Merneptah as The Pharaoh who destroyed Gezer

Once again I’m shifting my Revised Chronology views.

One argument against Shoshenq as Shishak we don't make enough is how Shoshenq was the first of his dynasty and so it makes the Pharaoh who destroyed Gezer and married a Princess of his Royal House to Solomon a Pharaoh of the dying and never really that militarily strong to begin with 21st Dynasty.  There simply is no archeological evidence for any 21st Dynasty Pharoah doing anything in Canaan especially not militarily, the last Pharaoh attested in the region until Shoshenq is Rameses VI of the 20th Dynasty.  And that Dynasty lasted over a century (in conventional chronology anyway) while 44-45 years separated Shishak's campaign agaisnt Rehoboam from the beginning of the reign of Solomon.

Another argument is how even in conventional chronology Shoshenq is actually too late. See the conventional dates for Shosenq are based on identifying him with Shishak and thus place him when mainstream Bible Scholars place the end of Solomon's reign.  When the 22nd Dynasty ended is pretty undisputed, we’re at the dawn of classical antiquity when all that goes down, plenty of solid verifiable synchronizations.  And proponents of various Revised Chronologies have pointed out that conventional chronologists are really stretching the dates for the 22nd dynasty even to have it start contemporary with those late mainstream dates for Solomon and Rehoboam.  It really should probably begin about the same time as the 23rd Dynasty, the Libyan dynasty of Upper Egypt, I think both were born of the same Libyan take over.

I’ve always placed Solomon decades sooner as a long time proponent of Bishop James Ussher for the Kingdom period, but how much I agree with Ussher has lessened over the years.  And now that I’ve advocated for an approach to the historical books of the Kingdom Period that allows me to consider their stated reign lengths may not even have to be accurate at face value, I’ve come to consider that Josephus’s dates for Solomon may be correct since he had access to now lost Temple records.

In Wars of The Jews Book 6 near the end of Chapter 4 he says that the destruction of The Temple in 70 AD was 1130 years 7 months and 15 days from when Solomon first laid its foundations, that gives us 1061 BC or 1062 BC depending on how the 7 months affects things.  In Antiquities of The Jews Josephus sought to correct mistakes he’d made in Wars, but in 20.10.2 he pretty much confirms that previous date for The Temple by saying it was 466 years 6 months and 10 days from the finishing of The Temple till it’s first destruction in 588-586 BC giving us 1054 or 1055 BC.  Back to Wars Josephus says it was 477 years and 6 months after King David that the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem happened.  Since David’s death was about 11 years before the full consecration of The Temple that lines up well with David dying and Solomon’s reign beginning in 1065 BC.  Solomon reigned for 40 years and Shishak’s raid was in the 5th year of Rehoboam according to 1 Kings 14:25 and 2nd Chronicles 12:5 giving us 1021 or 1020 BC.  But Shishak was already reigning in Egypt while Solomon was alive to harbor Jeroboam so was on the throne before 1025 BC.

So I’m proposing a revised chronology today that’s really a comparatively slight revision.

In Judges 1:29 the city of Gezer is among the cities the Israelites weren’t originally able to drive the Canaanites out of. Gezer was subdued by the Pharaoh whose daughter Solomon married in 1 Kings 9:15-17, he gave it to Solomon who then rebuilt it as an Israelite city.  Gezer is clearly still a Canaanite city in the Amarna period, so placing Amarna later then Solomon doesn't work.

That argument agaisnt Velikovsky's chronology has been stressed by David Rohl and supporters of his New Chronology, and my last posts on this blog that were actually about Revised Chronology were me supporting Rohl on at least the Amarna Period.  But that timeline for David and Saul combined with his viewing Rameses II during one of his earliest campaigns as Shishak would have to make the Pharaoh who took Gezer either Horemheb, Rameses I or Seti I.  But there are no surviving references to any of those three or Rameses II himself taking Gezer.

