by
Damien F. Mackey
“Go to Kalneh and look at it;
go from there to great Hamath,
and then go down to Gath in Philistia.
Are they better off than your two kingdoms?
Is their land larger than yours?”.
Amos 6:2
Presumably this text pre-dates that of the son of Amos, Isaiah, who will record the words of an all-conquering Assyrian king, Sargon II/Sennacherib (Isaiah 10:9-11):
‘Has not Kalno fared like Carchemish?
Is not Hamath like Arpad,
and Samaria like Damascus?
As my hand seized the kingdoms of the idols,
kingdoms whose images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria—
shall I not deal with Jerusalem and her images
as I dealt with Samaria and her idols?’
For Samaria, which apparently had not yet been dealt with when Amos spoke (cf. 6:1):
“Woe to you who are complacent in Zion, and to you who feel secure on Mount Samaria, you notable men of the foremost nation, to whom the people of Israel come!”,
had fallen to the Assyrians by the time Isaiah wrote his chapter 10.
Calneh has been a site most difficult to locate.
A typical view
It is common for scholars to identify two separate cities “Calneh” based on two far-flung biblical texts, namely, Genesis 10:10, listing Nimrod’s cities, and the Isaian text mentioned above. This procedure is, at least, what we find in the Encyclopedia.com:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/calneh
CALNEH (Heb. כַּלְנֵה, כַּלְנֶה). (1) Mesopotamian city mentioned together with Babel, Erech, and Akkad as cities in the land of Shinar which constituted the beginning of the kingdom of *Nimrod (Gen. 10:10). At present there is no acceptable identification of Calneh, although the other cities mentioned together with it in Genesis are known from Akkadian inscriptions. No identification of Calneh can be made on the basis of the "land of Shinar," which serves in this instance, as elsewhere in the Bible, as a synonym for Babylonia (cf. Yoma 10a, which identifies Calneh with נופר, i.e., the modern Tell Nuffar, ancient Nippur, connecting this name with נינפי, i.e., nymphe; the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew כַּלָה, kallah, "bride"). Some revocalize the word to read kullaneh, "all of them," i.e., "all of the aforementioned cities are in Shinar."
(2) Calneh, Calno (כַּלְנוֹ, כַּלְנֶה), a city in northern Syria identified with Kullāni or Kulania, which is mentioned in connection with *Tiglath-Pileser iii's conquests in his annals of the third year of his reign. The references to the city in Amos 6:2 and Isaiah 10:9 (as Calno) allude to Tiglath-Pileser's conquest in 740–732 b.c.e.
[End of quote]
Dr. W.F. Albright had ingeniously tried to get rid of Calneh altogether as a city in Genesis 10:10, re-interpreting the text as: “And the beginning of [Nimrod’s] kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, all of them (calneh), in the land of Shinar”.
Nimrod’s four cities now reduced to three.
I suspect, however, that there was only one Calneh, and that the highly problematical geography of southern Mesopotamia (known as “Sumer”), due to a massive error:
“The Sumerian Problem” – Sumer not in Mesopotamia
(6) “The Sumerian Problem” – Sumer not in Mesopotamia | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
has caused for Calneh to be split in twain.
Amos and Isaiah both represent Calneh as being a location in the environs of N Syria, (i) with reference to Hamath (Amos 6:2);
(ii) with reference to Carchemish (Isaiah 10:9); and (iii) with reference to Haran (Ezekiel 27:23).
That strictly circumscribes the limits of Nimrod’s Calneh within a relatively small region.
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