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.  

Dan West of Baalbek

 So I'd commented on Velikovsky's Dan as Baalbek theory before.  I no longer agree with that theory but have came up with one similar.

While Baalbek was a site with Temples going way back into the Bronze Age, the most impressive structures there now are Roman ones, chiefly The Temple to Jupiter built by Hadrian.  It seems like originally the far more important cult center was to the West, in the eastern part of the Byblos District of Modern Lebanon.

A site in that region called Afqa/Afka/Apheca/Afeka is one of the sites proposed to be the Aphik/Aphek allotted to Asher in Joshua 19:30 and Judges 1:31.  Marvin H. Pope of Yale University proposed that somewhere in this area was the ancient home of El referred to in the Ugarit texts.  In Greek Mythology this same region is associated with the myth of Adonis/Adonais who's name comes from the Biblical Hebrew Adoni/Adonai which is not otherwise known to have been used by Canaanites who preferred Baal as their word for calling a god Lord.  So I really do think this is evidence this cult was a Paganized worship of of the God of Abraham.

Both those references to Asher's Aphik mentioned a Rehob nearby.  If this is the same Rehob that is identified with the "Entering in of Hamath" in Numbers 13:21 as well as the Bethrehob of Laish in Judges 18, then that is the city of Northern Dan.  Judges 1:31 lists these cites as among those Asher didn't drive the Canaanites out of, so that's consistent with them still being Canaanite when Dan arrives later.  

My current theory reads that verse as making them the northern most of those cities and Accho/Acco the Sothern Most.  Accho is the city called Ptolemais in Greco-Roman times and thus in The New Testament, Acre by the Crusaders and is now known as Akka in modern Israel.  It would be the only of the Judges 1:31 cities that is today in Israel rather then Lebanon.  And Asher unlike the tribes in the surrounding verses didn't even make these Canaanite cities Tributaries, they remained fully independent.  

So Rehob/Laish/Dan is probably Yanouh (the nearby temples at Qaalat Faqra and Yammoune are also interesting).

For Naphtali the main cities they didn't drive the Canaanites out of, but that they did make Tributaries, were Beth-Anath and Bethshemesh according to Judges 1:33.  These Tributaries I think were still practicing their Native Baal Worship however.  Two of the sites proposed for Beth-Anath are in South Eastern Lebanon close to the proper Naphtalite territory.  

More then one city is called Beth-Shemesh in the Hebrew Bible since naturally there were many Houses of Sun Worship.  The one west of Jerusalem was no longer in use by Hellenistic times.  The Bethshemesh in the Land of Egypt mentioned in Jeremiah 43:13 we know was called Heliopolis by the Greeks.  Baalbek was also called Heliopolis by the Greeks.

Baalbek and Afqa are close to being on the same Latitude, along with the port city of Byblos.  In 1 Kings 5:18 what the KJV weirdly translated "Stonequarers" is actually Gibilites or people of Gebel/Byblos.  Since a Maternal Danite was the architect of The Temple I consider this evidence Gebel was Dan's port city.

The Byblos District is among the regions of Lebanon where today the majority of the population is Maronite.  I have a theory that the Maronites are the modern descendants of the Danites.  They are significantly the Majority of Christians in Lebanon, and DNA studies have shown the Lebanese Christians to be among the groups even closer related to The Jews then the Arabs are.  Since the people classified as Arabs includes the Ishmaelites, Keturites, Edomites and probably now also descendants of Moab and Ammon, that would have to make The Maronites fellow descendants of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The Adonis connection also means this region's version of Astarte might be the version who became Aphrodite after entering Greece through the Southern Peloponnese.  The same region of Greece said to have been colonized by Danoi/Danaans.

The Three Kings skipped by Matthew

It is appropriate for this kind of Hebrew genealogy to skip generations, and Matthew outright admits he wants to make this three sets of 14 generations.

