The oldest biblical character who probably existed

[Skeptic Ginger]

Moses notwithstanding, Ramses II would have been "Pharaoh" from Exodus, born a little before 1279 BCE.

There is no consensus the Exodus occurred, let alone which Pharaoh was involved.

 

[Beerina]

I don't know anything about which words or parts of words are missing from ancient Semitic-language inscriptions or your personal posting history here, but even I know not to take you seriously after seeing this. U, V, and W started out as one letter in the Latin alphabet, which was derived from a Semitic letter which has also been used for the same set of sounds (a vowel sound and at least two consonant sounds, just to keep things simple) and independently split into more than one letter in modern Semitic-language alphabets ("waw" and "vav" at least) which still each do double duty, for the same reason: those sounds are related to each other and tend to get shifted around over the centuries, with pronunciations changing and letters getting reassigned from one sound to another. The changes you refer to in Germanic languages are merely the most recent in a long line that have happened in multiple language families.

That's why W is double-U in English but double-V in Spanish and French

Thank you, I've been wondering that for years. So it's because we get it by way of Germanic rather than Latin source.


Is there a way to tell how it was actually originally pronounced, w or v, in use for Yahweh/Jehova?

 

[I Ratant]

.
The first words in the theme for the movie "Exodus" are the basis..." This land is mine, God gave this land to me..".
.
Yup, shure He did..
Years of christian guilt are invoked, with the pogroms and ghettos and all the nasty things that the Jews have suffered since, like, forever.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Fair enough. I'm interested in the question because modern Christians all too often think that the Bible is historically accurate, not because I think it makes a speck of difference to how a rational person should view Israel....

Getting back to the thread, Lionking, when you say, "jews and their history", have you considered matching up what you are reading with National Geographic's human genetic migration mapping? Move the timeline in the link to 15000 BCE then move the cursor around Israel until you find the J Haplogroup.

J
'Y-Adam' > M168 > M89 > M304

The patriarch of Haplogroup J was born around 15,000 years ago somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, a region that today includes Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. The early farming successes of the J lineages spawned population booms and encouraged migration throughout much of the Mediterranean region. Both Haplogroup J and its subgroup J2 are found at a combined frequency of around 30 percent among the Jewish population. The Cohen modal lineage is found in Haplogroup J*
Today the M304 marker appears at its highest frequencies in the Middle East, North Africa and Ethiopia. In Europe M304 is seen only in the Mediterranean region.

J1
'Y-Adam' > M168 > M89 > > M304 > M267

Haplogroup J1 emerged during the Neolithic Revolution in the Middle East. Members of the J1 clans shared the farming successes of the other J Haplogroups. In particular, some J1 individuals moved back into North Africa and were quite successful there as well as evidenced by the highest frequencies for J1 appearing in this region. Other members of the J1 lineage remained in the Middle East, and some moved northward into Western Europe, where J1 is found at low frequencies.

J2
'Y-Adam' > M168 > M89 > > M304 > M172

The M172 marker defines a major subset of Haplogroup J, which arose from the M89 lineage. Today Haplogroup J2 is found today in North Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe. As with other populations with Mediterranean ancestry, this linage is found within Jewish populations.

(emphasis mine)

It shows the interrelatedness of the people who occupied the land in and around Israel. I highlighted a fact I found intriguing given the Exodus story.

I doubt the Biblical myths originated with the Jews. Many elements of the stories are echoed in earlier African myths. That doesn't mean more historical elements weren't added later including modifying older stories to contain newer elements.

I think Abraham is a good candidate for at least the name of a particular ancestor. But beyond the name, the rest of the myth is rather unrealistic. So what difference would it make if a tribal head from 10,000 years before the Bible existed if the rest of the account is fiction?

As for the migration of a whole people from being Egyptian slaves to "the promised land"? I think if this occurred the genetic maps should reveal it. Maybe the National Geo map has some lineages that do or do not correlate the Exodus story.


Y Chromosome Phylogenic Tree

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Thank you, I've been wondering that for years. So it's because we get it by way of Germanic rather than Latin source.

Just a side note, mapping language evolution matches the genetic migration findings. Languages evolved as people initially populated the planet and then continued to evolve from there. Apparently you can trace the language migration map along with the genetic migration map.

There are rare exceptions because a group adopted the language of people who migrated to a location. The vast majority of the time, immigrants adopt the language of the land they migrate to or bring their language and establish a new ethnic population in an area.

