Bible Review

The Amarna Tablets—found in Tell-el Amarna in Egypt—are written in cuneiform, in the Akkadian lingua franca of diplomatic correspondence in the 14th century B.C.E. between Egypt and Egyptian vassals of Syria-Palestine, as well as between the great powers: Egypt, the Hittite kingdom, Mitanni and Mesopotamia.

The earliest inscriptions with hard dates (late 16th century) are those published by Joe D. Seger, “The Gezer Jars Signs: New Evidence of the Earliest Alphabet,” in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth [David Noel Freedman Festschrift], ed. C.L. Myers and M.O’Connor (Winona Lake, IN: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1983), pp. 477–495.

William F. Albright, “The Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from Sinai and Their Decipherment,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR) 110 (1948), pp. 6–22; and Itzhak Beit-Arieh, “Serabit el-Khadim: New Metallurgical and Chronological Aspects,” Levant 17 (1985), pp. 89–116.

Flinders Petrie was the most famous of the founders of Palestinian archaeology. He also dug in Egypt and Sinai.

Sir Alan Gardiner in his famous paper of 1915, “The Egyptian Origin of the Alphabet,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 3 (1916), pp. 1–16, attributed the inscriptions to the XIIth Egyptian Dynasty, which came to an end in the early 18th century B.C.E.

The Egyptians attributed the XVth and XVIth Dynasties to the Hyksos. “Hyksos” is a rendering of an Egyptian term for “foreign ruler.” They ruled in the 18th and in the first half of the 17th centuries B.C.E.

Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, rev. and ed. by Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, Matthew Black et al. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1979).

Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, Anchor Bible Series, vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 704–742 (reviewed in Bible Books, BR 08:04).

See William W. Hallo, “The Origins of the Sacrificial Cult: New Evidence from Mesopotamia and Israel,” in Ancient Israelite Religion: Frank Moore Cross Festschrift, ed. P.D. Miller et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), pp. 3–13.

Though this is not part of the church’s “official” theology, some Christians tie the “sinlessness” of Jesus to the virgin birth—if he was not born of a virgin, how could he be without sin? For me, such an argument takes original sin, sinlessness and virgin birth too literally, as if we are dealing with biology.