Queries & Comments

BAR FALL 2023

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments about our Fall 2023 issue. We appreciate your feedback. Here are a few of the letters and responses we received. Find more online at biblicalarchaeology.org/letters.

BAR Readers Think Outside the Box

I appreciate Jose Paredes’s letter, in which he lauds the fact that “BAR articles are written by actual researchers, not by people summarizing or interpreting studies carried out by others.” Yet professional scholars must necessarily maintain a delicate balance between pursuing the truth and protecting their credibility, careers, and reputations. Some can’t keep their balance on that wire. So, what should a dedicated layperson do when faced with such academic logjams? We can ask questions and/or offer our own suggestions. BAR’s Queries & Comments is an excellent place to share such outside-the-box thinking.

MAHLON MARR
PEORIA, ARIZONA

BAR readers are, indeed, exceptional critical thinkers, and we enjoy presenting your creative thoughts and probing questions to the scholars who write for us. Keep those ideas coming!—ED.

Yahweh vs. Baal

Michael Stahl in his article “Yahweh or Baal?” states that, “The name yhw in Egyptian topographical texts from Amara West and Soleb does not refer to a deity but a people group, the name of which cannot be clearly linked to the god Yahweh.” Egyptologist Donald Redford, in his book Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), disagrees and writes of the reference to Yahweh at Soleb: “It has been generally admitted that we have here the tetragrammaton, the name of the Israelite god, ‘Yahweh’; and if this be the case, as it undoubtedly is, the passage constitutes a most precious indication of the whereabouts during the late fifteenth century B.C. of an enclave revering this god.”

Stahl also mistakenly assumes that the name Yahweh found at Soleb and Amara West is spelled yhw in Egyptian hieroglyphs. There are four glyphs used for this name, not three, and they should be transliterated as “Yahweh.”

CLYDE E. BILLINGTON
NICEVILLE, FLORIDA

MICHAEL STAHL RESPONDS:
Thank you for pointing out the incorrect spelling of yhw, where the last character “disappeared” during the conversion of my manuscript into a design software application. However, the name yhw in these topographical lists refers to a mobile pastoralist group, not a deity. Although many scholars posit a historical connection between this Shasu-group and the later Israelite god Yahweh, some of them correctly conclude that the available Egyptian evidence does not refer to a deity. I discuss this issue in more depth in my article “The Historical Origins of the Biblical God Yahweh,” Religion Compass 14.11 (2020): e12378 (pp. 1–14) (https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12378).

The Omride Rulers were Yahwists, but not pure Yahwists. They feared the people wouldn’t accept Yahweh as God unless they dressed him up like the old god, Baal. Suddenly, we can’t tell if it’s Baal or Yahweh decked out like Baal. When Elijah overhears people mistakenly praying to “Baal” instead of “Yahweh,” he demands a clean break, insisting on no images at all. A clean break is the last thing King Ahab wants. He wants a military coalition with neighboring kings, none of whom worship Yahweh. But most biblical prophets view alliances as the equivalent of idolatry, because each alliance comes with a foreign princess (and her gods, altars, and priests). When Ahab’s foreign wife, Jezebel, goes beyond idolatry and connives to violate the Mosaic laws by murdering Naboth and stealing his ancestral property, the prophets vow no more tolerance for compromised Yahwists. They anoint Jehu to conduct a bloody military coup.

TOM KANE
FLORESVILLE, TEXAS

I was surprised by Michael Stahl’s insinuation that while the Bible depicts the Omride dynasty as Baal worshipers, they were loyal to Yahweh. Omri has a mere seven verses dedicated to him in 1 Kings 16–19, where it only says that he “walked in the way of Jeroboam.” Jeroboam was not a Baal worshiper but dedicated two sanctuaries to Yahweh with calf idols (1 Kings 12). Even if Omri did worship Baal, there is no indication he did not just add Baal to a mini-pantheon that included Yahweh. There is no question that Yahweh was still worshiped in the Northern Kingdom under Omri.

In the case of Ahab, the Bible suggests that Jezebel influenced him to focus on Baal. In 1 Kings 18:4, it is Jezebel who is “putting away” the prophets of Yahweh. Even in Elijah’s confrontation with the priests of Baal, he tells the people to “stop limping between two different options” (1 Kings 18:21). When Jehoshaphat of Judah repeatedly asks for a prophet of Yahweh in 1 Kings 22, Ahab does not like it, as the only prophet of Yahweh he can think of (Micaiah) never says anything good about him. These do not seem like the words of a dedicated follower of Yahweh.