Is there a way to tell how it was actually originally pronounced, w or v, in use for Yahweh/Jehova?

You should be able to find your answer on this site somewhere.

 

[TimCallahan]

If should be clear any any critical person such how faked the translation.

Line 7, there are NO NAMES on it. Ahab is a total invention. Adding something ahead of RAM implies English transliterates with Aramaic but it does not. It is incredibly absurd to think anyone seriously takes [I killed] which is wholly invented as having been the original inscription.

Line 8 is even worse as both names are wholly invented and there is no G in Aramaic king.

Line 9 translates a place name BYTDWD, a single word on the inscription into two words house and david. Further BYT can only mean mean house when it is a place to live. It never means dynasty or, as believers would have it, this is the only usage of BYT to mean dynasty. Believers insist not only on this one time meaning for the word but also that the single word BYTDWD should be taken as two words for the purpose of making the Septuagint guided translation appear less silly.

Fact is there is ZERO archaeological evidence for the existence of biblical Israel or biblical Judah. When these imaginary people were supposed to have ruled those mythical kingdoms the region was part of the New Kingdom of Egypt.

Since Hans has already effectively rebutted your claims about the Tel Dan inscription, I'll just respond to the portion of your post I've hilited. There most assuredly is considerable archaeological evidence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the Iron Age. This evidence includes the following:

1) Preserved Assyrian documents referring to various kings of Israel and Judah - including Omri and Ahab in Israel, and Hezekiah and Ahaz in Judah. These documents also refer to the cities of Samaria, Lachish and Jerusalem.

2) The Moabite Stone set up by Mesha, king of Moab, in which he refers to Omri and his son, and tells of his struggles against Israel and how he dragged the altar of Yahweh in the dust.

3) Ahab's ivory palace and stables. These were originally thought to be those of Solomon. However, there is no archaeological evidence for that king. The "ivory palace" is so called because of the large number of ivory figurines found in it, indicating Ahab's wealth.

You seem to be conflating evidence of Iron Age kingdoms with that of Bronze Age kingdoms. Of course, the only reference to Israel in the Late Bronze Age, as I have previously noted, is the mention of a people called Israel, among others living in Canaan, in the Merneptah Victory Stele. Neither Hans nor I have proposed the existence of a Bronze Age kingdom of Israel or any historical or archaeological validity of the conquest narrative of Joshua. We have both, further, stated that the only basis for the Exodus would have been a few minor escapes of bands of slaves. My speculation that such escapes may have been conflated with the actual history of the earlier expulsion of the Hyksos is quite independent of Josephus.

As to Egyptian control of the Levant at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, Merneptah's military campaign in Canaan was to reassert a declining influence there. Rameses III reasserted Egyptian power - which had obviously declined somewhat from Merneptah's time - in the Levant for the last time in the 1100s. Even at the height of Egyptian power in the New Kingdom, Egyptian rule in Canaan was one of rather loose control and amounted to having garrisons stationed there to enforce Egyptian hegemony and the payment of tribute by subject kings, who still ruled their own kingdoms and city states. We have evidence for this in the letters of these various kings to Akhenaten in the Amarna Letters.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I have no idea where my ancestors were three thousand years ago.
Nor do I care.
I am , however pretty sure I had ancestors living then, which presumably means wherever they were is still mine.
So get out of my bit , you johnny-come-lately non-divinely endowed people!
(As well as all you other descendants of my ancestors, whose claims are not quite so divinely sanctioned as mine, while nonetheless being better in every way than those of lesser breeds outwith the Law.)

Meanwhile back at the OP, - so far as I know, the first man in the bible remains King James the VI of Scotland. And who better?

 

[I Ratant]

For us with European backgrounds, the Black Death did a lot to eliminate many variations in the gene pool.
Since then, most of us have the survivors of that as common ancestors.

 

[Matt Giwer]

Thanks for the link - I take it the relevant post is this one?

Matt Giwer: It does look very much like BYTDWD appears in Kings, according to this page here, and seems to be referring to a political entity rather than a place. I'm no expert and I'm only going by this one page, so if you can give us a good story as to how this is all a mistranslation I'd be more than willing to listen, but that sure as heck looks like a sighting of BYTDWD in the wild that's a heck of a lot earlier than the 14th Century.