Timescale and comparison to Luke has me convinced Matthew is also skipping generations from the Captivity to Jesus.  And I think even the Hebrew Bible genealogies skip some generations from Nasshon to Boaz.

All that said why leave these three of all of them out is something worth enquiring about.

The usual explanation for Matthew 1:8 skipping right from Joram to Uzziah is that the three kings skipped (Ahaziah, Joash and Amaziah) were “bad” kings.  But they weren’t the worst kings, in fact Joash and Amaziah could be considered pretty okay.  Manasseh was way worse but Chronicles records his repentance, however Amon and Ahaz were also worse than those three and have no repentance recorded.  I’ve seen one suggestion that it has to do with them starting good but then “going bad” and not repenting, but that narrative describes Solomon more than anyone else, and can arguably apply to Uzziah and Josiah as well. 

I’m intrigued by the fact that all three are consecutive, it’s like an entire era of the Davidic Monarchy’s history is being skipped.

What’s also interesting is that the two names flanking this skip are both names for which the Hebrew Bible has a degree of chaos concerning what their name even is.  Uzziah is also called Azariah and Joram is also called Jehoram.  And in each case at least one of those names is shared by other individuals who lived at the same time they did.

I’ve been considering the possibility that the post Pentateuch Historical books of the Hebrew Bible should perhaps not be considered as authoritative or infallible as those books much more directly quoted as Scripture by Jesus or other New Testament writers.  They are not unambiguously quoted in the NT, New Testament references to the “Old Testament” are focused on the Law and the Prophets.  When Paul talks about “rightly dividing the word of truth” and about testing all things, maybe it’s okay to subject the historical books to the same historical criticism other historical texts are given.

Immanuel Velikovsky in the first volume of Ages in Chaos in the section on the Amarna letters deals with what he perceives to be contradictions in the text by suggesting that Jehoram King of Israel didn’t exist.  I however, even back when I wasn’t open to what I’m suggesting now figured a far more plausible theory would be to say it's the Jehoram of Judah who didn’t exist.  That perhaps both Kings and Chronicles in their final forms are Judean histories seeking to erase that there was a time when Judah was conquered by the House of Omri.

That perhaps 2 Kings 8:16 was originally saying the fifth year of Jerhoram of Israel’s reign in Israel was when he became King of Judah.  And 2 Kings 8:25 that in his twelfth year he made his son Ahaziah King of Judah similar to how the heir to the throne of England is the Prince of Wales.  And Jehoram was perhaps married to his sister which was acceptable in some ancient Near Eastern pagan monarchies.

And so when Jehosheba and her husband the Priest Jehoiada conspire against Athaliah to put a kid on the Throne, it’s their kid not a Nephew.  The Azariah who lived at the same time as King Uzziah was a “chief priest” in 2 Chronicles 14-20, a term that is distinct in Hebrew from “High Priest” but many treat it as the same.  

Maybe Uzziah was the first patrilineal descendant of Jehoshaphat to sit on the Throne of David since Jehoshaphat was alive and that is what Matthew 1:8 is actually telling us?

I've discovered people arguing that the "Aryans" descended from Ham.

[Update 2023: I regret this post, I don't even to even facetiously endorse any Nazi ideas.]

Chariots had been used in Egypt as far back as the Old Kingdom.

This is now known thanks to discoveries made in 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariotry_in_ancient_Egypt

In ancient Egyptian society chariotry stood as an independent unit in the King’s military force. Chariots are thought to have been first used as a weapon in Egypt by the Hyksos^[1] in the 16th century BC, though investigation of materials long held in the Tahrir Square Egyptian Museum has potentially revealed the presence of chariots as early as the Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC).^[2] The Egyptians developed their own design of the chariot.

