Genesis 13:18 speaks of the Eloney Mamre (אלוני ממרא), the terebinth oaks of Mamre the Amorite, at Chevron (the "ch" is pronounced as in "loch"), where Av-Raham built an altar.
Genesis 23:2 and Judges 1:10 both state that Chevron was originally named Kiryat Arba (קרית ארבע), "the village of Arba"; the former also confirms that it was here that Sarai died; and that the oak grove lay close to the cave of Machpelah, where she was then buried. Thus we have a threefold picture: city, oak grove, temple-cave, and with them a fertility cult of considerable antiquity and multiple ownership.
Av-Raham purchased the cave from Ephron the Hittite, and the oak grove from Mamre the Amorite. Genesis 14:13 calls Mamre a man, but Genesis 18:1 gives it as the name of the place; it is of course entirely possible that both are correct, as residents of Washington D.C., for one example, can confirm.
Av-Raham purchased the cave from Ephron the Hittite, and the oak grove from Mamre the Amorite. Genesis 14:13 calls Mamre a man, but Genesis 18:1 gives it as the name of the place; it is of course entirely possible that both are correct, as residents of Washington D.C., for one example, can confirm.
Elon (אלון) means "oak tree" - though it can also mean (if we imagine it written as אל-ון; and quite probably this was the original intention) "the place where the god lives". Terebinths are a species of oak usually associated with oracular priestess cults (see Alon-Bachot). Oaks were chosen as holy trees primarily because of the great age to which they could live, but also because of their marvellous capacity for attracting lightning, their acorns which provided an obvious symbol of fertility, and because of their hallucinogenic mistletoe. Mamre may thus have been a god-name or a place-name, but probably he was not an ordinary man - perhaps a royal-priestly title or some cult-name left over from the age of the shamans.
The same is true of Ephron, who we know from Phoenician myths as Phoroneus, a Phoenician/Greek version of the "first Man", and quite likely the reason why Adam and Chavah (Eve) both came to be associated with Chevron. Mamre means "fatness" or "strength", which is what you hope for when you worship at the shrine of the high priestess of the sacred oak grove, heavily dosed on mistletoe like any good Druid. The cave of Machpelah (the name means "double" and refers to the fact that it is a cave with two natural sections) being where Sarai was buried, indicates a skull-cave where the dead or immolated priestess' remains were kept and used for oracles, as at Delphi. The altar that Av-Raham raised is thus the throne of his wife Sarai, who is really Asherah the mother-goddess.
According to Joshua 14:15 Arba was "the Great Man" (האדם הגדול) - an interesting term in the context - of the Anakim (ענקים), who were almost certainly one of the aboriginal Kena'ani (Canaanite) peoples. Can we then read Adam as originally Anakite, from whom the Edomites descended? (But we can also, elsewhere, read him as Hittite and Edomite – so most likely he was more ancient than any of these people, and was adopted again and again as the prototype human.)
Genesis 35:27 states that Chevron is also where Yitschak died and was buried, though this is probably apocryphal - his entire life was spent in and around Be'er Sheva, except for one brief visit, further west, to Gerar - an attempt to associate the Yitschak cult to the second city (he was already fully associated with Yeru-Shala'im, the first city, through the Akeda).
Genesis 37:14 has Emek Chevron (עמק חברון) - the valley of Chevron - from where Ya'akov sent Yoseph to Shechem, to take food to his brothers, the event that led to his being trafficked into slavery in Mitsrayim.
Exodus 6:18 names Chevron as a son of Kehat (Kohath)in the tribe of Levi (cf 1 Chronicles 5:28 and Numbers 3:27); one of his brothers was Amram, the father of Mosheh. As with all such genealogies, we are in the realm of retroactive validation.
1 Chronicles 2:42 says that Mareshah (מרשה), the son of Kalev (Caleb) ben Yephuneh, was the founder of Chevron (see my notes to ER in the page for CHIRAH); but this must be a late tradition, for the Edomites had no dominion over the shrine until the time of Yehoshua's conquest, and Kalev's claim to the city (Judges 1:20) was based on a promise made by Mosheh, and not on any familial connection (though neither Numbers 14:26 ff, nor Joshua 14:9, actually give him Chevron; they promise that he and Yehoshu'a will be the only two to go into the Promised Land, and that he will "inherit the land he walked on".
Genesis 35:27 states that Chevron is also where Yitschak died and was buried, though this is probably apocryphal - his entire life was spent in and around Be'er Sheva, except for one brief visit, further west, to Gerar - an attempt to associate the Yitschak cult to the second city (he was already fully associated with Yeru-Shala'im, the first city, through the Akeda).
