xv: "As a newcomer to the field of Semitic and Biblical studies, I was guided in the initial stages of my research by two colleagues."
1: "I freely acknowledge that my discovery must remain theoretical until confirmed by archaeological investigation .... Of course, in breaking new ground it is likely that I have committed a number of errors, which hostile critics may seize upon in an effort to discredit my conclusions. I sincerely doubt, however, that such errors are likely to be of such magnitude or substance that they will alter my case."
3: "My argument rests almost entirely upon the assumption that the Hebrew Bible has been consistently mistranslated."
6: "I look forward to the day when archaeologists will excavate some of the sites I mention and hopefully provide further evidence that the true land of the Hebrew Bible is West Arabia, not Palestine."
7: "Nearly all the Biblical place-names I could think of were concentrated in an area approximately 600 kilometres long and 200 kilometres wide .... All the co-ordinates of the places involved, as described in the Hebrew Bible, were also traceable there — a fact of the first importance, as these co-ordinates have never really been identified in the countries hitherto believed to have been the lands of the Bible. Moreover, I could not find such a concentration of Biblical place-names, usually in their original Hebrew form, in any other part of the Near East."
9: "‘Jegar-sahadutha’ (Aramaic ygr shdwt’) ... ‘Galeed’ (Hebrew gl‘d) and ‘Mizpah’ (Hebrew h-msph) .... All three names are
still carried today by three little-known villages in the same
vicinity on the maritime slopes of Asir, in the region of Rijal
Alma‘ (Rigal Alma‘), west of Abha (Abha). Their names are:
Far‘at Al Shahda (’I shd’), meaning ‘god is the witness’ or ‘god
of the witness’, the Arabic pr‘t or pr‘h denoting a mound or
hill, equivalent in meaning to the Aramaic ygr; al-Ja‘d (’l-g‘d),
which is an Arabicised metathesis of gl‘d; and al-Madhaf (mdp; cf. msph)."
14: "The battle of Carchemish ... took place near Taif, in the southern Hijaz, where two neighbouring villages, Qarr (qr) and Qamashah (qms), still stand. Thus, I would maintain, the Biblical ‘Carchemish’ is certainly not the Hittite Kargamesa, now Jerablus, on the Euphrates, as is traditionally believed."
23: "In [Beersheba] whose name features prominently in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis, and whose origins must therefore go back at least to the late Bronze Age, archaeological excavation has revealed on the exact site materials dating from no earlier than the late Roman period."
26: "Ideally, the full text of the Hebrew Bible must be so analysed, but this involves work for more than one lifetime."
26: "The fact that the Hebrew Bible relates the history of the ancient Israelites in West Arabia does not mean that Judaism had no base in Palestine in Biblical times. It did .... There are clear Biblical hints regarding the growth of a strong Jewish community in Palestine, starting perhaps in the tenth century B.C. ... The reconstruction of the early Jewish history in Palestine is not possible from these texts, nor indeed from any other records so far available."
51: "Kraeling, p. 80 ...: In late Roman times there was a district Geraritike, evidently so named because it was composed primarily of the old Gerar territory."
53-54: "The site of the Biblical Gerar in Palestine has not yet been satisfactorily identified, and no place there continues to carry anything resembling this name."
54: "Msrym denotes any of several locations in West Arabia, including the village of Misramah ... or that of Masr."
55: "Strabo reports ... Gallus reached a place called the ‘Seven Wells’ .... Philby noted the existence of Shaba‘ah."
60: "There is no Gerar near Gaza, in Palestine. Among several which are found in Asir, however, one (al-Qararah) is the Gerar of Genesis 20 and 26 and 2 Chronicles 14, and another (any of four called Ghurar, al-Jarar, Ghirar or al-Qararah) is that of Genesis 10."
WP: "Tel Haror is generally accepted as the site of ancient Gerar. Nevertheless, some other places in the vicinity, between Gaza and Beersheba, have also been suggested."
63: "In the field of Biblical archaeology and its related discipline, palaeography, there is ample opportunity not only for error, but for perpetuating it almost indefinitely."
64: "It is wrong to draw historical conclusions on the basis of inconclusive archaeological evidence."
68-69: "The ‘Moabite Stone’ (the name itself is a misnomer) was set up in Qarhoh (qrhh) by Mesha, king of Moab (ms‘ mlk m’b) - so the inscription on it says .... The Qarhoh in question is apparently the present-day Jahra (ghr), in the area where the stone was found."
WP: "The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, .... was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868."