Instead in all of Egyptian History the most well known and celebrated destruction of Gezer by an Egyptian Ruler was Merneptah the son and successor of Rameses II on the Stele named after him.  But this Stele isn’t the only reference, we know from the Amada Temple that Merneptah destroyed Gezer himself, he’s not merely referring to someone else destroying the cities in the region as Velikovsky’s 19th Dynasty theory had to interpret it.  

However the Merneptah Stele is also known as the “Israel Stele'' because of a line commonly read as saying “Israel is laid waste and his seed is not”.  If Israel was actually Merneptah’s ally and at the height of her prosperity under Solomon then how does this make sense?  Well I believe that reading is wrong and agree with those who argue “Israel” should read “Jezreel” instead.

We are no longer dependent on this stele for archaeological verification that Israel even existed, and one thing those other references seem to show to me is that Israel was not a name the Israelites were called by outsiders, especially not a hostile one bragging about claiming to have destroyed them.  Like how the Japanese don't generally call themselves that.  I think often outsiders would have just called them the same names they called the Canaanites because they weren't interested in the region's ethnic make up changing.  Besides that Egyptian and Assyrian records more often then not used the names of capital cities or more localized regions, tribes and clans.

The only other inscription commonly read as being a foreign King using the name Israel is Shalmaneser’s reference to King Ahab, but that too has been alternatively interpreted as reading Jezreel, and since that city was Ahab's capital and he didn’t actually rule all of Israel, that definitely makes more sense.  Both these sources were not using Alphabet based written languages like Hebrew, Jezreel absolutely would be represented in characters that could easily be confused with how the same system would say Israel.

Now Jezreel in The Bible is the name of both a City and a Valley by the City, but I believe the City was pretty much founded by the House of Omri, perhaps Ahab himself, and that any reference chronologically before then is referring to the Valley.  And that agrees with the Merneptah Stele which doesn’t call Jezreel a city as it did Gezer and Ashkelon in the preceding lines.  Jezreel in this Stele could be referring to basically the same region that is the subject of 1 Kings 4:12, the cities linked to Jezreel there were also ones the Canaanites weren’t driven out of back in Judges 1:27.  

That said there could have been some actual Israelites allied with the Canaanites who Merneptah fought this campaign agaisnt, perhaps some northerners were still resistant to unifying under the House of David, the Sea Peoples I'm still working on my theory for.

Back in 1 Kings 9:15-17 the taking of Gezer by Pharaoh is to add context to Solomon doing construction projects there but also other places like Megiddo, a city in the above verse whose name is also applied to the valley of Jezreel.  I don’t think this Pharaoh destroyed any of those cities in a similar way, but the same campaign may have also weakened Canaanite presence in and around the Valley of Jezreel, the language could be of a specific obscure Canaanite clan tied to the valley.

Every daughter of a Pharaoh was given the title “King’s Daughter” which she kind of held for life.  So the “Daughter of Pharaoh” Solomon married may not actually be the Daughter of the Pharaoh at the time but of a previous one.  I mention this since Rameses II had a lot of spare daughters we know little about, this excess of royal daughters could be exactly why Merneptah was more willing to marry one off to a foreign King then the prior 18th Dynasty Pharaohs had been.  But given how old conventionalists feel Merneptah was when he became Pharaoh, a Granddaughter or even Great Granddaughter is also possible.

That leads me to discussing the mysterious figure of Irsu.  Hans Goedicke advocated a reading of the Papyrus Harris I where Irsu is not some usurper ruling Egypt but a “rebel” in the land of Canaan who the later 19th Dynasty had been in the opinion of this 20th Dynasty propagandist too soft on and that Twosret had even allied herself with, and then Setnakhte the first Pharaoh of the 20th Dynasty finally stopped tolerating this “rebellion”.

Twosret is now known not to have been married to any of her predecessors as Pharaoh, but she seems to have been married to someone, this too is a mystery.  The idea that she was a direct daughter of Merneptah has also been suggested.

