What a Name Tells Us about Ancient Israel

An excavation in Israel has uncovered a pottery fragment bearing one of the oldest known Hebrew inscriptions. One, containing only the words “Ishbaal son of Beda,” suggests something notable about religion in the time of King David, as Hershel Shanks writes:

The name Ishbaal or, more commonly, Eshbaal, is well known from the Bible. It means “man of Baal” [a storm god worshipped in the area]. The name Beda appears for the first time in this inscription.

Dating to about 1000 BCE, the inscription reads from right to left and consists of whole and partially preserved letters incised into the clay pot before firing. . . . In the Bible, various Baal names appear of people who lived in King David’s time or earlier: Jerubbaal (Judges 6:32), Meribbaal (1 Chronicles 9:40), etc. But the Bible mentions no Baal names after this—neither Baal nor Eshbaal. Baal names simply do not appear in the Bible after David’s time.

The archaeological situation is a bit, but not completely, different. We have more than a thousand seals and seal impressions (bullae) and hundreds of inscriptions from Israel and Judah from the post-David period (the 9th to 6th centuries BCE). The name Eshbaal is not to be found among these names. The situation with the name Baal is slightly different; it does occasionally appear in [northern] Israel—and of course in Philistia, Ammon, and Phoenicia. But not in Judah.

It seems that Baal and Eshbaal were banned in David’s kingdom. One reason may have been that, at least officially, Judah was monotheistic.

Read more at Bible History Daily

More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Davidic monarchy, Hebrew Bible, History & Ideas, Idolatry

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF