Amalekites = Nabateans?

  1. Josephus mentions Petra, previously know as “Arce”), as belonging to the “Amalekites.” And obviously, Petra is inhabited by Nabataeans.
  2. However, This was just a guess by Josephus. The Amalekites were a people from the distant past and Josephus connected them to the people who lived in the same region during his lifetime (though the biblical evidence suggests that the Amalekites were located in the Sinai area near Rephidim and Timna). Amalek (עמלק) does not have any clear Hebrew or West Semitic derivation. The DDD (Karel van der Toorn, et al.) cites an article by Gorg associating the name with a mountain deity ḥmrq in the Leiden Magical Papyrus “related to a mountainous area probably in the Eastern Sinai” (p. 26), which fits with the localization of the Amalekites, but this is philologically difficult as well since Egyptian ḥ is not the equivalent of `ayin.

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