THE PATRIARCHS
Abraham had been born in "Ur of the Chaldees." Ur lay on the western
side of the Euphrates in Southern Babylonia, where the mounds of
Muqayyar or Mugheir mark the site of the great temple that had been
reared to the worship of the Moon-god long before the days of the Hebrew
patriarch. Here Abraham had married, and from hence he had gone forth
with his father to seek a new home in the west. Their first
resting-place had been Harran in Mesopotamia, on the high-road to Syria
and the Mediterranean. The name of Harran, in fact, signified "road" in
the old language of Chaldæa, and for many ages the armies and merchants
of Babylonia had halted there when making their way towards the
Mediterranean. Like Ur, it was dedicated to the worship of Sin, the
Moon-god, and its temple rivalled in fame and antiquity that of the
Babylonian city, and had probably been founded by a Babylonian king.
At Harran, therefore, Abraham would still have been within the limits of
Babylonian influence and culture, if not of Babylonian government as
well. He would have found there the same religion as that which he had
left behind him in his native city; the same deity was adored there,
under the same name and with the same rites. He was indeed on the road
to Canaan, and among an Aramaean rather than a Babylonian population,
but Babylonia with its beliefs and civilization had not as yet been
forsaken. Even the language of Babylonia was known in his new home, as
is indicated by the name of the city itself.
Harran and Mesopotamia were not the goal of the future father of the
Israelitish people. He was bidden to seek elsewhere another country and
another kindred. Canaan was the land which God promised to "show" to
him, and it was in Canaan that his descendants were to become "a great
nation." He went forth, accordingly, "to go into the land of Canaan, and
into the land of Canaan he came."
But even in Canaan Abraham was not beyond the reach of Babylonian
influence. As we have seen in the last chapter, Babylonian armies had
already penetrated to the shores of the Mediterranean, Palestine had
been included within the bounds of a Babylonian empire, and Babylonian
culture and religion had spread widely among the Canaanitish tribes. The
cuneiform system of writing had made its way to Syria, and Babylonian
literature had followed in its wake. Centuries had already passed since
Sargon of Akkad had made himself master of the Mediterranean coast and
his son Naram-Sin had led his forces to the Peninsula of Sinai. Istar of
Babylonia had become Ashtoreth of the Canaanites, and Babylonian trade
had long moved briskly along the very road that Abraham traversed. In
the days of the patriarch himself the rulers of Babylonia claimed to be
also rulers of Canaan; for thirteen years did the Canaanite princes
"serve" Chedor-laomer and his allies, the father of Arioch is also "the
father of the land of the Amorites" in his son's inscriptions, and at a
little later date the King of Babylon still claimed sovereignty over the
West.
It was not, therefore, to a strange and unexplored country that Abraham
had migrated. The laws and manners to which he had been accustomed, the
writing and literature which he had learned in the schools of Ur, the
religious beliefs among which he had lived in Chaldæa and Harran, he
found again in Canaan. The land of his adoption was full of Babylonian
traders, soldiers, and probably officials as well, and from time to time
he must have heard around him the language of his birthplace. The
introduction into the West of the Babylonian literature and script
brought with it a knowledge of the Babylonian language, and the
knowledge is reflected in some of the local names of Palestine. The
patriarch had not escaped beyond the control even of the Babylonian
government. At times, at all events, the princes of Canaan were
compelled to acknowledge the suzerainty of Chaldæa and obey the laws, as
the Babylonians would have said, of "Anu and Dagon."
The fact needs dwelling upon, partly because of its importance, partly
because it is but recently that we have begun to realize it. It might
indeed have been gathered from the narratives of Genesis, more
especially from the account of Chedor-laomer's campaign, but it ran
counter to the preconceived ideas of the modern historian, and never
therefore took definite shape in his mind. It is one of the many gains
that the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions has brought to the
student of the Old Testament, and it makes us understand the story of
Abraham's migration in a way that was never possible before. He was no
wild nomad wandering in unknown regions, among a people of alien habits
and foreign civilization. We know now why he took the road which we are
told he followed; why he was able to make allies among the inhabitants
of Canaan; why he understood their language and could take part in their
social life. Like the Englishman who migrates to a British colony,
Abraham was in contact with the same culture in Canaan and Chaldæa
alike.
But when he reached Canaan he was not yet Abraham. He was still "Abram
the Hebrew," and it was as "Abram the Hebrew" that he made alliance with
the Amorites of Mamre and overthrew the retreating forces of the
Babylonian kings. Abram--Abu-ramu, "the exalted father,"--is a
Babylonian name, and is found in contracts of the age of Chedor-laomer.
When the name was changed to Abraham, it was a sign that the Babylonian
emigrant had become a native of the West.
It was under the terebinth of Moreh before Shechem that Abraham first
pitched his tent and erected his first altar to the Lord. Above him
towered Ebal and Gerizim, where the curses and blessings of the Law were
afterwards to be pronounced. From thence he moved southward to one of
the hills westward of Beth-el, the modern Beitin, and there his second
altar was built. While the first had been reared in the plain, the
second was raised on the mountain-slope.
But here too he did not remain long. Again he "journeyed, going on still
towards the south." Then came a famine which obliged him to cross the
frontier of Egypt, and visit the court of the Pharaoh. The Hyksos
kinsmen of the race to which he belonged were ruling in the Delta, and a
ready welcome was given to the Asiatic stranger. He was "very rich in
cattle, in silver and in gold," and like a wealthy Arab sheikh to-day
was received with due honour in the Egyptian capital. The court of the
Pharaoh was doubtless at Zoan.
