Although the Amarna texts do not name any personage met on the pages of Scripture, they are of value in helping us to visualize life in the Palestinian city states during the middle of the second millenium B.C. Biblical cities mentioned in the correspondence include: Akko, Ashkelon, Arvad, Aroer, Ashtaroth, Gebal (Byblos), Gezer, Gath, Gaza, Jerusalem, Joppa, Keilah, Lachish, Megiddo, Sidon, Tyre, Sharon, Shechem, Taanach, and Zorah. Beth-ninurta is thought to be identical with Biblical Beth-shemesh.
These cities are, for the most part, independent city states, owing allegiance to Egypt yet free to form their own alliances and resolve their own local problems. It was this type of political structure that Joshua met in Canaan. He waged war against “thirty-one kings” (Josh. 12:24). At times these kings made alliances in order to prevent Israel from gaining control of the land, just as the Amarna Age rulers aided one another in resisting Lab‘ayu. A leader against Joshua was Adonizedek, king of Jerusalem, who found allies in Hoham, king of Hebron; Piram, king of Jarmuth; Japhia, king of Lachish, and Debir, king of Eglon (Josh. 10:1-3).
The military engagements were strictly limited affairs, judged by the numbers of troops and horses requested of the Pharaoh. Rib-Addi of Byblos pleaded:
Let it seem good to the lord, the sun of the lands, to give me twenty pairs of horses.[64]
In his encounter with Abdi-Ashirta, the Amorite chieftain who was seeking to control northern Syria in league with the Hittites, Rib-Addi asked for but three hundred men.[65]
Abi-milki of Tyre indicated that he could get by with but token help from Egypt. In one letter he asks for but twenty foot soldiers,[66] and in another he will be satisfied with but ten.[67] Somewhat earlier, in the Canaan of Abraham’s day, the patriarch was able to assemble an army of three hundred and eighteen men (Gen. 14:14), pursue a confederation of five kings with their armies, rout and chase the enemy. An entire garrison might number but fifty men in the armies of Amarna Age rulers.[68]
Affairs of Government
The presence of a friend at the court was appreciated and cultivated by the rulers of the city states. Several of the Amarna tablets are addressed to an Egyptian official named Yanhamu who bore the title “the king’s fanbearer.” He was evidently a man of considerable power, for the king entrusted him with the issuing of supplies from a place known as Yarimuta. For this reason the local princes in Syria and Canaan frequently wrote to him. After outlining his needs, Rib-Addi indulged in a little apple-polishing as he concluded, “There is no servant like Yanhamu, a faithful servant of the king.”[69]
Yanhamu seems to have occupied in the court of Amenhotep III (and possibly Akhenaton as well) a position comparable to the one Joseph held several generations earlier.[70] Both Yanhamu and Joseph were charged with overseeing the distribution of food supplies (cf. Gen. 42:51-57). They both had Semitic names, and the presence of Yanhamu in an Egyptian court during New Kingdom times indicates that Semites were not barred from government following the Hyksos expulsion. Rulers often find it safer to trust faithful foreigners than some of their own subjects who might be tempted to rebel.
The simple tastes of the Israelite tribes in the period before the monarchy may be contrasted with the ostentation of Solomon’s harem with its thousand wives and concubines (I Kings 11:3) along with the wealth and luxury of an oriental court. The rulers of the larger states of the Amarna Age, and particularly Tushratta of Mitanni, sent their daughters to grace the harems of Amenhotep III and Akhenaton. A scarab of Amenhotep III commemorates the arrival of Giluhepa, a Mitannian princess with a retinue of three hundred seventeen maidens.[71] That Amenhotep III was actively building his harem is shown in a letter which he addressed to Milk-ili of Gezer which says, in part: