THREAD: Below are a bunch of what look (to me) to be #Egyptian personal names in the #Hebrew Bible.
I’d be grateful for comments from #Semitists and, particularly, for possible translations from #Egyptologists .
I’ll start with a couple of obvious candidates (mentioned by Hoffmeier at least and no doubt others):
Judah’s genealogy mentions a guy named ‘Sheshan’ (1 Chr. 2),
who’s part of an ancestral chain which seeks to traverse Israel’s years in Egypt (though ultimately goes nowhere).
The name of his slave (‘Jarha’) looks like it’s composed of the Egyptian elements:
⟨wr⟩ = ‘great’, and
⟨ḫʕ⟩ = ‘the one who appears’, an epithet of ‘Re’ (from ⟨ḫʕi⟩ = ‘to appear’).
By way of illustration, here’s a name of the form ⟨Wr-DN⟩:
Meanwhile, the name ‘Sheshan’ denotes ‘a lotus flower’.
Here’s an instance of the equivalent name in Egyptian:
All well and good (perhaps).
So, now for some more tentative candidates, which aren’t mentioned by Hoffmeier. (They may be considered in Muchiki; I don’t have it here.)
In Genesis, we find Isaac near Egypt (Gen. 25.8),
where he encounters a commander named ‘Phicol’ (פִּיכֹל), who’s associated with ‘the land of the Philistines’ (presumably the region in and around modern-day Gaza?).
Joseph is a well known type/picture of Christ, so it’s natural for us (as Christians) to want us to map his experiences directly onto Jesus’s, all of which is well and good…
…But we can learn a great deal from a contemplation of Joseph’s life in its original (OT) context. For a start, let’s have a think about Genesis’s general flow.
As the book unfolds, God chooses out a line of promise. One by one its offshoots are peeled away as the story zooms in God’s chosen people (Israel).
The text of Mark 2.26 has caused quite a few folk quite a few problems.
Jesus seems to have thought David took the showbread from the sanctuary when Abiathar was the high priest, but the text of Samuel suggests he did it on Abimelech’s watch.
What’s gone wrong here?
Well, first of all, we need to consider a couple of relevant historical questions.
Question #1: Did Abiathar ever hold the office of high priest?
Well, we’re told three main things about him in his prophecies’ first two verses:
🔹 he was a priest;
🔹 he lived in Anathoth; and
🔹 he was the son of a certain Hilkiah.
Below, we’ll consider these facts in a bit more detail.
Let’s start with Anathoth.
Anathoth wasn’t just any old city; it was a highly significant one.
It was allotted to the line of Aaron, i.e., the line of Israel’s high priest (Josh. 21.13ff.).
As a result, it was where Eli lived.
That’s why when Solomon deposed Abiathar the priest—who was the son of Ahimelech, the son of Ahitub, the son of Phinehas, the son of Eli (I Sam. 14.3, 22.9ff., 22.20, 23.6, 30.7)—, he sent him back to ‘his estate’ in Anathoth (I Kgs. 2.26–27).
Keen to tackle the big questions of the day, I wondered if some thoughts on the thorny matter of hedgehog words in Scripture might be in order (with thanks to the Christmas card below for inspiration).
Modern-day Arabic dialects have quite an array of words for the hedgehog,
…which of course designate the desert hedgehog rather than the spiky fellows we encounter in European woodlands (and sometimes, sadly, squashed on European roads).