Israel thus stood in close relation to almost all the chief linguistic divisions of the Semitic world. Its first forefather had been born in the land where Babylonian—or Assyrian, as we usually term it—was spoken, and its contact with Aramaic had been early and intimate. Its desert wanderings had led it into a region into which the Bedâwin tribes of Central Arabia could make their way, and the Hebrew article seems to be a relic of its intercourse with them and the Arabic they spoke. But with all this contact with other Semitic tongues, Israel nevertheless remained true to that of the land of its destiny: the language of the Old Testament is the language which was spoken in Canaan before the days of Moses, the language of the inscriptions of Phœnicia and Carthage, the language of Hannibal as well as of Joshua.
If Israel was connected by language with Canaan, it was connected by blood as well as by language with Moab, and Ammon, and Edom. In fact, Edom and Israel were brothers. While the relationship with Moab and Ammon was comparatively distant, the relationship with Edom was peculiarly close. The fact was never forgotten, and in the later days of Jewish history the unbrotherly conduct of Edom caused a bitterness of feeling towards it on the part of the Jews such as no other Gentiles were able to excite.
Moab and Ammon were the children of Lot, and had possessed themselves of the mountain and fertile plains on the east side of the Dead Sea and southern course of the Jordan long before Israel had entered into its inheritance, or even Edom had carved out a possession for itself with the sword. They were accused of being of incestuous origin, and it was related how the ancestors of each had been born in hiding and in the wild solitude of a cave. Moab was the eldest, Ben-Ammi, ‘the Ammonite,’ being the younger of the two.
The name of Moab (or Muab) is engraved among the conquests of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II., on the base of one of the statues which stand before the northern entrance of the temple of Luxor. Ammi, whose ‘son’ the ancestor of the Ammonites was called, was the supreme God of Ammon, standing to the Ammonites in the same relation that Chemosh stood to Moab, or Yahveh to Israel. Ammon, indeed, is but another form of Ammi. The god was widely worshipped, as we may learn from the proper names into which his own name enters. Thus the Old Testament knows of Ammiel, ‘Ammi is god’; of Ammi-shaddai, ‘Ammi is the Almighty’; and of Ammi-nadab, ‘Ammi is noble.’ Ammi-nadab was king of Ammon in the time of the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal; the early Minæan inscriptions of Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-zadoq and Ammi-zadiqa, ‘Ammi is righteous,’ as well as Ammi-karib and Ammi-anshi; while among the kings of the south Arabian dynasty which ruled over Babylonia in the age of Abraham we find Ammi-zadoq, or Ammu-zadoq and Ammi-dhitana; and the Kadmonite chieftain east of the Jordan, with whom the Egyptian fugitive Sinuhit found a home in the time of the twelfth dynasty, bore the name of Ammi-anshi.[51] Balaam the seer, moreover, was summoned by the king of Moab from his city of Pethor, at the junction of the Euphrates and the Sajur, in ‘the land of the children of Ammo,’—for such is the correct translation of the Hebrew text. It may not be an accident that one who thus belonged to the ‘Beni-Ammo,’ or ‘Ammonites’ of the north, should have been called to the country which bordered on that of the Beni-Ammi, or Ammonites of the south.[52]
A few miles to the north of Pethor was Carchemish, now Jerablûs, which was destined to become one of the most important strongholds of the Hittite tribes. The Semites explained the name as ‘the fortified wall of Chemosh’;[53] and whether this etymology were true or not, at all events it indicates a belief that the worship of Chemosh extended as far northward into Aram as did the worship of Ammi. Chemosh was the national god of Moab. Like Yahveh of Israel and Assur in Assyria, he had neither wife nor children; and on the Moabite Stone even the Babylonian goddess Ashtar, whose cult had been carried to the West, is identified with him. She ceases to have any independent existence or sex of her own, and is absorbed into the one supreme deity of Moabite faith. It is probable that Ammi also was similarly conceived of as standing alone in jealous isolation, supreme over all other gods, and having no consort with whom to share his power.
