Préface 1988

Je reproduis ici la préface de Secrets of the Bible People (1988), second livre de Kamal Salibi dans le domaine des études bibliques, où l’auteur propose un bilan des critiques exprimées à l’encontre du premier (The Bible came from Arabia, 1985). Comme le texte est très bien construit, je me suis contenté d'ajouter un titre à chaque paragraphe :

§01 Généralités sur la critique biblique moderne
§02 L’idée d’un ancrage en Arabie n’est pas nouvelle
§03 En 1985, mon hypothèse est reçue comme une hérésie
§04 Leçons de l’histoire des sciences
§05 Mes arguments dans le livre précédent
§06 Critique n°1 (géographie) : retrouver des toponymes ne suffit pas
§07 Critique n°2 (philologie) : l’excès de métathèses
§08 …et l’excès de changements consonantiques
§09 Critique n°3 (sociolinguistique) : l’hébreux n’est pas une langue morte
§10 …et la vocalisation masorétique est fiable
§11 Critique n°4 (archéologie) : la Science a tranché pour la Palestine
§12 Conclusion : traiter la Bible hébraïque comme de l’histoire

Texte des pages 9 à 17, extrait par OCR et révisé.
⇒ traduisible sans difficulté par l’IA normalement
(demander au chat de Mistral.ai).

§01 Généralités sur la critique biblique moderne

As such a vital part of the heritage of the modern world, the Hebrew Bible deserves to be properly understood. This is why, during the last two centuries, it has been the subject of extensive critical study by Christian and Jewish scholars, many of them practicing believers of deep religious conviction, eager to understand the origins of their faith. At the hands of these scholars, the Hebrew text of the Bible has been subjected to thorough investigation, and various theories concerning the composition of its different parts have been advanced. Attempts were also made to study the Bible texts in the light of history in order to gain a better understanding of their narrative, devotional and doctrinal contents. Where the stories of the Bible are concerned it is today generally conceded that some involve chronicled or telescoped history, while others are only tangentially historical, preserving a rich fund of ancient myth and legend — the body of immemorial lore which forms the pagan background of Judaism and ultimately of Christianity.

§02 L’idée d’un ancrage en Arabie n’est pas nouvelle

To this extent the present book, which examines some of the better known Bible stories, is in the tradition of modern Biblical criticism, but with one important difference. While Biblical scholars today generally adhere to the traditional belief that the land of the Hebrew Bible was Palestine, the present book proceeds on the assumption that this land was actually in peninsular Arabia. This concept of Biblical geography is not entirely new. A number of references to Arabia in the Bible texts are so obvious that they can hardly pass unnoticed. It has always been known, for example, that [10] the Biblical land of Sheba is present-day Yemen, and that the valley of Hadramut, which lies there, still carries the name of Biblical Hazermaveth in an Arabicized form. It has long been speculated that the Yemen could have been the original Arabian setting of the Biblical story of Job. In the nineteenth century many scholars were convinced that Arabia was much more closely connected with the Bible than was commonly thought. These scholars had read early Arabic literature where a number of intriguing references to the Israelites as an ancient West Arabian people are to be found. In 1864 the great orientalist Reinhart Dozy published a book called The Israelites of Mecca in David’s Time, in which he suggested that the lost Israelite tribe of Simeon was already firmly established in the West Arabian land of the Hijaz by King David’s time. Even before the time of Dozy, there was widespread conviction among scholars that the Biblical Israelites were originally Arabian desert tribes who later came to settle in Palestine.

§03 En 1985, mon hypothèse est reçue comme une hérésie

Today Biblical scholars scoff at the idea that the Hebrew Bible could have had much connection with Arabia beyond the undeniable fact that the ancient Israelites had a certain familiarity with the peninsula. When I first came forward with the proposition that the West Arabian highlands, rather than Palestine, were the original land of the Bible and the setting of its entire history (The Bible Came from Arabia, London, Jonathan Cape, 1985; Pan Books, 1987), my work was condemned, in the words of Professor George Mendenhall, formerly of the University of Michigan, as ‘a quixotic absurdity that cannot be taken seriously’, and ‘an extreme example of the misuse of specialized learning, based on nineteenth-century ideas that have long ago been proved false’. Yet were these ideas ever really proved false? And if so, how? Moreover, what if some major archaeological discovery, in Arabia or in Palestine, should one day prove these ideas — and my own, more extreme thesis — to be correct?

