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Egypt: an Illustration of How an Archaeological Find May Illumine a Biblical Passage

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Egypt: an Illustration of How an Archaeological Find May Illumine a Biblical Passage Back to Egypt: An Illustration of How an Archaeological Find May Illumine a Biblical Passage Lawrence T. Geraty As one who has been supported and inspired by the archaeological, exegetical and administrative efforts of Robert Coughenour, it is an honor to dedicate to him this meditation on a relatively new find from our excavation in Jordan where his own work has been so fruitful. The Find On the second day of our new Madaba Plains Project which began with the excavation of Tell el-'Umeiri (the successor project to the excavations at Tell 1 Hesban where Robert Coughenour was a key staff member ), during the summer of 1984, one of our supervisors who was working the sift spied a small, stone-like, conically shaped ceramic object, showed it to his supervisor who in tum showed it to another one of the supervis.ors who happened to be walking by. This time the latter supervisor rubbed the object on his trousers, took a good look at it, and discovered that the circular flat portion of the cone was inscribed! That happened to be on a Friday (June 22) when in the afternoon we were scheduled to take the staff down to Petra for the weekend. Larry Herr, our chief archaeologist (whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard was on Iron Age seals), volunteered to stay behind to work on reading and interpreting the new find. When we returned from our weekend trip, Larry Herr had it figured out. The finely conceived and executed seal impression was divided into three panels, the top and bottom panels containing the Ammonite inscription-dated paleographically to ca. 600 B.C.2-and the middle panel depicting typically 3 Ammonite iconography : a four-winged scarab beetle pushing a solar ball flanked by standards, solar discs, and crescent moons in an assemblage reminiscent of Zephaniah 1 :4-6. The inscription itself read lmlkm- 'wr 'bd b 'l­ ys ', "belonging to Milkom-'ur, servant of Ba'al-yish'a (or Ba'al-yasha')." Both of the personal names constituted "firsts": The seal's owner, Milkom­ 'ur ("Milkom's flame") or Milkom-'or ("Milkom is light"), is the first known occurrence of the well-known Ammonite divine name Milkom as one of the elements in an Ammonite proper name. Since our find, a couple of other examples have been published. 4 According to his title, "servant," this 221 individual would have been a prominent government official in the service of the Ammonite king, Ba'al-yish'a ("Baal is salvation") orBa'al-yasha' ("Baal saves"). At first we thought we had found evidence for a previously unknown Ammonite king. Then Robert Boling of McCormick Theological Seminary, who was in charge of our regional survey and lived at the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) where Robert Coughenour was later president and where there was a library, came back to camp and told us to look at Jeremiah 40: 14. It quickly became apparent that our Ammonite king was to be identified with the Baalis of that text. And that is how we came across Baalis' first extra­ biblical confirmation-despite Wright's published claim5 about "Ba'lay" being 6 on the Tell Siran bottle (a misunderstanding of Cross ; and this misinformation was perpetuated by Feinberg. 7 The spellings for the name of the Ammonite king preserved in Jeremiah 40: 14 (b'lys) and in the seal impression (b'lys') are different enough that one may legitimately question the identification. The following points argue in its 8 favor : 1. Of the nine Ammonite kings now known from the Bible, Assyrian texts, and 9 Ammonite inscriptions (cf. Cross' listing in Herr ), the Baalis of Jeremiah is the only one containing "Baal" as a theophoric element. 2. In the more than one hundred other proper names assembled thus far in our Ammonite onomasticon, Baalis is the only name containing "Baal" as its theophoric element, except for the fragmentary Amman Theater Inscription where there is a broken, but possible, Baal name. 10 Thus the use of "Baal" in an Ammonite king's name appears to be exclusive to the king of the 'Umeiri sealing and the king mentioned in Jeremiah 40: 14. Even though the verbal element in the names differs, it is reasonable to conclude that the two references are to one and the same Ammonite king. The spelling difference in the verbal element of the name thus requires an explanation. Before the discovery of the seal impression, both Cross" and Landes 12 recognized that the name Baalis makes no sense as it stands in the Hebrew Bible (Massoretic Text), so suggested it could be a hypocoristicon. Subsequent to the find, Shea 13 has argued an intentional pious change in the 14 Bible to avoid heathen theology, a view disputed by Herr • It is also possible that it is an unintentional change reflecting the way Judaeans heard the name pronounced in Ammonite, partially preserved, perhaps, in Jeremiah 47: 14 (LXX) as Belisa, where the final vowel would reflect the presence of a final 'ayin which would, of course, not have been written in Greek. 