Moab and Ammon were alike intruders in the lands which subsequently bore their names. The older inhabitants of Moab were known as the Emim, ‘a people great and many and tall, as the Anakim, which also were accounted giants.’ Ammon too had been ‘accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time, and the Ammonites call them Zamzummim.’ The word rendered ‘giants’ in the Authorised Version is Rephaim; and it is very possible that a trace of it survives in the name On-Repha, ‘On of the giant,’ the Raphon or Raphana of classical geography, which is coupled by the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. with Astartu or Ashteroth-Karnaim.[54] When Chedor-laomer made his campaign in Canaan the Rephaim were still living at Ashteroth-Karnaim, and the ‘Zuzim’ or Zamzummim in ‘Ham.’ The name of the latter seems to occur in the inscriptions of the kings of Ur, who reigned some centuries before the birth of Abraham; they mention hostile expeditions against the land of Zavzala or the Zuzim; and a Babylonian high-priest who owned allegiance to one of them brought blocks of limestone for his temples and palace from the same district, which he tells us was situated ‘in the mountains of the Amorites.’[55]
Whether or not the Emim and Zamzummim were Amorite tribes, we cannot tell. The physical characteristics ascribed to them in the Old Testament would, however, seem to indicate that such was the case. Moreover, the Amorites had at one time been the dominant population, not only in Palestine itself, but also in the country east of the Jordan as well as in the Syrian districts to the north. When the Babylonians first became acquainted with Western Asia in the fifth or fourth millennium before the Christian era, the inhabitants of Syria were mainly of the Amorite race. Syria, accordingly, and more especially that part of it which is known to us as Palestine, was called in the old agglutinative language of Chaldæa ‘the land of Martu’ or ‘the Amorite,’ a word which has survived in the book of Genesis under the form of Moreh.[56] When the older language of Chaldæa made way for Semitic Babylonian, Martu became Amurru, and Hadad, the supreme Baal or sun-god of Canaan, became known as ‘Amurru,’ ‘the Amorite.’ By the Egyptians the Amorites were termed Amur; and, as has been already stated,[57] the Egyptian artists have shown us that they were a fair-skinned people, with blue eyes and reddish hair; that they were also tall and handsome, and wore short and pointed beards. In fact, they resembled in features the Libyans of Northern Africa, whose modern descendants—the Kabyles of Algeria—offer such a striking likeness to the golden-haired Kelt. The Amorite type may still be seen in its purity among the Arabs of the El-Arîsh desert, who inhabit the district between the frontiers of Palestine and Egypt: many of the latter, as we see them to-day, might well have sat for the portraits of the Amorites depicted on the walls of the old Egyptian temples and tombs. It would seem that the Amorite race, fair and tall and energetic, once extended along the northern coast of Africa into Asia itself, where they occupied the larger part of Southern Syria. There they have left behind them cromlechs and dolmens which remind us of those of our own islands. Indeed, if the Amorite were the eastern branch of the Libyan race, it is probable that he could claim kindred with the so-called red Kelt of Britain. The physiological characteristics of the Libyan and fair-haired Kelt are similar; and many anthropologists assume the existence of a Libyo-Keltic or ‘Eurafrican’ family, which has spread northward through Spain and the western side of France into the British Isles.[58]
The Emim and Zamzummim, accordingly, whom the descendants of Lot partly expelled, partly absorbed, may have been of Amorite origin, and connected in race with a portion of the population of our own country. At all events, when the Israelites entered Canaan, the Amorites were already settled on the eastern side of the Jordan. At that time the land was divided between the Amalekites or Bedâwin of the desert to the south, the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites ‘in the mountains,’ and the Canaanites on the coast of the Mediterranean and in the valley of the Jordan (Numb. xiii. 29). As might have been expected in the case of a fair-skinned people, the Amorites needed the bracing air of the mountains in order to hold their own against the other populations of the country; in the hot plains their vigour was in danger of being lost.
The Egyptian rule, which the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties had maintained eastward of the Jordan, passed away with the fall of the Egyptian empire, and its place was taken by the Amorite kingdoms of Sihon and Og. Sihon had overthrown the Moabites in battle, and had wrested their territory from them as far south as the Arnon (Numb. xxi. 26). They had been driven out of their cities into the barren mountains which overlooked the Dead Sea. A fragment of the Amorite Song of Triumph which recorded the conquest has been preserved to us. ‘Come unto Heshbon,’ it said, ‘let the city of Sihon be built and fortified. For a fire has gone forth from Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon; it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the Baalim of the high places of Arnon. Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: [Chemosh] hath given his sons that escaped [the battle], and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites’ (Numb. xxi. 27-29).
