority o f these prophets, however, was generally resisted by the kings o f ‘Israel’ and their followers, w hose conception o f the Israelite religion seems to have re­ m ained tribal - hence their reported readiness to accept the divinity o f the gods o f other tribes and peoples am ong w hom they lived. H o w the heterodoxy o f ‘Israel’ developed into the ‘Sam aritanism ’ o f later times is not a question that will be discussed here. Suffice to say that the Samaritans, as a sect, continue to call themselves bny ysr’l, ‘the people o f Israel’, or h-smrym (vocalised Shomerim). This is usually taken to mean ‘the vigilant ones’ but actually means ‘those o£smr, the reference being to the ancient (and still existing) West Arabian tribal territory o f the Shimran. A m ong orthodox Jews, they are kno w n as h-smrwnym (vocalised Shomeromm), ‘those o f

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13 I

Shomeron , or ‘Samaria’, the one-tim e capital o f the kings o f ‘Israel’ w hich survives as the West Arabian village o f Shimran. W hen Judaism , in one w ay or another, spread from West Arabia to Palestine and elsewhere, it did so in both its orthodox and Sam aritan forms. In Palestine, the Samaritans established for them selves a new ‘Sam aria’ in w hat is today Sabastiyah (Sabastiyah , classical Sebaste), near m odern Nablus; there they recognised tw o local hills as the Biblical M ount Gerizim (grzym ) and M o u n t Ebal (‘ybl), w hich they held to be sacred. From the Biblical texts that speak o f these tw o hills, one has the im ­ pression that they were extrem ely close to one another. M o u n t Gerizim and M o u n t Ebal are spoken o f in Joshua 8:33f follow ing the account o f the Israelite conquest o f yryhw and h -‘y (the ‘Jericho’ w hich is present-day Rakhyah, in the W adi A dam , see C hapter 7; and the ‘Ai’ which is today ‘U ya ’ (‘y), in the highlands betw een the Zahran and T aif regions, rather than al-Ghayy in Rijal A lm a‘ (see Chapters 7 and 13)). T h e byt 7 , or ‘Bethel’, associated w ith h ‘y in this connection is the B utaylah (btyl) o f the Zahran highlands rather than the Batllah o f Rijal A lm a‘. This Butaylah controls one o f the main crossings o f the escarpm ent (or yrdn) o f the area. According to D eu tero n o m y 11:30, M o u n t Gerizim and M ount Ebal were located ‘beyond the yrdn, w est o f the road (today the Taif-A bha highw ay), to w ard the going d ow n o f the sun’. D ow nhill from Butaylah, on the western slopes o f the Zahran region, stand the tw in ridges o fja b a l Shada. The higher ridge, to the north, m ust have been the Biblical Gerizim, this nam e being still carried on its higher slopes by the village o f Suqran (sqm, corrupted metathesis o f g rzym , with the H ebrew plural suffix Arabicised in the present form o f the name). T he low er ridge, to the south, m ust have been Ebal - a name which is not actually found there, b u t w hich survives in the broader Zahran vicinity as that o f W adi ‘Ilyab ( ‘lyb)\ also as that o f the villages o f ‘Abalah (‘bl), ‘A bla’ (' bl) and ‘Ablah (‘bl), and the village and sandy ridge o f Bil‘ala’ (bl‘1), w here there is also a village called La‘ba’ (l ‘b). T he sandy ridge o f Bil‘ala’ could not have been the Biblical M o u n t Ebal, because it falls east rather than west o f the escarp­ m ent and the road.

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A ccording to D euteronom y 11:29, M ount Gerizim was the m ountain to be blessed by the Israelites, and M o u n t Ebal the one to be cursed. Actually, the northern ridge o f Jabal Shada is densely forested and traditionally terraced for cultivation, while the southern ridge is barren. Judges 9:7 associates M o u n t Geri­ zim w ith a Shechem (skm). This is today the village o f Suqamah (sqm), in W adi Suqamah, w hich flows at the eastern foot o f the n orthern ridge o f Jabal Shada. O n this same ridge (see Chapter 7, note 5), one finds ‘an altar o f unhew n stones, upon which no m an has lifted an iron to o l’ (Joshua 9:31; cf. D euteronom y 27:2-8). Similar altars are found in other parts o f the Zahran region, at least one o f them carrying an as yet undeciphered inscription (cf. Joshua 8:32). T he people o f Asir and the Yem en have traditionally regarded the altar on the northern Shada ridge (i.e. that o f the Biblical Gerizim) as a shrine o f special sanctity. T hey used to go there on special pilgrimages, m aking a point o f n o t stopping in any o f the villages along the way. In the present century, how ever, this practice has been suppressed. W hatever else the tw o sacred hills o f the Palestinian Samari­ tans o f N ablus m ay be, they were certainly not the original M ount Gerizim and M ount Ebal.

11 THE ITINERARY OF THE SHESHONK EXPEDITION Such is the im portance o f the H ebrew Bible to m odern m an that the ancient history o f the whole N ear East has been re­ searched w ith an eye to prove its historicity. H ow ever, as I have suggested, the traditional m isinterpretation o f Biblical geography has led to a m isunderstanding o f the historical geo­ graphy o f the ancient N ear East in general. A good example o f the confusion that has resulted from this crucial error o f m isplacem ent is provided by an analysis o f the m uch studied E gyptian records relating to the expedition o f Sheshonk I.' Sheshonk I was an Eyptian king o f the tw enty-second dyn­ asty, w h o ruled from about 945 to 924 B.C., and is credited w ith a m ilitary cam paign against the cities o f Judah described briefly in 1 Kings 14:25-26; 2 Chronicles 12:2-9. So far, the lists o f the places he subdued or visited have been studied on the assum p­ tion that they referred to cities or tow ns in Palestine (see map 9). O n the face o f it, this is n o t unreasonable, for Sheshonk, like other rulers o f ancient E gypt, m ust have had m uch to do w ith Palestine and Syria. A fragm ent o f an Egyptian stela found in coastal Palestine bears his name, or w hat scholars assume was his name, but evidence such as this does not necessarily m ean that he was actually there during his recorded expedition against the kingdom o f Judah. Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and artefacts bearing names o f ancient Egyptian kings have been discovered in various parts o f the N ear East, but few scholars regard their presence there as necessarily indicating that the m onarchs they refer to once passed through the vicini­ ties w here they were found.

T HE BIBLE C A M E F R O M ARABIA

^Rehob

T irza h ^

ichem Adam ■ Bethel sJerusalei

.Beersheba

r*-r Jam ar

Shu r D esert -

Kadesh

(Sur) Zin / .Desdrt

E ziorj-G eber

0 0 km

M ap 9

T h e itinerary of S heshonk I - in Palestine

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I w ould certainly suggest that on his expedition against Judah, Sheshonk did not go to Palestine. Setting out for this expedition from one o f the Egyptian seaports along the coast o f the Red Sea, Sheshonk landed som ew here along the coast o f the Hijaz, apparently near Lith. His intention, it seems, was to make a great show o f military p ow er there, to rem ind the kings o f Judah and other West Arabian rulers that their territories were not outside E g y p t’s m ighty reach. After gaining a foothold in the Lith hinterland, the Egyptian Pharaoh proceeded south tow ards the central part o f Judah, either by way o f the coastal road, or by taking another further inland which hugs the first line o f hills. A long the way, he stopped from tim e to tim e to conduct forays into the m ore m ountainous regions, and on one occasion penetrated the Sarat escarpment as far as Al Sharim, w hich I have suggested was probably the site o f the H ebrew Bible’s ‘J erusalem ’. Perhaps flushed w ith his success in that area, he was em boldened to m ove further southw ards into the Jizan region, w here his m ilitary operations appear to have been limited, perhaps on account o f the stiff resistance he m et from the m ountain tribes o f the region. From there, Sheshonk re­ turned alm ost directly to the vicinity o f Lith, where he subdued not only num erous places on the m aritim e side o f the escarp­ m ent, but also m any others in the region o f Taif, pushing his conquests inland to the lim it o f the desert. Such, at least, is m y o w n supposition, based on a reinterpreta­ tion o f Sheshonk’s expedition as described in the H ebrew Bible and in his o w n topographical records. Needless to say, the itinerary I have traced does not conform to that o f traditional Biblical scholars, w ho, I w ould suggest, have engaged in some bew ildering legerdemain in an effort to im pose som e form o f logic on the Sheshonk account to accom m odate it w ithin the borders o f Palestine. T heir version can hardly be taken seriously, how ever, for it rests on the curious assum ption that the Egyptian scribes responsible for transcribing the accounts did n o t k n o w h o w to render the place-names they contain in their o w n language and script. Considering that ancient E gyp­ tian is n o t too distant a cousin to the Semitic languages, that hardly seems likely. Even if w e accept such a shaky hypothesis,

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fitting the names o f all the places referred to in the Sheshonk lists to Palestine can only be done w ith cavalier disregard to the original E gyptian text. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that there is considerable disagreem ent am ong Biblical scholars as to w hat actually happened on Sheshonk’s expedition. If we read the accounts w ith West Arabia in mind, how ever, m any - if n o t all - o f the problem s disappear, leaving us w ith a rem arkably clear itinerary o f the Egyptian ruler’s campaign. Incidentally, I w ould suggest that if other Egyptian topographical lists, as well as M esopotam ian lists o f a similar nature, were studied in a similar way, it w ould produce som e startling results (see, for example, m y com m ents on Carchem ish and Karkara in Chapter i, note i i , and on the conquests o f Sargon II and the Am arna Letters, in C hapter 5). It is true that the Biblical accounts o f the Sheshonk (Biblical swsq or sysq, ‘Shishak’) expedition against Judah do not go into geographical detail. T he longer o f the tw o - that o f 2 Chronicles 12:2-9 _ sim ply reports that the Egyptian king arrived w ith a large arm y, ‘to o k the fortified cities o f Judah and came as far as Jerusalem ’, w ith o u t actually capturing it. T he king o f ‘Ju d ah ’, w h o was R ehoboam , the son o f Solomon, apparently managed to buy o ff the invader w ith ‘the treasures o f the house o f the Lord (i.e. the temple) and the treasures o f the kin g ’s house’. This m ight explain w h y ‘J erusalem ’ does not feature am ong the readable nam es in the Sheshonk lists. It is also possible, o f course, that the nam e o f the city m ight have existed in the parts o f the lists that have been lost, or which survive only as indecipherable fragments. Sheshonk, as I have already said, m ust have crossed the Red Sea to land on the coast o f the southern Hijaz near Lith. From there he proceeded uphill to subdue six places in the Lith hinterland (nos. 10-15 in the great Sheshonk list at the tem ple o f A m on in Karnak), four o f which rem ain fully legible. These places are, as n um bered in the original Sheshonk topographical list: 10 mtt‘: M u t i ‘ (mt‘), in W a d i A d a m ; o r a l-M a t‘ah (mt1), in W ad i al-Ja’izah, f u r th e r so u th . 13 rbt: R ib a t (rbt), in th e Z a h r a n lo w la n d s, o r a n o th e r R ib at, fu rth e r s o u th in W a d i al-S h aqq ah .

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14 t'nkV:2 th e Biblical T aa n ac h , o r t'nk; to d a y K a ‘n a h (k ‘nt), in th e Z a h r a n lo w la n d s .3 15 snmV :4 a l-M a sh n iy y a h ( tnsny), in th e Z a h r a n h igh land s.

In a first raid inland from there, Sheshonk appears to have subdued a place in Wadi Ranyah, whose headwaters are in the Zahran region: 16

snri’:5 S h a ry a n iy y a h (sryny).

He then returned to the Lith hinterland w here he seized yet another place: 17 Rhbt’: W a d i R a h a b a h ( rhb), a cluster o f villages in th e Z a h r a n lo w la n d s; o r R u h b a h (rhb), in W ad i A d am . N e x t Sheshonk proceeded southw ards to the central lands o f Judah, in the hinterland o f Q unfudhah and Birk. He could have taken either the coastal road, or the one further inland which hugs the first line o f hills. A long the way, he stopped here and there to conduct forays into the m ountain regions (see map 10). O f the seventeen places he raided in the area, the names o f fifteen are still legible and can be identified w ith varying degrees o f certainty: 18 hprmi’ (p arsed hpr mV): H a fa r (hpr), iden tified in relation to n e i g h b o u r in g M u w a y h (mwy), in th e Q u n f u d h a h v icinity, to d istin g u ish it f r o m o th e r H afars in th e sa m e area an d elsew h e re .6 H a fa r to d a y is a village o f th e a d m in istra tiv e d istrict o f M u w a y h . 19 idrtn, also read ’drm: a l-M a rd a (mrd’), in th e M a jarid a h reg io n . 21 swd: a l-D lsh (dys), in th e h in te rla n d o f H ali. 22 mhnm : clearly a m e tath esis o f th e Biblical ‘M a h a n a im ’ (imhnym) w h ic h w o u ld b e at p re se n t U m m M a n a h i (A rabic plu ral o f mtih, m e tath esis o f mini o f w h ic h th e H e b r e w p lu ral is mhnym), in th e Q u n f u d h a h r e g io n .7 23 qb‘n: Al J u b 'a n (gb‘n), th e Biblical ‘G ib e o n ’ (gb‘u>n), in the M a ja rid a h reg io n . 24 bt h(w)rn: a l-R a w h a n (rwhn), th e Biblical ‘B e th - h o r o n ’ (byt hwnvn), in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n ; unless the la tte r is K h a y ra n (hyrn), in W adi A d a m . 25 qdttn: p e rh a p s M a k d a h (mkdt), in the B a h r reg io n . 26 iyrn: a l-R a w n (rwn), in th e h in te rla n d o f H a li.8 27 mkdV: M a q d i (mqd), in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n , o n e o f the th re e B iblical ‘M e g id d o s ’ (mgdw), th e o th e r tw o b e in g M a g h d a h (mgd), in th e T a i f reg io n (see n o te 3), an d S h u 'a y b M a q d a h (the ‘v alley ’ o f mqd), in W ad i A d a m . 28 idr: W a d h ra h (wdr), in th e B ani S hah r reg io n . 29 id htnrk (parsed h-mrk): th e id in th e n a m e (H e b re w yd) is th e

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M ap 10 The itinerary of S heshonk I - in Asir

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e q u iv a le n t o f th e A ra b ic wadi (wd), o r ‘v alley ’; h-mrk, w ith th e H e b r e w d efinite article, is to d a y a l-M a ra k a h (mrk, w ith th e A ra b ic d efin ite article), in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n . T h e village o f a l-M a ra k a h is actually lo c ate d in o n e o f th e m a jo r w ad is, o r valleys, o f th e reg io n . 31 hinm, also rea d h’y ’nm: H a w m a n (hwmn), in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n ; Al H a w m a n , in th e B a lla sm a r regio n ; o r H a w m a n , in th e M u h a y il reg io n . 32 ‘rn: ‘A rm (‘rn), th e B iblical ‘E r a n ’ (‘rn), in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n ; un less th e la tte r is Al G h u rr a n (grn), in th e B a n i S h ah r reg io n . 33 brn, also read brm: B a rm a h ( brm), in th e Q u n f u d h a h reg io n ; unless it is B u r r a n (brn), in th e Z a h r a n lo w lan d s. 34 dtptr, also rea d d dptr:9 e ith er al-F atra h ( ’l-ptr) in Rijal A lm a ‘, o r a l-D a fra h (’l-dprt), in th e B a h r reg io n ; unless th e reference is to a n o th e r a l-D a fra h in th e Faifa d istrict o f th e j i z a n re g io n (see b elo w ).

It m ust have been at this stage o f the campaign that Sheshonk crossed the escarpm ent and advanced against Al Sharim, i.e. the suggested Biblical Jerusalem in the N im as region, w ithout entering the city. O nce he had arrived at dt ptr or d dptr, how ever, Sheshonk was already on his way south to m ake a rapid sweep thro u g h the Jizan hinterland, or perhaps he was already there (see no. 34). T he four places which he m ust have subdued in this region w ere the following: 35 ihm: W a h m (whm), in th e M a sarih a h district. 36 bt ‘rm: ‘U m a r (‘mr), full n a m e Q a r y a t ‘U m a r M a q b u l (literally, ‘th e v illage o f ‘U m a r to w h o m p ray e r, o r p ilg rim a g e , is d u e ’, w h ic h e x p lain s th e bt, o r ‘te m p le ’, in th e n a m e as cited in th e S h esh o n k list), in th e M a d a y a district. 37 kgri: G h a r q a h (grq), in th e A b u ‘A rish d istrict; a p p a re n tly th e h o m e o f th e ‘A rk ite s ’ (‘rqy, g en itiv e o f ‘rq o r ‘rqh) o f G enesis 10:17, h ith e r to ta k e n to b e th e ‘A rq a o f th e n o r th e r n L eb an o n , in th e h in te r la n d o f T rip o li.

38 sik: Kus (kws), in the Masarihah district, or Kls (kys), in the ‘Aridah district. R eturning from the Jizan region, Sheshonk stopped at bt tpw(h) (the Biblical ‘B eth-tappuah’, or byt tpwh, Joshua 15:53), today al-Fatih (pth) in the Bahr region. From there he proceeded directly back to the hinterland o f Lith, m aking fresh conquests there (notably in W adi Adam ), and resum ing his forays, this tim e across the B uqran col, to subdue places in the T aif region. A m o n g the new places he subdued in W adi A dam were the following:

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40 ibn’: W a b ir (ivbr). 55 p ’ ktt: Q a ti t (qtt) . 10 56 idmi’: W a d m a h (wdni). 58 (m)gdr: M a q d h a r (mqdr). 67 inmr: N a m i r a h ( nmr); u nless it w as a n o th e r N a m ira h , o r N a m i r (nmr), o u tsid e W ad i A d a m , b u t close b y in th e L ith h in terlan d . 69 ftisT’: F atish (pts). 74 (h)bri: K h a b ira h (hbr). 78 ‘dit: A d y a h (‘dyt). 112 & 119 irhm: a l-R a h m (rhm), a p p a re n tly raid e d tw ice. 133 ir(i’): W a ry a h (wryh), th e Biblical ‘J o r a h ’ (ywrh, see C h a p te r 8).

O utside W adi A dam , Sheshonk appears to have subdued Al Yarar ( 7 yrr), in the Banu ‘A m r region o f the Sarat. T he name is rendered in the list (no. 70) as irhrr or V hrr (parsed h-rr), the Egyptian V standing for the Semitic 7 (Arabic Al), as the ancient Egyptians w rote the I as r (and sometim es as n). In the broader Lith hinterland, the following places were also attacked: bt dbi: U m m Z a b y a h (’m zby). (q)dst: K ad lsah (kdst). dmrm (p arsed d mrm): A l M a r y a m ( 7 mrym. B iblical ‘M e r o m ’, o r mrwrn, J o s h u a 11:5, 7). 59 yrdV: Y a rid a h (yrd). 89 hq(q) (parsed h-qq): a l - Q u q a ’ (qq, w ith th e A ra b ic definite 45 54 57

article).

Across the B uqran col, Sheshonk waged raids against four­ teen places in the T a if region, which the great Sheshonk list m entions by name: 60 p ’ ‘mq: th e valley o f W a d i ‘A m q (‘mq). 72 ibrm: B a rm a h (brm), an oasis n ea r W adi T u r a b a h a n d the basaltic d e s e rt o f H a r r a t al B u q u m . 76 wrkyt: a l-W iraq (wr’q, A ra b ic p lu ral o f wrq; cf. wrkyt as th e fem in in e p lu ral o f wrk). 80 dpkl’ (parsed d pkT"), also read dpk (d pk): A l Faqih ( 7 pqh); unless it is th e al-F aq ih (as 7 pqh) o f W ad i A d a m . 86- tsdn(w): S h ad an a h (sdnt); unless it is D a s h n a h (dsnt) in th e L ith h in terlan d . 88 snyy’: S h an iy a h (stty). 91 wht wrki’: W a h a t (wht ) , id en tified in relatio n to th e n e ig h b o u r ­ ing D a r a l-A ra k a h (’rk), cited in th e A ra b ic lite ra tu re o n th e T a i f reg io n , to d istin g u ish it f ro m th e W a h at o f th e B a lla sm a r re g io n in A sir.

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93 ysht: S h u h u t (slit), th e n a m e o f a sm all w a d i o f th e T a i f reg io n . 95 & 99 limnt’ an d hnni: n o t o n e place, b u t tw o d ifferen t ones, A l H u m a n (hmn) a n d H a n a n a h (hnn). 107 hqrm: a l-M ih ra q (mhrq), e ith er o f t w o villages b y this n a m e in th e sa m e vicinity. 108 & n o ‘rdV: ‘A ra d a h (‘rd). ill nbt: N a b a h (nb, w ith th e fem in in e suffix nbt).u 118 (p’?) byy B u w a ’ (bwr). 150 irdn: a l-D a ra y n (dryn\ n o t th e ‘J o r d a n ’, see C h a p te r 7): a n y o f th re e villages b y this n am e; unless it is th e a l-D a ra y n o f th e Z a h r a n h ig h la n d s f u rth e r so u th .

It is possible to identify other places raided by Sheshonk in northern Asir and the southern Hijaz, but I think the point has been made: his campaign was clearly conducted in West Arabia rather than in Palestine. M ore precisely, it seems that the Egyptian invader pushed inland in his raids as far as the basaltic desert o f H arrat al-Buqum , w here he attacked the oasis o f B arm ah (see no. 72), and also ibr (no. 122), which is today the oasis o f W abr (wbr). It also appears that he proceeded south­ w ards across the headwaters o f Wadi Ranyah (srnrV, no. 104, parsed sr tin ’: Al Siyar (syr), in the G ham id highlands where the waters o f Wadi Ranyah (my) spring) to invade Wadi Bishah. Here, apparently on tw o different occasions, he attacked irqd (no. 97), w hich is probably present Al Q irad (qrd)\ idmm (nos. 98 and 128), probably Wadi Adam ah (’dm)\ and inn (no. 140), which is today W anan (wtin). In the prologue to his great list at Karnak, Sheshonk speaks o f having subjugated ‘the armies o f M itanni’ - either the present village o f M athani (mtny), or m ore likely the vicinity o f Wadi M athan (nitn), in the T a if region where he took so m any villages, as I have already noted. Certainly, the M itanni in question was not a kingdom in northern M esopotamia; had it been so, it w ould have involved a blatant anachronism .12 In the shorter Sheshonk list at the tem ple o f A m on in El Hibeh, nhrn (no. 4) is certainly not ‘M esopotam ia’, as has hitherto been assum ed, but the present village o f N aharin (nhrn), a short distance from W adi M athan or the village o f M athani in the T a if region. This place is no doubt the Biblical ‘N aharaim ’ (nhrym, Genesis 24:10; D euteronom y 23:5; Judges 3:8; Psalm

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60:2; I Chronicles 19:6), w hich the Septuagint (followed by traditional Biblical scholarship) v/as to identify as ‘M esopo­ tam ia’ (see C hapter 1). Likewise, the iss(wr) in this same list (no. 9) is n o t ‘A ssyria’, b u t am ong various possibilities the m ost plausible candidate is Yasir (ysr) in the region o f Mecca, near the seaport o f Rabigh. Setting aside such m inor uncertainties, w hat seems clear is that n o t only Biblical history should be reassessed, b u t also the ancient history o f the entire N ear East region. Those seemingly arid lists o f H ebrew O ld Testam ent place-names are, I am sure, fertile gro u n d for a new generation o f scholars w ho, if they can rid them selves o f the traditional notion that they are located in Palestine, m ay be able to clarify large areas o f ancient history w hich have hitherto been w rapped in confusion.

