Lecture 2 Canaanite Jerusalem

     Jerusalem's earliest settlement dates back to around 4000BCE and the main factors that played in this settlement were water availability, with the Gihon spring, agriculture, and trade available through the Watershed Highway. There isn't a lot of archaeological evidence for the existence of Jerusalem as a city during this time, but we do get some evidence dating around 1900BCE. The Exercration Texts mention the enemies of Egypt, and in there we see "Rusalimum" or Jerusalem, giving non-biblical evidence to the existence of Jerusalem. We get further evidence of Jerusalem's existence through the Egyptians. The Amarna Letters, which date back to 1350BCE, are tablets with written text from rulers of other states, including Jerusalem, to the Egyptian Pharoah.
      We get our earliest Biblical account of Jerusalem is Genesis 14. It mentions Abraham visiting this city, named Salem, where a man, both king and priest, named Melchizedek blesses him. We interpret Salem to be the city of Jerusalem, and so we have a biblical account of the Jerusalem dating back to Abraham. An important part to the history of Jerusalem is how did the Israelites get to the land around city. The Bible has two different accounts of how this happened. Joshua 10, 21, and 24 state that they killed everyone, destroying everything, while Joshua 15 and Judges1 state that no one was killed, and that the Jebusites remained in the city. The Bible, even though confusing, is one explanation, with immigration being another one. What does it mean when a event in the bible has two different explanations, especially in the same book? I thought it possibly meant trying to make the Israelites look powerful and strong, but at the same time not completely evil by killing everyone, so the writer changes the story later on in the same book, or someone else changes it in Judges. Or another explanation could have been that there was more than one writer on the Book of Joshua, leading to two different accounts of the same event, depending on what they saw or heard and at what time during the conquest.

I think it fits the post, because the song talks about taking the world, while the Israelites may have tried taking Jebusite land. "Lupin" by Kara