Talk:Kenites

message: This article is a stub?
Under exegesis...are we to imply then that eve and satan had sexual relations?
::Haha, yes, that sounds like Pastor Arnold Murray's White Christian Identity movement talking. He has this theory that the 12 Tribes comprise modern Europeans, and the Jewish people are really these "Kenites", descendents of Cain, himself a product of Eve and Satan ("serpent seed"). The idea is that Adam (whom Murray interprets as "ruddy" or "red cheeked", as in a White man with a pinkish hue) is the progenitor of Jesus, who was a White European type, and not a Jew. The early Hebrews were White, not Jewish, is what you get out of Murray's biblical exegesis. He's a scholar, he knows these things, he tells his congregation. If you ever get the opportunity to see older televised sermons by Murray Sr., he will actually spit when he says the word "Kenite". I hope someone is monitoring this article, because risks becoming a foundation of White Identity if not supervised.giggle  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gregory.george.lewis (talk • contribs) 18:33, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: [Untitled]

message: Does anyone have an actual verifiable third-party reference that sheds any light on the etymology of the word "Kenite"? There are three competing etymologies in the article right now: Kenan, Cain, and Kainim. I might also mention that the Wikipedia article on Cain derives "Cain" from the Hebrew from "spear", while the Bible derives it from "gotten" (Gen. 4:1), but I don't know any Hebrew, ancient or modern, so I have no idea what the deal is with that.
Also, I'm not happy with the word choice "fringe doctrine" for serpent seed, but "heresy" seems much too strong (even if it's technically true?), and I can't think of anything in the middle at the moment. --Quuxplusone (talk) 02:36, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no genealogical link in the Bible, the main source of information on the Kenites, that shed light on the Kenite's origin. Information from various scholars are described in their writing as guesses. Consider "Cain" to mean "something produced". Shemaah (talk) 19:13, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The trouble is not so far finding `verifiable third-party references' (I just added yet another), as finding unambiguous ones...  There is also the small problem that linguists often consider the proposed etymologies in the Bible as folk etymologies, while from a more `biblicistic' point of view the bible explanations may be considered as having to be correct, to the extent that the bible text itself is held to be uncorrupted. JoergenB (talk) 00:17, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

text: A recent book YHWH: Origin of a desert God (2020) by Robert Miller II may shed some light on this. Miller believes the Kenites were a quasi ethnic group who were and were not Midianites and Edomites and that they were known for metallurgy and music. He replies to Kalimi's claim and argues that Kalimi ignores the etymology of the word Kenite which Miller believes means smith like many other scholars. Tzofia1996 (talk) 17:39, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Derivation of name 

message: "the Kenites were a nomadic clan sent under Jethro to priest Midian."  This sentence appears to have been mangled or to have lost some words, but I can't even begin to imagine what it means.  Can somebody fix? --Jfruh (talk) 16:09, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opening sentence makes no sense 

message: I have some trouble with how to handle the ways Hebrew and Aramaic was handled in .  There Sayce consistently uses a k with a dot under it to represent the emphatic explosive written in Hebrew by means of Qoph, and also for what I suppose he considered as the same sound in Aramaic.  I know from other older scolarly texts that other emphatic consonants often also are marked in the same manner.  I have no idea of how to write these "dotted consonants" in the WP; and I also do not know whether I should.  On the one hand, we should try to render statements from our sources as correctly as possible; on the other hand, the reader may be confused by various principles of transcription being used side by side in the same article.
In this case, I replaced the "dotted k" with the letter q, since I could write it:-), and since qoph seems to be rendered thus in other parts of the article.  However, this means that I write that Sayce wrote "qayin" and "qéní", when he actually wrote [dotted k]ayin and [dotted k]éní, respectively.
Are there some guidelines or recommendations about this within e. g. the WikiProject Judaism? JoergenB (talk) 00:43, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rendering transcriptions from older scolarly traditions. 

message: The "Mythology" section only contains the ideas of one single German orientalist. (IMHO) It should either contain some actual (pre-1930s) mythology, or else be relabeled to make it clear that this is only the interpretation of Walter Beltz, not an actual mythology found or discovered. Ikmxx (talk) 20:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Mythology" section 

message: This 'German orientalist' framing of the critical scholarship is highly unusual. We do not normally emphasis the ethnicity of bodies of scholarly work in this manner. Every theory, of any kind, about anything, is ultimately initiated by a scholar of some sort of nationality, but we don't go categorizing theories by ethnicity. And here it is demonstrably misleading, since we also have the Dutch scholar Cornelis Tiele, British scholar Archibald Sayce and Canadian scholar George Aaron Barton, among others, in the mix. Iskandar323 (talk) 09:39, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I totally agree. His argument that only German orientalists proposed the Kenite hypothesis is totally incorrect. As I argued the other day, modern Jewish scholars also support this theory. https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-original-arabic-meaning-of-the-name. Most scholars in the past century also support the Midianite Kenite hypothesis. ( John Day, YHWH and the gods and goddesses of Canaan). The "misconceptions" section also does not make sense with the rest of the article.   Tzofia1996 (talk) 16:10, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  If the consensus here is to not mention that those ideas are from a small number of people from a very specific school of (anti-Jewish) scholarship, then I can stop labeling it. If you guys want to claim that pseudoscience from 1800s is mainstream biblical scholarship, honestly I don't agree with biblical scholars' conclusions a lot of the time anyway, so go ahead and ruin their reputation, I don't care. Just keep it out of the factual part of the article. Ikmxx (talk) 17:18, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The Midianite Kenite hypothesis is part of modern mainstream biblical scholarship. It is one of two leading hypothesis. It is not pseudoscience as you claim. Here is a quote from scholar John Day from his book YHWH and the gods and goddesses of Canaan: "Most scholars who have written on the subject during recent decades support the idea that Yahweh had his origins outside the land of Israel to the south in the area of Midian" Here is another article from scholar Jacob Dunn, supporting the Midianite Kenite hypothesis which also talks about the discovery of Midianite pottery and a metallurgical workshop within a Midianite tent shrine. https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/dunn_jacob_e_201505_ma.pdf These are real archaeological discoveries, in no way pseudoscience.  Tzofia1996 (talk) 19:31, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

text: Mainstream + biblical scholarship seems like a bit of an oxymoron and makes me chuckle, but on a note of clarification, both Barton and Sayce were active well into the 1900s. It is a matter of scholarly consensus that Yahweh was a deity first worshipped outside of Israel in the vicinity, or at least direction, of Edom. What is not known is how that cultic tradition migrated to Canaan to be adopted by the Israelites. The Kenite hypothesis is merely one theory that grasps at answers to such questions. Iskandar323 (talk) 20:00, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Though I'll certainly grant that the 'Cain' stuff is full-on 1800s batshit crazy talk. Iskandar323 (talk) 20:12, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I haven't seen any modern scholars support what is in the "mythology" section about Cain killing a god child either. That doesn't seem to be a part of the modern theory. I don't know who added that.  Tzofia1996 (talk) 22:05, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  Looking through the edit history, it looks to me like it was added on 23 August 2016 by‎ Doug Weller, I haven't looked through the entire history though, so it could be that he actually just re-added it from earlier. Ikmxx (talk) 22:49, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  Update, Doug Weller is super-reliable, so the "mythology" section is legitimately what Walter Beltz believed about the Kenites. Whether or not Walter Beltz's ideas actually belong here, I don't know. Ikmxx (talk) 23:12, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: @Tzofia1996@Ikmxx@Iskandar323 Beltz did say that. I see it was removed from Cain and Abel by a sockmaster after I edited this page as "seems unnotable". That's not a good reason, but looking more deeply I think it is probably WP:UNDUE, see . I should have checked that. Maybe his comments should be removed at Zipporah at the inn. Sorry about that. Doug Weller talk 07:45, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: On the other hand, David Leeming recommends him. and his book seems to be mentioned quite a bit.. You all make the decision, I am trimming my watchlist a lot to work on things I really enjoy in the time I have left, but I wanted to respond here. Ikmxx, thanks for the compliment! Doug Weller talk 07:51, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I would note that we also don't seem to have page numbers for either the Harris or Beltz (1980s-dated) refs linking it to the Kenites, which makes me highly inclined to just nix this. Iskandar323 (talk) 08:12, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: He discusses the Kennites but I can't see a snippet with a link to them and the idea that Abel was God's child. Doug Weller talk 11:03, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The whole middle paragraph is frankly off-topic anyway. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:16, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree, but although I called the idea itself 1800s-era-nonsense earlier, I still wonder if the paragraph should live-on somewhere else? (Since it seams to be part of the history of history) Maybe there should be an article for Walter Beltz? Looks like he wrote other books in German (7 available on Amazon) but I really can't research him at all in English. Ikmxx (talk) 23:07, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  'German orientalist' framing