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Scholars Disagree: Can You Name the Panel with the Israelites?

Rainey’s Challenge

By Anson F. Rainey

In a brilliant piece of detective work entitled “3,200-Year-Old Picture of Israelites Found in Egypt,” BAR 16:05, Frank J. Yurco analyzes the reliefs on a wall of the Cour de la Cachette in the Karnak temple in Upper Egypt. But he points to the wrong picture as that of Israelites. This has disastrous results for his conclusions. Yurco’s scrupulous examination of the cartouches is certainly convincing. He has clearly demonstrated that the original pharaoh to whom the battle reliefs on the western face of the western wall of the Cour de la Cachette must be ascribed is Merneptah,a not […]

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Footnotes

1.

Spelled “Merenptah” by Yurco, for reasons that he explained in his article.

2.

Rainey prefers this spelling to “Shasu,” as used by Yurco and others.

3.

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), used by this author, is the altemate designation corresponding to B.C. often used in scholarly literature.

4.

See Hershel Shanks, “Israel’s Emergence in Canaan—BR Interviews Norman Gottwald,” Bible Review (BR), October 1989, P. Kyle McCarter, “A Major New Introduction to the Bible—Norman Gottwald’s Sociological-Literary Perspective,” BR, Summer 1986 and Betnhard W. Anderson, “Mendenhall Disavows Paternity,” BR, Summer 1986.

5.

Even the most recent fundamentalist attempts to invent a pseudo Ai (John J. Bimson and David Livingston, “Redating the Exodus,” BAR 13:05) or to prove Joshua’s conquest of Jericho (Bryant G. Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?” BAR 16:02 and “Dating Jericho’s Destruction: Bienkowski Is Wrong on All Counts,” BAR 16:05 respectively) are exercises in science fiction.

Endnotes

1.

Every generation of Old Testament scholars seems to look for a new panacea around which to chase their tails. Gottwald gave them just such a panacea for the 1980s; see my review of Gottwald’s The Tribes of Israel in Journal of the American Oriental Society 107/3 (1987), pp. 541–543.

2.

Israel Finkelstein, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1988). See also the review by Douglas L. Esse, Books in Brief, BAR 14:05, and Israel Finkelstein, “Searching for Israelite Origins,” BAR 14:05.

3.

In a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in New Orleans, November 1990. See G. W. Ahlstrom and Diana Edelman, “Memeptah’s Israel,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 44 (1985), pp. 59–61, see also Hershel Shanks, “When 5,613 Scholars Get Together in One Place—The Annual Meeting, 1990,” BAR 17:02.