The scouring of the land

I am continuing my scan of Elitzur's dataset. Yesterday I added some words I recognise in Arabic: BKY, ḌḤK; this morn have I removed his first example elón. I got intrigued with example #5 GLY so have held off to poast that, today, separately.

The Quran will use GLY for exile. The Arabs didn't, at least not in the Safa. There it meant cut off, erased, exposed. So when I look at Elitzur's data, he turns up Judges 18:30 for which authenticity he argues: which I think vocalised some gelút há-aretz in CBH construct. Clearly you can't exile the land. Meanwhile GLY as exile comes nowhere in the Hexateuch (to Joshua), despite exile being a central theme.

By parallel with Safaitic, gelút há-aretz implies a scouring. Elitzur applies this term to the land around Judges 18:30-1, whose candidate is Shiloh's temple which, by then, was dismantled. Whenever Judges thought that was: Gath's invasion? Hazael?

At this point I want to bring example #1, elón; I further suspect the há- as late in Hebrew's evolution (it was probably *han- prebiblically). Elitzur finds elón in Genesis and Deuteronomy, then through to 1 Samuel. Once David takes control we no longer read the word. For Elitzur it should be something like the Archaic Greek chora (district/ viable-flatland)... like aretz. Why does it end with Samuel, if it was Deuteronomic, he asks. I counter that everywhere, elon had been fossilised - into placenames (construct, without há-!) and/or semantically become "oak grove". These elón texts existed to place scenes into a landscape of memory. For Judges 18, either Elitzur must abandon its status as an ancient account or else he must admit that elón was already a fossil.

For my part I accept that Judges 18 be early. As for why the Pent-to-Hexateuch didn't use GLY, Elitzur would put that down to not knowing Judges 18. For Elitzur the Hexateuch is simply earlier. The Deuteronomic History, having read Judges 18, shifted GLY's semantics to exile. Elitzur fn. 17 is aware of GLY for exile in Akkadian (which might have followed a parallel shift) then Aramaic.

I won't argue that point for Deuteronomy alone. For the rest of Torah (and Joshua) I propose, rather: refusing this use of GLY. The authors and editors saw the term as belonging to a later time.

REPOST: I don't know WTF happened to the URL, but let's try to fix it