Genesis 37:14 has Emek Chevron (עמק חברון) - the valley of Chevron - from where Ya'akov sent Yoseph to Shechem, to take food to his brothers, the event that led to his being trafficked into slavery in Mitsrayim.
Exodus 6:18 names Chevron as a son of Kehat (Kohath)in the tribe of Levi (cf 1 Chronicles 5:28 and Numbers 3:27); one of his brothers was Amram, the father of Mosheh. As with all such genealogies, we are in the realm of retroactive validation.
1 Chronicles 2:42 says that Mareshah (מרשה), the son of Kalev (Caleb) ben Yephuneh, was the founder of Chevron (see my notes to ER in the page for CHIRAH); but this must be a late tradition, for the Edomites had no dominion over the shrine until the time of Yehoshua's conquest, and Kalev's claim to the city (Judges 1:20) was based on a promise made by Mosheh, and not on any familial connection (though neither Numbers 14:26 ff, nor Joshua 14:9, actually give him Chevron; they promise that he and Yehoshu'a will be the only two to go into the Promised Land, and that he will "inherit the land he walked on".
Kalev ben Yephuneh was a Kenezite, which was an Edomite clan; both he and Arba the Anakite cannot therefore have founded it; but Kalev was given Chevron as his inheritance by Yehoshu'a, so it is logical that his tribe would have wanted to post a claim by "discovering" an ancient link, and none better than having one of your ancestors "found" it – founding myths of this sort occur throughout the Five Books, and are indeed one of the principal areas of scholarly discussion, precisely because there are so many and they all contradict each other: Beit-El the other obvious example.
And anyway, the Chronicles text is almost certainly referring to a different Kalev - Kalev ben Chetsron (1 Chronicles 2:18); see my notes to CHORIM for a fuller explanation.
Mareshah (מרשה) too is probably an error, in this case for Mar'eshah (מראשה), a fortified town in the territory of Yehudah referred to on numerous occasions in the Tanach, but of such vast insignificance that I am not wasting your time or mine with hyperlinks to them.
The Anakim were a race of giants roughly equivalent to the Titans – i.e. prehistoric creatures left over from the stone-age, mythological-aboriginal, or perhaps the megalithic tribes whose temples formed the basis of all the later local religious shrines. We can presume the ancientness of the shrine of Chevron, especially as we know that there were skull-oracles given there. So take it that Arba founded it. Arba means "four", and Kiryat a village. Village of the four what? or who? We are told of Av-Raham buying it as a family vault; but more than four Yisra-Eli patriarchs and matriarchs are said to be buried there, so it can't be them. Are the four ancients buried there and attributed to Av-Raham actually much older, being the real patriarchs upon whom the cult of the cave depended?
Legends, especially the mystical legends of Cabbalism (click here for one such; but please note that the editor of TheBibleNet disclaims all responsibility for anything you may read on anybody else's website), suggest that Eden was a Hittite/Edomite myth, that Eden was Chevron, and Chevron the gateway to the afterlife, thereby connecting Adam and Chavah (Eve) to the shrine. The point is: all Jewish legends eventually lead back to Chevron, because it became the capital before Yeru-Shala'im, because it is the ancestral burial-ground, and because, for many many centuries when Jews could not get meaningful access to Yeru-Shala'im, Chevron was still available, and so the Relics of the True Cross, so to speak, like the bent spine of Richard III, were dug up and reburied there.
1 Chronicles 2:43 says that Chevron ben Mareshah's sons were Korach (קרח), Tap'uach (תפוח), Rekem (רקם) and Shem'a (שמע). These are worth unraveling.
KORACH is given in Genesis 36:5 as a son of Esav, reinforcing the Edomite link and allowing us to read "son" as a later resident of the original shrine (can we then read Mareshah, from the root Rosh - ראש - as denoting the founding tribe, i.e. the Anakim?). The Korachites were later a Levitical group who served as temple choristers to King David, and to whom the writing of ten of the Psalms (42,44-49,84-85,87-88) are ascribed. Was this the original name, and the Esav link retrospective validation?
Legends, especially the mystical legends of Cabbalism (click here for one such; but please note that the editor of TheBibleNet disclaims all responsibility for anything you may read on anybody else's website), suggest that Eden was a Hittite/Edomite myth, that Eden was Chevron, and Chevron the gateway to the afterlife, thereby connecting Adam and Chavah (Eve) to the shrine. The point is: all Jewish legends eventually lead back to Chevron, because it became the capital before Yeru-Shala'im, because it is the ancestral burial-ground, and because, for many many centuries when Jews could not get meaningful access to Yeru-Shala'im, Chevron was still available, and so the Relics of the True Cross, so to speak, like the bent spine of Richard III, were dug up and reburied there.