Among the possessions of the patriarch we are told were camels. The
camel is not included among the Egyptian hieroglyphs, nor has it been
found depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. The name
is first met with in a papyrus of the time of the nineteenth dynasty,
and is one of the many words which the Egyptians of that age borrowed
from their Canaanitish neighbours. The animal, in fact, was not used by
the Egyptians, and its domestication in the valley of the Nile seems to
be as recent as the Arab conquest. But though it was not used by the
Egyptians, it had been a beast of burden among the Semites of Arabia
from an early period. In the primitive Sumerian language of Chaldæa it
was called "the animal from the Persian Gulf," and its Semitic name,
from which our own word _camel_ is derived, goes back to the very
beginnings of Semitic history. We cannot, therefore, imagine a Semitic
nomad arriving in Egypt without the camel; travellers, indeed, from the
cities of Canaan might do so, but not those who led a purely nomadic
life. And, in fact, though we look in vain for a picture of the camel
among the sculptures and paintings of Egypt, the bones of the animal
have been discovered deep in the alluvial soil of the valley of the
Nile.
Abraham had to quit Egypt, and once more he traversed the desert of the
"South" and pitched his tent near Beth-el. Here his nephew Lot left him,
and, dissatisfied with the life of a wandering Bedawi, took up his abode
in the city of Sodom at the northern end of the Dead Sea. While Abraham
kept himself separate from the natives of Canaan, Lot thus became one of
them, and narrowly escaped the doom which afterwards fell upon the
cities of the plain. In forsaking the tent, he forsook not only the free
life of the immigrant from Chaldæa, but the God of Abraham as well. The
inhabitant of a Canaanitish city passed under the influence of its faith
and worship, its morals and manners, as well as its laws and government.
He ceased to be an alien and stranger, of a different race and
fatherland, and with a religion and customs of his own. He could
intermarry with the natives of his adopted country and participate in
their sacred rites. Little by little his family became merged in the
population that surrounded him; its gods became their gods, its
morality--or, it may be, its immorality--became theirs also. Lot,
indeed, had eventually to fly from Sodom, leaving behind him all his
wealth; but the mischief had already been done, and his children had
become Canaanites in thought and deed. The nations which sprang from
him, though separate in race from the older people of Canaan, were yet
like them in other respects. They formed no "peculiar people," to whom
the Lord might reveal Himself through the law and the prophets.
It was not until Lot had separated himself from Abraham that the land of
Canaan was promised to the descendants of the patriarch. "Lift up now
thine eyes," God said to him, "and look from the place where thou art,
northward and southward, and eastward and westward: for all the land
which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever."
Once more, therefore, Abraham departed southward from Shechem; not this
time to go into the land of Egypt, but to dwell beside the terebinth-oak
of Mamre hard by Hebron, where the founder of the Davidic monarchy was
hereafter to be crowned king. It is probable that the sanctuary which in
days to come was to make Hebron famous had not as yet been established
there; at all events the name of Hebron, "the confederacy," was not as
yet known, and the city was called Kirjath-Arba. Whether it was also
called Mamre is doubtful; Mamre would rather seem to have been the name
of the plateau which stretched beyond the valley of Hebron and was
occupied by the Amorite confederates of the Hebrew patriarch.
It was while he "dwelt under the terebinth of Mamre the Amorite" that
the campaign of Chedor-laomer and his Babylonian allies took place, and
that Lot was carried away among the Canaanitish captives. But the
triumph of the conquerors was short-lived. "Abram the Hebrew" pursued
them with his armed followers, three hundred and eighteen in number, as
well as with his Amorite allies, and suddenly falling upon their
rear-guard near Damascus by night, rescued the captives and the spoil.
There was rejoicing in the Canaanitish cities when the patriarch
returned with his booty. The new king of Sodom met him in the valley of
Shaveh, "the king's dale" of later times, just outside the walls of
Jerusalem, and the king of Jerusalem himself, Melchizedek, "the priest
of the most High God," welcomed the return of the victor with bread and
wine. Then it was that Abram gave tithes of the spoil to the God of
Salem, while Melchizedek blessed him in the name of "the most High God."
Outside the pages of the Old Testament the special form assumed by the
blessing has been found only in the Aramaic inscriptions of Egypt. Here
too we find travellers from Palestine writing of themselves "Blessed be
Augah of Isis," or "Blessed be Abed-Nebo of Khnum"! It would seem,
therefore, to have been a formula peculiar to Canaan; at all events, it
has not been traced to other parts of the Semitic world. The temple of
the Most High God--El Elyôn--probably stood on Mount Moriah where the
temple of the God of Israel was afterwards to be erected. It will be
remembered that among the letters sent by Ebed-Tob, the king of
Jerusalem, to the Egyptian Pharaoh is one in which he speaks of "the
city of the Mountain of Jerusalem, whose name is the city of the temple
of the god Nin-ip." In this "Mountain of Jerusalem" it is difficult not
to see the "temple-Mount" of later days.
In the cuneiform texts of Ebed-Tob and the later Assyrian kings the name
of Jerusalem is written Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim." Salim or "Peace"
is almost certainly the native name of the god who was identified with
the Babylonian Nin-ip, and perhaps Isaiah--that student of the older
history of his country--is alluding to the fact when he declares that
one of the titles of the Messiah shall be "the Prince of Peace." At any
rate, if the Most High God of Jerusalem were really Salim, the God of
Peace, we should have an explanation of the blessing pronounced by
Melchizedek upon the patriarch. Abram's victory had restored peace to
Canaan; he had brought back the captives, and had himself returned in
peace. It was fitting, therefore, that he should be welcomed by the
priest of the God of Peace, and that he should offer tithes of the booty
he had recovered to the god of "the City of Peace."
This offering of tithes was no new thing. In his Babylonian home Abraham
must have been familiar with the practice. The cuneiform inscriptions of
Babylonia contain frequent references to it. It went back to the
pre-Semitic age of Chaldæa, and the great temples of Babylonia were
largely supported by the _esra_ or tithe which was levied upon prince
and peasant alike. That the god should receive a tenth of the good
things which, it was believed, he had bestowed upon mankind, was not
considered to be asking too much. There are many tablets in the British
Museum which are receipts for the payment of the tithe to the great
temple of the Sun-god at Sippara in the time of Nebuchadrezzar and his
successors. From one of them we learn that Belshazzar, even at the very
moment when the Babylonian empire was falling from his father's hands,
nevertheless found an opportunity for paying the tithe due from his
sister; while others show us that Cyrus and Cambyses did not regard
their foreign origin as affording any pretext for refusing to pay tithe
to the gods of the kingdom they had overthrown.
The Babylonian army had been defeated near Damascus, and immediately
after this we are told that the steward of Abraham's house was "Eli-ezer
of Damascus." Whether there is any connection between the two facts we
cannot say; but it may be that Eli-ezer had attached himself to the
Hebrew conqueror when he was returning "from the slaughter of
Chedor-laomer." The name of Eli-ezer, "God is a help," is characteristic
of Damascus. More often in place of El, "God," we have Hadad, the
supreme deity of Syria; but just as among the Israelites Eli-akim and
Jeho-iakim are equivalent, so among the Aramaeans of Syria were Eli-ezer
and Hadad-ezer. Hadad-ezer, it will be remembered, was the king of Zobah
who was overthrown by David.
Sarai, the wife of Abraham, was still childless, but the patriarch had a
son by his Egyptian handmaid, the ancestor of the Ishmaelite tribes who
spread from the frontier of Egypt to Mecca in Central Arabia. It was
when Ishmael was thirteen years of age that the covenant was made
between God and Abraham which was sealed with the institution of
circumcision. Circumcision had been practised in Egypt from the earliest
days of its history; henceforth it also distinguished all those who
claimed Abraham as their forefather. With circumcision Abraham received
the name by which he was henceforth to be known; he ceased to be Abram,
the Hebrew from Babylonia, and became Abraham the father of Ishmael and
Israel. The new rite and the new name were alike the seal and token of
the covenant established between the patriarch and his God: God promised
that his seed should multiply, and that the land of Canaan should be
given as an everlasting possession, while Abraham and his offspring were
called upon to keep God's covenant for ever.
It could not have been long after this that the cities of the plain were
destroyed "with brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven." The
expression is found in the cuneiform tablets of Babylonia. Old Sumerian
hymns spoke of a "rain of stones and fire," though the stones may have
been hail-stones and thunderbolts, and the fire the flash of the
lightning. But whatever may have been the nature of the sheet of flame
which enveloped the guilty cities of the plain and set on fire the
naphtha-springs that oozed out of it, the remembrance of the catastrophe
survived to distant ages. The prophets of Israel and Judah still refer
to the overthrow of Sodom and its sister cities, and St. Jude points to
them as "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." Some scholars have
seen an allusion to their overthrow in the tradition of the Phoenicians
which brought their ancestors into the coastlands of Canaan in
consequence of an earth-quake on the shores of "the Assyrian Lake." But
the lake is more probably to be looked for in the neighbourhood of the
Persian Gulf than in the valley of the Jordan.
The vale of Siddim, and "the cities of the plain," stood at the northern
end of the Dead Sea. Here were the "slime-pits" from which the naphtha
was extracted, and which caused the defeat of the Canaanitish princes by
the Babylonian army. The legend which placed the pillar of salt into
which Lot's wife was changed at the southern extremity of the Dead Sea
was of late origin, probably not earlier than the days when Herod built
his fortress of Machaerus on the impregnable cliffs of Moab, and the
name of Gebel Usdum, given by the modern Arabs to one of the
mountain-summits to the south of the sea proves nothing as to the site
of the city of Sodom. Names in the east are readily transferred from one
locality to another, and a mountain is not the same as a city in a
plain.
There are two sufficient reasons why it is to the north rather than to
the south that we must look for the remains of the doomed cities, among
the numerous tumuli which rise above the rich and fertile plain in the
neighbourhood of Jericho, where the ancient "slime-pits" can still be
traced. Geology has taught us that throughout the historical period the
Dead Sea and the country immediately to the south of it have undergone
no change. What the lake is to-day, it must have been in the days of
Abraham. It has neither grown nor shrunk in size, and the barren salt
with which it poisons the ground must have equally poisoned it then. No
fertile valley, like the vale of Siddim, could have existed in the
south; no prosperous Canaanitish cities could have grown up among the
desolate tracts of the southern wilderness. As we are expressly told in
the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), the Canaanites dwelt only "by the coast
of Jordan," not in the desert far beyond the reach of the fertilizing
stream.
But there is another reason which excludes the southern site. "When
Abraham got up early in the morning," we are told, "he looked towards
Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld,
and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."
Such a sight was possible from the hills of Hebron; if the country lay
at the northern end of the Dead Sea, it would have been impossible had
it been south of it.
Moreover, the northern situation of the cities alone agrees with the
geography of Genesis. When the Babylonian invaders had turned northwards
after smiting the Amalekites of the desert south of the Dead Sea, they
did not fall in with the forces of the king of Sodom and his allies
until they had first passed "the Amorites that dwelt in Hazezon-tamar."
Hazezon-tamar, as we learn from the Second Book of Chronicles (xx. 2),
was the later En-gedi, "the Spring of the Kid," and En-gedi lay on the
western shore of the Dead Sea midway between its northern and southern
extremities.
In the warm, soft valley of the Jordan, accordingly, where a
sub-tropical vegetation springs luxuriantly out of the fertile ground
and the river plunges into the Dead Sea as into a tomb, the nations of
Ammon and Moab were born. It was a fitting spot, in close proximity as
it was to the countries which thereafter bore their names. From the
mountain above Zoar, Lot could look across to the blue hills of Moab and
the distant plateau of Ammon.
Meanwhile Abraham had quitted Mamre and again turned his steps towards
the south. This time it was at Gerar, between the sanctuary of
Kadesh-barnea and Shur the "wall" of Egypt that he sojourned. Kadesh has
been found again in our own days by the united efforts of Dr. John
Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull in the shelter of a block of mountains
which rise to the south of the desert of Beer-sheba. The spring of clear
and abundant water which gushes forth in their midst was the
En-Mishpat--"the spring where judgments were pronounced"--of early
times, and is still called 'Ain-Qadîs, "the spring of Kadesh." Gerar is
the modern Umm el-Jerâr, now desolate and barren, all that remains of
its past being a lofty mound of rubbish and a mass of potsherds. It lies
a few hours only to the south of Gaza.
Here Isaac was born and circumcised, and here Ishmael and Hagar were
cast forth into the wilderness and went to dwell in the desert of Paran.
The territory of Gerar extended to Beer-sheba, "the well of the oath,"
where Abraham's servants digged a well, and Abimelech, king of Gerar,
confirmed his possession of it by an oath. It may be that one of the two
wells which still exist at Wadi es-Seba', with the stones that line
their mouths deeply indented by the ropes of the water-drawers, is the
very one around which the herdsmen of Abraham and Abimelech wrangled
with each other. The wells of the desert go back to a great antiquity:
where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the
Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it. The old
wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side.
Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of
the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines. But they had been
new-comers. All through the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth
Egyptian dynasties the country had been in the hands of the Egyptians.
Gaza had been their frontier fortress, and as late as the reign of
Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was still
garrisoned by Egyptian troops and governed by Egyptian officers. The
Pulsata or Philistines did not arrive till the troublous days of Ramses
III., of the twentieth dynasty. They formed part of the barbarian hordes
from the shores of Asia Minor and the islands of the Ægean, who swarmed
over Syria and flung themselves on the valley of the Nile, and the land
of Caphtor from which they came was possibly the island of Krete. The
Philistine occupation of the coastland of Canaan, therefore, did not
long precede the Israelitish invasion of the Promised Land; indeed we
may perhaps gather from the words of Exod. xiii. 17 that the Philistines
were already winning for themselves their new territory when the
Israelites marched out of Egypt. In saying, consequently, that the
kingdom of Abimelech was in the land of the Philistines the Book of
Genesis speaks proleptically: when the story of Abraham and Abimelech
was written in its present form Gerar was a Philistine town: in the days
of the patriarchs this was not yet the case.
At Beer-sheba Abraham planted a tamarisk, and "called on the name of the
Lord, the everlasting God." Beer-sheba long remained one of the sacred
places of Palestine. The tree planted by its well was a sign both of the
water that flowed beneath its soil and of its sacred character. It was
only where fresh water was found that the nomads of the desert could
come together, and the tree was a token of the life and refreshment they
would meet with. The well was sacred; so also was the solitary tree
which stood beside it, and under whose branches man and beast could find
shade and protection from the mid-day heat. Even Mohammedanism, that
Puritanism of the East, has not been able to eradicate the belief in the
divine nature of such trees from the mind of the nomad; we may still see
them decorated with offerings of rags torn from the garments of the
passer-by or shading the tomb of some reputed saint. They are still more
than waymarks or resting-places for the heated and weary; when standing
beneath them the herdsman feels that he is walking upon consecrated
ground.
It was at Beer-sheba that the temptation came to Abraham to sacrifice
his first-born, his only son Isaac. The temptation was in accordance
with the fierce ritual of Syria, and traces of the belief which had
called it into existence are to be found in the early literature of
Babylonia. Thus in an ancient Babylonian ritual-text we read: "The
offspring who raises his head among mankind, the offspring for his life
he gave; the head of the offspring for the head of the man he gave; the
neck of the offspring for the neck of the man he gave." Phoenician
legend told how the god El had robed himself in royal purple and
sacrificed his only son Yeud in a time of pestilence, and the writers of
Greece and Rome describe with horror the sacrifices of the first-born
with which the history of Carthage was stained. The father was called
upon in time of trouble to yield up to the god his nearest and dearest;
the fruit of his body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul, and
Baal required him to sacrifice without a murmur or a tear his first-born
and his only one. The more precious the offering, the more acceptable
was it to the god; the harder the struggle to resign it, the greater was
the merit of doing so. The child died for the sins of his people; and
the belief was but the blind and ignorant expression of a true instinct.
But Abraham was to be taught a better way. For three days he journeyed
northward with his son, and then lifting up his eyes saw afar off that
mountain "in the land of Moriah," on the summit of which the sacrifice
was to be consummated. Alone with Isaac he ascended to the high-place,
and there building his altar and binding to it his son he prepared to
perform the terrible rite. But at the last moment his hand was stayed, a
new and better revelation was made to him, and a ram was substituted for
his son. It cannot be accidental that, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has
pointed out, we learn from the temple-tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles
that in the later ritual of Phoenicia a ram took the place of the
earlier human sacrifice.
Where was this mountain in the land of Moriah whereon the altar of
Abraham was built? It would seem from a passage in the Second Book of
Chronicles (iii. 1) that it was the future temple-mount at Jerusalem.
The words of Genesis also point in the same direction. Abraham, we read,
"called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day,
In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen." It is hard to believe that
"the mount of the Lord" can mean anything else than that _har-el_ or
"mountain of God" whereon Ezekiel places the temple, or that the proverb
can refer to a less holy spot than that where the Lord appeared
enthroned upon the cherubim above the mercy-seat. It is doubtful,
however, whether the reading of the Hebrew text in either passage is
correct. According to the Septuagint the proverb quoted in Genesis
should run: "In the mountain is the Lord seen," and the same authority
changes the "Moriah" of the Book of Chronicles into _Amôr-eia_, "of the
Amorites."
It is true that the distance of Jerusalem from Beer-sheba would agree
well with the three days' journey of Abraham. But it is difficult to
reconcile the description of the scene of Abraham's sacrifice with the
future temple-mount. Where Isaac was bound to the altar was a solitary
spot, the patriarch and his son were alone there, and it was overgrown
with brushwood so thickly that a ram had been caught in it by his horns.
The temple-mount, on the contrary, was either within the walls of a city
or just outside them, and the city was already a capital famous for its
worship of "the most High God." Had the Moriah of Jerusalem really been
the site of Abraham's altar it is strange that no allusion is made to
the fact by the writers of the Old Testament, or that tradition should
have been silent on the matter. We must be content with the knowledge
that it was to one of the mountains "in the land of Moriah" that Abraham
was led, and that "Moriah" was a "land," not a single mountain-peak. (We
should not forget that the Septuagint reads "the highlands," that is,
_Moreh_ instead of _Moriah_, while the Syriac version boldly changes the
word into the name of the "Amorites." For arguments on the other side,
see p. 79.)
Abraham returned to Beer-sheba, and from thence went to Hebron, where
Sarah died. Hebron--or Kirjath-Arba as it was then called--was occupied
by a Hittite tribe, in contradistinction to the country round about it,
which was in the possession of the Amorites. As at Jerusalem, or at
Kadesh on the Orontes, the Hittites had intruded into Amoritish
territory and established themselves in the fortress-town. But while the
Hittite city was known as Kirjath-Arba, "the city of Arba," the
Amoritish district was named Mamre: the union of Kirjath-Arba and Mamre
created the Hebron of a later day.
Kirjath-Arba seems to have been built in the valley, close to the pools
which still provide water for its modern inhabitants. On the eastern
side the slope of the hill is honeycombed with tombs cut in the rock,
and, if ancient tradition is to be believed, it was in one of these that
Abraham desired to lay the body of his wife. The "double cave" of
Machpelah--for so the Septuagint renders the phrase--was in the field of
Ephron the Hittite, and from Ephron, accordingly, the Hebrew patriarch
purchased the land for 400 shekels of silver, or about £47. The cave, we
are told, lay opposite Mamre, which goes to show that the oak under
which Abraham once pitched his tent may not have been very far distant
from that still pointed out as the oak of Mamre in the grounds of the
Russian hospice. The traditional tomb of Machpelah has been venerated
alike by Jew, Christian, and Mohammedan. The church built over it in
Byzantine days and restored by the Crusaders to Christian worship has
been transformed into a mosque, but its sanctity has remained unchanged.
It stands in the middle of a court, enclosed by a solid wall of massive
stones, the lower courses of which were cut and laid in their places in
the age of Herod. The fanatical Moslem is unwilling that any but himself
should enter the sacred precincts, but by climbing the cliff behind the
town it is possible to look down upon the mosque and its sacred
enclosure, and see the whole building spread out like a map below the
feet.
More than one English traveller has been permitted to enter the mosque,
and we are now well acquainted with the details of its architecture. But
the rock-cut tomb in which the bodies of the patriarchs are supposed to
have lain has never been examined by the explorer. It is probable,
however, that were he to penetrate into it he would find nothing to
reward his pains. During the long period that Hebron was in Christian
hands the cave was more than once visited by the pilgrim. But we look in
vain in the records which have come down to us for an account of the
relics it has been supposed to contain. Had the mummified corpses of the
patriarchs been preserved in it, the fact would have been known to the
travellers of the Crusading age. (See the _Zeitschrift des deutschen
Palästina-Vereins_, 1895.)
Like the other tombs in its neighbourhood, the cave of Machpelah has
doubtless been opened and despoiled at an early epoch. We know that
tombs were violated in Egypt long before the days of Abraham, in spite
of the penalties with which such acts of sacrilege were visited, and the
cupidity of the Canaanite was no less great than that of the Egyptian.
The treasures buried with the dead were too potent an attraction, and
the robber of the tomb braved for their sake the terrors of both this
world and the next.
Abraham now sent his servant to Mesopotamia, to seek there for a wife
for his son Isaac from among his kinsfolk at Harran. Rebekah, the sister
of Laban, accordingly, was brought to Canaan and wedded to her cousin.
Isaac was at the time in the southern desert, encamped at the well of
Lahai-roi, near Kadesh. So "Isaac was comforted after his mother's
death."
"Then again," we are told, "Abraham took a wife," whose name was
Keturah, and by whom he was the forefather of a number of Arabian
tribes. They occupied the northern and central parts of the Arabian
peninsula, by the side of the Ishmaelites, and colonized the land of
Midian. It is the last we hear of the great patriarch. He died soon
afterwards "in a good old age," and was buried at Machpelah along with
his wife.
Isaac still dwell at Lahai-roi, and there the twins, Esau and Jacob,
were born to him. There, too, he still was when a famine fell upon the
land, like "the first famine that was in the days of Abraham." The story
of Abraham's dealings with Abimelech of Gerar is repeated in the case of
Isaac. Again we hear of Phichol, the captain of Abimelech's army; again
the wife of the patriarch is described as his sister; and again his
herdsmen strive with those of the king of Gerar over the wells they have
dug, and the well of Beer-sheba is made to derive its name from the
oaths sworn mutually by Isaac and the king. It is hardly conceivable
that history could have so closely repeated itself, that the lives of
the king and commander-in-chief of Gerar could have extended over so
many years, or that the origin of the name of Beer-sheba would have been
so quickly forgotten. Rather we must believe that two narratives have
been mingled together, and that the earlier visit of Abraham to Gerar
has coloured the story of Isaac's sojourn in the territory of Abimelech.
We need not refuse to believe that the servants of Isaac dug wells and
wrangled over them with the native herdsmen; that Beer-sheba should
twice have received its name from a repetition of the same event is a
different matter. One of the wells--that of Rehoboth--made by Isaac's
servants is probably referred to in the Egyptian _Travels of a Mohar_,
where it is called Rehoburta.
Isaac was not a wanderer like his father. Lahai-roi in the desert, "the
valley of Gerar," Beer-sheba and Hebron, were the places round which his
life revolved, and they were all close to one another. There is no trace
of his presence in the north of Palestine, and when the prophet Amos
(vii. 16) makes Isaac synonymous with the northern kingdom of Israel,
there can be no geographical reference in his words. Isaac died
eventually at Hebron, and was buried in the family tomb of Machpelah.
But long before this happened Jacob had fled from the well-deserved
wrath of his brother to his uncle Laban at Harran. On his way he had
slept on the rocky ridge of Bethel, and had beheld in vision the angels
of God ascending and descending the steps of a staircase that led to
heaven. The nature of the ground itself must have suggested the dream.
The limestone rock is fissured into steplike terraces, which seem formed
of blocks of stone piled one upon the other, and rising upwards like a
gigantic staircase towards the sky. On the hill that towers above the
ruins of Beth-el, we may still fancy that we see before us the "ladder"
of Jacob.
But the vision was more than a mere dream. God appeared in it to the
patriarch, and repeated to him the promise that had been made to his
fathers. Through Jacob, the younger of the twins, the true line of
Abraham was to be carried on. When he awoke in the morning the fugitive
recognized the real character of his dream. He took, accordingly, the
stone that had served him for a pillow, and setting it up as an altar,
poured oil upon it, and so made it a Beth-el, or "House of God,"
Henceforward it was a consecrated altar, a holy memorial of the God
whose divinity had been mysteriously imparted to it.
The Semitic world was full of such Beth-els, or consecrated stones. They
are referred to in the literature of ancient Babylonia, and an English
traveller, Mr. Doughty, has found them still existing near the Tema of
the Old Testament in Northern Arabia. In Phoenicia we are told that they
abounded. The solitary rock in the desert or on the mountain-side seemed
to the primitive Semite the dwelling-place of Deity; it rose up
awe-striking and impressive in its solitary grandeur and venerable
antiquity; it was a shelter to him from the heat of the sun, and a
protection from the perils of the night. When his worship and adoration
came in time to be transferred from the stone itself to the divinity it
had begun to symbolize, it became an altar on which the libation of oil
or wine might be poured out to the gods, and on the seals of Syria and
the sculptured slabs of Assyria we accordingly find it transformed into
a portable altar, and merged in the cone-like symbol of the goddess
Ashêrah. The stone which had itself been a Beth-el wherein the Deity had
his home, passed by degrees into the altar of the god whose actual
dwelling-place was in heaven.
The Canaanitish city near which Jacob had raised the monument of his
dream bore the name of Luz. In Israelitish days, however, the name of
the monument was transferred to that of the city, and Luz itself was
called the Beth-el, or "House of God." The god worshipped there when the
Israelites first entered Canaan appears to have been entitled On,--a
name derived, perhaps, from that of the city of the Sun-god in Egypt.
Bethel was also Beth-On, "the temple of On," from whence the tribe of
Benjamin afterwards took the name of Ben-Oni, "the Onite." Beth-On has
survived into our own times, and the site of the old city is still known
as Beitîn.
It is not needful to follow the adventures of Jacob in Mesopotamia. His
new home lay far away from the boundaries of Palestine, and though the
kings of Aram-Naharaim made raids at times into the land of Canaan and
caused their arms to be feared within the walls of Jerusalem, they never
made any permanent conquests on the coasts of the Mediterranean. In the
land of the Aramaeans Jacob is lost for awhile from the history of
patriarchal Palestine.
When he again emerges, it is as a middle-aged man, rich in flocks and
herds, who has won two wives as the reward of his labours, and is
already the father of a family. He is on his way back to the country
which had been promised to his seed and wherein he himself had been
born. Laban, his father-in-law, robbed at once of his daughters and his
household gods, is pursuing him, and has overtaken him on the spurs of
Mount Gilead, almost within sight of his goal. There a covenant is made
between the Aramaean and the Hebrew, and a cairn of stones is piled up
to commemorate the fact. The cairn continued to bear a double name, the
Aramaean name given to it by Laban, and the Canaanitish name of Galeed,
"the heap of witnesses," by which it was called by Jacob. The double
name was a sign of the two populations and languages which the cairn
separated from one another. Northward were the Aramaeans and an Aramaic
speech; southward the land of Canaan and the language which we term
Hebrew.
The spot where the cairn was erected bore yet another title. It was also
called Mizpah, the "watch-tower," the outpost from which the dweller in
Canaan could discern the approaching bands of an enemy from the north or
east. It protected the road to the Jordan, and kept watch over the
eastern plateau. Here in after times Jephthah gathered around him the
patriots of Israel, and delivered his people from the yoke of the
Ammonites.
Once more "Jacob went on his way," and from the "two-fold camp" of
Mahanaim sent messengers to his brother Esau, who had already
established himself among the mountains of Seir. Then came the
mysterious struggle in the silent darkness of night with one whom the
patriarch believed to have been his God Himself. When day dawned, the
vision departed from him, but not until his name had been changed. "Thy
name," it was declared to him, "shall be called no more Jacob, but
Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast
prevailed." And his thigh was shrunken, so that the children of Israel
in days to come abstained from eating "of the sinew which shrank, which
is upon the hollow of the thigh." The spot where the struggle took
place, beside the waters of the Jabbok, was named Penu-el, "the face of
God." There was more than one other Penu-el in the Semitic world, and at
Carthage the goddess Tanith was entitled Peni-Baal, "the face of Baal."
The name of Israel, as we may learn from its equivalent, Jeshurun, was
really derived from a root which signified "to be straight," or
"upright." The Israelites were in truth "the people of uprightness." It
is only by one of those plays upon words, of which the Oriental is still
so fond, that the name can be brought into connection with the word
_sar_, "a prince." But the name of Jacob was well known among the
northern Semites. We gather from the inscriptions of Egypt that its full
form was Jacob-el. Like Jeshurun by the side of Israel, or Jephthah by
the side of Jiphthah-el (Josh. xix. 27), Jacob is but an abbreviated
Jacob-el. One of the places in Palestine conquered by the Pharaoh
Thothmes III., the names of which are recorded on the walls of his
temple at Karnak, was Jacob-el--a reminiscence, doubtless, of the Hebrew
patriarch. Professor Flinders Petrie has made us acquainted with
Egyptian scarabs on which is inscribed in hieroglyphic characters the
name of a king, Jacob-bar or Jacob-hal, who reigned in the valley of the
Nile before Abraham entered it, and Mr. Pinches has lately discovered
the name of Jacob-el among the persons mentioned in contracts of the
time of the Babylonian sovereign Sin-mu-ballidh, who was a contemporary
of Chedor-laomer. We thus have monumental evidence that the name of
Jacob was well known in the Semitic world in the age of the Hebrew
patriarchs.
Jacob and Esau met and were reconciled, and Jacob then journeyed onwards
to Succoth, "the booths." The site of this village of "booths" is
unknown, but it could not have been far from the banks of the Jordan and
the road to Nablûs. The neighbourhood of Shechem, called in Greek times
Neapolis, the Nablûs of to-day, was the next resting-place of the
patriarch. If we are to follow the translation of the Authorised
Version, it would have been at "Shalem, a city of Shechem," that his
tents were pitched. But many eminent scholars believe that the Hebrew
words should rather be rendered: "And Jacob came in peace to the city of
Shechem," the reference being to his peaceable parting from his brother.
There is, however, a hamlet still called Salîm, nearly three miles to
the east of Nablûs, and it may be therefore that it was really at a
place termed Shalem that Jacob rested on his way. In this case the field
bought from Hamor, "before the city of Shechem," cannot have been where,
since the days of our Lord, "Jacob's well" has been pointed out (S. John
iv. 5, 6). The well is situated considerably westward of Salîm, midway,
in fact, between that village and Nablûs, and close to the village of
'Askâr, with which the "Sychar" of S. John's Gospel has sometimes been
identified. It has been cut through the solid rock to a depth of more
than a hundred feet, and the groovings made by the ropes of the
waterpots in far-off centuries are still visible at its mouth. But no
water can be drawn from it now. The well is choked with the rubbish of a
ruined church, built above it in the early days of Christianity, and of
which all that remains is a broken arch. It has been dug at a spot where
the road from Shechem to the Jordan branches off from that which runs
towards the north, though Shechem itself is more than a mile distant. We
should notice that S. John does not say that the well was actually in
"the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph," only that it
was "near to" the patriarch's field.
If Jacob came to Shechem in peace, the peace was of no long continuance.
Simeon and Levi, the sons of the patriarch, avenged the insult offered
by the Shechemite prince to their sister Dinah, by treacherously falling
upon the city and slaying "all the males." Jacob was forced to fly,
leaving behind him the altar he had erected. He made for the Canaanitish
city of Luz, the Beth-el of later days, where he had seen the great
altar-stairs sloping upward to heaven. The idols that had been carried
from Mesopotamia were buried "under the oak which was by Shechem," along
with the ear-rings of the women. The oak was one of those sacred trees
which abounded in the Semitic world, like another oak at Beth-el,
beneath which the nurse of Rebekah was soon afterwards to be buried.
At Beth-el Jacob built another altar. But he could not rest there, and
once more took his way to the south. On the road his wife Rachel died
while giving birth to his youngest son, and her tomb beside the path to
Beth-lehem was marked by a "pillar" which the writer of the Book of
Genesis tells us remained to his own day. It indicated the boundary
between the territories of Benjamin and Judah at Zelzah (1 Sam. x. 2).
At Beth-lehem Jacob lingered a long while. His flocks and herds were
spread over the country, under the charge of his sons, browsing on the
hills and watered at the springs, for which the "hill-country of Judah"
was famous. In their search for pasturage they wandered northward, we
are told, "beyond the tower of the Flock," which guarded the Jebusite
stronghold of Zion (Mic. iv. 8). Beth-lehem itself was more commonly
known in that age by the name of Ephrath. Beth-lehem, "the temple of
Lehem," must, in fact, have been the sacred name of the city derived
from the worship of its chief deity, and Mr. Tomkins is doubtless right
in seeing in this deity the Babylonian Lakhmu, who with his consort
Lakhama, was regarded as a primaeval god of the nascent world.
At Beth-lehem Jacob was but a few miles distant from Hebron, where Isaac
still lived, and where at his death he was buried by his sons Jacob and
Esau in the family tomb of Machpelah. It was the last time, seemingly,
that the two brothers found themselves together. Esau, partly by
marriage, partly by conquest, dispossessed the Horites of Mount Seir,
and founded the kingdom of Edom, while the sons and flocks of Jacob
scattered themselves from Hebron in the south of Canaan to Shechem in
its centre. The two hallowed sanctuaries of the future kingdoms of Judah
and Israel, where the first throne was set up in Israel and the monarchy
of David was first established, thus became the boundaries of the
herdsmen's domain. In both the Hebrew patriarch held ground that was
rightfully his own. It was a sign that the house of Israel should
hereafter occupy the land which the family of Israel thus roamed over
with their flocks. The nomad was already passing into the settler, with
fields and burial-places of his own.
But before the transformation could be fully accomplished, a long season
of growth and preparation was needful. Egypt, and not Canaan, was to be
the land in which the Chosen People should be trained for their future
work. Canaan itself was to pass under Egyptian domination, and to
replace the influence of Babylonian culture by that of Egypt. It was a
new world and a new civilization into which the descendants of Jacob
were destined to emerge when finally they escaped from the fiery furnace
of Egyptian bondage. The Egypt known to Jacob was an Egypt over which
Asiatic princes ruled, and whose vizier was himself a Hebrew. It was the
Egypt of the Hyksos conquerors, whose capital was Zoan, on the frontiers
of Asia, and whose people were the slaves of an Asiatic stranger. The
Egypt quitted by his descendants was one which had subjected Asia to
itself, and had carried the spoils of Syria to its splendid capital in
the far south. The Asiatic wave had been rolled back from the banks of
the Nile, and Egyptian conquest and culture had overflooded Asia as far
as the Euphrates.