MELCHIZEDEK: CLUES TO A PANTHEON Given the unequivocal reference to a king-priest called M elchizedek in standard English versions o f the O ld Testam ent, it w ould seem churlish to question w hether, in fact, he existed. Yet, if there was such a person, the H ebrew Bible has nothing to say about him. N o w , it is true that a structure o f consonants reading as m lky sdq does occur in tw o Biblical texts (Genesis 14:18 and Psalm 110:4), w hich has been translated to mean ‘M y King is R ighteousness’. In each case, however, it seems highly unlikely that it is a personal name. In Genesis 14:18, m lky sdq appears to be an idiom atic expression. In Psalm 110:4 it is alm ost certainly a reference to the ‘kings’ (m lkym , w ith the final m o f the plural suffix dropped in the genitive structure) o f a particular place. Let us consider the full text o f Genesis 14:18. It reads consonantally as follows: w -m lky sdq mlk sltn h w sy’ Ihm iv-yyn w -hw khn l-’l ‘lyw n. This has traditionally been vocalised to yield the follow ing sense: ‘and Melchizedek king o f Salem (5/m) brought out bread and w ine and he is priest to E l ‘Elydn (or “ G od M ost H ig h ” R S V )’. In context, how ever, the mlk in m lky is unlikely to be the H ebrew w o rd for ‘kin g ’ to make m lky sdq a personal nam e m eaning ‘M y King is Righteousness’. M ore likely it is the plural o f m lk as a contracted form o f m lwk, meaning ‘m outhful’the participle o f a verb attested in Arabic (but n o t in Hebrew) as ’Ik, ‘ch ew ’. Arabic dictionaries cite ’Iwk sdq (vocalised aluk sidq, literally ‘m outhful o f offering’), as an archaic euphem ism for ‘food’, especially food offered to a guest. Hence, the real

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sense o f Genesis 14:18 w ould appear to be: ‘and the king o f Salem b ro u g h t o u t food (literally, ‘m outhfuls o f offering’), bread and wine, and he is priest to El ‘Elyon’. Incidentally, the peculiar syntax o f the H ebrew original, as o f the whole o f Genesis 14, suggests that it was w ritten in verse, as an epic account o f the m ilitary exploits o f A bram the H ebrew (see C hapter 13). W ord by w ord, the passage w ould translate: ‘A nd food the king o f Salem b rought out, bread and wine; A nd he is priest to El ‘Elyon.' In the context o f the story told in Genesis 14, the king o f Salem ho noured ‘A bram the H eb rew ’, w h o was on his way back hom e from a successful military venture, laden w ith booty. H aving b rought out his ‘bread and w in e’, the king o f Salem invited A bram to eat; idiomatically, he ‘gave him a m orsel o f fo o d ’ (w-ytn Iw m ‘sr mkl, Genesis 14:20). This makes it even clearer that the mlky sdq o f Genesis 14:18, like the mkl (Arabic m ’kl, vocalised ma’kal) o f Genesis 14:20, refers to food, and is n o t a personal name, ‘M elchizedek’. Traditionally, the expression o f m ‘sr mkl has been read as m ‘sr m-kl, to m ean ‘a tenth o f everything’, since m ‘sr can m ean ‘ten th ’ and ‘tenth p o rtio n ’ as well as ‘p o rtio n ’. Furtherm ore, the subject o f w-ytn Iw, ‘and he gave h im ’, has traditionally been taken to be A bram rather than the king o f Salem, although the latter was the subject o f the tw o preceding sentences. T he w hole verse has hence been understood to mean n o t that the king o f Salem invited A bram to eat, but that A bram gave him a tenth o f all the spoils w ith which he returned - a falsely assumed justification o f ecclesiastical tithing, considering that the king o f Salem was also a priest to ‘G od M ost H ig h ’. Here, it seems to me, is an exam ple o f h o w wide o f the m ark the traditional reading o f Biblical H ebrew has been. T u rn in g to the consonantal text o f Psalm 110:4, one finds the following: ’th khn l-‘wlm 7 dbrty mlky sdq, traditionally vocalised to read in translation: ‘you are priest for ever over the order o f M elchizedek’, the person addressed being presum ably King David. H ow ever, consider the following: 1 T h e H e b r e w l-‘wltn can ce rtain ly m e a n ‘fo r e v e r ’, b u t it can also m e a n ‘to ‘Olam’ - th e n a m e o f a g o d o r a shrine, o r an ep ith e t

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fo r Y a h w e h , th e G o d o f Israel (see b elo w ), m e a n in g ‘ev e rlastin g ’ o r ‘e te rn a l’. C o n s id e r in g th a t n o m o rta l can be priest - o r a n y th in g else fo r th a t m a tte r - ‘fo r e v e r’, th e seco n d p o ssib le in te rp re ta tio n o f th e H e b r e w l-‘wlm m ak es c o n te x tu a lly b e tte r sense. 2 T h e H e b r e w dbrty c a n n o t m e an ‘o r d e r ’ b ecau se it is n o t a w o r d in th e sin g ular. It can o n ly b e the dual o f dbrh (dbrtym, as d istin ct fro m th e fem in in e p lu ral dbrwt), w ith th e final m in th e dual suffix d r o p p e d in th e g enitive s tr u c tu re dbrty(m) mlky(m) sdq. T h e H e b r e w dbrh is th e fem in in e v erb a l n o u n f ro m dbr, h ere clearly in the sense o f th e vo ca lised A ra b ic dabara (also dbr), ‘fo llo w b e h in d ’. T h u s , th e w o r d m u s t b e tra n sla te d as ‘f o llo w in g ’ (i.e. ‘area o f ju r is d ic tio n ’, o r m o r e likely ‘flo ck ’), w h ic h w o u ld m a k e dbrty(m) m e a n ‘th e tw o fo llo w in g s ’, o r ‘th e t w o flo ck s’. T h e fact th a t th e re are places called sdq in t w o d iffe re n t p a rts o f W e st A ra b ia s h o u ld also b e ta k en in to a c co u n t h ere (see b elo w ). 3 T h e H e b r e w mlky(m) sdq, in c o n tex t, stand s as a g en itiv e s tr u c tu re m e a n in g ‘th e k in g s o f Sedeq’. O f course, it can also be read as a p e rso n a l n a m e , ‘M e lc h iz e d e k ’. T w o K o ra n ic references, h o w e v e r, s u g g e st th a t sdq (vocalised sidq, an d in te rp re te d to m e an ‘r ig h te o u s n e s s ’) co u ld h av e actually b een a place: o n e in w h ic h th e p eo p le o f Israel w e re m a d e to settle (10:93); also th e seat o f a ‘p o w e rfu l k in g ’ (54:55). T h is s tr o n g ly en d o rses th e first in te rp re ta tio n . S ignifi­ can tly , th e re is n o m e n tio n o f ‘S a le m ’ o r El 'Elydii in th e te x t o f th e P salm . I n t h e l i g h t o f th e s e o b s e r v a t i o n s , t h e r e a d i n g o f P s a l m 110 :4 s h o u l d b e c o r r e c t e d t o y i e l d t h e f o l l o w i n g se n se : ‘y o u a re p r i e s t t o ‘Olam o v e r t h e t w o flo c k s ( o r t w o dabrahs) o f t h e k i n g s o f

Sedeq'. H e r e , as in G e n e s is 1 4:18, t h e r e is n o q u e s t i o n o f a n y o n e c a lle d ‘M e l c h i z e d e k ’. W h a t is a c t u a l l y i n v o l v e d in t h e t w o p a s s a g e s I h a v e e x a m i n e d a r e t w o d i f f e r e n t se ts o f k i n g - p r i e s t s : t h o s e o f ‘S a l e m ’ a n d El ‘Elyon, a n d t h o s e o f Sedeq a n d ‘Olam. W h i l e t h e k i n g s o f ‘S a l e m ’

(slm) w e r e p r ie s t s t o El ‘Elyon (’I ‘lywn), t h o s e o f Sedeq (sdq) w e r e p r i e s t s t o ‘Olam (‘wlm). L o n g t h o u g h t t o h a v e b e e n a t o w n in P a l e s t i n e , s o m e t i m e s id e n t i f i e d as J e r u s a l e m , t h e ‘S a l e m ’ o f G e n e s is 14 c o u l d o n l y h a v e b e e n w h a t is t o d a y t h e v illa g e o f

Al S a l a m a h ( 7 slm, ‘g o d o f slm’, o r ‘g o d o f s a fe ty , s e c u r ity , w e l l - b e i n g , p e a c e ’), in t h e N i m a s r e g i o n o f t h e A s ir h i g h l a n d s . C l o s e b y , i n t h e s a m e r e g i o n , s ta n d s t h e v il la g e o f Al ‘A l y a n ( 7 ‘lyn, cf. B i b lic a l 7 ‘lywn), c a r r y i n g t o th is d a y t h e n a m e o f t h e d e i t y w h o m t h e k i n g o f ‘S a l e m ’ s e r v e d as p r ie s t. A ls o in

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the same N im as region, and in the T anum ah highlands n o t far to the southeast, stand the villages o f Al al-A‘lam ( 7 ulm) and Al al-‘Alam ( 7 7 m), carrying to this day the name o f the deity (the Biblical ‘wlm) w h o m the kings o f Sedeq served as priests. T he tw o different ‘flocks’ or ‘areas o f jurisdiction’ (Hebrew dbrtym) o f these king-priests (if tw o actual places w ith identical names w ere n o t involved) could have centred around the Zahran highlands, in the extrem e n o rth o f Asir, and the Jizan and N ajran regions, in the extrem e south. M ost probably, the seat o f these kings o f Sedeq w ho served the god ‘Olam was the present village o f Bayt al-Sadiq (byt ’l-sdq, ‘tem ple o f the god o f sdq’), in the Zahran region. N earby stands another village called Sidaq (sdq). T w o other villages called Sidaqah (sdq) and Siddlqah (sdq) are still to be found today in the Jizan region, along w ith one called Sadaqah (sdq) in the vicinity o f Wadi N ajran. If it is true, as I have suggested, that King David came originally from Wadi Adam , near the Bayt al-Sadiq o f the Zahran region, and that he finally reigned as king in the ‘Z io n ’ (or Siyan) o f Rijal A lm a‘ closer to the Sidaqah o f the Jizan region, the explanation o f the dual in dbrtym could lie there. Furtherm ore, the following should be taken into account: 1 T h e Israelite G o d Y a h w e h is d istin ctly id en tified as Shalom (slwm, a f o r m o f slm, o r ‘S a le m ’) in th e n a m e o f an altar r e p o rte d ly b uilt b y G id e o n at ‘O p h r a h ’ ( ‘prh), a place said to h a v e b e lo n g e d to s o m e o n e f r o m ‘E z e r ’ (’by h- 'zry, ‘th e father o f th e E z r ite ’, as cited in J u d g e s 6:24). T h e ‘O p h r a h ’ in q u e s tio n m u s t b e p re s e n t-d a y ‘A fra (‘pr), a v illage in th e N im a s reg io n , n o t far f ro m ‘A d h ra h (‘dr, cf. H e b r e w ‘zr), n o d o u b t th e Biblical ‘E z e r ’, in n e a rb y B an i Shahr. O b v io u s ly , th e altar o f Yahweh Shalom w as n o n e o th e r th a n Al S alam ah, in th e N im a s re g io n - th e ‘S a le m ’ o f G enesis 14. 2 T h e M essiah w h o s e b ir th is p ro p h e sie d in Isaiah 9:6 is called 7 gbwr ’by ‘d sr slwm, u su ally tra n sla te d as ‘M ig h ty G o d , E v e rla stin g F ath er, P rin c e o f P eac e’ (RSV). T h e H e b r e w sr slwm h ere p ro b a b ly m ean s ‘p rin ce o f Shalom’, i.e. o f th e sh rin e city o f ‘S a le m ’, o r Al Salam ah. C e rta in ly , ’by ‘d is th e n a m e o f a g o d , w h ic h su rv iv es in th e n a m e o f th e village o f A b u al-‘Id (’b ‘d, o r ’b ’I- ‘d), in t h e j i z a n reg io n . J u s t as certain ly , 7 gbwr is th e n a m e o f a g o d su rv iv in g in th e n a m e s o f th re e villages called Al J a b b a r ( 7 gbr): o n e in th e T a n u m a h reg io n ; o n e in th e ‘A b id a h reg io n ; o n e in th e M a ja rid a h d istrict; all th ree in A sir. In Isaiah, th e n a m e s o f th ree W est A ra b ia n g o d s are g iv e n to th e Israelite M e ssia h w h o w as to sit o n th e th r o n e o f D av id .

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3 The traditional reading of Genesis 14:22 has long assumed that Abram the Hebrew, in an oath, identifies his own god, Yahweh, with the El 'Elydn of the king o f ‘Salem’. The Hebrew text of Abram’s oath, hrmty ydy 7 yhivh 7 ‘lywn, has normally been taken to mean ‘I have sworn (literally, raised my hand) to Yahweh El ‘Elyon (in RSV, ‘to the Lord God Most High’). Actually, the Hebrew yhwh here (as in examples cited earlier) must be read as the archaic imperfect of the verb hyh - ‘be’. Hence, the oath must be read as: ‘I have sworn, El ‘Elydn being a god’, or ‘1 have sworn, (as) El ‘Elydn is a god ( 7 yhwh 7 ‘lywn)’, the recognition of the divinity o f El ‘Elydn being presented as testimony to the truth of the oath. In Psalm 7:18, however, ‘Elyon is unequivocally mentioned as a name of Yahweh (sm yhwh ‘lywn, ‘the name o f Yahweh is ‘Elyon’). Yahweh is also called ‘Elyon in Psalm 47:3. Moreover, ‘Elyon rather than Yahweh is cited as the name o f the God of Israel in more than twenty other passages of Biblical text, where it is commonly rendered in translation as ‘Most High’. 4 Yahweh is identified as El ‘Olam ( 7 ’wlm) in Genesis 21:33, and as ’lhy(m) ‘wlm (literally, ‘gods o f ‘Olam’) in Isaiah 40:28. He is also called ‘King of ‘Olam (mlk ’wlm) in Jeremiah 10:10. 5 In Psalm 7:18, the Hebrew ’wdh yhwh b-sdqw has so far been taken to mean ‘I will give thanks to Yahweh (or ‘the Lord’) due to his righteousness’. The b in b-sdqw, however, clearly means ‘in’ or ‘at’, and can in no way be made to mean ‘due to’, or ‘for’. The latter reading would have required the Hebrew preposition I in that case, as l-sdqw. Thus, the correct translation of the Hebrew is: ‘I will give thanks to Yahweh in his Sedeq’, that is to say in his shrine at a place called sdq, which is probably the Sidaqah or Siddlqah of Jizan.1 Indeed, one may go through other Biblical passages in which the word sdq occurs, and determine, according to the context, where it refers to a shrine called Sedeq and where it means simply ‘righteous­ ness’. By n ow , it should be perfectly clear: in all probability there never was a Biblically attested king-priest o f ‘Salem’ by the nam e o f ‘M elchizedek’, w ho headed an ‘ord er’. Interesting though such a conclusion m ay be, w hat is perhaps m ore signifi­ cant is that investigation o f the Melchizedek question offers clues w hich help to unravel a great historical mystery: the forgotten origins o f m onotheism in ancient West Arabia. First o f all, we m ust rem em ber that the w ord denoting the O n e ‘G o d ’, in H ebrew , is Elohim (’Ihym), which is the mascu­ line plural o f eloh (’Ih), or ‘g o d ’.

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N o w , one m ay safely suggest that w hat came to be recognised in W est Arabia, at som e point, as the O ne G od was originally a pantheon o f local or tribal gods. A count o f place-names in W est Arabia starting w ith Al ( 7 , cf. H ebrew 7 , ‘g o d ’), setting aside the countless place-names carrying an Arabic definite article al w hich could conceivably be a survival o f the H ebrew 7 , w o u ld readily show that the ancient West Arabian pantheon originally num bered hundreds o f gods, possibly including gods called by different names. A m ong these gods were Al Salamah (Biblical slm or slwm), Al ‘Alyan (Biblical 7 ‘lywn), Al al-A‘lam or Al al-‘Alam (Biblical ‘wlm), and Sidq (Biblical sdq, also attested as sdq and sdyq in Arabian inscriptions). In the H ebrew Bible, Al Salamah, Al ‘Alyan, and Al al-A‘lam (or al-‘Alam) are clearly identified w ith the Israelite god Yahw eh (yhwh, see below), and a sdq is cited as a shrine o f Yahweh. Also identified w ith Y ahw eh are a n um ber o f other West Arabian gods, whose names survive in their land o f origin as place-names. Such are Al Sadi ( 7 sdy, Biblical 7 sdy, or El Shadddi, often rendered in translation as ‘G od A lm ighty’); Al Rahw ah (rhw, ‘waterhole, w ell’, Biblical 7 r’y, vocalised El R o’i, being m isinterpreted to mean ‘G od o f Seeing’); al-Sabayat (sby’t, ‘gazelles’, the placenam e for a shrine; Biblical sb’wt, or ‘Sabaoth’, also m eaning ‘gazelles’, but traditionally interpreted in the sense o f ‘armies, hosts’ - hence the rendering o f yhwh sb’wt, as ‘the Lord o f H osts’, w here it actually means ‘the Yahw eh o f Sabayat’). As already noted, the names o f tw o other West Arabian gods, Al Jabbar (Biblical 7 gbwr) and A bu al-‘Id (Biblical ’b ‘d), are identified in Isaiah 9:6 as names o f the Israelite Messiah; these tw o gods m ay equally have been identified w ith the Israelite G od Y ahw eh.2 As for the nam e o f Y ahw eh himself, it also survives in West Arabia - not only as the yh or yhw o f the T ham udic and Lihyanite inscriptions o f the northern Hijaz (which is already a recognised fact), but also in a num ber o f place-names. O ne is that o f a m ountain ridge, Jabal T ahw a (thw), in coastal Asir. O thers are those o f villages such as al-Haw ( 7 hw), near Mecca; al-H aw a’ (’l-hw), A bu H iya’ (’b hy) and Hiyah (hyh), near Taif; Al H iyah ( 7 hyh), in the N im as region (possibly the nam e o f

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the principal Y ahw eh shrine, considering its proxim ity to Al "Alyan and Al al-A ‘lam, see above), and Hiyay (hyy), near D hahran, in the southernm ost heights o f Asir (perhaps the dt zhrn o f the Arabian inscriptions). M ore likely than not, Y ahw eh, like El ‘Elyon, was originally a god o f m ountain heights. His nam e has been the subject o f m uch learned contro­ versy, yet it can be sim ply explained as an archaic substantive o f the verb hwh (rather than the oft-suggested hyh, ‘be’), not in the H ebrew and Arabic sense o f ‘fall’, but in the Arabic sense (unattested in H ebrew) o f ‘rise, be elevated’. His nam e alone, in that sense, m ust have recom m ended him for recognition as a suprem e and transcendent deity. O n e cannot really tell w hen Yahw eh came to be identified w ith other gods o f the West Arabian pantheon, as the Elohim (’Ihym, ‘G o d ’, as distinct from h-’lhym, ‘the gods’) o f Israel. All one can say is that the identification was selective. While the names o f som e West Arabian gods, such as the ones m entioned above, came to be equated w ith that o f Yahweh, others did not. Such was the nam e o f the god ‘Succoth’ (skwt, Am os 5:26), w hich survives in the Ahha vicinity o f the Asir highlands as that o f the village o f Al Skut ( 7 skwt). Such also were the various gods called ‘Baal’ (b‘l, possibly by origin a contraction o f ’b 7 , ‘father o f crops’, or ‘the one o f crops’), such as ‘B aal-Zebub’ (b‘l zbwb, 2 Kings 1:2), w hose nam e survives as that o f various villages in Asir such as D habub (dbwb), and D hubabah (dbb) in the Jizan region, and Al D hubabah ( 7 dbb) near Khamis M u ­ shait. O ne can readily understand w hy this Baal-Zebub (the nam e is com m only thought to mean ‘Lord o f the Flies’) was never identified w ith Y ahw eh. Judging by the surviving m ean­ ing o f zbb in Arabic, his nam e indicates that he was the ‘father, o f the crops w ith the enorm ous phallus’. H ow ever, a complete inventory o f the West Arabian gods w ho came to be equated w ith Yahweh, and those w ho were not, is beyond the scope o f the present w ork. W hat seems m ore im portant is that a reinterpretation o f certain passages in the H ebrew Bible m ay provide us w ith some evidence that could be useful in assisting scholars to form ulate a new theory that w o u ld explain h o w m onotheism developed in W estern Arabia.

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O nce again, onom astics points the way which others with greater know ledge o f such matters than I may care to follow. Let m e add sim ply this, by way o f conclusion: there is an interesting story in Genesis 22:1-14 which, if read carefully, w ould appear to shed light on the transition in ancient West Arabia betw een polytheism and monotheism (or at least the cult o f Y ahw eh as a suprem e god). In this passage, we are told that A braham was ordered by ‘the gods’ (h-’lhym as distinct from ’Ihym) to take his son, Isaac, to the land o f ‘M oriah’ (h-mryh, today al-M arw ah, or mrwh, also with the definite article, in Rijal A lm a‘; see the geography of the Abraham story in C hapter 13). There, he was to sacrifice him as a b urnt offering on a m ountain, subsequently identified by name as yhwh yr’h, or ‘Y ahw eh Y ireh’ (today Yara’, or yr’, also in Rijal A lm a‘). A braham carefully follow ed the orders o f ‘the g ods’ (h-’lhym, repeated in 22:1, 3, 9),3 b u t w hen he began to prepare the altar for the sacrifice o f his son, and the latter enquired where the lam b for the b urnt offering was, Abraham answered that ‘G o d ’ in the singular (’Ihym n o t h -’lhym) will provide the lam b (22:8). Hearing this, Y ahw eh intervened to save Isaac from being sacrificed by providing a ram in his stead for the offering, having satisfied him self that A braham feared ‘G od’ (again ’Ihym, n o t h-’lhym), as w e are told in Genesis 22:1 if. Is it too fanciful to assume that this story was originally told to explain how m onotheism first began?

THE HEBREWS OF THE ASIR WOODS T he term ‘H e b re w ’ (‘bry, plural ‘brym, ‘bryym, feminine ‘bryt) occurs seventeen times in the H ebrew Bible, and three times in the Christian scriptures (Acts 6: i ; 2 Corinthians 11:22; Philippians 3:5). In the Christian texts, it is used to distinguish Chris­ tians w h o w ere ethnically Jews from others - particularly ‘Hellenists’ (Acts 6:1). In the H ebrew texts, its usage is som e­ w hat vague; the reading o f these texts, however, leaves one w ith the im pression that, the people o f ancient Israel were originally regarded as ‘H e b re w ’ tribes. W hat can one say about the ‘H ebrew s’? So far, m any attempts have been m ade to identify the Biblical 'brym w ith the ha-pi-ru o f the cuneiform texts, the U garitic ‘p rm, the Egyptian ‘pr, and the habiru o f the A m arna Letters (for these A m arna Letters, see C hapter 5). Such people are generally believed to have been not so m uch an ethnic group as a social class o f people obeying no authority and living outside the law, such as bandits, mercenar­ ies, vagabonds or pedlars. H ad these ha-pi-ru really been the Biblical ‘brym, the cuneiform texts, w ritten in languages closely related to Biblical H ebrew , w ould surely have spelt their name correctly, w ith o u t one or m ore fundamental consonantal changes. From exam ination o f the Egyptian topographical lists in C hapter 11, one finds that the ancient Egyptians also repro­ duced the consonantal structure o f Semitic place-names cor­ rectly; they certainly never took a b to be a p. Hence, the E gyptian ‘pr could hardly have been a misrendering o f the H ebrew ‘br - the ro o t from w hich ‘brym derives.

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T o gain clearer insight into w hat the ‘H ebrew s’ originally were, one m ay turn to the story o f A braham in Genesis, w here this patriarch goes under tw o names, A bram (’brm), until Genesis 17, and A braham (’brhm), starting from Genesis 18. Regardless o f w hether or not A bram and A braham were the same person, the Genesis story treats them as such. In Genesis 14:13, this patriarch, w h o is regarded as the ancestor o f the Israelites and other related peoples, is called ‘A bram the H e­ b re w ’ (’brm h-‘bry). H e is also said to have been living ‘by the oaks (m ore likely, the wood) o f M am re’ (b-’lny mmr’, literally in, not by the w ood o f M amre). This same A bram is described as living ‘in the w o o d ’ o f M oreh (mwrh) in Genesis 12:6, and ‘in the w o o d ’ o f M am re (same as above) in Genesis 13:18. The latter w o o d features again as the hom e o f A braham in Genesis 18:1, right w here the change in the nam e o f the patriarch occurs. Clearly, the claimed ancestor o f the Israelites, as depicted in Genesis, was a ‘H e b re w ’, or ‘bry, a m an w ho lived in the woods. T he term ‘bry itself m ay denote this. So far taken to be the equivalent o f the Arabic verb 't r (vocalised, ‘abara), ‘cross, cross over, traverse’, 1 the H ebrew ‘br in ‘bry, or its plural ‘brym, can ju st as well be the equivalent o f the Arabic collective plural noun gbr (vocalised gabar, singular gabarah, or gbrh), m eaning ‘w o o d s’. T he ‘H ebrew s’, originally, could have been a West Arabian folk o f the woods. In the D hahran region, in the southernm ost highlands o f Asir, there stands to this day a village called Al al-Ghabaran ( 7 gbrn, ‘god o f the w o o d s’). C ould a god by this nam e have been the ’Ihy h-‘brym (‘G od o f the H eb rew s’ RSV) identified as Yahweh, the G od o f Israel, in six passages o fE x o d u s (3:18, 5:3, 7:16, 9:1, 13, io:3)2? T o find out w here the ‘H e b re w ’ w ood folk o f W est Arabia were believed to have originated, one m ay follow the trek o f ‘A bram the H e b re w ’, as described in Genesis 11:31-13:18. Reportedly, A bram and his folk came originally from Ur Kasdim, or ’wr ksdym. The traditional rendering o f this U r Kasdlm as ‘U r o f the Chaldaeans’, taken to be in M esopotam ia, comes from the Greek Septuagint, and thus represents a geographic m isinterpretation o f the Hellenistic period. Actually, A b ra m ’s original hom e m ust have been present W aryah (wry, cf. ’wr) in

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Wadi A dam , Biblically identified in relation to M aqsud (mqsd, cf. ksdym), a place which is still there in the same region. From there, A bram and his folk m oved to ‘H aran’ (hrn) - apparently present-day Khayran (hyrn), also in Wadi Adam. At this point A bram parted com pany w ith his people and proceeded south­ wards to the vicinity o f ‘Shechem ’ (skm), today al-Kashmah (ksm), in Rijal A lm a‘, w here he settled in the w o o d o f ‘M o reh ’ - apparently present-day M arw ah (mrwh, one o f tw o villages by the same nam e in Asir, the other being the Biblical ‘M oriah’, see C hapter 12). N ext, A bram m oved to the ‘m ountain’ (i.e. the ridge) east o f ‘Bethel’ (byt ’I), present Batilah (btl), in Rijal A lm a‘ (see C hapter 4), encam ping in a place w here ‘Bethel’ was to his w est and ‘A i’ (h-‘y , present al-Ghayy, in the same region, see C hapter 7) to his east.3 There is actually a Bethel called Bayt U la (byt ’I) in Palestine, in the region o f al-Khalll (or ‘H e b ro n ’). A t a considerable distance to the east, across the Dead Sea, there is an Ai called K hirbat ‘A yy ('y), in the region o f al-Karak. The tw o regions, however, are separated from one another not by a m ountain, but by the particularly deep valley o f the Dead Sea. It is perhaps for this reason that Biblical scholars have not identified these places as the Bethel and Ai o f A bram , and rightly so. H ow ever, their suggestion that the Bethel in question is the Palestinian Baytln, and Ai the nearby al-Tall (see C hapter 7, note 8), is untenable on all counts. A b ra m ’s next m ove was in the direction o f ‘the N e g e b ’ (h-ngb, today al-Naqab, or nqb, again in Rijal A lm a‘). From there he w ent to msrym - not ‘E g y p t’, as the traditional identification has it, but present M isram ah (msrm), near Abha, where he reportedly got into trouble w ith ‘Pharaoh’ - pr'h, apparently the local g o d .4 A fter a sojourn there, w hich reportedly brought him great wealth, probably through trade in livestock, A bram returned to Rijal A lm a‘ - first to ‘the N eg eb ’, or al-Naqab; then to the site o f his earlier encam pm ent betw een ‘Bethel’, or Batilah, and ‘A i’, or al-Ghayy. It was from there that he finally w ent to settle in the w o o d o f ‘M am re’ (mmr’), near ‘H e b ro n ’ (hbrwn) - today N am irah (nmr), near Khirban (hrbn), in the hill country o f the hinterland o f Q unfudhah. In the vicinity o f N am irah, and in the same Q unfudhah region, there exists to

