Historical Error in the Bible: Shishak's Alleged Campaign on Jerusalem
We read from the First Book of Kings, Chapter 14:25
And in the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up to Jerusalem,
26 and took away the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king's house, and took away all. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made .
27 So King Rehoboam made shields of bronze instead of them
, and he delivered them into the hand of the chief of the guard who kept the door of the king's house. 28 And it was so, when the king entered the house of the LORD, that the guard carried them, and they brought them back to the chamber of the guard.
I say: This campaign mentioned in verses 25-26 is not supported by historical evidence, and there is no such campaign as a historical fact, since the Egyptian records, especially those that recorded the campaign of Shishak I on the land of Canaan and mentioned a list of the cities he raided, did not mention that Jerusalem was among them .
We read what Dr. Israel Finkelstein says in his research The Last Labayu: King Saul and the Expansion of the First North Israeliite Territorial Entity, page 174
((The only reasonable location is Ras et-Tahune in el-Bireh (Kallai 1971), an Iron Age site located on a commanding hill overlooking the entire region (Finkelstein, Le-derman, and Bunimovitz 1997: 512–13). The three sites mentioned in the Shoshenq I list are located, therefore, in one restricted area of the highlands, to the north of Jerusalem important to point out that other parts of the highlands—Jerusalem, all of the Judean highlands, and (except for one possible place) northern Sa-maria—are missing from the list. ))
And we read from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
((According to the Bible, “Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem” (1 Kings 14:25–26) about 930 BCE in support of Jeroboam, the pretender who challenged the right of Solomon's son Rehoboam to succeed to the Israelite throne. Sheshonk's victories in Palestine were celebrated by reliefs and inscriptions at Karnak. Although the biblical account reported the looting of the palace and temple, the name Jerusalem did not survive in the Egyptian record. A fragment bearing Sheshonk's name was found at Megiddo. ))
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sheshonk-I
The response to the patchworkers’ patches:
They said that the reason for not mentioning Jerusalem in the list of Shishak I is one of two things:
1. Time played its role and the word Jerusalem was erased from the list of Shishak!
2. The name of Jerusalem was not mentioned in the list because of the tribute that Rehoboam gave to Shishak I!!!
We read what the Biblical Archeaology website says:
Why was Jerusalem not mentioned on the Bubastite Portal, and why does the passage in Kings mention Jerusalem but not Sheshonq's other campaigns in Judah? Some scholars believe that Jerusalem's toponym was erased by time. Others believe that Rehoboam's tribute to Sheshonq saved the city from destruction and therefore from the Bubastite Portal's lists. Still others suggest that Sheshonq claimed conquest that he did not enact (Egyptian Pharaohs made false claims about their conquests frequently) and copied the list of conquered territories from an old Pharaoh's conquest list. Finally, as Kings is a religious text, it focuses on Jerusalem without including full details on the military, history and politics of the surrounding region, though Chronicles tells a fuller account of the Egyptian invasion.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/...ack-jerusalem/
And I say: These two types of patchwork are worthless and Dr. Finkelstein responded to both of them:
1. There is no evidence of erosion in the places that mention the names of cities in the upper bank.
2. There are no other names of cities belonging to the Kingdom of Judah (later) .
3. It is unreasonable that Shishak I did not mention in his list his victory over Jerusalem, which was supposed to be the capital of Judah at that time!!
4. Why would Shishak accept taking the gifts (which are Solomon's shields and the treasures of the House of the Lord and the King's House) from his siege of Gibeon and not go to Jerusalem to take other gifts in return, which is the capital that is no more than 10 kilometers away from Gibeon????!!!!
5. Archaeological discoveries - according to Dr. Finkelstein's analysis of the Bronze Age remains - tend to make Jerusalem in the tenth century BC a small village and not a huge populated city, and that this remained the case until the ninth century BC, beginning with the family of King Omri .
