Shishak, also spelled Shishaq or Susac (, Tiberian: , ), was, according to the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' pharaoh Pharaoh (, ; Egyptian language, Egyptian: ''wikt:pr ꜥꜣ, pr ꜥꜣ''; Meroitic language, Meroitic: 𐦲𐦤𐦧, ; Biblical Hebrew: ''Parʿō'') was the title of the monarch of ancient Egypt from the First Dynasty of Egypt, First Dynasty ( ...

who sacked

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

in the 10th century BC. He is usually identified with the pharaoh Shoshenq I.Troy Leiland Sagrillo. 2015.
Shoshenq I and biblical Šîšaq: A philological defense of their traditional equation
. In ''Solomon and Shishak: Current perspectives from archaeology, epigraphy, history and chronology; proceedings of the third BICANE colloquium held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 26–27 March 2011'', edited by Peter J. James, Peter G. van der Veen, and Robert M. Porter. British Archaeological Reports (International Series) 2732. Oxford: Archaeopress. 61–81. He supported

Jeroboam Jeroboam I (; Hebrew language, Hebrew: ''Yārŏḇʿām''; ), frequently cited Jeroboam son of Nebat, was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the first king of the northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria), Kingdom of Israel following a Jeroboam's Revol ...

against king Rehoboam of Judah, and led a successful campaign through that country with a large army. Shishak did not destroy Jerusalem but took the treasures of Solomon's Temple and the king's house. His campaign records, found in the Bubastite Portal at

Karnak The Karnak Temple Complex, commonly known as Karnak (), comprises a vast mix of temples, pylons, chapels, and other buildings near Luxor, Egypt. Construction at the complex began during the reign of Senusret I (reigned 1971–1926 BC) in the ...

and a relief at el-Hibeh, list several conquered towns but fail to mention Jerusalem. The omission has sparked various theories, with some scholars questioning the historical accuracy of the Biblical account and others suggesting possible explanations for the omission. Shishak has also appeared in popular culture, notably in the film '' Raiders of the Lost Ark''.

Biblical narrative

Shishak's campaign against the

Kingdom of Judah The Kingdom of Judah was an Israelites, Israelite kingdom of the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. Centered in the highlands to the west of the Dead Sea, the kingdom's capital was Jerusalem. It was ruled by the Davidic line for four centuries ...

and his sack of Jerusalem are recounted in the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' 1 Kings 14:25 and 2 Chronicles 12:1–12. According to these accounts, Shishak had provided refuge to

during the later years of

Solomon Solomon (), also called Jedidiah, was the fourth monarch of the Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy), Kingdom of Israel and Judah, according to the Hebrew Bible. The successor of his father David, he is described as having been the penultimate ...

's reign, and upon Solomon's death, Jeroboam became king of the tribes in the north, which separated from Judah to become the Kingdom of Israel. In the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign, commonly dated ca. 926 BC, Shishak swept through Judah with a powerful army of 60,000 horsemen and 1,200 chariots, in support of Jeroboam. According to , he was supported by the Lubim (Libyans), the Sukkiim, and the

Kush KUSH 1600 AM is a radio station licensed to Cushing, Oklahoma. The station broadcasts a Full service format, consisting of local and national talk, sports Sport is a physical activity or game, often competitive and organized, tha ...

ites ("

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

ns" in the

Septuagint The Septuagint ( ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy (), and abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Biblical Hebrew. The full Greek ...

). Shishak took away treasures of the Solomon's Temple and the king's house, as well as shields of gold which Solomon had made; Rehoboam replaced them with

bronze Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals (such as phosphorus) or metalloid ...

ones. According to Second Chronicles,

Flavius Josephus Flavius Josephus (; , ; ), born Yosef ben Mattityahu (), was a History of the Jews in the Roman Empire, Roman–Jewish historian and military leader. Best known for writing ''The Jewish War'', he was born in Jerusalem—then part of the Judaea ...

in ''

Antiquities of the Jews ''Antiquities of the Jews'' (; , ''Ioudaikē archaiologia'') is a 20-volume historiographical work, written in Greek, by the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus in the 13th year of the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, which was 94 CE. It cont ...

'' adds to this a contingent of 400,000 infantrymen. According to Josephus, his army met with no resistance throughout the campaign, taking Rehoboam's most fortified cities "without fighting". Finally, he conquered Jerusalem without resistance, because "Rehoboam was afraid." Shishak did not destroy Jerusalem, but forced King Rehoboam of Judah to strip the Temple and his treasury of their gold and movable treasures.Antiquities of the Jews - Book VIII
Chapter X. Shishak was also related by marriage to Jeroboam. The wife of Jeroboam is unnamed in the

Masoretic Text The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; ) is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (''Tanakh'') in Rabbinic Judaism. The Masoretic Text defines the Jewish canon and its precise letter-text, with its vocaliz ...

, but according to the

, she was an

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

ian princess called Ano: :''And Sousakim gave to Jeroboam Ano, the eldest sister of Thekemina his wife, to him as wife; she was great among the king's daughters...'' 1 Kings 12:24e
New English Translation of the Septuagint

Shishak's name

The spelling and pronunciation of Shishak's name is not consistent throughout the Hebrew Bible. It occurs three times as ''Šīšaq'' (שִׁישַׁק), three times as ''Šīšāq'' (שִׁישָׁק), and once as ''Šūšaq'' (שׁוּשַׁק).

Identified as Pharaoh Shoshenq I

In the very early years after the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, on chronological, historical, and linguistic grounds, nearly all Egyptologists identified Shishak with Shoshenq I of the 22nd dynasty, who invaded Canaan following the Battle of Bitter Lakes. A common variant of Shoshenq's name omits its 'n' glyphs, resulting in a pronunciation like, "Shoshek". This position has been maintained by most scholars ever since, and remains the majority position today.

