Map taken from: http://creation.com/the-times-of-Abraham
by
Damien F. Mackey
“It came to pass in the days of
Amraphel king of Shinar, Arioch king of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer king of Elam, and
Tidal king of nations, that they made war with Bera king of Sodom, Birsha king
of Gomorrah, Shinab king of Admah, Shemeber king of Zeboiim, and the king of
Bela (that is, Zoar) ... In the fourteenth year Chedorlaomer and the kings that
were with him” (Genesis 14:1-5 NKJV)
Introduction
The
debate over whether Amraphel was Hammurabi continues to this day. For thus we
read at (http://www.3amthoughts.com/article/people-and-places/amraphel-and-hammurabi):
AMRAPHEL SAME AS
HAMMURABI?
Many scholars believe Amraphel, the leader of the alliance that fought
against Abraham, was none other than Hammurabi:
- Easton’s Bible Dictionary states, “It is now found that Amraphel (or Ammirapaltu) is the Khammu-rabi whose name appears on recently-discovered monuments.”[1]
- The New Unger’s Bible Dictionary states, “Generally identified with Hammurabi the Great of the First Dynasty of Babylon.”[2]
- The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia states, “There is no doubt that the identification of Amraphel with the Hammurabi of the Babylonian inscriptions is the best that has yet been proposed, and though there are certain difficulties therein, these may turn out to be apparent rather than real, when we know more of Babylonian history … Amraphel is mentioned first, which, if he be really the Babylonian Hammurabi, is easily comprehensible, for his renown to all appearance exceeded that of Chedorlaomer.”[3]
- Easton’s Bible Dictionary describes Hammurabi [Khammu-rabi] as “The most famous king of the dynasty was Khammu-rabi, who united Babylonia under one rule, and made Babylon its capital … Khammu-rabi, whose name is also read Ammi-rapaltu or Amraphel by some scholars”[4]
- Hastings’ 5 Volume Dictionary of the Bible states, “Schraeder, who suggested that the name was a corruption for Amraphi, was the first to identify this king with Khammurabi, the 6th king of the 1st dynasty of Babylon. The cuneiform inscriptions inform us that Khammurabi was king of Babylon and North Babylonia; that he rebelled against the supremacy of Elam, that he overthrew his rival Eri-aku, king of Larasa, and after conquering Sumer and Accad, was the first to make a united kingdom of Babylonia.”[5]
- Nelson’s Topical Bible Index states, “identified by some as the Hammurabi of the monuments[6]
AMRAPHEL NOT HAMMURABI?
However, not all scholars link Amraphel to Hammurabi:
- The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia also states, “There would therefore appear to be no sound reason for maintaining that Amraphel can be identified with Hammurabi, particularly as such a procedure is unsubstantiated by Mesopotamian archeology and history. If Hammurabi were really Amraphel, it is difficult to see why he should be occupying a subordinate position to that of Chedorlaomer, unless Hammurabi happened to be a crown prince at the time. But here it has to be recognized that the Palestinian expedition itself has not been discovered to date among the recorded campaigns of Hammurabi. The identity of Amraphel king of Shinar must therefore remain uncertain for the moment.”[7]
- The New Bible Dictionary states, “The equation with Hammurapi is unlikely.”[8]
- Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary states, “While some have tried to identify Amraphel with Hammurabi, founder of the first Babylonian dynasty, all efforts to identify him or pinpoint the location of Shinar have failed.”[9]
- The New Unger's Bible Dictionary states of Amraphel, “formerly generally identified with Hammurabi the Great of the First Dynasty of Babylon (c. 1728-1689). This Amraphel-Hammurabi equation always was difficult linguistically but is now also disproved chronologically.”[10]
[End of quotes]
According
to my own reconstruction of history, however, the famous Hammurabi is far later
than the time of Abram and the four kings of Genesis 14:1, later by
approximately a millennium. Hammurabi and his contemporaries most definitely
belong to the time of King Solomon of Israel. See my:
and:
Bringing
New Order to Mesopotamian History and Chronology
Now we
find from careful research that king Hammurabi himself had actually looked back
on the Genesis 14 coalition of kings as vandals from a bygone era.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
“This can only mean that Khedorla’omer’s [Chedorlaomer’s]
days were long before Hammurabi’s time”.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is
apparent from the excellent article, “The Wars of Gods and Men” (Chapter
Thirteen: “Abraham the Fateful Years”), which begins with the Genesis 14
passage, already quoted, and then goes on to tell (http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sitchin/sitchinbooks03_05.htm):
Thus
begins the biblical tale, in chapter 14 of Genesis, of an ancient war that
pitted an alliance of four kingdoms of the East against five kings in Canaan.
It is a tale that has evolved some of the most intense debate among scholars,
for it connects the story of Abraham, the first Hebrew Patriarch, with a
specific non-Hebrew event, and thus affords objective substantiation of the
biblical record of the birth of a nation.
"....For
many decades the critics of the Old Testament seemed to prevail; then, as the
nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the scholarly and religious worlds
were astounded by the discovery of Babylonian tablets naming Khedorla’omer,
Ariokh, and Tidhal in a tale not unlike the biblical one.
"The
discovery was announced in a lecture by Theophilus Pinches to the Victoria
Institute, London, in 1897. Having examined several tablets belonging to the
Spartoli Collection in the British Museum, he found that they describe a war of
wide-ranging magnitude, in which a king of Elam, Kudur-laghamar, led an
alliance of rulers that included one named Eri-aku and another named Tud-ghula
- names that easily could have been transformed into Hebrew as Khedor-la’omer,
Ariokh, and Tidhal. Accompanying his published lecture with a painstaking
transcript of the cuneiform writing and a translation thereof, Pinches could
confidently claim that the biblical tale had indeed been supported by an
independent Mesopotamian source.
