Grace Theological Journal 2.2 (Spring,
1961) 5-13.
[Copyright © 1961
Grace Theological Seminary; cited with permission;
digitally prepared for use at Gordon
NEW LIGHT ON THE WILDERNESS JOURNEY
AND THE CONQUEST
JOHN REA
Moody Bible Institute
In the previous issue of GRACE JOURNAL (Winter, 1961), the writer set
forth his conclusions regarding the time of the
Oppression and the Exodus of
the children of
1447
B.C. for the Exodus, during the Eighteenth Dynasty of
(1570-1315 B.C.). This date can be
further substantiated by the subsequent
experiences of the Israelites under Moses and
Joshua.
New
Considerations Concerning the Wilderness Journey
The
opposition of the Edomites.--One of the
weightiest arguments in favor
of the late date of the Exodus (13th century B.C.)
is advanced by Nelson
Glueck concerning the Edomites
who denied passage through their territory
to Moses and the Israelites. He has charged that
no Edomite or Moabite kingdoms
would have been encountered in
century B.C. Not until that century did these
peoples build houses and fortifications
in
could be ascribed to Middle Bronze II or to Late
Bronze" (Explorations in Eastern
Elsewhere
he contends:
Had
the Exodus through southern
the 13th century B.C., the Israelites would have
found neither Edomite nor
Moabite
kingdoms, well organized and well fortified, whose rulers could have
given or withheld permission to go through their
territories. Indeed, the
Israelites,
had they arrived on
the scene
first, might have occupied all of
the land on the west side
of the
First of all, we must accept the Biblical
statement that it was not so much the
superior strength of the Edomites
and the Moabites that prevented the Israelites
from crossing their territories as it was the direct
command of Jehovah not to
fight with these distant brethren of theirs (Deut.
2:4, 5, 9). It was God's sovereign
plan that His chosen nation not settle in these
areas but in
Second, while the Bible speaks of the king
of
various cities of Edomite kings (Gen.
36:32, 35, 39), these terms need not prove
that the Edomites were yet
a sedentary people dwelling in fortified towns. At that
period the head of every tribe or city-state was
called a king. The five kings of
Midian (Num.
31:8) in Moses' day and the two kings of Midian. In Gideon's
day (Jud. 8:5, 12) were surely nomadic chieftains,
as was perhaps also Adoni-bezek
who had subdued seventy kings (Jud. 1 :3-7). The book of Joshua and the Amarna
Letters
both testify to the great number of petty kings of city states in
around 1400 B.C.
Nor does
This
article was read at the Fall Wheaton Archaeology Conference,
5
6
GRACE
JOURNAL
the word "city" mean necessarily a
well-fortified site with permanent buildings,
for Kadesh-barnea is
called "a city in the uttermost of thy (i .e.,
border" (Num.
thirty-seven years, and yet probably never
erected any stone buildings it nor
made and used much pottery. Their community was centered around the
portable tabernacle; thus their's
was a tent city. Likewise the Edomites may
well have lived in similar tent cities. Note that when Moses sent forth the
twelve spies into the territory of the Canaanites, he
instructed them to detect
"what cities they are that they dwell in, whether in camps or
in strongholds"
(Num.
13:9).
Third, a careful study of the location of
through Joshua seems to reveal that whereas
were living for the most part in the central Negeb, i.e., in the mountainous
country with its valleys and oases between Kadesh-barnea and the Arabah.
The
key to the location of
of
pass through
prominent point in the highlands (up to 3000') ten
to fifteen miles east or northeast
of Kadesh-barnea and on
the border of
likely because after Aaron died there and the
congregation of
mourning for him, the king of
them (Num.
Aqabah:
"And they journeyed from
compass the
because of the way" (Num. 21:4; cf. Deut. 2:1-8). The Israelites had to go all
the way to Ezion-geber
(Deut. 2:8), for the Edomites were holding the west
side
of the Arabah, making
stops at Punon and Oboth
(Num. 33:42, 43; 21:5-10).
Punon is probably to be identified with Feinan, the site of ancient copper mines,
and is a logical place for the spot where Moses
lifted up the copper serpent in
the wilderness.
If the Edomites
were living in the Negeb instead of in
time of the Exodus, is there any evidence of their
existence in the more western
area?