The southern half of Ammon also, as far north as the Jabbok, was in Amorite hands. Here, however, the Ammonites had strongly fortified their ‘border’ (Numb. xxi. 24), so that neither Sihon himself, nor his Israelitish conquerors, succeeded in passing it. But Rabbah, ‘the city of waters,’ the future capital of Ammon, must have been held by the Amorites, and the two intrusive populations of Ammon and Moab were separated from one another by the Amorite conquest.
If the older inhabitants of the country were Amorite by race, the kingdom of Sihon will have represented an Amorite reaction against the descendants of Lot. But we must remember that the Babylonians had given the name of ‘Amorite’ to all the populations of Palestine and the adjoining districts, whether they were Amorites in blood or not. The old Babylonian usage is followed in several passages of the Pentateuch, and points to their origin in those pre-Mosaic days when Babylonian influence was still dominant in Western Asia. Thus in Gen. xv. 16, God declares to Abraham that ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full,’ and Jacob reminded his sons (Gen. xlviii. 22) that he had wrested Shechem ‘out of the hand of the Amorite’ with his sword and bow. Perhaps the emphatic statement that ‘the Canaanite was then in the land,’ which we read in Gen. xii. 6, is due to the previous mention of the terebinth of Moreh’ or Martu, Martu being the primitive Babylonian equivalent of the later ‘Amorite.’ The terebinth, indeed, was in the country of the Amorites, but the country was already inhabited by Canaanitish tribes.[59]
We cannot, then, be certain that the aboriginal peoples of Moab and Ammon were actually of the Amorite race. They were, it is true, included by the Babylonians under the common name of ‘Amorites,’ but this was because all the rest of the population of Southern Syria was known under the same title. The fact, however, that the Hebrew writers have described them as tall, like the Anakim, and that popular tradition should have spoken of them as Rephaim or giants, is in favour of their having been really of Amorite descent. In this case we may see in them the easternmost representatives of the blond race, and the builders of the cromlechs with which the hillsides of Moab are covered.
Southward of Moab came other tribes which, like the Ishmaelites, were said to have sprung directly from Abraham himself. These were the Midianites and the merchant tribes of Sheba and Dedan, who possessed stations on the great desert road that led from the spice-bearing regions of Southern Arabia to the borders of Canaan. They claimed to be the descendants of Keturah, or ‘Incence,’ the second wife of the Hebrew patriarch, after Sarah’s death. Another genealogy (Gen. x. 7) placed Sheba and Dedan in the extreme south of the Arabian peninsula, among the children of Cush. Both genealogies, however, are correct. Sheba was the kingdom of the Sabæans, whose centre was in Southern Arabia, but whose power and commerce extended far to the north. Their trading settlements and garrisons were to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of Midian, at Tema, the modern Teimah, and elsewhere.[60] If Professor Hommel is right in identifying Dedan with Tidanum, one of the names by which Palestine was known in early days to the natives of Babylonia, it would seem that the Dedanites also had become a leading people on the frontiers of Canaan. At all events, it is clear that Abraham was claimed as an ancestor by the tribes of Western Arabia from its northern to its southern extremity, by the descendants of Keturah on the western coast and caravan-road, as well as by the Ishmaelites further to the east. They represented the trading and more cultured population of the peninsula as opposed to the wild Amalekites or Bedâwin hordes, who had their home among the mountains of Seir and the desert south of Palestine. The connection between Midian and Israel, which found expression in a common ancestry, was reasserted in later days when the great legislator of Israel fled to Midian and married the daughter of its high-priest.
