Nero's Boot

A tribe, if large enough, can be referred to as a nation. Several Native American tribes formed alliances and such that were loosely considered "nations."

--also, ancient cultures over-embellished to make themselves look better NB

Minimalist

The word on the stele, ysrir, appears no where else in Egyptian writing. The stele itself is written, obviously, in hieroglyphs. The determination that ysrir meant "Israel" seems to be one of those annoying "sounds-like" attributions which has nothing else to support it. Author, John Romer, recounts Flinders-Petrie's finding of the stele and the rather off-the-cuff method for making the determination. Meanwhile:

http://hotcupofjoe.blogspot.com/2007...naan-part.html

By this point in time ( c 1207 BCE) Egypt had dominated Canaan for 3 centuries. Not a single inscription makes any reference to ysrir before or after that time.

It is a puzzle. Equally puzzling is the rest of the stele which is in the form of a poem approximately 150 lines long as translated. The first 140 lines record Merneptah as heroically slaughtering the Libyans and their Sea People allies with his "strong arm of Ra" and other such boilerplate language. Oddly, all of that is missing from the last ten lines which includes the ysrir reference and never once says that Merneptah conquered anything in Canaan.

I'll see if I can still find the Romer reference.

Nero's Boot

A pious forgery?

--"Lying for God," maybe? NB

Casper

It is simpler than that; a small city state can be considered a nation where a region filled only with nomads could be overall much larger and more populaous and before really being considered a nation (after all, a nation implies centralized authority and a fixed population center).

If the stele exagerrates the destruction of Israel, then the others must likely be exagerrated too, in proportion with their status as rivals, right?

The Canaanite campaign is given little mention, and in that mention Israel (or whatever it is) gets a diminished title compared to Ashkelon and Gezer. Even Yanoam would have been left in rubble because the stele depicts it as a city, but poor old israel doesn't even get that much.

Besides that, it also kind of upsets more than it fixes, because Ashkelon in this context was wrested away from the sea peoples, who had wrested control from the canaanites, who could not have been hebrews and so it places the exodus at a very inconvenient time relative to other mentioned campaigns like Jericho, but LOL!

Minimalist

I don't think so, NB. More like "wishful thinking" by early archaeologists who were, more often than not, using the bible as a tool.

Here is the comment from Romer's book:

http://mailstar.net/archaeology-bible.html

Minimalist

P.S.

Here is a translation of the entire stele.

http://bibledudes.com/biblical-studi...ranslation.php