According to Egyptian records from the 15th century B.C. there were
peoples dwelling in the Negeb
important enough to warrant an attack by the
pharaoh’s army.
Thutmose III mentions the Negeb in the
campaign list of his
military operations (James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, p. 243).
Amen-em-heb, one of Thutmose’s soldiers, had the following
statement painted
on the wall of his tomb at
(ANET,
p. 241). A century later Amarna
Letter #256 mentions Udumu as a city
or people seemingly in
A.B.
Mercer, The Tell el-Amarna
Tablets
666;
BASOR, #89, p. 14). Various scholars have identified Udumu with
The
condition of the Moabites.--Two things relevant to the Moabites at the
time of the wilderness journey lead one to believe
that they were neither settled
nor so strong as they were in the thirteenth and
following centuries. First,
was much weaker than
afraid of the people, because they were many; and
of the children of
with the Midianites, so
much so that the elders of both peoples acted as one
group when they went to the town of
22:4-7). The Bible depicts
the Midianites as largely a nomadic people. The
point is this: for the Moabites to have been on such
friendly terms with the
Midianites, the former also were probably still
largely nomadic, since from
time imme-
NEW LIGHT ON THE WILDERNESS JOURNEY AND THE
CONQUEST 7
morial there has been strife
between the inhabitants of the desert and the residents
of the towns in agricultural areas. Therefore the time of Moses must have been
before the thirteenth century
B.C. when the Moabites began to build permanent
towns.
New
discoveries near Amman.--Several recent finds in the vicinity of
the capital city of the
statements that there was no settled occupation
anywhere in
of the
tombs in
hundreds of pottery vessels and scarabs and other
objects from the periods known
as Middle Bronze II and late Bronze I, i.e., from
about 1800 to 1400 B.C. Also,
in 1955, a building which appears to have been a
Late Bronze Age temple with over
100
pieces of imported pottery of Cypriote and Mycenaean origin, was unearthed when
bulldozers were clearing away a small mound by the
Harding,
The Antiquities of Jordan London: Lutterworth Press, 1959 ,p.
33). Thus
it seems that there was some sedentary occupation
in central
of the fifteenth century B. C. On the other hand
the apparent relative scarcity of
population in southern
that district considerably less difficult than it
would have been in the thirteenth
century B.C. when so many more cities
existed. His campaigns against Sihon and
Og lasted only a matter of
months compared with the several years necessary for
Joshua to subdue
The
time of Balaam.--In order to invite Balaam the prophet to come to curse
the land of the children of his people" (Num.
22:5). Pethor
is the Hittite city of
Pitru, captured by Thutmose III and much later on by Shalmaneser III; it lay on
the western bank of the
Hebrew word for "his people" is ammo.
W. F. Albright interprets this term as
the name of the land called 'Amau
in the inscription on the statue of Idri-mi found
by Sir Leonard Woolley
at Alalakh (Wm. F. Albright, "Some Important Discoveries,
Alphabetic
Origins and the Idrimi Statue," BASOR, #118, p.
16). Idri-mi
also found
sons of the land of 'Amau
and sons of the
read of Balaam’s coming from such a distance (350
miles) to
century B.C.
As to the date of Idri-mi, Albright dates the
statue about 1450 B.C.,
but Woolley and Sidney
Smith date it about 1375 B.C. The land
of ‘Amau is also
mentioned in an inscription from the tomb of an
officer who served in the army of
Amenhotep II (Ibid., p. 15). My argument is this: if Balaam prophesied at
the end
of the fifteenth century B.C., according to the
early date of the Exodus, then the
term 'Amau in Num. 22:5 is
found in a proper historical context, along with the
occurrences of this name in the Idri-mi
inscription and the Egyptian text. Only
around 1400 B.C. was the Aleppo-Carchemish
region--the land of ‘Amau—
independent and not under the rule of either the
Egyptians or the Hittites.
During
the reign of Amenhotep III (1410-1372 B.C.) northern
to free itself from Egyptian overlordship,
while the Hittites under Suppiluliumas
did not conquer this area until about 1370
B.C. But if the Exodus happened in
the thirteenth century, then the homeland of Balaam
was under Hittite control
and would probably have been called "the land
of the Hittites" (cf. Josh. 1:4;
Jud. 1-26).