3. Hyskos introduced chariots to ancient Egypt Archived 2010-06-29 at the Wayback Machine
4. 
   
Nevine El-Aref, “Old Kingdom leather fragments reveal how ancient Egyptians built their chariots”, English Ahra, Monday 22 Apr 2013, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/9/40/69897/Heritage/Ancient-Egypt/Old%20Kingdom-leather-fragments-reveal-how-ancient-E.aspx

Much past discussion of when in Egyptian History certain Biblical events could have happened were based on the long held assumption that there were no Chariots in Egypt till the Hyksos period.  But we now know otherwise.  I wish I'd known about this sooner, being made in 2013 it predates my starting this Blog, I could have opened with it.

I'm still reevaluating just how much of my past Revised Chronology speculations I still agree with.  But for now this is an enlightening discovery either way.

What does Greek even mean?

First I want to remind people that when I discus the Table of Nations I don't expect direct easy correlations between Noah's sons and modern "racial" classifications or DNA Haplogroups or ancient assumptions about the continents.  I think things were a lot more complicated then that.

In the KJV of the Hebrew Bible any time you see Greece or Greek or Grecia or Grecian it's a reference to Javan son of Japheth, his descendants and where they settled. Which scholars of the ancient Bronze/Iron Age and early classical antiquity know refereed to the Ionians and Ionia.

However in the New Testament those words are translations of references to the Hellenes.  The Hellenes as an ethnic term didn't always  include everyone we today mean by Greeks.  However the word was also associated with anyone who could speak the Hellenic language and is thus used of Hellenized Jews like the Seven Deacons in Acts 6.

The Ionians were Hellenes, but only one of a number of Hellenic tribes.  And of the mythical founder figures of the original four Hellenic tribes, Ion's parentage is questionable, which may be a mythical memory that the Ionians were not Hellenes originally but became absorbed into them.  And the same may be true later on of the tribes said to descend from Hellen's sisters' sons.

The ancient root of the words Greek and Greece is one of those nephews of Hellen, Greacus, but the Hellenes typically said to come from him were mainly those of Southern Italy and Sicily, Magna Graecia.  The Latins called all Hellenes Greeks after them and thus via the Vulgate that's why there are so many Greeks in our English Bibles.

Ionia was a part of Asia Minor/Turkey, south of Mysia and west of Phrygia, it included the cities of Miletus, Ephesus and Smyrna, and Islands like Samos.  The Ionians also colonized more Aegean islands and eventually came to the actual mainland of modern Greece and by the early Classical period a significant portion of the population of Athens/Attica were Ionians, maybe even the majority.  But the Athenians of legends set in the Heroic Age were not likely to have been Ionians.

Athens becoming the cultural capital of Greece during the Classical Period is the main basis for treating Ionian and Hellen as synonyms, but on purely genealogical grounds it doesn't work so well.  Alexander The Great can be called of Javan based on his culture, being educated by Aristotle made him in many ways more Athenian then Macedonian in his way of thinking.  But also Daniel 8:21 arguably describes Alexander as a King of Javan in a way that doesn't' necessarily make him Javanite himself.  Daniel 11 doesn't directly link Alexander to Javan at all but mentions Javan as where the Persian Wars started, the first conflict of which is known as the Ionian Revolt.

Now I do believe that the Grandsons of Noah had more children then just the ones named, the sons named are founders of offshoot nations.  Therefore I do think Ionian strictly speaking doesn't include the nations of Javan's four sons.  So does that justify expanding Javan's descendants to include all Hellens?  Well that's complicated, there is plenty of reason to think all their original locations were also either in modern Turkey or on islands not far from Turkish coast-lands.

Kittim is well known to refer to Cyprus, Kition, but perhaps not even all of it as Kition was one of ten ancient kingdoms of Cyprus.  Attempts to expand it to being synonymous with "Greece" start with desiring to see Isaiah 23 as about Alexander's siege of Tyre.  But Kittim is not actually identified as Tyre's enemy here but a place Tyrians would try to flee to, which can potentially apply equally to both Alexander's siege and Nebuchadnezzar's.  Daniel 11:30 is used to try and make Kittim into Rome because in the traditional view this is where Rome starts becoming a thorn in the side of Antiochus Epiphanes, but that encounter between Antiochus and Rome happened on Cyprus.  In my alternative view that this is about the reign of Ptolemy IV this may have to do with how Cyprus was under Ptolemaic control.  There was even a brief dynastic connection.

