Israelites who had been brought to Egypt as Merenptah’s prisoners in 1208 BCE, or slightly earlier, had come into contact with shasu from Edom and thus encountered the god YHWH. Evicted after the failure of Beya’s coup, the survivors settled in the northern Central Range, where Egyptian control was on the wane (1150–1130 BCE). There, they articulated the memory of their salvation as recorded in Exodus 18:1: YHWH had brought Israel out of Egypt.
Chapter from: A History of Biblical Israel: The Fate of the Tribes and Kingdoms from Merenptah to Bar Kochba (Equinox Publishing, 2016).
By Ernst Axel Knauf
Professor of the Old Testament and Biblical Studies
University of Berne
Philippe Guillaume
Biblical Institute of the Theological Faculty
University of Berne
December 2017
Click here for article.
Comments (1)
I cannot quite reconcile p.40, where you mention a Philistine land on the strength of Amenope, with the previous page, where the 'notion' - I took this to mean 'the very idea' of a P land is said to be first found in Adadnirari, several centuries later. Perhaps I'm mistaken or the matter is trivial, but there always seems to be something elusive about Philistines, the very idea of them.
#1 - Martin Hughes - 12/31/2016 - 17:10