by
Damien F. Mackey
Baalat Neše,
being the only female correspondent of the El-Amarna [EA] series,
must therefore have been a woman of great significance at the time.
Who was she?
Dr. I Velikovsky had introduced Baalat Neše as “Baalath
Nesse” in his 1945
THESES FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF ANCIENT HISTORY
FROM THE END OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM IN EGYPT TO THE ADVENT OF ALEXANDER THE
GREAT
According to
Velikovsky:
1.
The el-Amarna Letters were written not in the
fifteenth-fourteenth century, but in the middle of the ninth century.
1.
Among the correspondents of Amenhotep III and
Akhnaton are biblical personages: Jehoshaphat (Abdi-Hiba), King of Jerusalem;
Ahab (Rib Addi), King of Samaria; Ben-Hadad (Abdi-Ashirta), King of Damascus;
Hazael (Azaru), King of Damascus; Aman (Aman-appa), Governor of Samaria; Adaja
(Adaja), Adna (Adadanu), Amasia, son of Zihri (son of Zuhru), Jehozabad
(Jahzibada), military governors of Jehoshaphat; Obadia, the chief of Jezreel;
Obadia (Widia), a city governor in Judea; the Great Lady of Shunem (Baalath
Nesse); Naaman (Janhama), the captain of Damascus; and others. Arza (Arzaja),
the courtier in Samaria, is referred to in a letter.
Then he, in his Ages in Chaos I (1952,
p. 220), elaborated on why he thought Baalat
Neše was,
as above, “the Great Lady of Shumen”.
I mentioned it
briefly, as follows, in my university thesis:
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah
of Judah
and its Background
(Volume One, p.
93), as follows:
“Queen Jezebel
Velikovsky had, with typical ingenuity, looked to identify the only female
correspondent of EA, Baalat
Neše, as the biblical ‘Great Woman of Shunem’, whose dead son the
prophet Elisha had resurrected (cf. 2 Kings 4:8 and 4:34-35). …. Whilst the
name Baalat Neše is
usually translated as ‘Mistress of Lions’, Velikovsky thought that it could
also be rendered as “a woman to whom occurred a wonder” (thus referring to
Elisha’s miracle).
This female correspondent wrote two letters (EA 273, 274) to Akhnaton,
telling him that the SA.GAZ pillagers had sent bands to Aijalon (a
fortress guarding the NW approach to Jerusalem). She wrote about “two sons of
Milkili” in connection with a raid.
The menace was not averted because she had to write again for pharaoh’s
help”.
I continued,
referring to Lisa Liel’s rejection of Velikovsky’s hopeful interpretation of
the name, Baalat
Neše (“What’s
In A Name?”:
“Liel, in the process of linguistically unravelling the Sumerian name of
this female correspondent, points to what she sees as being inaccuracies in
Velikovsky’s own identification of her: ….
NIN.UR.MAH.MESH
This lady’s name is generally transcribed as “Baalat Nese”, which means
“Lady of Lions”. Velikovsky either saw a transcription where the diacritical
mark above the “s” which indicates that it is pronounced “h” was omitted, or
didn’t know what the mark meant.
[Since this character doesn’t show up well in HTML, I’ve used a regular
“s”. The consonant is actually rendered as an “s” with an upside-down caret
above it, like a small letter “v”.] [Liel’s comment]
He also took the “e” at the end of the word as a silent “e”, the way it
often is in English. Having done all this, he concluded that the second word
was not “nese,” but “nes,” the Hebrew word for miracle. He then drew a
connection with the Shunnamite woman in the book of Kings who had a miracle
done for her.
Liel’s own
explanation of the name was partly this:
Flights of fancy aside, the name has in truth been a subject of debate, so
much so that many books nowadays tend to leave it as an unnormalized
Sumerogram. The NIN is no problem. It means “Lady,” the feminine equivalent of
“Lord.” Nor is the MESH difficult at all; it is the plural suffix …. What is
UR.MAH? One attested meaning is “lion.” This is the source of the “Lady of
Lions” reading. ….
