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.