The Kabar Canal

Although I've been poasting here about - say - Ezekiel 38-39 not really belonging to that Ezekielian book, I hadn't much about the book's earlier parts. So: Zilberg and Segev.

All editions of Ezekiel note its writing on the river KBR. Problem: there was no such river under the Babylonians, who ruled when our prophet lived there. Z&S note there came, however, a canal: the Kabârû. This attached Babylon with another city, Borsippa. Documents crop up under Cambyses II of its construction; annals note its use under Darius the Great.

Ezekiel would have been prophet indeed if he predicted the name of a future canal. Z&S instead note that the KBR river shows up only at the beginning of the whole text, and in later passages as make hash of the poetry. The authors conclude: glosses.

Since, uh, blog I get to speculate further. The Bavli community of Jews, preserving Ezekiel, or at least catering to his Judaean fanclub, figured to throw up some tourist-traps why-not. Meanwhile this canal was an important throughfare for the Achaemenids (once Darius had reconquered the place); Jews as Canaanite-bilinguals could do some trade up and down stream. The point of the glosses wasn't to say that Ezekiel was at this river, which didn't then exist. The point was that he was at shrines which became (praise G-d) riverwalk attractions.