New Excavations in
Old
Jericho.--The
first fortress city in
they crossed the
8
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JOURNAL
check on the chronology adopted for the Exodus and
the Conquest, whether
around 1407 B.C. or about 1250 B.C. But the date as
determined by
archaeological methods has become one
of the most hotly-contested issued
among Palestinian archaeologists.
Both Sir John Garstang,
who dug at
Kathleen
Kenyon, who has been directing a new series of excavations there
since 1952, agree that the Middle Bronze Age levels, Garstang's City III,
represent Hyksos
occupation ending about 1550 B.C. Both recognize remains
from the late Bronze Age, but at that point the
agreement ceases. We must be
ready and willing to admit that Miss Kenyon's careful
investigations disproved
that the parallel fortification walls, built of mud
bricks and fallen outwards,
belonged to the late Bronze Age city, as Garstang claimed so loudly (Garstang,
John
and J.B.E., The Story of
&
Scott, 1948 , pp. 133-142). But this does not mean that there were no
walls
to the Canaanite city in Joshua's time. In the
light of the fact that the mound of
winter rains, the absence now of such walls may in a
way be a confirmation of
Scripture. Joshua
the wall was probably made of mud bricks, after it
fell and the city lay unoccupied
for the most part until Hiel
rebuilt the city in the time of King Ahab (I Kings
there was nothing to cover the fallen bricks and to
prevent their turning back to
mud and washing down the slope.
There can be no doubt, however, that there
was occupation of the site of
that contained deposits, some 320 late Bronze Age
objects out of a total of
2818
specimens including two scarab seals of Amenhotep III
(1410-1372 B.C.);
also he found late Bronze potsherds in the fosse
(moat) and on the mound
especially in debris underlying the isolated "
attributed to Eglon--Jud.
3:12ff). In
1954 Miss Kenyon uncovered on the
eastern side of the mound the foundations of a
single house wall with about
a square meter of intact floor beside it; on the
floor was a small bread oven
beside which was a juglet
that she says is probably fourteenth century in date.
She
believes the evidence accords with a destruction and subsequent
abandonment of the site, and suggests a date in the
second half of the
fourteenth century B.C. (Archaeology in the Holy
Land London: Ernest
Benn, 1960, pp. 210f). At any rate, G. E. Wright's statement seems
totally
unwarranted:
“All that remains which can be assigned with any confidence
to the period between 1400 and 1200 B.C. are a few
pieces of pottery from
three tombs and from the area above the spring, and
perhaps the '
Building'"
(Biblical Archaeology
p.
79). Garstang did competent, accurate work on the
whole. Miss Kenyon
speaks very; highly of the fullness of his records
(Kathleen M. Kenyon,
"Some
Notes on the History of
Exploration Quarterly, LXXXIII 1951,
122f). The Israeli archaeologist,
Immanuel
Ben-Dor, who was on Garstang's
staff at
that much late Bronze pottery was found in the tombs
and a good bit of it on
the tell itself.
All the evidence so far available seems
to suggest that the Hyksos city of
Egyptians. Then the mound lay vacant for about 150
years. Since most of
the typically fifteenth century forms of pottery
are lacking, reoccupation
could hardly have taken place much before 1410. Probably the Canaanites
re-used the Hyksos
rampart or glacis; this is the conclusion of Miss Kenyon
and of Yigael Yadin, the director of the current excavations at Hazor. On
the rampart they mayor may not have built their own
mud brick wall. The
reason not more late Bronze pottery has been found may
be that the city
NEW LIGHT ON THE WILDERNESS JOURNEY AND THE
CONQUEST 9
was re-occupied such a short time before its divine
demolition--this, together with
the completeness of the destruction (Josh.
of this stratum to erosion.
Shechem.--As
soon as the army of
nation northward more than twenty miles to establish
God’s covenant with
and Gerizim (Josh.
between the hills the Israelites had to go past
the stronghold of Shechem, less
than a mile to the east. Years later, Joshua covened
all the leaders of the
nation at Shechem to renew
their covenant commitment to Jehovah (chap. 24).
Excavations
at Tell Balatah in the last few years clearly confirm
that Shechem
was inhabited during the Late Bronze Age. (G.
