Endnote 25 – Finding Historical Memories in the Patriarchal Narratives

Note, for example, the difficulties Van Seters finds in accounting for “this feeling of kinship with the Arameans of Northwestern Mesopotamia” (Abraham in History, p. 34). He appeals, among other things, to the Assyrian mass deportations of Israelites to this region and to the importance of the trade route through Haran during the Neo-Babylonian period as factors encouraging a sense of kinship with Arameans. These factors, however, do not seem adequate to explain the relationship in the Biblical text, as the tentativeness of Van Seters’s discussion seems to acknowledge.