My problem I do not read the Israeli form of the Aramaic script given in that reference. If some one who does would be so kind as to point out the words being translated as "house of david" in the sense of dynasty not "household of" or "palace of" I will much appreciate it. Also keep in mind Kings first appears in history as one of the books found in the collections referred to as the Septuagint in the 1st c. BC. There is no evidence it existed before that time.

Keep in mind the subject inscription is clearly one word as in BYTLHM which belevers are breaking up into two words -- proving nothing is written in stone for believers. I may be wrong on the aspect of BYT meaning dynasty but the inscription is only one word regardless of what believers desire.

Nope. He may have been the first recorded person to engage in semitism-related race baiting for all I know, but that's not at all the same thing.

Of course I said no such thing. I said Josephus was the oldest example known of a Jew contriving a nonsense reason to falsely claim people hate Judeans. He gives several nonsense things people refuse to believe solely because they hate Jews. His rant is in book I of Against Apion if you wish to read it yourself.

This is absolutely true, but nonetheless to ignore his arguments without knowing of better ones would be irrational. The fact that he's irrational about facts pertaining to the Holocaust is grounds for caution about his other claims but not grounds for immediate disbelief.

It is not a matter of arguments but of physical evidence. One can then argue the meaning of the physical evidence, the inscription being physical evidence for which the believers have not been able to credibly.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Actually, composite words are as old as recorded history, and some languages still work by the A-Team way of taking a small bucket of words and some tools found in a barn, and coming out with a composite monstrosity like Panzerkampfwagen that scares the crap out of everyone else

The ancient middle East was no different. There are composite Aramaic names around like the Assyrian city of Urmia (nowadays in Iran) which meant "city of water". In fact, th whole Ur-something construct gave us several cities in the former Akkadian sphere of influence. Or, really, the original name of Bethlehem.

And probably the biggest treasure chest of such composite words is ancient Egypt, where just in the "house of" category alone we have cities like Per-Bastet ("house of Bastet", a.k.a., Bubastis), Per-Medjed ("House of Medjed", a.k.a., Oxyrhynchus), Per-Atum ("House of Atum", a.k.a., Heliopolis), Per-Ramessu ("House of Ramesses", i.e., a composite of a composite, a.k.a. Pi-Ramesses), etc. The last one is exactly a "house of <person name>" construct used for the whole city. But generally, the use of composite words was so common in Egyptian that we have funny cases like Bastet becoming interpreted as "She of the ointment jar" although her name was not a composite originally.

It's not even the only word in the bible that is a composite of house. E.g., in the anointing by the woman from Bethany scene, Bethany is itself a composite of "house", meaning, according to Origen, “House of Obedience.” Though Origen argues that it's actually from Bethabara, meaning “House of Preparation.” (Which would make the whole scene blatantly symbolic in fact, as Jesus says the anointing is in preparation for his funeral. And it's done by a woman from the “House of Preparation.” Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?) And yet another possible Aramaic spelling of Bethany gives us "House Of The Poor", i.e., pretty much saying that Jesus was in Poor Town when he said "you will always have the poor with you" and again making the whole scene blatantly symbolic.

Etc.

Really, it seems to me like they had plenty of "house of" constructs, meaning even whole cities or groups of people.

 

[Delvo]

Is there a way to tell how it was actually originally pronounced, w or v, in use for Yahweh/Jehova?

You should be able to find your answer on this site somewhere.

It's not in that link, but I'm pretty sure it was originally the sound we now spell with a W. The letter was originally a vowel like our U and was adopted by the Romans when it was just a vowel, with consonants later deriving from that in certain contexts. And that derivation almost certainly had to follow a certain path/order: first to the sound of our W, and then that sound shifting into the sound of our V later on.

I say it would have happened in that order for three reasons. One is that that's the path I know was taken in Latin. I know that independent languages don't always evolve in parallel directions, but the fact that both language families started with the same vowel and ended up with the same two consonants coming from it indicates that there's a common factor between them making them act parallel in this case even if they don't in all others.