"With
justified excitement the Assyriologists of that time agreed with Pinches reading
of the cuneiform names. The tablets indeed spoke of "Kudur-Laghamar, king
of the land of Elam"; all scholars agreed that it was a perfect Elamite
royal name, the prefix Kudur ("Servant") having been a component in
the names of several Elamite kings, and Laghamar being the Elamite epithet-name
for a certain deity. It was agreed that the second name, spelled Eri-e-a-ku in
the Babylonian cuneiform script, stood for the original Sumerian ERI.AKU,
meaning "Servant of the god Aku," Aku being a variant of the name of
Nannar/Sin. It is known from a number of inscriptions that Elamite rulers of
Larsa bore the name "Servant of Sin," and there was therefore little
difficulty in agreeing that the biblical Eliasar, the royal city of the king
Ariokh, was in fact Larsa. There was also unanimous agreement among the
scholars for accepting that the
Babylonian
text’s Tud-ghula was the equivalent of the biblical "Tidhal, king of
Go’im"; and they agreed that by Go’im the Book of Genesis referred to the
"nation-hordes" whom the cuneiform tablets listed as allies of
Khedorla’omer.
"Here,
then, was the missing proof - not only of the veracity of the Bible and of the
existence of Abraham, but also of an international event in which he had been
involved! "....The second discovery was announced by Vincent Scheil, who
reported that he had found among the tablets in the Imperial Ottoman Museum in
Constantinople a letter from the well-known Babylonian King Hammurabi, which
mentions the very same Kudur-laghamar! Because the letter was addressed to a
king of Larsa, Father Scheil concluded that the three were contemporaries and
thus matched three of the four biblical kings of the East - Hammurabi being
none other than "Amraphael king of Shin’ar."
"....However,
when subsequent research convinced most scholars that Hammurabi reigned much
later (from 1792 to 1750 B.C., according to The Cambridge Ancient History), the
synchronization seemingly achieved by Scheil fell apart, and the whole
bearing of the discovered inscriptions - even those reported by Pinches -
came into doubt. Ignored were the pleas of Pinches that no matter with whom the
three named kings were to be identified - that even if Khedorla’omer, Ariokh,
and Tidhal of the cuneiform texts were not contemporaries of Hammurabi - the
text’s tale with its three
names was
still "a remarkable historical coincidence, and deserves recognition as
such." In 1917, Alfred Jeremias (Die sogenanten Kedorlaomer-Texte)
attempted to revive interest in the subject; but the scholarly community
preferred to treat the Spartoli tablets with benign neglect.
"....Yet
the scholarly consensus that the biblical tale and the Babylonian texts drew on
a much earlier, common source impels us to revive the plea of Pinches and his
central argument: How can cuneiform texts, affirming the biblical background of
a major war and naming three of the biblical kings, be ignored? Should the
evidence - crucial, as we shall show, to the understanding of fateful years -
be discarded simply because Amraphel was not Hammurabi?
"The
answer is that the Hammurabi letter found by Scheil should not have sidetracked
the discovery reported by Pinches, because Scheil misread the letter. According
to his rendition, Hammurabi promised a reward to Sin-Idinna, the king of Larsa,
for his "heroism on the day of Khedorla’omer." This implied that the
two were allies in a war against Khedorla’omer and thus contemporaries of that
king of Elam.
It was on
this point that Scheil’s find was discredited, for it contradicted both the
biblical assertion that the three kings were allies and known historical
facts: Hammurabi treated Larsa not as an ally but as an adversary, boasting
that he "overthrew Larsa in battle," and attacked its sacred
precinct "with the mighty weapon which the gods had given him."
"A
close examination of the actual text of Hammurabi’s letter reveals that in his
eagerness to prove the Hammurabi-Amraphel identification, Father Scheil
reversed the
letter’s
meaning: Hammurabi was not offering as a reward to return certain goddesses to
the
sacred precinct (the Emutbal) of Larsa; rather, he was demanding their return
to Babylon from Larsa.
"....The
incident of the abduction of the goddesses had thus occurred in earlier times;
they were
held captive in the Emutbal "from the days of Khedorla’omer"; and
Hammurabi was now demanding their return to Babylon, from where Khedorla’omer
had taken them captive. This can only mean that Khedorla’omer’s days were long
before Hammurabi’s time.
"Supporting
our reading of the Hammurabi letter found by Father Scheil in the
Constantinople Museum is the fact that Hammurabi repeated the demand for the
return of the goddesses to Babylon in yet another stiff message to Sin-Idinna,
this time sending it by the hand of high military officers. This second letter
is in the British Museum (No. 23,131) and its text was published by L.W. King
in The Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi.
"....That
the goddesses were to be returned from Larsa to Babylon is made clear in the
letter’s further instructions.
"....It
is thus clear from these letters that Hammurabi - a foe, not an ally, of Larsa
- was seeking restitution for events that had happened long before his time, in
the days of Kudur-Laghamar, the Elamite regent of Larsa. The texts of the
Hammurabi letters thus affirm the existence of Khedorla-omer and of Elamite
reign in Larsa ("Ellasar") and thus of key elements in the biblical
tale. ....
[End of
quotes]
No comments:
Post a Comment