Ernest Wright, "The Second
Campaign
at Tell Balatah Shechem ," BASOR,
11148, 21t). In 1926 two
cuneiform tablets were unearthed by German
archaeologists at Shechem;
they were both written about 1400 B.C. (Wm. F.
Albright, "A Teacher to a
Man
of Shechem about 1400 B.C.," BASOR, #86, 28-31). Nor does there
seem to have been any widespread destruction of the
city and its temple
between its capture by the Egyptians about 1500
B.C. and its burning by
Abimelech
around 1150B.C. (Jud. 9:49, cf. Edw.
F. Campbell, Jr., "Excavation
at Shechem, 1960";
Robert J. Bull, "A Re-examination of the
The Biblical
Archaeologist,
XXIII 1960,101-119).
Since Joshua did not attack
Shechem, the city must have been in friendly
hands. Several of the Amarna
letters declare that around 1380 B.C. Lab'ayu the prince
of Shechem was in
league with the
invading Habiru.
Certainly we cannot equate the Israelite
Hebrews
with the Habiru bands wherever they are mentioned in
clay tablets
throughout the
every mention of the Habiru
in the Amarna Tablets refer to Israelites. But
in this case of Lablayu
the Israelite Hebrews may be his confederates, stigmatized
as Habiru by
pro-Egyptian neighboring kings. In fact,
some of the Shechemites
could possibly even have been descendants of Jacob,
whose ancestors had left
actually did go back to
to imply, however, that one or more entire tribes
of
some other exodus before the time of Moses.
Gibeon.--Before 1960 James B. Pritchard, director of the highly
successful
excavations at
occupation of the site of el-Jib. But in July 1960 an Arab woman revealed in
her vineyard the presence of twelve shaft tombs cut
in the rock. According
to the pottery imported from
the beginning of the
Middle Bronze Age to the end of the late Bronze period
(James
B. Pritchard, "Seeking the Pre-Biblical History of
Illustrated
fall to the Israelites, however, no help in settling
the controversy concerning
the date of the Conquest can be expected from that
site in the future.
Hazor.--After
Joshua had pursued the Canaanites in three directions from
the waters of Merom he
turned back and took Hazor. He killed Jabin
king of
Hazor and set fire
to the city (Josh. 11:10f). Hazor was undoubtedly the
largest city in all of
city, stretches for 1000 yards from north to south
and averages 700 yards
in width covering an area of about 183 acres. It
could accommodate
30,000-40,000
people in an emergency with all their horses and chariots.
There is no need to confuse the two
accounts concerning two kings
of Hazor named Jabin. Those who try to harmonize the account in Joshua
11
with the one in Judges 4, 5 are those who
10
GRACE
JOURNAL
accept a late date for the Exodus and the Conquest.
They feel compelled to
combine the two Israelite victories into one
campaign and the two Jabins into
one man because of the shortness of the time
allotted by them to the period
of the Judges. Yet the same scholars would not
claim that Rameses II and
Rameses III of
Biblical
history requires that in interpreting the archaeological evidence from
Hazor one must assign a later Canaanite level to the
time of Deborah and
Barak than
the level which he assigns to the time of Joshua. Therefore, since
the last Canaanite city in the vast enclosure to
the north of the mound of the
acropolis had been destroyed, not to be
reoccupied, in the thirteenth century
B.C.,
this last city must be the one in which Jabin of
Judges 4 resided. This
date agrees well with a date around 1240 to 1220
B.C. for Deborah's battle
against Sisera.
In the fourth season of excavations at Hazor, Yadin found what may
well be evidence of Joshua's burning of the
city. In Area K he and his staff
excavated the gate of the
was erected on the foundations of the earlier
Middle Bronze Age II gate,
and is identical in plan. Yadin
writes:
This gate must have been destroyed
in a violent conflagration, though the exterior
walls still
stand to a height of nine feet. Traces of the burnt bricks of its inner
walls and the ashes of the
burnt beams still cover the floors in thick heaps. The
evidence suggests that this
destruction occurred before the final destruction of
Hazor by the Israelites, but
this problem remains to be studied. --Yigael Yadin,
"The Fourth Season of Excavation at Hazor," The Biblical Archaeologist, XXII
(1959), 8f.
One may wonder why or how the Canaanites
regained control of Hazor after
the time of Joshua.