How nearly that connection had been lost through the death of the forefather of the Israelitish people was recorded in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. A voice came to Abraham, which he believed to be divine, bidding him offer ‘for a burnt-offering’ the son of his old age, the heir of the covenant which had been made with him. It was a form of sacrifice only too well known in Canaan. In time of pestilence or trouble the parent was called upon to sacrifice to Baal that which was dearest and nearest to him, his firstborn or his only son. The gods themselves had set the example. Once when a plague had fallen upon the land, El had clothed Yeud, his only son, in royal purple, and on one of the high-places of Palestine had offered him up to the offended deities.[61] The doctrine of vicarious sacrifice was deeply enrooted in the minds of the Canaanitish people. But it needed to be a sacrifice which cost the offerer almost as much as his own life. The fruit of his own body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul. And the sacrifice had to be by fire. Only through that purifying element could the stains of sin and impurity be obliterated, and the offering made acceptable to heaven.
The practice, horrible as it seems to us, was nevertheless founded on a truth. The victim, if he were to be accepted, must be the most precious that the offerer could present. The gods did not require that which cost him nothing. It needed to be the most costly that could be given; it needed to be also, in the words of the prophet, the fruit of the sinner’s own body. Nothing else would suffice: the gods demanded the firstborn son, still more the only son. In no other way could Baal be satisfied that the sinner had repented of his guilt or had made to him an offering which was of equal value to his own life.
The firstborn of all animals, of beasts as well as of men, was owed to the gods. The belief was not confined to the Canaanites. We find traces of it in Babylonian literature, and all the denunciations of the prophets before the Exile failed to eradicate it from the mind of the Jew. Up to the closing days of the Jewish monarchy, the valley of the sons of Hinnom was defiled with the smoke of the sacrifices wherein, as it is euphemistically said, the kings and people of Jerusalem made their children to pass through the fire. The belief, indeed, was consecrated by the Mosaic law itself. Human sacrifice, it is true, was forbidden, but the firstborn, nevertheless, had to be redeemed (Exod. xxxiv. 20). Like the firstfruits and the firstborn of beasts, Yahveh had declared that the firstborn of the sons of Israel also belonged to Him (Exod. xxii. 29). He could claim them, and it was of His own freewill that He waived the claim. And along with this assertion of His claim to the firstborn went the doctrine of vicarious punishment. It was not the firstborn only in whose case a substitution was allowed: once a year the sins of the whole people were laid upon the head of the scapegoat, which was then driven like an evil spirit into the wilderness. The idea of vicarious punishment, which lies at the foundation of historical Christianity, had already found expression in the Mosaic law.
The sacrifice of the firstborn was thus part of a larger conception behind which there lay a profound truth. The sins of the father were visited upon the child in more senses than one; the child, in fact, could become an expiation for them, and divert to himself the anger of the gods. Experience had shown how often the son must suffer for the deeds of the parent, and the inference was drawn that if that suffering were voluntarily offered to heaven by the parent, he would receive all the benefits that flowed from it. Moreover, the gods had a right to the firstborn, if they chose to exercise it; and in offering the firstborn, accordingly, man was only giving back to them what was strictly their own.
The heathenism of the Mosaic age went no further. Israel was the first to learn that the law of the substitution of the firstborn for the sins of the father was subordinate to a higher and more general law—that of vicarious punishment. As the firstborn of men could be substituted for the parent, so, too, could a lower animal, or the price of a lower animal, be substituted for the firstborn of men. It was not the sacrifice which the God of Israel demanded, but the spirit of sacrifice; not the blood of bulls and goats, or even men, but obedience and readiness to give up all that was dearest and best at the command of God.
The story of the sacrifice of Isaac was a practical illustration of the lesson. Abraham was called upon to slay with his own hand his only child, the son through whom he had believed that he would become the ancestor of a mighty nation. He was summoned to lead him to one of those high-places of Canaan where the deity seemed nearer to the worshipper than in the plain below, and there, like the Phœnician god El, to offer him up to his God. We are told how he set forth from Beer-sheba, on the borders of the desert, and on the third day reached the sacred mountain on whose summit the Canaanitish rite was to be celebrated. It was in ‘the land of Moriah,’ according to the reading of the Hebrew text, a name which the chronicler (2 Chron. iii. 1) transfers to the temple-mount at Jerusalem. But the Septuagint changes the name in the books of Chronicles into that of ‘the mountain of Amoria’ or the Amorites; while in Genesis the Greek translators must have read Moreh, since the Hebrew word is rendered by ‘Highlands.’ Moreh is the Babylonian Martu, the land of the Amorites, so that we need not be surprised at finding the Syriac version boldly substituting ‘Amorites’ for the Masoretic ‘Moriah.’
