In the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

, Tidal () is a king of

Goyim In modern Hebrew and Yiddish, (; , pl: , or ) is a term for a gentile, a non-Jew. Through Yiddish, the word has been adopted into English (pl: goyim or goys) also to mean "gentile", sometimes in a pejorative sense. The Biblical Hebrew word ...

. In the

Book of Genesis The Book of Genesis (from Greek language, Greek ; ; ) is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its Hebrew name is the same as its incipit, first word, (In the beginning (phrase), 'In the beginning'). Genesis purpor ...

(14:1), he is described as one of the four kings who fought

Abraham Abraham (originally Abram) is the common Hebrews, Hebrew Patriarchs (Bible), patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Judaism, he is the founding father who began the Covenant (biblical), covenanta ...

in the

Battle of Siddim The Battle of the Vale of Siddim, also often called the War of Nine Kings or the Slaughter of Chedorlaomer, is an event in the Hebrew Bible book of that occurs in the days of Abram and Lot. The Vale of Siddim was the battleground for the cities ...

. Modern scholars have attempted to identify the original context of the story and potential historical correspondents. It has been speculated that the name ''Tidal'' is a

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

rendering of ''

Tudhaliya Tudḫaliya is the name of several Hittite kings or royals. It is not clear how many kings bore that name, and numbering schemes vary from source to source. *Tudḫaliya (sometimes called Tudḫaliya I) is deduced from his early placement in a lat ...

'', the name of several Hittite and

Neo-Hittite The states called Neo-Hittite, Syro-Hittite (in older literature), or Luwian-Aramean (in modern scholarly works) were Luwian and Aramean regional polities of the Iron Age, situated in southeastern parts of modern Turkey and northwestern parts o ...

kings. The name continued as "Tudal" down to the Neo-Hittite period.

Stephanie Dalley Stephanie Mary Dalley FSA (''née'' Page; March 1943) is a British Assyriologist and scholar of the Ancient Near East. Prior to her retirement, she was a teaching Fellow at the Oriental Institute, Oxford. She is known for her publications of ...

argues that Tidal should be identified as the military leader ‘Tudhaliya the chief cupbearer’ mentioned on a clay tablet from the pre-Hittite Assyrian colony at Kanesh.Cf. Alternatively, Gard Granerød regards Tidal as literary figure rather than a historical one. According to him, the name Tidal could be originated from a foreign story that Jewish people learned from the foreign diaspora community, which included Elamites and many other foreigners, as mentioned in Ezra 4.Gard Granerød (26 March 2010). Abraham and Melchizedek: Scribal Activity of Second Temple Times in Genesis 14 and Psalm 110. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 118-121. ISBN 978-3-11-022346-0. The kingdom of Goyim has not been identified, though modern scholars have speculated that it may refer to

Hittites The Hittites () were an Anatolian peoples, Anatolian Proto-Indo-Europeans, Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia. Possibly originating from beyond the Black Sea, they settled in mo ...

Hurrians The Hurrians (; ; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri) were a people who inhabited the Ancient Near East during the Bronze Age. They spoke the Hurrian language, and lived throughout northern Syria, upper Mesopotamia and southeaste ...

and other groups in central

Anatolia Anatolia (), also known as Asia Minor, is a peninsula in West Asia that makes up the majority of the land area of Turkey. It is the westernmost protrusion of Asia and is geographically bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean ...

. The

Genesis Apocryphon The Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20), also called the Tales of the Patriarchs or the Apocalypse of Lamech and labeled 1QapGen, is one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1946 by Bedouin shepherds in Cave 1 near Qumran, a small settlemen ...

(col. 21) places it in

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

. In Biblical Hebrew, the word is generally translated as "nations" or "peoples".

References

{{Reflist Monarchs in the Torah Lech-Lecha

See also

References