[Update Ocotber 2020: I'm semi retracting this post, if Hor and Kadesh-Meribah are both in the area of Petra then the Israelites were right be the modern border of Israel and Jordan and so this detail of Numbers doesn't mean as much as I thought.]
First supporting Jabal El Lawz as Sinai, then the Petra Sinai location. I did a post on my Revised Chronology blog responding to certain critics of that view. Reading and writing off their arguments about how ancient usage of "Arabia" included west of the Gulf of Aqaba, and verses saying Sinai wasn't in Jethro's homeland. That was made at the time I was switching from Lawz to Petra.
Later I argued for Kadesh-Barneas being Mecca and Sinai being Sana'a in Yemen. Then I considered Mecca being Sinai. Then become convinced of arguments for Petra being Kadesh. Then recently argued for Sinai being in southern Iraq or Kuwait. And through most of this I supported Mont Hor where Aaron died being the mountain near Petra that local tradition identifies it with.
But I was reading Numbers 21 today, and noticed a vital smoking gun. Maybe the critics of Sinai in Arabia I'd read before had mentioned this passage and it just slipped by me. First Israel fights a brief war with King Arad in the Negev (South is a misleading translation). Then in verse 4.
And they journeyed from mount Hor by the way to the Red Sea, to compass the land of Edom: and the soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way.And then they went on to travel to Moab.
Edom was south of the Dead Sea and north of the Gulf of Aqaba/Red Sea/Yam Suf, on a modern map straddling the border between Israel and Jordan but it's most key capitals were on Jordan's side. The Negev desert is to it's north-west and Moab to it's north-east.
This verse clearly and unambiguously places Mount Hor west of the Gulf of Aqaba. So years of fringe theorizing of mine are dead. Still there is more then one Sinai view just on the Peninsula. There is no Biblical Basis for saying it has to be the tallest mountain, that comes from Josephus.
However, I have become very open to the hypothesis that Mizraim in The Torah was not in Africa but in Arabia. In that post I'd briefly considered that I could still support the Wyatt-Cornuke Read Sea Crossing site just going the other way, but wrote it off because when I made that I'd just posted the Sinai in Iraq theory. Now however, this discovery when ruining old theories of mine has filled the one hole that the Mizraim in Arabia hypothesis had.
Now technically this passage I just noticed directly only confirms a Sinai Peninsula based location for Mount Hor. But it's difficult to make sense of going west to Hor just to turn back around again.
I still think it's possible there are two Kadeshes. Barnea is never used as a border marker. Numbers 20 says they just arrived at that Kadesh, it's from there they sent messengers to Edom. The second Kadesh, Meribah-Kadesh, probably has a Sinai Peninsula based location also.
It is Kadesh-Barnea that is 11 days from Horeb/Sinai. 38 years separated the arrival at Kadesh-Barnea in Numbers 13 and the passing of the Brook Zered in Numbers 21:12 and Deuteronomy 2:13-14. So the people arguing they spent 38 years at just one Kadesh are wrong.
Numbers 33 does seem to list only one Kadesh. But the number of sites they camped at between Sinai and the Kadesh in Zin (which is Meribah-Kadesh) are way to many to fit an only 11 day Journey. In Numbers 12 and 13 it seems like they went right from Hazeroth to Paran and Kadesh-Barnea.
So either they mostly camped at two places per day, or Kadesh-Barnea should be identified with Rithmah or between Hazeroth and Rithmah. Numbers 10 tells us it took them 3 days from leaving Sinai to find their first resting place.
The Wilderness of Zin is mentioned in Numbers 13:21, but that's after the spies have left that Kadesh to spy out the land.
And now I can't help but feel like I'm making another tortured argument. At the end of the day the only problem the people viewing both Kadeshes as the same have is the wording of Numbers 20:1, and that could only read that way cause of the English. Numbers 15-19 describe no traveling.
And a verse saying it is an 11 days journey doesn't mean that's how long it took Israel. Yahuah might have intentionally wanted them to take the long way.
I have a lot to work out still.
But, perhaps it is really only Hor this passage places west of Aqaba. Because in Numbers 14, at Kadesh-Barneas after they rejected the land and Yahuah sentenced them to wonder 40 years. He tells them to go to the wilderness "by way of the Red Sea". So that seems like Evidence that Kadesh-Barnea and Hor are not on the same side of the Gulf of Aqaba.
And once again, even Pre-Isalmic sources like Jerome place Paran in Arabia Deserta, a specific Roman term not applicable to the widest possibly definition of Arabia, it refers to the massive Desert between Petra and Arabia Felix (Yemen).
Both Eusebius (in his Onomasticon, a Bible dictionary) and Jerome reported that Paran was a city in Paran desert, in Arabia Deserta (beyond Arabia Nabataea), southeast of Eilat Pharan. Onomasticon, under Pharan, states: "(Now) a city beyond Arabia adjoining the desert of the Saracens [who wander in the desert] through which the children of Israel went moving (camp) from Sinai. Located (we say) beyond Arabia on the south, three days journey to the east of Aila (in the desert Pharan) where Scripture affirms Ismael dwelled, whence the Ishmaelites. It is said (we read) also that (king) Chodollagomor cut to pieces those in 'Pharan which is in the desert'."[3]
Sebeos, the Armenian Bishop and historian, describing the Arab conquest of his time, wrote that the Arabs "assembled and came out from Paran".[4][5]So perhaps this doesn't change my other views as much as I at first thought. And the Teman of Habakkuk is probably Tihamah.
But it puts me back to square one as far as a Red Sea crossing with Mizraim in Arabia does.
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