Whilst Liel would
go on to suggest an identification of (NIN.UR.MAH.MESH) Baalat
Neše with
“the usurper [Queen] Athaliah”, my own preference then in this thesis was for
Queen Jezebel. Thus I wrote:
“In a revised context Baalat
Neše, the ‘Mistress of Lions’, or ‘Lady of Lions’, would most
likely be, I suggest, Jezebel, the wife of king Ahab. Jezebel, too, was wont to
write official letters – in the name of her husband, sealing these with his
seal (1 Kings 21:8). And would it not be most appropriate for the ‘Mistress of
Lions’ (Baalat Neše)
to have been married to the ‘Lion Man’ (Lab’ayu)?
Baalat (Baalath, the goddess
of Byblos) is just the feminine form of Baal.
Hence, Baalat
Neše may possibly be the EA rendering of the name, Jezebel, with the
theophoric inverted: thus, Neše-Baal(at).
Her concern for Aijalon, near Jerusalem, would not be out of place
since Lab’ayu himself
had also expressed concern for that town”.
If this
identification of EA’s Baalat
Neše, or Neše-Baal(at), as the biblical Jezebel, holds good, then
it can be for us a very solid biblico-historical anchor.
What is the meaning of the mysterious
name, Jezebel?
“The etymology and meaning of the name Jezebel is unclear”.
Abarim Publications
The rather unique
name, Jezebel, is borne probably by
only two women in the Bible:
- Jezebel became such a symbol of evil that John the Revelator refers to her in Revelation 2:20 (spelled Ιεζαβηλ, Iezabel), or so it seems”.
In the Hebrew, this name is represented as (’î-ze-ḇel) אִיזֶבֶל
But, upon her
death, her name (in 2 Kings 9:37) is slightly altered to read (’î-zā-ḇel) אִיזָבֶל
There
is, as James A. Montgomery [1866-1949] recognizes (International Critical
Commentary, p. 407), possibly a word-play between ‘dung’ (dōmen [II
Kings 9:37] and zebel (meaning also ‘dung’ as in the Arabic cognate)
in the Hebrew parody of an original element zebūl in the name of the
queen (Gray, I & II Kings: A Commentary, Second, Fully Revised Edition
(Old Testament Library), 551)
Given our
identification of Queen Jezebel with the only female El Amarna correspondent, Baalat Neše, then it is possible
that Jezebel is just a Hebrew transliteration of Baalat Neše, meaning “Mistress
of Lions”, or “Mistress of the Lionesses”.
Hence:
Neše-Baal [-at is the feminine ending];
Jeze-bel
A different version of the
name:
Nadav Na’aman, though, in his article “The Shephelah according to the Amarna Letters”, has opted to render the name of the only
female El Amarna correspondent, not as Baalat Neše, but as
- albeit the same meaning - Bēlit-labi’at
(p. 282, n. 3):
The name of
the queen who sent EA 273–374 is written fNIN.UR.MAHmeš (“lady
of the lioness”; see Bauer 1920). Formerly, on the basis of two Ugaritic texts,
I suggested rendering the name as Bēlit-nešēti (Na’aman 1979: 680 n. 32). However, recent collations of the two
Ugaritic texts have shown that the reading nešēti/nṭt was mistaken (see Singer 1999:
697–98). Thus, there is no evidence for rendering the ideographic writing
UR.MAHmeš as nešēti. As an alternative reading I suggest
rendering it labi’at (“lioness”).
The name ‘bdlb’t appears on arrowheads discovered
at el-Ḫaḍr (near Bethlehem) and in Ugaritic texts (‘bdlbit).
Labi’at (“lioness”) was probably an epithet of the goddess ‘Ashtartu (see Milik
and Cross 1954: 6–9; Gröndahl 1967: 154; Donner and Röllig 1968: 29). See also
the toponyms Lebaoth/Beth-Lebaoth mentioned in Josh 15:32; 19:6. In light of the
textual evidence I suggest rendering fNIN.UR.MAHmeš as Bēlit-labi’at.
[End
of quote]
On the strength of my connection of Neše-Baal and Jeze-bel, I would be
inclined to stick with the Baalat-Neše rendering of the female El Amarna
correspondent.
Seal of Bible’s Queen Jezebel
“Korpel said that owning her own seal confirms the biblical image of
Queen Jezebel,
wife of King Ahab, as a woman of influence”.
Catherine Hornby
The
inscription and symbols on the seal make it highly likely that it was the
official seal of the wicked woman of the Old Testament. She was a woman of
power as indicated by her title “Queen Mother” (2 Kgs 10:13). Although Jezebel
had her own seal to authenticate official correspondence, when she forged the
letters to the elders and nobles of Jezreel in order do away with Naboth and
seize his vineyard, she used Ahab’s seal rather than her own for maximum
authority (1 Kgs 21:8). ….