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this day a cluster o f four villages called Q aryat Al Sllan, Q aryat al-Shiyab, Q aryat ‘Asiyah and Q aryat ‘A m ir - no doubt the ‘K iriath-arba’ (qryt ’rb‘, ‘village o f four’, or ‘villages o f four’, perhaps four gods) w here the patriarch’s wife died (Genesis 23:2), w hich is identified in the same context w ith ‘H eb ro n ’. In the same vicinity also stands the village o f Maqfalah (mqplh), carrying to this day the nam e o f the cave o f ‘M achpelah’ (mkplh), w hich the patriarch purchased outside ‘H e b ro n ’ as a place o f burial for his family (Genesis 23:9f). So m uch for the geographic precision o f the Genesis story. M ore generally, one m ight also add that the nam e o f A bram (’brm) survives as that o f tw o locations in the regions w here he m ostly lived: the village o f Sha‘b Baram (the ‘valley’ o f brm), in Rijal A lm a‘; and Barm ah (brm), in the Q unfudhah region. Clearly, the career o f A bram centred around the region o f Rijal A lm a‘ and the hill country further to the north, in the hinterland o f Q unfudhah - areas where dense forests o f juniper and cypress at the higher elevations, and savannahs o f terebinth, acacia and other forest trees at the low er ones, are interspersed w ith pastures and arable lands. Incidentally, the ‘w o o d ’ o f A braham ’s ‘M a m re ’ is represented today by the cluster o f acacia trees and tamarisks in the vicinity o f N am irah and Khirban, in the Q unfu d h ah hinterland. W hat was in question was neither ‘oaks’ (as in the old Biblical translations) nor ‘terebinths’ (as in the m ore recent ones). M isram ah, however, w here the patriarch settled for a while, was no doubt an im portant m arket tow n, m uch as neighbouring Abha and Khamis M ushait have been in m ore recent times. T he highlands there are intensively culti­ vated and located at an im portant junction o f trade routes. A bram reportedly w ent there w hen ‘there was famine in the land’, probably caused by locusts, as until recently the wadis on the m aritim e side o f Asir w ere infested by these voracious pests. W ere all the people o f Israel originally ‘H ebrew s’, or tribal folk from the w oodlands o f Asir? Probably not. A m ong the tw elve ‘sons’ o f Israel, w ho were reckoned to be the eponym ous ancestors o f the twelve Israelite tribes (if twelve they were), only Joseph is distinctly spoken o f in Genesis as a ‘H eb rew ’ -

T H E H E B R E W S OF T H E ASIR W O O D S

I $5

an ’ys ‘bry, or ‘H ebrew m an ’; a ‘bd ‘bry, or ‘H ebrew servant, slave’; a n ‘r ‘bry, or ‘H ebrew b o y ’ (Genesis 39:14, 17, 41:12). N o n e o f his ‘b rothers’ is singled out as H ebrew , even though collectively they are referred to as such (e.g. 43:32). Joseph was reportedly sold as a slave in ‘E g y p t’ (msrym) - either M isramah, near Abha, or M asr (msr, singular o f msrym), in Wadi Bishah. Before that, he had been living in ‘H e b ro n ’, already identified as Khirban, in the Q unfudhah region, while his ‘brothers’ herded their flocks near ‘Shechem ’, or al-Kashm ah (see above), in Rijal A lm a‘ (Genesis 37:13-14). Sent after his brothers in ‘Shechem ’, and failing to catch up w ith them , Joseph pursued them to ‘D o th a n ’ (spelt dtyn and dtn, Genesis 37:17) - probably D athanah (dtn), in the vicinity ofjabal Faifa, in the m ountainous hinterland o f Jizan.5 A t the foot ofjabal Faifa runs the m ountain defile connecting th ejiza n coastal region and inland Asir. This explains w h y caravaneers passed near ‘D o th a n ’ on their w ay to M isram ah or to M asr, picking up Joseph from his ‘brothers’ and taking him along w ith them to sell him as a slave there. Later on, Jo sep h ’s ‘brothers’ (and his ‘father’ as well) followed him to M isram ah or M asr to escape a famine in their hom e country, m uch as the patriarch A bram had done som e tim e before. T he pre-em inence o f the ‘H e b re w ’ element am ong the Israel­ ites is indicated by the dom inant role given to Joseph am ong his ‘b ro th ers’ after all o f them had m igrated to the territory o f M isram ah or M asr (probably M asr, since the H ebrew V5 msrym can best be rendered as ‘the land o f the people o f msr’, the w o rd msry, plural msrym, being the genitive o f msr). O nce established there, all the Israelite ‘b rothers’ and their descendants came to be recognised as ‘H ebrew s’ (Genesis 43:32; Exodus i:is f , 19, 2:6, 7, 11, 13, 21:2), and their G od Yahw eh regarded as the ‘G od o f the H ebrew s’, as already indicated. After the emergence o f the Israelites as a political com m unity, how ever, the term ‘H e b re w ’ was used only occasionally to refer to them , in­ variably to distinguish them ethnically from other peoples am ong w h o m they lived or happened to be (1 Samuel 4:6, 9, 13:3, 19, 14:11; Jonah 1:6). Finally, the language w hich came to be k n o w n as ‘H eb rew ’

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was certainly n o t the language o f the ‘H ebrew s’ or o f the tribes o f Israel alone. In its time, it was a language widely spoken n ot only in W est Arabia, but also elsewhere. It was the Israelites o f West Arabia, how ever, claiming a com m on ‘H e b re w ’ ancestry, w ho im m ortalised this language in their m agnificent scriptures - the H ebrew Bible, w hose geography is the subject o f the present study. B y w hat other nam e can this language, highly expressive by nature, but enriched and transform ed into a vehicle o f enduring ideas by the genius o f a great people, be better called?

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THE ARABIAN PHILISTINES K. A. Kitchen, an em inent Biblical scholar writes: ‘A m ong the peoples o f the O ld T estam ent the Philistines are at once am ong the m ost familiar and the m ost elusive.’1 T heir elusiveness is hardly surprising, for scholars have persisted in searching for their Biblical hom eland in the w rong place. Because the Phili­ stines are referred to in som e Biblical passages as ‘C herethites’ (krty, genitive o f krt), it has long been taken as an article o f faith that they were originally a m ysterious ‘Sea People’ from the M editerranean island o f C rete w ho came to occupy southw est Palestine. H o w Palestine came to be called ‘Palestine’ after it was settled by West Arabian Philistines is a question that has already been touched upon (see Chapter i). W hat w e can say for sure is that the Philistines spoken o f in the H ebrew Bible did n o t live there, and they did not come from Crete. The Biblical krt (i Samuel 30:14; Zephaniah 2:4-5; Ezekiel 25:15-16) m ust have been Wadi K arith (krt), a tributary o f Wadi Tayyah in the heights o f Rijal A lm a‘. There are also three places in Asir called K arath (krt): one in Wadi Bishah, w here there is also a village called Falsah (plst, cf. H ebrew plst, o f w hich the mascu­ line plural o r the plural o f the genitive w ould be plstym, ‘Phili­ stines’); one near G hum ayqah, in the Lith region; and one in W adi A dam , again in the Lith region, w here there is also a village called Fasilah (pslt, metathesis o f plst, w ith the s trans­ form ed in the local pronunciation into a s rather than the standard 5). R ather than take tedious issue w ith traditional Biblical scholarship over the question o f the Philistines, I find it simpler to say w ho they actually were. The famed ‘Tables o f

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N atio n s’ in Genesis 10 classify them among the descendants o f H am , son o f N oah. These ‘Tables o f N ations’ are actually lists o f ancient W est Arabian tribes and communities, as will shortly be seen. Genesis is, in fact, no m ore than a narrative o f ancient W est Arabian legend. The com m only held notion that it at­ tem pts to explain the origins o f a wider w orld (that o f the w hole o f the ancient N ear East) is hardly valid, and should be discarded. Table 2, based on Genesis 10:6, 13-14, shows how the Biblical Philistines were reportedly descended from H am . 1 Ham

(hm)

6 Ludim (Iwdym)

2 Cush (k w s )

3 ‘E g y p t’ (msrym)

7 A n am im ('nmym)

8 Lehabim (Ih b y m )

(PM)

5 Canaan Ckn'n)

9 N aphtuhim

10 Pathrusim

11 Casluhim

12 C a p h t o r i m

(1n p th y m )

(p lr s y m )

(k s l h y m )

(kptrym)

4 Pu t

Table 2 T he Philistines in the ‘Tables o f N ations’

13 Philistines (plstym)

C onsidering that the Biblical Philistines were the neighbours o f the Israelites, and that the Israelites have already been show n to have been W est Arabians, the names in the above table m ay be identified in term s o f West Arabian geography as follows: 1 ‘Ham ’ (hm): probably Hamm (hm), in the Qunfudhah region; possibly Hamm, in the Bahr district further south. 2 ‘Cush’ (kws): Kuthah (kwt), in the Khamis Mushait vicinity (see Chapter 4).2 3 ‘Egypt’ (msrym): here probably Madrum (mdrm), in the Ghamid highlands. Other possibilities are Misramah, near Abha, and Masr, in Wadi Bishah (see Chapter 10); Al Masri (msry, ‘the one of msr), in the Taif region (a good possibility); or Madlr (mdr), in the Muhayil district. It is also possible that there is a connection between

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the Biblical msrym, as the masculine plural of msr or msry, and the attested Arabian tribal name Mudar (mdr). 4 ‘Put’ (pwt): Fatiyah (pty), in the Qunfudhah region; or Fawayit (Arabic plural of Fut, or pwt), in Rijal Alma1. 5 ‘Canaan’ (krin): Al Kun‘an ('/ kn'n, ‘the god of Canaan’), in Wadi Bishah. The Canaanite peoples, as enumerated in Genesis 10:15-16, all have names which are genitives of place-names in different parts of Asir, which will not be identified here; the cities of the Canaanites, listed in Genesis 19 to fix the boundaries of the Canaanite territory, also survive by name there, where a local tribe has the name al-Qin‘an (qn'n). The cryptic statement in Genesis 10:18 that ‘Afterward the families of the Canaanites spread abroad’ may explain why the names of two of the West Arabian Canaanite cities (Sidon and Gaza, not to mention others not listed here such as Sur, or ‘Tyre’) are also to be found as the names of ancient coastal cities in Syria. When Herodotus (1:1), writing in the fifth century B.C ., stated that the Phoenicians (the people of coastal Syria, who spoke a language consonantally almost identical with Biblical Hebrew) had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Red Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts ‘where they still inhabit’, he was unknowingly agreeing with the statement made about the ‘spreading abroad’ of the Canaanites in Genesis 10:18. Whatever the origin o f the name Phoenicia, which is a transliteration from ancient Greek usage, it certainly survives in West Arabia as the name of the village of Fanlqa (pnq), in Wadi Bishah, where the village of Al Kun‘an also stands. The question of the Biblical Canaan has already been touched upon in Chapters 1 and 4. 6 ‘Ludim’ (Iwdym): Ludhan (Idn) in Rijal Alma‘; Lawdhan (Iwdn), in the inland region of al-QasIm; Lidan (or Liddan, dual of Id), in the Taif region. There is also a Lidd (Id) in the Taif region, and a Lidah (or Liddah, Id) in the Lith region, of either of which Iwdym could be the plural of the genitive. 7 ‘Anamim’ ('nmym, plural of the genitive of 'nm): Ghanamln (Arabic plural of gnm), the name of two villages in the Taif region, where there are also two villages called Ghunam (gnm), and one called Ghanamah (gnm). Two other villages called Ghanamah are also to be found in Rijal Alma‘. 8 ‘Lehabim’ (Ihbym): Lahban (Ihbn, from Ihb, with archaic defi­ nite article), in the Taif region. There is also a village called Abi Lahab (’b Ihb, the ‘father’ or ‘god’ of Ihb) in the Jizan region. The Banu Luhabah (Ihb) are a tribe of the Buqum desert, east of Taif. 9 ‘Naphtuhim’ (npthyrn, dual or plural of npth): Mafatlh (mpth, vocalised as the Arabic plural of the same word), in the Taif region. There is also a village called Miftah (mpth in the singular) in the Lith

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region. As a West Arabian tribal name, ‘Naphtuhim’ appears to survive differently as that of the tribe of the Fatahin (pthn), in the Taif region. 10 ‘Pathrusim’ (ptrsym, plural of the genitive of ptrs): Sharfat (srpt), full name Hajib Bani al-Sharfat (a tribal name), in the Birk region. There is also a tribe, the Farsat (prst), found today in the northern Hijaz. As in the Hebrew plural ptrsym, both Sharfat and Farsat are in the Arabic plural form. 11 ‘Casluhim’ (kslhym, plural of the genitive of kslh): following the pattern o f corruption by which the Biblical gl'd (Giiead) yielded ’l-g d (al-Ja‘d, see Chapter i), by externalising an internal I to become an Arabic definite article, kslh would be today al-Husakah ('l-hsk), in the Medina region; Wadi al-Husakl (’l-hsk), in North Arabia; or al-Qash (’l-qsh) in Wadi Adam. A tribe of the Taif region are called today al-Huskan (’l-hskn, with the final n as the Arabic plural suffix). 12 ‘Caphtorim’ (kptrym, plural of kptr or kptry): apparently al-Faqarat (Arabic plural of pqrt, metathesis of kptr), in Wadi Bishah; or al-Rafaqat (Arabic plural of rpqt), in the Jizan region. Both placenames have the structure of tribal names. 13 ‘Philistines’ (reportedly descended from the ‘Casluhim’, and hence possibly originating in the Wadi Adam region, from which they spread to other regions; Hebrew plstym, dual or plural o f plst or the genitive o f it, plsty): Falsah (plst), in Wadi Bishah; Shalfa (sip’, probably an original slpt pronounced as slph), near Abha; Faslah (pslt), in the Qunfudhah region; and four villages called FasTlah (pslt), two in the Zahran highlands, one in Wadi Adam, of the Lith region, and one in Bani Shahr, southeast of Qunfudhah. In the light o f this evidence, it w ould seem that the Biblical Philistines w ere one am ong a n u m ber o f W est Arabian peoples w ith w h o m the Israelites lived, n o t only along the Red Sea but perhaps also in the inland region o f Wadi Bishah. T hat they spoke the same language as the H ebrew s or Israelites is clear from the personal names o f their chiefs or ‘kings’, as reported in som e Biblical texts, such as ‘Abim elech’ (’b mlk, from mlk, ‘ow n, possess’, or ‘kin g ’); ‘A huzzath’ (’hzt: possibly the plural o f ’hzh, Arabic ’hdh, ‘property, holding’); and ‘Phicol’ (pykl, Genesis 26:26; cf. Arabic Afkal, or ’p kl, ‘trem bling’, attested as an old Arabian personal and tribal nam e).3 T he Philistines certainly differed from the Israelites in religion, and also in customs; the H ebrew Bible refers to them in a special way as the ‘uncircum cised’ (Judges 14:3, 15:18; 1 Samuel 14:6, 17:26,

T H E A R A B I A N P HI L I S T I N E S

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36, 31:4; 2 Samuel 1:20; 1 Chronicles 10:4). T hey w orshipped various gods o f the land, but their special god was ‘D a g o n ’ (1dgwn, fro m dgn, ‘corn, grain’), w h o had shrines at ‘Gaza’ (Judges 16:21-23) and ‘A shdod’ (1 Samuel 5:if). ‘Gaza’ and ‘A sh d o d ’ w ere tw o o f the five principal cities o f the Philistines in coastal Asir, and the names o f the shrines o f ‘D a g o n ’ still survive in their vicinity, as show n in the follow ing identifica­ tions o f the five cities: 1 ‘Gaza’ (‘zh): ‘Azzah (‘zh), in Wadi Adam (Lith region). In the same vicinity stands the village of Daghma (Aramaicised form o f dgm, with the suffixed Aramaic definite article; cf. Biblical dgn or dgwn)-, also five other villages called Duqum (dqm), one of them in Wadi Adam. Other ‘Gazas’ in coastal Asir are ‘Azzah, in the Majaridah district; Al ‘Azzah ( 7 ‘zh, ‘god of Gaza’, no doubt ‘Dagon’), in the Ballasmar district; and ‘Azz (‘z, without the feminine suffix), near Birk. 2 ‘Ashdod’ (’sdwd): Sudud (sdwd), in Rijal Alma‘, where the hilltop village of Dharwat Al Daghmah (the ‘peak o f the god dgm', or ‘Dagon’) is also found. Other ‘Ashdods’ in West Arabia are Sidad (sdd) in the Jizan region, and Shadld (sdd) in the Mecca region. There is a village called Daghumah (dgm) near a Sidad in the Taif region. 3 ‘Ashkelon’ ('sqlwn): either Shaqlah (sql), in the Qunfudhah vicinity, or Thaqalah (tql) in the same vicinity; possibly both. The tqln (vocalised taqalan) of Koran 55:31 may be a reference to these two places in an otherwise obscure context. The Palestinian Ascalon, ‘Asqalan (‘sqln), could be the same name, except that it starts with the voiced pharyngeal fricative ‘ayn rather than with the glottal stop o f ’sqlwn. 4 ‘Gath’ (gt): al-Ghat in the Jizan region (see Chapter 10). Among other West Arabian Gaths, there is al-Ghati (gt), in the Zahran region, w here a village called Al D ughm an also' exists ( 7 dgmn, ‘the god Dagon’, here the dgm carrying the archaic Semitic definite article). 5 ‘Ekron’ (‘qrwn): ‘Irqayn (‘rqyn), in Wadi ‘Itwad, between Rijal Alma‘ and the Jizan region; unless it is Jar‘an (gr‘n, metathesis o f ‘qrwn), in Rijal Alma‘. W herever else they m ay have been found in West Arabia, the Biblical Philistines certainly had their m ain cities on the m aritim e side o f Asir, apparently being concentrated in the hinterland o f the harbours o f Lith, Q unfudhah, Birk and Jizan. H ere their territory dovetailed into that o f the Israelites and other local peoples. T here is nothing whatsoever in the H ebrew

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T H E BIBLE C A M E F R O M ARABI A

Bible to indicate that they were originally alien settlers in the country, arriving as a ‘Sea People’ from abroad. T o show h o w closely the Biblical Philistines and Israelites o f coastal Asir lived side by side, w ithin the same regions and districts, here is a topographical analysis o f the story o f Samson, w hich unfolds alm ost entirely in the hinterland o f Lith, in the southern Hijaz (read the full story as it is told in Judges 13-17): Sam son was born in the coastal hills o f the Zahran region, in the village o f al-Z ar‘ah (z r ‘h, cf. Biblical sr‘h, or ‘Z o ra h ’). His family belonged to the tribe o f D an (dn), w hich carried the nam e o f w hat is today Danadinah (Arabic plural o f the genitive o f dn, ‘D anite’), in the same region. The ‘Spirit o f Y ahw eh’ began to stir him in al-M ahna (mhn), near Danadinah (Biblical mhnh dn, the ‘M ahaneh o f D a n ’ rather than ‘M ahaneh-dan’), betw een Z a r‘ah and al-Ishta’ (’l-’st, inversion o f the original ’st’l or ’st ’I, ‘E shtaol’, m eaning ‘w om an, wife o f g o d ’). H e sought a wife am ong the Philistines o f ‘T im n a h ’ (tmnh), apparently present-day al-M athanah (mtnh), again in the same Zahran region. His first attack against the Philistines was directed against Shaqlah or Thaqalah, near Q unfudhah (‘A shkelon’, see above). H e then w ent northw ards to stay at G hutm ah (gtm, Biblical ‘ytm, or ‘E ta m ’), in W adi Adam. T h e Philistines, in retaliation, raided ‘Lehi’ (Ihy) in the land o f ‘J u d a h ’, which is present-day Lakhyah (Ihy), also in Wadi A dam . N earby, to this day, stand the villages o f D ha al-Ramah (rmh) and D ha al-H am lrah (hmyr). Samson reportedly slew a thousand o f the attacking Philistines b-lhy h-hmwr which, interestingly, means both ‘w ith the jaw b o n e o f an ass’ and ‘in the Lakhyah o f H am lrah’ (i.e. the Lakhyah o f the vicinity o f Ham lrah). T he story obviously aimed at explaining the origin o f the tw o place-names. T he location w here the battle took place, according to the story, was subsequently called ‘Ram athlehi’ (rmt Ihy), m eaning both ‘hill o fth e ja w b o n e ’ and ‘the Ram ah o f Lakhyah’. T he spring from w hich Samson refreshed him self there, called ‘E n-hakkore’ (‘yn h-qwr’), is the site o f w hat is today the village o f al-Qara (qr’, w ith the Arabic definite article), also in W adi A dam . T he Philistine w om an Delilah, w h o m Sam son took as a

THE ARABIAN PHILISTINES

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mistress, and w h o finally m anaged to lure him to his destruc­ tion, cam e from the valley o f ‘Sorek’ (nhl swrq) - today m ost probably Shuruj (srwg), in W adi Adam; unless it is Shariqah (srq) o r Shark (srk), in the Q unfudhah region. Sam son, o f course, m et his end in ‘Gaza’ ( ‘z h ) - the ‘Azzah o f W adi A dam (see above). H e was buried betw een Z ar'ah (Zorah) and al-Ishta’ (Eshtaol), in the Z ahran region. A t this point, one can afford the entertainm ent o f tackling Sam son’s fam ous ‘riddles’. Those, I believe, w ere no m ore than stories or conundrum s set to explain the origin o f place-names, and to preserve the folk m em ory o f tribal connections betw een one co m m u n ity and another. As has already been seen, the story o f Sam son’s ‘j aw b o n e o f an ass’ was contrived to explain tw o place-nam es, those o f present-day Lakhyah and Ham lrah. T he story o f h o w he took ‘honey from the carcass o f the lion’ (;m-gwyt h-’ryh rdh h-dbs, Judges 14:9) suggests, at one level, etym ologies for the nam es o f three places, those being Ja w w (g w , cf. gwyt, ‘inside o f ’, here ‘inside o f ’ a carcass) and W aryah (wryh, cf. 'ryh, ‘lion’), in W adi Adam ; and Dabash (dbs), near Hali, in the Q unfudhah region. A t another level, the story hints that Dabash, in the Q unfudhah region, was originally a colony founded by em igrants from Jaw w , near W aryah, perhaps under the sponsorship o f Samson. W ord by w ord, the H ebrew sen­ tence translates in tw o ways: first, ‘from the inside o f the lion he took (or scraped) the ho n ey ’; second, ‘from the Ja w w o f W aryah he took D abash’. Sam son’s riddle concerning the ‘honey’ he took from the ‘inside’ o f ‘the lion’ treats o f another set o f tw o m other com ­ m unities and their respective colonies: ‘O u t o f the eater (m-h-’kl) came som ething to eat (m ’kl); out o f the strong (m -‘z ) came som ething sw eet (mtwq)’ (Judges 14:14). T he riddle can also be read as a conundrum to mean: ‘O u t o f al-Kulah (kl, in the Q unfu d h ah region) came M akllah (mkl, in the Bahr district); ou t o f ‘Azz (‘z , the ‘Gaza’ near Birk, see above) came M athqah (;mtq, in the Q unfudhah region).’ By conundrum s such as these the folk culture o f the N ear East continues to rem em ber events and developm ents o f the past. There is a com parable pheno­ m enon in E uropean culture as one m ay see from the com m ents

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on a n u m b er o f entries o f The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. W hen the Philistines to w h o m Sam son posed his riddle w ere able to provide the answer, because his betrothed Philistine wife had secretly given it to them , he responded w ith the follow ing conundrum : ‘If you have not ploughed w ith m y heifer ('glh, here ‘glty, in the first person possessive), you w ould not have found out m y riddle (hydh, here hydty, again in the first person possessive)’ (Judges 14:18). Samson, according to the story, had surm ised that the Philistines had ‘ploughed’ on his betrothed wife to get the correct answer to his riddle. The alternative sense o f the conundrum , how ever, m ay be freely rendered in the follow ing w ords: ‘If you do n o t come from ‘Ajlat (‘g it, in Bani Shahr), you cannot k now H aydah (hydh, also in Bani Shahr).’ W hat is involved here is obviously a proverb, m eaning that you have to come from a place yourself to have intim ate know ledge o f its surroundings. A t the figura­ tive level, the proverb also says that one cannot really know anything w ith o u t being familiar w ith other things to w hich it relates - w hich m ight alm ost serve as an epigraph to the present study. T o consider and reinterpret all the Biblical references to the Philistines is beyond m y lim ited scope. In 1 Samuel 6:18, how ever, there is a statem ent on the extent o f the territory w here the Philistines w ere found w hich m erits som e com m ent. In H ebrew , it reads as follows: kl ‘ry plstym . . . m-‘yr mbsr w -‘d kpr h-przy. In the RSV, this is translated as ‘all the cities o f the Philistines . . . both fortified cities (m-‘yr mbsr) and walled villages (w -‘d kpr h-przy)'. A m ore inaccurate translation can hardly be im agined. Actually, m -‘yr mbsr sim ply means ‘from the city o f mbsr’, the city in question being the present village o f M idbar (mdbr), in the H u rrath hill country at the southern end o f the Jizan region. As for ‘d kpr h-przy, it can only mean ‘to the village o f the p r z y ’, the p rz in question being today the ham let o f al-Firdah [prd), in W adi A dam (the H ebrew p rzy is the genitive o f p rz, and refers to the inhabitants o f the place). Hence, according to this geographic definition o f the Philistine land, their territory extended all the w ay from the southernm ost

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ex trem ity o f the Jizan region to W adi Adam . In short, there was no set geographic boundary betw een Israelite and Philistine territories in the area in question, w hich w ould seem to th ro w considerable light n o t only on the story o f Sam son, but also on o ther Biblical passages w here the Philistines appear.

