Amalek

Jonathan Edelstein has a post on the Jewish tradition regarding Amalek, which he considers potentially similar to the Muslim jihad. In the book of Exodus, the Amalek were a group who attacked the Hebrews as they fled Egypt, leading to a commandment to the Hebrews to exterminate the Amalek. When I was a freshman I became rather obsessed with the Amalek, though my professors didn't really know anything about them. I found a bit of irony in his post because the Amalek also turn up in the medieval Islamic historical tradition, though not with religious implications.

I don't know anything about this site, but it does remind me of the basic story. The Amalek were among the greatest of th Arab tribes in the ancient world, and were custodians of the Ka'aba in Mecca. Following some rather elaborate natural upheavels, they left and went to Egypt, where they ruled as pharaohs. (The linked site, which melds together Hebrew and Arab sources, also gets from somewhere that the Amalek later converted to Judaism, which would probably really screw with the minds of certain Jewish militants.)

The identity of the Amalek has always intrigued me because it is unclear from the existing sources why they get to be Public Enemy #1 for ancient Israel. I remember Immanuel Velikovsky (whose theories I am not here touting) equated them with the Hyksos, partly on the basis of the Arab traditions mentioned above. Both Arab and Hebrew traditions tout them as extremely powerful - in the book of Numbers, they are called the greatest of nations, a designation that in that time better seems to fit Egypt. However, I don't see any easy way to learn more.

Ultimately, the identity of the Amalek lies in the historical issues surrounding the Exodus itself, where I am rather unorthodox, though Biblical scholarship is in no way my field. I think the Pentateuch should be regarded as oral tradition, and in oral tradition it is the specifics which are usually late additions, not the generalities. Most scholars place the historical Exodus in the reign of Ramses II on the basis of the Pi-thom and Ramses mentions and the fact that the first historical mention of Israel is on a stele of Ramses's son Merneptah. However, I've been reading al-Tabari, and for remote periods he reports traditions about stuff happening in cities that didn't exist at the time, like Nebuchadnezzar's connections to al-Hira. I can easily see Pi-thom and Ramses getting tacked onto an existing tradition about Hebrew slavery in Egypt.

What I believe is that the Exodus story functions kind of like the bursting of the Ma'rib dam in Arab tradition - a period of great upheavel in which various tribes found in convenient to postulate genealogical links. Viewing it as oral tradition, I'm more inclined to believe in the plagues than the exact cities. There may have been a tribe working at Pi-thom and Ramses. There may have been a tribe that fought the Amalek. These need not have been the same. The Biblical story of the Exodus is then a theologically interpreted editing of the oral traditions of different tribal groups which made links in very ancient Israel. And that would mean that the historical Amalek could eventually be found at any time over a several-century period.