This question can be answered by pointing out that in his
southern campaign Joshua did not attempt to
occupy the cities whose inhabitants
and kings he killed. At the end of that campaign "Joshua
returned, and all
with him, unto the camp to Gilgal"
(Josh.
in the cities to hold them. Furthermore, in the
cases of
stated that these cities had to be recaptured (Josh.
of warfare seems to have been a series of
lightning-like raids against key Canaanite
cities, with the purpose of destroying the fighting
ability of the inhabitants, not
necessarily of besieging and actually capturing and
settling the cities which he
attacked (see Josh. 10:19f and
be remembered that Joshua burned none of those
cities except
and Hazor (
new evidence which has appeared, not at the tell of
some important ancient
city, but at numerous small unnamed sites in
archaeologist, Yohanan
Aharoni, conducted a systematic survey of an area
in
Naphtali. Sixty-one ancient sites were examined,
and he and his associates made
two trial digs.
He reports that a chain of eight Bronze Age towns, presumably
Canaanite,
lay along the present Israeli-Lebanese border in less hilly and more
fertile territory; and that nineteen small Iron
Age settlements--sometimes only
a mile apart--were situated in the heavily
forested higher mountains in the
southern part of
"special sort of large jar with thickened rim and plastic
ornament, made of
gritty clay."
In a trial dig at Khirbet Tuleil
he discovered in the lowest stratum
not a sherd from the Late
Bronze Age; rather he found examples of those
large jars in
situ, together with other types of pottery somewhat analogous
to vessels from
NEW LIGHT ON THE WILDERNESS JOURNEY AND THE
CONQUEST 11
pottery type, dating from the 13th-12th
centuries B.C., was introduced by the
invading Northern Israelite tribes who took over
areas not very suitable for settlement
in the harsh mountains where there was no
Canaanite population (Y. Aharoni,
"Problems
of the Israelite Conquest in the light of Archaeological Discoveries,"
Antiquity and Survival, II 1957, 146-149. Since Megiddo VII is usually dated
about 1350-1150 B.C., we may date the beginning of
these Iron Age I settlements
in
reference to the territory of a people called ‘Asaru or Asher in
an inscription of
Seti I, dating about 1310 B.C. According to a book
review by B. S. J. Isserlin
(Journal of Semitic Studies, IV 1959, 279f.) of Aharoni's book, The Settlement
of the Israelite Tribes in Upper Galilee, published in Hebrew in
1957, Aharoni
readily admits that Israelite infiltration began
at least as early as the period of Seti
I in the 14 century B.C.
It must be remembered that Joshua returned
to Gilgal after defeating Jabin
and
burning Hazor, without
occupying any towns or territory in
Naphtali and Asher received their tribal
allotments and migrated northward, they
found that the Canaanites had reoccupied their cities
and resumed control of
most of
century or more until they began to clear fields
in the forests and build towns in
the mountainous part of
B.C.
have been discovered in
century date for the Exodus and the Conquest. Let
us remember that the Bible over
and over again indicates that all the tribes
entered
was in
also.
The
Silence concerning
The
objection.--Those who favor the late date of the Exodus and of the Conquest
make much of the fact
that contact with
Judges
is seldom if ever mentioned in the sacred text.
They claim that
effectively controlled by the Egyptians as one of
their provinces from Thutmose III
at least through the reign of Rameses
II (1301-1234 B.C.). Therefore they say
it
was impossible or at least very improbable that the
Israelites could have taken
possession of
crushing
inscribed on a stela
found in the ruins of his mortuary temple at
Petrie in 1896. In reply it may be pointed out that in the
book of Judges there are
two references to the Egyptians (6:8, 9;
refer to that people at the time of the Exodus, they may also include later attempts
by
The probable solution.--J. W. Jack has discussed this whole
problem thoroughly
and sanely in his book The Date of the Exodus. He
demonstrates from the evidence
in the Amarna letters that beginning around 1400 B.C. in the reign
of Amenhotep
III
(1410-1372 B.C.),
concern on the part of the Egyptians continued
for over three quarters of a century,
thus giving ample time to the Israelite invaders to
get a foothold in the
Canaan.2
Beginning again with the Nineteenth Dynasty
pharaohs (whose records can be
read on the walls of
their great temples at
marched northward into
12
GRACE
JOURNAL
and
captured the towns of the
city of
least two stelae of his in
that city. From there he crossed the
turned northward again to the
Valley.