1

5

THE PROMISED LAND Som etim es, disinterested scholarly research yields results which m ay have repercussions that extend far beyond the boundaries o f o n e’s academic discipline, especially if they appear to chal­ lenge tim e-honoured historical assum ptions that are central to cherished religious beliefs. T o suggest that the ‘prom ised land’ is n o t w here it is generally believed to be, is unlikely to be taken seriously by those for w h o m the creation o f the state o f Israel in 1948 was the fulfilm ent o f a centuries-old dream. Yet, having em barked on m y onom astic analysis o f the H ebrew Bible, such is the conclusion that m y research has led m e to believe. A historian, o f course, can argue for a historiographical, as against a religious, explanation o f the Biblical prom ise of specified territory to the H ebrew descendants o f A bram (Gene­ sis 15), and the Israelite followers o f M oses (N um bers 34). W hen the stories o f the tw o prom ises, as recorded later in the Bible, w ere originally told, the Israelites already inhabited their prom ised land, so that the stories o f the tw o promises w ere ex post facto explanation. W hat is im portant for us here, however, are the prom ises as historical geography, not as history or religion. In the conventional translations, the land prom ised by Y ahw eh to A bram the H ebrew (Genesis 15:18) is said to extend ‘from the river o f E gypt (nhr msrym) to the great river, the river Euphrates (nhr prt)’. C ontrary to received opinion, I w ould suggest that the land indicated in the H ebrew original o f the prom ise actually com prised the historical land o fju d a h (Chapter 8), in geographic Asir, from the Jizan region in the south to W adi A dam , in the hinterland o f Lith, to the north. T he ‘river

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o f E g y p t’ (nhr msrym) in this prom ise is certainly n o t the Nile, b u t the stream o f W adi ‘Itw ad w hich springs near the present village o f M isram ah, in the Asir highlands, and form s the present border betw een the Jizan region and Rijal Alma*. It could also be W adi Liyah, w hich separates the Jizan region from the Y em en, and w here a village called M asram (msrm) is still to be found. In W adi A dam , w hich form s part o f the m ain valley o f the Lith region, there is a village called Firt (jprt) and another called Farat (alsoprt), w hich leads m e to suggest that Y ahw eh’s prom ise to A bram should be read as follows: ‘T o your descen­ dants I will give this land, from the stream o f M isram ah (or M asram , nhr msrym) to the great stream (h-nhr h-gdwl), the stream Firt (or Farat, nhrprt)’, this being the W adi A dam , not ‘the River E uphrates’. T he land prom ised to A bram and his ‘H e b re w ’ descendants was, o f course, inhabited. Y ahw eh’s prom ise listed the inhabi­ tants - ten peoples in all (Genesis 15:19-21), five am ong w h o m w ere ‘C anaanite’ folk, according to Genesis 10:15-18 (see C hap­ ter 14). T h e names o f all these peoples survive as place-names in various parts o f Asir, and m ostly in ‘Ju d a h ’. H ere they are: 1 The ‘Kenites’ (qyny, genitive of qyn): as a tribal name, qyny survives as the name o f the present Qawayinah (singular QawnI, or qwny, from qwn), south of Taif. Related place-names are QanI (qn), in the Jizan region; Qann (qn), in the Ballasmar district; Qana (qn), altogether four villages, one in the Bahr district, one in the Dhahran highlands, one in the Qunfudhah region, near Hali, and one in Wadi Adam; Qanan (qnn), in the Majaridah district; Qanwah (qnw), in Rijal Alma‘; Qannah (qn), altogether five villages, one in the Muhayil district, one near Khamis Mushait, one in the Jizan region, and two in Wadi Adam; Al Qanmah ( 7 qnyn), in the ‘Abidah highlands; Qanyah (qny), in Wadi Adam. 2 The ‘Kenizzites’ (qnzy, genitive of qnz): Qanazlz (Arabic plural o f qnzyz or qnz), in the Jizan region. An Arabian tribe is still found today called al-Qunaysat (singular Qunaysl, or qnysy, from qnys). 3 The ‘Kadmonites’ (qdmny, genitive of qdmn): Damjan (dmgn, metathesis of qdmwn), in the Taif region. Less likely, but also plaus­ ible, is Qadamah (qdm), in the Lith region, and Kawadimah (kwdm), in the Jizan region. An Arabian tribe of the northern Hijaz is today the Qidman (qdmn). 4 The ‘Hittites’ (hty, genitive ofht\ listed as Canaanites in Genesis

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10): Hathah (ht), in the Lith region; Hat (ht), in the Ballasmar district; Hatwah (htw), in Rijal Alma1; Hittayy (hty), in the Zahran coastlands; Al Hatahlt ( 7 hthyt, ‘god o f the ht folk’), in Wadi Adam. Hatahit (Arabic plural of hty), moreover, is attested in the Arabic literature as an Arabian tribal name. 5 The ‘Perizzites’ {przy, genitive o f prz): Al Farzan ( 7 przn, prz with the Semitic archaic definite article), in Bani Shahr; Furdah (prd, cf. prz), the name of four villages, one in the Jizan region, two in Wadi Adam, and one in the Majaridah region. Perhaps also the names o f the present tribes o f the Safarin (singular Safari, or spry), in southern Asir; the Zawafirah (singular ZafTri, or zpry), in the southern Hijaz; and the Farasat (singular Farsi, or prsy), in the northern Hijaz. 6 The ‘Rephaim’ (rp’ym, dual or plural of rp’ or its genitive rp’y): Rafah (rp), in thejizan region, and Rafyah (rpy), in Rijal Alma*. The Arabic literature speaks of a Yarfa (yrp\ archaic substantive of rp’) tribe in southwest Arabia. 7 The ‘Amorites’ (’mry, genitive of W ; listed as Canaanites in Genesis io): Amarah (W ), in the Zahran coastlands; Wamrah (wmr), in Wadi Adam; also probably Maru (mrw, with the final w as the suffixed Aramaic definite article), altogether three villages, two in Wadi Adam and one in the Bahr district. As a tribal name, ’mry may be still there as the name of the ubiquitous Banu Murrah (tnr), or that of the Maru (mrw) of the southern Hijaz. 8 The ‘Canaanites’ (kn‘ny, genitive o fk n ‘n): Al Kun‘an ( 7 kn'n), in Wadi Bishah; also the name of the tribe of al-Qin‘an (qn‘n), in Asir (see Chapter 14). For more details see Chapters 1 and 4. 9 The ‘Girgashites’ (grgsy, genitive of grgs, hyperbolic or diminutive of grs\ listed as Canaanites in Genesis 10): Juraysh (grys, diminutive of grs) and Quraysh (qrys, diminutive of qrs), in the Qunfudhah region; also Quraysh, two villages in the Taif region; Qaryat Quraysh, in the Qunfudhah region; Dar Bam Quraysh, in Wadi Adam; Quraysh al-Hasan, in the Zahran highlands. The histori­ cal West Arabian tribal name Quraysh can hardly be other than the same name. 10 The ‘Jebusites’ (ybw'sy, genitive of ybws\ listed as Canaanites in Genesis 10): Yabasah (ybs), in Wadi Adam; Yabs (ybs), on the maritime slopes of the Ghamid region; and Yabs, near Mudhaylif, north o f Qunfudhah (see Chapter 9). Yubbas (ybs) and Yabis (ybs) still exist as names of tribes in West Arabia today. A ssum ing m y identification o f the ten tribes is correct, Bibli­ cal research into their history has been com pletely off-course.1 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that so little palaeographic and archaeological evidence has been cited to substantiate their

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provenance, because w hatever investigation has been done in this regard has been undertaken w ith the w rong place in m ind - Palestine and historical Syria, rather than W est Arabia. A ccording to Genesis, it was the hom elands o f these ancient W est A rabian tribes that w ere prom ised by Y ahw eh to A bram and his descendants. These same hom elands were also included in the territory prom ised by Y ahw eh to M oses (N um bers 34:1-12), w hich was, in fact, not smaller than that prom ised to A bram , as has so far been thought, but actually m ore vast. It com prised ‘the land o f Canaan in its full extent’ (34:2) to include inland as well as coastal Asir, along w ith the T a if region o f the Hijaz, from the Red Sea coast to the fringes o f the Central A rabian desert. In attem pting to m ake a geographic interpretation o f the boundaries o f this prom ised land in term s o f Palestine, Biblical scholars have invariably com e up against difficulties, which again is hardly surprising considering the territory does not belong there. Reading the H ebrew text o f the ‘prom ise’, as traditionally interpreted and hence vocalised, the Biblical ym has always been taken to m ean ‘sea’, though the same ym is also attested in the sense o f ‘w est’. Scholars have also taken ym h-mlh to m ean the ‘sea o f salt’, or the ‘salt sea’, in reference to the Palestinian D ead Sea. W hile mlh in H ebrew and Arabic does m ean ‘salt’, it also means ‘sand’ in the present Arabic dialect o f inland Asir. Hence, while the Biblical h-ym h-gdwl certainly means ‘the Great Sea’ (with respect to W est Arabia, not the M editerranean b u t the Red Sea), ym h-mlh in the context o f the ‘prom ise’ under discussion, does not m ean ‘sea o f salt’, but ‘w est o f the sand’. T he reference, as will be seen, is to Bilad Y am (ym), literally the ‘country o f the w est’, w hich actually flanks the ‘sands’ (mlh) o f the Arabian E m pty Q uarter from the ‘w est’ (ym). Likewise, ym knrt means ‘w est o f Q u ray n at’ (a place, see below ), and n o t the ‘Sea o f C hinnereth’, believed on no grounds w hatsoever - to be the Biblical nam e for the Palestinian Lake Tiberias. It follows that the construction ktp ym knrt does n o t m ean ‘the shoulder (ktp) o f the Sea o f C hinnereth’ (RS V ), b u t the ‘Q a tf w est o f Q u ra y n a t’, Q a tf (qtp) being actually a place in W est Arabia lying ‘w est’ o f Q uraynat (see below).

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In interpreting the Prom ised Land o f M oses, Biblical scholars have been confused n o t only about the m eaning o f the H ebrew y m , b u t also about h -yrd n , w hich they assum ed was none other than the Palestinian ‘J o rd a n ’. T hey w ere further confused by the nam e o f a place called qds b rn ‘ (or ‘Kadesh-B arnea’), falsely identified since 1847 as the oasis o f ‘A yn Q udays, in southern Palestine (see C hapter 4). This identification has been m ade on no grounds other than that the Arabic Q udays, or qdys, is the dim inutive o f Q uds, or qds, which is the equivalent o f the H ebrew qds. Actually, qds b rn ‘, parsed to read qds b -rn ‘ (the b here being apparently a contraction o f ’b, ‘father’, i.e. ‘g o d ’), sim ply means the ‘holy place’, ‘sanctuary’, or ‘shrine’ o f the ‘g o d ’ r n \ w hose nam e survives m etathetically in tw o East Arabian place-nam es as A bu ‘Arinah {’b ‘rn ), and in the Asir highlands south o f Khamis M ushait as Al ‘Arinah ( ’I ‘rn). ‘K adesh-B arnea’ m ust have been an ancient ‘holy city’, w hich survives today as the village o f Al ‘Arinah, as w e shall see. Incidentally, the nam e o f the same ancient W est Arabian god rn ' survives by another metathesis, as r ‘n, in Lihyanite and D edanite inscriptions o f the northern Hijaz. H ere are the boundaries o f the land prom ised to the Israelite followers o f M oses, as described in N um bers 34 and related to W est A rabian geography: 1 The western boundary is ‘the Great Sea’ (h-ym h-gdwl, 34:6), i.e. the Red Sea (see above). 2 The southern boundary begins from the desert of Zin, or z n (Biblical sn, ‘Zin’), an oasis of the Najran region which is correctly described as being ‘on the side’ ( 7 ydy) of Wadi Idimah, or ‘dm (Biblical ’dw m , ‘Edom ’), actually to the south; more precisely, ‘from Quziyyah (q z y h ), west of the sand to the east’ (m-qsh ym h-mlh qdmh), Quziyyah (Biblical qsh) being an oasis of Bilad Yam, downstream from Zin in Wadi Najran, and right on the western border of the sands o f the Empty Quarter. From there the boundary extends westwards ‘south o f the ascent of Akrabbim ('qrbym )’, today a village o f Sarat ‘AbTdah, uphill from Wadi Najran, called al-Jarabi‘ (Arabic plural o fg r b ‘, metathesis of Biblical ‘qrb, of which the Hebrew plural would be ‘qrbym ).2 Further to the west, the boundary passes through another Zin (Biblical sn) in the Dhahran region, which is actually ‘south’ of Al ‘Arinah (or ‘Kadesh-Barnea’, see above), exactly as the text has it. It then proceeds through what the Biblical Hebrew

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describes as hsr ’dr (‘Hazzar-addar’), which probably denotes the ‘land of settlement’ (hsr) of a tribe called ’dr, whose name is still carried by the tribe of Adhar (’dr), in Sarat ‘Abidah and the vicinity of Dhahran al-Janub. Next the boundary passes through Al ‘Asman (’/ ‘smn, cf. Hebrew ‘zmn or ‘zmwn, ‘Azmon’), in the Dhahran region, to reach Wadi ‘Itwad (nhl msrym, meaning ‘the palms of Misramah’ or ‘the headwaters of Misramah’, see above, not ‘the Brook of Egypt’ as traditionally rendered; for the confusion of this Misramah with ‘Egypt’, see above). From that point, the boundary follows the course of Wadi ‘Itwad (or perhaps again Wadi Liyah, see above) all the way to the sea (34:3-5)3 The northern boundary begins at the coast o f the Red Sea and proceeds uphill, passing through ‘Mount H or’ (hr h-hr), already identified as the ridge (hr) o f al-Harrah (hr with the Arabic definite article), at the northern extremity of the Zahran highlands (see Chapter 7, note 5). From there the boundary turns directly north to reach the Taif region at Dhawl Himat (hmt) or Himatah (hmt, cf. Biblical hmt, ‘Hamath’), and Sidad (sdd, cf. Biblical sdd, ‘Zedad’). From here it continues through zprn (‘Ziphron’, possibly present Safra’, or spr without the archaic suffixed definite article w),3 to end in the basaltic wilderness o f Harrat al-Buqum, at the ‘oasis’ or ‘settlement’ (Hebrew hsr) of ‘Aynln (‘ynn, cf. Biblical hsr ‘ynn, ‘the hsr or “settlement” of ‘ynn, conventionally rendered as ‘Hazar-enan’, 3 4 :7 - 9 )4 The eastern boundary, beginning from ‘Aymn (see above), proceeds southwards, apparently to al-Thafan (tpn, cf. Biblical spm, ‘Shepam’), in Wadi Tathlith (full name Hadayir al-Thafan, or the ‘settlements’ of al-Thafan). It then continues southwards passing through ‘Riblah’ (rblh), east o f ‘Ain’ (‘yn), which is perhaps presentday al-Rabiyah ('l-rbyh),4 in the Yam extremity of Wadi Habuna, northeast of the oasis o f ‘Ayn, in the Najran region. From this point the boundary passes through ‘Q atf (qtp), west o f Quraynat (qrynt)’ (ktp ym knrt, see above), Quraynat being an oasis of Wadi al-Dawasir, and Q atf lying to the southwest o f this Quraynat in Bilad Yam. From there it crosses ‘the ridge’ (h-yrdn), no doubt what Philby called the ‘great granite boss’ ofjabal Abu Hamdan in the Najran region, to end ‘west o f the sand’ (ym h-mlh) of the Empty Quarter (34:10-12). Projecting the boundaries o f the Prom ised Land o f M oses, as interpreted here, on a m ap o f W est Arabia, one is left w ith hardly a question to ask. T he picture is com plete alm ost to the last detail.

A VISIT TO EDEN B y the standards to w hich W esterners are accustomed, Junaynah, in W adi Bishah, is not m uch o f a garden; as an oasis on the fringes o f the desert, how ever, the place does have a certain charm . It is ‘the low est o f the Bishah villages’, w ro te H. St J. B. Philby w h o visited Junaynah in the early 1930s; it is ‘an oasis in the desert’, w ith ‘no palm s’ beyond it. As described by Philby, the oasis com prised ‘a graceful arc o f palm groves’, w ith ‘patches o f ripening w heat and barley’ at its eastern end, ‘thick plantations’ o f tam arisk, and a ‘generous g ro w th ’ o f shrubs around som e abandoned ruins, w ith a small village nearby - altogether ‘an ideal oasis picture’, particularly by m oonlight (Arabian Highlands, Ithaca, N Y , 1952, pp. 29-31). As the m ost outlying o f the Bishah villages, Junaynah, despite its insignificance, features on m ost maps o f peninsular Arabia (20°20'N by 40°55'E). Philby visited the place and described it w ith o u t know ing that it was the Garden o f Eden. H o w could he, w ith tradition throw ing its full w eight behind the location o f this garden som ew here in M esopotam ia, far away? B y now , I hope the reader is willing to accept the idea that the H eb rew Bible was w ritten by Israelite authors living in the hill country o f Judah, in coastal Asir. In Genesis 2:8-14, one o f these authors, w hose nam e w e shall never know , described the setting o f the Garden o f Eden as follows: A nd the Lord (or G od Yahweh) planted a garden (gn) in Eden, in the east, and there he put the m an w h o m he had form ed. A nd out o f the ground the Lord G od m ade to grow

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every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree o f life (hyym) also in the m idst o f the garden, and the tree o f the know ledge (d‘h) o f good and evil. A river (nhr, ‘stream , river’) flowed o u t o f Eden to w ater the garden, and there it divided and becam e four rivers (r’sym, plural o f r’s, ‘head, headstream ’). T he nam e o f the first is Pishon (pyswn); it is the one w hich flows around the w hole land o f H avilah (hwylh), w here there is gold; and the gold o f that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The nam e o f the second river is G ihon (gyhwn); it is the one w hich flows around the w hole land o f C ush (kws). A nd the nam e o f the third river is hdql (traditionally rendered ‘T ig ris’), w hich flows east o f ’swr (traditionally rendered ‘A ssyria’). A nd the fourth river is prt (traditionally rendered ‘E uphrates’). Later, while speaking o f A dam , the first m an, and his family, the sam e author gives tw o additional pieces o f inform ation about the location o f Eden and its garden. W hen A dam and his wife Eve w ere expelled from paradise, Y ahw eh placed the cherubim (krbym, dual or plural o f krb, literally ‘priest’) ‘at the east o f the garden’, to guard the w ay to the tree o f life (3 :2 4 ). W hen Cain, the first-born o f A dam and Eve, slew his brother Abel and was punished by being banished from the sight o f Y ahw eh, he w ent to dwell ‘in the land o f N o d (nwd), east o f E d en ’ (4 : 16 ). T he inform ation all this yields about the geographic location o f Eden and its garden m ay be sum m arised as follows: First, Eden was east o f the hom eland o f the author o f the Biblical text in question, w hich was the land o f Judah, on the coastal side o f Asir. Second, Eden and its garden w ere located in a drainage system com prising four recognised tributaries, w hich are identified by name. T hird, the garden (gn) o f Eden {‘dn) lay dow nstream from Eden, being w atered by a stream w hich ‘flow ed o u t’ (ys’) o f Eden. Fourth, the garden was associated w ith tw o trees o f special

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significance, one being a tree o f ‘life’ (hyym) and the other tree o f ‘kno w led g e’ (d‘h). Fifth, tw o or m ore cherubs (krbym, plural krb, m eaning ‘priest’) came to be stationed east o f the Garden o f Eden to guard the w ay to the tree o f life. Sixth, east o f the general vicinity o f Eden lay the land o f N o d (;mvd ).

O n e m ay conclude from the above that the Garden o f Eden was in a region o f well w atered oases located betw een the land o f Judah, in coastal Asir, and an inland area called tiwd. T hat this region was none other than the W adi Bishah basin seems obvious in light o f the further identification o f the ‘four rivers’ o f Eden: 1 The ‘Pishon’ (pyswn, essentially psn), flowing around the land o f ‘Havilah’ (hwylh) where there is gold. This is today Wadi Tabalah, the westernmost of the Bishah tributaries. The wadi takes its present name from one of the many oases along its course. Its Biblical name survives as that of the village of Shufan (spn, metathesis ofthe Hebrew pyswti), near its headwaters in the highlands o f Nimas. The author o f the Eden story must have considered Wadi T abalah (or the ‘Pishon’) as the main stream of the Wadi Bishah system, considering the way he describes its course. ‘Havilah’, which the ‘Pishon’ is said to skirt, is present-day Hawalah (hwlh), in the highlands of the Ghamid region, north of Nimas. The main course of Wadi Bishah actually skirts the Ghamid region on the inland side after its junction with its main tributaries. That this was a land of ‘gold’ is correct; gold was actually found there in antiquity, and is still sought there today. This was probably the land of ‘fossil gold . . . not in the form of dust, but in lumps’, noted by Strabo in his description o f Arabia (see Chapter 3). East of the Ghamid region runs a small tributary of Wadi Bishah, which in fact is called Wadi Dhahab, the ‘Valley of Gold’ (see again Chapter 3). Also found there is carnelian (h-shm), generally mistranslated as ‘onyx’. Even today, pilgrims returning from Mecca usually bring with them beads made from this semi-precious stone. The bdellium (bdlh) referred to is a prized gum produced by a local tree (Commiphora mukul), peculiar to West Arabia, called today Meccan balsam. Despite the resemblance in name, the Biblical ‘Pishon’ is certainly not the tributary of the main course of Wadi Bishah known today as Wadi Shaffan (spn). 2 The ‘Gihon’ (gyhwn, essentiallyghn), flowing around the land o f ‘Cush’ (kws). This is the main stream of Wadi Bishah, as it is called

THE BIBLE CAME FROM ARABIA

today, one o f its headstreams being still called W adijuhan (ghn). This wadi is located between Khamis Mushait and Abha, where there is also a village with the name Aljahun (also ghn). The present name o f Wadi Bishah comes from the village of Bishah, near the junction o f the main tributaries o f the wadi system. The ‘Cush’ whose land is skirted by the ‘Gihon’ is today the village of Kuthah (kwt, see Chapter 4), in the Khamis Mushait vicinity, which actually flanks Wadi Juhan. 3 The hdql, traditionally taken to be the Mesopotamian Tigris. Had the name o f this ‘river’ been h-dql (today Arabicised as al-Dijlah, or dglh preceded by the definite article), it could conceivably have been the Tigris. In fact, however, the name o f the river, as given in Genesis, is distinctly hdql, with an initial h rather than the h, which makes a world - or at least several hundred kilometres - o f difference. Today, the name hdql survives as that of the village of Al Jahdal (ghdl), in the highlands o f Sarat ‘Abidah, where the headwaters of Wadi Tindahah are to be found. Sarat ‘Abidah is located to the southeast o f Khamis Mushait, and Wadi Tindahah joins the main course o f Wadi Bishah north o f Khamis Mushait. In Biblical times, Wadi Tindahah must have been called hdql after the name o f the village where it springs. Just as the hdql is not the Tigris, but present Wadi Tindahah, likewise the ’swr to the east o f which it flows is not ‘Assyria’. Actually, Wadi Tindahah does flow directly east of an 'swr which is today the village o f Bani Thawr (twr), also called Al Abu Thawr. As we have had the opportunity to demonstrate several times before, there is hardly a topographical error in the Hebrew Bible. 4 The prt, traditionally taken to be the Euphrates, could only have been what is today Wadi Kharif, which springs from the heights o f the Tanumah region, north o f Abha, and is one o f the principal tributaries o f the main course of Wadi Bishah. Its Biblical name, prt, must have derived from the name o f a village at its headwaters called today al-Tafra’ (tpr, a metathesis o f prt). In other Biblical texts, as already observed, the prt is Wadi Adam (see Chapter 1, note 11), which is not the case here. A ccording to the Genesis story, the river (nhr) o f Eden divided into four headstream s (r’sym) in the neighbourhood o f Eden and its garden. Actually, the Biblical r’sym survives as the nam e o f the oasis o f Raw shan (rwsn) located close to the point w here W adi Tabalah (the ‘Pishon’) joins the main course o f W adi B ishah.1 A short distance upstream from Raw shan, along the course o f W adi Tabalah, is another oasis called ‘Adanah {‘dn), bearing to this day the nam e o f the Biblical Eden {‘dn).

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T he oasis o fju n a y n a h (gnyn, dim inutive o f gn, cf. H ebrew gn, ‘garden’) lies not far dow nstream from Rawshan, irrigated by w aters w hich flow out o f ‘Adanah. It m ay seem uncanny, but there it is: the Garden o f Eden, no less, and surviving by nam e (see m ap 8). East o f the Wadi Bishah confluence, w hich is the general vicinity o f the Biblical Eden, there is a land o f ‘N o d ’ - a ‘country o f hom elessness’ (H ebrew nwd), exactly as it is explained in the standard dictionaries o f Biblical H ebrew (from the verb nwd, ‘be homeless, m ove to and fro, w ander aimlessly’). It is the stretch o f parched pastoral desert w hich separates inland Asir from central Arabia. Beyond this land o f N od, there is ‘nothing but endless desolation’ - either gravel desert, or ‘the dead flat expanse o f the E m p ty Q u a rte r’ (Arabian Highlands, p. 221). Southeast o f W adi Bishah lies the oasis o f al-Q arban (qrbn, w ith the definite article; cf. H ebrew h-krbym, ‘the priests’). This could have been the ‘cherubim ’ stationed ‘east’ o f the Garden o f Eden after A dam and Eve w ere banished from it. In the context o f this story, how ever, the w o rd h-krbym could actually have m eant ‘the priests’ (see below). As for the tree o f life (hyym) and the tree o f know ledge (d‘h) in the Garden, they were no do u b t sacred trees dedicated to tw o ancient local gods. T he present village o f Al H iyah (’I hy), in Wadi Bishah, still carries the nam e o f a forgotten W est Arabian god o f ‘life’; so do the villages o f Al HI (’/ hy) and Al Ibn HI (also hy), in the Asir highlands to the west; Al H ayat (hyt), in the D hahran region, and H iyln {hyyn, cf. H ebrew hyym, in the plural form ), in the Jizan region. Likewise, the present village o f Al D a'yah (’/ d‘y, cf. H ebrew d‘h), in the highlands west ofW adi Bishah, preserves to this day the nam e o f a forgotten W est Arabian god o f ‘k now ledge’. Was the Biblical Garden o f Eden a sacred grove - a cult centre for the w orship o f a god o f life and a god o f know ledge - before it becam e Y ahw eh’s ow n garden? T he available toponym ic evidence certainly points in this direction. Analysed in this fram e o f reference, the Biblical story o f this garden m ay yield new m eanings which, like the investigation o f the Melchizedek

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question, could provide further insights into the origins o f m onotheism in ancient W est Arabia. H ow ever, such an analysis o f the story will not be m ade here. W hat is notew orthy, how ever, is that the K oran does not speak o f one Garden o f Eden, but o f the ‘Gardens o f E den’, in the plural, and also o f the ‘rivers’ (anhar), n o t the one river (inahr), that flow ‘beneath th em ’. A ltogether, there are eleven K oranic references to these ‘Gardens o f E den’, and not one to a single garden, leaving one to speculate how m any there actually were. M ore significantly, there are tw o Koranic pass­ ages w hich hint at a close connection betw een gardens and traditional religious cults, w hich m ay be the explanation o f the Biblical m ention o f the appointm ent o f ‘cherubim ’, or priests, as wardens o f the Garden o f Eden. According to one Koranic text, M u ham m ad was told by ‘m ost people’ that they were no t willing to recognise his religious mission unless he could dem onstrate that he had at his disposal ‘a garden o f palm trees and grapes w ith gushing rivers’ (17:89-91). A ccording to another, people w ondered h o w M uham m ad could claim to be a prophet w hen he ate ordinary food, and w alked about the m arket places, and did n o t possess a special ‘garden from which he ate’ (25:7-8). O f these sacred gardens o f ancient W est Arabia, o f w hich the Biblical G arden o f Eden and its ‘cherubim ’ was the prototype, w e have direct know ledge o f only one, w hich was still in existence in the early decades o f the seventh century a .d . It was the garden o f the high priest M aslamah o f Y am am ah, an Arabian m onotheist, w h o was a contem porary, but not a follower, o f M uham m ad. It was called H adlqat al-Rahman, al-Rahm an (rhmn, the ‘M erciful O n e ’), being the nam e o f the O ne G od in som e o f the pre-Islamic Arabian m onotheistic cults. W hile M uham m ad lived, M aslamah was willing to come to term s w ith him. A fter M u h am m ad ’s death, how ever, he fell out w ith his successors, and the first caliph, A bu Bakr (a.d. 632-634) sent forces to subdue him. A ccording to the Arab historians, the w ar cry o f M aslamah and his followers was: ‘T he Garden! T he Garden!’ It is reported, in fact, that M aslam ah’s last stand against the forces o f Islam was w ithin the walls o f his

A VISIT TO EDEN

I7 9

o w n garden, where he and ten thousand o f his followers fought until they w ere killed. A n interesting thought: could M aslamah, w ith his sacred garden, have been the last o f the W est Arabian cherubim?