Basically I’m kind of suggesting that Solomon was Irsu, and maybe Twosret was the daughter of Pharaoh he was married to but this papyrus chose to obscure that.  Irsu is an Egyptian designation that means “He who made himself” . I could see enemies of Solomon choosing to describe him that way.  Another way Irsu has been transliterated is Yarsu, that really makes me consider the possibility that in addition to what it means in Egyptian it’s also a play on the name of Jerusalem.  There is also no actual reference to Tworset dying at the end of her reign, she could have just left.

Timeline wise it still wouldn’t be Setnakhte who was Shishak but Rameses III, that’s who’s reigning 44 years after Merneptah no matter when in Merneptah’s reign you start counting.  Now as I’ve pointed out before that many miss, Shishak didn’t actually fight any battle with Rehoboam at all, Rehoboam following the advice of a Prophet willingly offered tribute.  The language making it sound like “everything” in The Temple was taken by Shishak is hyperbole, none of the major Temple Sacred Relics were taken, and I don’t expect Ramses III would have even considered the incident all that notable.

Rameses III also fought land battles in his wars with the Sea Peoples and that’s what probably brought him to the land of Israel.  The Tjekker are linked in the Story of Wenamun to Dor, another city Judges 1:27 tells us was Canaanite.  The Teresh I think could be Tarshish/Tarsus because they had close relations with both Tyre and Solomon.  I finally have a view on Egyptology that doesn’t have me rejecting the Peleset=Philistines identification, but conventionally it’s said they weren’t in the Gaza region till after Rameses III which is obviously not the case here.  And despite how we use the term these Egyptians texts don’t call the Tjekker or Peleset Sea Peoples.

Or I could step back a minute and consider that maybe Setnakhte can be Shishak, maybe with the theory that Twosret and Irsu were married in mind we can argue her Reign was longer, but she was also ruling it from afar in Jerusalem with envoys of Solomon acting on her behalf.  Basically Egypt and Israel temporarily unified in Royal matrimony Ferdinand and Isabel style?

It’s also plausible from the reading of the Papyrus that Irsu himself wasn’t still in charge when Seknakhte put down the “rebellion” and so his pacifying Rehoboam is The Bible’s account of that same event.

Once again I consider it futile to look for the name of Shishak among any names any Pharaohs actually used, it’s a Hebrew name with a Hebrew etymology and probably serves a similar function to Jeremiah calling Babylon Sheshach.  Both Kings and Chronicles are commonly believed to enter their final written down forms around Jeremiah’s time or later.  The same method by which Sheshach is B-B-L, Shishak would be B-B-D but I don’t actually think that’s the answer either.  My point is it’s some type of poetic nickname.  No one thinks Pharaoh is a personal name (except for the Mizriam isn't Kemet at all theory which I once flirted with but have abandoned), but the fact is it's largely because of The Bible that we use Pharaoh as a word for every Egyptian Monarch.  But when dealing with the texts of Kings and Chronicles, Pharaoh is in fact never used of Shishak, rather when we compare the references Shishak is being used in place of Pharaoh.  The problem with reading Pharaoh as an Egyptian synonym for King is that the word King is also used when Pharaoh is, it's Pharaoh King of Egypt and Shishak King of Egypt.  It might be that in this period Pharaoh is used of the 19th Dynasty while Shishak is used of the 20th.

There is almost certainly overlap between the reigns of Asa and Rameses III given how long they were.  Zerah The Cushite was probably a chieftain of one of the Cushite tribes of Arabia and so I don’t feel the need to look for him in Egyptian records at all. The reference to Asa having dealt with invasions by Cushites and Lubims is a long after the fact statement that I don’t think actually means those two attacks were the same, The Lubim incident is just not otherwise in Scripture.  The Lubim in Egyptian history were active and working with the Sea Peoples again in the time of Rameses III.

This theory has been suggested before by a Peter James, and one objection to Solomon as Irsu was that Irsu is called a Hurrian.  But in my Languages of The Table of Nations study I argued that the family of Abraham were Hurrian originally, and maybe even as late as the time of Solomon many still used a Hurrian Language alongside the Language of Canaan.