15 That Transjordanian sin was pronounced sin in Cisjordan is well known from the Shibboleth story in Judges 12:6. Whatever the reason for the difference in spelling, it was accurately hypothetically reconstructed by Puech 16 before the archaeological discovery. 222 The Text This important discovery has obviously interested me in the larger context of Jeremiah 40: 14. It provides us with an opportunity to see how archaeology helps to fill out the picture for the full understanding of a biblical passage. The historical narrative in Jeremiah 40-43 constitutes one of the most vivid and striking stories in the Bible. It tells what happened to Judah after Jerusalem's fall to the Babylonians in 586 B.C. The story in Jeremiah 40 begins with the Babylonian dragnet that is sweeping up the intelligentsia of Judah after the fall of Jerusalem, for deportation to Babylon. The Babylonian captain is surprised to find Jeremiah in his group. Knowing that Jeremiah had counseled Judah to cooperate with the Babylonians, the captain says to him, "I release you from your chains. If you want to come along with us, fine, I will treat you well, but if you wish to stay here in Judah with Gedaliah, you are free to do so." Now Gedaliah, the Jew, was the newly-appointed Babylonian governor of Judah. He had surely been known to the Babylonians as one who had opposed the anti-Babylonian policies of Zedekiah, Judah's last king. As it happened, Gedaliah came from a family that strongly supported Jeremiah (cf. Jer. 39: 14; 26:24). So Jeremiah decided to stay with his friend in Mizpah, Gedaliah's headquarters just north of Jerusalem, chosen no doubt because of the complete destruction of the latter. Gedaliah attracted the support of the Jewish leaders from far and wide. His message to them was, "Do not be afraid to serve the Babylonians. Everything will be all right. While I represent your interest to our rulers, you just go ahead and gather wine and summer fruits and oil, store them in your vessels, and dwell in your cities that you have taken." So the exiles from the surrounding countries, particularly those from Transjordan, came home, trusting in Gedaliah's assurances. About this time Johanan, one of the former guerilla leaders, came to Gedaliah with this warning, "Do you know that Baalis the king of the Ammonites has sent Ishmael to take your life?" (Jer. 40: 14). In fact Johanan suggested that he be allowed to kill Ishmael before Ishmael could kill Gedaliah. But Gedaliah, wanting to let bygones be bygones and to encourage a fresh start, responded, "Do not even think of doing that and do not slander Ishmael." We do know that seven or eight years before this episode the Transjordanian kings had tried to persuade Zedekiah to join a coalition of western states whose purpose was to overthrow the Babylonian domination. So now Baalis must have seen Gedaliah's leadership as a threat to this prior plan. And perhaps Ishmael was a willing tool because, being of royal Davidic blood, he was jealous of Gedaliah. Or maybe he just wanted to cause trouble for the Babylonians. But Gedaliah was too big a man to operate on rumor and gossip. Some time after this, while Gedaliah was entertaining a group of men that included Ishmael, Ishmael jumped up and murdered his host, killing also the 223 other Jews who were with Gedaliah as well as his Babylonian soldiers. These and others murdered that day were buried in a cistern at Mizpah. "Then Ishmael took captive all the rest of the people who were in Mizpah, the king's daughters and all the people who were left at Mizpah, whom Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, had committed to Gedaliah, son of Ahikam. Ishmael, son of Nathaniah, took them captive and set out to cross over to the Ammonites" (Jer. 41: 10). But when Johanan and his friends heard about this terrible massacre, they took their friends and started on a chase of Ishmael and his entourage. "They came upon him at the great pool that is in Gibeon" (Jer. 41: 12). Archaeologists have excavated this pool which is carved out of the rock down to a depth of some eighty feet. It had been the site of an earlier gruesome battle between the generals of Saul and David (see 2 Sam. 2: 13). Ishmael's captives were delighted to be set free by this unexpected turn of events· while Ishmael, himself, together with eight men, escaped, crossing the Jordan River over to their sponsors, the Ammonites.
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