The Soleb Temple Inscription — YHWH of the Shasu

In the temple of Soleb in Sudanese Nubia — built by Pharaoh Amenhotep III around 1390 BC and dedicated to the god Amun-Re and to the deified king himself — a granite column in the hypostyle hall preserves an inscription listing six "lands of the Shasu," the bedouin tribes of the southern Levant whom Egyptian sources locate in Edom, Midian, and the Sinai-Negev fringe. Among the six is a place-name written in hieroglyphic transliteration as t3 š3sw yhw3: "the land of the Shasu of Yhw3." The Soleb temple was state-built Egyptian work pushed deep into Nubia, and the inscription was photographed and documented by the Czech Institute of Egyptology and by Charles Bonnet's later Soleb expedition. A second, abbreviated occurrence of the same toponym appears at the related temple of Amarah West. The reading is the earliest known reference to the divine name YHWH outside the Hebrew Bible. The form is a place-name — the land of YHWH-people, in the same construction as "the land of the Shasu of Seir" listed alongside it — meaning that by the late fourteenth century BC, an identifiable Semitic group somewhere in the Edom-Midian region was already being identified by this divine name. The biblical text places the patriarchs and the early Mosaic encounter in precisely this geography: Sinai, Midian, Seir, the wilderness of Paran. Deuteronomy 33, Judges 5, and Habakkuk 3 all preserve the ancient poetic tradition of YHWH coming forth from Seir, from Teman, from Sinai. Karel van der Toorn, Donald Redford, and Michael Astour have all argued that the Soleb inscription preserves a memory of the divine name attached to a specific group of Shasu bedouin in the late Bronze Age, well before any biblical text was committed to writing. The conservative reading takes the inscription as external corroboration that YHWH was worshipped by a distinguishable Semitic population in the geographical zone the Hebrew Bible assigns to the patriarchs — not as the source of the divine name, but as outside witness to a name already known. The inscription remains on its column at Soleb, weathered but legible, a thousand miles upriver from the world it remembers. Sources: Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton, 1992); Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel (Brill, 1996); Michael C. Astour, "Yahweh in Egyptian Topographic Lists," in Festschrift Elmar Edel (Bamberg, 1979); Charles Bonnet and the Soleb expedition publications, with the Czech Institute of Egyptology photographic record; Exodus 3:13–15.