THE SIEGE OF JAFFA
Photo from Unsplash.
An Egyptian government outpost in western Canaan, 14th century BCE (1)
I prostrate myself seven times and again,
To the Pharaoh Akhenaten, a god among men.
The floodplains of the Nile are a banner unfurled,
And your court at Amarna the jewel of the world.
In your palace and temples, you worship the Sun,
Who looks down upon Canaan, by hordes overrun;
For from Jaffa’s high watchtowers, we see their dread clans;
Let the King look after his lands!
The Habiru insurgency prospers and thrives;
If the King will send archers, we may keep our lives.
If the archers don’t come, then beyond any doubt
The King’s lands will be forfeit before the year’s out.
They have taken three cities, and shall soon take a fourth;
They plunder our strongholds each time they set forth.
May my Lord give attention, and issue commands;
Let the King look after his lands!
They could not conquer Gezer, yet they force it to pay
A tribute of slaves--and to get them away,
Gezer’s king must pay ransom: the price of a slave
For each of his people he is minded to save.
King Labaya gave Shechem away to the horde,
Because a pitched battle he could not afford.
When we look on their host, we are desperate, unmanned;
Let the King look after his lands!
In Byblos, the cities of mountain and sea
Have joined the invaders, and declared themselves free.
Though our chariots have turned back their host on the plains,
They have overrun Sumer, of which nothing remains.
The Habiru say idols are deaf, blind, and dumb;
Why refurbish Ra’s temples, while Canaan succumbs?
What becomes, then, of strategies, tactics, and plans?
Let the King look after his lands!
The host of Habiru are raising a shout;
They have hemmed us all in; they are blotting us out!
They pour down from the hills in their thousands, and see—
They are taking it all; they are stronger than we!
Will the King turn his mind from the glories of Ra,
And give aid to his outposts that languish afar?
Only Jaffa and Jerusalem still withstand;
Let the King look after his lands!
Jerusalem’s ruler’s no king, and no mayor,
But a cunning old soldier who chanced to be there
When the horde’s latest sieges laid low Salem’s strength—
And so cunning they are, they will get in at length.
They will find a way in when they come back again;
Of our Canaanite Empire, no scrap will remain.
When the Jebusites perish at our former slaves’ hands,
Then the King will not have any lands;
THE KING WILL NOT HAVE ANY LANDS!
TL;DR:
The substantia nigra is the part of my brain
That’s diseased; though some cognitive functions remain,
Organizational skills fall apart more each day,
And executive functions are wasting away.
Where the dopamine’s made in substantia n.,
Cells are being destroyed, and won’t function again.
Two citadels still are defying their fates:
The part that can learn, and the part that creates.
But disease, like a harrowing host, still comes on,
Until all is laid waste; until everything’s gone.
The narrative section of the poem is derived from the El-Amarna tablets, an archive of 382 cuneiform letters inscribed on clay. Discovered in the 1870’s under the floor of Akhenaton’s palace at El-Amarna, most of the tablets comprise the bureaucratic and diplomatic business of running an empire. But a small subset consists of a series of letters, always meticulously formal yet increasingly frantic, from Egypt’s outposts in Canaan, (which it nominally ruled), to Pharoah Akhenaten. As the invading Habiru became ever more powerful, the outposts implored their king, who was too much obsessed with the cult of the sun-god Ra/Atun to pay much attention to outlying vassal states, to send them archers, or any other aid, to keep them from being wiped out by the powerful Habiru. Each letter, however panicky its tone as things grew more dire, ends with the formula, “Let the King look after his lands!”
I am especially indebted to S. Douglas Waterhouse, “Who are the Habiru of the Amarna Letters?” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, 12/1 (2001): 31–42. Article copyright © 2001 by S. Douglas Waterhouse, Andrews University.