In any case, the belief that the scene of Abraham’s sacrifice was the spot whereon the Jewish temple afterwards stood went back to an early date. When the book of Genesis assumed its present form it had already become fixed in the Jewish mind. This is clear from the proverb quoted to explain the name of Yahveh-yireh. ‘To this day,’ we are told, it was said: ‘In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen.’ For the Jew there was but one ‘mount of the Lord,’ that mountain whereon Yahveh revealed Himself above the cherubim of the ark. It was ‘the hill of God,’ wherein He desired to dwell (Ps. lxviii. 15), the seat of the sanctuary of Yahveh the God of Israel. When the Samaritans set up on Gerizim their rival temple to that of Jerusalem, it was necessary that the scene of the sacrifice of the Hebrew patriarch should be transferred to the new site. It was a proof how firm was the conviction that the temple-mount had been consecrated to the sacrifice of the firstborn by the great ancestor of the Israelitish family. The spot whereon the victims of the Jewish ritual were offered up was the very spot to which Abraham had been led by God that he might offer there the terrible sacrifice of his only son. Its name had been given to it by Abraham, and this name found its explanation in a saying that was current at Jerusalem about the temple-mount.
The actual meaning of the name is not certain, nor indeed is the original signification of the proverb itself. Already in the time of the Septuagint translation the meaning of the latter was doubtful, and the Greek translators have made the divine name the subject of the verb, reading, ‘In the mountain the Lord was seen.’ But the fact that the Chronicler calls the temple-mount Moriah shows that such a rendering was not accepted in Jerusalem.
It may be that the name ‘mount of the Lord’ goes back, at all events in substance, to patriarchal times. Among the places in Southern Palestine conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Thothmes III., of the eighteenth dynasty, and recorded on the temple walls of Karnak, is Har-el, ‘the mountain of God.’[62] The names found in immediate connection with Har-el indicate that its site is to be sought in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem; and as the name of Jerusalem itself does not occur in the Pharaoh’s list of his conquests, it is probable that we are to see in it the future capital of Judah. As we now know from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, Jerusalem was an important city of Canaan long before the Mosaic age; it was, moreover, the centre of a district which had been conquered by the Egyptians, and its ruler was a vassal of the Egyptian monarch. It is therefore difficult to account for the omission of any reference to it in the catalogue of the conquests of the Pharaoh except upon the supposition that it is really mentioned among them, though under another name.
The distance that separates Jerusalem from Beer-sheba would correspond with the three days’ journey of Abraham to the destined place of sacrifice. It was on the third day that Abraham lifted up his eyes ‘and saw the place afar off.’ The main, in fact, the only, argument of any weight that has been urged against the identification is the fact that the place of sacrifice seems to have been a desert spot. No spectators are mentioned as present, and close to it was a thicket in which a ram was caught by the horns. How can such solitude, it is asked, be reconciled with the existence of a city in the same spot? How can the deserted high-place whereon the patriarch raised the altar of sacrifice for his son be identical with the fortress-city of which Melchizedek was king?
At first sight the difficulty seems overwhelming. But we must remember that nothing is said in the narrative about the place being desert and remote from men, nor even that it was not within the walls of a city. And we must further remember that the temple of Solomon itself was built on what had been the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Before the age of Solomon, therefore, the place must have been open and free from buildings; it must, too, have been a level platform of rock on the summit of the hill where the winds could freely play and scatter the chaff when the grain was threshed. Such open spaces are not infrequent in Oriental cities, and the visitor sometimes finds himself suddenly emerging out of close and crowded lanes into a growth of rank brushwood and weeds.
It is true that in the books of Samuel, where we are told how the threshing-floor of the Jebusite came to be chosen as the site of the temple, no allusion is made to Abraham’s sacrifice. Another reason is assigned for the choice of the spot. But Oriental modes of writing history are not the same as ours, and the so-called argument from silence is worthless when applied to them. Archæological discovery has shown, time after time, that facts and references are passed over in silence by the writers of ancient Oriental history, not because the writers did not know them, but because their conception of history was different from ours.