Elishah is the big factor in trying to make all Hellenes into Javanites, sometimes by arguing the name Hellen itself comes from Elishah which is pretty tortured, as well as Elysium and the Elysian fields which were underworld locations, and Josephus said the Eleans (people of Elis) came from Elishah.  However the Elishah of Javan is probably the Alashiya, another kingdom of ancient Cyprus, perhaps specifically the sites of Kalavasos and Alassa.  Elishah and Kittim are both mentioned together with Mizraim in Ezekiel 27:7-8, at the time Ezekiel was writing Egypt was also colonizing Cyprus, or in one theory I've considered had been exiled there.

The Dodanim is most likely supposed to be read Rodanim which I explained the textual reasons for on my Sola Scirptura blog.  It most likely refers to Rhodes, an island north-east of Crete and closer to Turkey then it is to Crete, south of Ionia.  KJV onlyists however will cling to Dodanim irrationally, which makes Dodona an attractive identification.  Dodona was an Oracle in Epirus even more ancient then Delphi, and also a city in Thessaly.  Aristotle said Dodona was the original homeland of the Hellenes, but history wasn't his area of expertise.  Attempts to say they were actually the Dardanians are also made, but there is no textual support for a d-r reading.

Tarshish is who's identification is the most mysterious.  I do not think possibly misunderstood Chronicles verses are good justification for placing Tarshish in the east rather then west.  Regions of ancient Spain like Tartessos I think were first settled by Phut, there has long been speculation that the Basques are related to the Berbers.  And if I were to theorize a Biblical origin for the name Tartessos itself, Tirzah is closer then Tarshish since there are reasons that letter for Z sometimes become a T.

I no longer support fanciful theories about Tarshish being Briton or India or Japan.  However of mainstream theories Tarsus is the most probable.

Tarshish is another example of my maybe coming to support a theory of Velikovsky I originally didn't think I would, which is making them the Minoans/Crete or more specifically Knossos.
https://www.varchive.org/nldag/tarshish.htm

However it could also simply be the Tarsus of Cilicia which was already known by that name in Assyrian Inscriptions.

In Greek Mythology a people called the Telchines were the earliest inhabitants of Rhodes, and also lived on Cyprus and Crete. So this term could be a name given to the offshoots of Javan.  And that makes them Pre-Hellenic not Hellens.

The Pre-Hellenic people of Greece were often called Pelasgians as a whole, yet Pelasgians are sometimes implied to be one specific group.  Some theories about the etymology of Pelasgian imply there wasn't originally an S before the G, which makes a connection to Peleg possible.

I also believe two Canaanite tribes were among the Pre-Helelnic Greeks.  The Arkite tribe were the Arcadians and the Sinite tribe the Sintians.

Thrace I think was the ancient nation of Tiras, but I think Thracians also traveled north and contributed to Scandinavia.

Where do I think the Hellens came from Biblically?  Well I think they may have been Israelites who lost their identity.  Partly from north western coastal tribes of the Northern Kingdom becoming sea traders and thus mingling with the Phoenicians as well as Ionians in cities like Miletus.  And partly from what Joel 3 says about children of Judah and Jerusalem being sold as slaves to Javanites by Tyre and Philista.  Which could include the wives and children of Jehoram of Judah some of whom were taken by the Philistines.

On my comparative mythology blog I shall in the future discus evidence for that from Greek mythology.  But one particular factor there, since the Joel verse gives good reason to see Benjamites as included, is that the Tarsus of Cilicia could come from the Tarshish of the Tribe of Benjamin in 1 Chronicles 7:10.  Paul was born in Tarsus of Cilicia and is well known to have been a Benjamite.