His son, the great Rameses II, re-established
Egyptian authority in many
a Palestinian town, but these were all in the
Maritime Plain and the Shephelah
(the Judean foothills), which were not actual Israelite
territory at the time, or at
least not
continuously held by the Jews till long afterward. While Merneptah
listed
of
captured or socked, which seems to show that he,
no more than his father
Rameses, penetrated into what was Israelite
territory. In the Twentieth Dynasty
Rameses III (1195-1164 B.C.) pursued the
retreating "Sea Peoples," whom he
had repulsed in their attempted invasion of the
Nile Delta, along the
coast into
coastal towns.
the end of his reign
dependencies.3
The facts just recited do not furnish
reason to say that
by the kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty and made so
thoroughly an Egyptian
province that the Conquest could not well have
begun until the latter part of
the reign of Rameses III
--or even of Rameses II. Sir Flinders Petrie's remarks
were too hasty when he wrote: "The Egyptians
were incessantly raiding
down to 1194 B.C., and yet there is absolutely no
trace of Egyptian action in the
whole period of the Judges, which shows that the entry
into
after that date."4 Jack presents a number of arguments to
demonstrate that the
Israelites
could have been in the
there being any necessity of mentioning contact with
Egyptians during the period
of Joshua and the Judges.5
(1) After Joshua's campaigns or raids to
exterminate much of the wicked
population of
settlement in
The
names of the towns which could not be conquered and consequently were
left for a long
period in control of the Canaanites make a surprising list. The
inspired record in
Judges 1 includes
Dor, Ibleam,
Helbah, Aphik, Rehob, Beth-shemesh (in Naphtali's portion), Beth-anath,
Aijalon, and Shaalbim. The Israelites, then, at least until after
the time of
Rameses III, were residing chiefly in the hill
country, removed from the coastal
plain along which the pharaohs were wont to march.
(2) The campaigns of Seti
I, Rameses II, and Rameses
III were directed
mainly against the Syrians and the Hittites to the
north of
names of towns and districts mentioned in their
records of their marches it seems
that the Egyptian armies kept as much as possible to
the military route along the
Mediterranean coast. There is no indication that they invaded the
high central
ridge of the
(3) Even supposing that the Egyptians did
make some attacks on
repulse some Israelite raids on their positions
along their line of march--such as
the victory which Merneptah
claimed over
made no clear references to such does not afford any
valid argument against the
early-date theory.
No one would claim that the Hebrew records of the time of
the Judges are a complete account of every battle
and skirmish in which every
tribe of
NEW
LIGHT ON THE WILDERNESS JOURNEY AND THE CONQUEST 13
(4) Some of the encounters which the
tribes of
and Amorites (Jud. 1-5) may have been instigated by
that the pharaohs used native levies and mercenaries
to maintain control in their
provinces.
As Jack says, "The struggling Israelites in the heart of the land
were
beneath the notice of the main Egyptian armies,
and could be safely left to the
soldiery of the tributary princes to deal
with."6
In general throughout the long period of
the Judges Israel had little contact
with the Egyptians.
The pharaohs marched along the coast and through the
of Esdraelon, whose
cities the Israelites could not capture from the Canaanites at
least until the time of Deborah. Concerning any times when the Egyptians did
meet
the Hebrews, it was not in the purpose of the
writer of the book of Judges to mention
them in any detail. The Egyptians were never one of
the main adversaries of
after the days of Moses. Thus no valid objection to the early date of
the Exodus and
the Conquest can rightfully be made on the basis of
the reputed silence in the book
of Judges about Egyptian campaigns in
Dynasties.
DOCUMENTATION
1.
E.g., Melvin Grove Kyle, "Exodus: Date and Numbers (Alternative View)," ISBE, II,
1056A.
2.
J. W. Jack, The Date of the Exodus (Edinburgh: T. &
T. Clark, 1925), pp. 43-57.
3.
Ibid, pp. 58-68.
4.
W. M. Flinders
Knowledge, 1911),
pp. 37f.
5.
Jack,. op. cit., pp. 69-85.
6.
Ibid., p. 84.
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