Campaign records

Shoshenq I left behind "explicit records of a campaign into Canaan (scenes; a long list of Canaanite place-names from the Negev to Galilee; stelae), including a stela oundat Megiddo" which supports the traditional interpretation.K.A. Kitchen, ''On the Reliability of the Old Testament'', William Eerdmans & Co, 2003. pp. 10, 32–34, 607. Page 607 of Kitchen's book depicts the surviving fragment of Shoshenq I's Megiddo stela which bears this king's cartouche.'The First Oppressors: Shishak of Egypt' – BiblicalStudies.org pg1
/ref> The Bubastite Portal, a relief discovered at

, in

Upper Egypt Upper Egypt ( ', shortened to , , locally: ) is the southern portion of Egypt and is composed of the Nile River valley south of the delta and the 30th parallel North. It thus consists of the entire Nile River valley from Cairo south to Lake N ...

, and similar reliefs on the walls of a small temple of

Amun Amun was a major ancient Egyptian deity who appears as a member of the Hermopolitan Ogdoad. Amun was attested from the Old Kingdom together with his wife Amunet. His oracle in Siwa Oasis, located in Western Egypt near the Libyan Desert, r ...

at el-Hibeh, shows Pharaoh Shoshenq I holding in his hand a bound group of prisoners. The names of captured towns are located primarily in the territory of the kingdom of Israel (including Megiddo), with a few listed in the Negeb, and perhaps Philistia. Some of these include a few of the towns that Rehoboam had fortified according to Chronicles. However, the inscription makes no mention of Jerusalem itself, nor of Rehoboam or

. Various explanations of this omission of Jerusalem have been proposed: its name may have been erased, the list may have been copied from an older pharaoh's list of conquests, or Rehoboam's ransoming the city (as described in the Second Book of Chronicles) would have saved it from being listed. Other scholars, notably Israel Finkelstein, doubt the historicity of the biblical narrative that Shoshenq conquered Jerusalem, arguing that Jerusalem was an insignificant settlement in the 10th century BC and that the biblical story was constructed by later Jerusalemite authors to promote the

United Monarchy The Kingdom of Israel (Hebrew: מַמְלֶכֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל‎, ''Mamleḵeṯ Yīśrāʾēl'') was an Israelite kingdom that may have existed in the Southern Levant. According to the Deuteronomistic history in the Hebrew Bible ...

narrative.

Critical questions

It has been claimed that the numbers of Egyptian soldiers given in Chronicles can be "safely ignored as impossible" on Egyptological grounds; similarly, the numbers of chariots reported in 2 Chronicles is likely exaggerated by a factor of ten—leading 60,000 horses through the Sinai and Negev would have been logistically impossible, and no evidence of Egyptian cavalry exists from before the 27th Dynasty. Some authors, such as Israel Finkelstein, deem the treasures taken by Shishak as unlikely, alleging the material culture of 10th century Jerusalem and surroundings to have been too primitive to allow for any treasure that an Egyptian pharaoh would have been interested in. Finkelstein concludes that the looting narrative "should probably be seen as a theological construct rather than as historical references". By contrast, Krystal V. L. Pierce has pointed that a relief from Karnak records Sheshonq I presenting the tribute from his Levantine campaign to Amun-Re, and that the Pharaoh used the tribute to finance the construction of several monumental structures across Egypt.

Fringe theories

Other identifications of Shishak have been put forward by chronological revisionists, arguing that Shoshenq's account does not match the Biblical account very closely, but these are considered fringe theories. In his book ''

Ages in Chaos ''Ages in Chaos'' is a book by the author Immanuel Velikovsky, first published by Doubleday (publisher), Doubleday in 1952, which put forward a major revision of the history of the Ancient Near East, claiming that the histories of Ancient Egypt a ...

'',

Immanuel Velikovsky Immanuel Velikovsky (; rus, Иммануи́л Велико́вский, p=ɪmənʊˈil vʲɪlʲɪˈkofskʲɪj; 17 November 1979) was a Russian-American psychoanalyst, writer, and catastrophist. He is the author of several books offering Pseudohi ...

identified him with Thutmose III of the 18th dynasty. More recently, David Rohl's New Chronology identified him with

Ramesses II Ramesses II (sometimes written Ramses or Rameses) (; , , ; ), commonly known as Ramesses the Great, was an Pharaoh, Egyptian pharaoh. He was the third ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, Nineteenth Dynasty. Along with Thutmose III of th ...

of the 19th dynasty, and Peter James has identified him with Ramesses III of the 20th dynasty.

In popular culture

Shishak is mentioned in

Steven Spielberg Steven Allan Spielberg ( ; born December 18, 1946) is an American filmmaker. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, Spielberg is widely regarded as one of the greatest film directors of all time and is ...

's action-adventure film '' Raiders of the Lost Ark'' as the pharaoh who seized the

Ark of the Covenant The Ark of the Covenant, also known as the Ark of the Testimony or the Ark of God, was a religious storage chest and relic held to be the most sacred object by the Israelites. Religious tradition describes it as a wooden storage chest decorat ...

from the Temple of Solomon during his raids on

and hid it in the Well of Souls in

Tanis Tanis ( ; ; ) or San al-Hagar (; ; ; or or ; ) is the Greek name for ancient Egyptian ''ḏꜥn.t'', an important archaeological site in the northeastern Nile Delta of ancient Egypt, Egypt, and the location of a city of the same name. Tanis ...

References

External links

by Kevin A. Wilson

{{authority control Pharaohs in the Bible