§04 Leçons de l’histoire des sciences

In the field of learning, as I see it, there is no orthodoxy and heresy, but only the search, involving reasoned conjecture tested against evidence. Until such time as proper evidence is brought to prove beyond doubt that Biblical history ran its course in Palestine, I shall continue to search for it in Arabia, not because I want it to be there, but because I remain fully convinced by reason and evidence that its dramas were played out there. Hence I venture to write a new book on the subject. Time may ultimately prove my thesis [11] correct in its essence and perhaps even in most of its details, or it may prove to be entirely wrong. If it turns out to be correct, then many an accepted concept of the ancient history of the Near East will have to undergo a radical change. If the thesis turns out to be incorrect, it will still have served a useful purpose: that of stirring modern scholarship in the field to rethink its basic position — an exercise which is always in order. The plain fact is that in our own century Biblical scholars and historians of the ancient Near East have come to form a closed circle which resents unsolicited intrusions into the field. They have built an edifice based on foundations which are, in most cases, assumptions which they attempt to pass for facts, while refusing any radical re-examination of the subject matter. To any attempt at such re-examination, they react in anger, defending the edifice they have constructed and turned into a citadel and hurling condemnations at their critics from its ramparts. This does not imply that all their theories and hypotheses are necessarily incorrect. In the final analysis they may turn out to be right on many counts. However, their insecurity in the citadel, where they have chosen to lock themselves, is paramount, as they refuse to accept in good grace external challenges which may be right or wrong.

§05 Mes arguments dans le livre précédent

For readers who have not read my previous book, The Bible Came from Arabia, it would be useful to summarize its thesis here. While undertaking an etymological study of Arabian place names, I was struck by what seemed to be a high concentration of Biblical place names in the West Arabian territory of Asir bordering the Red Sea, between the city of Taif and northern Yemen. Upon closer scrutiny, I discovered that the coordinates of the towns and villages in the area bearing Biblical names conform to a stunning degree to the coordinates given to the places mentioned by the same names in the Bible — a far more telling fact than the actual existence of the names. When I went back to the massive body of scholarly literature on Biblical geography to check my findings against it, I found this literature more confusing than illuminating. First, after more than a century of research, scholars have only found a handful of Biblical place names which actually survive in a recognizable form in Palestine. Second, many of the Palestinian places which have come to be known by Biblical names have been given these names, either anciently or recently, by itinerant pilgrims, or by scholars or archaeologists who took them, on no conclusive evidence, to be [12] Biblical sites. Third, in nearly all cases, the coordinates of the places which actually carry Biblical names in Palestine do not conform to the coordinates given to the places by the same names in the Bible, although they do in Arabia. Fourth, Biblical scholars have doubted the historicity of many events related by the Bible because they cannot easily be fitted into the geography of Palestine. Fifth, no one has yet found the slightest trace of an ancient Hebrew or Israelite presence in Egypt, and scholars remain in disagreement as to when, and by what route, the Israelites made their exodus out of Egypt, ultimately to reach Palestine. There also exists a host of other problems of Biblical geography about which scholars continue to argue, pitting one awkward hypothesis against another, but refusing to accept any suggestions from outside their closed circle. The one factor that appears to have united these scholars, since 1985, has been my own suggestion that the Bible need not have come from Palestine at all, and that one might seriously entertain the possibility that its origin is West Arabian. So far most scholars who have publicly expressed opinions about this suggestion have haughtily dismissed it as ‘worthless rubbish and nonsense from beginning to end’, often without further comment.

§06 Critique n°1 (géographie) : retrouver des toponymes ne suffit pas

Among those who cared to explain why they thought my suggestion about the relocation of Biblical geography to be absurd, a number of arguments were presented. First, some said that place names alone are not sufficient evidence to establish where Biblical history ran its course. I was not just guided by place names, but also by comparative coordinates, and furthermore, I took matters of topography, natural resources, flora and fauna, along with other matters into consideration, yet all this was invariably slurred over. Some scholars remarked that, going by place names alone, one might relocate the Bible land almost anywhere in the Near East, because of the strong similarity between the different Semitic languages from which place names in that part of the world are derived. Because this criticism was made by Biblical scholars of recognized eminence, there were many who accepted it. Before he could have read a word of my book, Professor James Sauer of the University of Pennsylvania, president of the American Schools of Oriental Research, permitted himself to announce to the world through the pages of Newsweek that, going by my method, one could demonstrate that Israelite history had its geographical setting in Kenya, and that the Biblical [13] Jerusalem was actually Nairobi. This statement was made in September 1984, more than a year before my book was first published. What Professor Sauer and others who argued against the validity of my method were unaware of was the fact that I had done my homework carefully on this point. Before daring to consider my thesis about the West Arabian origin of the Bible, let alone advance it, I had examined the map of every part of the Near East in detail to determine whether or not I could find any concentrations of Biblical place names, no matter how small, in areas other than West Arabia, until I was completely satisfied that there were none. Outside West Arabia the only territory in which I could find an appreciable, though small, concentration of Biblical place names, but with coordinates that do not fit Biblical accounts, was Palestine. If Professor Sauer seriously believes that going by place names, he can make a case for relocating the Biblical Jerusalem in Nairobi, there is nothing to prevent him from trying.