[End
of quote]
The Seal of Jezebel
Haaretz reports (via Mirabilis):
For some 40 years, one of the flashiest opal signets on display at the Israel Museum had remained without accurate historical context. … Dutch researcher Marjo Korpel identified article IDAM 65-321 as the official seal of Queen Jezebel, one of the bible's most powerful and reviled women.
Israeli archaeologists had suspected Jezebel was the owner ever since the seal was first documented in 1964. "Did it belong to Ahab's Phoenician wife?" wrote the late pioneering archaeologist Nahman Avigad of the seal, which he obtained through the antiquities market. "Though fit for a queen, coming from the right period and bearing a rare name documented nowhere other than in the Hebrew Bible, we can never know for sure." . . .
In her paper, scheduled [this was written in 2007] to appear in the highly-respected Biblical Archaeology Review, Korpel lists observations pertaining to the seal's symbolism, unusual size, shape and time period. By way of elimination, she shows Jezebel as the only plausible owner. https://scribalterror.blogs.com/scribal_terror/2007/10/the-seal-of-jez.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-jezebel/dutch-scholar-traces-ancient-seal-to-bibles-jezebel-idUSL2317518720071023
Dutch scholar traces ancient seal to Bible's Jezebel
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch scholar has traced an
ancient royal seal back to the biblical figure Queen Jezebel, based on a study
of its engravings and symbols.
….
An ancient
letter seal, which was discovered in 1964, is displayed in this University of
Utrecht handout released October 23, 2007. A Dutch scholar has traced the
ancient royal seal back to the biblical figure Queen Jezebel, based on a study
of its engravings and symbols.
After close
scrutiny of the images on the seal, which dates from the 9th century BC,
Utrecht University Old Testament scholar Marjo Korpel concluded that it must
have belonged to Queen Jezebel, she told Reuters ….
“Because of
the symbolism on the seal, which has to do with royalty, and the date of the
seal, there is a great possibility that it is the real seal of Queen Jezebel,”
said Korpel.
“There is a
sphinx on the seal, which stands for royalty or king. But this sphinx has a
female crown, which I suppose has to do with a female owner.”
Other
symbols include two cobras and a falcon, which she said have also been
associated with royalty. The size and the image quality of the seal, located in
the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, also led Korpel to her conclusion.
“It’s twice
as big as normal seals and also the iconography is very nicely engraved,”
Korpel said.
Archaeologist
Nahman Avigad found the seal in Israel in 1964. Although it was assumed that it
belonged to Jezebel as it was engraved with the name “yzbl” in ancient Hebrew,
there was lingering uncertainty because some of the letters were missing.
By comparing
the seal with other similar relics, Korpel showed that its upper edge must have
included two missing letters that complete the spelling of Jezebel’s name.
Korpel said
that owning her own seal confirms the biblical image of Queen Jezebel, wife of
King Ahab, as a woman of influence.
“If she had
her own seal she was able to seal documents and so on. Egyptian queens also had
great influence because of their seals,” she said. “It might point to the fact
that she was a very intellectual woman.”
Jezebel’s
story is told in the Books of Kings. She is portrayed as a foreign idol
worshipper, who dominated her husband Ahab and ruled through her sons after his
death. She met her death when she was thrown from a window and eaten by dogs.
Seal of Jezebel has Egyptian Queen Tiy
characteristics
“Often [Queen Tiy(e)] is represented wearing the Isis/Hathor crown
or the crown with double uraei”.
Marjo C.A. Korpel
At: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/fit-for-a-queen-jezebels-royal-seal/ we read:
Fit for a Queen: Jezebel’s Royal Seal
Scholars Debate “Jezebel” Seal
Reviewed by Marjo C.A. Korpel • 05/01/2008
….
The
winged sphinx, winged sun disk and especially the falcon are well-known symbols
of royalty in Egypt. The female Isis/Hathor crown on the winged sphinx (symbol
for the king) suggests the owner to be female. The graceful Egypto-Phoenician
style points to someone who apparently loved this type of art, a circumstance
tallying with the fact that Jezebel was a Phoenician princess (1 Kings 16:31).