Mount Moriah, then, may well have been the scene of that temptation of Abraham when, in accordance with the fierce ritual of Syria, he believed himself called upon to offer up in sacrifice his only son. At all events, the belief that it was so can be traced back to an early date among the Jews. The very fact that the Samaritans transported the place of sacrifice to Mount Gerizim proves that it had already been associated with the site of the temple, and the transference of the site was necessary in support of the claim that the true centre of Hebrew worship was at Samaria and not in Jerusalem.
Light has been cast on the substitution of a ram for the human victim by an acute observation of M. Clermont-Ganneau.[63] We know that human sacrifice occupied a prominent place in the ritual of Phœnicia and Carthage; and yet in the so-called sacrificial tariffs which have been discovered at Carthage and Marseilles, and in which the price is stated of each of the offerings demanded by the gods, there is absolute silence in regard to it. The place of the human victim is taken by the ayîl, the ‘ram’ of the book of Genesis.[64] The tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to that later period of Phœnician religion, when contact with the Greeks had introduced Western ideas of the value of human life, and a truer conception of what the gods required. The merchants of Carthage had learned that Baal would be satisfied with a victim less costly than man, and would accept instead of him the blood of rams.
The lesson which the Carthaginians learned from contact with the Greeks had been taught the ancestors of the Hebrews by the Lord. The Law and the Prophets alike protested against the old belief, hard as it was to eradicate it from the Semitic mind. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter stands alone, even in the troublous period of the Judges; the sacrifice of his eldest son by the king of Moab (2 Kings iii. 27), though it stayed the Israelitish attack, was the act of one who did not acknowledge Yahveh of Israel as his God; and the Jewish children who were burnt in the fire to Moloch were offered by renegades from the national faith. Israelitish law and history bear upon them the traces of the old Semitic custom, but they are traces only. The story of Abraham’s sacrifice is an antitype of the future history of the religion of Israel. The firstborn, indeed, belonged to Yahveh, if He chose to claim them; but, unlike the gods of the heathen, He did not claim them when they were the firstborn of man.
Once again we have a picture of Abraham; but this time it is not as the shêkh who conforms to the beliefs and practices of Canaan, but as a foreign prince who acquires land in the country of his adoption. Sarah is dead, and Abraham accordingly buys a field at Machpelah in the close neighbourhood of Hebron. The field included a portion of the limestone cliff which overlooked the city, and was pierced then, as now, by numerous cavities, partly natural, partly excavated by the hand of man. They were the burying-places of the inhabitants of the town, the chambered tombs in which the dead were laid to rest. That Abraham should choose Hebron as the future home and resting-place of his family was perhaps natural. It was here that he had lived when he first came, as an immigrant, into ‘the land of the Amorites’; it was here that he had been confederate with its Amorite chieftains, and had led his forces against the invading host of the king of Elam. Moreover, Hebron was one of the old centres of Canaan. It had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt (Numb. xiii. 22), perhaps in the age when the Hyksos kings first conquered Egypt and rebuilt Zoan, making it the capital of their new kingdom. The sanctuary of Hebron rivalled that of Jerusalem in sanctity and fame, at all events in the years immediately succeeding the Israelitish conquest, and it was at Hebron that David first established his power and his son Absalom matured his rebellion.
In the age of Abraham the city had not yet received its later name of Hebron, the ‘Confederacy.’ It was still known as Kirjath-Arba, and the district in which it stood was that of Mamre. Amorites and Hittites dwelt there side by side. Arba, we are told, was ‘a great man among the Amorite Anakim’ (Josh. xiv. 15), but it was from ‘the sons of Heth’ that the field of Machpelah was bought.
Critics have raised the question who these Hittites of Southern Palestine may have been. It has been asserted that they are the invention of a later Hebrew writer, and that the Hittites of Northern Syria were never settled in the south of Canaan. On the other hand, the veracity of the Hebrew record has been admitted, but the identity of ‘the sons of Heth’ with the great Hittite tribes of the north has been denied.