§07 Critique n°2 (philologie) : l’excès de métathèses

Second, there were many critics who pointed out that the parallels I draw between the place names mentioned in the Bible and those that survive in West Arabia are frequently not valid. John Day, editor of the Oxford Bible Atlas, apart from generally condemning them as ‘total nonsense’, declared them to be ‘inadmissible on philological grounds’. There were those who maintained, for example, that I make too much of metathesis — the change in the order of consonants in a given word, whereby a name such as Hermon (hrmn) could become Hemron (hmrn). My critics here, granting that they are experts in the Semitic languages, were simply dishonest, because they must know better; their aim was to confuse non-specialists on a technicality with which only a specialist would be familiar. I will cite here the simplest example of metathesis between Biblical Hebrew and modern Arabic. In Biblical Hebrew the word for ‘with’ is ‘m (vocalized as ‘am). In Arabic, it is m‘ (vocalized as ma‘). All one has to do is go through an etymological dictionary of Biblical Hebrew to discover the countless cases in which metathesis is involved in the consonantal structure of words having the same meanings, or related meanings, between the different Semitic languages. Moreover, it is because metathesis is a generally acknowledged phenomenon of comparative and diachronic linguistics that the technical term for it exists. Centuries before modern western scholars called it ‘metathesis’, the Arabic dictionaries had labelled it istibdāl.

§08 …et l’excès de changements consonantiques

[14] Also taking advantage of the unfamiliarity of non-specialist readers with Semitic linguistics, a number of my critics cast doubts on the comparisons I made between Biblical and modern Arabian place names in which changes of consonants are involved. These have been done according to a pattern of consonantal changes between the different Semitic languages, and between different dialects of the same language (see table preceding Preface). The validity of such changes has always been accepted by scholars in the field. Again, the standard etymological dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew are replete with examples of such consonantal changes between one Semitic language and another in the same word. Here also, my critics were plainly dishonest. For example, they accept, without batting an eyelid, the identification of the Biblical Bethel (byt’l) with the modern Palestinian village of Beitin (bytn), and of the Biblical Gibeon (gb‘n) with the modern Palestinian village of al-Jib (ǧb), although the change of the Hebrew l into the Arabic n to turn Bethel into Beitin is not a commonly attested consonantal change between Hebrew and Arabic, and the name of al-Jib actually lacks two consonants that are found in the name Gibeon. In my own studies, I identify Bethel as the West Arabian Batīlah (btl) or Buṭaylah (btyl), and Gibeon as the West Arabian Jib ‘an (ǧb‘n), whose names, in their Biblical and modern Arabic forms, are absolutely identical in consonantal structure. On the other hand, where I do recognize consonantal changes, as in the case of the Biblical Cush (kwš) being the modern West Arabian Kuthah (kwṯ), I follow the rules of consonantal changes between Hebrew and Arabic which my most ardent critics are bound to recognize as eminently valid. Why they make a point of not recognizing these generally accepted rules in the case of my work is a matter which I leave for them to explain, if they can. In the small minority of cases where I do make comparisons between Biblical and Arabian place names which do not strictly follow the accepted rules regarding consonantal change, I am careful to point out that such comparisons are no more than guesses subject to reconsideration. My predecessors in the field, who identified Bethel with the Palestinian Beitin, and Gibeon with the Palestinian al-Jib, presented their identifications, which are linguistically untenable on more than one count, as definitive and beyond doubt.

§09 Critique n°3 (sociolinguistique) : l’hébreux n’est pas une langue morte

One of the first critics to attack my book in the press, shortly after its publication, was Tudor Parfitt, lecturer in Hebrew at the [15] School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. In an article politically entitled ‘The hijacking of Israel’, which he wrote for the Sunday Times, Parfitt dismissed my work as utterly worthless on a number of grounds — among others that I treated Biblical Hebrew as a dead language whose texts have to be deciphered afresh, whereas Hebrew’, he claims, has been in continuous existence as a living language from Biblical times to the present day. This criticism was echoed from Cambridge University by no less eminent a scholar than Regius Professor John Emerton in the pages of the Guardian. The implication of this criticism was that I had no reason to doubt the validity of the traditional, or Masoretic, vocalization of the Bible texts, arguing that the Jewish scholars called the Masoretes, who undertook the vocalization of the consonantal Hebrew of the Bible in Palestine and Iraq between the sixth and tenth centuries AD, were people to whom Hebrew was a language of religious scholarship and not one of common daily speech. As it happens, I am far from being the person who actually discovered that Biblical Hebrew ceased to be a language of day to day speech long before the time of the Masoretes. Any article on the history of the Hebrew language in any standard encyclopaedia will say as much. The normal estimate is that Hebrew ceased to be a living language in about the third century BC. I would say that the death of Hebrew as a spoken language occurred a century or two earlier, but I would not split hairs on this point.