69: "Mesha describes himself in the inscription as not only king of Moab, but also as a dybny, i.e., as a native of dybn. Dibyan (dbyn) today is also a village in Wadi Adam, not far from Umm al-Yab. So far, readers of the ‘Moabite Stone’ have assumed that dybn is the present village of Dhiban (dbn), in Transjordan, north of where the stone was found. I would suggest, however, that this Dhiban was called after the old Dibyan of the Hijaz after Mesha and his followers arrived to settle there."
72: "The Amarna place-names only make a collective fit in
West Arabia. The interested reader may care to examine a table of thirty such names, identified one by one by location."
76: "By now, I hope the reader is willing to concede that there may be sufficient evidence to justify at least a reassessment of the hitherto universally held belief that the events described in the Hebrew Bible relate mainly to Palestine. My next task is to establish the Arabian setting of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, hoping to convince the reader further .... I intend ... to show how this Tihamah is actually the Tehom mentioned in more than thirty passages of the text of the Hebrew Bible."
WP: "Tihamah is the Red Sea coastal plain of the Arabian Peninsula from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Bab el Mandeb. Tihāmat is the Proto-Semitic language's term for 'sea'. Tiamat was the ancient Mesopotamian god of the sea and of chaos. The word appears in masculine form in the Hebrew Bible as təhōm (Genesis 1:2), meaning 'primordial ocean, abyss'."
76-77: "Hayam (hym) ... denotes porous, sandy soil unable to retain water, that is to say soil which remains ‘thirsty’ .... In Arabic, the name of the West Arabian coastal desert should have been Hayam. Its actual name, Tihamah, is a survival of the Biblical Tehom (thwm)."
77-78: "Tehom makes the best sense, wherever it occurs in the canonical Hebrew Bible, as the old Semitic name for the West Arabian coastlands which are called today Tihamah."
78: "The mistranslation here is that of the Revised Standard Version, hereafter RSV .... 1 He will bless you (ybrkk) with the blessings of heaven above (brkt smym m-'l), blessings of the deep that couches beneath (brkt thwm rbst tht), blessings of the breasts and the womb (brkt sdym w-rhm) (Genesis 49:25b). 2 Blessed by the Lord (or by Yahweh) be his land (mbrkt yhwh ’rsw), with the choicest gifts of heaven above (m-mgd smym m-‘l), and the deep that couches beneath (m-thwm rbst tht) (Deuteronomy 33:13b)."
79: "One finds that they actually involve not ‘blessings’, but definitions of the territory or territorial claim of this tribe: 1 He shall settle you (ybrkk) in the Rakkah of Samayin from above (b-rkt smym m-‘l), in the Rakkah of the Tihamah of Rabidah below (b-rkt thwm rbst tht), in the Rakkah of Thadyayn and Rahm (b-rkt sdym w-rhm). 2 From Barakah shall be his land (m-brkt yhwh ’rsw), from the Miqaddah of Samayin (m-mgd smym); from the ridge (m-tl); and from the Tihamah of Rabidah below (w-m-thwm rbst tht) .... I concede there could be a play on words in each of these two definitions of the territory of the Joseph tribe .... In the two passages just cited, the Hebrew ybrkk (see note 8) can mean both ‘he shall settle you’, and ‘he shall bless you’."
80: "Yet the fact remains that the two ‘blessings’ of the Joseph tribe, in Genesis and Deuteronomy, do cite place-names, and hence yield a sense that is concrete. Whatever figurative sense might have been intended by punning, it must be regarded as being of secondary importance, if any."
86: "The event is reported in the standard translations as follows: The waters coming down from above (m-l-m‘lh) stood and rose up in a heap far off (nd ’hd h-rhq m ’d) at Adam (’dm), the city that is beside Zarethan (srtn), and those flowing down toward the sea of the Arabah (‘l ym ‘rbh), the Salt Sea (ym h-mlh), were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Jericho (yryhw) (RSV)."
87: "Joshua 3:16 must be retranslated as follows: The waters coming down from al-Ma‘lah stood, they rose up in one dam extending from Wadd, at Adam, the city that is beside Raznah, and those flowing down west of Ghurabah, west o f al-Milhah, were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Rakhyah."
92: "Msrym ... is rarely used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to Egypt, as commonly assumed. Where it does not refer to Misramah near Abha (see Chapters 4 and 13), it refers to Masr, in Wadi Bishah, or to Madrum (mdrm), in the Ghamid highlands (see Chapter 14). The Biblical ‘Pharaoh’ (pr‘h), as will be suggested later, was not the ruler of Egypt, but a West Arabian god."