I've settled on viewing Rameses III as Shishak but I still think there was more then the conventional 30 years between Merneptah Year 5 and Rameses III's year 8 and that that involved a longer reign for Twosret.

A lot of people don't understand how complex the Biblical picture of the Judges period is which is why so many people have trouble buying that the Amarna Letters are any period after Joshua.  All the Authors of those letters are Pagan Canaanites and that's what I'd expect from The Biblical depiction.  The major players are all among cities Judges 1 and other passages tell us were still Canaanite at least till the time of David (unless they are arguably outside the range of what was allotted to Israel entirely) Gezer, Megiddo, Jerusalem, Sidon and her daughter Tyre.  And it could be more cities were Canaanite then just ones The Bible specified, Pella in the Trans-Jordan does not seem to be directly mentioned in Scripture at all, but most of the Roman era Decapolis cities were ones that had stayed Canaanite.

The Israelites entered Canaan as primarily a pastoral nomadic people, for all of the Judges Period a good percentage of them, maybe even the majority, probably didn't even live in cities but preferred the rural life.  But the major cities we know were Israelite cities during this period do not have Kings or Mayors who wrote letters to Pharaoh at Amarna.  Hebron, Lachish, Bethlehem, Kirathjearim and Bethgader in Judah, Gibea in Benjamin, Bethel and Hai, Jericho, Shiloh, Shechem and Tirzah in the House of Joseph's allotment. Japhia and the other Bethlehem in Zebulun, Kedesh-Naphtali and so on.  Some of these cities are mentioned in the letters, some Canaanite Kings claimed sovereignty over them, but Kings do love to claim to be King of more then what they actually were.

Labaya is the enigma, he's not really linked to a specific city the way the others are, he's been called the King of Shechem but that's actually a city he claims is in his domain and is not depicted as his capital at all.  David Rohl argues for him being Saul and other revised chronologies have tried almsot every major Northern Kingdom monarch.  But again Gezer shows that the post Solomon period can be ruled out for Amarna.  And I really don't see Saul writing these kinds of letters to Pharaoh, even during his darker final years.

This timeline most likely makes Labaya contemporary with Eli and the rise of Samuel. In which context Labaya as a leader of the Philistines oppressing Israel could work.  Though a more minimalist interpretation of the Judges time period could make Labaya an Ammonite oppressor which would better fit his son being in the Trans-Jordan.

But he could just be a King of one of the Judges 1 Canaanite cities who's Amarna era King isn't specifically known, probably one of the Jezreel Valley ones disputed between Issachar and Manasseh in Joshua 17:11 and Judges 1:27.  Taanach is seemingly missing from the Amarna records, and it's far enough south to be in the West Bank on a modern Map of Israel, since Labaya's fall was at the hands of nearby Gina/Jenin it fits well.  The name of Labaya however is believed to come from a word for Lion, and a famous Stele at Bethshean depicts a Lion and Lioness.  Another Semitic word for Lion is Gur often translated "whelp" as in a baby lion, and Gur is also a place name connected to Ibleam in 1 Kings 9:27.  Dor is also missing form the Amarna records, Labaya could have ruled an alliance of everyone in those verses but Megiddo.

Back to the Sea Peoples subject, the Peleset being the Philistines and Tjekker the Canaanites of Dor I haven't changed my mind on, but they and the Lukka(Lycians) are NOT actually called Sea Peoples in the original Egyptian inscriptions.  

Based on Genesis 10 I think the term Philistim/Philistines was originally a term for Mizraimite colonists in Canaan and/or their puppets, though they could also have some Libyans like the Meshwesh and Tehenu, I believe Casluhim equates to what the Greeks and Romans would later call Cyrenaica and that the Lubim are a contracted form of Lehabim.  Gaza has been described as Egypt's capital in the region during the New Kingdom.  The Peleset name doesn't show up in Egyptian records till Ramses III because that's when these colonists sought independence.  And so the Philistine oppressors of the eras of Jephthah, Samson, Eli, Samuel, Saul and David are really just the proxies of the 18th and early 19th Dynasty Egyptian Empire.  And/or in addition to all that the Philistines could also be one of the tribes that made up the Hyksos.