But for now I want to remind those trying to argue Paul only brought The Gospel to the "Lost Tribes" that specifically Ionian places are important in Acts.  Ephesus and Miletus in Ionia (likewise Ephesus and Smyrna in Revelation), Athens, Cyrpus, Rhodes and Crete were all visited by Paul.  And then of course Paul's hometown may itself be Tarshish.

Update October 2020:  I'm updating this in the context of my Language of The Table of Nations discussion on another blog.

The Linguistic unity of all the subtribes of Greece has caused me somewhat change what I argued above and still view all of them as ultimately of Javan.  First look at this Map from the Dorian Invasion Wikipedia page.

Elishah I believe was the Northwest Greeks and the Aeolians.

Further Update June 2021: There is plenty of reason to suspect the region of Ionia is where all the ancestors of the Hellens lived first.  Linguistically that Phrygian is considered closely related to Greece fits, and the Anatolian Languages might be as well, perhaps they are the branch of Javan represented by Tarshish.  Archeologists don't believe Hellenic speakers arrived on Western site of the Aegean till about 1600 BC.  Revised Chronology could bring that down another 4 or 5 centuries.

Homer is believed to have lived on an Island on Anatolia's side of the Aegean, and Hesiod is said to have been born there as well.  Ionia is also where Pre-Socratic Greek Philosophy started, the three Milesian Philosophers, Heraclitus of Ephesus, Xenophanes of Colophon, and Pythagoras was born in Samos.

The Richat Structure as Atlantis theory

Recently I learned of the Richat Structure theory via this video from the Bright Insight YouTube Channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDoM4BmoDQM
He believes a number of fringe things I don't support, like when he talks about Baalbek in other videos.
[[That video now has a follow up https://youtu.be/lyV8TUlV3Ds.]]

Here is a playlist of the full documentary on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzaG2Oyvx5GAFhqrPSo5CyrmBNL3Z1E3
It brings up the debunked Dogon/Sirius mystery stuff, but other then that seems like solid research.

Now I was aware of Atlantis possibly being in North-West Africa long before I heard of the Richat Structure.  So these advocates of the theory would benefit by mentioning how broadly Atlantis in this region theories were proposed before the Richat Structure was even discovered in 1965.

Like the theories of French geographer E. F. Berlioux first published in 1874, and expanded in 1883 in L'Atlas primitif et l'Atlantis, of the Saharian Sea, which located Atlantis in the Hoggar mountains of the Saharan Atlas.  A different part of North-West Africa, but still in the ballpark broadly.

That theory was among the influences on French novelist Pierre Benoit (1886-1962) when he wrote his novel L'Atlantide, first published in France in February 1919.  It was adapted to film multiple times before 1965, and influenced other fiction including some Italian Sword and Sandal films, the character of Queen Antinea was an important influence on the modern Femme Fatale archetype.
http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/atlantide.htm

These two different theories could be compatible, the Hoggar Mountains could have been home to one of the Colonies of Atlantis.

Herodotus refereed to Atlantians in North-West Africa in Book IV of his Histories, sections 184-185.  Diodorus Sicilus Library of History Book III Chapters 52-57&60-61 talks about people of North-West Africa (Libya to the Ancient Greeks was all of Saharan Africa west of Egypt and Cyrene, not just modern Libya) including people called Atlantians and the Libyan Amazons (and also claims the Gorgons were actually a Human Matriarchal Tribe of the region rather then Snake monsters).  The curious thing about Diodorus account though is it's the Amazons rather then Atlantians who's history resembles Plato's Atlantis.  Their capital city is on an island in a Marsh, they build a vast empire through conquest including making a connection with Aegytpos, but are stopped by Greeks, sometime after which their homeland is said to be submerged.  His account does equate ancient Atlantian Kings with the Titans and Olympian deities however.

The question for me as a Biblical Literalist is, how do we fit this into a Biblical View of history?

