Monday, January 30, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
Among the many references the document uses to make its point is the Amarna Correspondence, a series of diplomatic letters between Canaanite city-state kings and their Egyptian overlords during the 14th century B.C., which mention Jerusalem. The paper presents pictures of the cuneiform tablets uncovered in Egypt in the late 19th century to validate its argument.Along with archaeological discoveries, the Biblical record is also used as a source to establish original Arab presence in Jerusalem. The Bible, the paper says, shows that “the Arabs, Hamites, Canaanites, and Jebusites were the original inhabitants of the land of Palestine, including the area of Jerusalem.” Canaanites and Jebusites were there long before the Jews, even before Judaism was revealed.The 108-page document quotes passages from the Old Testament to establish that “Jerusalem was always an Arab city” and notes that, “the Palestinian Arabs of today are largely the direct descendants of the indigenous Canaanite Arabs who were there over 5,000 years ago. Modern-day Arab Muslim and Christian Palestinian families (such as the “Kanaan” tribe, direct descendants of the Canaanites) are the oldest inhabitants of the land.”
The bolded quote makes it sound like the Torah mentions the "Arabs" as one of the Canaanite nations along with the Hamites, Canaanites and Jebusites. And indeed that is what the paper by the Jordanian Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought says.
Obviously the Torah never mentions a nation called the "Arab" nation along with the nations that occupied the land of Canaan. The author made that up.
The paper's argument is contradictory and circular. It doesn't prove at all that Arabs were there - it merely asserts that Canaanites and Jebusites were Arabs, after saying that Arabs were separate from the Canaanites and Jebusites. Then it mentions how the Tanakh mentions that Canaan was inhabited by these nations as if that proves they are Arab.
It also brings as "proof" that "Jerusalem is mentioned by name in the Amarna Correspondence, a series of diplomatic letters between Canaanite city-state kings and their Egyptian overlords during the 14th century."
But no one disputes that the Torah says that it was the land of Canaan and that those nations lived there.. What the paper pretends to do, and fails, is find a connection between Jebusites and Arabs, or Canaanites and Arabs.
The word "Arab" is quite rare in the Hebrew scripture, and never refers to the residents of Canaan. A character named Geshem the Arabian is mentioned in Nehemiah; in Jeremiah 3:2 the word "Arab" is used as a synonym for "bandit."
The term was clearly known to the writers of the Hebrew scripture, and clearly none of them said that Canaan was an Arab land.
Clearly the authors of the paper knew this, and pretended that the Tanach said things it never says.
But why would we expect anything else?
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