SONGS FROM THE JIZAN MOUNTAINS T he idealisation o f rural life, it seems, was as m uch in fashion in the royal court o f the A rabian Jerusalem as it was in Versailles under the later B ourbons. O n e should keep this in m ind w hen considering the nature o f the ‘Song o f Songs w hich is Solom on’s (syr h-syrym ’sr l-slmh), an anthology o f folk songs speaking o f love am ong the shepherds and vineyard-keepers, apparently com piled under one o f the later kings o f Judah, tho ugh bearing Solom on’s name. This anthology, preserved am ong the H ebrew ktwbym (or ‘books’), ultim ately came to form part o f the Bible, alongside other ‘b ooks’ o f proverbs and w isdom attributed to Solom on. Jew s have traditionally interpreted the boldly erotic material included in the ‘Song o f Songs’ as a series o f allegories which dem onstrate G o d ’s love for Israel. Christians regard the same passages as allegorical prophecies relating to C h rist’s love for the church. T o the Arab ear, how ever, the lyrics included in the ‘Song o f Songs’ have a far less ethereal ring: they mean exactly w hat they say, being early examples o f a genre o f erotica still very m uch alive today. Songs very m uch like them abound in classical Arabic litera­ ture, and you can hear their m odern equivalents throughout the N ear East, at social gatherings w herever musical entertain­ m ent is offered. Imitations o f these songs, as in the case o f folk songs all over the w orld, have found their w ay into the reper­ to ry o f the Arabic m usic hall and ju k e box, and their popularity attests to the vigour o f the tradition.

SONGS FROM THE JIZAN MOUNTAINS

l8l

In these live Arabic folk songs, as in the Biblical ‘Song o f S ongs’, young lovers are transform ed into gazelles and does w h o enjoy secret trysts in vineyards and bedouin tents. K nock­ ing at a door or entering a vineyard or orchard to gather fruit (especially pom egranates or grapes), or to partake freely o f honey or m ilk, are sly references to erotic seduction, which everyone recognises for w hat they are. In the ‘Song o f Songs’, the lover is Solom on (Shldmdh, or slmh), and the beloved, w here she is identified by name, is the Shulam m ite (swlmyt), the feminine form o f slmh or Solom on (see below ). In the traditional Arabic love song, the beloved m aiden is frequently Salma (feminine form o f the nam e Salman, w hich is the Arabic equivalent o f the H ebrew Shldmdh, or Solom on). Like the Biblical Shulamm ite, the Arabic Salma is extolled in classical verse as in m odern song for her sw arthy beauty; she has been ‘dark but com ely’ for as long as anyone can rem em ber. O f course, the strong sim ilarity betw een the ‘Song o f Songs’ and Arabic love poetry has been com m ented upon by scholars before. Recently, M orris Seale noted: In m y view , the Song m ay be best understood if com pared w ith erotic poetry o f Arabian origin. W hat is im m ediately striking to a student o f ancient Arabian poetry is the very great sim ilarity betw een such nom adic poetry and the ef­ fusions o f the Song. T he similarity extends to the subjectm atter, the literary genre and to the imagery. The beloved Shulam m ite o f the Song is sister to a w hole host o f beauties celebrated by Arabian poet-lovers. T he poets lived in tow n but their m inds roam ed the desert. M odern Arabic is full o f such examples. This corpus o f sensual poetry (i.e., the Song) points to the ethos o f an untam ed, free-living age. As such, it is a m o n u m en t to the nom adic past o f the Hebrew s w hen the enjoym ent and celebration o f physical love counted for m ore than the fear o f G o d .1 The question remains, how ever, where exactly did the erotic lore preserved in the Song o f Songs originate? As I hope to

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dem onstrate, it was now here other than the true Bible land o f Asir. Judging by the place-names referred to in these love songs, they m ust have com e originally from the m ountains and hills o f the Jizan hinterland - the half-circle o f m agnificent ridges, part bare, part densely forested, and part terraced for culti­ vation, w hich overlook the fertile valleys o f the broad Jizan coastal plain. W hen Philby visited this area, he was struck by the glory o f the scenery. M ore so, his ‘waking senses were thrilled by the sound o f a shepherd piping a thin tune from the m ountain-side’ (Arabian Highlands, p. 488), w hich left him w ishing he had ‘som e means o f recording the tuneful folk-songs’ o f the local people (p. 503) - som ething that Philby did not say in relation to other parts o f Asir. In Biblical times also, there was no w ay to record the tunes o f the local folk songs for posterity. A selection o f the lyrics, how ever, was preserved. H o w , w hen and w h y the Song o f Songs was com piled is beyond the scope o f the present study; n o r w ould m y k now ­ ledge o f Biblical textual history be equal to such an undertaking. W hat I am sure of, how ever, is that the lore contained in the Song o f Songs could only have come from the Jizan m ountains. In any given country, folk songs are frequently com posed by w andering m instrels w ho have been to m any places, and are often anxious to dem onstrate their familiarity w ith w here they have been. M oreover, by citing place-names from different districts in their songs, m instrels m ake their songs directly m eaningful to listeners w herever they m ay be. A m instrel may even change the place-names in a given song as he sings it in one district or another, to please his various audiences. Here are the places w hich occur in the text o f the Song o f Songs. Except w here otherw ise indicated, they all belong to districts o f the Jizan region. This is im portant, for such identification clarifies m any passages o f the H ebrew text o f this charm ing anthology o f ancient love poem s, which w ould otherw ise re­ m ain obscure. C onsider the following: 1 ‘I am very dark, but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem, like

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the tents of Kedar (qdr), like the curtains of Solomon (yry'w t slm h)’ (RSV 1:5). Kedar here is possibly al-Ghadir (gdr), in the ‘Aridah hill country. The ‘tents’ of Kedar are referred to as ’hly(m)-, the y r y 'w t of slmh, cited alongside the ‘tents’ of Kedar as being very dark (i.e. black), could not have been the ‘curtains of Solomon’. The Hebrew y r y 'w t stands for ‘tent curtains’ or ‘tent cloths’, and slmh here is not ‘Solomon’, but either the village of al-Salamah (full transliteration slmh), in the Abu ‘Arlsh district, or that of Al Salamah (also slmh), in the heights o f Dhahran al-Janub beyond the Jizan hill country. This verse, therefore, should read: ‘I am very dark, but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of al-Ghadir, like the tent coverings of al-Salamah.’ 2 ‘My Beloved to me is a cluster of blossoms in the vineyard o f En-gedi ( ‘yn gdy, the ‘spring’ of g d y)’ (1:14). The reference here seems to be to the ‘spring’ o f al-Jiddiyyln (Arabic plural of gdy, or gd y as the genitive of gd), a famed oasis of the Sabya district. 3 ‘I am a rose (hbslt, ‘asphodel’) of Sharon (h-srwn ), a lily of the valleys’ (2:1). Here the ‘asphodel’ of Sharon is identified as being a lily of ‘the valleys’. Actually, in this context, Sharon is a valley, today Wadi Sharranah (srn) in the Hurrath hill country. 4 ‘O my dove, in the clefts of the rock (b-hgwy h-sl‘), in the covert o f the cliff (b-str h-mdrgh) . . . (2:14). The Hebrew hgw y h-sV can mean ‘clefts of the rock’. Here, however, it appears to refer to a village in the highlands of Rijal Alma‘ called today Jarf Sala‘ (grp si1). In the present name, the Arabic grp is a translation of the Hebrew hgw, which survives in the Jizan dialect as hqw (vocalised haqu), used today to denote the foot of a mountain ridge. The Hebrew mdrgh, attested in only two passages of Biblical text (the second being Isaiah 38:20) and interpreted to mean ‘cliff’, is here clearly a place-name today al-Madrajah (exactly, mdrgh), injabal Harub. To someone in thejizan region, the highlands of Rijal Alma‘ would lie ‘behind’ (b-str, ‘in the covert o f’) Jabal Harub. Thus the verse should read: ‘O my dove in Jarf Sala‘, behind Madrajah . . .’ 5 ‘Turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle, or a young stag upon rugged mountains’ (hry btr) (2:17). Even if btr here is taken to mean ‘rugged’, it could not be a description of hry(m ), which means ‘mountains’ or ‘hills’ (plural of hr), since btr is in the singular. The reference can only be to the ‘mountains’ or ‘hills’ ofjabal Bani Malik, where a village called Batar (btr) still exists. 6 ‘Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead (hr g l‘d, or ‘Mount Gilead’)’ (4:1). The Mount Gilead in question here must be the mountain spur of al-Ja‘dah (’l-g‘d), in Rijal Alma‘, across Wadi ‘Itwad from thejizan region. 7 ‘Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes (k -‘dr h-qswbwt)

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that have come up from the washing’ (4:2). Here h-qswbwt is certainly the name o f a place, today al-Qusaybat (qsybt, in the feminine plural and with the definite article, as in the Hebrew), in the Hurrath hills. No ‘ewes’ are to be found in the original, and a ‘shorn flock’ in Hebrew would have been ‘dr qswb, not ‘dr qswbwt, where the noun is in the masculine singular and the adjective in the feminine plural. Hence: ‘Your teeth are like the flock of Qusaybat that have come up from the washing.’ 8 ‘I will hie me to the mountain of myrrh (hr h-mwr) and the hill of frankincense (gb‘t h-lbwnh)’ (4:6). There is actually nothing figurative about the verse. The ‘hill of h-lbwnh’ is definitely that of Jabal al-Lubayni (Ibyny), in the Hurrath district. The ‘mountain of m yrrh’ refers to one of the ridges in the highlands of Mawr (mwr), today within the Yemen, where the headwaters of Wadi Mawr are located. 9 ‘Come with me from Lebanon (Ibnwn), my bride. . . Depart (correctly, ‘descend’) from the peak of Amana (’mnh), from the peak of Senir (snyr) and Hermon (hrmwn), from the dens of lions (m'nwt ’rywt), from the mountains of leopards (hrry h-nmrym)’ (4:8). The ‘Lebanon’, ‘Amana’, ‘Senir’ and ‘Hermon’ here are the highlands of Lubaynan (Ibynn), just south of the Yemen border; Yamanl (ymn), in the ‘Aridah district; al-Sarran (srn), in Jabal Harub; and Khimran (hmrn), in the Hurrath district. The ‘dens of lions’ are (or rather is) the present village of al-Ma‘ayin (Arabic plural o f m‘yn) of Jabal Harub, identified in relation to the adjacent district of al-Rayth (pronounced ar-Rayth, or ’ryt, cf. Hebrew ’rywt). The ‘mountains of leopards’ are clearly the ridges of Jabal Dhu Nimr (nmr, ‘leopard’), in the Hurrath district, unless the reference is to al-Numur (Arabic plural of nmr), in the neighbouring Rubu‘ah district. 10 ‘You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners’ (’ymh k-ndglwt)’ (6:4). The Hebrew ndglwt here, translated ‘banners’, and freely interpreted as ‘an army with banners’, is attested in no other passage of the Bible. It is clearly the feminine plural of ndgl, taken to be the participle of the np‘l form of dgl, ‘lift the banner’. Actually, it must refer to a range of hills in the extreme south of the Jizan region called today al-Janadil (Arabic plural of gndl, ‘large rock, boulder’, of which ndgl is a metathesis). It might be added here that ’ymh k-ndglwt probably means ‘awesome as al-Janadil’ rather than ‘terrible as al-Janadil’, the mountains and hills of the Jizan hinterland being truly majestic in their rugged beauty. For the Biblical ‘Tirzah’ and ‘Jerusalem’, see Chapters 10 and 9 re­ spectively. 11 ‘I went down to the nut orchard (gnt ’gwz), to look at the blossoms of the valley, to see whether the vines had budded, whether

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the pomegranates were in bloom’ (6 :11). In a nut orchard, one would expect to see nut trees rather than blossoms, vines and pomegranates. Moreover, ‘nut orchard’, in Hebrew, would have been rendered as gnt h-’g wz, granting that ’g wz means ‘nut’, or ‘nut tree’ (the term is not attested anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and is taken to mean ‘nut’ mainly by comparison to the Arabic gwz). However, what is at issue here is the name of a place, today the village of al-Janat (gnt) in the Bal-Ghazi (or Bani al-GhazI, gzy, cf. Biblical ’gwz) district an area where the foothills ofjabal Faifa andjabal Bani Malik merge with the Jizan coastal plain. The ‘valley’ there could have been any o f the fertile tributaries of Wadi Sabya or Wadi Damad. 12 ‘Return, return, O Shulammite (h-swlmyt), return, return, that we may look upon you (w-nhzh bk). Why should you look upon the Shulammite (tnh thzw b-swlmyt), as upon a dance before two armies (k-mhlt h-mhnym)V (RSV 6:13; Hebrew Bible 7:1). Here, swlmyt, the feminine of the genitive of swim, could refer to a girl from what is today the village of al-Shamla (sml), in the territory of the Salamah (5/m) tribe, in Jabal Bani Malik. Some scholars have suggested that it could actually be a girl’s name, which I find more plausible, considering that it is mentioned in the same verse once with and once without the definite article (a common feature of some Arabic personal names to this day). As such, it could be the equivalent o f Salma (slm’, feminine form of slmn) —the poetic prototype of the beloved so often praised in ancient and modern Arabic song. In the verse in question, as conventionally translated, this Shulammite is compared to the dance of two armies (or two camps, mhlt h-mhnym), which makes no sense. The verbal root of mhl, however, is hlh, which is attested in Arabic (hly) in the sense of ‘adorn’; hence the Arabic (and also Hebrew) hly as a noun meaning ‘women’s ornaments’. As another substantive o f hlh, mhlh can also mean ‘orna­ ment’. Hence the verse can be retranslated: ‘Return, return, O Shu­ lammite . . . that we may look upon you. Why do you look (mh thzw) on the Shulammite as the ornament of the camps?’ 13 ‘Your neck is like an ivory tower (mgdl h-sn). Your eyes are like pools in Heshbon (hsbwn), by the gate of Bath-rabbim ( 7 s‘r bt-rbym). Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon (mgdl h-lbnwn), overlooking Damascus (swphpny dmsq). Your head crowns you like Carmel (r’sk ‘lyk k-krml), and your flowing locks (dlt r’sk) are like purple; a king is held in the tresses (k-’rgmn mlk ’swr b-rhtym)’ (RSV 7:4-5; Hebrew Bible 7:5-6). Among the recognised place-names here, Heshbon and Bath-rabbim do not correspond to any known surviving place-names in the Jizan region or its close neighbourhood, unless Heshbon is the ridge (and spring) of Shihb (shb, metathesis of hsb, without the archaic suffixed definite article n) in Rijal Alma‘, and

THE BIBLE CAME FROM ARABIA

Bath-rabbim is Sha'b al-Baram (brm , metathesis of rbym) in the same region. The ‘Lebanon’ or Lubaynan of North Yemen has already been identified; it stands across thejizan region fromJabal Bani Malik where a ‘Damascus’ (the present village of Dha Misk, or d-msk, cf. Biblical dmsq) is to be found. ‘Carmel’, or Kirmil (krm l ), is cited by the Arab geographers as a ridge of the Jizan region, its name still being carried by the Karamilah (those o f krml), a tribe o f Wadi Jizan. Not recognised as a place-name is h-sn (mgdl h-sn, understood to mean ‘ivory tower’), which probably refers to al-Sinn (sn ), in the Muhayil region, or al-Shanu (sn), a village on the isolated ridge ofjabal Dirim, in the neighbouring Ballasmar region. The Hebrew dlt r’sk k - ’rgmn m lk ’swr b-rhtym, so far treated as two separate sentences (‘your flowing locks are like purple; a king is held in the tresses’), is actually one sentence. Here dlt means ‘dishevelled hair’, or simply ‘hair’, rather than ‘locks’; ’rgmn means ‘woollen cloth’, or ‘dyed woollen cloth’, rather than ‘purple’ (and who would think of hair as being purple?); ’sw r is a place-name, Al Yasir (ysyr), in the Tanumah region of the Sarat, rather than a common noun meaning ‘captive’; rhtym (plural of rht) is the equivalent o f the Arabic rihdt (collective plural o f rht), attested in the sense of ‘carpets, rugs, upholstery, textile furnishings’, and does not stand for ‘tresses’. Translators of the Bible have actually admitted uncertainty about the translation of this sentence, which should read: ‘The hair of your head is like the woollen rugs of the king of Asur (Al Yasir)’, which makes proper sense. Rugs of wool, coloured with local vegetable dyes (today increasingly with artificial dyes) are still made in the Sarat and sold in the market places of Abha and Khamis Mushait. 14 ‘Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon (b‘l hm w n )’ (8:11). Take b‘l to be b-‘l, and it would mean ‘above’, or ‘in the height’, not ‘Baal’. Hamon (hmwn) must be Wadi Haman (hmn), in the Hurrath district. Hence: ‘Solomon had a vineyard in the upper reaches of Haman.’ 15 ‘Make haste, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of spices (hry bsm ym )’ (8:14). The reference here could be to two places called Bashamah (bsm) in the Jizan region, one in the hill country of al-‘Aridah, and the other in the hill country bordering Wadi ‘Itwad. If only these two Bashamahs were involved, then hry bsmym should be read in the dual rather than in the plural. T he Song o f Songs is by no means the only exam ple o f the folk lore o f the Jizan m ountains to be found in the H ebrew Bible. A nother comprises the Psalms attributed to the ‘Sons o f K o rah ’ (bny qrh, see note 1 in C hapter 9). As already indicated,

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these ‘Sons o f K o rah ’ w ere a tribe o f the m ountain hinterland o f Jizan. T heir nam e survives there to this day as that o f the village o f al-Q arhah (qrh), in Jabal Faifa, and o f al-Q arhan (.qrhn), in Jabal Bani M alik, the latter nam e being the Arabic equivalent o f qrhym (H ebrew plural o f qrh), m eaning the qrh folk, or the qrh tribe. T h e contents o f the Song o f Songs, as already m entioned, m ust have been com piled n o t in the days o f Solom on, but under his successors. T here is, in fact, one piece o f evidence w hich suggests that they m ust have been collected som e tim e after his death and the division o f his kingdom , w hen his descendants w ere reigning as kings o f Judah in ‘J erusalem ’, while their rivals, the kings o f Israel, resided in ‘T irzah’. In the verse that says ‘Y ou are beautiful as Tirzah, m y love, comely as Jerusalem ’, the parallel m ention o f the tw o names in one sentence indicates a recognition o f an equality o f status between the tw o tow ns. Such an equality o f status could n o t have existed in the days o f K ing Solom on, w hen ‘T irzah’ was still a place o f little renow n in the G ham id highlands (see C hapter 10), while ‘J erusalem ’ was the capital o f ‘All Israel’. W hile transposing the Song o f Songs from Palestine to Asir m ay seem to add little o f m ajor significance to our understand­ ing o f the Bible - m istranslation o f place-names into desert bloom s hardly changes the im port o f the Songs - nevertheless, the examples I have chosen are revealing. It is not ju st that these ancient H ebrew lyrics gain in geographical precision; m ore im portantly, w e are m ade to recognise that they are firm ly rooted in a clearly definable place. This is w hat m any Bible readers fail to recognise, a residue o f piety leading them to underestim ate the extent to w hich its texts w ere w ritten in a language really used by actual people w ho lived in a particular place at a particular time. W hat a rereading o f the H ebrew Bible’s Song o f Songs dem onstrates m ost vividly is that even passages w hich seem so poetically right, so evocative in their sensuous beauty, are susceptible to a m ore prosaic, though truer, interpretation. T he sooner w e are ready to recognise that it is the ancient, fertile land o f Asir in w hich som e o f the m ost cherished beliefs o f a

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large portion o f the hum an race are grounded, the sooner w e will be in a better position to understand an im portant part o f our heritage.

EPILOGUE

O n e can, o f course, go on and on reinterpreting the geography o f the H ebrew Bible in term s o f W est Arabia rather than Palestine. For the purpose o f the present study, how ever, enough is enough. O ne day, should a new generation o f Biblical scholars decide to abandon w hat I believe are the obsolete traditions o f their craft, the w hole text o f the H ebrew Bible will be properly reassessed. W ords so far assumed to be verbs, adjectives, nouns o f all sorts such as substantive and gerunds, and even som e adverbs, w ould be recognised as place-names, w hile som e w ords so far taken to be place-names m ay turn out to be som ething else. Fed into a com puter, along w ith the host o f catalogued W est Arabian place-names, the k n o w n as well as the yet u n k n o w n Biblical place-names will all - or nearly all be correctly identified. N e w Biblical atlases, com pletely unlike the ones w ith w hich the w orld is presently familiar, will be prepared and published to serve as proper guides to Bible readers. So far, I have resisted addressing m yself to the question w hich m y investigation into Biblical geography has inevitably posed: does all this m ake any difference to the Bible as a book o f religion? O bviously, the answ er m ust be ‘yes’, in the sense that it will establish the veracity o f Biblical history to a degree that no one has so far suspected. As a result, one should be able to obtain rich insights into the origins, developm ent and nature o f the Jew ish and C hristian religions - insights based on scho­ larly accuracy rather than conjecture, w hich w ould m ake m uch o f w h at has been w ritten about the subject so far untei. able, if n o t also insipid, by com parison. Properly studied in the light

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o f its correct geography, the Bible will stand as a book o f history, no longer needing to have its historicity proved by lame artifice - certainly not by a Biblical archaeology w hich persists in searching for the Bible land in the w ro n g place. T he ancient history o f the w hole N ear East, restudied in the light o f a m ore accurate historical interpretation o f the Bible in its p roper geographic setting, will begin to m ake better sense. Even so, it is well to rem ind ourselves that the H ebrew Bible is a prized legacy o f the hum an race and will rem ain so, no m atter w hether it was originally w ritten in Palestine or W est Arabia. T h e ancient Israelites will continue to be rightly recog­ nised as a great people w h o w ere prim e contributors to hum an civilisation, no m atter w hether they lived in Palestine or Asir, or w hether their Jerusalem was the present Jerusalem or a W est A rabian village by the nam e o f Al Sharim. G eography makes a difference to history, but not to historical stature, and m uch less to religion and faith, w hich are m atters o f an altogether different order. Therefore, w hile m y thesis m ay cause some consternation - and perhaps, m ore likely, scepticism - all I w ould ask is that the evidence I have presented should be carefully studied in the light o f disinterested scholarly enquiry. T he Bible is, after all, the Bible, and nothing is likely to underm ine its im portance as a book w hich enshrines the wis­ d om w hich has shaped the course o f civilisation and sustained the faith o f all true believers. W hat is im portant is its m eaning for m ankind rather than the geographical context in w hich the events it describes actually took place.

APPENDIX O N O M A S T IC E V ID E N C E R E L A T IN G T O T H E T W E L V E T R IB E S O F IS R A E L IN W E S T A R A B IA

Reuben

Simeon

Levi

Judah

(r’wbn ): the Rawabln (rwbn ) tribe continue to carry the same name in Arabia today. The Reuben territory appears to have been in the southern Hijaz, between the Mecca vicinity and the hinterland of Lith. A village called Rabin (:rbn) exists today in the neighbourhood of Rabigh, near Mecca. East of Lith one finds a Rabwan (rbwn) in Wadi Adam, and a Rubyan (rbyn ) in the Bahah region. (sm'wn): the Sama‘inah or Sama‘Tn (sm'n) tribe, originally from the Yemen and today in southern Palestine, are an Arab tribe still known by the same name. The Simeon country appears to have been mainly in the southern part of the Jizan region, close by the Yemen border, where one village called Sha'nun (s'nwn) and two called Shima1 (sm‘, without the archaic definite article in sm'wn) are situated. There is also a Sham* (sm*) in the hinterland of Qunfudhah, and an Al Sham‘ah (’I sm‘) near Taif. {IwyY the name is strikingly similar to the Arabian tribal name Lu’ayy (I’y). Buq'at al-Lawat (singular Iwh) is found in the Jizan region, which is one place where the tribe was concentrated. There are a Law! (Iwy) and a Lawiyyah {Iwy) there. Two villages called Lawah (Iwh) and La­ wiyyah (Iwy) in Wadi Adam, one called Lawiyyah in the Bahah region, and one called Luwayyah (Iwy) near Taif, attest to an ancient presence of the tribe in these areas also. (yhwdh): the name is still carried today by a number o f Arabian tribes, among them the Wahadm (plural of WahadI, or whd). See Chapter 8 for the discussion. Two villages called Wahdah (whdh) exist in Rijal Alma*. There

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Dan

Naphtali

Gad

Asher

Issachar

APPENDIX

is also a Wahdah in Wadi Adam, another in the Bahah region, and a third in the Nimas region; also a Wihad (whd) in Wadi Bishah. When the Philistines raided the ‘land of Judah’ in the days of Samson, they attacked ‘Lehi’ (Ihy), today Lakhyah (Ihy), in Wadi Adam (see Chapter 14). This indicates that the original land of Judah must have been there. Other Biblical evidence for this is also available. (dn): today, the identical name is that of the Arabian trihes of the Duwaniyah (dny), Danaywi (dny) and Dandan (dndn). The Arabic plural form of the tribal name, Danadinah (dndn), is carried by a village in the maritime lowlands of the Zahran region. There is additional Bibli­ cal evidence that the Danite territory was there; see the toponymies of the story of Samson in Chapter 14. (nptly): the Arabian tribe of the Falatin (pltn) carries a metathesis of this name to the present day. The territory of the Biblical Naphtali could have comprised areas ranging from the hinterland of Birk in the north to that of Jizan in the south. Two villages called Maftali (mptly) and Al Maftalah ( 7 mptl) are to be found in the first area; three villages called Maftal (mptl) are located in the second. (gd): among several Arabian tribes that still carry this name today are thejadl (gd) and the Judan (plural ofjudl, or gd). Jadiyah (gdy), in the Bahah region, and Jldiyah (gdy), near Mecca, would indicate that the Biblical Gad was a northern tribe. There is also a Jadyah (gdy) in the Taif region. O n the other hand there is a Ghadah (gd) near Abha, one Ghadi (gd) and two villages called Ghadiyah (gdy) in the Jizan region, apart from a northern Ghadiyah in the hinterland of Lith, which suggests another southern homeland for the Gad tribe. The Mec­ can harbour ofjuddah (gd), and two villages calledjuddah and Ibn Juddah in the Qunfudhah region, may also be related to this tribal name. (’sr): today, the Arabian tribe that carries the identical name is the Dhawi Shari (sr). The identical place-name is Wishr (wsr), in the Jizan region, which suggests that the Asher were a southern tribe. Sharawra, or Sharawrah (srwr), is probably an Arabic plural form of the same tribal name; it is that of a village in the Najran region, in the southernmost part of inland Asir. (ysskr): the Shukarah (skr) tribe of Wadi Sayah, north of

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Mecca, carry what appears to be the name of this Biblical tribe today. There is also a Shukarah tribe in Wadi al-Dawasir, west o f Wadi Bishah. Closer to the Biblical ysskr, however, is the name o f the historical Arabian tribe of the Yashkur (yskr). Zebulun (zblwn): the Zabbalah (zbl) o f the highlands o f southern Asir are one West Arabian tribe that continues to bear this name; another is the tribe of the Zubalah (also zbl), found in Wadi Hajar, north of Mecca. The Biblical zblwn is the identical name, with the archaic definite article added as a suffix. Joseph (ywsp): the Arabian Banu Yusuf (ysp) still carry the same name today. There is also a village called Al Yusuf ( 7 ywsp) in the heights of the Ballasmar country, in central Asir. Also, the name survives in an Arabicised form as Asfa’ (’sp), which is the name of one village in the Asir highlands, and of another near Ghumayqah, in the hinterland o f Lith, where the tribal country of Joseph appears to have been located (see Chapter 6). Benjamin (bnymyn, or bn ymyn, apparently meaning ‘son of the south’): that ymyn (as ymn) means ‘south’ is certain. In pre-Islamic Arabic literature, the exact Arabic equivalent o f the Biblical name, Ibn Yamin (’bn ymn), is used poeti­ cally for the people o f the Yemen (Yaman, or ymn, also ‘south’). Today, in West Arabia, we have the tribes o f the Yamna, Yamanah and Yamani (all ymn), which continue to carry the same name. Villages with names derived from ymn (such as al-Yamam and Al Yamani) are numerous in the southern parts o f geographic Asir. According to Genesis 35:18, Benjamin was called Benoni (bn ’wny) before his name was changed. The Biblical 'wny here (from a root ’ny, perhaps a variant o f ’nk, ‘hold, comprise’) probably means ‘caravan’ (cf. Arabic aniyah, or ’nyh, in the sense o f ‘saddlebag’, or ‘saddlebags’, both in the singular and the collective plural). Thus, while Ben-oni could have meant the ‘son o f the caravans’, Benjamin, emphasising the location rather than the trade o f the tribe or people involved, must have meant the ‘son of the south’ (today southern Asir and the adjacent Yemen). The name in either case is appropriate, because ancient Asir was largely dependent for its commerce on the caravans coming from the direction of the south.

