Endnote 1 – Arad—An Ancient Israelite Fortress with a Temple to Yahweh

In Shishak’s inscription, the Egyptian scribe defines the two Arads by the term hqrm, “fortress enclosures.” Two scholars, Martin Noth and Benjamin Mazar, long ago had seen that the Egyptian spelling represented the equivalent of later Aramaic hagra’. elsewhere in the inscription, a few other places in the Negeb area are defined as p´-hqr, “the fortress enclosure,” with the Egyptian definite article for masculine singular nouns. But the form with final –m, the typical plural suffix of Semitic languages, only appears with the two Arads. The fact that this is the only place where hqr is followed by two towns with identical names is proof that hqrm is meant for a plural. The scribe did not add the Egyptian definite article for the plural, which is n´, not p´, because of the Semitic inflection; he did not think that the article was necessary.