Nadene Goldfoot
Abram's tribe seems to be those that came to Ur from the Chaldees, since the Bible refers to his city as Ur of the Chaldees. This differentiates the native Urians who were not Semites from the tribe who came and settled there from the Chaldees who were Semites, meaning they were people speaking a Semitic language such as Hebrew or Arabic.
Chaldea (/kælˈdiːə/) was a small country that existed between the late 10th or early 9th and mid-6th centuries BCE, after which the country and its people were absorbed and assimilated into the indigenous population of Babylonia. Semitic-speaking, it was located in the marshy land of the far southeastern corner of Mesopotamia and briefly came to rule Babylon. The Hebrew Bible (Torah) uses the term כשדים (Kaśdim) and this is translated as Chaldaeans in the Greek Old Testament, although there is some dispute as to whether Kasdim in fact means Chaldean or refers to the south Mesopotamian Kaldu.
The name appears in Hebrew in the Bible as Kaśdim (כשדים) and in Aramaic as Kaśdāy (כשדי).
In the Torah (Bible) (Book of Genesis 22:22), the name "Kesed"(כשׂד, ancient pronunciation /kaɬd/) , is the singular form of "Kasdim"(כַּשְׂדִּים), meaning Chaldeans.
Kesed is identified as son of Abraham's brother Nahor ((Genesis 11:26 NIV). When Terah had lived 70 years, he begot Abram, Nahor,, and Haran. Haran became the name of a town that Abram reached on the way from Ur to Canaan and lived there until he was 75 years old.
and King Jehu (843-816) ruled Israel . He was unsuccessful in his wars with Aram and paid tribute to Shalmaneser III of Assyria to obtain his protection. On repelling the Assyrian threat, Hazael of Aram deprived Jehu of much of his territory. His dynasty continued to reign for a century.
Scripture also shares that Nahor was married to Milkah, the daughter of his brother Haran) (and brother of Kemuel ( Genesis 22:21 as the nephew of Abraham, son of Nahor, brother of Bethuel (father of Rebekah) and the father of Aram), residing in Aram Naharaim. (ie, Aram of the Two Rivers, (Tigris and Euphrates) the NE area of Mesopotamia. It is the land of origin of the patriarchs, and nearly all the names of the ancestors of Abraham, such as Serug, Nahor and Terah correspond to place-names in this region. Aram means Syria and Aram-Dammesek was the most important Aramean kingdom in Syria in the 10th to 8th centuries BCE. After the division of Solomon's kingdom, Aram was a constant danger to Israel. The Arameans were a group of linguistically related Semitic peoples living in what is today Syria and western Iraq. Their influence and presence spanned the region of the Fertile Crescent. According to the Table of Nations in Genesis 10:22, Aram, the ancestral father of the Arameans, was a grandson of Noah and a son of Noah's firstborn son, Shem. Genesis 22:20-24
Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37 – c. 100) also links Arphaxad (Arpachshad alternatively spelled Arphaxad or Arphacsad, is one of the postdiluvian men in the Shem–Terah genealogy.) and Chaldaea, in his Antiquities of the Jews, stating, “Arphaxad named the Arphaxadites, who are now called Chaldeans.” Remember that Terah is the father of Abram.
The name Chaldaea is a latinization of the Greek Khaldaía (Χαλδαία), a hellenization of Akkadian māt Kaldu or Kašdu, suggesting an underlying /kaɬdu/.
The Torah holds the genealogy of mankind, starting with Adam and Eve and Seth, and through Seth that the human race survived. The flood story is told and then the Tower of Babel when all people spoke the same language and then were dispersed in world, and wound up speaking different languages. Trying to identify The Chaldeans is like trying to find a needle in the Tower of Babel. It's taken my Semitic tribes of Chaldees to Persia's land for an origin so far. The descendants of Noah and the Flood were in Shinar and their building tried to reach heaven. The story is that G-d frustrated their work by confusing their languages, leading to the diversity of tongues (Gen.11:1-9). Modern scholars have seen a similarity between the tower and the Sumerian Ziggurat, or step-temple.
Bit Yâkin was the name of the largest and most powerful of the five tribes of the Chaldeans, or equivalently, their territory. The original extension of Bit Yâkin is not known precisely, but it extended from the lower Tigris into the Arabian Peninsula. Sargon II mentions it as extending as far as Dilmun or "sea-land" (littoral Eastern Arabia). "Chaldea" or mat Kaldi generally referred to the low, marshy, alluvial land around the estuaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, which at the time discharged their waters through separate mouths into the sea.
Important Kaldu tribes and their regions in southeastern
The tribal capital Dur Yâkin was the original seat of Marduk-Baladan.
The king of Chaldea was also called the king of Bit Yakin, just as the kings of Babylonia and Assyria were regularly styled simply king of Babylon or Assur, the capital city in each case. In the same way, what is now known as the Persian Gulf was sometimes called "the Sea of Bit Yakin", and sometimes "the Sea of the Land of Chaldea".
Ur of the Chaldees was a special group of people who lived in Ur who were Hebrew speakers. The natives of Ur did not speak their language. Abram was one of them. His tribe, a member of 5 tribes, seemed to come from a section of Persia, that was even further east than Ur was to Canaan. They had been a nomadic society. Abram's tribe was Semitic, meaning speaking a Semitic language such as Hebrew or Arabic. Farsi, the language spoken in Persia (today's Iran) is not a Semitic language.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaldea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aram_(region)
No comments:
Post a Comment