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Subdivisions o f the Joseph tribe Ephraim

(’pryrn, dual or plural of ’pr): as a modern Arabian tribal name, we have the FIran (dual or plural of pr, cf. ’pr). The territory of the Ephraim tribe must have been in Wadi al-Malahah, in the Bani Shahr district on the mari­ time slopes of Asir, where a village called Wafrayn (wpryn, dual of wpr) still stands. Manasseh (mnsh ): as the name of an Arabian tribe, the name is still there as that of the Mansi (mns ). There is a village called Mansiyah (m nsyh) near Sabya, in the northern part of the Jizan region; a Munshah (mnsh), in the Ballasmar region; a Mamshah (mmsh, a dialectical corruption of mnsh) in the Qunfudhah region; also a Manshiyyat al-Far‘, in the Bahah region of northern Asir. The main concentration of the Manasseh appears to have been fairly close to that of the related Ephraim. The ‘Mothers’ o f the Israelite tribes According to Genesis 29, 30 and 35, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, and Issachar were born to Jacob by Leah (I’h), the elder daughter of his maternal uncle Laban (Ibn), the brother of his mother Rebekah (rbqh), both Laban and Rebekah being the children of Bethuel (btw’l). Joseph and Benjamin were borne by Laban’s younger daughter Rachel (rhl). Dan and Naphtali were the sons of Rachel’s maid Bilhah (blhh), while Gad and Asher were the sons of Leah’s maid Zilpah (zlph). All this indicates a northern origin for the reported maternal ancestry of the Israelite tribes. The name of Bethuel, father of Laban and Rebekah and paternal grandfather of Leah and Rachel, survives as the name of the village of Butaylah (btyl) in the Zahran highlands south o f Taif. The name of Rebekah, as Ribqah (exactly rbqh) survives a short distance further south, in the Ghamid highlands, as that of a village near Baljurashi. Incidentally, there is also a Ribkah (rbkh, variant of rbqh) near Rabigh, in the vicinity of Mecca, where a village called Laban (Ibn) also survives, still carrying the name of Rebekah’s brother. Against this topographical background, one must associate the name of Leah, the daughter of Laban, niece o f Rebekah, and mother o f six ofjacob’s twelve sons, with that of the valley of Wadi Liyyah (lyh), in the Taif region east of Mecca, rather than with Wadi Liyah (also lyh), in the Jizan region. As the ‘sister’ of Leah, Rachel would appear to have carried the name of Rakhilah or Rukhaylah (rhyl, cf. Hebrew rhl), one of the villages o f Wadi Liyyah, bearing in mind that a village called Rakhl (rhl, identical with rhl) also exists to this day further north in the

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vicinity of Yanbu‘ al-Nakhl, west of Medina. The name of Rachel’s maid, the mother of Dan and Naphtali, being Bilhah (blhh), recalls the name o f the present village of Balha’ (blh'), actually pronounced Balha or Balhah (blhh), in the vicinity o f Lith, southwest of Taif, near the Red Sea coast. As for Leah’s maid Zilpah (zlph), the mother of Gad and Asher, her name is still carried by one of three villages o f the same general vicinity: Dhulf (dip), in Wadi Adam; Zulf (zip), also in Wadi Adam; and (the most likely) Zuluf (zip), in the Taif region, close by Wadi Liyyah. Significantly, two places called ‘Aqb (‘qb, root of y ‘qb, or ‘Jacob’) survive in the Zahran region, south of Taif, along with one place called ‘Uqub (‘qwb), one called ‘Aqlb (‘qyb), and one called ‘Aqibah Cqyb) in the Taif region. There is also a village there called Al-Ya‘aqib (Arabic plural o fy'qwby, literally ‘theJacob people’). All these villages are found in the regions of Taif and Zahran which straddle the water divide between the inland and coastal parts o f the southern Hijaz. Therefore, taking into account the topography of the area, the name Jacob or y ‘qb, as a substantive o f ‘qb, could be related to the Arabic ‘aqabah (‘qbh), meaning ‘mountain pass, crossing’. Actually, a number o f villages called ‘Aqabah are found today in the same area. Thus, the Jacob tribes could originally have been the people controlling the mountain passes between the southern Hijaz and northern Asir (cf. the analysis of the crossing of h-yrdti by Joshua in Chapter 7). Taking into account that Genesis describes Jacob’s uncle Laban as an Aramaean, and actually makes him speak Aramaic rather than He­ brew (see Chapter 1), one may assume that a Jacob people living in the same area could also have been Aramaeans by origin, before migrating southwards to become fused with Hebrew-speaking tribes in Asir, eventually becoming known as Israelites. Actually, Laban’s ‘Aram’ appears to survive today as Aryamah (’rym), in the Zahran highlands (see Chapter 1, note 3). This may explain the cryptic statement in Deuteronomy 26:5: ‘A wandering Aramaean was my father; and he went down to msrym (not ‘Egypt’, but Misramah near Abha, as already suggested) and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous.’ Again, one cannot help recalling the words of Gerald de Gaury: ‘Who knows what treasures of history lay in the tangled ruins of Asir?’ The place-names that survive there are in themselves a priceless treasure o f frozen history, and, we may assume, have much more to tell us about the history of the ancient Near East than has been said in this book.

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NOTES TH E JEWISH W O R LD OF A N T IQ U IT Y The term ‘Semitic’, used to describe the peoples related to the Hebrews and their languages, was first introduced by A. L. Schlozer in 1781. It derives from the Biblical Shem (sm), son of Noah and supposed ancestor of the Israelites and other Biblical folk. The Hebrew Bible speaks o f the peoples descended from Shem without describing them as being ‘Semites’ or ‘Semitic’. The language may have been so called in antiquity. Mention o f the ‘language o f Canaan’ (spt kn'n), apparently to mean Hebrew, occurs in one Biblical passage, Isaiah 19:18. Later, it will be shown by toponymic analysis that the Biblical land of Canaan was on the maritime side o f Asir and not in Palestine and coastal Syria, as is commonly supposed. Basing their arguments almost entirely on Biblical evidence, wrongly interpreted, scholars have assumed that the Aramaeans were originally the inhabitants o f the area o f northern Syria west of the Euphrates. However, a re-examination of the Biblical evidence shows us that what the Hebrew Bible refers to as Aram (consonantal ’rm) was actually in West Arabia. Aram Naharim (’rm nhrym, Genesis 28:2 etc.), for example, was certainly not Mesopotamia but present-day Naharfn (nhryn) near Taif (alTa’if), in the southern Hijaz. Therefore, one must conclude that Paddan-aram (pdn ’rm, Genesis 28:2 etc.) was nearby Dafinah (dpn) in the vicinity of Mecca, not somewhere in Mesopotamia. Similarly, other names which the Hebrew Bible associated with Aram - Beth-rehob, Aram Zobah and even Damascus (West Arabian Dha Misk, or d msk, cf. Hebrew dmsq) - may be located today by name in the Hijaz and Asir. A Wadi Waram (wrm) also bears the name of ancient Aram there. Incidentally, the Koranic Iram (’rm, Koran 89:7) as a place-name is consonantally identical with the Biblical Aram, which is also ’rm. The Koran associates the place with that of Dhat al-‘Imad, al-‘Imad today being a

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village of the Zahran (Zahran) highlands, an area south of Taif, where a local Aram survives as the village of Aryamah (’rym). Admittedly, one cannot say for sure how far the Biblical land of Aram in West Arabia extended, but it certainly included the southern parts of the Hijaz. Zellig S. Harris, A Grammar of the Phoenician Language (New Haven, Conn., 1936), p. 7, note 29. Harris also cites further evidence indicating that the Phoenicians, along the Syrian coast as elsewhere, actually called themselves Canaanites. The evidence of Herodotus on this, as on other points relating to the history of the ancient Near East, is normally dismissed as being of no real worth by modern historians and archaeologists o f the area. They no doubt give it cavalier treatment because it does not fit in with their own notions, which largely derive from misinterpretations o f ancient records and archaeological findings, based in turn on misinterpretations of the geographical and topographical material o f the Hebrew Bible. The suggestion that the Red Sea of Herodotus was not the Red Sea but the Persian Gulf need not be credited, as it has little to support it. Herodotus (2:44) reports, on the authority of the priests of the Phoenician city of Tyre in his time, that this city was founded 2,300 years before. Biblical Tyre (Hebrew sr) was not a city by the ‘sea’ (Hebrew ym), but the present major oasis of Zur (zr), called Zur al-Wadi‘ah, in the Najran region, which stands on the edge of the Yam (ym) country, bordering on the Central Arabian desert. Its ‘ships’ (Hebrew ’wnywt) were really caravans of pack-animals (Arabic ’nyt, ‘saddlebags’), and the places with which it traded can be identified by name in different parts of Arabia. The Bible speaks of King Hiram (hyrm) of sr, or ‘Tyre’; no ancient king by this name is attested for the Lebanese city of Tyre, the Phoenician Ahiram (’hrm, not hyrm) having been a king of Byblos, which is an entirely different place. Gebal (as gbl or qbl) is among the commonest of place-names in West Arabia, one particular Gebal, near the Biblical Tyre, being Al Qabil (qbl), in the Najran region. The West Arabian Arwad is today Riwad (rwd), in the Asir highlands; Biblical Sidon is considered in Chapter 4. According to Arab geographers, Lubaynan (Ibynn, unvocalised Ibnn, or ‘Lebanon’) was the name of the highlands which today straddle the border between Asir and the Yemen. In the coastal foothills of this area, a village called Lubayni (Ibyny) still exists. The Biblical cedars of Lebanon must have been the giant junipers of this West Arabian Lubaynan, and the Biblical snow of Lebanon is, no doubt, local snow (see Chapter 2).

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8 The West Arabian Carmel is Kirmil (also krml), mentioned in the Arabic geographical dictionary of Yaqut (4:448) as a coastal ridge in the extreme south of Asir, bordering the Yemen, and hence immediately to the west of the West Arabian Lebanon (see note 7). This explains why Mount Carmel is sometimes mentioned in association with Mount Lebanon in Biblical texts, one of them the hitherto unsuspected Isaiah 29:17, sb Ibnwn l-krml, taken to mean ‘Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field’, but actually meaning ‘Lebanon shall turn to (or return to) Carmel’. 9 Place-names equivalent to the Hebrew glyl (meaning ‘terraced slopes’) are common in the West Arabian highlands. Among others, there is a Wadi Jalll (glyl) in the southern Hijaz, southeast of Taif. 10 The Biblical hrmwn (in the metathesis hmrn or hmm) survives as the name of no less than five places in the southern Hijaz and Asir called Hamran or Khamran. 11 Wadi Adam, which springs from the highlands o f Taif and flows in the direction of the Red Sea, is sometimes referred to in the Hebrew Bible as nhr prt, which makes it easily confusable with the Mesopotamian Euphrates. This confusion is enhanced by the Biblical description o f the nhr prt as h-nhr h-gdwl, ‘the great river’, Wadi Adam being one of the largest maritime-draining wadis of West Arabia. Actually, the Biblical name of this wadi derives from that of the village today called Firt (prt), in the same region. Like the battle of Carchemish, the battle of Karkara (or rather Qarqara), fought by the Assyrians against the kings of Amat and Imerisu and their allies Gindibu’ of Aribi and Ahab o f Israel (Ahabu Sir’lla) towards the middle of the ninth century B . C . , was actually fought in West Arabia, not along the Orontes river in northern Syria as generally believed. Amat, hitherto taken to be a reference to Hamah in the Orontes valley, in northern Syria, is actually the present village o f Amt (’mt), near Taif, and hence not far from the Biblical Carchemish. Imerisu is not the Syrian Damascus it has been taken to be, on no basis whatsoever. Among several West Arabian alternatives, probably Marasha (mrs), in the southern Asir highlands (the Dhahran al-Janub region, see Chap­ ter 3) is the most likely. Gindibu’ of Aribi is commonly assumed to have been an Arab chief of the Syrian desert. Actually, a tribe called the Banu Jundub (gndb) still inhabit the central Asir highlands, and Aribi must have been present-day ‘Arabah (‘rbh), a village o f those highlands where the Banu Jundub are still to be found. Karkara itself, in this case, would be present-day Qarqarah or Qarqara (qrqr), in coastal Asir, in the hinterland of the harbour of Qunfudhah, south of Lith. There are three other

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places called Qarqar (qrqr) also in West Arabia, and none in the Orontes region of Syria. For the doubts concerning the onomas­ tics connected with the Battle of Karkara, as it has hitherto been interpreted geographically, see the notes in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1969; hereafter Pritchard), pp. 278-279. Translations of the Egyptian records (such as those in Pritchard) confuse the issue by uncritically identifying the place-names cited with known Palestinian and Syrian place-names, instead of transliterating the original, which is the proper thing to do. The same also (as in Pritchard) goes for the Mesopotamian and other records. The search for the places in question must be sought with the help of the original records, not translations. The Egyptians were also interested, among other things, in securing the juniper wood of Asir (rather than the cedar of Lebanon) as building material, and for the construction of ships, cedar being of little use for that purpose. For the confusion between cedar and juniper, see the relevant passages in Alessandra Nibbi, Ancient Egypt and Some Eastern Neighbours (Park Ridge, N.J., 1981). It must be noted here that the Arab historians of early Islamic times, whose works preserve old Arabian traditions deserving serious attention, insist that Nebuchadnezzar was a conqueror of Arabia and relate the story of his conquests there. Judging by Micah 1:1, this expression of hope in the ‘daughter of Jerusalem’ dates from the eighth century B.C. So far, Biblical scholars have taken the expressions ‘daughter of Zion’ and ‘daughter of Jerusalem’ to be no more than poetic references to Zion and Jerusalem, thereby obviating the necessity of providing further historical information. These words are addressed to Sennacherib, the king of Assyria (704-681 B.C.). For the Biblical Sabaoth as a leading shrine o f Yahweh in the Asir highlands (today the village of al-Sabayat, cf. Hebrew ’Ihy sb’wt or yhwh sb’wt), see Chapter 12. The prophetic career of Zechariah coincided with the early years of the reign of the Achaemenid ruler Darius I (522-486 B.C.), as is clear from the mention of Darius and the years of his reign in the text of Zechariah’s prophecies. Because Zechariah 9:13 speaks o f ywn, which has been taken to be a reference to Greece (Greek laones), this chapter and what follows in Zechariah has been attributed by critics to another writer of a later date (late Achae­ menid or early Hellenistic times). Actually, the Hebrew ywn can only be a reference to Greece in Daniel. Everywhere else in the

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Hebrew Bible, it refers to what is today either the village of Yanah (yn), near Taif, in the southern Hijaz, or the village of Waynah (wyn) on the western slopes of Asir, in the Bani Shahr region. Zechariah was apparently one of the Israelites who returned from Persia or Babylon to West Arabia in early Achaemenid times (see text). Disappointed by what he found there, he could have had reason to turn his attention from the old Zion and Jerusalem in West Arabia to a more hopeful vision of a new Zion and Jerusalem in Palestine. 19 These successive language shifts, affecting the countries of the Near East surrounding the vast expanse of the Syro-Arabian desert, must have been related to successive waves o f settlement by pastoral tribes from the central desert in the sedentary lands around it. Canaanite, it appears, was the language of the original tribal and sedentary population of the western highland fringes o f the Syro-Arabian desert, in Syria as in Arabia. New settlers from the desert, from an early time, introduced Aramaic there, and also to Mesopotamia. Later settlements in the same areas established by Arabic-speaking desert tribes introduced Arabic. As variants of a mother Semitic language, Canaanite, Aramaic and Arabic might be regarded as of equal antiquity, though linguistically Arabic is regarded as the most ancient of the three. 20 One indication of this (apart from vowel sounds) was the adop­ tion of the Aramaic softening of the voiceless plosive k, when preceded by a vowel, into the voiceless fricative h, which is not attested in any instance by the actual vocalisation of surviving Biblical place-names in West Arabia, where the h is invariably an alternative pronunciation of another fricative, fi. 21 A number of West Arabian tribes, who are not Jews today, insist that they are Jewish by remote origin, and there is a local conviction in the area that the land of the Biblical prophets was there. Arabian tribal lore recalls that the Jews inhabited the mountains of the Hijaz (sic) when the Arabs were still in the desert, and that it was the Jews there who first domesticated the camel. See Alois Musil, The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins (New York, 1928), pp. 329-330. 22 For nhrym and prt, see above, notes 3 and 11. For ksdym, see Chapter 13. While the Biblical msrym sometimes refers to Egypt, more often than not it denotes a town or region in West Arabia, in inland Asir; see Chapters 4, 13 and 14. 23 See the summary discussion of the topographical content of this scroll in Emil G. Kraeling, Rand McNally Bible Atlas (New York, 1962; hereafter Kraeling), pp. 66-68. 24 The work of Biblical archaeologists in Palestine has actually been

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subjected to severe criticism. Writing in 1965, Frederick V. Winnet remarked that ‘the foundations of some of the edifices which have been erected by O T scholars in recent years . . . are in bad shape and stand in need of extensive repairs’ (Journal of Biblical Literature, 84 (1965), pp. 1-19). The point of view of Professor Winnet is upheld by other notable Biblical scholars, such as J. Maxwell Miller and H. J. Franken. 25 The Goshen (gsn), Pithon (ptm), and Raamses (r'mss) mentioned in Genesis and Exodus in connection with the stay of the Israelites in the land o f msrym have never been satisfactorily located in Egypt (see entries inj. Simons, The Geographical and Topographi­ cal Texts of the Old Testament . . . (Leiden, 1959; hereafter Simons), which makes several tentative identifications). Two possible Goshens (Ghathan, gtn, and Qashanln, qsnn, plural of qsn), a Pithom (Al Futaymah, ptym, unvocalised ptm) and a Raamses (Masas, mss) are still to be found in inland Asir, in the region of the West Arabian msrym. The initial r‘ in r'mss (Raamses) is probably the name of a god. In the vocalised form Ra' or Ra'T, it features as an initial part of a number of West Arabian place-names. 26 Unlike the Hebrew Bible, which relates the full story of the ancient Israelites from its legendary beginnings down to the fifth century B.C., the other historical records which have come down to us from the various lands of the ancient Near East relate only bits and pieces of history - king lists, accounts of particular military expeditions, peace treaties and the like - and in no case tell the complete story of a particular people, state or empire. 27 See the translations of the Aramaic papyri of the fifth century B.C. relating to the Jewish community of Elephantine (apparently a military colony of the Achaemenid period) in Pritchard, pp. 491-493, 548-549. Some of these papyri hint at the antiquity o f the Aramaic-speaking Jewish presence there. Interestingly, these papyri speak of Jews, not of Israelites. 2

A Q U E S T IO N OF M E T H O D 1 The Biblical slg, for example, which occurs no less than eighteen times in different Biblical texts, is normally taken to mean ‘snow’, except in job 9:30, where it is not infrequently translated to mean a cleansing or bleaching material, probably soapwort. The latter is probably the connotation o f slg in other Biblical passages, notably in Psalm 51:9. In this context, ‘Purge me with

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hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow (tkbsny w-m-slg ’Ibyn)’ should perhaps be more correctly rendered as: ‘You shall purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; you shall wash me, and from soapwort I shall be white.’ Two cleansing materials - the purgati ve hyssop and the detergent roots of the soapwort - are obviously what this verse refers to. For the Arabian soapwort, see below. The Biblical b’r Ihy r’y means ‘well of the ravine of r’y ’, not ‘well o f the living one who sees me (l-hy r’y)’, as the name is commonly interpreted. Even if the Ihy in the name is read l-hy, it would mean ‘to the living one’, not ‘of the living one’. Actually, Ihy in the vocalised Arabic form lahi, means ‘ravine’. The name of the ravine in question is r’y, vocalised to read as the Arabic rawi (rwy), it would mean ‘the irrigated one’, not ‘the seeing one’ or ‘the one who sees me’, which is what the Hebrew form of the word immediately suggests. This rwy could be none other than what is to this day the oasis of Rawiyyah (rwy) in Wadi Bishah (Bishah), in inland Asir. The oasis carrying this name is actually located along a road leading to a Shur - Al Abu Thawr (twr, cf. Hebrew swr). It also falls between any of two places called Kadas (kds, cf. Hebrew qds), on the western slopes of Asir, and another Wadi Bishah oasis called al-Baridah (brd). For the forced attempts to locate Beer-lahai-roi in southern Palestine, see Simons, pars. 367, 368; also Kraeling, pp. 69-70. My attention .was drawn to this by Dr Ahmad Chalabi, a mathematician and banker, who takes an amateur interest in geology and Biblical study. See Ahmad Khattab et alias, ‘Results of a botanic expedition to Arabia in 1944-194$’ (Publication of the Cairo University Her­ barium, no. 4, 1971), p. 27. Snow rarely falls on the mountains of Yemen, in southwest Arabia, where the rainy season is the summer, the time of the southwest monsoons. In Asir, however, the mountains capture the rains of the southwest monsoons in summer as well as those of the northwesterly winds in winter. Hence, the higher elevations there receive and sometimes hold the winter snow (see Chapter 3). According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad did not forbid the eating o f the dabb, although he would not eat it himself. Today, some Arabian Sunnites eat the dabb, while the Shiites hold it in abomination. As far as I know, the dabb is not found in the northern lands of the Near East. For example, one can conclude from the way Arabian placenames o f Hebrew type are actually pronounced that the k was

NOTES TO PAGES 3 6 - 4 2

not normally softened to a h, whereas the h was frequently pronounced as a h. Likewise, the t was softened into a (, but also appears to have been a dialectical variant of the s. The 'ayn(‘) was as often as not pronounced as a g, and the glottal stop (’) was often pronounced as a semi-vowel w or y, these two semi-vowels being in their turn interchangeable, and often voca­ lised as an open vowel a. There is also Biblical evidence for the identification ofjabal Had! in coastal Asir as the Biblical Horeb. According to Deuteronomy 1:1, Moses ‘spoke to all Israel’ in ‘the wilderness, in the Arabah ('rbh) over against Suph (swp), between Paran (p’rn) and Tophel (tpl), Laban (Ibn), Hazeroth (hsrt) and Dizahab (dy zhb)’. The location is the col of Wadi Ghurabah (grbh) which separates the Ghamid and Zahran regions. A village called al-Safa (sp, cf. swp) overlooks Wadi Ghurabah from the north. The wadi is also located between a p ’rn (Jabal Faran, or pm), to the east; a tpl (Wadi Tufalah, or tpl), to the south; a Ibn, today the village of al-Bunn (’l-bn), to the north; a dy zhb (Al-Dhuhayb, or dhyb), also to the north; and a hsrt, today al-HazIrah (hzrt), to the west (unless it is Jabal Khudayrah, or hdrt, which is yet again to the north). The name of the Biblical Moses actually survives in the same vicinity as that of the village of al-Musa. Deuteronomy 1:2 says the place was ‘eleven days’journey from Horeb’. The road distance between Jabal Had! and Wadi Ghurabah is approxi­ mately 200-250 kilometres, and can easily be covered in an eleven-day hike at the pace of about twenty kilometres a day. T H E L A N D OF ASIR Actually, the name Asir (‘sr, or ‘syr) denotes the tribal highlands around Abha, though it came to be applied by administrative usage to the broader area I have indicated. The name appears to be a survival, by metathesis, of the Biblical ‘Seir’, or ‘Mount Sen-’ (s‘yr, Genesis 14:6, 36:8f, etc.). For the correlation between the name Tihamah and the Biblical ‘Tehom’, see Chapter 6. For the correlation between the name Sarat and the Biblical ‘Israel’, see Chapter 10. For a modern study of the geography and ecology of Asir, see Kamal Abdul-Fattah, Mountain Farmer and Fellah in ‘Asir . . . (Erlangen, 1981). For the flora of Asir, see Western Arabia and the Red Sea (London, H.M .S.O ., 1946), Appendix D, pp. 590-602. Reference has already been made to the possibility that the camel was first domesticated as a beast of burden in Asir. See Michael

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Ripinsky, ‘Camel Ancestry and Domestication in Egypt and the Sahara’, in Archaeology, 36:3 (1983), pp. 21-27. 4 Strabo speaks of the gold of West Arabia, where he describes the country between the Hijaz and the Yemen (16:4:18): ‘Near these people is a nation more civilized, who inhabit a district with a more temperate climate; for it is well watered, and has frequent showers. Fossil gold is found there, not in the form of dust, but in lumps, which do not require much purification. The least pieces are in the size of a nut, the middle size of a medlar, and the largest of a w aln u t. . .’ Strabo’s reference to the ‘temperate climate’ and ‘frequent showers’ in the Arabian country he de­ scribes here leaves no doubt that he is speaking of Asir. 5 This Idimah (’dm) is one West Arabian location which could have been referred to in the Bible as Edom (’dm). Another, the one more commonly referred to, is Wadi Iddam (’dm), south of Mecca. A third is represented by the village of Admah (’dm), in the Wadi Bishah region. 6 For the activity of the volcanoes of thejizan region of Asir, see M. Neumann Van Padang, Catalogue of the Active Volcanoes and Solfatara Fields of Arabia and the Indian Ocean (Napoli, Inter­ national Association of Vulcanology, 1963), pp. 12-13. 4

TH E SEARCH FOR GERAR 1 The dating o f Biblical history is based on historical synchro­ nisms, such as that involving the expedition of the Egyptian ruler Sheshonk I against Judah during the reign of Solomon’s son Rehoboam (see Chapter 11). It may therefore be taken as more or less accurate. 2 The usual identification o f the Hebrew nhl msryn is Wadi al‘Arish, which separates Palestine from Sinai. For the identifica­ tion of nhl msrym in West Arabia, see Chapter 15. 3 For the tribe of Simeon and their territory in West Arabia, see Appendix.

