Chapter Three - The Fraternal Alliance in the Southern Levant

Summary

Biblical indications suggest that the first Israelites participated in a broad movement of emancipation from Amorite hegemony in the Southern Levant. It included all the newly emerging nations in a “fraternal alliance” of solidarity and mutual non-invasion. The polemic around the Israelite conquest of the Amorite kingdom of Heshbon that originally belonged to the Moabites exemplifies this alliance and its duties. Further indications – as well as traces of YHWH’s presence in Midian, Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and even Philistia – reveal that this god sponsored the whole alliance. YHWH was therefore the great deity promoting the movement of emancipation from Amorite hegemony. Consequently, despite Amorite affinities emanating from a few biblical sources, YHWH apparently belonged to the pre-Amorite indigenous horizon.