93: "Certainly, a ‘Pharaoh’ tribe, called the Far‘a (pr'), is still
to be found in Wadi Bishah today, carrying the name of the
ancient god or chiefs of the region."
95: "The Jordan (also h-yrdn) where Naaman of Aram ‘dipped himself seven times’ .... could only have been a stream or pool of water. In this case, the term yrdn derives from the same Semitic root yrd."
98: "In Arabic, whd yields the substantives wahd (whd) and wahdah (whdh, with the feminine suffix), meaning an ‘area of flat, low-lying land; ravine’, while the Biblical yhwdh, from yhd, must have been an ancient Semitic topographical term carrying more or less the same meaning."
100: "Pashhur (pshwr) ... is today clearly the oasis of al-Harshaf (hrsp), in Wadi Habuna, north of Wadi Najran."
108: "Altogether, of the 130 recognised place-names in the Ezra-Nehemiah lists, which I have correlated with those West Arabian villages cited above, the identification of only a few remains uncertain. What is perhaps even more important, however, is that no more than a handful of names have been identified with locations in Palestine (in Simons, only ten) .... The onomastic proof is so overwhelming that it seems hardly to warrant archaeological substantiation."
That's about halfway through so I'll leave it there for now as a quote list without significant analysis. You might guess my first impressions from my selections. However, my first note is that you're moving from an Egyptian apologist to an Arabian apologist (if you use too many sources partial to Islam you might get suspected of Islam; you're on the most skeptical site on the internet, doubt it). My second note is, as before, that Salibi is quite the literalist, upholding the existence of all the Biblical peoples, just putting them in Asir in Arabia; so it's hardly compatible to use him as evidence that Abraham and Moses didn't exist. It appears you've shifted the goalpost from your initial implication, "Did Abraham or Moses ever exist? perhaps they're all made up for the story", or from your rather contradictory acceptance of both positions, "Moses and the tribes (Israelites) were Arabs from Yemen .... [AI:] There is no proof of [Abraham and Moses] existence outside of the Bible." If your purpose is to debunk Judaism (and perhaps Christianity) by saying it was all Arabian, that doesn't debunk any miracle or claim other than geography, which is not relevant except for some Zionists. So I'm still unsure of your endgame. But still skimming the text.
The Bible Came From Arabia, Kamal Salibi, 1985, 1987 ed.
xv: "As a newcomer to the field of Semitic and Biblical studies, I was guided in the initial stages of my research by two colleagues."
1: "I freely acknowledge that my discovery must remain theoretical until confirmed by archaeological investigation .... Of course, in breaking new ground it is likely that I have committed a number of errors, which hostile critics may seize upon in an effort to discredit my conclusions. I sincerely doubt, however, that such errors are likely to be of such magnitude or substance that they will alter my case."
3: "My argument rests almost entirely upon the assumption that the Hebrew Bible has been consistently mistranslated."
6: "I look forward to the day when archaeologists will excavate some of the sites I mention and hopefully provide further evidence that the true land of the Hebrew Bible is West Arabia, not Palestine."
7: "Nearly all the Biblical place-names I could think of were concentrated in an area approximately 600 kilometres long and 200 kilometres wide .... All the co-ordinates of the places involved, as described in the Hebrew Bible, were also traceable there — a fact of the first importance, as these co-ordinates have never really been identified in the countries hitherto believed to have been the lands of the Bible. Moreover, I could not find such a concentration of Biblical place-names, usually in their original Hebrew form, in any other part of the Near East."
9: "‘Jegar-sahadutha’ (Aramaic ygr shdwt’) ... ‘Galeed’ (Hebrew gl‘d) and ‘Mizpah’ (Hebrew h-msph) .... All three names are still carried today by three little-known villages in the same vicinity on the maritime slopes of Asir, in the region of Rijal Alma‘ (Rigal Alma‘), west of Abha (Abha). Their names are: Far‘at Al Shahda (’I shd’), meaning ‘god is the witness’ or ‘god of the witness’, the Arabic pr‘t or pr‘h denoting a mound or hill, equivalent in meaning to the Aramaic ygr; al-Ja‘d (’l-g‘d), which is an Arabicised metathesis of gl‘d; and al-Madhaf (mdp; cf. msph)."
14: "The battle of Carchemish ... took place near Taif, in the southern Hijaz, where two neighbouring villages, Qarr (qr) and Qamashah (qms), still stand. Thus, I would maintain, the Biblical ‘Carchemish’ is certainly not the Hittite Kargamesa, now Jerablus, on the Euphrates, as is traditionally believed."
