Shishak as Sheshonq I burnt the cities circa 950-947 BCE and not
925 BCE
Koot van Wyk, Chongni, South Korea
Shirley Ben-Dor Evian (Jan 2011) wrote on “Shishak’s Karnak Relief –
More Than Just Name-Rings” in Egypt, Canaan and Israel: History, Imperialism,
Ideology and Literature. Proceedings of a Conference at the University of
Haifa, 3-7 May 2009. Series: Culture and History of the Ancient Near East,
Volume: 52: 9-22 especially page 9. What I like immediately about her writing is the sentence that said
in her Abstract: “The interpretation of these novelties as ideological markers
points to an earlier dating [my italics] of the military campaign,
sometime during the first decade [my italics] of Shishak’s reign” The
Abstract was downloaded from http://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004210691/Bej.9789004194939.i-370_005.xml. Biblical and Egyptian sources are needed to discuss this pharaoh. 1
Kings 14:25-27; 2 Chronicles 12:1-12 and then there is the Bubastis Relief of
Sheshonq I at the Karnak Temple showing the lists of cities conquered. Many scholars have discussed various aspects of Shishak of the
Bible or Sheshonq I with opinions rolling back or forth like Shishak is not
Sheshonq I or Shishak is Sheshonq I or Sheshonq I merely copied or plagiarized
his data from Ramses II (W. Albright and ) or not (M. Noth) or the events in
Kings should be dated later to the ninth century BCE (I. Finkelstein of Tel
Aviv University) or philologically the Shishak of the Bible should rather be
linked to events of Ramesses II or III rather than Sheshonq I but a rebuttal of
this was a reinvestigation by Tory Leiland Sagrillo on the basis of rare hypocoristica
for Ramesess: ssysw, ssw, and ss. He concluded that to identify biblical
Shishak with any king named Ramesses are “unwarranted and implausible” (T. L.
Sagrillo, 2015. Shoshenq I and Biblical Šîšaq: a philological defense of their
traditional equation* In James & Van der Veen (Eds) Solomon and Shishak (2015).
BICANE Colloquim at Cambridge 2011, pp. 61-81 especially page 61). Traditionally
as far as chronology is concerned, many scholars have concluded that 925 BCE is
the date of the campaign of Sheshonq I and that is the date for the Bubastis
Relief. As Sagrillo indicated, it is based on a communis opinio. This communis opinio is what I seriously challenge on the
basis of the Bible. The Pharaoh of Egypt, says the Bible, came to Palestine, burnt the
cities and gave Gezer among others, to Solomon as a gift and his daughter in
wedding. The listing of Gezer on Bubastis campaign could not have taken place
in 925 BCE when Solomon was already a skeleton. The fifth year of Rehoboam was
in 925 BCE. Solomon was history. So the date of this event should have been when the contract of
Solomon with Hiram expired after the building works of 20 years since 970 BCE
(start of reign of Solomon) thus 950-947 BCE because he built three years on
his Egyptian’s wife’s palace, and when Pharaoh came and burnt the cities he
could only give the gift and daughter as wife at that time and not later. Hiram
was angry with the gift but had to give cities and pay talents of gold tax from
that time on. Maybe the daughter was embossed about the actions of her dad and
intervened for him to mediate the contract situation between Hiram and Solomon.
Nevertheless Solomon could rebuild Gezer fortifications and those fortifications
were the subject of William Dever/Randy Younker Excavations and findings at
Gezer in 1990 archaeological dig in which yours truly also participated.