But I now know that in the Merneptah records it's confirmed that the Ekwesh, Teresh, Shekelesh and Sherden were all Circumcised peoples, so that most likely rules out the Teresh being the Tarshish of Japheth and thus Tarsus.  However 1st Chronicles mentioned a Tarshish of Benjamin, but with only one "sh" the Teresh could perhaps more likely be Tirzah a name linked to Western Manasseh.

The Danuans mentioned in the Amarna letters are all in letters about affairs in Lebanon, so that fits them being Dan after their migration recorded in Judges 18 to an area north of Apheca and expanding from there.  They hadn't taken over Gebel/Byblos yet but I think they will by the time of Solomon.  From there they colonized the "islands" that Rameses III associated his Denyen with.

The Sherden I once again think are the Sardite clan of Zebulun descended from Sered of Genesis 46:14 and Numbers 26:26, and perhaps also connected to the place named Sarid in Joshua 19:10-12.  The Shekelesh has been suggested  to be Issachar (Egyptian like Japanese uses often confuses the L and R sounds).  The Weshesh has been argued by some scholars to be Asher.  I feel like the name of Ekwesh could be explained as tied to Akko, they are the Asherites who felt Akko belonged to them and kept trying to take it.  The Weslesh and Ekwesh never appear together so them being different designations for the same people is plausible.

I kind of want to explain all the Circumcised Sea Peoples as clans of either Dan, Asher or Zebulun, they are the ones with Biblical passages hinting at them becoming "Sea Peoples", either in their Blessings in Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 33 or the Song of Deborah.  But Western Manasseh did have access to the coast, from how the allotments are usually mapped way more so then Zebulun.  Meanwhile Issachar is linked to Zebulun in those blessings.

So I've been looking into the Alashiya (a people often identified with Elishah of Genesis 10 and Ezekiel 27), and the old scholarly discussions on if they were on Cyprus or on the mainland in Syria or Cilicia, and I'm so annoyed that everyone felt it has to be either/or.  I think their capital was probably Enkomi which was close to where Salamis was in New Testament times, but I think they probably had colonies or at least trading ports on the mainland coasts, and my hunch is one was around where Antioch on the Orontes would later be founded.

I think references to "The Isles" in The Hebrew Bible and other ancient Semitic texts prior to Alexander The Great are chiefly to the Greek world, it contained a lot of Islands, the Peloponnese was sometimes called an island even though it's technically not.  I think to the ancient Near East who didn't know much about the world further west then that, the Greek world including Magna Grecia was probably thought of a being the Isles of the West.

In The Bible this phrase first appears in Genesis 10:5 where the portion of either Japheth as a whole or just Javan from verse 4 is called "The Isles of the Nations".  Next is Esther 10:1, since Ahasuerus is Xerxes that being a reference to his invading Greece fits.  Psalm 72:10 says "the Kings of Tarshish and of the isles", Isaiah 60:9 associates the term with Tarshish and Isaiah 66:19 again sociates them with Javan.  Jeremiah 2:10 refers to the Isles of Kittim, and then 25:22 refers to the Isles that Tyre and Sidon trade with which Ezekiel 27 with repeatedly identify with Javan and his sons.

So likewise I think "The Isles" that are associated with the Denyen by Rameses III are the Greek world and thus they are the Danaoi/Danaans of Homer.  If they are also a colony of The Tribe of Dan I don't think that means Dan made any significant permanent impact on the Hellene Gene Pool.  The Danaans/Acheans/Argrives of Homer chiefly ruled the Peloponnese, their kingdoms were later taken over by the Indo-European Dorians.  The "Acheans" of Classical Antiquity are just Dorians who appropriated that name.  The Dorians never fully subjugated Arcadia, but I don't think the Danaans did either.