23: "In [Beersheba] whose name features prominently in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis, and whose origins must therefore go back at least to the late Bronze Age, archaeological excavation has revealed on the exact site materials dating from no earlier than the late Roman period."
26: "Ideally, the full text of the Hebrew Bible must be so analysed, but this involves work for more than one lifetime."
26: "The fact that the Hebrew Bible relates the history of the ancient Israelites in West Arabia does not mean that Judaism had no base in Palestine in Biblical times. It did .... There are clear Biblical hints regarding the growth of a strong Jewish community in Palestine, starting perhaps in the tenth century B.C. ... The reconstruction of the early Jewish history in Palestine is not possible from these texts, nor indeed from any other records so far available."
51: "Kraeling, p. 80 ...: In late Roman times there was a district Geraritike, evidently so named because it was composed primarily of the old Gerar territory."
53-54: "The site of the Biblical Gerar in Palestine has not yet been satisfactorily identified, and no place there continues to carry anything resembling this name."
54: "Msrym denotes any of several locations in West Arabia, including the village of Misramah ... or that of Masr."
55: "Strabo reports ... Gallus reached a place called the ‘Seven Wells’ .... Philby noted the existence of Shaba‘ah."
60: "There is no Gerar near Gaza, in Palestine. Among several which are found in Asir, however, one (al-Qararah) is the Gerar of Genesis 20 and 26 and 2 Chronicles 14, and another (any of four called Ghurar, al-Jarar, Ghirar or al-Qararah) is that of Genesis 10."
WP: "Tel Haror is generally accepted as the site of ancient Gerar. Nevertheless, some other places in the vicinity, between Gaza and Beersheba, have also been suggested."
63: "In the field of Biblical archaeology and its related discipline, palaeography, there is ample opportunity not only for error, but for perpetuating it almost indefinitely."
64: "It is wrong to draw historical conclusions on the basis of inconclusive archaeological evidence."
68-69: "The ‘Moabite Stone’ (the name itself is a misnomer) was set up in Qarhoh (qrhh) by Mesha, king of Moab (ms‘ mlk m’b) - so the inscription on it says .... The Qarhoh in question is apparently the present-day Jahra (ghr), in the area where the stone was found."
WP: "The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, .... was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868."
69: "Mesha describes himself in the inscription as not only king of Moab, but also as a dybny, i.e., as a native of dybn. Dibyan (dbyn) today is also a village in Wadi Adam, not far from Umm al-Yab. So far, readers of the ‘Moabite Stone’ have assumed that dybn is the present village of Dhiban (dbn), in Transjordan, north of where the stone was found. I would suggest, however, that this Dhiban was called after the old Dibyan of the Hijaz after Mesha and his followers arrived to settle there."
72: "The Amarna place-names only make a collective fit in West Arabia. The interested reader may care to examine a table of thirty such names, identified one by one by location."
76: "By now, I hope the reader is willing to concede that there may be sufficient evidence to justify at least a reassessment of the hitherto universally held belief that the events described in the Hebrew Bible relate mainly to Palestine. My next task is to establish the Arabian setting of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, hoping to convince the reader further .... I intend ... to show how this Tihamah is actually the Tehom mentioned in more than thirty passages of the text of the Hebrew Bible."
WP: "Tihamah is the Red Sea coastal plain of the Arabian Peninsula from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Bab el Mandeb. Tihāmat is the Proto-Semitic language's term for 'sea'. Tiamat was the ancient Mesopotamian god of the sea and of chaos. The word appears in masculine form in the Hebrew Bible as təhōm (Genesis 1:2), meaning 'primordial ocean, abyss'."
76-77: "Hayam (hym) ... denotes porous, sandy soil unable to retain water, that is to say soil which remains ‘thirsty’ .... In Arabic, the name of the West Arabian coastal desert should have been Hayam. Its actual name, Tihamah, is a survival of the Biblical Tehom (thwm)."
77-78: "Tehom makes the best sense, wherever it occurs in the canonical Hebrew Bible, as the old Semitic name for the West Arabian coastlands which are called today Tihamah."
78: "The mistranslation here is that of the Revised Standard Version, hereafter RSV .... 1 He will bless you (ybrkk) with the blessings of heaven above (brkt smym m-'l), blessings of the deep that couches beneath (brkt thwm rbst tht), blessings of the breasts and the womb (brkt sdym w-rhm) (Genesis 49:25b). 2 Blessed by the Lord (or by Yahweh) be his land (mbrkt yhwh ’rsw), with the choicest gifts of heaven above (m-mgd smym m-‘l), and the deep that couches beneath (m-thwm rbst tht) (Deuteronomy 33:13b)."