6

STARTING FROM TEHOM 1 For the discussion of the question of the Biblical Judah, see Chapter 8. 2 The vocalisation of thwm as tehom is that o f the Masoretic tradition; the word might well have been originally vocalised differently.

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3 The semi-vowels y and w in the Semitic languages are readily interchangeable. 4 The feminine suffix h (the silent t) in the Arabic thmh (which is strictly thm) emphasises the feminine gender o f the Biblical thwm. 5 Scholars were apparently misled into this view by the fact that the word thwm’ (tehoma), in Syriac, means ‘chaos, deep abyss, bottomless pit’, etc., probably from hwm in the sense o f ‘get lost’. 6 The final t in thmt need not be a feminine plural suffix, as it can also be a feminine singular suffix. 7 The m, which is the preposition ‘from’ in m-mgd and m-thwm, is conveniently left out in the translation here, no doubt because it confused the translator. A note in the RSV admits that m-tl means ‘with the dew’ (actually, ‘from the dew’) rather than ‘above’. Here tl (noun from til, ‘cover over, roof’, or misspelling for tl, ‘hill, peak’) seems to refer to one o f the Samayin ridges. 8 The root brk, meaning ‘bless’, is also the Hebrew for ‘kneel down’; figuratively ‘settle down’. In Arabic, the primary sense of brk is ‘settle, settle down’. 9 One o f the most common mistakes in the traditional reading of the Bible involves the confusion o f yhwh in the sense o f ‘he is’, or ‘he shall be’ (also ‘it is’, ‘it shall be’), with yhwh as the name o f the Israelite God Yahweh. For example, the nonsensical ‘The Lord (yhwh) rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord (’s m-’t yhwh) out of heaven’ (Genesis 19:24), actually reads ‘The Lord (yhwh) rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone, and it is a fire o f death (w-‘s m’t yhwh) from heaven’. The Hebrew m’t here must be read as a variant o f mwt, to mean ‘death’. In the Semitic languages, the glottal stop and the semi-vowels w and y are readily interchangeable. 7

THE JORDAN QUESTION 1 See Simons, par. 137. Noting that ‘Palestine’s most substantial river’ is never referred to in the Hebrew Bible as a nhr, Simons adds in a footnote that ‘the problem as to the origin and meaning o f “Jordan” , about which divergent opinions have been set forth, is as yet quite unsolved’. 2 Arab geographers originally used the name Urdun (’rdn) to denote the territory of Galilee and the adjacent parts of the Jordan river valley rather than the Jordan river itself. This name could be the equivalent of the Hebrew yrdn, but not necessarily. The Arabic dictionaries derive the name from the root rdn, ‘shrivel,

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wrinkle, stiffen’, with the suggestion that it means ‘rugged, hardy’. For the derivation of yrdn, see below. 3 Countless seasonal and perennial streams spring from the various parts of the Asir escarpment, which explains the Biblical term my h-yrdti, or my my h-yrdn (‘water’ or ‘waters’ of the yrdn, see below). In some instances, however, the term yrdn does feature in the Bible to mean ‘water stream’ or ‘pool’. In this sense, it derives from yrd in the Arabic (wrd) sense o f ‘go to water’. See the story of Naaman at the end of this chapter. 4 According to Arab historians, Muhammad went from Medina to Mecca on his last pilgrimage by way ofjabal Shatan and the neighbouring village of Kada’, which is still there. 5 According to Numbers 33:41-49, Moses led the Israelites in the last stage of their wanderings from Mount Hor (hr h-hr) to Zalmonah (slmnh); then to Punon (pwnn); Oboth (’&/); Iye-abarim (‘yy h-‘brym), in the territory of the Moab (mw’b); Dibon-gad (dybn gd)\ Almon-diblathaim (‘Imn dbltym)-, the mountains of Abarim (hry ‘brym), facing Nebo (nbw)\ the ‘plains’ of Moab (‘rbt mw’b), ‘by the Jordan at Jericho’ ( 7 yrdn yrhw, literally ‘on’ the yrdn o f yrhw). Then they encamped ‘by the Jordan’ ( 7 yrdn, literally ‘on’ the yrdn), between Beth-jeshimoth (byt h-ysmt) and Abel-shittim (’bl h-stym), in the ‘plains’ of Moab (‘rbt mw’b). The first eight places indicated are in the Ghamid and Zahran regions. They are today the ‘promontory’ (Hebrew hr) of al-Harrah (hr, with the Arabic replacing the Hebrew definite article in the present name); Salaman (slmn); Jabal al-Nawf (tiwp); Wadi Bat (bt); the ‘heaped stones’ (‘yym) of al-‘Arba’ (‘rb, cf. ‘brym, plural of the genitive of ‘br), in Jabal Shada, still there as a flat, triangular slab o f stone raised on three other large stones and revered as a shrine o f Abraham; the neighbouring villages of Badwan (bdwn) and al-Ghadhl (gd), near the town of Qilwah; two other villages of the broader Qilwah vicinity, called ‘Amlah (‘ml, cf. ‘Imn) and al-Badlah (bdlt, cf. dbltym as the plural of the name or of its genitive); and finally the heights of Jabal Gharib (grb), in the Sarat of Zahran, which actually face Nabah (nb), the Biblical Nebo, on the southernmost spur of the Taif ridge to the north. As for ‘rbt mw’b, it is not the ‘plains’ of Moab but the present village of Ghurabah [grbt, or grbh, see text), located directly east o f the water divide between the Zahran and Taif regions, and across the yrdn, or ‘escarpment’, from U m m al-Yab (’m yb), the Biblical Moab. This Ghurabah actually lies on the same stretch o f the yrdn, or ‘escarpment’, where the village of Warakh, or wrh (the Biblical ‘J ericho’, see text), is to be found. The area where the Israelites under Moses finally settled was the stretch

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of highland between al-Athimmah (’tm) in the Zahran region, and the ‘water-course’ (’bl) o f Jabal Shatan (stn), called today Wadi Wajj, in the Taif region. For the awkward attempts to explain the geography o f Numbers 33:41-49 in terms of Trans­ jordan, see Kraeling, pp. 124—125. The Jordan river in Palestine does not flood at harvest time. In geographic Asir, however, this is a season of torrential rains which can cause enormous floods. I visited the area in late May and verified this fact to my satisfaction. Travellers visiting coastal Asir, as late as the present century, report that young men were taken out to a hillock outside their village to be circumcised there in public. The term for ‘circumcise’ in the local usage is ‘alia (‘I’), literally ‘raise, take to a high place’. DhT Ghulf, once called Gibeath-haaraloth, could have been the site of one hillock where ritual circumcision used to be performed on young adults. Biblical scholars have also falsely identified the Biblical ‘Bethel’ as the Palestinian village o f Baytln (bytn), on the basis of the vague resemblance between the two names, and nothing else. They suggest that ‘Ai’ could be present-day al-Tall, near Baytln. For further discussion, see Chapter 13, note 3. Actually V (rather than 'yr, ‘city’), the singular o f ‘ry (or 'rym) o f the text, and m‘rh derive from the same root, unattested in Hebrew, but the Arabic equivalent o f which is gwr, ‘sink, enter, go into hiding, percolate in the ground’. The Arabic equivalent o f m‘rh is mgrh, vocalised magarah, and like gar (see text) means ‘cave’ and derives from the same root, gwr. This Ghamr probably lies outside the range o f the volcanic fallout o f ‘Akwah; so does another ‘Gomorrah’ of the Jizan region, which is Ghamrah (gmrh, with the feminine suffix as in 'mrh), in Jabal Bani Malik. The ‘Gomorrahs’ o f Asir (as gttir or ‘mr, gmrh or ‘mrh) are too numerous to count. Biblical scholars have invented the term ‘Pentapolis’ to refer to the ‘five cities’ o f the ‘Jordan plain’, comprising ‘Sodom’ and ‘Gomorrah’ along with ‘Admah’ and ‘Zeboiim’ (see Chapter 4) and ‘Bela-Zoar’ (Genesis 15), although they have not managed to locate any of these ‘five cities’ in the Palestinian Jordan valley. See Simons, par. 271. For earlier doubts about the Biblical msrym being invariably a reference to Egypt, see Zeitschriftfiir Assyriologie, 37:76; Reallexi­ kon der Assyriologie (ed. E. Ebeling and B. Meissner, Berlin, 1928), I, 255a; Harri Torczyner, Die Bundeslade und die Anfange der Religion Israels (Berlin, 1930), pp. 67f. This god was no doubt the ’I msry (literally, ‘god of the msr

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17

people’), whose name survives as that of the village of Al Masri, in the Taif region. Judging by the distribution of place-names relating to the root msr in West Arabia, one may suggest that the Biblical ’rs msrym extended from the headwaters of Wadi Bishah, near Abha, to those of Wadi Ranyah, southeast of Taif. Fu’ad Hamzah, visiting Asir in 1934, counted twenty-four such defiles which cross the escarpment from Nimas southwards, not to mention those between Nimas and Taif. See Ft Bilad ‘Asir (Riyadh, 1968), pp. 9 i~ 9 3 As described in Van Padang, pp. 14-16, these volcanoes are at an elevation of about 2,900 metres above sea level, and consist today o f about sixty cones, mostly of recent age. The craters and their lava field spread around Jabal Hattab in all directions. Van Padang indicates, on the authority of the classical Arabic geographers, that the volcanic eruption described in the Koran 68:17-33 occurred in this district, which is correct. In the Koranic text, what is destroyed by the eruption is described as a ‘garden’ (68:17), and the inhabitants of this ‘garden’, according to the authoritative exegesis of the Koran by al-Fakhr al-Razi, were ‘said to be Israelites’. This, strictly speaking, is the translation of the Hebrew w-t’kl ’s b-’rzyk, which in no way can mean ‘that the fire may devour your junipers’. Hebrew yrd.

8

ARABIAN JU D A H

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16

1 According to Genesis 29:35, 49:8, the name yhwdh, as that of the eponymous ancestor o f the Judah tribe (one of the twelve tribes of Israel, see Appendix), means ‘may Yahweh be praised’ (yhwh ydh). This is clearly folk etymology, and is only interesting as such. So far, the name has not been successfully explained, and has generally been assumed to have been, by origin, the name o f a tribe rather than that of a territory. Normally, tribes are called after their territories, although there are cases where territories have carried the names of tribes which inhabit them. 2 So far, Biblical scholars have tended to think that the names in the two lists preceded by bny, or ‘sons o f’, were generally tribal or family names, while those preceded by ’nwsy, or ‘people o f’, were mainly the ones which were place-names. In ancient Hebrew, as in modem Arabic usage, one could just as easily speak o f the ‘sons’ o f a place as of the ‘people’ o f a place. The

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use of both expressions in the same text was, no doubt, for elegant variation. This Hajfah, along with Qihafah (qhp ) and Q ihf (qhp ) in the adjacent region of Rijal Alma‘, must have been the Ahqaf (plural o f hqp) of Koran 46:21, traditionally believed to have been the sand dunes of the Hadramut region, in South Arabia. What makes the identification of the Biblical Bethlehem with U m m Lahm, in Wadi Adam, absolutely certain, is its association in various Biblical passages with the place-name ‘Ephrathah’ (’prth), which is today Firt (prt), near Um m Lahm, in the same Wadi Adam. Consider, for example, Micah 5:2: ‘But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are little among the clans of Judah . . .’ See also Chapter 9. This is the Ramah, near Bethlehem, where Rachel was buried, which is mentioned by the prophets, e.g. Jeremiah 31:35: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children . . . ’ For Rachel, see Appendix. Note the association of Geba and Michmas with Ramah (see note 5) in Isaiah 10:28-29.

9 JER U SA L EM A N D TH E CITY OF DAVID 1 This Psalm is attributed to the ‘Sons of Korah’ (bny qrh) whose name survives intact as that of the villages of al-Qarhah (qrh), in Jabal Faifa, and al-Qarhan (qrhn ), in Jabal Bani Malik, both in the Jizan region, far south of Rijal Alma‘. In an earlier verse of the same Psalm (48:2), ‘Mount Zion’ is actually .described as being ‘in the far north’. 2 This is but one possible translation of the original Hebrew: 3

4

w -yw m r l-dwd l-’m r V tb w ’ hnh k y ’m hsyrk h - ‘w rym w -h-pshym l-’mr I’ y b w ’ dwd hnh. The name yrw slym has hitherto been regarded as enigmatic. Most probably, it means the ‘abode’ (substantive yrw , cf. Arabic verbal root ’ry, ‘abide, dwell’), of slym (cf. the surviving Arabic tribal name Sulaym, or slym , in the Asir highlands). The root ’ry is attested in other place-names in West Arabia, such as Arwa’ (’rw) and Arwa (’rw). If it was not the name of a tribe (perhaps a subdivision of the Jebusites), slym could have been the name of a local god - perhaps a variant of slm (see Chapter 12). It is also possible that the name yrw slym combined the present names of two villages, Arwa (’rw) and Al Salam (slm), in the

Tanumah region o f the Sarat, not far south of the Nimas region (see above).

NOTES TO PAGES I 2 I - I 3 3

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5 The singular form of this name, hmt (as in Numbers 13:21 and twenty-nine other places in the Hebrew Bible), also survives in the southern Hijaz and Asir as the name of one village called Dhawl Hamat and six villages called Hamatah. The confusion of this Biblical place-name with that of Hamah (hmh or hmt), of the Orontes valley in Syria, has done much to throw the tra­ ditional understanding of Biblical geography wide of the mark. The connotation of the same name, as it features in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian records, must also be carefully reconsidered. 6 Compare the identifications of the names of the gates of Jerusa­ lem here with those in j. Simons, Jerusalem in the Old Testament (Leiden, 1952), which are based on archaeological findings in the Palestinian Jerusalem, with no toponymic evidence to support them. 10

ISRAEL A N D SAMARIA

1 I am personally convinced that the (' ntr (or ‘God’s Land’) of the Egyptians is none other than the ysr’l (or ‘God’s Highland’) of the Bible - i.e., the Sarat of geographic Asir with its rich forest, mineral and other resources. Further study, however, is clearly necessary to substantiate this claim. 2 The name is locally interpreted as a diminutive of the Arabic sirwal, ‘trousers’, which is a highly unconvincing interpretation. Najd is the traditional name of the Central Arabian plateau. For evidence of the presence of Israelites in the area in Biblical times, see the identification of the khnym as an Israelite community of Wadi Najran and the Yamamah region (Chapter 8). 3 The Sama‘inah (or the Sama‘In, also sm‘n) exist today in southern Palestine. Originally, however, they appear to have come from a place called al-Sim‘aniyyah (sm‘n) in the Yemen, from where the tribe derives its name. According to the Biblical account of them, the Simeonites were a ‘southern’ tribe in the Biblical land of the Israelites. 11

TH E ITIN ERA RY OF THE SH ESH O N K EXPEDITION

1 For these records, seej. Simons, Handbookfor the Study of Egyptian Topographical Lists Relating to Western Asia (Leiden, 1937), pp. 178-187; cf. K. A. Kitchen, The Third Intermediate Period in

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Egypt, 1100-650 B.C. (Warminster, 1973), pp. 293-300, 432-447, which has a full review of the relevant literature to date. In the present study, I shall transliterate the Egyptian consonantal spelling of the place-names in the Sheshonk lists according to the same system I have adopted with respect to the transliteration of Hebrew and Arabic place-names, or at least as closely as possible. To simplify matters for the general reader, I have maintained, however, the difference between the semi-vowels, usually distinguished from one another in the transliteration of ancient Egyptian as an i and a y. The final V in this, as in other names that follow, appears to have stood at times for the Hebrew (and Arabic) feminine suffix h (which is the silent t). As already noted, a number of Biblical place-names carrying this suffix survive in West Arabia today without it, while Biblical place-names in the masculine form often survive in West Arabia today in the feminine, with the suffix h (the silent t) added. In Judges 1:27, 5:19-21, this ‘Taanach’ is geographically associ­ ated with Beth-shean (byt s’n), Dor (dwr), Ibleam (’bl‘m), Megiddo (mgdw), and the ‘torrent’ of Kishon (nhl qyswn). O f these five places, only Ibleam remains unidentifiable with a village in the southern Hijaz. It could be Bil‘um (bVm), today an oasis of the Qasim region, at some distance from Taif to the northeast. It could also be Bani Walibah (wlb), in the Ghamid region, identified in relation to al-Amiyah {‘my), in the neighbouring Zahran region. The other four places, all in the Taif region, are today the villages of Shanyah (sny), any of several villages called Dar (dr), Maghdah (mgd), and Qaysan (qysn). The Ta'nuq cited in the Arabic geographical literature cannot be the ‘Taanach’ referred to here, as it is located in the northern rather than the southern Hijaz. Not the hitherto suggested Biblical ‘Shunem’ (swnm), which is today probably Sanumah (snm), in Rijal Alma‘; other possibilities are Nasham (nsm) or Nashim (nsm), in the Jizan region and Dhl Nisham (nsm), in the Ballasmar region. Not the hitherto suggested Biblical ‘Beth-shean’, already iden­ tified in note 3. The bt (Hebrew byt, ‘house’) here, as in other names in the Sheshonk lists, means ‘temple’, which is frequently dropped in the Arabicised forms of these names. Not the hitherto suggested Biblical ‘Haphraim’ (hprym, Joshua 19:19), which must be present-day al-Harfan (dual of hrp, as the Hebrew hprym is the dual of hpr), in Rijal Alma‘. The Hebrew name means the ‘two encampments’, or (with a different vocalisation) the ‘encampments’. The Arabic name may

NOTES TO PAGES I 3 7 - I 4 8

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be not so much a corruption as an attempted translation, as the Arabic manahi is a plural of manhd, which means ‘encamp­ m ent’. N ot the hitherto suggested Biblical ‘Aijalon’ (’ylwn), which is identified in Chapter ro. The dt (Arabic d’t, vocalised dat) or d (Arabic nominative dw, vocalised du) in this name as in others means ‘the one o f’, i.e. ‘the goddess o f’ (feminine dt) or ‘the god o f (masculine d); in the Arabicised form of the name, it normally features as 7 , the latter in this case not to be read as the Arabic definite article but as an independent word which, like Al (also 7 ), would mean ‘god’. The;) ’ here, as in other names in the Sheshonk lists, is the Arabic fa y ’ (py’), meaning ‘district’, ‘vicinity’; cf. Hebrew ph, ‘here, hither, this side’. This is definitely the Biblical ‘Nebaioth’ (nbywt, or nbyt) listed among the ‘sons’ of Ishmael in Genesis 25:13 along with ‘Kedar’, and identified as the ‘Nebaioth of Kedar’ in Isaiah 60:7. Nabah is found in the Bajilah district o f the Taif region; so is the village ofal-Qidarah (qdr), the Biblical ‘Kedar’. Thus the ‘Nebaioth’ are not the Nabataeans of Petra, as hitherto identified. Nabah is apparently also the Biblical ‘Nebo’. Because the records of many an Egyptian conquest have been read with the wrong geography in mind, scholars have concluded that a number of vain boasts are involved in these records. Considering that the kingdom of the Mesopotamian ‘Mitanni’ had already passed from existence some four centuries before the time of Sheshonk, this Egyptian ruler’s statement that he subdued Mitanni has been taken to be one such boast, which it obviously was not, as Mitanni was a place in Arabia. Cf. Pritchard, pp. 263-264, with reference to the literature.

12 M E L C H I Z E D E K : C L U E S T O A P A N T H E O N 1 The title of Psalm 7 associates its composition with a place not a person - called ‘Cush’ (kws), which is most probably present-day Kus (kws) or KIsah (kys), both in thejizan region. It must be noted here that the verse numbers cited for the Psalms are those o f the Hebrew original, not of the translations. 2 Apart from the god sdq, the names of the gods slm (as slmn, with the hyperbolic suffix), ‘wlm (as 7 m), and possibly ’b ‘d (as b‘dn, or b-‘dn, with the archaic definite article), are attested in Arabian inscriptions.

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3 The verbs of which h-’lhym (the ‘gods’) are the subject in this passage appear in the Hebrew text without the plural pronominal suffix w. This could have been edited out by redactors confused by the text. On the other hand, they apparently failed to edit out the definite article in h-’lhym.

13

T H E H E B R E W S OF T H E ASIR W O O D S

1 One must not exclude the possibility that the ‘Hebrews’ received their name from ‘br in the sense o f ‘crossing’, with reference to the mountain defiles (m'brwt h-yrdn, see Chapter 7) of the heights of the West Arabian Sarat, which could have been their original homeland. 2 The ‘god of the woods’, whose name is still carried by the village of A l al-Ghabaran, in the Dhahran region, may also have been called Abu Ghabar, today the name of a village in Wadi Najran. Other villages with names derived from gbr are also to be found in various parts of the Asir highlands. 3 In the Abraham story, as related in Genesis, there could well be some confusion between these ‘Bethel’ and ‘Ai’ of Rijal Alma‘ and those of the Zahran and Taif regions (Butaylah and ‘Uya’), closer to Wadi Adam (see Chapter 10). 4 There are no less than twenty-eight villages in West Arabia which still carry the name of this pr‘h as Far‘ah (pr‘h) or al-Far‘ah (’1-pr‘h). That this was the name of a god is clear from the name of the village A l Fira‘ah ( 7 pr'h), in the Ballasmar district. There are two villages called al-Far‘ah near Abha, where Misramah is to be found. The ‘house’ o{pr'h, which was afflicted with ‘great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife’ (12:17), was no doubt the temple of this god in Misramah, where Sarai, taken to be Abram’s sister rather than his wife, was made to stay. 5 The variant spelling of the name may be due to a confusion between this Dathanah (dtn) and what is today the village of Dathinah (dtyn) in Wadi Adam, which was the territory of the Joseph tribe (see Chapter 8 and Appendix).

14

TH E ARABIAN PHILISTINES

1 K. A. Kitchen, ‘The Philistines’, in D. J. Wiseman, ed., Peoples of Old Testament Times (Oxford, 1973), p. 53. 2 The name kws may also be represented by Klsah (kys) and Kus

N OT E S TO PAGES

160-176

215

(,kws) in the Jizan region, and by Kiwath (kwt) near Ghumayqah, in the Lith region. 3 ‘Phicol’ has so far been regarded as a ‘non-Semitic’ name; hence K. A. Kitchen’s comment: ‘Finally, on the linguistic plane, the mixture of both Semitic (Abimelech, Ahuzzat) and nonSemitic (Phicol) . . . shows assimilation of aliens to a Semitic milieu.’ 15

THE PROMISED LAND

1 For what Biblical scholars have said about these Biblical peoples, who were so obviously West Arabian tribes, see the various entries in D. J. Wiseman, ed., Peoples of Old Testament Times, already referred to in Chapter 14. 2 The confusion in the Arabicisation of the name is between ‘qrb (Hebrew and Arabic, ‘scorpion’) and the Arabic jM', vocalised garbii‘ (a desert rodent, the gerboa). 3 Other possibilities are Zafar (zpr) and Dharlf (drp), also in the Taif region. If the Hebrew zprn is read as z-prn (the ‘one’ of pm, or ‘god’, i.e. shrine, of pm), the place in question could have been Faran, in the Zahran highlands, bordering the basaltic desert of Harrat al-Buqum. In any case, this Faran was no doubt the Biblical Paran (p’rn, Genesis 21:21; Numbers 10:12, 12:16, 13:3, 26; Deu­ teronomy 1:1, 33:2; 1 Samuel 25:1; 1 Kings 11:18; Habakkuk 3:3). The El Paran, or ’Ip’rn, ofGenesis 14:16, on the other hand, would be present-day Al Farwan (’Iprwn), south ofKhamis Mushait. 4 Here, as in the case o fgl‘d (Gilead) becoming al-Ja‘d (Chapter 1) and kslh becoming al-Hasakah (Chapter 14), an internal I was possibly externalised in corruption to become the prefixed Arabic definite article. The identification of ‘Riblah’, however, remains uncertain. 16

A VISIT T O E D E N

1 Wadi Harjab, one of the three principal tributaries of Wadi Bishah, joins the confluence at approximately the same point. The author o f Genesis appears to have regarded it as an extension o f Wadi Tindahah which, like Wadi Harjab, joins the main course of Wadi Bishah from the eastern side.