DANIEL BURNHAM
UNIONTOWN, OHIO

Books on Byzantium

Sarah Yeoman’s article “Constantinople: Christianity’s First Capital” was fascinating. Are there any books Sarah would recommend to learn more about this city and its rich history, archaeology, and ties to Christianity?

PAUL LARSON
KATY, TEXAS

SARAH YEOMANS RESPONDS:
Good entry points into learning more about the Byzantine Empire are A Short History of Byzantium (Vintage, 1998), by John J. Norwich, and A History of Byzantium (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), by Timothy E. Gregory. The first is an old classic; the latter is more of a textbook, which makes it easy to follow. The Oxford History of Byzantium (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), edited by Cyril Mango, is a more scholarly resource for deeper dives into specific aspects of the Byzantine Empire. To learn more about Constantinople in particular, I suggest starting with Jonathan Harris’s Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Ur of Abraham

The answer to “Where Is It?” states that the great Sumerian city of Ur “was also known to the biblical writers as the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham (Genesis 11:31).” This popular belief and oft-repeated statement is totally baseless, however. Instead, the birthplace of Abraham is to be identified with Urfa (called Ura, in antiquity), located in modern south-central Turkey, 28 miles north of Harran (also mentioned in Genesis 11:31). While I cannot review all the evidence here, suffice to note that Abraham’s homeland was located “beyond the River [Euphrates]” (Joshua 24:2–3), which works for Urfa in northern Mesopotamia, but not for Ur of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia.

GARY RENDSBURG
DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY

Horns of Moses

Gary Rendsburg’s Thesis (“Moses as Pharaoh’s Equal—Horns and All”) that, in Exodus 34:29, ki qaran means that Moses’s face became horned, and that its purpose was to put Moses on an equal footing with Pharaoh, while entertaining, would seem to be an improper rendering, both linguistically and logically. The linguistic problem is the form of the verb. It is in the form known as binyan Qal, which denotes an active rather than passive verb. If the meaning were “became horned,” the proper form would be niqran or hiqrin, which are passive, not qaran.

The logic is also faulty. Had the change taken place in Exodus 7, where Moses confronts Pharaoh, it might make sense to say that the Almighty wanted to put Moses on an equal footing with Pharaoh. However, at that confrontation, there is no mention of qaran. It is mentioned only in Exodus 34, where Pharaoh plays no role whatsoever. What purpose would be served—after Moses had summoned the miracles at the Red Sea, and miraculously supplied water and manna—to have him appear in a manner similar to Pharaoh?

MEIR BARCHAIM
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

GARY RENDSBURG RESPONDS:
The verb qaran is perfectly fine as a Qal form meaning “was horned,” on par with the usages in Job 7:5 (‘ori raga‘, “my skin is broken”) and Job 30:30 (‘ori shakhar, “my skin is dark”). Mr. Barchaim may be thinking in English, where these verbs may be understood more as passives, but in Hebrew, they all take the active, Qal form.

The Exodus account reserved this one final Egyptianizing element in the book’s concluding narrative about the descent from Mt. Sinai. As such, it serves as one final reminder for the status of Moses throughout the narrative. In addition, we should note that the “logic” of an ancient literary mind may not align with our own modern sensibilities.

Say it isn’t so! Are you really telling me that the early authors of the Bible, particularly of the Book of Exodus—those unerring men who directly speak the word of God—actually had a political agenda? They clearly made up a bunch of stuff so that Moses would be compared to Horus favorably, and by extension to Pharaoh. These men, it turns out, were just men, with foibles, weaknesses, and agendas, and to claim that every dot they put on the page is the unerring word of God is just false.

ED WALDOCK
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

The Name Miriam

Regarding the piece on the name Miriam (“What’s in a Name?”), I am wondering whether the name Miryam and its variant Mariamene could be more convincingly derived from the Egyptian name Meri-amun, rather than from mery + yam.

SUSIE HELME
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Although it may look like the name Mariamne contains the Amun theophoric element, this derivation of the name Miryam does not appear until the Herodian period (37 BCE–70 CE). “Beloved of Yam” rather than “beloved of Amun” (Mer-it-Amun) is thus a better interpretation of the name Miryam.—ED.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments about our Fall 2023 issue. We appreciate your feedback. Here are a few of the letters and responses we received. Find more online at biblicalarchaeology.org/letters. BAR Readers Think Outside the Box I appreciate Jose Paredes’s letter, in which he lauds the fact that “BAR articles are written by actual researchers, not by people summarizing or interpreting studies carried out by others.” Yet professional scholars must necessarily maintain a delicate balance between pursuing the truth and protecting their credibility, careers, and reputations. Some can’t keep their balance on that wire. So, what should […]