§10 …et la vocalisation masorétique est fiable

As for the doubts about the Masoretic vocalization of the Bible texts, they have existed since the earliest days of Biblical criticism, when it was suggested, for example, that the ‘ravens’ that brought bread and meat every morning and evening to the prophet Elijah, while he was hiding in the wilderness, could not really have been ‘ravens’ (‘rbym, vocalized by the Masoretes to read ‘ōrbīm) but Arabs (‘rbym, revocalized to read ‘arbīm) from the nearby desert. It has been standard practice since then for scholars engaged in the textual criticism of the Bible to doubt the Masoretic vocalization of problematical Biblical words and phrases now and then. What I do is go all the way and read the Hebrew Bible in its unvocalized text, paying no regard to the Masoretic vocalization, in order to discover what sense I can make out of it by myself, before turning to find out what sense the Masoretes had made of it. I simply carry to its logical conclusion what scholars have been doing for nearly two [16] centuries. In most cases my own reading of the Bible turns out to be no different from that of the Masoretes. In a number of cases, however, it does turn out to be radically different, and I explain in detail the reasons. If Emerton, Parfitt and others disagree with me, where I disagree with the Masoretes, they would also have to go into detailed explanation, in which case they might convince me of my errors of Biblical interpretation. If they choose to make sweeping condemnations of my Biblical readings, without bothering to explain their reasons, I shall take it that they have none.

§11 Critique n°4 (archéologie) : la Science a tranché pour la Palestine

Then there is the question of archaeology. My critics have generally maintained that the case for Palestine being the true land of the Bible has been fully proven on this basis. Professor James Sauer was emphatic on this point: ‘Archaeologists have come up with incontrovertible evidence in the ground that Hebron and Jerusalem are where the Bible says [sic] that they are.’ As I pointed out in The Bible Came from Arabia, there are a number of serious archaeologists and other scholars who disagree, and who have expressed unequivocal opinions on this matter. The fact that jar handles have been found in some Palestinian sites bearing Canaanite inscriptions that say lmlk ḥbrn (read to mean ‘to the King of Hebron’), and such like, prove nothing — certainly nothing conclusive. One might for instance ask w ho was the Biblical King of Hebron in question. Moreover, one might read lmlk ḥbrn, for example, to mean ‘for the ownership of Hebron’ (an attested personal name) rather than ‘to the King of Hebron’, especially as jars of ordinary earthenware are hardly worthy of dedication to a king. Granted, archaeological excavations in West Arabia are needed to provide more conclusive proof or disproof of my thesis that the land of the Hebrew Bible was in fact there. Archaeologically, however, the case for Palestine, after decades of intense excavation, remains completely unproven, and, moreover, the comparative toponymical evidence is far more against than for it. Biblical archaeologists are hardly ready to admit this, but there are scientific archaeologists who do so. In doubting the validity of Biblical archaeology to date, I am satisfied that I am in good company.

§12 Conclusion : traiter la Bible hébraïque comme de l’histoire

Let me set the record straight: I do not pretend in any way that my own findings in the field of Biblical geography and general Biblical study are, beyond doubt, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. On the other hand, I do maintain that they [17] are findings whose possible validity must be seriously considered rather than hastily accepted, or even more hastily dismissed. I arrived at these findings by following a method which I described in detail in the second chapter of The Bible Came from Arabia. My critics, in anger rather than in reason, have dismissed my method as a non-method. Yet by pursuing this method, I have arrived at conclusions which have a distinct advantage over the standing propositions of modern ‘Bible Science’: they provide an explanation of Biblical geography which facilitates rather than complicates the understanding of the Hebrew Bible as history. Some of my ardent critics, in their more reflective moments, have admitted this. Therefore, I shall venture to present interested readers with this second book of Bible studies, which I hope they will find more readable than the first, where the more tedious technicalities of geography and linguistics had to be covered.

In ending this preface I must acknowledge the assistance of four people who helped me in my work: John Munro of the American University of Beirut, who edited the first draft of the completed text; Leila Salibi and Margo Matta, who made the first typescripts of it; and Josephine Zananiri, who edited the book in its final form before it was sent to press.