Second is the reason why it happened that way in Latin, which is an example of a universal principle of language evolution: when a word's pronunciation changes, it's a gradual blending from the old way to the new way, not an abrupt jump to something else that wasn't even close, and the W sound is clearly more similar to the U sound than the V sound is. For example, take the quote "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered), which I said earlier was pronounced "weni, widi, wiki" at the time. (The point of contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth for pronunciation of C before E/I hadn't yet started moving forward back then either.) The earlier use of the first letter in those words as a vowel would have given three-syllable words: "U-eni, u-idi, u-iki". Putting vowels next to each other like that requires a W-glide to come between them whether there's a letter for it or not. I trust that it's easy to hear how that first syllable would get shortened out of existence and absorbed into the glide consonant, so if there's no written letter for the consonant's sound alone at first, then people come to think of it as being represented by that first letter whenever it's followed immediately by another vowel. There's no such direct way to get from a vowel to the sound of our V, though; it only comes along after the establishment of the letter U/V as a consonant (which sounds like W at first), by slight change of the position of the lower lip. So there's a physical cause for the order of changes in the sounds going from U to W then to V, because going straight from the U-sound to the V-sound would mean making at least two changes at once.

Third, when Semitic languages use that letter as a consonant, most of them still represent the sound of our W with it; only a few exceptions represent the sound of our V with it. So a transition from an original V-sound to a subsequent W-sound would have had to occur multiple times in separate languages, whereas a transition from an original W-sound to a subsequent V-sound would only have had to occur once or a relatively few times, more recently. So it makes more cladistic sense to figure the form in use way back then was not the sound of our V.

 

[seayakin]

The OP is an interesting question. About a year ago I saw a very nice documentary on PBS looking at the archaelogical evidence of the history of the Jews. They interview some archaelogists who supported a hypothesis that the Jews were originally a splinter group of Canaanites who worshipped the god Yahweh among a pantheon of gods worshipped by the Canaanites. If memory serves, the archaelogists cited the first evidence of a nation of Jews something like during the Babylonian captivity. However, they indicate there is absolutely no evidence for Exodus and cited that it is unlikely that the Egyptians would have no record of such events. In the end, the archaeologists interviewed indicated that the Jews were a people that evolved form the Canaanites with their own national identity. They talked about the first documented individual outside the bible but my memory fails me on that piece of information and haven't been able to find it on the web.

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

There most assuredly is considerable archaeological evidence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the Iron Age. This evidence includes the following:

1) Preserved Assyrian documents referring to various kings of Israel and Judah - including Omri and Ahab in Israel, and Hezekiah and Ahaz in Judah. These documents also refer to the cities of Samaria, Lachish and Jerusalem.

2) The Moabite Stone set up by Mesha, king of Moab, in which he refers to Omri and his son, and tells of his struggles against Israel and how he dragged the altar of Yahweh in the dust.

3) Ahab's ivory palace and stables. These were originally thought to be those of Solomon. However, there is no archaeological evidence for that king. The "ivory palace" is so called because of the large number of ivory figurines found in it, indicating Ahab's wealth.

Yup.

According to Finkelstein and Silberman - the Omrides (Omri, Ahab, Jezebel etc.) are the earliest biblical characters for whom we have evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Unearthed#David_and_Solomon_or_the_Omrides.3F

"David and Solomon or the Omrides?

Although the book of Samuel, and initial parts of the books of Kings, portray Saul, David and Solomon ruling in succession over a powerful and cosmopolitan united kingdom of Israel and Judah, Finkelstein and Silberman regard modern archaeological evidence as showing that this is a pious fiction. Archaeology instead shows that in the time of Solomon, the northern kingdom of Israel had an insignificant existence, too poor to be able to pay for a vast army, and with too little bureaucracy to be able to administer a kingdom, certainly not an empire;[21] it only emerged later, around the beginning of the 9th century BCE, in the time of Omri.[22] "


K.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

My problem I do not read the Israeli form of the Aramaic script given in that reference. If some one who does would be so kind as to point out the words being translated as "house of david" in the sense of dynasty not "household of" or "palace of" I will much appreciate it.

I was able to puzzle it out from the translations in the bottom half of the page, unless I'm badly mistaken. It looks to me like translating as "the house of DWD" meaning a political entity is the obvious translation in those verses.

Also keep in mind Kings first appears in history as one of the books found in the collections referred to as the Septuagint in the 1st c. BC. There is no evidence it existed before that time.

If we grant that, that still pushes the first sighting of "the House of X" referring to a political unit back 1500 years or so from where you claimed it was first sighted.

Keep in mind the subject inscription is clearly one word as in BYTLHM which belevers are breaking up into two words -- proving nothing is written in stone for believers. I may be wrong on the aspect of BYT meaning dynasty but the inscription is only one word regardless of what believers desire.