1 Chronicles 2:43 says that Chevron ben Mareshah's sons were Korach (קרח), Tap'uach (תפוח), Rekem (רקם) and Shem'a (שמע). These are worth unraveling.
KORACH is given in Genesis 36:5 as a son of Esav, reinforcing the Edomite link and allowing us to read "son" as a later resident of the original shrine (can we then read Mareshah, from the root Rosh - ראש - as denoting the founding tribe, i.e. the Anakim?). The Korachites were later a Levitical group who served as temple choristers to King David, and to whom the writing of ten of the Psalms (42,44-49,84-85,87-88) are ascribed. Was this the original name, and the Esav link retrospective validation?
TAPU'ACH means "apple". Joshua 12:17 and 15:34 place it in Yehudah, and Joshua 16:8 on the border with Ephrayim and West Menasheh. The apple grove would have contained a lesser sort of shrine, perhaps a minor temple linked in some manner to the central shrine of Chevron, as churches in mediaeval England were to abbeys, but probably nothing more than a couple of small teraphim at the entrance, dedicated to Ba'al or Asherah as patron and guardian of the fruit trees, and to whom some apples would be sacrificed at harvest time to ensure fertility the following year. Do not then make the leap that suggests a connection with the Garden of Eden, just because later Christian mythology decided the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was an apple. It wasn't. It might have been a pomegranate in the Hittite original, which eventually became the Greek tale of Persephone and the Roman one of Proserpina, but if it was a fruit in the original Yisra-Eli version it would have been a fig, and even more probably a sycamore fig - but probably it wasn't a fruit of any kind; rather, an abstract idea, a metaphor for "the knowledge of good and evil" – the act of picking the fruit being the key to the story, and not the fruit itself.
How did it get to be an apple? Partly from the Greek myth of the Garden of the Hesperides, in which the fruit was indeed an apple. Partly from word-play with the Latin "malus", which means an "apple" though it sounds like the French word for "evil"; evil in English was previously Yfel, similar to the German Übel and Dutch Euvel, all three stemming, via "the common source", from a Hittite original, Huwapp-elo. Devil comes from the Greek diabolos (διάβολος) meaning "slanderer" or "accuser", a term not dissimilar from the concept of the Adversary found in Zoroastrianism, and ha-Satan's role in the Book of Job.
Rekem is "a flower garden". One such is mentioned in Joshua 18:27 as being in the tribe of Bin-Yamin, another belonging to the king of the Midyanites is recorded in Numbers 31:8 and Joshua 13:21. see also 1 Chronicles 2:43 and 7:16. The patron deity would again be Asherah.
Shem'a is more difficult, though yes, the spelling of the name is the same as the opening of Judaism's central credo (click here), so it is an interesting name for a son of Korach to have, given the Korachites role as prayer-leaders in Temple times. Joshua 15:26 makes it a town in southern Yehudah. A man of that name appears in 1 Chronicles 2:43, 5:8 and 8:13, as well as Nehemiah 8:4. But there is also a Shim'a (שמעא) who is named as a son of David in 1 Chronicles 3:5 - the Aleph ending may reflect the lateness of the Chronicles text in the history of the northern kingdom, with the influence of Aramaic already apparent; or it may simply be a spelling error, because 2 Samuel 5:14 and 1 Chronicles 14:4 call him Shamu'a (שמוע). Given that David was king at Chevron, we cannot ignore this oddity. Nor can we overlook the fact that the tribe of Shim'on (שמעון) takes its name from the same root, and it too is located on the southern border of Yehudah. Other characters of similar name include a son of Yishai (Jesse), David's father (1 Chronicles 2:13), another (the Shim'atayim, a family of scribes)in 1 Chronicles 2:55, and a Shama'ah (הַשְּׁמָעָה הַגִּבְעָתִי), or possibly Hashama'ah the Givati (Gibeathite), in 1 Chronicles 12:3, as well as a Shim'i (שִׁמְעִי) in Exodus 6:17, Numbers 3:18, 2 Samuel 16:5, 1 Kings 1:8, Esther 2:5; and Shema-Yah (שמעיה) the Prophet in 1 Kings 12:22, which may be the explanatory real root of some of the variations above. Why so many men of this name, and so many variants? Why the link to Chevron? If these two questions could be answered, we would likely have an explanation of the origin of the tribe of Shim'on, but I think that my statement about Shema-Yah is likely to prove the most fruitful route to follow if you wish to answer the question. You might like to take a look at Ti Burtzloff's "Book of Shemaiah the Prophet, and of Iddo the Seer" as well; I say "might" because I haven't read it and so can only inform you that it exists, with neither positive nor negative recommendation.