But it was not Egypt alone which had undergone a change. The Canaan of
Abraham and Jacob looked to Babylonia for its civilization, its
literature, and its laws. Its princes recognized at times the supremacy
of the Babylonian sovereigns, and the deities of Babylonia were
worshipped in its midst. The Canaan of Moses had long been a province of
the Egyptian Empire; Egyptian rule had been substituted for that of
Babylon, and the manners and customs of Egypt had penetrated deeply into
the minds of its inhabitants. The Hittite invasion from the north had
blocked the high-road to Babylonia, and diverted the trade of Palestine
towards the west and the south. While Abraham, the native of Ur, and the
emigrant from Harran, had found himself in Canaan, and even at Zoan,
still within the sphere of the influences among which he had grown up,
the fugitives from Egypt entered on the invasion of a country which had
but just been delivered from the yoke of the Pharaohs. It was an
Egyptian Canaan that the Israelites were called upon to subdue, and it
was fitting therefore that they should have been made ready for the task
by their long sojourn in the land of Goshen.
How that sojourn came about, it is not for us to recount. The story of
Joseph is too familiar to be repeated, though we are but just beginning
to learn how true it is, in all its details, to the facts which Egyptian
research is bringing more and more fully to light. We see the Midianite
and Ishmaelite caravan passing Dothan--still known by its ancient
name--with their bales of spicery from Gilead for the dwellers in the
Delta, and carrying away with them the young Hebrew slave. We watch his
rise in the house of his Egyptian master, his wrongful imprisonment and
sudden exaltation when he sits by the side of Pharaoh and governs Egypt
in the name of the king. We read the pathetic story of the old father
sending his sons to buy corn from the royal granaries or _larits_ of
Egypt, and withholding to the last his youngest and dearest one; of the
Beduin shepherds bowing all unconsciously before the brother whom they
had sold into slavery, and who now holds in his hands the power of life
and death; of Joseph's disclosure of himself to the conscious-stricken
suppliants; of Jacob's cry when convinced at last that "the governor
over all the land of Egypt" was his long-mourned son. "It is enough;
Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before I die."
Jacob and his family travelled in wagons along the high-road which
connected the south of Palestine with the Delta. It led past Beer-sheba
and El-Arîsh to the Shur, or line of fortifications which protected the
eastern frontier of Egypt. The modern caravan road follows its course
most of the way. It was thus distinct from "the way of the Philistines,"
which led along the coast of the Mediterranean, on the northern edge of
the Sirbonian Lake. In Egypt the Israelitish emigrants settled not far
from the Hyksos capital in the land of Goshen, which the excavations of
Dr. Naville have shown to be the Wâdi Tumilât of to-day. Here they
multiplied and grew wealthy, until the evil days came when the Egyptians
rose up against Semitic influence and control, and Ramses II.
transformed the free-born Beduin into public serfs.
But the age of Ramses II. was still far distant when Jacob died full of
years, and his mummy was carried to the burial-place of his fathers "in
the land of Canaan." Local tradition connected the name of Abel-mizraim,
"the meadow of Egypt," on the eastern side of the Jordan, with the long
funeral procession which wended its way from Zoan to Hebron. We cannot
believe, however, that the mourners would have so far gone out of their
road, even if the etymology assigned by tradition to the name could be
supported. The tradition bears witness to the fact of the procession,
but to nothing more.
With the funeral of Jacob a veil falls upon the Biblical history of
Canaan, until the days when the spies were sent out to search the land.
Joseph was buried in Egypt, not at Hebron, though he had made the
Israelites swear before his death that his mummy should be eventually
taken to Palestine. The road to Hebron, it is clear, was no longer open,
and the power of the Hyksos princes must have been fast waning. The war
of independence had broken out, and the native kings of Upper Egypt were
driving the foreigner back into Asia. The rulers of Zoan had no longer
troops to spare for a funeral procession through the eastern desert.
The Chronicler, however, has preserved a notice which seems to show that
a connection was still kept up between Southern Canaan and the Hebrew
settlers in Goshen, even after Jacob's death, perhaps while he was yet
living. We are told that certain of the sons of Ephraim were slain by
the men of Gath, whose cattle they had attempted to steal, and that
their father, after mourning many days, comforted himself with the birth
of other sons (1 Chron. vii. 21-26). The notice, moreover, does not
stand alone. Thothmes III., the great conqueror of the eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty, states that two of the places captured by him in
Palestine were Jacob-el and Joseph-el. It is tempting to see in the two
names reminiscences of the Hebrew patriarch and his son. If so, the name
of Joseph would have been impressed upon a locality in Canaan more than
two centuries before the Exodus. The geographical lists of Thothmes III.
and the fragments of early history preserved by the Chronicler would
thus support and complete one another. The Egyptian cavalry who
accompanied the mummy of Jacob to its resting-place at Machpelah, would
not be the only evidence of the authority claimed by Joseph and his
master in the land of Canaan; Joseph himself would have left his name
there, and his grand-children would have fought against "the men of
Gath."
But these are speculations which may, or may not, be confirmed by
archaeological discovery. For the Book of Genesis Canaan disappears from
sight with the death of Jacob. Henceforward it is upon Egypt and the
nomad settlers in Goshen that the attention of the Pentateuch is fixed,
until the time comes when the age of the patriarchs is superseded by
that of the legislator, and Moses, the adopted son of the Egyptian
princess, leads his people back to Canaan. Joseph had been carried by
Midianitish hands out of Palestine into Egypt, there to become the
representative of the Pharaoh, and son-in-law of the high-priest of
Heliopolis; for Moses, the adopted grandson of the Pharaoh, "learned in
all the wisdom of the Egyptians," it was reserved, after years of trial
and preparation in Midian, to bring the descendants of Jacob out of
their Egyptian prison-house to the borders of the Promised Land.