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Shishaq (Šîšaq שׁישׁק) is the biblical Hebrew form of the ancient Egyptian name of a pharaoh. In English translations of the Bible, it is typically written Shishak.

Identification of Shishaq

In the very early years after the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, on chronological, historical, and linguistic grounds, nearly all Egyptologists identified Shishaq with Shoshenq I. This position was maintained by most scholars ever since, and is still the majority position.

However, the Egyptologist David Rohl, controversially proposed a massive revision of the traditional chronology of the ancient Near East, and attempted to identify Shishaq with Ramesses II. A few scholars (such as Peter James), who accept Rohl's criticism of identifying Shishaq with Shoshenq I while not his other theories, have sought to identify Shishaq with one of the other Ramesseses of this period with varying success. The so-called "James" chronology was first developed by Michael Sanders and published in "Catastrophism and Ancient History" in 1985 many years before James published his revision.

David Rohl, and other followers of the New Chronology, assert that the identification of Shishaq as Shoshenq I is based solely on a reading made by Jean-François Champollion of the text of Shoshenq’s Triumphal Relief near the Bubastite Portal of the temple of Karnak at Thebes. There, in a list of cities Shoshenq I had boasted he conquered, Champollion had read the 29th city from the list as y-w-d-h-m-r-k. He then surmised that this could mean יְהוּדָמַלְכוּת (Yehûdâ malekôṯ)—"Judah (the) Kingdom (or "Kings")"—and concluded this list referred to the biblical Shishaq's invasion of Judah. However, Wolfgang Müller (building on a related proposal by Heinrich Brugsch) later showed that y-w-d-h-m-r-k (yud-ha-merek) should be read in Hebrew as יַדְ־הַמֶּלֶך (yad ha-malek) meaning "Monument (lit. "hand") of the King", to the king of Judah.

Further, much controversy has resulted because from the list of cities in this inscription it appears that the target of Shoshenq's campaign was not the heartland of the kingdom of Judah (which is what the Bible seems to imply), but the northern cities that became the kingdom of Israel. It could be Shoshenq only listed the cities he either destroyed, or whose garrisons he defeated in support of the break-away kingdom of Israel. It may be, however, that the text only lists cities that the Egyptians regarded as under their political control, and so not intended to be read as an itinerary or list of directly conquered cities at all, which would be in line with similar lists from elsewhere in Egypt.

Rohl further argued that Shishaq does not properly equate to how the Egyptian name Sheshonq would have been spelled by the contemporary Hebrews, and put forth his own identification of Shishaq with Ramesses II, based on the hypocoristic form sysw which he claimed was used to refer to Ramesses and abused by the Hebrews into sysq (a pun on verbal root שׁקק šqq, the Hebrew word for "to attack, fall upon, storm").

In response to Rohl's theory, Egyptologists such as Kenneth Kitchen, have pointed out that no other known king of Egypt fits the identification as well as Shoshenq I. Redating the flourit of Ramesses II three centuries later would not only conflict with the date of the Battle of Qadesh and complicate the chronology of Hittite history, it conflicts with the very solid chronology of Assyrian history. Rohl's identification of Shishaq with Ramesses on philological grounds is weaker than with Shoshenq: for it to agree with Shoshenq, the "n" must be dropped—which automatically happens in Biblical Hebrew before a consonant—but for it to agree with sysw, a "q" must be added, which does not correspond to any known phonological rule in Biblical Hebrew. Furthermore, in Northwest Semitic languages (such as Hebrew) /š/ always is used to record Egyptian /š/ and never /s/ (as would be the case for sysw).

Shishaq's Reign

He is best known for his campaign through Palestine, as recorded in the Bible (1 Kings 11:40; 14:25; 2 Chronicles 12:2-9). Shishaq had provided refuge to Jeroboam during the later years of Solomon's reign, and upon Solomon's death, Jeroboam became king of the breakaway tribes in the north, which became the kingdom of Israel. In the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign (commonly dated between 926 and 917 BC), Shishaq swept through the kingdom of Judah with a powerful army, in support of his ally. Shishaq captured a number of cities of that kingdom, including Jerusalem, where he pillaged the temple and the royal palace, and carried away the shields of gold which Solomon had made. Although Judah was humbled, hostilities still continued between the two kingdoms; yet this was the only recorded intervention of a third party into the affairs of these two kingdoms during Rehoboam's reign.

Shishaq's name

Texts written in old languages seem to indicate that the first vowel was both long and round, and the final vowel was short. For example, the name is written in the Hebrew Bible as שׁישׁק . The variant readings in Hebrew, which are due to confusion between the letters < י > yôd and < ו > wāw that are particularly common in the Masoretic Text, indicate that the first vowel was long and received emphasis in pronunciation. The Septuagint uses Σουσακιμ , derived from the marginal reading שׁושׁק of Hebrew. This indicates during the 2nd century BC Hebrew-speakers pronounced the name with an initial long open vowel.

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