First, if Atlantis (or whatever it was originally called) was a Post-Flood Civilization, they were probably among the descendants of Phut who is traditionally associated with North-West Africa.  I believe Ezekiel 38 uses Phut as an idiom of the Far West, not unlike Greek Mythology associating Mount Atlas with the Far West.

But the idea that the Sinking of Atlantis is another memory of Noah's Flood should also be considered.

I've already explained why I think it's futile to assume the Euphrates of Genesis 2 must be where the Post-Flood Euphrates is.  That was in the context of arguing for Eden being Aden in Yemen, a theory I still lean towards, but in my search for truth I consider many theories.

The Garden of the Hesperides in Greek Mythology are often thought to be a corrupted Greek memory of the Garden of Eden, and it is traditionally placed near Mount Atlas as the Titan Atlas was sometimes the father of the Hesperides.  In Plato's account of Atlantis the innermost island included a Sacred Garden of Poseidon.  So could Atlantis also be a corrupt memory of Eden?

Maybe when Cain was exiled from Eden he was exiled from the Richat.  Or maybe only from the inner most Island and it was the city he or his son founded that became this great imperial capital.

I've also Biblically argued for The Flood being proceeded by a major war.

And maybe in light of some speculation on my Comparative Mythology Blog the Gorgons could be an all female tribe descended from Lilith.

What I've said above can apply to a Global Flood model, which remains over all my view of The Flood.

However I said when addressing the Racist associations of Old Earth Creationism that I could be open to a local flood interpretation of Genesis, it's an Old Earth model I'm completely against (though I am intrigued by Peter Hiett's The History of Time and the Genesis of you theory which is the only such compromise that doesn't separate the Genesis 1 and 2 Adams or in some way claim not all Human descend from Adam and Eve).

I've looked at some of Michael Heiser's material on the subject.  But here is the thing, if the purpose of a Local Flood model is to make The Bible fit more with what mainstream science assumes.  Then Adam and Eve have to be placed in Africa not the Near East.

I have also found some sites arguing that via correcting possible translation ambiguities Genesis 7 could have been describing a Tsunami, which fits with what is proposed to have happened to Atlantis in the Richat Structure theory.  So maybe it's possible Noah's Ark was built inside or near the Richat Structure, then a tidal wave took it out to the Ocean and it somehow wound up landing somewhere in the Near East.

What's important is all Homo-Sapiens descend from both Adam and Eve.  If there are some who don't descend from Noah, the mainstream interpretation of the Genetic evidence implies they would have been in Africa.  Now Racists could attempt to twist that kind of view to their means too, saying non Noahites are not as Chosen as the rest of us.  But Romans 5 and 1st Corinthians 15 promise Salvation to all descendants of Adam, and Romans 11 that all Ethnicities will be grafted into Israel.

I've talked about Y-Chromosomal Haplogroups on this Blog before.  Not all my conclusions there necessarily need to be abandoned under this hypothesis.  Here is a Tree of how mainstream scientists view the descent of Y-Chromosomal Haplogroups.

People who descend from A or B but not the rest are all indigenous to Africa.

The most attractive way to interpret that in this proposed Local Flood model would be BR is descent from Seth or Enos and CR is descent from Noah.  I would then guess that C is Japheth (Enlarge is a mis-translation in Genesis 9, something I intend to talk about elsewhere, C is attested among Greeks and Cypriots). DE is Ham as Haplogroup E dominates much of Africa including Egypt including some ancient Mummies), Sudan, Ethiopia and North-West Africa, and has presence in the Middle East and even the Far East. And lastly F is Shem from whom comes Abraham who's descendants were destined to be the most numerous.  People of Hamite Pater-lineal ancestry did get incorporated into Israel via the Mixed Multitude and The Torah specifically saying to welcome Mizraimites, so that's why there are both Ashkenazim, Shaphardi and other Jews who are in Y-Haplogroup E.  (Though I've also been considering a model that would switch Ham and Shem.)

In-spite of all that speculation, I still lean towards a Global Flood.  It's simply that if you want to convince me of a Local Flood model, this is the only viable one.