© The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
MIRROR IMAGE. Because most seals were pressed into wet pottery or into small blobs of clay used to secure scrolls— serving much like a signature— symbols and letters were often carved in reverse. When stamped into the clay, the seal images and inscription would appear correctly. This photo of the Jezebel seal and its impression, or bulla, show the seal in reverse and in proper stance.
MIRROR IMAGE. Because most seals were pressed into wet pottery or into small blobs of clay used to secure scrolls— serving much like a signature— symbols and letters were often carved in reverse. When stamped into the clay, the seal images and inscription would appear correctly. This photo of the Jezebel seal and its impression, or bulla, show the seal in reverse and in proper stance.
The
double uraeus (cobra) at the bottom is a typical symbol of queens with
prominent roles in religion and politics from the 18th Egyptian dynasty onward.
Especially the [Egyptian] queen Tiye seems to have functioned as a model for
later queens. Often she is represented wearing the Isis/Hathor crown or the
crown with double uraei. So, independent of the name of the owner, the
iconography definitely suggests a queen. Although other individuals used the
same symbols to indicate their closeness to the throne, no other seal uses them
all. ….
[End of quote]
That the biblical Queen Jezebel might have been influenced by the
prominent Queen Tiy of Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty is a far more reasonable proposition
in a revised historical context according to which these two queens were actual
contemporaries.
In conventional history, on the other hand, Queen Tiy of Egypt (c. 1350
BC) is separated from Queen Jezebel (c. 850 BC) by a full 500 years.
‘Lion Man’ had travelled north to acquire
a wife
“We know that Ahab’s influence, as an
Omride, did extend northwards,
and that he did enter into a marriage contract with Jezebel,
daughter of Ethbaal, ruler over the
Sidonians (1 Kings 16:31) …”.
According to the El Amarna-biblical connection that I
have proposed in my article:
King Ahab in
El Amarna
King Ahab is to be identified as El Amarna’s Lab’ayu, ruler of the region around
Shechem.
Now, it is interesting to learn that this Lab’ayu (“The Lion Man”) had gone
seeking for a wife in the northern coastal region which is approximately from
where King Ahab had acquired his famous wife, Jezebel.
I wrote on this briefly in my university thesis:
A Revised
History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its
Background
(Volume one, p. 90):
….
Campbell [Campbell, E. 1964, The
Chronology of the Amarna Letters, John Hopkins,
Baltimore] could not believe that so petty a king as he imagined Lab’ayu
to have been would have, as EA 32 indicates, ranged as far
northwards as Arzawa (not certainly located …), to get a foreign wife:231
To assume,
however, that Lab’ayu, who did wander as far afield as Megiddo and the
outskirts of his hill-country stronghold [sic], should go so far as to try to
make a marriage contract with the daughter of the king of a region fully 300
miles away, is at best a strain on one’s credibility. ...
Ahab though,
as we have seen, was by no means a petty king. We know that Ahab’s
influence, as
an Omride, did extend northwards,
and that he did enter into a marriage
contract with
Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal, ruler over the Sidonians (1 Kings 16:31) ….
Thus EA 32
might be giving some true indication of the extent of Ahab’s influence ….
Lab’ayu had, like King Ahab, two prominent
sons
“… the territory ruled by Lab’ayu and his sons, which bordered
on the territories of
Gezer in the west and Jerusalem in the
south, also including the Sharon coastal plain, reaching at least as far as the
Jezreel valley/Esdraelon in the north,
and stretching over the Transjordan to
adjoin Bashan, corresponds remarkably well
with the territories ruled by Ahab of
Israel and his sons”.
I wrote on this briefly in my university thesis:
A Revised
History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its
Background
(Volume one, pp. 90-92):
Lab’ayu’s
Sons
There are
several letters that refer to the “sons of Lab’ayu”, but also a small number
that, after Lab’ayu’s death, refer
specifically to “the two sons of Lab’ayu” (e.g. EA 250). It follows from my
reconstruction that these “two sons of Lab’ayu” were Ahab’s two princely sons,
Ahaziah and Jehoram; the former actually dying in the same year as his father.
Only one of
the sons though, Mut-Baal of Pi-hi-li
(= Pella, on the east bank of the Jordan), is specifically named.
He, my tentative choice for Ahab’s son, Ahaziah … was the author of EA 255
& 256.
