Textbook History Out of Kilter With Era of King Solomon By 500 Years
Dr. John Bimson’s important article, “Hatshepsut and the Queen of Sheba: A Critique of Velikovsky’s Identification and an Alternative View” (C and C Review, Vol. VIII, 1986), exposed as untenable, in the eyes of many revisionists, Velikovsky’s identification of Hatshepsut with the biblical Queen of Sheba. This was due to a series of strong arguments against Velikovsky’s reconstruction – some of these being irrefutable. Amongst the most telling of Bimson’s points were those that pertained to the famous Punt expedition, that Velikovsky had attempted to identify with the biblical visit by the Queen of the South to King Solomon in Jerusalem. Not only was Hatshepsut no longer a queen by the time of the Punt expedition – {she was actually in her Year 9 as pharaoh (king)} – but it appears from the Deir el-Bahri inscriptions that she did not actually accompany the Egyptian expedition to the land of Punt. The biblical queen, on the other hand, had most definitely visited King Solomon at Jerusalem in person.
What Bimson
still shared with Velikovsky (at least in 1986), however, was the conviction
that Hatshepsut was contemporaneous with the (approximate) era of King Solomon.
Revisionists do not necessarily take that view anymore. And therein lies a
problem. Because Hatshepsut, as queen, is still the outstanding candidate for
the biblical “Queen of Sheba (of the South)”, given the testimony of Josephus
that the biblical queen had ruled Egypt and Ethiopia, and given the likeness of
her throne name, Maat-ka-re (Makera) to the queen’s legendary name, Makeda.
Bimson scrapped Hatshepsut
as a candidate, but failed to provide any other contemporaneous woman ruler to
represent this famous queen to whom both the Old and New Testaments attest. The
same comment applies to Patrick Clarke in his more recent criticism of Velikovsky
on the subject: ‘Why Pharaoh Hatshepsut is not to be equated to the
Queen of Sheba’ (Journal of Creation, 24/2, August 2010, pp. 62-68).
And the same
applies again to those whose new chronologies do not align the early (undivided)
monarchy of Israel with the early 18th dynasty of Egypt: a downward
time shift of about 500 years. Now I don’t know if Eric [Aitchison] has himself
come up with any candidate for the celebrated biblical queen, but I presume
that he, with his “Damien likes moving things
by 500 years but my preference remains at 630 years”, cannot
possibly accommodate Hatshepsut in this his singular rearrangement of time.
With Hatshepsut
gone, then Thutmose III as the biblical “King Shishak of Egypt” must also go.
Patrick Clarke, for instance, has rejected this equation in his ‘Was Thutmose III the
biblical Shishak? – Claims of the ‘Jerusalem’ bas-relief at Karnak
investigated’ (Journal of Creation, 25/1, April 2011, pp. 48-56). Two important pillars of the revision thus toppled. But, again, what
is the alternative? So far, Clarke has not provided any candidate of his own.
And, as for those who would prefer Ramesses II ‘the Great’ as “Shishak”, well
they are running into the formidable problem as pointed out by Dale Murphie: “Critique
of David Rohl’s A Test Of Time (SIS C&C Review, Oct 1997:1), with Ramesses II
having the powerful king Asa of Judah (in all his strength) sandwiched right
between himself and his Hittite ally, Hattusilis.
Damien F. Mackey.
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