4 June 2017 Navigate to English index: index-topical-hb.
We find ourselves around the year 2668 Anno Mundi in biblical terms, or about 1444 BC.[1] It’s a fictional narrative we find ourselves in, but that’s its setting. Moses is about to send spies into Canaan in preparation for conquest.
They went up into the Negev, and came to Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of the Anak, were. Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.
Here we find a tantalizing bit of free-floating etymological information. The text implies that Hebron must have been built at some point prior to our story. Elsewhere, the Bible mentions Hebron in a story set about 650 years earlier.[2] On the other hand, this is the first mention of Zoan. The Bible provides no chronological anchors for this.
George Gray’s commentary on Numbers (1903) says that Zoan is Tanis, which was founded “before 2000 B.C.” However, the Wikipedia page places the building of Tanis late in the 20th dynasty of Egypt, that is, a little before 1077.
Richard Losch likewise says Tanis was built in the eleventh century, and that Hebron centuries earlier, but was abandoned and resettled “sometime around 1100 B.C.E.” This would indeed make the biblical aside approximately correct — the two did get built close to one another in time, with Hebron built earlier. However, Losch also notes that Josephus placed the building of Tanis in the late third millennium BC, and expresses some doubt as to whether the biblical authors were aware of the real building date.[3] Not that, if the biblical author was aware of the real date, he couldn’t be Moses — he’s at least three hundred years too late. (Mosaic authorship has already been ruled out on other grounds, so the question isn’t important for establishing authorship.)
Nadav Na’aman of Tel Aviv University has kindly shared with the internet a paper he wrote, entitled, “‘Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt,’ (Numbers XIII 22)” which was published in Vetus Testamentum.
Na’aman argues that the term “build” here “refers to the rebuilding of these cities as capitals of their respective kingdoms, Israel and Egypt” (page 489). He places the “building” of Tanis as an Egyptian capital around the mid-eleventh century (1069-1043), and the “building” of Hebron at the beginning of the kingdom of David, a bit later. The synchronism doesn’t match quite right, so Na’aman sees this as an error of several decades by a writer a good deal after the events he describes.
For the full explanation, see the paper.