Campbell,232
rightly sensing that “Mut-Ba‘lu’s role as prince of Pella could
conceivably coincide with Lab‘ayu’s role as prince of Shechem [sic]”, was more
inclined however to the view that “Mut-Ba‘lu would not be in a prominent enough
position to write his own diplomatic correspondence until after his father’s
death”.
But when one
realises that Lab’ayu was not a
petty ruler, but a powerful king of Israel - namely, Ahab, an Omride - then one
can also accept that his son, Mut-Baal/Ahaziah
could have
been powerful enough in his own right (as either co-rex or pro-rex) to have
been writing his own diplomatic letters.
That Ahaziah
of Israel might also have been called Mut-Baal is
interesting. Biblical scholars have sometimes pointed out, regarding the names
of Ahab’s sons, that whilst Jezebel was known to have been a fierce persecutor
of the Yahwists, Ahab must have been more loyal, having bestowed upon his sons
the non-pagan names of ‘Ahaziah’ and ‘Jehoram’. Along similar lines, Liel has
written …:
One reason for
the use of the generic Addu in place of the actual DN, especially
in
correspondence between nations worshipping different deities, might have been
to avoid the profanation of the divine name by those who did not have the same
reverence for it. This would be the case especially for the Israelites. Even
Israelites
such as Ahab, who introduced Baal worship, did not do so, in their estimation,
at the expense of YHVH, Whom they continued to revere. Ahab gave his children
(at least those mentioned in the Bible) names containing YHVH: Jehoram,
Ahaziah, Jehoash and Athaliah. He also showed great respect and deference to
the prophet Elijah.
The truth of
the matter is that Ahab called Elijah “my enemy” אֹיְבִ֑י
(1 Kings 21:20). And, if Elijah were also the prophet, Micaiah son
of Imlah, as I shall be suggesting later, then Ahab also said of him: ‘… I hate
him …’ (v. 8). Moreover, if, as I am claiming here, Ahaziah were in fact EA’s Mut-Baal
- a name that refers to the Phoenicio-Canaanite gods Mot
and Baal - then such arguments
in favour of Ahab’s supposed reverence for Yahwism might lose much of their
force. Given the tendency towards syncretism in religion, a combination of
Yahwism and Baalism (e.g. 1 Kings 18:21), we might even expect the
Syro-Palestinians to have at once a Yahwistic and a pagan name.
Scholars find
that Mut-Baal’s kingdom,
like that of his father, spread both east and west of the Jordan. They infer
from the letters that Lab’ayu had ruled a
large area in the Transjordan that was later to be the main substance of the
kingdom of Mut-Baal. In EA 255 Mut-Baal
writes to pharaoh to say he is to convey one of the latter’s
caravans to Hanigalbat (Mitanni);
he mentions that his father, Lab’ayu, was
in the custom of overseeing all the caravans that pharaoh sent there. Lab’ayu
could have done so only if he controlled those areas of
Transjordan through which the caravans were to pass. The area that came under
the rule of Mut-Baal affected
territories both east and west of the Jordan.
In EA 256 we
learn that the kingdom of Ashtaroth bordered on Mut-Baal’s
(to the N and E: Ashtaroth being the capital of biblical Bashan)
and that this neighbour was his ally.
That Mut-Baal
held sway west of the Jordan may also be deduced from EA 250,
whose author complains that the “two sons of Labayu” had written urging him to
make war on Gina in Jezreel (modern Jenin). The writer also records that the
messenger of Milkilu “does not move
from the sons of Labayu”, indicating to pharaoh an alliance between these
parties, which further suggests that Mut-Baal had
interests west of the Jordan.
It will be
seen from the above that the territory ruled by Lab’ayu
and his sons, which
bordered on
the territories of Gezer in the west and Jerusalem in the south, also including
the Sharon coastal plain, reaching at least as far as the Jezreel
valley/Esdraelon in the north, and stretching over the Transjordan to adjoin
Bashan, corresponds remarkably well with the territories ruled by Ahab of
Israel and his sons.
….
It should be
noted that kings and officials were expected to ‘inform’ even on members of
their own family. Lab’ayu himself had,
prior to this, actually informed on one of his
fathers-in-law.233
These scheming ‘vassal kings’ were continually changing
allegiance; at one moment being reckoned amongst the habiru
insurgents, then being attacked by these rebels - but, always,
protesting their loyalty to the crown. ….
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