As I said, if you have an alternative translation that makes any sense I would be interested to see it.

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

I was able to puzzle it out from the translations in the bottom half of the page, unless I'm badly mistaken. It looks to me like translating as "the house of DWD" meaning a political entity is the obvious translation in those verses.

BYT meaning "house" is like English "ville" or "borough" or "ton" - meaning a place, not a dynasty.

BYTShMSh is BethShemesh meaning a place, and also the group of people who live there.

BYTLHM is Bethlehem meaning a place, and also the group of people who live there.

BYTEL is BethEl meaning a place, and also the group of people who live there.

BYTDWD is BethDavid meaning a place, and also the group of people who live there.

All of these refer to places, and/or groups of people who live there.

Nothing to do with a the existence of Shamesh or Lehem or or El or David.
But it's too late now - it's widely (and wrongly) accepted as evidence for David, when it fairly clearly is not.


So what it actually says is :
7'. riots and thousands of horsemen. ... ram son of ...
8'. king of Israel, and I killed ... iahu son of ... g
9'. of BYTDVD. And I set ...

In other words, he killed someone from the place called BYTDVD about 2 centuries after the alleged time of David.

Nothing to do with any David at all.


K.

 

[Matt Giwer]

7. . . .[I killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab]
8. king of Israel, and I killed [Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin]g
9. of the House of David. . . .

To cut through some of the BLST

7. ram son of
8. king of Israel and I killed iahu son of g
9. DWDtown

There are other deletions necessary but this is a start.

 

[Matt Giwer]

Matt Giwer takes every opportunity to demonise Jews and question anything which legimitises Israel's existence. This is just another of his gambits.

If someone else questioned the existence of David, I would take notice. If Matt said the sky was blue, I would go outside to check.

Fact is even if the OT were 100% fact even including the god parts it cannot put lipstick on a pig, it cannot legitimize the only Israel that has ever existed.

Why do you attempt to change the discussion to something complete unrelated to the existence of some savage named David?

 

[Matt Giwer]

He's had enough of his arguments about ancient biblical history trounced that yes, I agree with Lionking. His stance is more minimalist than the Biblical Minimalists.

Yet after all of this there is still not a single bit of evidence of the existence of the Septuagint stories prior to the appearance of the appearance of the Septuagint.

As there is no evidence of anything prior to the Greek Septuagint much less what it might have consisted of if anything there is no rational reason to assume there was anything older.

As no rational person would make such an assumption the rational person must proceed with the evidence as it exists, that the Greek Septuagint is the original creation.

 

[Matt Giwer]

Bullcrap. The term pharaoh (actually, PR-AA in egyptian) has been used for the god-king since at least Tuthmoses III, in the 15'th century BC, a good half a frikken millennium before the estimated date of writing the Genesis, even more so before the Exodus. Amenhotep III in the 14'th century BCE is actually addressed as a pharaoh in a letter addressed to him. And before that, it's been used for the pharaoh's palace.

Yes the word existed. As I said it was used to refer to the equivalent of White House as in palace or more generally the palace and all the associated administrative buildings. In the US at least the use of White House as interchangeable with the President to avoid personal attribution when not having a quote did not become common until the 1930s. The two terms are not used interchangeably. One may paraphrase what the White House "says" but the president must be quoted.

My point being its use interchangeably with the word king. Since I came across this issue some 15 years ago I have made it a point to look into examples wherever I could find them but not having found any attempt to compile an exhaustive collections of mentions of the king. Obviously there is much I have missed.

What I did find almost as a sore thumb were translations using the word king and the surrounding narrative using pharaoh.

If what you are talking about is substantially different and in fact you do know of inscriptions using the word pharaoh instead of king I am interested and would like to have the references to the two items you mention.

HOWEVER, this has no bearing about the fact there is no evidence of any of the OT stories existing prior to the Greek Septuagint material. I can be wrong in any number of details or consequences of the Septuagint being the original versions of the stories but, absent evidence to the contrary, they are the original stories.

I never said I knew who that David was. That was in fact the caveat I was agreeing with: it's just a name, and we don't know exactly who or what it was. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a person, in fact. There are tribe names who aren't based on persons at all, but on places or historical ways to define themselves, and their invented ancestor brothers are just symbolic things to cement an alliance.

Not sure why you go on about Judah Maccabee, though. I don't think anyone actually claimed in this thread that a 2nd century BC ruler would be referenced on a 9'th-8'th century inscription. I think most of us are aware that they didn't have a time machine.