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SONGS FROM THE JIZAN M O U N TA IN S Morris S. Seale, The Desert Bible (London, 1974), condensed from pp. 54-74-

INDEX

Abarim , m ountains of, 207 n.5 Abdullah, 129 Abel-shittim , 207 n. 5 Abimelech, King, 49, 57, 160 A braham (Abram); H ebro n associated with, u i ; j o u r n e y , 152-4; king o f Salem and, 144, 147; land prom ised to, 166-70; L o t’s parting from , 89; sacrifice o f Isaac, 150 Achaemenes: Judah under, 97, 98; West Arabian conquests, 17-18,20 A dam , 174, 177 A dam (place), 86, 87, 88 ‘Adhrah, 146 A dm ah, 57, 58, 60, 208 n. 11 Adoraim , 129 Aelia Capitolina, 21 agriculture: in Asir, 42, 43 Ahab, King, 68, 70 Ahuzzath, King, 160 Ai, 89, 131, 153, 208 n.8, 214 n.3 Aijalon, 130, 213 n.8 Ain, 172 Akkadian language, 3, 19 A krabbim , ascent of, 171 Alexander the Great, 20 A lm on-diblathaim , 207 n. 5 alphabet, consonantal, xi, 5, 19, 30-1 Am ana, peak of, 184 A m arna Letters, 72-5, 151 A m orite people, 169 A m os, Book of: on Tehom , 81 A nam im tribe, 159 Arabah, Sea of, 86, 87, 204 n.8 Arabia, West: com m erce, 9-11, 17, 44, 126; emigration from to Palestine, 11—15; historical traditions related in H ebrew Bible and Koran, 36, 158; imperial conquests, 14-15, 17, 20, 71-2, I26 ;judaism ’s origins in, 8, 18-23, 97-8; language shift, 18-19, 3°, 201 n. 19; survival o fju d aism in, 18, 19-20, 22; tribes, 125-6, 191-5 Arabic language: classical, 3; alphabet,

31, 32; Aramaic replaced by, 18, 201 n. 19; Biblical H ebrew interpreted in light of, 27; transliteration, xi-xiii Arabic love poetry, ‘Song o f Songs’ and, 180-1 A ram , 95-6, 195, 197-8 n.3 Aramaeans, 197-8 n.3; Laban as, 195 Aramaic language, xi, 3, 9, 18, 201 n.19, 20; H eb rew Bible translated into, 28; proxim ity betw een Canaanite and, 9, 18; Syriac m od ern form of, 27; vocalisation o f H ebrew based on, 19 archaeology: in Asir, absence of, 60; Egyptian artefacts, 133; inconclusive evidence from , 64-73; little evidence on ‘prom ised land’, 169-70; mis­ leading historical and geographical assum ptions underlying, 23-4, 63-4, 190; need for in N im as region, 118, 122; place-name study compared w ith, 29; toponym ic evidence m ust be corroborated by, 32, 108-9 Arkites, 139 Arw ad, 12, 198 n.7 Asa, King, 49, 53, 56 Ashdod, 161 A sher tribe, 125, 192, 194, 195 Ashkelon, 161, 162 Asir: archaeological excavations n ot yet undertaken in, 60; Biblical placenames concentrated in, 7; caravan trade, n , 44; geographic isolation and disunity, 44-6; geography and ecology, 38-43; m onotheism in, 8, 147-50 Assyria: invasion o f West Arabia, 14, 15; Sheshonk’s expedition n ot in, 142; topographical lists, 71-2 ‘Aynln, 172 Azekah, 66, 67, 130 Azm on, 172 Baal (gods), 149 Baal-hamon, vineyard at, 186

218 Babylon: Israelites’ return from , 98-108; W est Arabia conquered by, 14-15 Barakah, 78, 79 Bashan, 94 B ath-rabbim , gate of, 185 Beersheba, 50-1; archaeological excavations near, 50, 64; Gerar and, 47, 49, 51, 54; Strabo on, 35; W est Arabian location, 54, 56, 6o, n o Bela-Zoar, 208 n. 11 Benjam in tribe, 125, 193, 194 Ben-oni, 193 Bethel, 89, 128, 131, 153, 208 n . 8 Beth-horon, 137 Beth-jeshim oth, 207 n. 5 Bethlehem , 107, 108, 127, 210 n.4; D avid from , 97; mentioned, 12, 129 Beth-rehob, 197 n. 3 Beth-shean, 212 n. 3 Beth-tappuah, 139 Bethuel, 194 Beth-zur, 129 Bible, see H eb rew Bible Bilhah (Rachel’s maid), 194, 195 Bishah, G arden o f Eden in, 173-7 Canaanite people, 159; Israelites’ attem p t to subdue, 114; language, 3, 9, 18, 201 n.19 (see also Hebrew ); m igration to Palestine, 11-12; in ‘prom ised land’, 168, 169, 170; territory, 47, 49, 57-9, 197 n. 3 C aph torim tribe, 160 Carchem ish, battle of, 14, 199 n. 11 Carm el, M ount, 12, 185, 186, 199 n.8 C asluhim tribe, 160 cedar: confusion w ith juniper, 94, 200 n.13 Chaala, 55, 56 Cherethites, 157 cherubim : in Garden o f Eden, 174, 175, 177, 178-9 Chinnereth, Sea of, 170 Christianity: new insights into possible, 189-90 Chronicles: on Gerar, 49, 52-3, 60; on Israelite territory, 129; o n Philistines, 161; o n Sheshonk, 133, 136 circumcision, mass, 85, 86, 88-89, 2°8 n -7 Crete, Philistines not from , 157 C ush, land of, 174, 175-6, 213 n. 1 C ush tribe, 158 Cushites: traditionally Ethiopians, 49, 52-3, 54; W est Arabian location, 54-6 D agon (Philistine god), 161 Damascus, 96, 185, 186, 197 n .3 Dan, n o , 128

INDEX Dan tribe, 125, 162, 192, 194, 195 Darius I, King, 200 n. 18 David: ‘All Israel’ ruled by, 25, 97, 123; descendants’ rivalry w ith ‘Israel’, 127, 130; H ebron as capital of, 111-12, 118; Jerusalem captured by, II , 112-18 David, C ity of, 113-15, 117, 118-19, 122 Dead Sea, erroneous reference to, 87, 170 D ead Sea scrolls, 22, 28 Delilah, 162-3 D euteronom y: on blessing o fjo sep h tribe, 78, 80; on H oreb, 204 n.8; on M ounts G erizim and Ebal, 131-2; on w andering Aramaean, 195 D ibon-gad, 207 n. 5 Dizahab, 204 n.8 D or, 212 n .3 D othan, 155 Ebal, M o unt, 131-2 Eden, G arden of, 1 7 3 -9 E dom , 171, 205 n.5 Egypt, erroneous references to, 24, 92-3, 153, 158-9, 166-8, 172 Egyptians: C ushites unlikely to have been, 52-3; language, 135; military expeditions against Judah, 14-15, 133-42; records, place-names in, 14, 24, 34, 71, 135-42, 151, 200 n. 12 E kron, 161 Elath inscription, 64 El ‘Elydn (god), 143, 144, 145, 147. *49 Hlohim, 147, 149 En-gedi, 183 En-nakkore, spring of, 162 Ephraim , 127 E phraim tribe, 125-6, 194 Ephraim ite, place-nam e mistranslated as, 127 Eran, 139 Esdraelon, Plain of, 128 Esek, well of, 49, 54n., 60 Eshtaol, 162 Etam , 129, 162 Ethiopians, C ushites traditionally identified as, 49, 52-3, 54 Euphrates, River, erroneous assum ptions concerning, 166, 168, 174, 176, 199 n. 11 Eve, 174, 177 Exodus: on T eh om , 80; on Y ahweh, 152 Ezekiel: o n Philistines, 157 Ezer, 146 Ezion-Geber, 64 Ezra: o n Israelites’ return from Babylon, 98-108 fauna and flora, to pon ym ic analysis

219

INDEX supported by, 33-4 folk songs, placc-names in, 182 forests, 42; H ebrew s as people from, 152 Gad tribe, 125, 192, 194, 195 Galeed, 9 Galilee, 12 Gallus, Aelius, jo u rn ey of, 55-6 gate-keepers, mistranslation of, 101 Gath, 129, 161 Gaza: as Canaanite city, 159; Gerar assum ed to be near, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 58-9, 60; as Philistine city, 161; Sam son’s death in, 163 Gebal, 12 Gedor, 60 Genesis: on A braham , 150, 152-4; on A ram , 197 n . 3; on Benjam in, 193; on blessing o fjo se p h tribe, 78, 80; on G arden o f Eden, 173-6; on Gerar and Canaanite territory, 47-9, 50, 54, 56-60; on Israelite tribes, 194-5; ° n Jacob and Laban’s covenant, 9; on L ot’s jo urney, 89-92; on m eaning o f Israel and Judah, 124, 2 0 9 n . i ; o n Melchizedek and A bram , 143-4, 147; on M o u n t Seir, 204 n. 1; o n ‘prom ised lan d’, 166-70; as proto-historical record, 25; on Sodom and G om orrah, 206 n.9 geology, toponym ic evidence supported by, 33 Gerar, 47-62 Gerizim, M ount, 131-2 G ibbethon, 128 G ibeath-haaraloth, 85, 86, 88-9, 208 n .7 Gibeon, 112, 118, 137 Gihon, River, 174, 175-6 Gilead, M ount, 183 Gilgal, tw elve stones of, 88 G irgashite people, 169 gold: in Asir, 43, 205 n.4; in G arden o f Eden, 174, 175 G om orrah, see Sodom Goshen, 202 n.25 Greek, Bible translated into, see Septuagint H adlqat al-Rahm an, 178 Hadrian, Jerusalem rebuilt by, 21 H am , Philistines descended from, 158-60 H am ath, 172 Ham irah, 162, 163 Haphraim , 212 n.6 Haran, 153 Hasm onaeans, 21, 22 Havilah, 174, 175 Hazeroth, 204 n.8

Hazzar-addar, 172 H ebrew Bible: books comprising, 2; dating and com position, 2-3; early translations of, 28; geography and history of, erroneous assum ptions relating to, 23-6, 133; im portance o f cannot be underm ined, 190; mis­ translations, 1, 3, 5, 34 Hebrew , Biblical: interpretation in light o f m odern Semitic languages, 27; spoken by Philistines, 160; traditional (Masoretic) vocalisation, 3, 5, 27-8; transliteration, xi-xiii; vocalisation, xi, 3, 5, 19-20, 27, 28, 31-2; w ide­ spread use of, 156; see also placenames, Biblical Hebrew , rabbinical, 27, 31 H ebrew people, 151-6; fruitless search for evidence o f in M esopotamia, 24 Hebron: A bram in, 111, 153-4; as D avid’s capital, 111-12, 118; Joseph in, r 55; mentioned, 12, 130 Helkath-hazzurim , 112 H erm on, peak of, 12, 184 H erod the Great, King, 21 Herodotus: on W est Arabian origins o f Palestinian inhabitants, 11, 35, 159 Heshbon, 185 Hezekiah, King, 64-5 Hijaz, 38, 40; Biblical place-names in, 7; Israelite-Moab wars in, 69-70 Him yar, Jew ish k ingdom of, 22 Hinnorp, Valley of, 122 H iram , King, 198 n .7 Hittite people, 168-9 H or, M ount, 172, 207 n. 5 Horeb, M oun t, 35-6, 204 n.8 Ibleam, 212 n.3 im m igration, place-name origins and,

12

inscriptions, m isinterpretation of, 64-71, 72-5 Isaac, sacrifice of, 150 Isaiah: on ‘daughters’ o f Z ion and Jerusalem , 16; on Geba and Michmas, 210 n. 6; on language o f Canaan, 197 n.2; Messiah prophesied by, 146, 148; on N ebaioth o f Kedar, 213 n .i 1 Israel: etym ology, 124-5; rivalry w ith Judah, 15, 96, 126-7, I2 9, 130; Samaritan sect, 130-1; territory, 126, 127-30 Israelites: affinity w ith Canaanites and Aramaeans, 9; conquest o f Jerusalem, 114, 116; crossing o f ‘J o rd a n ’, 85-9; Hebrew s p re-em inent am ong, 154-5; im portance of, 190; im prisonm ent in Egypt, ho archaeological evidence

INDEX

220 Israelites (cont) for, 24; keen sense o f history, 25; kingd om established by, 12, 15, 25, 126; king dom partitioned into ‘J u d a h ’ and ‘Israel’, 15, 96, 126-7, 129, 130; Philistines com pared with, 160-1; return from Babylon, 98-108; territory, Philistine territory in relation to, 162-5; twelve tribes of, 97, 98, 125-6, 154-5, 191-2; wars w ith M oab, 69, 70; see also Israel; Judah Issachar tribe, 125, 192-3, 194 Jacob, 9, 194 Jacob people, 195 Jebusite people: Jerusalem captured from , h i , 112, 113, 115-17; in ‘prom ised land’, 169 Jegar-sahadutha, 9 Jeremiah: on ‘Jo rd a n ’, 93; on Rachel, 210 n.5 Jericho, 86, 87, 88, 108, 131 Jeroboam , King, 127-8 Jerusalem , 12, 21; ‘daughter’ of, 16-17, 200 n. 15; D avid’s capture of, 111, 112-18;‘gates’, 119-21; imperial control of, 21; inscription assumed to refer to, 66, 67-8; Sheshonk’s successes in area of, 135, 136, 139; Siloam inscription found at, 64-5; Solo m o n ’s jo u m e y to, 118-19; in ‘Song o f Songs’, 184, 187; West Arabian location, 110-23 Jewish religion, ieejudaism Jezreel, 128, 129 Jizan region, 43; land o f C anaan in, 59; returning Israelites from , 102-4, 105; Sargon II’s conquests in, 71; Sheshonk in, 135, ! 39; ‘Song o f Songs’ from , 180-8; Z eboiim located in, 19 Jonah: o n T eh om , 80-1; use o f term ‘H e b re w ’ in, 155 Jordan, 12, 25; identification o f as topographical term , 83-96; ‘prom ised land’ in relation to, 171 Joseph, 154-5 Joseph tribe, 125-6, 193, 194; blessing of, 78-80 Josephus, Flavius: o n Jew ish history, 22 Joshua: crossing o f Jordan, 25, 85-9 Joshua, B ook of: on Gerizim and Ebal, 131, 132; o n H aphraim , 212 n.6; on ‘J o rd a n ’, 93 Jo tham , King, 64 Judah, 40, 97; Egyptian m ilitary expedition against, 14-15, 133-42; kin g d o m established, 126; land prom ised to A bram , 166-70; Philistine raid on, 192; rivalry w ith

Israel, 15, 126-7, 129; territory, 126-7, 129-30; W est Arabian location, 97-109 Judah tribe, 125, 191-2, 194 Judaism : developm ent and spread, 130-1; establishement in Palestine, 8-18, 26, 131; new insights into, 189-90; origins, 8, 97-8; W est Arabian origins forgotten, 18-23; West Arabian survival, 18, 19-20, 22 Judges, 25 Judges, Book of: on capture o f Jerusalem , 113, 114; o n ‘J o rd a n ’, 93; on M o u n t Gerizim, 132; on Philistines, 160, 161; on Samson, 162-4; on Taanach, 212 n.3 Junaynah, 173, 177 juniper, confusion betw een cedar and, 94, 200 n. 13 Kadesh, G e rara n d , 49, 51-2, 54, 56-7, 60 K adm onite people, 168 Karkara, battle of, 199-200 n. 11 Kedar, 183, 213 n . n Kenite people, 168 Kenizzite people, 168 K idron, b rook of, 122 Kings, B ook of: on brook o f Kidron, 122; o n ‘daughters’ o f Z io n and Jerusalem , 16; o n extent o f ‘All Israel’, 110; on Jeroboam , 128; o n ‘Jo rd a n ’, 93, 95; o n Sheshonk expedition, 133 Kishon, 212 n.3 Korah, Sons of, 186-7, 210 n. I Koran, evidence from , 35-6; on Gardens o f Eden, 178 Laban (Jacob’s uncle), 9, 194, 195 Laban (place), 204 n.8 Lachish, 129-30; O straca, 65-8 Lakhyah, 162, 163 languages, ancient, misleading assum ptions about, 24; see also Arabic; Aramaic; H ebrew ; Semitic etc. Lasha, 57, 58, 60 Leah (Jacob’s wife), 194, 195 Lebanon, 12, 198 n.7, 199 n.8; erroneous reference to, 94; in ‘Song o f Songs’, 184, 185, 186 Lehabim tribe, 159 Lehi, 162 Levi tribe, 125, 191, 194 Levites, m istranslation concerning,

100-1

Lith region: Israelites from , 107; Sheshonk in, 135, 136-7, 139-40; story o f Sam son in, 162 locusts, 40, 154 Lod, 108

INDEX Lot, jo u rn ey of, 89-92 L udim tribe, 159 Machpelah, cave of, 154 M ahanaim , 137 M ahaneh, 162 M alothas, 55, 56 M am re, w o od of, 152, 153, 154 Manasseh tribe, 125-6, 194 M areshah, 49, 53, 56, 60, 129 M aslam ah (high priest), 178-9 M asoretic scholars, 5, 27-8 M egiddo, 212 n. 3 Melchizedek, King, 143-5, H 7 M erom , 140 Mesha, King, 68-9, 70 M esopotam ia: A bram assumed to come from , 152; Eden assumed to be in, 173; fruitless search for H ebrew s in, 24; invasion o f West Arabia, 15; m yths, 8; records, Biblical placenames in, 24, 34, 71-2; Sheshonk’s expedition not in, 141-2 Messiah, 146, 148 metathesis, xiiin., 4-5, 30 Micah: on Bethlehem, 210 n.4; on ‘d aughters’ o f Z ion and Jerusalem , 16, 200 n. 15 M illo o f Jerusalem , 113, 114-15 minerals: in Asir, 43 M iqaddah, 78, 79 M isram ah, 54, 91, 92, 153, 154, 155, 168, 172 M itanni, 141, 213 n. 12 M izpah, 9 M oab territory, 207 n.5 M oabite Stone, m isinterpretation of, 68-70 m onotheism , developm ent of, 8, 147-50 M oreh, w o o d of, 152, 153 M oriah, land of, 150 Moses: K oran on, 35; land prom ised to, 170-2; leadership oflsraelites, 25, 86, 207 n.5 M uham m ad, Prophet, 178 N aam an o f A ram , 95-6 Nablus, 126, 131-2; O stracanear, 65 N abodinus, King, 15 N aharaim , 141 N aphtali tribe, 125, 192, 194, 195 N ap h tu h im tribe, 159-60 N ebaioth, 213 n. n N eb o, 106, 108, 2 0 7 n.5, 213 n . n Nebuchadnezzar, King, 15 N echo II, King, 14 Negeb: A bram in, 153; G erar and, 49, 50; L ot’s departure from , 89 Negra, 55

221 Nehem iah: on Israelites’ return from Babylon, 98-108 N im as, 40 N o d , land of, 174, 177 N um bers, B ook of: on ‘Jo rd a n ’, 93; on M oses’jo u rn ey w ith Israelites, 207-8 n.5; o n ‘prom ised land’, 166, 170-2 O both, 2 0 7 n.5 'Oldm (god), 144-5, 146. 147 O ld T estam ent, see H ebrew Bible olive oil, 33 Olives, M o u n t of, 121 O m ri, King, 68, 69, 70 O ph rah, 146 O straca, m istranslation of, 65-8 Paddan-aram , 197 n. 3 Palestine: archaeological evidence from inconclusive, 64-71; assum ed to be original land o f H ebrew Bible, 21-3; im m igration from West Arabia, 11-15; imperial control of, 20-1; Judaism established in, 8-18, 26, 131; Philistine and Canaanite settlem ent in, 11-12, 157; W est Arabian place-names in associated w ith im m igration, 12 Paran, 2 0 4 n.8, 215 n .3 Pathrusim tribe, 160 Pentapolis, 208 n. 11 Penuel, 128 Perizzite people, 169 Persian empire, 17-18, 20 Pharaoh, 92-3 Phicol, Chief, 160 Philistine people: assum ptions about, 24, 157; as descendants o f Ham , 158-60; Gerar and, 50, 57; Israelites com pared w ith, 160-1; Judah raided by, 192; in Palestine, 11-12, 157; territory, 49-50, 161-5 Phoenicia, n , 159 Pishon, River, 174, 175, 176 Pithon, 202 n. 25 place-names: language shift reflected in, 18-19; Palestinian, West Arabian origins of, 12; persistent survival, 29; in ‘Song o f Songs’, 182-7; topo ­ graphical elements in, 83-5 place-names, Biblical: concentration in Asir, 7; errors in recognition of, 34, 94-5, 98-108, 189; evidence on in other ancient records etc., 24, 34-6, 71-2, 133-42, 151; inscriptions relating to, m isinterpretation of, 64-71, 72-5; linguistic analysis, 1, 29-32; w ro n g ly identified w ith Palestinian place-names, 23

222 priests, place-names m istranslated as, 99-100 prophets, Judaism developed by, 97-8 Proverbs: on T eho m , 81-2 Psalms: attributed to Sons o f Korah, 186-7; on hyssop and snow , 202-3 n. 1; on Melchizedek, 143, 144-5; on T eh om , 80; on Z ion, 115 Ptolemies, 20 Punon, 207 n. 5 P ut tribe, 158 Q arhoh, M oabite Stone at, 68-9 Raamses, 202 n.25 Rabldah, 78, 79, 80 Rachel (Laban’s daughter), 194-5, 210 n.5 Rahm , 78, 79 rainfall: in Asir, 42 Rakkah, 78, 79 Ramah, 210 n, 5 Ramath-lehi, 162 Rebekah (Jacob’s m other), 194 Red Sea, 170, 171, 172 Rehoboam , King, 127, 129, 136 Rehoboth, 49, 55 n., 60 Rephaim people, 169 Reuben tribe, 125, 191, 194 Riblah, 172 riddles o f Solom on, 163-4 Rom ans, Palestine controlled by, 21 Sabaoth, 16, 118, 200 n. 17 Salem: king-priests of, 143-4, 145. 146, 147; shrine at, 115 Samaria: captured by Sargon II, 15; as Israelite capital, 15, i n , 128-9, 131; ‘Jo rd a n ’ and, 95-6; O straca of, 65 Sam aritan sect, 130-1 Samson, 162-4 Samuel, B ook of: on D avid’s capture o f Jerusalem , i i 2 - i 7 ; o n Philistines, 157; use o f term ‘H e b rew ’ in, 155 Sarai (A bram ’s wife), 214 n.4 Sarat highalnds, 38-40, 42, 85; ‘Israel’ related to, 124; Sheshonk in, 135 Sargon II, King: conquest oflsrael by, 15; topographical list of, 71-2 Saul, 25 Sedeq, king-priests of, 145, 146, 147 Seir, M ount, 204 n. 1 Seleucid empire, 20-1 Semitic languages: co m m o n features of, 3-5; consonantal alphabet, xi, 5, 19, 30-1; H ebrew as dialect of, .8-9 (see also Hebrew ); metathesis in , xiiin., 4-5, 30; m o d em , Biblical H ebrew interpreted in light of, 27

INDEX Senir, peak of, 184 Sennacherib, King, 200 n. 16 Septuagint, 22, 28, 142, 152 Sharon, rose of, 183 Shechem, 127-8, 132, 153, 155 Shepam, 172 Sheshonk I, King: expedition of, 14, 133-42; Je ro b o a m ’s refuge with, 127 Shittim, 85-6 Shulamm ite, 181, 185 Shunem , 212 n.4 Shur, Gerar and, 49, 51-2, 54, 56-7, 60 Sidon, Gerar and, 47, 49, 50, 57-8, 60; mentioned, 12, 159 Siloam inscription, 64-5 Simeon tribe, 125, 191, 194 singers, m istranslation concerning, 101 Sitnah, well of, 49, 55n. 60 snow , 33 soapw ort, 33, 202-3 n - J Soco, 129 Sodom and G om orrah: G erar and, 57, 58, 60; volcanoes and, 33, 58, 92; mentioned, 90, 91 Solom on: ‘All Israel’ ruled by, 25, 11 o - 11; copper mines, 64; Je ro b o a m ’s rivalry with, 127; jo u rn e y from C ity o f D avid to jerusalem , 118-19; palace, 33; servants, 103-4; ‘Song o f Songs’, 180-8 Song o f Songs, 180-8 Sorek, 163 Strabo: on Aelius Gallus’jo urney, 55-6; on Beersheba, 35; on birds in Asir, 34; on gold in Asir, 175, 205 n.4 Succoth (god), 149 Suph, 2 0 4 n.8 Syriac language, 27 Taanach, 137, 212 n.3 Tables o f Nations, 158 Taif, 38; battle o f Carchem ish near, 14, 199 n. n ; Israelites from , 108; Sheshonk in, 135, 139, 140-1 Tall al-D uw ayr Ostraca, 65-8 Tehom, T iham ah identified as, 76-82 Teim a, 15 Tekoa, 129 tem ple-servants, m istranslation of, 101-3 T hadyayn, 78, 79 Tigris, River: erroneously assum ed to Be in Garden o f Eden, 174, 176 T im nah, 162 Tirzah, 128, 184, 187 T ophel, 2 0 4 n.8 topographical lists, 71-2, 136, 151 toponym ic analysis, 1, 29, 32; archaeological corroboration

INDEX neccssary, 32, 108-9; evidence supporting, 32-4 trade, West Arabian, 9-11, 17, 44, 126 T ransjordan, 70 trees, sacred: in Eden, 174, 175, 177 T yre, 12, 159, 198, n.6, 7 U r o f the Chaldaeans, 152-3 U rdu n, Arab geographers’ use of, 206-7 n.2 vocalisation, Hebrew , xi, 19-20, 31.-2; traditional (Masorctic), 3, 5, 27-8 volcanoes, 35, 36, 43, 81, 92, 205 11.6, 209 n. 15 W ahdah, 40 West Arabia, see Arabia, West woods, H ebrew s from, 152 Y ahweh, 144-5, 147; cult o f developed into w orld religion, 130; G arden o f Eden and, 173, 174; a s ‘God o f the H eb rew s’, 15, 155; Hebrew

223 form of, 80, 90, 206 n.9; land prom ised by, 166-72; in place-names, 148-9; as suprem e god, 8, 147-50 Y am am ah, 178 Zalm onah, 207 n.5 Zaredah, 127 Zarethan, 86, 87 Z eboiim , 19, 57, 58, 60, 208 n. 11 Zcbulun tribe, 125, 193 Zechariah: on 'daughters’ o f Zion and Jerusalem , 17, 200-1 n. 18; on Jordan, 93-5; on M o unt o f Olives, 121 Zedad, 172 Zephaniah: on Philistines, 157 Zephathah, valley of, 49, 53, 60 Zerah ‘the C ush ite’, 49, 53, 55 Zilpah (Leah’s maid), 194, 195 Zin, desert of, 171 Zion: C ity o f D avid and, 113-15, 117, 118-19, I22; ‘dau g h ter’ of, 15-16, 200

n.15

Ziph, 129 Z iphron, 172 Zorah, 130

“I BELIEVE I HAVE MADE A REMARKABLE DISCOVERY, WHICH SHOULD MAKE POSSIBLE A RADICAL REINTERPRETATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT” Kamal Salibi, professor of history at the American University of Beirut, reveals startling linguistic evidence which controversially suggests that Judaism originated not in Palestine but in West Arabia. Whilst looking at a gazeteer of Saudi place names, he noticed a remarkable concentration of Biblical place names in an area 600km long by 200km wide - Asir. Ancient Hebrew, like Arabic, was written without vowels. Salibi believed that scholars of the sixth centuiy might have added the vowels wrongly when standardizing texts, and so he went back to the original unvowelled Old Testament to prove histheoiyand it did. The geography of Palestine has never corresponded in any way to the apparently specific stories in the Bible. Salibi’s research authenticates the events as histoiy for the first time - but within an Arabian setting. This book has caused a predictable storm amongst academics and politicians. The issue is of such importance that everyone should read the evidence first-hand. ‘Avery important book’ Contemporary Review ‘Professor Salibi presents histheoiy both confidently and with becoming modesty’ Country Life Cover photography by P eter Williams

ISBN 0 - 3 3 0 - 2 1 S 1 V S PHILOSOPHY/RELIGION

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£3.95

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111

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