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AMRAPHEL

(Heb. ʾamrāpel)

King of Shinar and one of the four kings from the East who joined together under Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, to attack the five kings in the Dead Sea Valley (Gen. 14:1, 9). This coalition plundered Sodom and Gomorrah before taking Abraham’s nephew Lot captive. Abraham gathered together a force that defeated the coalition and rescued Lot and the other captives.

Shinar, where Amraphel resided, was later identified in the OT with Babylon (Isa. 11:11; Dan. 1:2; Zech. 5:11), while the Targums and 1QapGen 21:23 rendered it as Babel. Amraphel was once identified with the Babylonian king Hammurabi, under the assumption that Amraphel reflected an inaccurate Hebrew rendering of a variant of the cuneiform name. If correct, this would historically situate Abraham between 1728 and 1686 b.c.e. No documentation, however, exists that Hammurabi ever campaigned in Palestine. Others use the Akkadian “Chedorlaomer texts,” the so-called Spartoli Tablets, to equate Amraphel with Marduk-apaliddina II (Merodach-baladan), chief of the Chaldean tribe of Bît-yakin, who twice seized the Babylonian throne from Assyria (722-710 and 703). These theories remain philogically unconvincing, although the geographical details and possible Akkadian influences support the basic credibility of the narrative. Most likely, Amraphel was a member of a coalition of minor figures, whom Abraham could rout with no more than 318 warriors.

Bibliography. M. C. Astour, “Political and Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis 14 and in its Babylonian Sources,” in Biblical Motifs, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 65-112.

Kenneth Atkinson

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

AMRAPHEL

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)