The point is the imposition of the Yahweh cult by military conquest upon people whom the Septuagint stories would lead us to believe were already members of the cult. From the first "paragraph" of the first book of Wars of the Jews by Josephus we learn the Maccabes were partisans of the Ptolemeys and the whole fight was what we sometimes call a surrogate war between to major powers.

The Hyskos connection can stand on its own as a valid hypothesis, regardless of who said it first. Of course, it's just a hypothesis.

It is not clear how anyone can possibly say it is valid. One might say it was at one time an hypothesis but discarded upon serious consideration.

Simply if the military expulsion of a people who had ruled Egypt can be so confused that it results in the Exodus story then one does not need the Hyksos as the source of the confusion. On face value Exodus is so wildly different from a military expulsion that it takes more to explain how it became confused than it does to simply consider it a fanciful creation.

Such things make Lord Occam turn in his grave.

It is nothing but a sham contrivance to support the religious tradition that the Septuagint contains real history. Sort of like a Roman saying "there really was a Romulus but he was entirely different." Such desperate contrivances are not taken seriously except with the religious traditions regarding the Septuagint stories are involved.

Heh. Just heh... You're judging an ancient semitic inscription by the modern English version of that name? WTH? It's like denying Roman inscriptions about Julius Caesar on account of their writing it with an I instead of J. So it can't be the same Caesar, right? I hate to break this to you buddy, but variants and translitaration of the same name can vary massively between languages and over time.

It is written in Phoenician which is, except for believers, the same as what they want to call Hebrew. The transliterations are well known. W and V are not interchangeable. When the Septuagint was transliterated into "hebrew" aka Aramaic V was used. The letters are not interchangeable in the original Greek either.

So what is the point of trying to say Dwdtown is David house [of]?

The fact is, that name is actually pronounced "Daud" or "Dawud" for both the ancient semitic populations and the Arabs as one of their descendants. Hence that letter being transliterated with a W. You don't need to be German for that. You just need to know WTH you're talking about.

Without vowels being in the inscription and as vowels are the fastest sounds to change in a language and as many different sounds for the same vowel can exist side by side for centuries as in England, I always find it strange that people are so ready to declare vowels sounds prior to the ability to make audio recordings.

1. Religions borrow from each other all the time. If you think that's big, check out how much they borrowed from the Akkadians. But, really, that's the kind of thing that happened in all religions. Not sure why you think it's important.

The borrowing from Egypt is perhaps the most extensive and certainly the most ignored. Not only Apophis the evil serpent but Amun/Amen making the first humans out of clay. And he also being the first god, the god that came before all the other gods in time and whom "thou shalt have no other gods older than me." Then there is the incantation of Ra, dated to the time of Amun-Ra "may his light shine upon you" which found its way into Psalms.

2. By that logic, just about any animal is connected to some Egyptian cult, just because they had a god for each animal. E.g., then by that logic the Easter Bunny is the Egyptian goddess Unut, the spirit wolf of the Innuit is obviously Wepwawet, etc. You'll need a stronger connection than just being also present in a culture that made gods in the shape of almost every single animal they knew of.

The connections to the details of the Egyptian stories being so great and often close enough to support the obvious source of the Septuagint, created in Alexandria as backstory for the Yahweh cult imposed by the Maccabes. The Ptolemeys had previously invented Serapis to bridge Greek and Egyptian pantheons so inventing another was nothing new.

Picking Yahweh of the Yahweh/Ashara patron pair for the region and endowing him as Amun is hardly surprising nor is ending prayers with his name.

 

[Matt Giwer]

You do know that the BYT in BYTLHM also means house, yes? The name of the city is "house of Lehem" and it's a toss whether that "lehem" is its literal meaning of "bread", i.e., the town name actually meant "house of bread", or someone was actually named Lehem waaay back.

So, your point is... what? That BYT can't mean "house" in BYTDWD, because it's like in BYTLHM where it does mean "house"?

House as a place to live such as BYT YHWH, meaning Temple of Yahweh or the "cute" English house of the Lord. A town is a place to live. BYT is also used for geographic areas. BYT signifies a place to live. The choice of English words to translate it as depends upon who or what lives there and the nature of the who or what. Thus it can become literally a home, a neighborhood, town or city as well as palace and temple.

Nothing about a place to live suggests dynasty.