Avi-Melech

אבימלך


The word Av (אב) = "father" was an epithet for the deity, as well as forming part of the royal title (cf Jupiter = Iou-pater = sky-father). Thus Av-Ram (אברם) and Av-Raham (אברהם) for Abraham, but also here Avi-Melech.

Melech (מלך) means king (from the root HALACH = "to go", but in the Hiph'il or Causative form, "to make someone go", and thus "a leader"), and its root is the same as Moloch; probably Avi-Melech meant "my father is Moloch" rather than "my father is king", a name that would describe perfectly the title of the High Priest, or of the tribal sheikh, though those two roles were generally combined.

Genesis 20:2 ff; 21:22 ff; 26:1 ff and Psalm 34:1 make it the name of a king of the Pelishtim (Philistines), which in the Genesis references is slightly odd, in that it contradicts the belief that the Pelishtim did not begin to attack Yisra-El's shores much before King Sha'ul's time; their arrival led to the tribe of Dan being forced to move away from the coastal plain to a new home at La'ish in the north-east of Yisra-El. But the tribe of Dan cannot have settled there until the time of the conquest by Yehoshu'a, thereby rendering impossible the presence of Pelishtim in Genesis or Exodus.

However, if Genesis and Exodus are correct, then the Pelishtim were clearly established in the region of Azah (Gaza) much sooner, and the departure of Dan would have to be a consequence of their failure to conquer their designated territory from the Pelishtim, rather than their being expelled by the new arrivals, and would support the alternate scholarly theory that the Danites came from the region of La'ish and attempted to colonise further to the south and west, rather than the other way around.

There is, however, yet a third possibility, which is that they were actually the same people, and that the movement of Dan was not an expulsion at all, but either a further stage of colonisation, or a conflict within the tribe that caused it to split. See my essay on "The Leprachauns of Palestine" for a fuller account, but the probability is that two different groups of Cretan refugees, both of them Dana'ans, clashed, and the weaker group moved away, becoming the tribe of Dan.

Avi-Melech's capital was at Gerar (Genesis 21:33), though this was the name of the kingdom as well as the capital, something in the city-state tradition of the later Greeks. It stood on the south-west border of Kena'an, between Azah and Be'er Sheva, possibly Wadi Sahr'ah, possibly Wadi Ghaza. Most evidence, Biblical and otherwise, suggests that the Pelishtim came from Kaphtor, which was Minoan Crete. Daedalus, the father of Icarus, also came from Kaphtor, where he built its famous labyrinth and was known as Kothar wa-Khasis ("Wise and Skilful"); elsewhere among the Greeks he was Hephaestus, among the Egyptians Ptah, and was known among various of the Beney Kena'an, including the Pelishtim, by the same name; or slightly varied, as Choshar va Chasis (כושר וחסיס‎), in the Yehudit.

The People of the Sea (also known as Phoenicians) were aboriginal Greeks, who bore such tribe-names as the Pulasati (whence the Yehudit Bene Pelesht and Beney Pelet, as well as the more commonly used Pelishtim, from which the English creates Philistine and later Palestine) and Purasati; elsewhere we can find Ekwesh, which is probably a variant on the Achaeans, in a dialect that suggests possible Chivite links.

The Pelishtim seem to have called themselves Puresatu or Pulesatu in their own language, which was Cretan Phoenician; the word meant "wanderers" or "foreigners", and they came from Crete after the fall of Knossos - so really they weren't of that tribe, but referring to themselves adjectivally - as post-Holocaust Jews were "displaced persons", and many people today are "economic migrants". This is ironic because the word Apiru, or Hapiru, or Habiru (all three variations can be found among the ancient texts) had exactly the same connotation, and is the source of the word "Hebrews". Ditto for the Anglo-Saxon word Wal-es, whence Welsh.

Homeric Greek accounts regard the aboriginal Greeks as having come from Kena'an (see "The Leprachauns of Palestine"), and called these people Dana'an, which is highly likely the tribe of Dan; making Dan a colony of the Dana'ans of Argos. They were worshippers of the Phoenician sun-god Moloch and the moon-goddess Danaë, whose shrine they established at Shechem (today's Nablus) under the name Dinah. Several "Hebrew" stories in the Bible, which are attributed to the tribe of Dan, have very strong links with the Greek myths and legends, especially the Shimshon (Samson) legends, which echo Herakles, and the David legends during his bandit years (1 Samuel 27 ff) and at Tsiklag (1 Samuel 29 ff), which echo Orpheus.

Both the Av-Raham/Sarah and Yitschak/Rivkah stories take place in Gerar, which may have been (debated, as above) a city of the Pelishtim. An identical story is told for both Av-Raham/Sarah (Genesis 20) and Yitschak/Rivkah (Genesis 26), of sister-pretense and royal marriage; the third version, of Av-Ram and Sarai, makes the Mitsri Pharaoh the king, which suggests an error of the scribes, or the repetition of some genuine marriage ritual, or simply the incapacity of the Redactor to leave out tales that were important to different tribes in their own version.

Was there then one Avi-Melech, or more than one? The meaning of the name is identical to the Persian Padishah, and Atalik of the Khans of Bhokra. "Our Father Our King" (Avinu Malkeynu) is a very ancient Yisra-Eli epithet for, and hymn to, YHVH, which echoes the name Avi-Melech, and may actually be a remnant of the liturgy of Moloch worship absorbed into the Yisra-Eli cult, when Yeru-Shala'im was established. 1 Samuel 21:11 suggests that Avi-Melech may also have been called Achish; or that Achish was the name of the Philistine King of Gat, and Avi-Melech his title. Achish is also mentioned in 1 Samuel 27:2 and 1 Kings 2:39.

Psalm 34's reference to him by name infers a non-Yisra-Eli origin for that song.

Judges 8:31 ff makes Avi-Melech a son of Gid'on (Gideon - גדעון) by his concubine in Shechem (we can deduce that the concubine was in fact Dinah - or at least one of her priestesses). His story is told in full in Judges 9; he also crops up in 2 Samuel 11:21 which has the story of the murder of Avi-Melech ben Yeruv-Eshet. 

But more significant is the statement in Judges 7:1 that Gid'on's real name was Yeruv-Va'al (ירבעל) - note the repetition of YERUV ("strife"), though the previous linked to Eshet, who is Egyptian Isis, where this links to Mesopotamian Ba'al. Gid'on (Gideon) was called to judgement while threshing wheat by the winepress under the oak in Ophrah (Judges 6:11), which belonged to Yo'ash the Avi-Ezrite. Every detail of this, names and places as well as actions, tells us we have a "pagan" Kena'ani tradition which the later redactors of the Tanach have attempted to rewrite as a Yisra-Eli legend.

1 Chronicles 18:16 has an Achi-Melech, meaning "brother-king", obviously a related term, pardon the pun.

See Ancestry of the Patriarch 1, Taurus Mountains 400,000 BCE for the link between Avi-Melech and Eurystheus, the king who set Herakles his twelve labours.

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