Archaeologica.org

A third mini-version of the Abraham story turns him into another "Noah." We know that a flood drove Abraham out of India. "...Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, Even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor; and they served other gods. And I took your father Abraham from the other side of the flood, and led him throughout all the land of Canaan." (Joshua 24:2-3

The quote about the flood was a jab at Arch

The original form of the name, Abram, is apparently the Assyrian Abu-ramu (Lofty father) The meaning given to Abraham in Genesis 17:5 is popular word play, and the real meaning is unknown.

there should be no real signifigance attached to its usage

Or, to Kitchen.

archaeologist wrote:he doesn't. he used to teach at the University of Liverpool but is retired now.

here is a link to some of his works which put him in a class all by himself and far superior to finkelstein or dever:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_n_2/1 ... 873&page=1

apologies to beagle, hoepfully i am not going to far afield from his original post.

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Isb ... malism.htm

1. Balaam. Kitchen has amassed numerous pieces of evidence to show the second millennium matrix of the patriarchal narratives, including the Book of Deuteronomy. Yet in the case of Balaam, and in the face of the evidence from the Tell Deir Alla text, Kitchen backs away from his own principles. This text clearly mentions "Balaam Son of Beor," the exact name of the central figure in Numbers 22-24. And the date of the Deir Alla text is, in Kitchen’s own estimation, "shortly before ca. 800" (p. 413). Based on his own arguments elsewhere throughout the book, Kitchen might be expected to date the Numbers narrative to a comparable period. But he does nothing of the sort, electing not to mention a composition date for the biblical story at all, and thus taking not a single step back from his ironclad assertion that the entire Pentateuch is datable to the second millennium.

2. Biblical Prophets. Kitchen is unshakable in his conviction that the literary works of the biblical prophets must be dated early and must be ascribed to those whose names they bear. His position is based in large part upon Egyptian prophetic texts that are datable archaeologically to a time immediate to the events about which they comment. So Kitchen will have none of the idea of a school [or "guild"] of prophets who may have been involved in an extended period of transmission of the sermons of great master prophets before some of their words were selected for a written corpus. But this ignores the clear evidence of the biblical text itself. Elisha clearly asks to be named "head" ["father"] of what can only be perceived as a widely established group called the "sons of the prophets," with representative membership at least in Gilgal, Bethel, and Jericho [see 2 Kings 2]. Isaiah specifically refers to his disciples or students [limmudim in 8.16], chapter fifty-two of the Book of Jeremiah is marked off as not from Jeremiah, and the entire Book of Amos describes the great prophet in the third person, in words obviously written by someone else after the fact [see Amos 1.1]. Such examples could be multiplied. Someone made the decision to include six sermons of Malachi in a book, just our present biblical six and no more, surely in testimony to the fact that these six were representative of his life work and teaching. Yet it is hardly conceivable that throughout his career these were Malachi’s only six utterances! In other words, what Kitchen is ignoring is the difference between an inscription carved in stone, and thereby locked in an unchanging version awaiting their modern rediscovery, and the words of biblical prophets that soon became the property of a community of like minded prophetic students who never locked them away, lost or buried them, but studied them, recopied them, handed them down to future generations. In other words, everything we have in the Bible of today, regardless of when its words were initially spoken or written, somehow wound its way through the centuries, to survive as times and circumstances changed. I believe an inter-generational professional guild offers the most "plausible" [dare I say "reliable!"] explanation of how this happened.

3. Exodus six. Here the ideology of Kitchen once again betrays him. In his view, the acknowledgement of more than one "source" for the Pentateuch would be a mortal sin. And this leads him to the most bizarre explanation of Exodus 6.3 yet. What appears in the text as a simple declarative statement in a series of similar statements, Kitchen proposes to have read as "a rhetorical negative that implies a positive" (p. 329). Of course, if translators wished to employ this principle at their pleasure, countless texts in the Bible could become the opposite of what they seem to mean. Only his prior commitment to oppose a hypothesis of "documents" pushes Kitchen to this explanation here in Exodus 6.3. Forget doublets throughout the Torah, which surely stand as warrants of authenticity from editors who were not afraid to transmit more than one perspective on the same incident. Forget differences in theological perspective. For Kitchen, even the plainest text of all must be altered, however necessary, to fit into an ideological scheme.

4. Kitchen’s view of Cyrus is also instructive. Because of his belief that the Book of Isaiah is a literary unit, he cannot allow reference to a sixth century Cyrus in the second half of a book [44.28 and 45.1] which he believes was written in the eighth century. No problem! Kitchen merely introduces a seventh century Persian Cyrus, and notes that "other Cyruses (or Kurashes) may have reigned there before 646" (p. 380). I doubt that I will be the only person to view this as special pleading, again in the face of the plain meaning of a biblical text.