part0061

The Myth: And Abram [i.e., Abraham] went up out of Egypt, he, and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the south. And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold. And he went on his journeys from the south even to Bethel, unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Hai…. (Gen. 13:1–3)

The above passage raises some puzzling questions about the historical roots of Abraham. It suggests that Abraham went from Egypt into Canaan, towards the region of Bethel where he originally placed his tent. But the Hebrew text says that Abraham left Egypt and went “into the south.” One can’t get to Canaan by going south from Egypt.

Ancient Egypt thought of itself as two lands united together, Lower Egypt in the northern delta formed by the Nile and Upper Egypt in the south. This tradition is preserved in the Table of Nations, which makes Ham’s son Mizraim (the Semitic name for Egypt) the father of several children, among whom are Naphtuhim and Pathrusim, which names refer to Lower and Upper Egypt. In the late first millennium B.C., Egypt’s neighbors tended to equate Egypt primarily with the richer fertile northern delta and confused Upper Egypt in the south with Ethiopia, Egypt’s southern neighbor.

Abraham went to Egypt because of a famine in Canaan and would have traveled to the fertile delta in northern Lower Egypt for the purpose of obtaining food. If he went into the south, he would have been heading into Upper Egypt, away from Canaan. To get to Canaan from the Egyptian delta one would travel on an approximately easterly to northeasterly route. How then did Abraham get to Bethel in Canaan by traveling into southern Egypt?

The biblical description of Abraham’s route obviously creates a problem. While the King James Version gives the translation “into the south,” many other versions of the Bible give a different translation. They say that Abraham traveled not “into the south” but “into the Negev,” the vast desert region in southern Canaan.

This alternative translation resulted from the idiomatic meaning of “south” for “Negev,” in much the same way that Americans use the term “south” to define the southeastern United States. For example, if one flies north from Mexico to Florida, one flies “into the south” because Florida is part of the American South.

But there are some problems with this alternative translation. First, the Hebrew word used is not “negev” but “negevah.” The first form is a noun and could be used in an idiomatic way to refer to Southern Canaan. The second form, however, is an adverb, referring specifically to a direction of movement. Abraham wasn’t traveling “into the South,” which could refer to the Negev, but in a “southerly direction,” which means towards southern Egypt.

Second, a route through the Negev desert makes no sense. Abraham departed his Egyptian locale with great wealth and a large cattle herd. One doesn’t drive cattle into a vast waterless desert waste, especially when there is a major highway leading from Egypt to Canaan that goes along the Mediterranean coast, avoids the desert and provides water for the cattle. The Egyptians called this highway “The Way of Horus” and the Bible refers to it as “The Way of the Philistines.”

Third, the name Bethel didn’t exist in the time of Abraham, at least according to the Bible. The city received that name from Jacob, long after Abraham died, and the Bible usually indicates that the city used to be called Luz, although that gloss is missing in the present story. Bethel simply means “House of God” and could easily refer to any place where there is an altar or temple dedicated to any of the deities, in Egypt or in Canaan. Abraham could have built an altar anywhere and called it Bethel.

In context then, the King James Version has it right and the alternative translations are wrong. Abrahamheaded into southernEgypt and nottoCanaan. This raisessome interesting questions about the roots of ancient Israel .

Prior to Abraham’s arrival in Egypt, we have hardly any information about his background. The Bible says that in Abraham’s seventy-fifth year God told him to move from his home in Mesopotamia to Canaan, where he would “make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.” But, no sooner does he arrive in Canaan than he finds a great famine requiring that he move to Egypt.

If God had this great plan to give Canaan to Abraham and wanted his heir to move there to establish his name, why did he wait seventy-five years to tell him to move, and why did he wait until there was a famine requiring him to leave the land right away? Something is wrong with this picture.

As we saw in Myth #48, the early genealogy and history of Abraham was a late anachronistic invention. If we strike that portion of the narrative from Abraham’s biography, we find the story of Abraham beginning in Egypt, where he has some sort of confrontation with the pharaoh. This indicates that the original biblical history of Israel began in Egypt, not Canaan or Mesopotamia.

Biblical redactors, living amidst a culturally sophisticated Babylonian cultural and long out of touch with their Egyptian roots, sought to show that the Hebrew people stemmed from the same intellectual roots and influences as that of the highly regarded Babylonians. Consequently, they took advantage of ambiguities in their early historical traditions and added in a journey from Mesopotamia to Canaan in order to show that they had roots in the Babylonian world long before they resided in Egypt.