Israelin the Merneptah Stela

Abstract

The name Israel in the Merneptah stela of ca. 1207 B. C. has entered a new phase of discussion and debate in recent reconstructions of the origin of ancient Israel. Some of the issues involved include the translation of the name Israel and the location and nature of the entity Israel. Attempts to resolve some of these concerns have included linguistic analyses of the designation Israel; structural analyses of the final hymnic-poetic unit; and some attempts to identify archaeological correlations with Merneptah's campaign in Palestine. This study assesses a number of linguistic analyses indicating that the Egyptian designation is properly translated as Israel. Our new structural analysis reveals that Israel is located within the region of Canaan and Hurru, designations that stand parallel to each other. Israel is an agricultural/sedentary socioethnic entity. The term "seed," Egyptian prt, based on contextual relations in other military texts, means "grain," supporting the identification of Israel as a largely agricultural, noncity-state entity.

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