Historical Na’aman
by Damien F. Mackey As Ianhama of El Amarna “According to the Rabbis, Naaman was the archer who drew his bow at a venture and mortally wounded Ahab, King of Israel (I Kings xxii. 34). This event is alluded to in the words “because by him the Lord had given deliverance unto Syria” (II Kings v. 1), and therefore the Syrian king, Naaman’s master, was Benhadad”. In a revised El Amarna Dr. I. Velikovsky seems to have scored some hits and some misses in his attempts, in the series Ages in Chaos, to identify characters who figure in the El Amarna [EA] correspondence (re-dated downwards by Velikovsky from the conventionally estimated C14th, to the C9th BC) with biblical figures. One of his promising efforts was, so it seems to me, his proposed identification of the prominent Ianhamu of EA with the biblical Na’aman (Hebrew: × ַ×¢ֲמָן ), famously cured by the prophet Elisha of his leprosy. Velikovsky had referred to a couple