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Genealogy done, back to Chevron, and the link to David is confirmed in 2 Samuel 2, which tells how Chevron became David's royal city, and remained so until the capture of the seven hillside villages from which Yeru-Shala'im would be created seven years later (2 Samuel 5). David was anointed king in a sacred-marriage ceremony at Chevron with Michal, who was Sha'ul's daughter but also the priestess of Chevron; the marriage was necessary to assume the kingship since the right to rule in a matriarchal shrine was bestowed by the priestess. This would therefore have been a sacred kingship, and as such a priesthood, so it makes sense that he adopted the Levitical Korachites as his temple choir, and took them with him when he moved to Yeru-Shala'im. Had the shrine already been in Yisra-Eli hands, and David the legitimate heir, he would not have needed to make a marriage with Michal, so we can deduce that it was not Yisra-Eli under Sha'ul. The tale of his coronation, and the pilgrimage around the shrines that preceded it (1 Samuel 9), confirms Sha'ul as a worshipper of Egyptian Set. By marrying Michal and imposing on Chevron the new cult of YHVH (if indeed he did; that may well have come later and David, as several Psalms indicate, followed Yah; or probably both), David took over the shrine and added it to the newly-founded Yisra-Eli confederation. Therefore it is explained as being Kalevite, whence Edomite, because these are the strongest family connections (Kayin-Esav-Yishma-El et al). Being Kalevite it is of course still Yisra-Eli, while also not. But it further diminishes the Av-Rahamite claim.
What remains then is a complex picture of two major shrines and a number of subsidiary shrines, which changed hands repeatedly over several hundred years, and probably changed gods and goddess too in the process.
Chevron itself means "to bind" or "join together" and in the Hiphil form means "the making of an alliance"; the change of name to this from Kiryat Arba suggests the linking of two (or more) cults - the prehistoric, the Hittite, the Edomite, the Yisra-Eli?
Deuteronomy 18:11 uses Chever to mean an incantation or charm; cf notes to Chazo.
The personal name Chevron appears in Exodus 6:18; 1 Chronicles 5:28; Numbers 3:27 and 1 Chronicles 2:42. Chevron, like all names ending On, means "the place of". Is there then a Chever whose place it could be? The answer seems to be yes, for in Genesis 46:17 he appears as a son of Beri'ah (בריעה) in the tribe of Asher (cf also Numbers 26:45). Judges 4:1/24 tells the story of Chever the Kenite, and the Kenites were an Edomite tribe out of Kayin; 1 Chronicles 4:18 has Chever the father of Socho (שוכו) and 1 Chronicles 8:17 has a Chever who was the son of El-Paal (אלפעל) - probably an error for El-Ba'al (אל בעל). None of this is terribly helpful in itself, though it does confirm that the name was extant at this epoch.
Michal of Chevron, as noted above, was the priestess of David's title through marriage; her deity "created" Adam. Kalev ousted the Anakim (the Giants or Titans of the Bney Yisra-El) from Chevron in Yehoshu'a's time, to gain Machpelah, the sepulchre of Av-Raham, where he consulted Av-Raham's shade. Later texts add the burials of Sarah and Ya'akov and imply Yitschak; though Ya'akov was also said to be buried in Avel Mitsrayim. Yitschak was more likely buried at Be'er Lechi Ro'i = "the well of the antelope's jawbone", an oracular shrine (jawbone plus navel string) in the Negev desert connected with Hagar, and later with the sun-god Shimshon (Samson) - see Judges 15 and 16.
Some traditions hold that Adam was buried at Chevron, though Golgot-Yah (Golgotha – "the circle of stones of Yah") also claims to be his burial-place.
Sozomen of Gaza says that the Terebinth Fair at Chevron was celebrated with taboos on new clothes and sexuality, and with rites to wash and cleanse the holy images. It included the Tree of Lent, and abstinence, and as such is probably an early form of the rites of the Omer, which became Christian Lent: the period between first and second harvest, the period of the counting of the Omer in Judaism, between Pesach (Passover) and Shavu'ot.
Aner, Eshkol and Mamre were residential districts of Chevron. Genesis 35:27 gives Mamre as a section of Kiryat-Arba, which is Chevron. Numbers 13:22 gives Eshkol as a valley or wadi near Chevron. Aner is probably Ne'ir, a neighbouring hill.
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