Chavoux Luyt:
1. You wrote: “[T]he narratives make it fairly clear that the Patriarchs
were primarily semi-nomadic lifestock farmers and not permanently settled
planters of fields, vineyards and trees. And the kind of veld most favorable
for lifestock farming is not the same as for other kinds of farming. E.g.
forests do not provide the best grazing for sheep! More water does not always
equal better grazing.”
(a) The Shephelah did not have forests. Rather, its various valleys were
lined by low ridges on which oak trees were very prominent. One sees three
villages, and one valley, in the Shephelah named after “oak trees” because
oak trees were so prominent there, not because there was a forest there.
The Shephelah was the best place for sheep and goats in the dry Late Bronze
Age, which I see as being the Patriarchal Age.
(b) The Patriarchs’ were not “semi-nomadic”. After splitting from Lot
and settling at the Patriarchs’ XBRWN in the northeast Aijalon Valley, the
only other place Abraham lives in his long life is GRR/Upper Galilee. Genesis
13: 17 required Abraham to leave XBRWN and move far away to GRR, so that
Abraham would follow the divine commandment of walking all the way through
Canaan. Not a single time in the text does a Patriarch ever move the flock on
a
seasonal basis. Several moves are instigated by a drought/famine, which is
a classic indication that the time period is the abnormally dry Late Bronze
Age. In fact, the Late Bronze Age was so dry that regular farming was not
routinely done in the Shephelah in that time period, with the Amarna Letters
making very clear “the power of the Apiru”, that is, tent-dwelling people,
in the Aijalon Valley during that unusually dry time period.
2. You wrote: “Do you really think the abundance of "XBRN lmlk" seals in
the Shephelah is sufficient evidence for the claim that XBRN is a nickname
for the Shephelah?”
What I think is that the presence of over 300 XBRN lmlk seals in the
Shephelah, and only 7 at the mountainous site 20 miles south of Jerusalem,
means
that it makes no rational sense whatsoever to consider XBRWN at Genesis 13:
18 to be a mandatory, unequivocal reference to southern hill country. What I
am advocating is that we look at how the Patriarchal narratives describe
the Patriarchs’ XBRWN in seeking to determine its locale, instead of assuming,
erroneously and irrationally, that XBRWN in all events can only be the
mountainous city northwest of the Judean Desert in the Patriarchal Age. When
you look at what words are actually in the Biblical text, you never see “hill”
or “up” or “city”, but rather you see the opposite from “east” of
Bethel, “oak trees”, villages named after “oak trees”, “Mamre” [the Amorite,
with an Amorite princeling dominating the Aijalon Valley in the Amarna
Letters], and “valley”. That is to say, the words that are in the received
text
are a perfect description of the eastern Aijalon Valley in every way, and do
not fit the locale of the city of Hebron at all. There’s nothing “wrong”
with Abram deciding to sojourn in the rural paradise of the Shephelah, west
of Bethel, which is in the heart of the Promised Land. After all, Abraham
was divinely promised all of Canaan, and he could muster 318 armed men, so
why not choose the best place for a huge flock of sheep and goats?
3. You wrote: “Only if you insist on "East" excluding the fact that Lot
actually went South-East to Sedom. And that Abram going West can be just as
plausibly be seen as going West relative to Lot rather than West relative to
Bethel.”
At the time Lot and Abram split, they had traversed precisely two places
together in Canaan: the Jordan River Valley, and the Shephelah. When the two
men make a provisional division of Canaan between them [which YHWH will
override 12 years later], naturally one picks the Jordan River Valley, and the
other gets the Shephelah. There was international trade and regular farming
in the Jezreel Valley, which locale connects to the Jordan River Valley,
and hence more money to be made there, if one was willing to give up the
virtuous life of living in tents and live in a city in a house with a roofbeam.
Lot’s wife made certain that Lot chose the Jordan River Valley, while
treating the Jezreel Valley as a tributary to the Jordan River and hence
provisionally as being a part of Lot’s share of Canaan as well. And that was
fine
with Abram anyway, who preferred sojourning in a rural paradise away from
international traffic: the Shephelah. However, on a provisional basis, note
that Abram had temporarily ceded to Lot all claim to the northern two-thirds
of Canaan. Thus on a provisional basis, Galilee was temporarily off-limits
to Abram, until Lot forfeited Lot’s claims to any part of Canaan (per chapter
19 of Genesis), though Genesis 13: 17 foreshadows that in due course, all
of Canaan [including Galilee] will rightly be Abraham’s.
There’s no way that Lot, seeking the soft life and big bucks, would have
weirdly decided to head out south after going to the Jordan River, and go to
an unknown locale southeast of the Dead Sea. Lot was not an adventurer like
that. His wife insisted that he take the sure thing: the soft life of
living at Rehov, near Beth Shan, on the east end of the Jezreel Valley.
Remember, Lot made his choice after looking out from a mountain near Bethel,
per
Genesis 13: 10. It’s the Jordan River Valley, n-o-r-t-h [not south] of the
Dead Sea that dominates the view from a mountaintop near Bethel:
"I have wandered all over the Bethel hills.… [W]hat can there be seen is
the northern end of the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley, and the river running
like a blue thread through the green plain. The hills of Engedi shut out
completely all view of the southern end of the [Dead] sea; but as I before
said, the northern end, where the Jordan runs in, and about two or three
miles of the sea, can be seen. I have wandered all over the Bethel hills and
tested this question." Henry A. Harper, in “A Handbook of Scientific and
Literary Bible Difficulties”, edited by Robert Tuck (1891), at p. 323.
By going east to the Jordan River, Lot provisionally claimed the entire
Jordan River Valley [through which Abram and Lot had recently traveled], with
Abram thus being limited to Canaan west and southwest of Bethel [being the
other part of Canaan through which Abram and Lot had recently traveled, per
Genesis 12: 9 and Genesis 13: 3, which effectively reference the Diagonal
Route through the Shephelah]. Neither man knew or cared anything about (i) the
oases and desert southeast of the Dead Sea, or (ii) rugged southern hill
country; neither of those two locales can be seen from a mountaintop near
Bethel, whereas both the Jordan River Valley and the northeast corner of the
Shephelah can be seen from such vantagepoint [as well as the city of Jerusalem,
though neither Abram nor Lot cared anything about Jerusalem, which was a
totally pagan city at the time, whose ruler had the Hurrian name of IR-Heba].
No one in the Patriarchal narratives is ever southeast of the Dead Sea or
in southern hill country. Why should they be? Rather, Lot lives the soft
city life at Rehov, next to the best “fields”/%DYM in Canaan for farming, the
good “fields”/%DYM of the Jezreel Valley, with %DYM being one of the bases
for the Biblical nickname CDM. Abraham for his part sojourns in the rural
paradise of the eastern Aijalon Valley, until YHWH changes everything [in
Abraham’s favor] with the destruction of Sodom, at which point Abraham
immediately moves north to GRR/Galilee, thereby perfecting his claim to all of
Canaan.
If we can get the geography right, these stories practically tell
themselves.
Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
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