Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ARABIA

A term used to refer to an area at times encompassing the north Syrian desert (cf. Paul’s detour “into Arabia” after his revelation, Gal. 1:17), at times the Sinai (the location of Mt. Sinai in “Arabia,” Gal. 4:25), and anomalously to gloss Saba in LXX Ps. 72:10, 15. Biblical Arabia was certainly not construed as the entirety of the Arabian Peninsula, but may be likened to an upright parallelogram extending from the oasis of Dedan in the southwest, across to the Jawf oasis at the southern end of the Wadi Sirhan, up into the Syrian desert, across to the borders of Palestine and the Negeb, and down through the Hijaz. In this respect it was not dissimilar to the much later Roman province of Arabia. As for the inhabitants of Arabia, both the biblical and extrabiblical sources, especially the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian records, make it clear that Arabia was populated by a variety of groups and contained sedentary communities living in cities and towns as well as agriculturalists and pastoralists.

A number of the North Arabian toponyms and ethnonyms attested in Neo-Assyrian sources can be identified with names mentioned in the OT as well. Thus, the people of Massaʾ (^uruMasʿayya) who brought tribute to Tiglath-pileser III are identical with the OT Massa (Gen. 25:14; 1 Chr. 1:30), listed as a son of Ishmael and hailing from a town not far from Tema, as shown by the reference to a war against Massaʾ (ms[ʾ]) in an inscription from Jabal Ghunaym. Tema, an important oasis settlement on the route from Dedan to Dumah (Gen. 25:14), itself appears in both Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian sources (^uruTemayya), as well as in the list of the sons of Ishmael (Gen. 25:15; 1 Chr. 1:30; cf. Job 6:19; Isa. 21:14; Jer. 25:23). The homeland of the “princes of Kedar” (Ezek. 27:21) appears in Neo-Assyrian sources as kurQid-ri, ^kurQi-id-ri, ^kurQí-id-ri, ^kurQa-da-ri; it is clear that the center of this region was Dumah (Gen. 25:14; Akk. uruA-du-um-ma-tu, ^uruA-du-mu-u, ^uruA-du-mu-tu) in the Jawf oasis of modern northern Saudi Arabia, although Kedarite tribes ranged more widely from the borders of Mesopotamia to the fringes of Palestine. The Idibaʾilu (^lúIdibaʾilayya) are the Abdeel, one of the sons of Ishmael (Gen. 25:13; 1 Chr. 1:29) and, according to LXX Gen. 25:3, a son of Dedan. The Hajappa (^uruHayappâyya) can be identified with Ephah (Gen. 25:4; 1 Chr. 1:33), a son of Midian, and sometimes identified with the site of Ruwwafa in northwestern Saudi Arabia. The inclusion of Sabaeans (^lúSabaʿayya) among the peoples from the North Arabian desert who brought tribute to Assyria suggests the existence of a northern Saba or, at the very least, of Sabaean tribes in North Arabia as well as in the south.

The OT refers variously to ʿărab/ʿărāb (Jer. 25:24; Ezek. 27:21; 2 Chr. 9:14; Isa. 21:13) or ʿarḇiyyīm/ʿarḇīʾīm/ʿarḇīm (2 Chr. 17:11; 21:16; 22:1; 26:7; Neh. 4:7[MT 4:1]), i.e. “Arabs.” It has been customary either to identify these as some sort of bedouin, nomads, pastoralists, tent-dwellers, or camel-breeders, or to derive the terms from ʿărāḇâ, meaning “steppe” or “desert.” Other scholars point to a number of cases (e.g., Jer. 25:24; 2 Chr. 9:14 compared with the par. 1 Kgs. 10:15) where a phrase like “all the kings of ʿereḇ that dwell in the desert” is opposed to “all the kings of ʿărāḇ.” The Hebrew root ʿereḇ, meaning “mixture,” seems thus to be used to gloss ʿăraḇ, a term for the North Arabian desert dwellers, whether sedentary or mobile, used also in Neo-Assyrian accounts of campaigns against Arabia (^kurArb-a-a, ^kurAra/i/ub-, ^matAribi) and the Arabs (^lúArba-a-a, ^lúArab-), and when speaking of the tribute brought to Assyria by tribes from this region. The “mixed” nature of the ʿăraḇ may explain why they are not mentioned in the OT genealogies. It is important to remember, however, that these “Arabs” were not confined to Arabia, but appear everywhere from the Fertile Crescent to Mesopotamia.

The importance of Arabia for the inhabitants of Israel undoubtedly lay less in the wealth of its herds (cf. the 7700 rams and 7700 male goats brought by the Arabians to Jehoshaphat, 2 Chr. 17:11; cf. Ezek. 27:21) than in the wealth (e.g., gold and silver, 2 Chr. 9:14) derived from its position astride the route which linked the frankincense-bearing and trading states of South Arabia, such as Saba, and the Mediterranean world. Furthermore, it is difficult to comprehend the preoccupation of successive Neo-Assyrian monarchs, and the extended campaign in the region by Nabonidus, if it were only for the pastoral and agricultural produce of the area, all of which was available in Assyria and Babylonia. High-quality frankincense, on the other hand, was a monopoly of South Arabia, and even if other sources existed (e.g., Somalia, India) these generally produced an inferior quality.

That “Arabia” was never unified politically is patently clear from the Neo-Assyrian sources, for even if several Arabian queens are mentioned there, nothing suggests that any of them ruled over a unified country identifiable as “Arabia.” Similarly, when the Bible refers to “all the kings of Arabia” (e.g., 2 Chr. 9:14; cf. Peshitta malkē ʿarbāyē; Vulg. reges Arabiae) these should probably be understood in the sense of numerous petty sheikhs, each based in one of the towns of Arabia and enjoying the allegiance of a relatively small and geographically circumscribed population. The decentralized nature of biblical Arabia accounts for the multitude of ethnonyms which can be assigned to the area, and the absence of a “king of all the Arabs,” a title never attested in the Bible, confirms that “Arabia” never had a political meaning.

Bibliography. G. W. Bowersock, Roman Arabia (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); I. Ephʿal, The Ancient Arabs (Leiden, 1982); J. Retsö, “The Earliest Arabs,” Orientalia Suecana 38/39 (1989-1990): 131-39; R. Zadok, “Arabians in Mesopotamia during the Late-Assyrian, Chaldean, Achaemenian and Hellenistic Periods,” ZDMG 131 (1981): 42-84; “On Early Arabians in the Fertile Crescent,” Tel Aviv 17 (1990): 223-31.

D. T. Potts

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

ARABIA

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)