CHAPTER VI

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MONARCHY

Influence of Shiloh—Samuel and the Philistines—Duplicate Narratives in

the Books of Samuel—Prophet and Seer—Dervish Monasteries—Capture of the

Ark and Destruction of Shiloh—Saul made King—Quarrels with

Samuel—Delivers Israel from the Philistines—Attacks the

Amalekites—David—Two Accounts of his Rise to Power—Jealousy of

Saul—David’s Flight—Massacre of the Priests at Nob—Wanderings of

David—He sells his Services to the King of Gath—Duties of a

Mercenary—Battle of Gilboa and David’s Position—He is made King of

Judah—War with Esh-Baal—Intrigues with Abner—Murder of Esh-Baal—David

revolts from the Philistines and becomes King of Israel—Capture of

Jerusalem, which is made the Capital—Results of this—Conquest of the

Philistines, of Moab, Ammon, Zobah, and Edom—The Israelitish

Empire—Murder of Uriah and Birth of Solomon—Influence of Nathan—Polygamy

and its Effects in the Family of David—Revolt of Absalom—Of Sheba—Folly

and Ingratitude of David—Saul’s Descendants sacrificed because of a

Drought—The Plague and the Purchase of the Site of the Temple—David’s

Officers and last Instructions—His Character—Chronology—Solomon puts

Joab and Others to Death—His Religious Policy—Queen of Sheba—Trade and

Buildings—Hiram of Tyre—Palace and Temple Built—Tadmor—Zoological and

Botanical Gardens—Discontent in Israel—Impoverishment of the

Country—Jeroboam—Tastes and Character of Solomon ... Pp. 332-480

ABBREVIATIONS

W. A. I. = _Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia._ Published by the

Trustees of the British Museum.

Z.D.M.G. = _Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft._

W. & A. = Winckler and Abel’s edition of the Tel el-Amarna Tablets at

Berlin and Cairo in _Mitthetlungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen_,

i. ii. iii.

CHAPTER I

THE HEBREW PATRIARCHS

Who were the Hebrews?—Origin of the Name—Ur and its Kings—Amraphel

or Khammu-rabi—Canaanites in Babylonia—Harran—The Amorites—Abram in

Canaan and Egypt—The Campaign of Chedor-laomer—Melchizedek—Sodom and

Gomorrha—Circumcision—Name of Abraham—Hebrew and Aramaic—Moab and

Ammon—Amorite Kingdoms—Dedan—Sacrifice of the firstborn—Mount

Moriah—Purchase of the Field of Machpelah—The Hittites—Babylonian

Law—Isaac as a Bedâwi Shêkh—Esau and the Edomites—Jacob—Settles at

Shechem—His Sons—The Israelitish Tribes—Joseph—The Hyksos in

Egypt—Egyptian Character of Joseph’s History—Goshen—Deaths of Jacob

and Joseph.

The historian of the Hebrews is met at the very outset by a strange

difficulty. Who were the Hebrews whose history he proposes to write? We

speak of a Hebrew people, of a Hebrew literature, and of a Hebrew

language; and by the one we mean the people who called themselves

Israelites or Jews, by the other the literary records of this

Israelitish nation, and by the third a language which the Israelites

shared with the older population of Canaan. It is from the Old Testament

that we derive the term ‘Hebrew,’ and the use of the term is by no means

clear.

Abram is called ‘the Hebrew’ before he became Abraham the father of

Isaac and the Israelites. The confederate of the Amorite chieftains of

Mamre, the conqueror of the Babylonian invaders of Canaan, is a

‘Hebrew’; when he comes before us as a simple Bedâwi shêkh he is a

Hebrew no longer. When Joseph is sold into Egypt it is as a ‘Hebrew’

slave; and he tells the Pharaoh that he had been ‘stolen’ out of ‘the

land of the Hebrews.’ The oppressed people in the age of the Exodus are

known as ‘Hebrews’ to their Egyptian taskmasters. Moses was one of ‘the

Hebrews’ children’; and he declares to the Egyptian monarch that Yahveh

of Israel was ‘the God of the Hebrews.’ It would seem, therefore, as if

it were the name by which the people of Canaan, and more especially the

Israelites, were known to the Egyptians.

And yet there is no certain trace of it on the Egyptian monuments. In

the Egyptian texts the south of Palestine is called Khar, perhaps the

land of the ‘Horites’; the coast-land is termed Zahi, ‘the dry’; and the

whole country is indifferently known as that of the Upper Lotan or

Syrians, and of the Fenkhu or Phœnicians. When we come down to the age

of the nineteenth dynasty we find the name of Canaan already established

in Egyptian literature. Seti I. destroyed the Shasu or Bedâwin from the

frontiers of Egypt to ‘the land of Canaan’; and in a papyrus of the same

age we hear of Kan’amu or ‘Canaanite slaves’ from the land of Khar. Of

any name that resembles that of the Hebrews there is not a trace.

It is equally impossible to discover it in the cuneiform records of

Babylonia and Assyria. The Babylonians, from time immemorial, called

Palestine ‘the land of the Amorites,’ doubtless because the Amorites

were the dominant people there in those early ages when Babylonian

armies first made their way to the distant West. The Assyrians called it

‘the land of the Hittites’ for the same reason, while in the letters

from the Asiatic correspondents of the Pharaoh found at Tel el-Amarna,

and dating from the century before the Exodus, it is termed Kinakhna or

Canaan. How then comes Joseph to describe it as ‘the land of the

Hebrews,’ and himself as a ‘Hebrew’ slave?

More than one attempt has been made to identify the mysterious name with

names met with in hieroglyphic and cuneiform texts. The Egyptian

monuments refer to a class of foreigners called ’Apuriu, who were

employed in the time of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties to convey

the blocks of stone needed for the great buildings of Egypt from the

quarries of the eastern desert. We are told how they dragged the great

altar of the Sun-god to Memphis for Ramses II.; and how, at a much later

date, Ramses IV. was still employing eight hundred men of the same race

to transport his stone from the quarries of Hammamât. Chabas and some

other Egyptologists have seen in these ’Apuriu the Hebrews of Scripture,

and have further identified them with the ’Aperu mentioned on the back

of a papyrus, where it is said that one of them acted as a sort of

aide-de-camp to the great conqueror of the eighteenth dynasty, Thothmes

III.

But there are serious objections to these identifications.[1] There are

reasons for believing that the ’Aperu and the ’Apuriu do not represent

the same name; and no satisfactory explanation has hitherto been

forthcoming as to why we should meet with Hebrews of the Israelitish

race still serving as public slaves in Egypt so long after the Exodus as

the reigns of Ramses III. and Ramses IV. Moreover, in one text it is

stated that the ’Apuriu belonged ‘to the ’Anuti barbarians,’ who

inhabited the desert between Egypt and the Red Sea. It is true that some

of the Semitic kinsfolk of the Israelites led a nomad life here in the

old times, as they still do to-day; nevertheless, ‘the ’Anuti

barbarians’ were for the most part of African origin, and the eastern

desert of Egypt is not quite the place where we should expect to find

the nearest kindred of a Canaanitish people. At present, at all events,

the identification of Hebrews and ’Apuriu must be held to be non-proven.

Since the discovery of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna another

attempt has been made to find the name of the Hebrews outside the pages

of the Old Testament. Ebed-Tob, the vassal-king of Jerusalem, in his

letters to Khu-n-Aten, the ‘heretic’ Pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty,

speaks of certain enemies whom he terms Khabiri. They were threatening

the authority of the Egyptian monarch, and had already captured several

of the cities under Ebed-Tob’s jurisdiction. The Egyptian governors in

the south of Palestine had been slain, and the territory of Jerusalem

was no longer able to defend itself. If the Pharaoh could send no troops

at once, all would be lost. The Khabiri, under their leader Elimelech,

were already established in the country, and in concert with the Sutê or

Bedâwin were wresting it out of the hands of Egypt.[2]

Some scholars, with more haste than discretion, have pronounced the

Khabiri of the cuneiform tablets to be the Hebrews of the Old Testament.

If that were the case, Hebrew and Israelite could no longer be

considered to be synonymous terms. In the age of the Khabiri the

Israelites of Scripture were still in Egypt, where the cities of Ramses

and Pithom were not as yet built, and their leader to the conquest of

Canaan was Joshua, and not Elimelech. When in subsequent centuries

Ramses II. and Ramses III. invaded and occupied Palestine, they found no

traces there of the children of Israel. They have left us lists of the

places they captured; we look in vain among them for the name of Israel

or of an Israelitish tribe. We look equally in vain in the Book of

Judges for any allusion to Egyptian conquests.

The Khabiri, then, are not the Hebrews of Scripture, nor does the word

throw any light on the term ‘Hebrew’ itself. Khabiri is really a

descriptive title, meaning ‘Confederates’; it was a word borrowed by

Babylonian from the language of Canaan, but is met with in old

Babylonian and Assyrian hymns.[3] It may be that Hebron, the city of

‘the Confederacy,’ derived its name from these ‘Confederated’ bands; at

all events, the name of Hebron is nowhere mentioned by Ebed-Tob or his

brother governors, and it first appears in the Egyptian records in the

time of Ramses III. under the form of Khibur.[4]

The Tel el-Amarna tablets, accordingly, give us no help in regard to the

name of the Hebrews, nor do any other cuneiform inscriptions with which

we are acquainted. Babylonian records do indeed speak of a people called

the Khabirâ, but they inhabited the mountains of Elam, on the eastern

side of Babylonia, and between them and the Hebrews of Scripture no

connection is possible.[5] In an old Babylonian list of foreign

countries we read of a country of Khubur, which was situated in northern

Mesopotamia in the neighbourhood of Harran; but Khubur is more probably

related to the river Khabur than to the kinsfolk of Terah and Laban.[6]

Moreover, a part of the mountains of the Amanus, overlooking the Gulf of

Antioch, from whence logs of pine were brought to the cities of Chaldæa,

was also known as Khabur.[7]

Archæological discovery, therefore, has as yet given us no help. We must

still depend upon the Old Testament alone for an answer to our question,

Who were the Hebrews? And, unfortunately, the evidence of the Old

Testament is by no means clear. We have seen that on one side by the

Hebrews are meant the Israelites, and that from time to time the

Israelitish descendants of Abraham are characterised by that name. But

on the other side there are passages in which a distinction seems to be

made between them. Though Joseph is a Hebrew slave, it is because he has

been stolen out of ‘the land of the Hebrews.’ Canaan, accordingly, even

before its conquest by the Israelites, was inhabited by a Hebrew people.

So, too, in the early days of the reign of Saul, the Israelites and the

Hebrews appear to be still separate. While ‘the men of Israel’ hide

themselves in caves and thickets, ‘the Hebrews’ cross over the Jordan to

the lands of Gad and Gilead (1 Sam. xiii. 6, 7). Similarly we are told

that in Saul’s first battle with the Philistines ‘the Hebrews’ that were

with the enemy deserted to ‘the Israelites’ that were with Saul (1 Sam.

xiv. 21).

Perhaps, however, all that is intended in these passages is to emphasise

the fact that among the Philistines, as among the Egyptians, the

children of Israel were known as ‘Hebrews.’ The difficulty is that such

a name is not found in the monumental records of Egypt. When Shishak

describes his campaign against Judah and Israel, it is not the Hebrews,

but the Fenkhu and the ’Amu whom he tells us he has conquered.

In fact, the Egyptian equivalent of Hebrew is ’Amu. What Joseph calls

‘the land of the Hebrews’ would have been termed ‘the land of the ’Amu’

by an Egyptian scribe. Joseph himself would have been an ’Amu slave.

’Amu signified an Asiatic in a restricted sense. It denoted the Asiatics

of Syria and of the desert between Palestine and Egypt. It included also

the nomad tribes of Edom and the Sinaitic Peninsula. It was thus larger

in its meaning than the Biblical ‘Hebrew’; but, at the same time, it

conveyed just the same ideas, and was used in much the same way. The

Hyksos conquerors of Egypt were termed ’Amu, and a famous Syrian oculist

in the days of the eighteenth dynasty is described as an ’Amu of Gebal.

The name is probably derived from the Canaanitish and Hebrew word which

signifies ‘a people.’

The name ‘Hebrew’ comes from a root which means ‘to pass’ or ‘cross

over.’ It has been variously explained as ‘a pilgrim,’ ‘a dweller on the

other side,’ ‘a crosser of the river.’ But the second explanation is

that which best harmonises with philological probabilities. We find

other derivatives from the same root. Among them is Abarim, the name of

that mountain-range of Moab on ‘the other side’ of the Jordan, from

whence Moses beheld the Promised Land (Numb. xxvii. 12), as well as

Ebronah, near the Gulf of Aqaba, one of the resting-places of the

children of Israel (Numb. xxxiii. 34). Hebrew genealogists indeed seem

to have connected the name with that of the patriarch Eber. But this is

in accordance with that spirit of Semitic idiom which throws geography

and ethnology into a genealogical form. It is probable that the name of

the patriarch is merely the Babylonian _ebar_, ‘a priest,’ which is met

with in Babylonian contracts of the age of Abraham.

Professor Hommel, however, supplementing a suggestion of Dr. Glaser, has

recently drawn attention to certain facts which throw light on the early

use of the name ‘Hebrew,’ even if they do not remove all the

difficulties connected with it.[8] A Minæan inscription from the south

of Arabia, in which the name of ’Ammi-zadoq occurs, couples together the

countries of Misr or Egypt, of Aashur, the Ashshurim of Gen. xxv. 3, and

of ’Ibr Naharân, ‘the land beyond the river.’ In another Minæan

inscription of the same age, the name of ’Ibr Naharân is replaced by

that of Gaza. It is clear, therefore, that in ’Ibr Naharân we must see

the south of Palestine. But the Minæan texts are not alone in their use

of the term. A broken Assyrian tablet from the library of Nineveh[9]

also refers to Ebir-nâri, ‘the land beyond the river,’ in Canaan, and

associates it with Beth-el, Tyre, and Jeshimon. Professor Hommel is

probably right in assigning the inscription to the reign of

Assur-bel-Kala, the son of Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1080). At all

events, the name seems to be of Babylonian origin, like most of the

geographical expressions adopted by the Assyrians, and it is

consequently very possible that Ebir-nâri primarily signified the

country on the western bank of the Euphrates, where Ur was situated, and

that it was subsequently extended to the country west of the Jordan when

Syria became a province of the Babylonian empire.[10]

However this may be, the question with which we started remains

unanswered. We are still unable to define with exactness who the Hebrews

were. The origin and first use of the name are still a matter of doubt.

We must be content with the fact that it came to be applied—if not

exclusively, at all events predominantly—to the people of Israel in

their dealings with their foreign neighbours. It may be that this

special application of it was first fixed by the Philistines. In any

case it was a name which was accepted by the Israelites themselves, and

gradually became synonymous with all that was specifically Israelitish.

Even the old ‘language of Canaan,’ as it is still called by Isaiah (xix.

18), became ‘the Hebrew language’ of modern lexicographers. For us of

to-day the history of the Hebrew people means the history of the

descendants of Israel. It is with ‘Abram the Hebrew’ that the history

begins. Future ages looked back upon him as the ancestor of the Hebrew

race, ‘the rock’ from whence it was ‘hewn.’ He had come from the far

East, from ‘Ur of the Casdim’ or Babylonians. His younger brother Haran

had died ‘in the land of his nativity’; with his elder brother Nahor and

himself, his father Terah had migrated westward, to Harran in

Mesopotamia. There Terah had died, and there Abram had received the call

which led him to journey still further onwards into the land of Canaan.

He was already married. Already in Babylonia he had made Sarai his wife,

who is also said to have been his step-sister; while the wife, Milcah,

whom his brother Nahor had taken to himself, was his niece. A time came

when both Abram and Sarai took new names in token of the covenant they

had made with God. Abram became Abraham, and Sarai became Sarah.

Upon these beginnings of Hebrew history light has been thrown by the

decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions. The site of ‘Ur of the

Chaldees’ has been found. Geographers are no longer dependent on Arab

legends or vague coincidencies with classical names. Ur was one of the

most ancient and prosperous of Babylonian cities. The very name meant

‘the city’; it was, in fact, the capital of a district, and its kings at

one time had claimed sway over the rest of Chaldæa. Alone among the

great cities of Babylonia, it stood on the western bank of the Euphrates

in close contact with the nomad tribes of Semitic Arabia. More than any

other of the Babylonian towns it was thus able to influence and be

influenced by the Semites of the west; it was an outpost of Babylonian

culture, and its position made it a centre of trade.

Its mounds of ruin are now known as Muqayyar or Mugheir. Highest among

them towers the mound which covers the remains of the great temple of

the moon-god. For it was to Sin, the moon-god, that the city had been

dedicated from time immemorial, and in whose honour its temple had been

built. There was only one other temple of Sin that was equally famous,

and this was the temple which stood at Harran in Mesopotamia, and which,

like that at Ur, had been erected and endowed by Babylonian kings.

It was not only with the Semites of Northern Arabia that Ur carried on

its trade. It lay not very far from the mouth of the Euphrates, which in

early days flowed into the Persian Gulf nearly a hundred miles to the

north of the present coast. We hear in the cuneiform tablets of ‘the

ships of Ur,’ and these ships must have been used in the trade that was

carried on by water. The products of Southern Arabia could thus be

brought to the Chaldean city; perhaps also there was intercourse even

with Egypt.

The kings of Ur grew in power, and a dynasty arose at last which gained

ascendency over the other states of Babylonia. We are beginning to learn

something about these kings and the society over which they ruled.

During the last few years excavations have been carried on by the

Americans, by the French, and even by the Turkish Government, which have

brought to light thousands of early cuneiform records, some of which are

dated in their reigns. A large proportion of these records are contracts

which throw an unexpected light on the commerce and law, the manners and

customs and social life of the inhabitants of Babylonia at the time.

Among the last kings of the dynasty of Ur were Inê-Sin and Pûr-Sin,

whose names, it will be observed, are compounded with that of the

patron-god of the state. Inê-Sin not only invaded Elam, but the distant

west as well. His daughters married the High-Priests both of Ansan in

Elam and of Markhasi, now Mer’ash, in Syria.[11] But it was not the

first time that Babylonian armies had marched to the west. Centuries

before (about B.C. 3800) another Babylonian king, Sargon of Accad, had

made campaign after campaign against the land of the Amorites, as Syria

and Palestine were called, had set up images of himself on the shores of

the Mediterranean, and had united all Western Asia into a single empire,

while his son and successor had marched southward into the Sinaitic

Peninsula.[12] A predecessor of Inê-Sin himself, Gimil-Sin by name, had

overrun the land of Zabsali, which Professor Hommel is probably right in

identifying with Subsalla, from whence an earlier Babylonian prince

obtained stone for his buildings, and which, we are told, was in the

mountains of the Amorites. The stone, in fact, was the limestone of the

Lebanon.[13]

Inê-Sin married his daughter to the High-Priest of Zabsali, but his

successor Pûr-Sin II. appears to have been one of the last of the

dynasty. Babylonia fell under Elamite domination, and a line of kings

arose at Babylon whose names show that they came from Southern Arabia.

The first of them was Khammu-rabi, whose reign lasted for fifty-five

years. He proved himself one of the most able and vigorous of Babylonian

monarchs. Before he died he had driven the Elamites out of the country,

and united it into a single monarchy, with Babylon for its capital.

When Khammu-rabi first mounted the throne, he was a vassal of the king

of Elam. In Southern Babylonia, not far from Ur, though on the opposite

side of the river, was a rival kingdom, that of Larsa, whose king,

Eri-Aku or Arioch, was the son of an Elamite prince. His father

Kudur-Mabug is called ‘the Father of the land of the Amorites,’ implying

not only that Canaan was subject at the time to Elamite rule, but also

that Kudur-Mabug held some official position there. In one of his

inscriptions Eri-Aku entitles himself ‘the shepherd of Ur,’ and tells us

that he had captured ‘the ancient city of Erech.’

In Eri-Aku or Arioch, Assyriologists have long since seen the Arioch of

the book of Genesis, the contemporary of Abram; and their belief has

been raised to certainty by the recent discovery by Mr. Pinches of

certain fragmentary cuneiform tablets in which allusion is made not only

to Khammu-rabi, but also to the kings who were his contemporaries. These

are Arioch, Kudur-Laghghamar or Chedor-laomer, and Tudghula or Tid’al.

Khammu-rabi, accordingly, must be identified with Amraphel, who is

stated in the Old Testament to have been king of Shinar or Babylonia,

and we can approximately fix the period when the family of Terah

migrated from Ur of the Chaldees. It was about 2300 B.C. if the

chronology of the native Babylonian historians is correct.[14]

There was at this time constant intercourse between Babylonia and the

West. The father of Eri-Aku, as we have seen, bore the title of ‘Father

of the land of the Amorites,’ and Khammu-rabi himself claimed

sovereignty over the same part of the world. So, too, did his

great-grandson Ammi-satana (or Ammi-dhitana), who in one of his

inscriptions adds the title of ‘king of the land of the Amorites’ to

that of ‘king of Babylon.’ Indeed, the kings of the dynasty to which

Khammu-rabi belonged bear names which are almost as much Canaanitish or

Hebrew as they are South Arabic in form. The Babylonians had some

difficulty in spelling them, and in the contract-tablets, consequently,

the same name is written in different ways. Thus we learn from a

philological tablet in which the names are translated into Semitic

Babylonian that Khammu and Ammi are but variant attempts to represent

the same word—that of a god whose name appears in those of South Arabian

princes as well as Israelites of the Old Testament, and from whom the

Beni-Ammi or Ammonites derived their name.[15]

The founder of the dynasty had been Sumu-abi (or Samu-abi), ‘Shem is my

father,’ and his son had been Sumu-la-il, ‘Is not Shem a god?’ The

monarchs who ruled at Babylon, therefore, when Abram was born claimed

the same ancestor as did Abram’s family, and worshipped him as a god.

The father of Ammi-satana was Abesukh, the Abishua’ of the Bible; and

his son was Ammi-zaduq, where _zaduq_, ‘righteous,’ is a word well known

to the languages of Southern Arabia and Canaan, but not to that of

Babylonia. The kings who succeeded to the inheritance of the old

Babylonian monarchs of Ur were thus allied in language and race to the

Hebrew patriarch.

But this is not all. We find in the contracts which were drawn up in the

reigns of the kings of Ur and the successors of Sumu-abi not only names

like Sabâ, ‘the Sabæan,’ which carry us to the spice-bearing lands of

Southern Arabia,[16] but names also which are specifically Canaanitish,

or as we should usually term it, Hebrew, in form. Thus Mr. Pinches has

discovered in them Ya’qub-il and Yasup-il, of which the Biblical Jacob

and Joseph are abbreviations, and elsewhere we meet with Abdiel and

Lama-il, the Lemuel of the Old Testament. Even the name of Abram

(Abi-ramu) himself occurs among the witnesses to a deed which is dated

in the reign of Khammu-rabi’s grandfather, and its Canaanitish character

is put beyond question by the fact that he is called the father of ‘the

Amorite.’[17]

From other documents we learn that there were Amoritish or Canaanite

settlements in Babylonia where the foreigner was allowed to acquire land

and carry on trade with the natives. One of these was just outside the

walls of Sippara in Northern Babylonia, and a good many references to it

have already been detected. Thus in the reign of Ammi-zaduq a case of

disputed title was brought before four of the royal judges which related

to certain feddans or ‘acres’ of land ‘in the district of the Amorites,’

‘at the entrance to the city of Sippara’;[18] and a contract dated in

the reign of Khammu-rabi’s father further describes the district as just

outside the principal gate of the city. It included arable and garden

land, pasturage and woods, as well as houses, and was thus like the land

of Goshen, which was similarly handed over to the Israelites to settle

in. An Egyptian inscription of the time of the eighteenth dynasty also

speaks of a similar district close to Memphis, which had been given to

the Hittites by the Pharaohs.[19] The strangers had their own judges. We

learn, for instance, from a lawsuit which was decided in the time of

Khammu-rabi that a Canaanite, Nahid-Amurri (‘the exalted of the Amorite

god’), who was defendant in a case of disputed property, was first

taken, along with the plaintiff, before the judges of Nin-Marki, ‘the

lady of the Amorite land,’ and then before another set of judges and the

assembled people of the city. It is clear from this that the judges who

were deputed to look after the interests of the settlers from the West

also acted when one of the parties was a native of Babylonia.[20]

The migration of Terah and his family thus ceases to be an isolated and

unexplained fact. In the age to which it belonged Canaan and Babylonia

were in close connection one with the other. Babylonian kings claimed

rule over Canaan, and Canaanitish merchants were established in

Babylonia. The language of Canaan was heard in the Babylonian cities,

and even the rulers of the land were of foreign blood. Between Babylonia

and Canaan there was a highway which had been trodden for generations,

and along which soldiers and civil officials, merchants and messengers,

passed frequently to and fro.

Midway, on a tributary of the river Belikh, was the city of Harran, so

called from a Sumerian word which signified ‘a high-road.’ Its name

pointed to a Babylonian foundation, as did also its temple dedicated to

the Babylonian moon-god. The temple, in fact, counted among its founders

and restorers a long line of Babylonian and Assyrian kings, and almost

the last act of the Babylonian Empire was the restoration of the ancient

shrine. Merodach, the god of Babylon, came in a dream to the last of the

Babylonian monarchs, and bade him raise once more from its ruins the

sanctuary of his brother-god. And Nabonidos tells us how he performed

the task laid upon him, how he disinterred the memorial-stones of the

older Assyrian kings, and how ‘by the art of the god Laban, the lord of

foundations and brickwork, with silver and gold and precious stones,

with spices and cedarwood,’ he built again Ê-Khulkhul, ‘the temple of

rejoicing.’ The moon-god, Sin, who was adored within it, was known

throughout the Aramaic lands of Northern Syria as Baal-Kharran, ‘the

Lord of Harran.’

But there was another city of the moon-god besides Harran. This was Ur

in Babylonia. In Babylonian literature it is commonly known as the city

of Sin. Between Ur and Harran there must have been some close

connection, and it may be that Harran owed its foundation to the kings

of Ur. At all events, there was good reason why an emigrant from Ur

should establish his abode in Harran. Both cities were under the same

divine patron, and that meant, in the ancient world, that both lived the

same religious and civil life. Harran obeyed the rule of the Babylonian

kings; its very name showed that it was of Babylonian origin, and its

culture was that of Babylonia. Law and religion, manners and customs,

all were alike in Harran and Ur. The migration from the one city to the

other did not differ from a change of dwelling from London to Edinburgh.

The country in which Harran was built formed part of the vast tract

between the Tigris and Euphrates, which was known to the Babylonians in

early days as Suru or Suri, a name which perhaps survived in that of the

city Suru, the Suriyeh of modern geography. In Semitic times it was

called Subari or Suwari by the Assyrians, sometimes also Subartu. Suru

thus corresponded with our Mesopotamia, though it seems to have included

a part of Northern Syria as well. But to the district in which Harran

stood the Babylonians gave a more special name. It was Padan or Padin,

‘the cultivated plain,’ of which it is said in a cuneiform tablet that

it lies ‘in front of the mountains of the Aramæans,’[21] while an early

Babylonian sovereign entitles himself king of Padan as well as of

Northern Babylonia.[22] The name bore witness to the fertility of the

country to which it was applied. The Babylonian lexicographers make

_padan_ a synonym of words signifying ‘field’ and ‘garden’; it was, in

fact, originally the piece of ground which a yoke of oxen could plough

in a given period of time. Hence it came to mean an ‘acre,’ a sense

which still survives in the Arabic _feddân_. The Babylonian leases and

sales of land which were drawn up in the Abrahamic age repeatedly

describe the ‘feddans’ or ‘acres’ of which the property consists. The

fertile plain of Mesopotamia, accordingly, was not a plain merely; it

was also ‘the field’ or ‘acre’ of Aram where the Semites of the Aramæan

stock ploughed and harvested their corn.[23]

In Egyptian its name was Naharina. The name had been borrowed from the

Aramæans, who called their country the land of Naharain, ‘the two

rivers.’ In Canaan, as we know from the cuneiform tablets of Tel

el-Amarna, it bore the Canaanitish form of Naharaim, Nahrima, the final

nasal of the Aramaic dialects becoming _m_. Aram-Naharaim was thus the

Egyptian and Canaanitish title of the country which the Babylonian spoke

of as Padan Arman, ‘Padan of the Aramæans.’ Both names go back to the

age before the Israelitish Exodus out of Egypt; the one belongs to Egypt

and Palestine, the other to Babylonia.

Before the age of the Exodus, however, the Aramæan population of

Mesopotamia became the subjects of a people who seem to have come from

the north. Mitanni, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from

the modern Birejik, became the capital of a kingdom which extended over

Naharaim on the one side, and to the neighbourhood of the Orontes on the

other. The race which founded the kingdom spoke a language unlike any

other with which we are acquainted; it was, however, agglutinative, and

exhibits certain general resemblances to some of the languages of the

Caucasus. From the sixteenth century B.C. onwards, Mitanni and Naharaim

are synonymous terms, even though, at times, the Egyptian scribes still

observed the old distinction between them; even though also, it may be,

Naharaim had a larger meaning than Mitanni. But the kings of Mitanni

were vigorous and powerful. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna

correspondence we find them intriguing with the Hittites and Babylonians

in the Egyptian province of Canaan, and Ramses III. of the twentieth

Egyptian dynasty still counts the people of Mitanni among his enemies.

At an earlier date the royal families of Egypt and Mitanni had

intermarried with one another, and the marriages had introduced new

ideas and a revolutionary policy into the ancient monarchy of the Nile.

When the kingdom of Mitanni had been founded we do not know. There is no

trace of it in the earlier records of Babylonia, and we may safely say

that it arose long after the era of Khammu-rabi and Abram.[24]

Terah, we are told, died in Harran, and there Nahor, his second son,

remained to dwell. Terah and Nahor are names which we look for in vain

elsewhere in the Old Testament or in the inscriptions of Babylonia. And

yet light has been thrown upon them by the cuneiform texts. Tablets have

been found in Cappadocia, written in archaic cuneiform characters and in

a dialect of Assyrian, which are at least as old as the the of the Tel

el-Amarna letters; according to some scholars, they are coeval with the

dynasty of Khammu-rabi. In one of these tablets we find the word, or

name, _Nakhur_; what its signification may be, we cannot, unfortunately,

tell; all we can be sure of is that it was known to the Semitic

inhabitants of eastern Cappadocia, not far from the Aramæan border.[25]

The name of Terah points in the same direction, Tarkhu was a god whose

name enters into the composition of Cappadocian and North-Syrian

princes; he was worshipped by the Hittites, and so belongs to the same

region as that in which we have found the name of Nahor.

But neither Tarkhu nor Nakhur is Aramaic in the usual sense of the term.

Both seem to belong to that mixed dialect which has been revealed to us

by German excavation at Sinjerli, north of the Gulf of Antioch, and

about which scholars have disputed whether to call it Hebraised Aramaic

or Aramaised Hebrew. At any rate, it is a dialect which, though Aramaic

in origin, has been profoundly influenced by ‘the language of Canaan.’

It bears witness to the existence of a Hebrew-speaking population in

that part of the world. It would be rash to affirm that this population

already existed there in patriarchal days, though words which seem to be

of Hebrew origin are met with in the Cappadocian tablets. But we now

know that Northern Syria was once the meeting-place of the northern

Semitic languages; that here they mingled with one another and with

other languages which were not Semitic in type, and that here alone,

outside the pages of the Old Testament, are the names of Terah and Nahor

to be found.[26]

Nahor remained in Harran, but Abram moved on still further to the West.

The road was well known to his contemporaries, and probably followed the

later line of march which led past Carchemish, now Jerablûs, Aleppo, and

Hamath. From Hamath southward the land was in the possession of the

Amorites. Their chief seat was immediately to the north of the Palestine

of later days, but they had already occupied large portions of the

territory to the south of them as far as the Dead Sea and the limits of

the cultivated land. They had been for many centuries the dominant

people of the West. Already in the time of Sargon of Akkad they had

given their name among the Babylonians to Central Syria and Canaan. The

name, indeed, goes back to the pre-Semitic days of Babylonian history.

What the Semites called the land of the Amurrâ or Amorites, the

Sumerians had termed Martu. And the two names, Amurrâ and Martu,

continued to designate Syria and Palestine almost to the latest epoch of

Babylonian political life.

The monuments of Egypt have shown us what these Amorites were like. They

belonged to the blond race, like the Libyans of Northern Africa. At

Abu-Simbel their skins are painted yellow—the Egyptian equivalent of

white—their eyes blue, and the beard and eyebrows red. At Medînet Habu

the skin, as Professor Flinders Petrie expresses it, is ‘rather pinker

than flesh-colour,’ while in a tomb of the eighteenth dynasty at Thebes

it is painted white, the eyes and hair being a light red-brown. At

Karnak the names of the places captured by Thothmes III. in Palestine

are surmounted by the figures of Amorites whose skin is alternately red

and yellow, the red denoting sunburn, the yellow what we term white. In

features the Amorites belonged to the Indo-European type. The nose was

straight and regular, the forehead high, the lips thin, and the

cheek-bones somewhat prominent, while they wore whiskers and a pointed

beard. So far as we can judge from the representations of the Egyptian

artists, they belonged to a dolichocephalic or long-headed race.[27]

That they were tall in stature we know from the Old Testament. By the

side of them the Hebrew spies described themselves as grasshoppers. The

cities they built were strong and ‘walled up to heaven’; the thick walls

of one of them have been disinterred on the site of Lachish by Professor

Petrie and Mr. Bliss. But though the Babylonians continued to include

Canaan in the general term, ‘land of the Amorites,’ and spoke of the

Canaanite himself as an ‘Amorite,’ they nevertheless came to know that

there was a distinction between them. The Babylonian king, Burna-buryas,

whose letters to the Egyptian Pharaoh have been found at Tel el-Amarna,

distinguishes Kinakhkhi or Canaan from the land of the Amorites, which

had come to be confined to the country immediately to the north of

Palestine. From the seventeenth century B.C. downwards, Amorite and

Canaanite cease to be synonymous terms. It is only in certain parts of

the Pentateuch that the old Babylonian use of the name ‘Amorite’ still

survives.

It was a use that never prevailed among the Assyrians. When Assyria

became a kingdom, and its rulers first led their armies to the West, the

Amorites were no longer the dominant power. Their place had been taken

by the Hittites. And it is the Khattâ or Hittites, therefore, who in the

Assyrian inscriptions, as distinguished from those of Babylonia, are the

representatives of Western Syria. On the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser

II., now in the British Museum, even Ahab of Israel and Ba’asha of Ammon

are included among the ‘kings of the country of the Hittites.’ But of

this Assyrian use of the term Hittite there are slight, if any, traces

in the Old Testament.[28]

Abram, the Hebrew, first pitched his tent near the future Shechem, under

‘the terebinth of Moreh.’ Moreh is the Sumerian Martu, ‘the Amorite,’ in

Hebrew letters; and the fact gives point to the statement which follows

immediately, that ‘the Canaanite’—and not the Amorite—‘was then in the

land’ (Gen. xii. 6). ‘The mountain of Shechem’ is mentioned in an

Egyptian papyrus which describes the travels of an Egyptian officer in

Palestine, in the fourteenth century B.C.,[29] but the book of Genesis

represents the city as founded only in the lifetime of Jacob (Gen.

xxxiv. 6). Hence we are told that it was to ‘the place’ or ‘site’ of

Shechem that Abram made his way, not to the town itself. And after the

foundation of the town its Canaanite inhabitants are still called

Amorites, in accordance with ancient Babylonian custom (Gen. xlviii.

22).

We next find the Hebrew patriarch in Egypt. There was famine in Canaan,

and Egypt was already the granary of the eastern world. In the Tel

el-Amarna tablets we hear of Egyptian corn being sent to the starving

population of Syria; and Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Exodus,

tells us that he had loaded ships with wheat for the Hittites when they

were suffering from a famine. The want of rain which destroyed the crops

of Canaan did not affect Egypt, where the fertility of the soil depends

upon the irrigating waters of the Nile.

Egypt at the time must have been under the sway of the Hyksos kings.

They were Asiatic invaders who had overrun the country from north to

south, and established themselves on the throne of the Pharaohs. In

three successive dynasties did they govern the land, and the descendants

of the native monarchs sank into _hiqu_ or vassal ‘princes’ of Thebes.

At first, it is said, they laid Egypt waste, destroying the temples and

massacring the people. But the influence of Egyptian culture soon led

them captive. The Hyksos court became Egyptianised; the Hyksos king

assumed the titles and state of the ancient sovereigns; Sutekh, the

Hyksos god, was identified with Ra, the Sun-god of On, and the official

language itself remained Egyptian. A treatise on mathematics, one of the

few scientific works that have survived the shipwreck of Egyptian

literature, was written under the patronage of the Hyksos king, Apophis

I.[30]

Nevertheless, with all this outward varnish of Egyptian culture, the

Hyksos rule continued to be foreign. Even the names of the kings were

not Egyptian, and up to the last the supreme object of their worship was

a foreign deity. According to the Sallier Papyrus, the war of

independence was occasioned by the demand of Apophis II. that Sutekh,

and not Amon, should be acknowledged as the god of Thebes, and a scarab

found at Kom Ombos in 1896 bears upon it, in confirmation of the story,

the name of Sutekh-Apopi.[31] Moreover, the Hyksos capital was not in

any of the old centres of Egyptian government. Zoan, it is true, now

Sân, in the north-eastern part of the Delta, was nominally their

official residence; but they preferred to dwell in the fortress of

Avaris, on the extreme eastern edge of Egypt, and within hail of their

Asiatic kinsmen. It was from Avaris that Apophis had sent his insolent

message to the terrified Prince of Thebes.

The Hebrew visitor to Egypt, therefore, was among friends and not

strangers. Moreover, he had only to cross the frontier to find himself

in the presence of the Pharaoh’s court. Whether at Zoan or at Avaris, it

was alike close at hand to the traveller from Asia.

After leaving Egypt, Abram established himself at Hebron. It would seem

that the name of Hebron, ‘the Confederacy,’ was not yet in existence, as

it was to the ‘terebinth’ of Mamre, and not of Hebron, that Abram

‘removed his tent.’ Indeed, it is more than doubtful whether Mamre and

Hebron occupied precisely the same site. It may be that Mamre was the

older fortress of the Amorites, whose place was taken in after times by

the town which gathered round the adjoining sanctuary of Hebron.

In any case, its population was Amorite, though probably we should

understand ‘Amorite’ here in its Babylonian sense. ‘Abram the Hebrew,’

it is declared, ‘dwelt under the terebinth of Mamre the Amorite, brother

of Eshcol and brother of Aner; and these were confederate with Abram.’

In other words, the Hebrew settler in Canaan had formed an alliance with

the native chiefs.

Then came an event upon which the cuneiform records of Babylonia are

beginning to cast light. Chedor-laomer, king of Elam, and the vassal

kings Amraphel of Shinar, Arioch of Ellasar, and Tid’al of ‘nations,’

marched against the five Canaanitish princes of the Vale of Siddim at

the northern end of the Dead Sea, bent upon obtaining possession of the

naphtha springs that abounded there, and the produce of which had

already made its way to Babylonia. No resistance was made to the

invader; it is clear, in fact, that the invasion was no new thing, and

that the rest of Canaan was already subject to the lords of the East.

For ‘twelve years’ the five Canaanitish kings ‘served Chedor-laomer, and

in the thirteenth year they rebelled.’ Once more, therefore, the forces

of Elam and Babylonia moved westward. The revolt, it would appear, had

spread to other parts of the ‘land of the Amorites,’ and the invading

army marched southward along the eastern side of the Jordan. First, the

Rephaim were overthrown at Ashteroth-Karnaim, in ‘the field of Bashan,’

as it was termed in the days of the Tel el-Amarna tablets; then followed

the turn of the Zuzim in the future land of Ammon, and of the Emim in

what was to be the land of Moab; and after smiting the Horites of Mount

Seir, the invaders penetrated into the wilderness of Paran, fell upon

the desert sanctuary of Kadesh, now called ’Ain el-Qadîs, and returned

northward along the western shore of the Dead Sea. They had thus

partially followed in the footsteps of an earlier Chaldæan king,

Naram-Sin, who centuries before had made his way to the Sinaitic

Peninsula, and there gained possession of the coveted copper-mines.

The native princes in the Vale of Siddim were no match for the foe. A

battle was fought which ended disastrously for the Canaanitish troops.

The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah were slain, their men were driven into

the naphtha-pits of which the plain was full, or else fled to the

mountains. Their cities fell into the hands of the conquerors, who

carried away both captives and spoil.

But Abram heard that among the captives was his ‘brother’ Lot. Thereupon

he started in pursuit of the Chaldæan army, with his three hundred and

eighteen armed followers and the forces of his Amorite allies. The

victorious army was overtaken near Damascus, and its rear surprised in a

night attack. The captives and spoil were recovered, and brought back in

triumph to the south of Canaan. Here at the ‘King’s Dale,’ just outside

the walls of Jerusalem, the new king of Sodom went to welcome him; and

Melchizedek, the priest-king of Jerusalem, blessed the conqueror in the

name of ‘the Most High God.’

The history of the campaign of Chedor-laomer reads like an extract from

the Babylonian chronicles. It is dated in the reign of the king of

Shinar or Babylon, as it would have been had it been written by a

Babylonian scribe, although the Babylonian king was but the vassal and

tributary of the sovereign of Elam. Even the spelling of the names

indicates that they are taken from a cuneiform document. ‘Ham’ for

Ammon, and ‘Zuzim’ for Zamzummim, can be explained only by the

peculiarities of the cuneiform system of writing.[32]

The whole story, however, has been thrown into a Canaanitish form. The

king of Northern Babylonia, whose capital was Babylon, has become a king

of Shinar, that being the name given in the West to the northern half of

Chaldæa.[33] Larsa, the capital of Eri-Aku or Arioch, has been

transformed into Ellasar, perhaps through the influence of the

Babylonian _al_, city.’ Lastly, Tid’al, the Tudghula of the cuneiform

texts, is entitled the ‘king of nations.’

The fragmentary tablets discovered by Mr. Pinches, in which we hear of

Khammu-rabi, king of Babylon, of Eri-Aku or Arioch, and his son

Bad-makh-dingirene, and of Kudur-Laghghamar, the Chedor-laomer of

Genesis, refer to Tudghula or Tid’al as ‘the son of Gazza[ni].’

Unfortunately, the words which follow, and which gave a description of

the prince, have been lost through a fracture of the clay tablet. But

there is another tablet from which we may supply the deficiency. On the

one hand we are told that Tudghula burned the sanctuaries of Babylonia

and allowed the waters of the Euphrates to roll over the ruins of the

great temples of Babylon; on the other hand we read: ‘Who is this

Kudur-Laghghamar who has wrought evil? He has assembled the Umman Manda,

has devastated the land of Bel, and [has marched] at their side.’

Elsewhere Kudur-Laghghamar is called the king of Elam.[34]

The Umman Manda were the barbarous tribes in the mountains which

adjoined the northern part of Elam and formed the eastern boundary of

Babylonia. The term means the ‘Nomad,’ or ‘Barbarous Peoples,’ and is

thus the Babylonian equivalent of the Hebrew Goyyim, ‘Nations.’[35] What

the ‘Gentiles,’ or Goyyim, were to the Hebrews, or the ‘Barbarians’ to

the Greeks, the Umman Manda were to the civilised population of Chaldæa.

The fact that the king of Elam summons them to his help when he invades

Babylonia implies that they acknowledged his suzerainty. It would seem,

therefore, that the ‘Nations’ over which Tid’al is said to have ruled

were the Kurdish tribes to the east of the Babylonian frontier.

Khammu-rabi eventually succeeded in overthrowing the king of Elam, in

crushing his rival Eri-Aku and his Elamite allies, and in making himself

master of an independent Babylonia, which was henceforth a united

kingdom, with its centre and sovereign city at Babylon. Recent

excavations have brought letters of his to light which were written to

his faithful vassal Sin-idinnam, Sin-idinnam had been the king of Larsa

whom Eri-Aku and his Elamite troops had driven from the city of his

fathers, and he had found refuge and protection in the court of

Khammu-rabi at Babylon. When the great war finally broke out, which

ended in leaving Khammu-rabi sole monarch of Babylonia, Sin-idinnam

rendered him active service, and after the conclusion of the struggle he

was reinstated in his ancestral princedom. Khammu-rabi loaded him with

other honours as well; and one of the letters which have been recovered

refers to certain statues which were presented to him as a reward for

his ‘valour on the day of Kudur-Laghghamar’s defeat.’ This was an

Oriental anticipation of the statues which the Greek cities of a later

age bestowed upon those they would honour.[36]

It has been suggested that the reverse sustained by Kudur-Laghghamar in

Palestine at the hands of the ‘Amorites,’ under the leadership of ‘Abram

the Hebrew,’ may have given the king of Babylon his opportunity for

successfully revolting from his liege lord. If so, the Hebrew patriarch

would have influenced the destinies of the country he had forsaken. What

is more certain is that his victory gave him a commanding position in

the country of his adoption. Syrian legend in after days made him a king

in Damascus;[37] and when he buys the rock-tomb of Machpelah, the owners

of the land tell him that he is no ‘stranger and sojourner’ among them,

but ‘a mighty prince,’ ‘a prince of Elohim.’ From henceforth the

‘Hebrew’ occupies a recognised place in ‘the land of the Amorites.’

The figure of Melchizedek, king of Salem, loomed large upon the

imagination of later ages out of the mists that enveloped the history of

Canaanitish Jerusalem. But the romance is now making way for sober

history. The letters on clay tablets in the Babylonian language and

writing, found at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, have come to our help.

Several of them were sent to the Pharaoh from Ebed-Tob, king of

Jerusalem, and they show that Jerusalem was already the dominant state

of Southern Palestine. Its strong position made it a fortress of

importance, and it was the capital of a territory which stretched away

towards the desert of the South. Its name was already Jerusalem or

Uru-Salim, ‘the city of Salim,’ the God of Peace, and the hieroglyphic

texts of Egypt accordingly speak of it simply as Shalama or Salem,

omitting the needless Uru, ‘city.’[38]

Ebed-Tob reiterates that he was not, like the other governors of Canaan,

under Egyptian rule. They had been appointed to their offices by the

Pharaoh, or had inherited them by descent from the older royal lines of

the country whom the Egyptian Government had allowed to remain. He, on

the contrary, was the friend and ally of the Egyptian king. His kingly

dignity had not been derived from either father or mother, but from the

‘Mighty King,’ from the god, that is to say, whose temple stood on ‘the

mountain of Jerusalem.’ He was, therefore, a priest-king, without father

or mother, so far as his royal office was concerned.[39]

That the king of Salem, the priest of the God of Peace, should have come

forth from his city and its temple to welcome the conqueror when he

returned in peace, was both natural and fitting. It was equally natural

and fitting that he should bless the Hebrew in the name of the ‘Most

High God’—the patron deity of Jerusalem, whom Ebed-Tob identifies with

the Babylonian Ninip—and that Abram should in return have given him

tithes of the spoil. From time immemorial, the _esrâ_ or tithe had been

exacted in Babylonia for the temples and their priests, and had been

paid alike by prince and peasant. It passed to the West along with the

other elements and institutions of Babylonian culture.[40]

The destruction of the cities of the Vale of Siddim, which is

represented as occurring not long after the retreat of the king of Elam,

made a profound impression on the Western world. References are made to

the catastrophe up to the latest days of Hebrew literature; and the mist

caused by the evaporation of the salt on the surface of the Dead Sea was

popularly supposed to be the smoke which hung eternally over the ruins

of the doomed cities of the plain. The storm which burst from the

heavens set fire to the naphtha springs that oozed through the soil, and

houses and men alike were enveloped in a sheet of fire. Similar

catastrophes have happened in our own time at Baku on the Caspian, where

the petroleum, accidentally ignited, has blazed for days in columns of

fire.

Ingenious Germans have connected with the destruction of Sodom and its

sister cities a passage in the Latin writer Justin (xviii. 3. 2, 3), in

which it is said that the Phœnicians were driven to the Canaanitish

coast by an earthquake which took place in their original home near ‘the

Assyrian lake.’ Instead of ‘Assyrian,’ some manuscripts read ‘Syrian,’

and the lake has accordingly been imagined to be the Dead Sea, and the

earthquake to be the rain of fire which destroyed the cities of the

plain.[41] But there is no other instance in which the Dead Sea is

called ‘the Syrian lake,’ supposing this to be the true reading, nor is

there any trace of an earthquake in the catastrophe described in

Genesis. Moreover, the unanimous voice of classical antiquity declared

that the Phœnicians had come from the Persian Gulf, not from the valley

of the Jordan, and their seafaring propensities were explained by the

fact that they once lived in the islands of the Erythræan Sea. Whatever

the ‘Assyrian lake’ may have been, it was not the ‘Salt Sea’ of the Old

Testament.

The Israelites traced back to Abram the rite of circumcision which they

practised. The rite, however, was not confined to Israel. So far as

Western Asia is concerned, it seems to have been of African origin. It

is to be found among most of the races and tribes of Africa, and in

Egypt the institution was of immemorial antiquity. According to

Herodotos (ii. 36), the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, and the Kolkhians

alone observed it ‘from the beginning,’ the Phœnicians and Syrians of

Palestine having learned it from the Egyptians, and the Cappadocians

from the people of Kolkhis. But the knowledge of the world possessed by

Herodotos was limited, and his anthropology is not profound. The

practice is met with in various parts of the world; it owes its origin

to considerations of chastity, its maintenance to sanitary reasons. It

is true that Africa was peculiarly its home, and that it seems to have

been common to the aboriginal tribes of that continent, but it is also

true that it was known to aboriginal tribes in other parts of the globe

among whom—so far as our evidence can tell us—the practice originated

independently.[42]

Whether it was originally a Semitic as well as an African rite, we do

not at present know. We have as yet no certain evidence that it was

practised among the Babylonians. Indeed, the fact that Abraham was not

circumcised until after his arrival in Canaan would imply that it was

not. Even in Canaan itself there were tribes, apart from the Philistine

immigrants, to whom it was unknown, as we learn from the story of Hamor

and Shechem (Gen. xxxiv. 14, _sqq._). And though the inhabitants of

Northern Arabia were circumcised in their thirteenth year, as we are

told by Josephus, it is doubtful whether the same custom prevailed in

the southern half of the peninsula. So far as Midian was concerned, we

have express testimony (Exod. iv. 24-26, cf. ii. 19) that the rite was

regarded as peculiar to the stranger from Egypt.

It seems probable, therefore, that Herodotos was right in declaring that

circumcision had been introduced into Palestine by the Egyptians.

Intercourse between Canaan and the Delta went back to the early days of

Egyptian history, and it would not be surprising if Egyptian influences

had found their way into Canaan at the same time. Canaanitish slaves

were carried into the valley of the Nile, and doubtless Egyptian slaves

were at times kidnapped into Canaan.

The circumcision of Abraham and his household may, consequently, have

been in accordance with a custom which had already grown up among the

Amoritish population around him. But whether this were the case or not,

the rite received a new meaning and assumed a new form. It became the

sign and seal of a religious covenant. Those who had been circumcised

were thereby devoted to the God of Abraham and his descendants.

Henceforth there was not only a division between the circumcised and the

uncircumcised, there was also a division between those who had received

the circumcision of Abraham and those who had not. It is noticeable that

the narrative expressly includes among those who were thus outwardly

dedicated to the God of Israel not only the ancestor of the Ishmaelite

tribes of Northern Arabia, but also the foreign slaves who belonged to

the household of the patriarch. They had left the home of their fathers,

and his God accordingly had become theirs. The fact is paralleled by the

law relating to another seal of the covenant between Israel and its God;

the Sabbath had to be kept not only by the Israelite, but also by the

‘stranger’ within his gates.

A change of name accompanied the rite which the patriarch performed. The

Babylonian Abram became the Palestinian Abraham. To the native of the

old Oriental world the name was not merely the representation of a

thing; it was, in a measure, the thing itself. Even Greek philosophy

failed at first to distinguish between an object and its expression in

speech. A thing was known only through its name, and in the name were to

be found its qualities and its essence. A name which brought with it

unlucky associations was itself the bringer of ill-luck, but the

ill-luck would turn to good if once the name were changed. The belief

has lingered on into our own times, and the change of the Cape of Storms

into the Cape of Good Hope is an illustration of its influence. The name

meant personality as well as a thing. The man himself was changed when

his name was changed. Hence it was that the Canaanites or Karians, who

settled in Egypt, and there became Egyptian citizens, at once assumed

Egyptian names. They had left Canaan and Karia behind them, with the

gods and the habits of their ancestors, and had adopted the religion and

manners of another country. They had, as it were, stripped themselves of

their old personality, and had clothed themselves with a new one. It was

thus a new personality that was assumed by the Babylonian Abram when he

became the Abraham of Western Asia. It cut him off, as it were, from the

land of his birth, and gave him a new birth in the country of his

adoption. The merchant-prince of Babylonia, who had overthrown the

rearguard of the host of Chedor-laomer, and whose maid had borne to him

the ancestor of the Ishmaelites, thus passed into the forefather and

founder of the Israelitish race.

The etymology and meaning of the new name are unknown. It would seem

that they had been forgotten even at the time when the book of Genesis

was written. At all events, the explanation of the name given there

(xvii. 5) is one of those plays upon words of which the Biblical

writers, like Orientals generally, are so fond. ‘Ab-(ra)ham,’ it is

said, is Ab-ham(ôn), ‘the father of a multitude,’ in total disregard of

the second syllable of the name. It may be, however, that there was

still a tradition that in _raham_ we have a word which had a similar

signification to that of _hamôn_, ‘a multitude,’ though the attempts

that have been made to discover any word of the kind in the Semitic

languages have hitherto been unsuccessful. We must be content with the

fact that Ab-ram, ‘the exalted father,’ was transformed into the

Israelitish Ab-raham.[43]

The change of name was followed by the birth of Isaac and the expulsion

of Ishmael from his father’s house. Closely allied in blood as the

Ishmaelites of north-western Arabia were to the house of Israel, it was

only in part that they shared in the covenant made with their common

father. Circumcision indeed they also possessed, but to Israel alone was

granted the Law. To Israel alone did God reveal Himself under His name

of Yahveh.

The inscriptions of a later age, which have been found in the Ishmaelite

territory, show that the language then spoken by the Ishmaelitish tribes

was Aramaic rather than what we call Arabic.[44] From the borders of

Babylonia to the Sinaitic Peninsula, and as far north as the

mountain-ranges of the Taurus, Aramaic dialects were used. How far the

difference in language meant that the populations who spoke these

Aramaic dialects differed also in blood from the other members of the

Semitic family, we do not know, but it is probable that the difference

in blood was not great. The Semitic family seems to have been as

homogeneous in race as it was in speech, and the differences in speech

were comparatively slight. In fact, the Semitic languages do not differ

more from one another than the languages of modern Europe which claim

descent from Latin, and it is probable that the speaker of an Aramaic

dialect would not have had very great difficulty in making himself

intelligible to the speakers of what we term Hebrew.

Hebrew was, as Isaiah tells us (xix. 18), ‘the language of Canaan.’ The

fact became clear to European scholars as soon as the Phœnician

inscriptions were deciphered. Between the Hebrew of the Old Testament

and the Phœnician of the older inhabitants of Canaan the differences are

less than those between one English dialect and another. Chief among

them is the absence in Phœnician of the Hebrew article and _waw

conversivum_. But the idiom to which grammarians have given the latter

name seems to have been an independent creation of Hebrew itself, and

even in Hebrew it disappeared in the later stage of the language. The

article is found in the so-called Lihyanian inscriptions of Northern

Arabia,[45] and we may regard it as one of the indications that the

Israelites had been Bedâwin before they entered Palestine and made their

way from the desert into the Promised Land.

The Tel el-Amarna tablets have carried the history of Canaanitish or

Hebrew beyond the age of the Exodus. In some of the letters written from

Palestine the writers have added the Canaanitish equivalents of certain

Assyrian words and phrases. They show that from the pre-Mosaic epoch

down to the period of the Exile the language changed but little; the

words and phrases that have thus been preserved being substantially the

same as those which we find in the pages of the Old Testament.[46]

The northern boundary between Canaanitish and Aramaic dialects was among

the mountains of Gilead. This is made clear by the narrative of the

covenant between Laban and Jacob. At Mizpah, the ‘Watch-tower,’ which

guarded the approaches to the south, a cairn was raised, called

Yegar-sahadutha in the language of Laban, Galeed in that of Jacob (Gen.

xxxi. 47, 48). The two names alike signified the ‘heap of witnesses,’

but while the first was Aramaic, the second was Canaanitish. The fact

that the names survived into later history shows that the line of

demarcation between the two Semitic languages which they represent

continued to remain in the same place.[47]

Jacob, despite his long residence in Aram and his relationship to an

Aramæan family, is nevertheless Canaanite in his language. It is a sign

and proof how completely the ancestors of the Israelites had identified

themselves with the country which their descendants were afterwards to

possess. The Canaanitish history of Israel begins long before the days

of Moses or Joshua; it already dates from the day when the Babylonian

Abram became the Abraham of Canaan, and when the field of Machpelah was

sold to him by the children of Heth.

It is true that Jacob—or it may be, Terah—is once called in the Old

Testament (Deut. xxvi. 5) ‘a wandering Aramæan.’ But he was so only in a

secondary sense. It was not as an Aramæan, but as a wanderer out of

Aramaic lands, that the title is given him. Israel was closely connected

with Aram and Harran, but it was a relationship only.

Discoveries recently made in Northern Syria by the German explorer, Dr.

von Luschan, have thrown some light on the matter. At Sinjerli,

twenty-five miles north-east of the Gulf of Antioch, and nearly midway

between Yarpuz and Aintab, he has excavated the ruins of the capital of

the ancient kingdom of Samâla, and found monuments which make mention of

the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser.[48] Most of them, in fact, were

erected by a prince who acknowledged the supremacy of the Assyrian

monarch, and whose father’s name is met with in the annals of the latter

sovereign. The inscriptions on them are in an Aramaic dialect; but the

dialect is so largely mixed with Hebrew words and idioms as to have made

scholars doubt at first whether it was not an Aramaised form of Hebrew

rather than an Hebraised form of Aramaic. In any case, it is plain that

the dialect was in close contact with a population which spoke ‘the

language of Canaan.’ Far away to the north, therefore, in the heart of

an Aramaic country, there must have been speakers of Hebrew or

Canaanite. Nor is this all. Two or three miles from the ruins of Samâla

are the ruins of another ancient town, the modern name of which is

Girshin. Here, too, the German excavators have found an inscription of

the same age as those of Samâla, and we may gather from it that Girshin

stands on the site of a city which was the capital of the land of

‘Ya’di.’ In the Tel el-Amarna tablets, written in the century before the

Exodus, Yaudâ are mentioned as living in the same part of the world.[49]

Now Yaudâ is also the Assyrian mode of spelling the name of the Jews,

and it would accordingly seem that a tribe which bore a name similar to

that of Judah existed in Northern Syria as far back as the Patriarchal

age.[50]

All this is in singular harmony with the Scriptural narrative which

tells us that a part of Terah’s family lingered at Harran, and that the

wives of both Isaac and Jacob came from their Aramæan kindred in the

north. There were Hebrews in Northern Syria as well as in Canaan, and

Scripture and archæology are alike in agreement in testifying to the

fact.

Even in Babylonia it may be that Abraham had been educated in ‘the

language of Canaan.’ There were colonies of Amorite (or, as we should

say, Canaanitish) merchants in Chaldæa who had special districts and

privileges assigned to them by the Babylonian kings. Reference is not

unfrequently made to them in the contracts of the Abrahamic age. The

proper names, which sometimes make their appearance in deeds of sale or

lease, or in legal suits in which the foreign merchants were involved,

are Canaanitish and not Babylonian. Thus we find names like Ishmael and

Abdiel, Jacob-el (Ya’qub-il), and Joseph-el (Yasup-il), and we even read

of ‘the Amorite the son of Abi-ramu’ or Abram, who appears as a witness

to a deed dated in the reign of the grandfather of Amraphel.

Israel thus stood in close relation to almost all the chief linguistic

divisions of the Semitic world. Its first forefather had been born in

the land where Babylonian—or Assyrian, as we usually term it—was spoken,

and its contact with Aramaic had been early and intimate. Its desert

wanderings had led it into a region into which the Bedâwin tribes of

Central Arabia could make their way, and the Hebrew article seems to be

a relic of its intercourse with them and the Arabic they spoke. But with

all this contact with other Semitic tongues, Israel nevertheless

remained true to that of the land of its destiny: the language of the

Old Testament is the language which was spoken in Canaan before the days

of Moses, the language of the inscriptions of Phœnicia and Carthage, the

language of Hannibal as well as of Joshua.

If Israel was connected by language with Canaan, it was connected by

blood as well as by language with Moab, and Ammon, and Edom. In fact,

Edom and Israel were brothers. While the relationship with Moab and

Ammon was comparatively distant, the relationship with Edom was

peculiarly close. The fact was never forgotten, and in the later days of

Jewish history the unbrotherly conduct of Edom caused a bitterness of

feeling towards it on the part of the Jews such as no other Gentiles

were able to excite.

Moab and Ammon were the children of Lot, and had possessed themselves of

the mountain and fertile plains on the east side of the Dead Sea and

southern course of the Jordan long before Israel had entered into its

inheritance, or even Edom had carved out a possession for itself with

the sword. They were accused of being of incestuous origin, and it was

related how the ancestors of each had been born in hiding and in the

wild solitude of a cave. Moab was the eldest, Ben-Ammi, ‘the Ammonite,’

being the younger of the two.

The name of Moab (or Muab) is engraved among the conquests of the

Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II., on the base of one of the statues which

stand before the northern entrance of the temple of Luxor. Ammi, whose

‘son’ the ancestor of the Ammonites was called, was the supreme God of

Ammon, standing to the Ammonites in the same relation that Chemosh stood

to Moab, or Yahveh to Israel. Ammon, indeed, is but another form of

Ammi. The god was widely worshipped, as we may learn from the proper

names into which his own name enters. Thus the Old Testament knows of

Ammiel, ‘Ammi is god’; of Ammi-shaddai, ‘Ammi is the Almighty’; and of

Ammi-nadab, ‘Ammi is noble.’ Ammi-nadab was king of Ammon in the time of

the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal; the early Minæan inscriptions of

Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-zadoq and Ammi-zadiqa, ‘Ammi is

righteous,’ as well as Ammi-karib and Ammi-anshi; while among the kings

of the south Arabian dynasty which ruled over Babylonia in the age of

Abraham we find Ammi-zadoq, or Ammu-zadoq and Ammi-dhitana; and the

Kadmonite chieftain east of the Jordan, with whom the Egyptian fugitive

Sinuhit found a home in the time of the twelfth dynasty, bore the name

of Ammi-anshi.[51] Balaam the seer, moreover, was summoned by the king

of Moab from his city of Pethor, at the junction of the Euphrates and

the Sajur, in ‘the land of the children of Ammo,’—for such is the

correct translation of the Hebrew text. It may not be an accident that

one who thus belonged to the ‘Beni-Ammo,’ or ‘Ammonites’ of the north,

should have been called to the country which bordered on that of the

Beni-Ammi, or Ammonites of the south.[52]

A few miles to the north of Pethor was Carchemish, now Jerablûs, which

was destined to become one of the most important strongholds of the

Hittite tribes. The Semites explained the name as ‘the fortified wall of

Chemosh’;[53] and whether this etymology were true or not, at all events

it indicates a belief that the worship of Chemosh extended as far

northward into Aram as did the worship of Ammi. Chemosh was the national

god of Moab. Like Yahveh of Israel and Assur in Assyria, he had neither

wife nor children; and on the Moabite Stone even the Babylonian goddess

Ashtar, whose cult had been carried to the West, is identified with him.

She ceases to have any independent existence or sex of her own, and is

absorbed into the one supreme deity of Moabite faith. It is probable

that Ammi also was similarly conceived of as standing alone in jealous

isolation, supreme over all other gods, and having no consort with whom

to share his power.

Moab and Ammon were alike intruders in the lands which subsequently bore

their names. The older inhabitants of Moab were known as the Emim, ‘a

people great and many and tall, as the Anakim, which also were accounted

giants.’ Ammon too had been ‘accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt

therein in old time, and the Ammonites call them Zamzummim.’ The word

rendered ‘giants’ in the Authorised Version is Rephaim; and it is very

possible that a trace of it survives in the name On-Repha, ‘On of the

giant,’ the Raphon or Raphana of classical geography, which is coupled

by the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. with Astartu or

Ashteroth-Karnaim.[54] When Chedor-laomer made his campaign in Canaan

the Rephaim were still living at Ashteroth-Karnaim, and the ‘Zuzim’ or

Zamzummim in ‘Ham.’ The name of the latter seems to occur in the

inscriptions of the kings of Ur, who reigned some centuries before the

birth of Abraham; they mention hostile expeditions against the land of

Zavzala or the Zuzim; and a Babylonian high-priest who owned allegiance

to one of them brought blocks of limestone for his temples and palace

from the same district, which he tells us was situated ‘in the mountains

of the Amorites.’[55]

Whether or not the Emim and Zamzummim were Amorite tribes, we cannot

tell. The physical characteristics ascribed to them in the Old Testament

would, however, seem to indicate that such was the case. Moreover, the

Amorites had at one time been the dominant population, not only in

Palestine itself, but also in the country east of the Jordan as well as

in the Syrian districts to the north. When the Babylonians first became

acquainted with Western Asia in the fifth or fourth millennium before

the Christian era, the inhabitants of Syria were mainly of the Amorite

race. Syria, accordingly, and more especially that part of it which is

known to us as Palestine, was called in the old agglutinative language

of Chaldæa ‘the land of Martu’ or ‘the Amorite,’ a word which has

survived in the book of Genesis under the form of Moreh.[56] When the

older language of Chaldæa made way for Semitic Babylonian, _Martu_

became _Amurru_, and Hadad, the supreme Baal or sun-god of Canaan,

became known as ‘Amurru,’ ‘the Amorite.’ By the Egyptians the Amorites

were termed Amur; and, as has been already stated,[57] the Egyptian

artists have shown us that they were a fair-skinned people, with blue

eyes and reddish hair; that they were also tall and handsome, and wore

short and pointed beards. In fact, they resembled in features the

Libyans of Northern Africa, whose modern descendants—the Kabyles of

Algeria—offer such a striking likeness to the golden-haired Kelt. The

Amorite type may still be seen in its purity among the Arabs of the

El-Arîsh desert, who inhabit the district between the frontiers of

Palestine and Egypt: many of the latter, as we see them to-day, might

well have sat for the portraits of the Amorites depicted on the walls of

the old Egyptian temples and tombs. It would seem that the Amorite race,

fair and tall and energetic, once extended along the northern coast of

Africa into Asia itself, where they occupied the larger part of Southern

Syria. There they have left behind them cromlechs and dolmens which

remind us of those of our own islands. Indeed, if the Amorite were the

eastern branch of the Libyan race, it is probable that he could claim

kindred with the so-called red Kelt of Britain. The physiological

characteristics of the Libyan and fair-haired Kelt are similar; and many

anthropologists assume the existence of a Libyo-Keltic or ‘Eurafrican’

family, which has spread northward through Spain and the western side of

France into the British Isles.[58]

The Emim and Zamzummim, accordingly, whom the descendants of Lot partly

expelled, partly absorbed, may have been of Amorite origin, and

connected in race with a portion of the population of our own country.

At all events, when the Israelites entered Canaan, the Amorites were

already settled on the eastern side of the Jordan. At that time the land

was divided between the Amalekites or Bedâwin of the desert to the

south, the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites ‘in the mountains,’ and the

Canaanites on the coast of the Mediterranean and in the valley of the

Jordan (Numb. xiii. 29). As might have been expected in the case of a

fair-skinned people, the Amorites needed the bracing air of the

mountains in order to hold their own against the other populations of

the country; in the hot plains their vigour was in danger of being lost.

The Egyptian rule, which the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth

dynasties had maintained eastward of the Jordan, passed away with the

fall of the Egyptian empire, and its place was taken by the Amorite

kingdoms of Sihon and Og. Sihon had overthrown the Moabites in battle,

and had wrested their territory from them as far south as the Arnon

(Numb. xxi. 26). They had been driven out of their cities into the

barren mountains which overlooked the Dead Sea. A fragment of the

Amorite Song of Triumph which recorded the conquest has been preserved

to us. ‘Come unto Heshbon,’ it said, ‘let the city of Sihon be built and

fortified. For a fire has gone forth from Heshbon, a flame from the city

of Sihon; it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the Baalim of the high places

of Arnon. Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh:

[Chemosh] hath given his sons that escaped [the battle], and his

daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites’ (Numb. xxi.

27-29).

The southern half of Ammon also, as far north as the Jabbok, was in

Amorite hands. Here, however, the Ammonites had strongly fortified their

‘border’ (Numb. xxi. 24), so that neither Sihon himself, nor his

Israelitish conquerors, succeeded in passing it. But Rabbah, ‘the city

of waters,’ the future capital of Ammon, must have been held by the

Amorites, and the two intrusive populations of Ammon and Moab were

separated from one another by the Amorite conquest.

If the older inhabitants of the country were Amorite by race, the

kingdom of Sihon will have represented an Amorite reaction against the

descendants of Lot. But we must remember that the Babylonians had given

the name of ‘Amorite’ to all the populations of Palestine and the

adjoining districts, whether they were Amorites in blood or not. The old

Babylonian usage is followed in several passages of the Pentateuch, and

points to their origin in those pre-Mosaic days when Babylonian

influence was still dominant in Western Asia. Thus in Gen. xv. 16, God

declares to Abraham that ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full,’

and Jacob reminded his sons (Gen. xlviii. 22) that he had wrested

Shechem ‘out of the hand of the Amorite’ with his sword and bow. Perhaps

the emphatic statement that ‘the Canaanite was then in the land,’ which

we read in Gen. xii. 6, is due to the previous mention of the terebinth

of Moreh’ or Martu, Martu being the primitive Babylonian equivalent of

the later ‘Amorite.’ The terebinth, indeed, was in the country of the

Amorites, but the country was already inhabited by Canaanitish

tribes.[59]

We cannot, then, be certain that the aboriginal peoples of Moab and

Ammon were actually of the Amorite race. They were, it is true, included

by the Babylonians under the common name of ‘Amorites,’ but this was

because all the rest of the population of Southern Syria was known under

the same title. The fact, however, that the Hebrew writers have

described them as tall, like the Anakim, and that popular tradition

should have spoken of them as Rephaim or giants, is in favour of their

having been really of Amorite descent. In this case we may see in them

the easternmost representatives of the blond race, and the builders of

the cromlechs with which the hillsides of Moab are covered.

Southward of Moab came other tribes which, like the Ishmaelites, were

said to have sprung directly from Abraham himself. These were the

Midianites and the merchant tribes of Sheba and Dedan, who possessed

stations on the great desert road that led from the spice-bearing

regions of Southern Arabia to the borders of Canaan. They claimed to be

the descendants of Keturah, or ‘Incence,’ the second wife of the Hebrew

patriarch, after Sarah’s death. Another genealogy (Gen. x. 7) placed

Sheba and Dedan in the extreme south of the Arabian peninsula, among the

children of Cush. Both genealogies, however, are correct. Sheba was the

kingdom of the Sabæans, whose centre was in Southern Arabia, but whose

power and commerce extended far to the north. Their trading settlements

and garrisons were to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of Midian,

at Tema, the modern Teimah, and elsewhere.[60] If Professor Hommel is

right in identifying Dedan with Tidanum, one of the names by which

Palestine was known in early days to the natives of Babylonia, it would

seem that the Dedanites also had become a leading people on the

frontiers of Canaan. At all events, it is clear that Abraham was claimed

as an ancestor by the tribes of Western Arabia from its northern to its

southern extremity, by the descendants of Keturah on the western coast

and caravan-road, as well as by the Ishmaelites further to the east.

They represented the trading and more cultured population of the

peninsula as opposed to the wild Amalekites or Bedâwin hordes, who had

their home among the mountains of Seir and the desert south of

Palestine. The connection between Midian and Israel, which found

expression in a common ancestry, was reasserted in later days when the

great legislator of Israel fled to Midian and married the daughter of

its high-priest.

How nearly that connection had been lost through the death of the

forefather of the Israelitish people was recorded in the story of the

sacrifice of Isaac. A voice came to Abraham, which he believed to be

divine, bidding him offer ‘for a burnt-offering’ the son of his old age,

the heir of the covenant which had been made with him. It was a form of

sacrifice only too well known in Canaan. In time of pestilence or

trouble the parent was called upon to sacrifice to Baal that which was

dearest and nearest to him, his firstborn or his only son. The gods

themselves had set the example. Once when a plague had fallen upon the

land, El had clothed Yeud, his only son, in royal purple, and on one of

the high-places of Palestine had offered him up to the offended

deities.[61] The doctrine of vicarious sacrifice was deeply enrooted in

the minds of the Canaanitish people. But it needed to be a sacrifice

which cost the offerer almost as much as his own life. The fruit of his

own body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul. And the sacrifice

had to be by fire. Only through that purifying element could the stains

of sin and impurity be obliterated, and the offering made acceptable to

heaven.

The practice, horrible as it seems to us, was nevertheless founded on a

truth. The victim, if he were to be accepted, must be the most precious

that the offerer could present. The gods did not require that which cost

him nothing. It needed to be the most costly that could be given; it

needed to be also, in the words of the prophet, the fruit of the

sinner’s own body. Nothing else would suffice: the gods demanded the

firstborn son, still more the only son. In no other way could Baal be

satisfied that the sinner had repented of his guilt or had made to him

an offering which was of equal value to his own life.

The firstborn of all animals, of beasts as well as of men, was owed to

the gods. The belief was not confined to the Canaanites. We find traces

of it in Babylonian literature, and all the denunciations of the

prophets before the Exile failed to eradicate it from the mind of the

Jew. Up to the closing days of the Jewish monarchy, the valley of the

sons of Hinnom was defiled with the smoke of the sacrifices wherein, as

it is euphemistically said, the kings and people of Jerusalem made their

children to pass through the fire. The belief, indeed, was consecrated

by the Mosaic law itself. Human sacrifice, it is true, was forbidden,

but the firstborn, nevertheless, had to be redeemed (Exod. xxxiv. 20).

Like the firstfruits and the firstborn of beasts, Yahveh had declared

that the firstborn of the sons of Israel also belonged to Him (Exod.

xxii. 29). He could claim them, and it was of His own freewill that He

waived the claim. And along with this assertion of His claim to the

firstborn went the doctrine of vicarious punishment. It was not the

firstborn only in whose case a substitution was allowed: once a year the

sins of the whole people were laid upon the head of the scapegoat, which

was then driven like an evil spirit into the wilderness. The idea of

vicarious punishment, which lies at the foundation of historical

Christianity, had already found expression in the Mosaic law.

The sacrifice of the firstborn was thus part of a larger conception

behind which there lay a profound truth. The sins of the father were

visited upon the child in more senses than one; the child, in fact,

could become an expiation for them, and divert to himself the anger of

the gods. Experience had shown how often the son must suffer for the

deeds of the parent, and the inference was drawn that if that suffering

were voluntarily offered to heaven by the parent, he would receive all

the benefits that flowed from it. Moreover, the gods had a right to the

firstborn, if they chose to exercise it; and in offering the firstborn,

accordingly, man was only giving back to them what was strictly their

own.

The heathenism of the Mosaic age went no further. Israel was the first

to learn that the law of the substitution of the firstborn for the sins

of the father was subordinate to a higher and more general law—that of

vicarious punishment. As the firstborn of men could be substituted for

the parent, so, too, could a lower animal, or the price of a lower

animal, be substituted for the firstborn of men. It was not the

sacrifice which the God of Israel demanded, but the spirit of sacrifice;

not the blood of bulls and goats, or even men, but obedience and

readiness to give up all that was dearest and best at the command of

God.

The story of the sacrifice of Isaac was a practical illustration of the

lesson. Abraham was called upon to slay with his own hand his only

child, the son through whom he had believed that he would become the

ancestor of a mighty nation. He was summoned to lead him to one of those

high-places of Canaan where the deity seemed nearer to the worshipper

than in the plain below, and there, like the Phœnician god El, to offer

him up to his God. We are told how he set forth from Beer-sheba, on the

borders of the desert, and on the third day reached the sacred mountain

on whose summit the Canaanitish rite was to be celebrated. It was in

‘the land of Moriah,’ according to the reading of the Hebrew text, a

name which the chronicler (2 Chron. iii. 1) transfers to the

temple-mount at Jerusalem. But the Septuagint changes the name in the

books of Chronicles into that of ‘the mountain of Amoria’ or the

Amorites; while in Genesis the Greek translators must have read Moreh,

since the Hebrew word is rendered by ‘Highlands.’ Moreh is the

Babylonian Martu, the land of the Amorites, so that we need not be

surprised at finding the Syriac version boldly substituting ‘Amorites’

for the Masoretic ‘Moriah.’

In any case, the belief that the scene of Abraham’s sacrifice was the

spot whereon the Jewish temple afterwards stood went back to an early

date. When the book of Genesis assumed its present form it had already

become fixed in the Jewish mind. This is clear from the proverb quoted

to explain the name of Yahveh-yireh. ‘To this day,’ we are told, it was

said: ‘In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen.’ For the Jew there was

but one ‘mount of the Lord,’ that mountain whereon Yahveh revealed

Himself above the cherubim of the ark. It was ‘the hill of God,’ wherein

He desired to dwell (Ps. lxviii. 15), the seat of the sanctuary of

Yahveh the God of Israel. When the Samaritans set up on Gerizim their

rival temple to that of Jerusalem, it was necessary that the scene of

the sacrifice of the Hebrew patriarch should be transferred to the new

site. It was a proof how firm was the conviction that the temple-mount

had been consecrated to the sacrifice of the firstborn by the great

ancestor of the Israelitish family. The spot whereon the victims of the

Jewish ritual were offered up was the very spot to which Abraham had

been led by God that he might offer there the terrible sacrifice of his

only son. Its name had been given to it by Abraham, and this name found

its explanation in a saying that was current at Jerusalem about the

temple-mount.

The actual meaning of the name is not certain, nor indeed is the

original signification of the proverb itself. Already in the time of the

Septuagint translation the meaning of the latter was doubtful, and the

Greek translators have made the divine name the subject of the verb,

reading, ‘In the mountain the Lord was seen.’ But the fact that the

Chronicler calls the temple-mount Moriah shows that such a rendering was

not accepted in Jerusalem.

It may be that the name ‘mount of the Lord’ goes back, at all events in

substance, to patriarchal times. Among the places in Southern Palestine

conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Thothmes III., of the eighteenth

dynasty, and recorded on the temple walls of Karnak, is Har-el, ‘the

mountain of God.’[62] The names found in immediate connection with

Har-el indicate that its site is to be sought in the neighbourhood of

Jerusalem; and as the name of Jerusalem itself does not occur in the

Pharaoh’s list of his conquests, it is probable that we are to see in it

the future capital of Judah. As we now know from the Tel el-Amarna

tablets, Jerusalem was an important city of Canaan long before the

Mosaic age; it was, moreover, the centre of a district which had been

conquered by the Egyptians, and its ruler was a vassal of the Egyptian

monarch. It is therefore difficult to account for the omission of any

reference to it in the catalogue of the conquests of the Pharaoh except

upon the supposition that it is really mentioned among them, though

under another name.

The distance that separates Jerusalem from Beer-sheba would correspond

with the three days’ journey of Abraham to the destined place of

sacrifice. It was on the third day that Abraham lifted up his eyes ‘and

saw the place afar off.’ The main, in fact, the only, argument of any

weight that has been urged against the identification is the fact that

the place of sacrifice seems to have been a desert spot. No spectators

are mentioned as present, and close to it was a thicket in which a ram

was caught by the horns. How can such solitude, it is asked, be

reconciled with the existence of a city in the same spot? How can the

deserted high-place whereon the patriarch raised the altar of sacrifice

for his son be identical with the fortress-city of which Melchizedek was

king?

At first sight the difficulty seems overwhelming. But we must remember

that nothing is said in the narrative about the place being desert and

remote from men, nor even that it was not within the walls of a city.

And we must further remember that the temple of Solomon itself was built

on what had been the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Before the

age of Solomon, therefore, the place must have been open and free from

buildings; it must, too, have been a level platform of rock on the

summit of the hill where the winds could freely play and scatter the

chaff when the grain was threshed. Such open spaces are not infrequent

in Oriental cities, and the visitor sometimes finds himself suddenly

emerging out of close and crowded lanes into a growth of rank brushwood

and weeds.

It is true that in the books of Samuel, where we are told how the

threshing-floor of the Jebusite came to be chosen as the site of the

temple, no allusion is made to Abraham’s sacrifice. Another reason is

assigned for the choice of the spot. But Oriental modes of writing

history are not the same as ours, and the so-called argument from

silence is worthless when applied to them. Archæological discovery has

shown, time after time, that facts and references are passed over in

silence by the writers of ancient Oriental history, not because the

writers did not know them, but because their conception of history was

different from ours.

Mount Moriah, then, may well have been the scene of that temptation of

Abraham when, in accordance with the fierce ritual of Syria, he believed

himself called upon to offer up in sacrifice his only son. At all

events, the belief that it was so can be traced back to an early date

among the Jews. The very fact that the Samaritans transported the place

of sacrifice to Mount Gerizim proves that it had already been associated

with the site of the temple, and the transference of the site was

necessary in support of the claim that the true centre of Hebrew worship

was at Samaria and not in Jerusalem.

Light has been cast on the substitution of a ram for the human victim by

an acute observation of M. Clermont-Ganneau.[63] We know that human

sacrifice occupied a prominent place in the ritual of Phœnicia and

Carthage; and yet in the so-called sacrificial tariffs which have been

discovered at Carthage and Marseilles, and in which the price is stated

of each of the offerings demanded by the gods, there is absolute silence

in regard to it. The place of the human victim is taken by the _ayîl_,

the ‘ram’ of the book of Genesis.[64] The tariffs of Carthage and

Marseilles belong to that later period of Phœnician religion, when

contact with the Greeks had introduced Western ideas of the value of

human life, and a truer conception of what the gods required. The

merchants of Carthage had learned that Baal would be satisfied with a

victim less costly than man, and would accept instead of him the blood

of rams.

The lesson which the Carthaginians learned from contact with the Greeks

had been taught the ancestors of the Hebrews by the Lord. The Law and

the Prophets alike protested against the old belief, hard as it was to

eradicate it from the Semitic mind. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter

stands alone, even in the troublous period of the Judges; the sacrifice

of his eldest son by the king of Moab (2 Kings iii. 27), though it

stayed the Israelitish attack, was the act of one who did not

acknowledge Yahveh of Israel as his God; and the Jewish children who

were burnt in the fire to Moloch were offered by renegades from the

national faith. Israelitish law and history bear upon them the traces of

the old Semitic custom, but they are traces only. The story of Abraham’s

sacrifice is an antitype of the future history of the religion of

Israel. The firstborn, indeed, belonged to Yahveh, if He chose to claim

them; but, unlike the gods of the heathen, He did not claim them when

they were the firstborn of man.

Once again we have a picture of Abraham; but this time it is not as the

shêkh who conforms to the beliefs and practices of Canaan, but as a

foreign prince who acquires land in the country of his adoption. Sarah

is dead, and Abraham accordingly buys a field at Machpelah in the close

neighbourhood of Hebron. The field included a portion of the limestone

cliff which overlooked the city, and was pierced then, as now, by

numerous cavities, partly natural, partly excavated by the hand of man.

They were the burying-places of the inhabitants of the town, the

chambered tombs in which the dead were laid to rest. That Abraham should

choose Hebron as the future home and resting-place of his family was

perhaps natural. It was here that he had lived when he first came, as an

immigrant, into ‘the land of the Amorites’; it was here that he had been

confederate with its Amorite chieftains, and had led his forces against

the invading host of the king of Elam. Moreover, Hebron was one of the

old centres of Canaan. It had been built seven years before Zoan in

Egypt (Numb. xiii. 22), perhaps in the age when the Hyksos kings first

conquered Egypt and rebuilt Zoan, making it the capital of their new

kingdom. The sanctuary of Hebron rivalled that of Jerusalem in sanctity

and fame, at all events in the years immediately succeeding the

Israelitish conquest, and it was at Hebron that David first established

his power and his son Absalom matured his rebellion.

In the age of Abraham the city had not yet received its later name of

Hebron, the ‘Confederacy.’ It was still known as Kirjath-Arba, and the

district in which it stood was that of Mamre. Amorites and Hittites

dwelt there side by side. Arba, we are told, was ‘a great man among the

Amorite Anakim’ (Josh. xiv. 15), but it was from ‘the sons of Heth’ that

the field of Machpelah was bought.

Critics have raised the question who these Hittites of Southern

Palestine may have been. It has been asserted that they are the

invention of a later Hebrew writer, and that the Hittites of Northern

Syria were never settled in the south of Canaan. On the other hand, the

veracity of the Hebrew record has been admitted, but the identity of

‘the sons of Heth’ with the great Hittite tribes of the north has been

denied.

The critics, however, have no grounds for their scepticism. The book of

Genesis does not stand alone in testifying to the existence of Hittites

in Southern Palestine. The prophet Ezekiel does the same. He too tells

us that the origin of Jerusalem was partly Amorite, partly Hittite.

Indeed, throughout the Pentateuch it is assumed that Hittites and

Amorites were mingled together in the mountainous parts of the country.

‘The Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites,’ it is said in the

book of Numbers (xiii. 29), ‘dwell in the mountains,’ and the same

combination of names in the same order is found in the geographical

table of Genesis (x. 15, 16). Between these Hittites and the Hittites of

the north no distinction is made in the Old Testament. ‘The land of the

Hittites,’ mentioned in Judg. i. 26, into which the Canaanite betrayer

of Beth-el made his way, was in the north, like the Hittite kingdoms

whose princes are referred to in 2 Kings vii. 6.

Thanks to archæological discovery, we now know a good deal about these

Hittites of Northern Syria. Their name is found on the monuments of

Egypt, of Assyria, and of Armenia, and they are mentioned in Babylonian

tablets which go back to the age of Abraham. Cappadocia was their

earliest home; from hence they descended on the possessions of the

Aramæans and established their power as far south as the Lake of Homs.

The cuneiform inscriptions of Armenia in the ninth century B.C. describe

them as on the Upper Euphrates in the neighbourhood of Malatiyeh, and

the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) tells us that

Carchemish was one of their capitals. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we

hear of their growing power on the northern frontier of the Egyptian

empire, of their intrigues with the Amorites and the people of Canaan,

and of their steady advance to the south. Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the

Oppression, after twenty years of warfare, was glad to conclude peace on

equal terms with ‘the great king of the Hittites.’ The Hittite capital

was already so near the northern border of Palestine as Kadesh on the

Orontes ‘in the land of the Amorites.’ Here the Hittite monarch gathered

together his vassals and allies from Syria and Asia Minor; even the

distant Lycians and Dardanians came at his call.

The Egyptian artists have left us portraits of the Hittite race. Their

features and dress were alike peculiar, and both reappear without change

on certain monuments which have been found in Asia Minor and Syria, thus

fixing the character of the latter beyond dispute. The monuments are

covered with a still undeciphered system of hieroglyphic writing, and

among the hieroglyphs are numerous human heads with the strange profile

of the Hittite face. The nose and upper jaw protrude, the forehead is

high and receding, the cheeks smooth, while we learn from the paintings

of Egypt that the skin was yellow and the hair and the eyes were black.

The hair was gathered together in a kind of ‘pig-tail,’ and the feet

were shod with the shoes of mountaineers, the toes of which rose upwards

into a point.[65]

Why should not a body of Hittites have settled in Southern Palestine,

and there have been, as it were, interlocked with the older Amorite

inhabitants, as they were according to the testimony of the Egyptian

inscriptions at Kadesh on the Lake of Homs? Indeed, there is indirect

evidence that such was really the case.

Thothmes III., who conquered Syria for the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty,

tells us that he received tribute from the king of ‘the greater Hittite

land.’ There was then a lesser Hittite land; and as the ‘greater Hittite

land’ was in the north, it is reasonable to look for the lesser land in

the south. Half a century later, at a time when the Tel el-Amarna

correspondence was being carried on, the Hittites were actively

interfering in the internal politics of Canaan; and in one of the

bas-reliefs of Ramses II. at Karnak the vanquished population of

Ashkelon—in the near neighbourhood of Hebron—is represented with the

peculiar Hittite type of face.[66] At a still earlier date, when the

Assyrians first became acquainted with Western Asia, the dominant people

there were the Hittites. In the Assyrian inscriptions, accordingly, the

whole of Syria, including Palestine, came to be known as ‘the land of

the Hittites.’ Shalmaneser II. even speaks of Ahab of Israel and Baasha

of Ammon as ‘Hittite’ kings.[67] ‘The land of the Hittites’ in the

Assyrian texts thus corresponds with the ‘land of the Amorites’ in the

texts of Babylonia. Just as Canaan was ‘the land of the Amorites’ to the

Babylonian of the age of Abraham, so too it was ‘the land of the

Hittites’ to the Assyrian of the age of Moses. Before Assyria had become

acquainted with the shores of the Mediterranean, the Hittites had taken

the place of the Amorites and become the leading power in the West.

There is, therefore, nothing antecedently improbable in the existence in

Southern Palestine of Hittites of the genuine northern stock. But the

name may also be due to the Assyrian use of it at the time when the

narrative in the book of Genesis was written. The use of the term

‘Amorite’ in several passages of the Pentateuch is certainly of

Babylonian origin, and takes us back to the age when all the natives of

Palestine were alike included in it; it may be that the ‘Hittites’ of

Hebron and Jerusalem owe their title to a similar adoption of a foreign

term. If so, the Amorites and Hittites were equally one people; but

whereas the name of ‘Amorite’ comes from Babylonia and indicates an

earlier date for the sources of the narrative in which it occurs, the

name of ‘Hittite’ points to Assyria and the Assyrian epoch of Asiatic

history.

Against this is the Babylonian colouring of the story of Abraham’s

dealings with the children of Heth. During the last few years thousands

of contract-tablets have been discovered in Babylonia which belong to

the age of Abraham or to a still earlier period. And these tablets show

that in the account of the purchase of the field of Machpelah we have a

faithful picture of such transactions as they were conducted at the time

in the cities of Babylonia. It reads, in fact, like one of the cuneiform

documents which have been unearthed from Babylonian soil. It is

conformed to the law and procedure of Babylonia as they were in the

patriarchal age. At a later date the law and procedure were altered, and

a narrative in which they are embodied must therefore go back to a

pre-Mosaic antiquity. It must belong to the Babylonian and not to the

Assyrian epoch.

That the law and custom of Babylonia should have prevailed in Canaan is

no longer surprising. The same contract-tablets which have revealed to

us the commercial and social life of primitive Chaldæa have also shown

us that colonies of ‘Amorite’ or Canaanitish merchants were settled in

Babylonia, where they enjoyed numerous rights and privileges, and could

acquire land and other property. There were special districts called

‘Amorite’ allotted to them, one of which was just outside the walls of

the city of Sippara. They had judges of their own, and where disputes

arose between themselves and the native Babylonians the case was tried

before both the ‘Amorite’ and the native courts. These foreign settlers

could act as witnesses in trials that concerned only Babylonians, and

could even rise to high offices of state. It must be remembered,

however, that the Babylonian kings claimed to be kings also of ‘the land

of the Amorites,’ and that consequently the natives of Canaan were as

much subjects of the rulers of Chaldæa as the Babylonians themselves.

Through the Canaanitish colonies in Babylonia a knowledge of Babylonian

law was necessarily communicated to the commercial world of the West.

Moreover, Babylonian rule brought with it Babylonian culture and law as

well. The ‘Amorites’ when the Babylonians first met with them were

doubtless in a semi-barbarous condition, and their subsequent culture,

as we now know, was wholly Babylonian. A very important part of this

culture, at all events in the eyes of the trading world, was the law of

Babylonia, more especially in its relation to contracts. That the

purchase of the field of Machpelah should have been conducted with all

the formalities to which Abraham had been accustomed in his Chaldæan

home, is consequently what archæological discovery has informed us ought

to have been the case.

A simple form of contract for the sale and purchase of landed property

in Babylonia is to be found in one that was drawn up in the reign of

Eri-Aku or Arioch. It is written in Sumerian, the old legal language of

Chaldæa, as Latin was the legal language of Europe in the Middle Ages,

and runs as follows:—‘One and five-sixths _sar_[68] of a terrace with a

house upon it, bounded on three sides by the house of Abil-Sin, and on

the fourth side by the street, has been purchased by Sin-uzilli the son

of Tsili-Istar from Sin-illatsu the son of Nannar-arabit: 2-½ shekels of

silver he has weighed as its full price. In days to come Sin-illatsu

shall never make any claim in regard to the house or dispute the title.

The (contracting parties) have sworn by the names of Sin, Samas, and

king Eri-Aku. Witnessed by Abu-ilisu the son of Tsili-Istar, Abil-Sin

the son of Uruki-bansum, Nur-Amurri the son of Abi-idinnam, Ibku-Urra,

son of Nabi-ilisu, and Sin-semê his brother. The seals of the witnesses

(are attached).’[69]

Still more insight into the character and procedure of Babylonian

commercial law is given by the record of a case of disputed property

which came before the judges in the reign of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel.

The following is a translation of it:—‘Concerning the garden of

Sin-magir which Naid-Amurri bought for silver, but to which Ilu-bani

laid claim on the ground that he had bred horses there. They went before

the judges, and the judges took them to the gate of the goddess

Nin-Martu (the mistress of the land of the Amorites), and to the judges

of the gate of Nin-Martu Ilu-bani thus declared in the gate of

Nin-Martu: I am indeed the son of Sin-magir; he adopted me as his son;

the sealed documents (recording the fact) he never destroyed. Thus he

declared, and under (king) Eri-Aku they adjudged the garden and house to

Ilu-bani. Then came Sin-mubalidh and claimed the garden of Ilu-bani; so

they went before the judges, and the judges (said): To us and the elders

they have been taken, and must stand in the gate of the gods Merodach,

Sussa, Sin, Khusa, and Nin-Martu the daughter of Merodach ... and the

elders who have already appeared in the case of Naid-Amurri have heard

Ilu-bani declare in the gate of Nin-Martu that “I am indeed the son (of

Sin-magir)”; accordingly, they adjudged the garden and house to

Ilu-bani. Sin-mubalidh cannot come again and make a claim. Oaths have

been sworn by the names of Sin, Samas, Merodach, and king Khammu-rabi.

Witnessed by Sin-imguranni the noble, Elilka-Sin, Abil-irzitim, Ubarrum,

Zanbil-arad-Sin, Akhiya, Bel-dugul (?), Samas-bani the son of

Abid-rakhas, Zanik-pisu, Izkur-Ea the major-domo, and Bau-ila. The seals

of the witnesses (are attached). The 4th day of the month Tammuz, the

year when Khammu-rabi the king offered prayers to Tasmit.’[70]

It is needless to quote other documents of a similar nature, unless it

be to add that when a field or garden is sold, the palms and other trees

planted in it are carefully specified. So they were also in the case of

the field of Machpelah. Here, too, the transaction took place before the

‘elders’ of the city, at ‘the gate’ through which the people entered,

and it was duly witnessed by ‘the children of Heth.’[71] The fact that

‘a stranger and a sojourner’ could thus acquire landed property and hand

it down to his descendants was in strict accordance with Babylonian law.

As the Canaanite in Babylonia could buy land and leave it to his

children, so too the Babylonian in Canaan could do the same. Even the

technical words used in recording the deed of sale are of Babylonian

origin. The shekel is the Babylonian _siqlu_, and the Babylonian was the

first who spoke of ‘weighing silver’ in the sense of ‘paying money.’[72]

The statement that the shekels were ‘current with the merchant’ takes us

back to those Babylonian ‘merchants’ who played so great a part in the

early Babylonian world. It was for them that Dungi, king of Ur, long

before the birth of Abraham, had fixed the monetary standard which

remained in use down to the later days of the Chaldæan monarchy. He had

determined by law the weight and value of the maneh, of which the

sixtieth part was a shekel, and only those manehs and shekels which

conformed to it could be accepted by the Babylonian trader. The words of

Genesis are a curious indication of the period of society to which they

must belong.[73]

There was evolution in Babylonian law as in the law of all other

countries; and though the early contracts remained a model for those of

a later epoch, their style and form underwent change. The Assyrian and

later Babylonian contracts resemble them, it is true, in their main

outlines; but they have become more complicated, and the older

phraseology is altered in many respects. The ‘elders’ no longer appear

as witnesses; it is no longer needful to try cases of disputed title at

the various gates of the city; and it is questionable whether foreigners

could claim the same rights in regard to possessions in land that they

did in the days of Amraphel and Arioch. The sale of the field of

Machpelah belongs essentially to the early Babylonian and not to the

Assyrian period.

It is only fragments of the life of Abraham that are brought before us

in the pages of Genesis. They are like a series of pictures which have

been saved from the shipwreck of the past. And the pictures are not

always painted in the same colours. At one time the patriarch appears as

‘a mighty prince,’ as a rich and cultured Chaldæan immigrant, with armed

bands of warriors under him with whom he can venture to attack even the

army of the king of Elam. He is the confederate of the Amorite

chieftains, the prince whom the Hittites of Hebron hear with respect.

But at another time the colours on the canvas seem quite different. When

the angels warn the patriarch of the approaching overthrow of the cities

of the plain, they find him in the tent of a Bedâwi, leading the simple

life of an uncultured nomad, and preparing the food of his guests with

his own hands. Between this Bedâwi shêkh and the companion of the king

of Gerar or the Pharaoh of Egypt the contrast is indeed great.

To the Western mind, however, the contrast is greater than it would be

to the Oriental. The traveller in the East is well acquainted with

wealthy Bedâwin shêkhs who live in the desert in barbaric simplicity,

but, nevertheless, have their houses at Cairo or Damascus, where they

indulge in all the luxury and splendour of Oriental life. Moreover, the

narratives which have been combined in the book of Genesis do not all

come from the same source. Some of them have been taken from written

historical documents which breathe the atmosphere of the cultured city,

of the educated scribe, and the luxurious court. Others, derived it may

be from oral tradition, are filled with the spirit of the wanderer in

the desert, and set before us the simple life and rude fare of the

dweller in tents. The history of the patriarchs is, in fact, like

Joseph’s coat of many colours. It is a series of pictures rather than a

homogeneous whole. The materials of which it is composed differ widely

in both character and origin. Some of them can be shown to have been

contemporaneous with the events they record; some again to have been

like the tales of their old heroes recounted by the nomad Arabs in the

days before Islam as they sat at night round their camp-fires. The

details and spirit of the story have necessarily caught the colour of

the medium through which they have passed. The life of Abraham,

doubtless, presented the contrasts still presented by that of a rich

Bedâwi shêkh; at one time spent in the wild freedom and privations of

the desert; at another amid the luxuries and culture of the town; but

the contrasts have been heightened by the difference in the sources

through which they have been handed down. Naturally, while the scribe

would record only those phases of Abraham’s history which brought him

into contact with the great world of kings and princes, of war and

trade, the nomad reciter of ancient stories would dwell rather on such

parts of it as he and his hearers could understand. For them Abraham

would become a desert-wanderer like themselves.

This difference in the sources of the narrative explains why it is that

the figure of Abraham so largely overshadows that of his son Isaac.

Isaac seems almost swallowed up in that darkness of antiquity through

which the figure of his father looms so largely. Apart from his dispute

with Abimelech of Gerar, which reads like a repetition of the dispute

between Abimelech and Abraham, there is little told of the life of Isaac

which is not connected with his more famous father or son. Between

Abraham and Jacob, the great ancestors of Israel, Isaac seems to

intervene as merely a connecting link.

But the life of Isaac was that of a Bedâwi shêkh. The other side of his

father’s life and character was lost. The forefather of Israel had

ceased to be a Chaldæan, and had become simply a dweller in the desert,

like the fugitive slaves from Egypt in after days. Even Hebron was left,

and the life of Isaac was mainly passed on the northern edge of that

desert in which his descendants were in later times to receive the Law.

If he approached Canaan, it was only to Beer-sheba and Gerar on the

southern skirts of Canaanitish territory, where the Bedâwin and their

flocks still claimed to be masters. But his chief residence was further

south, in the very heart of the wilderness.

Isaac was thus essentially a Bedâwi, a fit type of the phase of life

through which the Israelites were destined to pass before their conquest

of the Promised Land. With the politics and trade of the civilised

world, accordingly, he never came into contact. There was nothing in his

existence for the historian to chronicle; nothing which could bring his

name into the written history of the time. If his memory were to be

preserved at all, it could be only through the unwritten traditions of

the desert, through the tales told of him among the desert tribes.

Once indeed, it is said, he had relations with a king. The king was one

of those Canaanitish princelets with whose names the Tel el-Amarna

tablets are filled. The dominions of Abimelech of Gerar were of small

extent, and must have been barren in the extreme. The site of Gerar lies

two hours south of Gaza,[74] and the territory of its king extended

eastward as far as Beer-sheba. It was essentially a desert territory:

during the greater part of the year the whole country is bare and

sterile; only after rain does the wilderness break forth suddenly into

green herbage.

In the story of Isaac’s dispute with Abimelech the writer of Genesis

calls him ‘king of the Philistines,’ and speaks of his subjects as

‘Philistines.’ This, however, is an accommodation to the geography of a

later day. In the age of the patriarchs the south-eastern corner of

Palestine has not as yet been occupied by the Philistine immigrants. We

have learned from the Egyptian monuments that they were pirates from the

islands and coasts of the Greek Seas who did not seize upon the frontier

cities of Southern Canaan until the time of the Pharaoh Meneptah, the

son of Ramses II. Up to then, for more than three centuries, the

frontier cities had been garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and included in

the Egyptian empire. It was not till the period of the Exodus that the

district passed into Philistine hands, and the old road into Egypt by

the sea-coast became known as ‘the way of the Philistines.’

In speaking of the ‘Philistines,’ therefore, the writer of the book of

Genesis is speaking proleptically. And in reading the narrative of

Isaac’s dealings with Abimelech by the side of that of Abraham’s

dealings with the same king, it is difficult to resist the conclusion

that we have before us two versions of the same event. Doubtless,

history repeats itself; disputes about the possession of wells in a

desert-land can frequently recur, and it is possible that two kings of

the same name may have followed one another on the throne of Gerar. But

what does not seem very possible is that each of these kings should have

had a ‘chief captain of his host’ called by the strange non-Semitic name

of Phichol (Gen. xxi. 22; xxvi. 26); that each of them should have taken

the wife of the patriarch, believing her to be his sister; or that

Beer-sheba should twice have received the same name from the oaths sworn

over it.

When we compare the two versions together, it is not difficult to see

which of them is the more original. It is in the second that Abimelech

is called ‘king of the Philistines’; in the first he is correctly

entitled ‘king of Gerar.’ Abraham was justified in calling Sarah his

sister; there was no ground and no reason for Isaac doing the same in

the case of his own wife. Moreover, Beer-sheba had already received its

name from Abraham, who had planted there an _êshel_ or tamarisk, and

‘called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.’

The wife of Isaac was brought from Harran, from the members of Abraham’s

race who had settled in Northern Syria, and there become an Aramæan

family. She was the daughter of Bethuel, ‘the house of God,’ a proper

name which is found in the Tel el-Amarna letters, where it also belongs

to a native of Northern Syria.[75] Bethuel is the older form of Bethel,

that anointed stone which, according to Semitic belief, was the special

residence of divinity. There was something peculiarly appropriate in

such a name at Harran, where the great temple of the Moon-god, the ‘Baal

of Harran,’ was itself a Beth-el on a large scale.

That Isaac should have lived all his life long in the southern desert,

and that his name should have been associated with none of the ancient

sanctuaries of Canaan, Beer-sheba alone excepted, is perhaps curious

when we bear in mind a passage in the prophecies of Amos (vii. 9), where

it is with Northern Israel and not with Judah that the name of the

patriarch is connected. Isaac, however, was as much the forefather of

the Israelites of Samaria as he was of those of Jerusalem; and the use

of his name by the prophet shows only that he was no mere Jewish hero,

but was regarded as an ancestor of the whole Israelitish nation. For the

whole of Israel, Isaac was no less historical than Abraham or Jacob.

That Isaac’s dwelling-place should have been in the desert of the south

agrees well with the fact that he was the father of Edom as well as of

Israel. He thus lived on the borderland of the two peoples who

afterwards boasted of their descent from him.

Esau, from whom the Edomites traced their origin, was the elder of his

two twin sons. The name has been connected with that of the Phœnician

deity Usous, but Usous is really the eponymous god of the city of Usu,

in the neighbourhood of Tyre. Esau took possession of the mountains of

Seir. Here he partly absorbed, partly destroyed the older races, the

Amalekites or Bedâwin whose descendants still prowl among the wadis of

Edom, and the Horites whom a somewhat doubtful etymology would turn into

Troglodytes or dwellers in caves. Edom itself, the ‘Red’ land, took its

name from the red hue of its cliffs. It was a name which went back to a

remote antiquity, for among the Egyptians also the desert-country which

stretched away eastward into Edom was known as Desher, ‘the Red.’ The

punning etymology in Genesis (xxv. 30) preserves a recollection of the

true origin of the name.

The territories of Esau extended southward to the head of the Gulf of

Aqaba. Here were the towns of Elath and Eziongeber, through which the

merchandise of the Indian Ocean was conveyed northward, enriching the

merchants and princes of Edom in its passage through their land. To the

north Edom was in touch with the peoples of Canaan. The wives of Esau,

we are told, were ‘of the daughters of Canaan’ (Gen. xxxvi. 2); one of

them at least was Hittite, and another, according to one account (Gen.

xxvi. 34), bore the name of the ‘Jewess.’ But other wives were taken

from the tribes of Arabia. Bashemath was the daughter of Ishmael and

sister of a Nabathean chief, while Aholibamah was the daughter of a

Horite who belonged to the primeval race of Seir.

Like the Ishmaelites, like the Israelites themselves, it was long before

the Edomites submitted to the rule of a king. At first they were divided

into tribes, each of them under a shêkh. In Israel the shêkhs were

entitled ‘judges,’ a title borrowed from the Canaanite population; in

Edom they bore the name of _alûphim_, which the Authorised Version

renders by ‘dukes.’[76] The old name still survived down to the time of

the Exodus, as we may gather from its use in the Song of Moses (Exod.

xv. 15). But when the wanderings in the wilderness were almost over, and

Israel was preparing to invade Palestine, the ‘dukes’ of Edom had

already been superseded by kings. It was a ‘king of Edom’ to whom Moses

sent messengers from Kadesh praying for a ‘passage through his border,’

and it was a king of Edom who refused the request. But the ancient

spirit of independence still lingered; and, as we may gather from the

extract from the Edomite chronicles preserved in Gen. xxxvi., the

monarchy was elective. The son never succeeded the father on the throne,

the royal dignity passed from one division of the kingdom to the other,

and each city in turn became the capital.[77]

Though Esau was the elder, the birthright passed to the younger brother.

Israelitish tradition knew of more than one occurrence which accounted

for this. It was told how Esau had sold his birthright for a mess of

pottage; it was also told how it had been stolen from him by the craft

of his brother Jacob. Naturally, the first tradition was more favoured

in Israel, the second in Edom, and the union of the two in the book of

Genesis is a proof of the diligence with which the writer of it has

gathered together all that was known of the past of his people as well

as the impartiality with which he has used his materials. Perhaps both

stories owed their preservation to the play upon words which was

connected with them. The ‘red’ pottage served to explain the name of

Edom, the craft of the younger son the name of Jacob.[78]

Upon the real origin of the latter name, however, recent discovery has

thrown light. It is the third person singular of a verb, and is formed

like numerous names of the same class in Arabic and Assyrian. But the

third person singular of a verb implies a nominative, and the nominative

was originally a divine name or title. In familiar use the nominative

came to be dropped, and the shortened form of the name to be alone

employed. The older form of the name Jacob has now been recovered from

the monuments of Babylonia and Egypt. Among the Canaanites who appear as

witnesses to Babylonian contracts of the age of Khammu-rabi, Mr. Pinches

has found a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el, ‘God will recompense,’ ‘God will

add.’[79] The same names, though written a little differently,[80] are

met with in contracts earlier than the time of Moses, which have been

discovered near Kaisariyeh, in Cappadocia, and are inscribed on clay

tablets in cuneiform characters and in a Babylonian dialect. We can thus

trace them from the primitive home of Abraham to the neighbourhood of

that Aramæan district of Northern Mesopotamia in which his father

settled.

But this is not all. Among the places in Palestine conquered by Thothmes

III. of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and recorded on the walls of

his temple at Karnak, we find a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el. In Canaan,

therefore, the names were already current; it may even be that in the

town of Jacob-el we have a reminiscence of the patriarch, in Joseph-el a

connection with the ancestor of the ‘House of Joseph.’ At all events,

the name of Joseph-el follows immediately after that of the ‘Har’ or

‘Mountain’ of Ephraim, while that of Jacob-el is placed in the

neighbourhood of Hebron.[81]

The name of Jacob-el can be carried still further back than the age of

Thothmes III., further back probably than the age of the patriarch

himself. There are Egyptian scarabs which bear the name of a Pharaoh

called Jacob-el. The first part of the name is written just as it would

be in Hebrew, and the Pharaoh is given all the titles of a legitimate

Egyptian king. On one he is ‘the good God,’ on another ‘the son of the

Sun,’ and ‘the giver of life.’ The scarabs belong to the period of the

Hyksos, and in the Pharaoh Jacob-el we must accordingly see one of those

Hyksos conquerors from Asia who ruled over Egypt for so many centuries.

There was thus a Jacob in Egypt before the patriarch migrated there, and

he belonged to that Hyksos race under whom Joseph rose to the highest

honours of the state.[82]

The shortened form of the name is also found in the Babylonian texts;

and it is probable that Egibi, the founder of the great banking and

trading firm which carried on business in Babylonia down to the time of

the Persian kings, had a name which is identical with it. At any rate

the older forms of both ‘Jacob’ and ‘Joseph’ show that ‘Isaac’ too must

be an abbreviation from an earlier ‘Isaac-el’ (_Yitskhaq-êl_). ‘God

smileth’ would have been the primitive signification of the word.

The craft of Jacob was the cause of his flight to his mother’s family in

Padan-Aram. He thus became that ‘wandering Aramæan’ of whom we read in

Deuteronomy (xxvi. 5). On his way he rested at the great Beth-el of

Central Palestine, and there in a vision beheld the angels of God

ascending and descending the steps of limestone that were piled one upon

the other to the gates of heaven.[83] There, too, he poured oil upon the

sacred stone and consecrated it to the deity, and future generations

revered it as a veritable Beth-el or ‘House of God.’

The name, in fact, we are told, was given to it by Jacob himself. ‘If I

come again to my father’s house in peace,’ he said, ‘then shall Yahveh

be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s

house; and of all that Thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth

unto Thee.’ The vow was in accordance with a Canaanitish custom which

had originally come from Babylonia. From time immemorial the Babylonian

temples had been supported by the tenth or tithe, which was levied on

both king and people: it was not thought that the gods were asking too

much when they demanded the tenth of the income which had been given to

man by themselves. Among the Babylonian contract-tablets there are

several which relate to the payment of the tithe as well as to the gifts

that were made to a Bit-ili or Beth-el.[84]

Jacob’s vow was performed, at least in part, when once more he returned

to Canaan. Then again ‘God appeared to him’ and changed the patriarch’s

name. Then again, too, ‘he set up a pillar of stone; and he poured a

drink-offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon. And Jacob called the

name of the place where God spake with him Beth-el.’ This second account

of the naming of the place doubtless comes from a different source from

that which recorded Jacob’s dream, and is the account which was known to

Hosea, the prophet of the northern kingdom. Modern critics have alleged

that it is inconsistent with the first, and that consequently neither

the one nor the other is historical. The compiler of the book of

Genesis, however, thought otherwise; he has made no attempt to smooth

over what the European scholar declares to be inconsistencies, and which

therefore cannot have seemed inconsistencies to him. The Oriental mode

of writing history, it must once more be remarked, is not the same as

ours; and as it is with the ancient East that we are now concerned, it

would be wiser to follow the judgment of the writer of Genesis than that

of his European critics.

At Harran Jacob served his cousin Laban ‘for a wife, and for a wife he

kept sheep.’ Such contracts of voluntary service are to be found in the

Babylonian tablets of the age of Khammu-rabi and his predecessors. It

was not at all unusual for a slave to be hired out to another master for

a definite period of time; it sometimes happened that the master himself

hired out his own services in a similar way.[85] In Babylonia the work

was partly pastoral, partly agricultural; the semi-Bedâwi Jacob was a

herdsman only. His cousin Laban bore a name which was also that of an

Assyrian deity; and it may not be a mere coincidence that when

Nabonidos, the last king of Babylonia, restored the great temple of the

moon-god at Harran, he tells us that he began the task ‘by the art of

the god Laban, the god of foundations and brickwork.’[86]

The two daughters of Laban bore names which had a familiar sound to the

ear of a herdsman. Rachel means ‘ewe’; Leah is the Assyrian _li’tu_, ‘a

cow.’ It is needless to recount the well-known story of the wooing of

the younger daughter, and of the efforts made by Laban to retain Jacob

in his service and marry both the sisters to him. Craft was met by

craft; but in the end the ancestor of Israel proved more than a match

for the wily Syrian. His cattle and riches multiplied like the children

who were born to him, and a time came when the sons of Laban began to

view with envy the poor relative who was robbing them of their

patrimony. So Jacob fled, before harm had come to him, carrying with him

his wives and children and all the wealth he had accumulated. Laban

pursued and succeeded in overtaking the heavily-weighted caravan at the

very spot where the frontiers of Aram and Canaan met together. There the

cairn of stones was raised in which later generations saw a memorial of

the pact that had been sworn between Jacob and his father-in-law.

Henceforth the tie with Aram was broken: the wives of Jacob forgot the

home of their father and looked to Canaan instead of Aram as the native

land of their race. Over the cairn of Gilead the forefathers of Israel

forswore for ever their Aramæan ties.

But Rachel had carried with her her father’s teraphim, those household

gods on whose cult the welfare of the family seemed to depend. What they

were like we may gather from the teraphim of David, which Michal placed

on the couch of her husband, and so deceived the messengers of Saul (1

Sam. xix. 13-16). They must have had the shape of a man, and, at all

events in the case of those of David, must have also been about a man’s

size. Like the ephod and the Urim and Thummim, they were consulted as

oracles (Zech. x. 2), and their use lingered among the Jews as late as

the period of the Captivity. When Hosea depicts the coming desolation of

Israel, he describes it as a time when ‘the children of Israel shall

abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a

sacrifice, and without a sacred pillar, and without an ephod and

teraphim’ (Hos. iii. 4).

The final break between Jacob and the Aramæan portion of Terah’s family

was marked by a change of name. From henceforth Jacob was to be

distinctively the father of the children of Israel. He and his

descendants were severed from the rest of their kinsmen whether in

Padan-Aram, in Edom, or in the lands beyond the Jordan. Abraham had been

the ‘father of many nations’; Jacob was to be the father of but one—of

that chosen people to whom the character and worship of Yahveh were

revealed.

We read of him in Hosea (xii. 3, 4), ‘By his strength he had power with

God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed.’ What the

Authorised Version translates ‘had power’ is _sârâh_ and _yâsar_ in

Hebrew. The story of the mysterious struggle is told in full in the book

of Genesis. The long caravan of Jacob had arrived at length at Mahanaim,

‘the two camps’ by the stream of the Jabbok, and from thence he sent

messengers to his brother, who had already established his power in the

mountains of Seir. In after days the name of the place was connected

with the strange occurrence that there befel the patriarch. He was

visited by the angels of God, nay, by God Himself. In the visions of the

night he wrestled with one whom, when morning dawned, he believed to

have been his God. He had seen God, as it were, face to face, and a

popular etymology saw in the fact an explanation of the name of Peniel.

When Hosea wrote his prophecies, the belief was too well established

that man cannot ‘see God’s face and live,’ and the angel of God

accordingly takes the place of God Himself. But when the narrative in

Genesis was composed, a more primitive conception of the Divine nature

still prevailed, and no reluctance was felt in stating exactly what the

patriarch himself had believed. It was God with whom he had struggled,

and from whom he had extorted a blessing, and a memory of the conflict

and victory was preserved in the name of Israel, which Jacob henceforth

bore.

The etymology, however, is really only one of those plays upon words of

which the Biblical writers, like Oriental writers generally, are so

fond. It has no scientific value, and never was intended to have any.

Israel is, like Edom, not the name of an individual, but of the people

of whom the individual was the ancestor. The name is formed like that of

Jacob-el, and the abbreviated Jeshurun is used instead of it in the Song

of Moses.[87] If the latter is correct, the root will not be _sârâh_,

‘he fought,’ or _yâsar_, ‘he is king,’ but _yâshar_, ‘to be upright,’

‘to direct’; and Israel will signify ‘God has directed.’ Israel, in

fact, will be the ‘righteous’ people who have been called to walk in the

ways of the Lord.

While Jacob was keeping the sheep of his Aramæan father-in-law, Esau was

making a name for himself among the mountains of the Horites. Half

robber, half huntsman, he had gathered about him a band of followers,

and with their help had founded—if not a kingdom—at all events a nation

to the south of Moab. It is true that the ‘red’ land he had occupied was

rocky and barren, but the high-road of commerce from the spice-bearing

regions of Southern Arabia passed through it, and the plunder or tribute

of the merchants who travelled along it brought wealth to him and his

well-armed Bedâwin. What David did in later days, when he made himself

the head of a band of outlaws, and with their assistance eventually

raised himself to the throne of Judah, had already been accomplished by

Esau among the barbarians of Seir.

The message of Jacob led him northward by the desert road which ran to

the east of Moab and Ammon. It is clear from the story that Jacob knew

little about his brother’s power. When news was brought that he was

coming with a troop of four hundred men, Jacob’s heart sank within him,

and his only thought was how to save himself and at least a portion of

his wealth from the powerful robber-chief. The event proved that his

precautions were needless. Esau behaved with a magnanimity which it must

have been hard for a Hebrew writer to describe, and pressed his brother

to accompany him to Seir. Jacob feared to accept the invitation, and

equally feared to refuse it. With characteristic caution and craft, he

promised to come, but urged that the cattle and children that were with

him made it necessary to follow slowly in Esau’s track. So the Edomite

chieftain departed, and Jacob took good care to turn westward across the

Jordan into the land of Canaan. There, among the cities and fields of

the civilised ‘Amorite,’ he felt himself secure from the pursuit of the

desert tribes.

Was it fear of Esau which kept him in Central Palestine and prevented

him so long from venturing near that southern part of the country where

his father and grandfather had mainly dwelt? At all events, while

Abraham had bought land at Hebron, the land purchased by Jacob was near

Shechem. Moreover, it was the ‘parcel of a field where he had spread his

tent,’ not a burying-place for his family. It would seem, therefore,

that it was intended for a permanent residence; here the patriarch

determined to settle and to exchange the free life of the pastoral nomad

for that of a villager of Canaan.[88]

The field was bought from Hamor the father of Shechem, the founder of

the city which was destined to become the seat of the first monarchy in

Israel, and on it was raised the first altar consecrated to the God of

Israel. El-elohê-Israel, ‘El is the God of Israel,’ the altar was

termed, a declaration that the El whom the Canaanites worshipped was the

God of Israel as well. But though the field was bought for one hundred

‘pieces of money’—an expression, be it noted, which is not Babylonian—we

are assured also that Jacob had gained land at Shechem by the right of

conquest. In blessing Joseph he declared to him that to the tribe of his

favourite son there was given ‘a Shechem above’ his ‘brethren which’ he

had taken ‘out of the hand of the Amorite with’ his ‘sword and bow’

(Gen. xlviii. 22); and the story of the ravishment of Dinah recounts how

the sons of the patriarch massacred the men of the city, how they

enslaved their women and carried away their goods. The terrible tale of

vengeance was never forgotten; it is alluded to in the Blessing of Jacob

(Gen. xlix. 5-7), and the disappearance of Simeon and Levi as separate

tribes was looked upon as a punishment for the deed. It would seem that

after the Israelitish conquest of Canaan the population of Shechem

remained half Canaanite, half Israelite,[89] and the Canaanitish

population would naturally remember with horror and indignation the

crime of the sons of Jacob. That the deed should have been attributed to

the ancestors of two of the southern tribes instead of to those of

Issachar or some other tribe of the north is evidence in favour of its

truthfulness.