79: "One finds that they actually involve not ‘blessings’, but definitions of the territory or territorial claim of this tribe: 1 He shall settle you (ybrkk) in the Rakkah of Samayin from above (b-rkt smym m-‘l), in the Rakkah of the Tihamah of Rabidah below (b-rkt thwm rbst tht), in the Rakkah of Thadyayn and Rahm (b-rkt sdym w-rhm). 2 From Barakah shall be his land (m-brkt yhwh ’rsw), from the Miqaddah of Samayin (m-mgd smym); from the ridge (m-tl); and from the Tihamah of Rabidah below (w-m-thwm rbst tht) .... I concede there could be a play on words in each of these two definitions of the territory of the Joseph tribe .... In the two passages just cited, the Hebrew ybrkk (see note 8) can mean both ‘he shall settle you’, and ‘he shall bless you’."
80: "Yet the fact remains that the two ‘blessings’ of the Joseph tribe, in Genesis and Deuteronomy, do cite place-names, and hence yield a sense that is concrete. Whatever figurative sense might have been intended by punning, it must be regarded as being of secondary importance, if any."
86: "The event is reported in the standard translations as follows: The waters coming down from above (m-l-m‘lh) stood and rose up in a heap far off (nd ’hd h-rhq m ’d) at Adam (’dm), the city that is beside Zarethan (srtn), and those flowing down toward the sea of the Arabah (‘l ym ‘rbh), the Salt Sea (ym h-mlh), were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Jericho (yryhw) (RSV)."
87: "Joshua 3:16 must be retranslated as follows: The waters coming down from al-Ma‘lah stood, they rose up in one dam extending from Wadd, at Adam, the city that is beside Raznah, and those flowing down west of Ghurabah, west o f al-Milhah, were wholly cut off; and the people passed over opposite Rakhyah."
92: "Msrym ... is rarely used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to Egypt, as commonly assumed. Where it does not refer to Misramah near Abha (see Chapters 4 and 13), it refers to Masr, in Wadi Bishah, or to Madrum (mdrm), in the Ghamid highlands (see Chapter 14). The Biblical ‘Pharaoh’ (pr‘h), as will be suggested later, was not the ruler of Egypt, but a West Arabian god."
93: "Certainly, a ‘Pharaoh’ tribe, called the Far‘a (pr'), is still to be found in Wadi Bishah today, carrying the name of the ancient god or chiefs of the region."
95: "The Jordan (also h-yrdn) where Naaman of Aram ‘dipped himself seven times’ .... could only have been a stream or pool of water. In this case, the term yrdn derives from the same Semitic root yrd."
98: "In Arabic, whd yields the substantives wahd (whd) and wahdah (whdh, with the feminine suffix), meaning an ‘area of flat, low-lying land; ravine’, while the Biblical yhwdh, from yhd, must have been an ancient Semitic topographical term carrying more or less the same meaning."
100: "Pashhur (pshwr) ... is today clearly the oasis of al-Harshaf (hrsp), in Wadi Habuna, north of Wadi Najran."
108: "Altogether, of the 130 recognised place-names in the Ezra-Nehemiah lists, which I have correlated with those West Arabian villages cited above, the identification of only a few remains uncertain. What is perhaps even more important, however, is that no more than a handful of names have been identified with locations in Palestine (in Simons, only ten) .... The onomastic proof is so overwhelming that it seems hardly to warrant archaeological substantiation."
That's about halfway through so I'll leave it there for now as a quote list without significant analysis. You might guess my first impressions from my selections. However, my first note is that you're moving from an Egyptian apologist to an Arabian apologist (if you use too many sources partial to Islam you might get suspected of Islam; you're on the most skeptical site on the internet, doubt it). My second note is, as before, that Salibi is quite the literalist, upholding the existence of all the Biblical peoples, just putting them in Asir in Arabia; so it's hardly compatible to use him as evidence that Abraham and Moses didn't exist. It appears you've shifted the goalpost from your initial implication, "Did Abraham or Moses ever exist? perhaps they're all made up for the story", or from your rather contradictory acceptance of both positions, "Moses and the tribes (Israelites) were Arabs from Yemen .... [AI:] There is no proof of [Abraham and Moses] existence outside of the Bible." If your purpose is to debunk Judaism (and perhaps Christianity) by saying it was all Arabian, that doesn't debunk any miracle or claim other than geography, which is not relevant except for some Zionists. So I'm still unsure of your endgame. But still skimming the text.
u/PrestonHart3rd