We read what Dr. Finkelstein said from the same source, page 175:
((One may argue that the name Jerusalem had originally been included but was not preserved (Niemann 1997: 297).This is possible but not likely, be-cause rows II and V of the list, which mention places in the highlands to the north of Jerusalem, do not have many damaged toponyms. Moreover, no other Judahite town (in the highlands or in the Shephelah) appears on the list. Most scholars explain the absence of Judah by adapting the biblical story in 1 Kings 14 to the reality of the Shoshenq I list: Jerusalem was subdued but was saved from destruction by a heavy ransom—the temple treasures that were handed over to the pharaoh at Gibeon (for example, Herrmann 1964; Kitchen 1986: 447). This interpretation of the events is hardly acceptable. First, why would Shoshenq I receive the surrender tribute at Gibeon and not in the cap-ital of Judah, located only 10 km to the south? Second, had Shoshenq subdued the capital of a great United Monarchy, even without conquering it, he would certainly have included it in his list (Knauf 1991: 182 n. 60). Indeed, new analyzes of the archaeological data from Jerusalem have shown that the settlement of the 10th century bce was no more than a small, poor highland village without monumental construction (Finkelstein 2001; Ussish- kin 2003) Moreover, archaeological surveys have revealed that at that time the hill country of Judah to the south of Jerusalem was sparsely inhabited by a few relatively small settlements, with no larger, fortified towns (Over 1994). No less important, apparently the expansion of Judah to include the territories of the Shephelah and Beer-Sheba Valley did not take place before the 9th cen- tury bce (Finkelstein 2001). This means that the first signs of statehood in Judah appeared only in the 9th century BCE, probably in its later stage . At the time of the Shoshenq I campaign, Judah was a marginal, bilateral chief-dom in the southern highlands and was ruled from a small village. All of these details render the biblical description of the events “in the fifth year of Reho-boam” highly unlikely. First and foremost, the poor material culture of Judah in the 10th century leaves no room to imagine great wealth in the temple—certainly not wealth great enough to appease an Egyptian pharaoh. Indeed, at least some of the repeated references to the looting of the treasures of the temple in the Deuteronomistic History (Mullen 1992) should probably be seen as a theological construct rather than as historical references. ))
May God bless our master Muhammad, his family and his companions
26 and took away the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king's house, and took away all. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made .
27 So King Rehoboam made shields of bronze instead of them
, and he delivered them into the hand of the chief of the guard who kept the door of the king's house. 28 And it was so, when the king entered the house of the LORD, that the guard carried them, and they brought them back to the chamber of the guard.
I say: This campaign mentioned in verses 25-26 is not supported by historical evidence, and there is no such campaign as a historical fact, since the Egyptian records, especially those that recorded the campaign of Shishak I on the land of Canaan and mentioned a list of the cities he raided, did not mention that Jerusalem was among them .
We read what Dr. Israel Finkelstein says in his research The Last Labayu: King Saul and the Expansion of the First North Israeliite Territorial Entity, page 174
((The only reasonable location is Ras et-Tahune in el-Bireh (Kallai 1971), an Iron Age site located on a commanding hill overlooking the entire region (Finkelstein, Le-derman, and Bunimovitz 1997: 512–13). The three sites mentioned in the Shoshenq I list are located, therefore, in one restricted area of the highlands, to the north of Jerusalem important to point out that other parts of the highlands—Jerusalem, all of the Judean highlands, and (except for one possible place) northern Sa-maria—are missing from the list. ))
And we read from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
((According to the Bible, “Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem” (1 Kings 14:25–26) about 930 BCE in support of Jeroboam, the pretender who challenged the right of Solomon's son Rehoboam to succeed to the Israelite throne. Sheshonk's victories in Palestine were celebrated by reliefs and inscriptions at Karnak. Although the biblical account reported the looting of the palace and temple, the name Jerusalem did not survive in the Egyptian record. A fragment bearing Sheshonk's name was found at Megiddo. ))
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sheshonk-I
The response to the patchworkers’ patches:
They said that the reason for not mentioning Jerusalem in the list of Shishak I is one of two things:
1. Time played its role and the word Jerusalem was erased from the list of Shishak!
2. The name of Jerusalem was not mentioned in the list because of the tribute that Rehoboam gave to Shishak I!!!
We read what the Biblical Archeaology website says:
Why was Jerusalem not mentioned on the Bubastite Portal, and why does the passage in Kings mention Jerusalem but not Sheshonq's other campaigns in Judah? Some scholars believe that Jerusalem's toponym was erased by time. Others believe that Rehoboam's tribute to Sheshonq saved the city from destruction and therefore from the Bubastite Portal's lists. Still others suggest that Sheshonq claimed conquest that he did not enact (Egyptian Pharaohs made false claims about their conquests frequently) and copied the list of conquered territories from an old Pharaoh's conquest list. Finally, as Kings is a religious text, it focuses on Jerusalem without including full details on the military, history and politics of the surrounding region, though Chronicles tells a fuller account of the Egyptian invasion.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/...ack-jerusalem/
And I say: These two types of patchwork are worthless and Dr. Finkelstein responded to both of them:
1. There is no evidence of erosion in the places that mention the names of cities in the upper bank.
2. There are no other names of cities belonging to the Kingdom of Judah (later) .
3. It is unreasonable that Shishak I did not mention in his list his victory over Jerusalem, which was supposed to be the capital of Judah at that time!!
4. Why would Shishak accept taking the gifts (which are Solomon's shields and the treasures of the House of the Lord and the King's House) from his siege of Gibeon and not go to Jerusalem to take other gifts in return, which is the capital that is no more than 10 kilometers away from Gibeon????!!!!
5. Archaeological discoveries - according to Dr. Finkelstein's analysis of the Bronze Age remains - tend to make Jerusalem in the tenth century BC a small village and not a huge populated city, and that this remained the case until the ninth century BC, beginning with the family of King Omri .
We read what Dr. Finkelstein said from the same source, page 175:
((One may argue that the name Jerusalem had originally been included but was not preserved (Niemann 1997: 297).This is possible but not likely, be-cause rows II and V of the list, which mention places in the highlands to the north of Jerusalem, do not have many damaged toponyms. Moreover, no other Judahite town (in the highlands or in the Shephelah) appears on the list. Most scholars explain the absence of Judah by adapting the biblical story in 1 Kings 14 to the reality of the Shoshenq I list: Jerusalem was subdued but was saved from destruction by a heavy ransom—the temple treasures that were handed over to the pharaoh at Gibeon (for example, Herrmann 1964; Kitchen 1986: 447). This interpretation of the events is hardly acceptable. First, why would Shoshenq I receive the surrender tribute at Gibeon and not in the cap-ital of Judah, located only 10 km to the south? Second, had Shoshenq subdued the capital of a great United Monarchy, even without conquering it, he would certainly have included it in his list (Knauf 1991: 182 n. 60). Indeed, new analyzes of the archaeological data from Jerusalem have shown that the settlement of the 10th century bce was no more than a small, poor highland village without monumental construction (Finkelstein 2001; Ussish- kin 2003) Moreover, archaeological surveys have revealed that at that time the hill country of Judah to the south of Jerusalem was sparsely inhabited by a few relatively small settlements, with no larger, fortified towns (Over 1994). No less important, apparently the expansion of Judah to include the territories of the Shephelah and Beer-Sheba Valley did not take place before the 9th cen- tury bce (Finkelstein 2001). This means that the first signs of statehood in Judah appeared only in the 9th century BCE, probably in its later stage . At the time of the Shoshenq I campaign, Judah was a marginal, bilateral chief-dom in the southern highlands and was ruled from a small village. All of these details render the biblical description of the events “in the fifth year of Reho-boam” highly unlikely. First and foremost, the poor material culture of Judah in the 10th century leaves no room to imagine great wealth in the temple—certainly not wealth great enough to appease an Egyptian pharaoh. Indeed, at least some of the repeated references to the looting of the treasures of the temple in the Deuteronomistic History (Mullen 1992) should probably be seen as a theological construct rather than as historical references. ))
May God bless our master Muhammad, his family and his companions
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