Abraham’s date is not based on any of this. It’s based on whatever is needed to make a claim about him sound plausible.
This was a guy who lived to be 175, so...
I hear what you're saying and understand. BUT, the Abraham of the Bible based upon biblical chronology places him squarely in the jaws of death.
Death by Abraham!
Death to the Book of Abraham.
Screw you, John Gee, you liar for the Lord and WORST Egyptologist of the 21st century who will go down in history as a traitor and a liar for Mormonism.
John Gee, the Mormon Egyptologist was the very worst of the worst.
Symmachus wrote:
Why bring in Hittite gods to the Egyptian court? That's ludicrous, you'd more likely have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump play golf together at Mar-a-Lago and Elizabeth Warren serving them sandwiches.
Since we're just playing word association games, I'll take Abraham's connection to Arabia via Islamic tradition, which Gee loves to exploit elsewhere. It's more likely than Hittite gods at the Egyptian court, and in any case the supposed time of Abraham would have been a few centuries before the earliest attested Hittite anyway. Very bizarre.
But let's try our word association game in three minutes or less. My hypothesis is that these were not names or titles but references to the gods of people's and places, which actually fits the phraseology of the text quite well, as Gadianton points out.
The god of Elkenah = the god ("El" in Semitic) of the Banu Kinana, a tribe in Arabia
The god of Korash = the god of the Quraish tribe, of which Muhammad was a member in later centuries.
Remember that Abraham established the Kaaba at Mecca, so this makes sense, right? My theory is that the Egyptians Abraham was encountering were from the second intermediate period, when the Semitic Hysksos dominated the country, and they likely included contingents of Arabian tribes. That is how you get their gods there.
The god of Libnah = the god of the city of Libnah in western Israel, in Canaan, where Abraham sojourned. The rule of the Hyksos was preceded by the influx of Canaanites into the eastern delta.
The god of Mahmackrah = an Egyptian pronunciation of the Arabic mamlaka, which means "kingdom," or the chief god in the Hyksos pantheon. (r/l were in variation in some dialects and stages of Egyptian, so no problem with the linguistics here, and the transposition of a liquid consonant presents no problems; it's very common cross-linguistically, especially when you have a bilingual society, which you would have had with the Hyksos). Or it could it could be a nomen loci, with an unattested mamakrāh in Semitic, which would mean "a place of selling." Remember that Abraham came down to Egypt because of famine—that is, to buy food.
This all makes more sense than the Egyptians' importation of Hittite gods into the royal court, especially a bag-god (as the two great powers of the near east in the mid second millennium, they were constantly at war with each other until the end of that millennium). I fudge the chronology too—since when do apologists take pains with chronology—but I still manage to connect Abraham with established traditions unknown to Joseph Smith and without relying on a complete absurdity.
You should consider writing for Interpreter. by the way, I had a big laugh over the "bag god" when I skimmed Gee's paper. Funny that stuck out for you enough to mention it. ;)
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