The critics, however, have no grounds for their scepticism. The book of Genesis does not stand alone in testifying to the existence of Hittites in Southern Palestine. The prophet Ezekiel does the same. He too tells us that the origin of Jerusalem was partly Amorite, partly Hittite. Indeed, throughout the Pentateuch it is assumed that Hittites and Amorites were mingled together in the mountainous parts of the country. ‘The Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites,’ it is said in the book of Numbers (xiii. 29), ‘dwell in the mountains,’ and the same combination of names in the same order is found in the geographical table of Genesis (x. 15, 16). Between these Hittites and the Hittites of the north no distinction is made in the Old Testament. ‘The land of the Hittites,’ mentioned in Judg. i. 26, into which the Canaanite betrayer of Beth-el made his way, was in the north, like the Hittite kingdoms whose princes are referred to in 2 Kings vii. 6.
Thanks to archæological discovery, we now know a good deal about these Hittites of Northern Syria. Their name is found on the monuments of Egypt, of Assyria, and of Armenia, and they are mentioned in Babylonian tablets which go back to the age of Abraham. Cappadocia was their earliest home; from hence they descended on the possessions of the Aramæans and established their power as far south as the Lake of Homs. The cuneiform inscriptions of Armenia in the ninth century B.C. describe them as on the Upper Euphrates in the neighbourhood of Malatiyeh, and the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) tells us that Carchemish was one of their capitals. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we hear of their growing power on the northern frontier of the Egyptian empire, of their intrigues with the Amorites and the people of Canaan, and of their steady advance to the south. Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, after twenty years of warfare, was glad to conclude peace on equal terms with ‘the great king of the Hittites.’ The Hittite capital was already so near the northern border of Palestine as Kadesh on the Orontes ‘in the land of the Amorites.’ Here the Hittite monarch gathered together his vassals and allies from Syria and Asia Minor; even the distant Lycians and Dardanians came at his call.
The Egyptian artists have left us portraits of the Hittite race. Their features and dress were alike peculiar, and both reappear without change on certain monuments which have been found in Asia Minor and Syria, thus fixing the character of the latter beyond dispute. The monuments are covered with a still undeciphered system of hieroglyphic writing, and among the hieroglyphs are numerous human heads with the strange profile of the Hittite face. The nose and upper jaw protrude, the forehead is high and receding, the cheeks smooth, while we learn from the paintings of Egypt that the skin was yellow and the hair and the eyes were black. The hair was gathered together in a kind of ‘pig-tail,’ and the feet were shod with the shoes of mountaineers, the toes of which rose upwards into a point.[65]
Why should not a body of Hittites have settled in Southern Palestine, and there have been, as it were, interlocked with the older Amorite inhabitants, as they were according to the testimony of the Egyptian inscriptions at Kadesh on the Lake of Homs? Indeed, there is indirect evidence that such was really the case.
Thothmes III., who conquered Syria for the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, tells us that he received tribute from the king of ‘the greater Hittite land.’ There was then a lesser Hittite land; and as the ‘greater Hittite land’ was in the north, it is reasonable to look for the lesser land in the south. Half a century later, at a time when the Tel el-Amarna correspondence was being carried on, the Hittites were actively interfering in the internal politics of Canaan; and in one of the bas-reliefs of Ramses II. at Karnak the vanquished population of Ashkelon—in the near neighbourhood of Hebron—is represented with the peculiar Hittite type of face.[66] At a still earlier date, when the Assyrians first became acquainted with Western Asia, the dominant people there were the Hittites. In the Assyrian inscriptions, accordingly, the whole of Syria, including Palestine, came to be known as ‘the land of the Hittites.’ Shalmaneser II. even speaks of Ahab of Israel and Baasha of Ammon as ‘Hittite’ kings.[67] ‘The land of the Hittites’ in the Assyrian texts thus corresponds with the ‘land of the Amorites’ in the texts of Babylonia. Just as Canaan was ‘the land of the Amorites’ to the Babylonian of the age of Abraham, so too it was ‘the land of the Hittites’ to the Assyrian of the age of Moses. Before Assyria had become acquainted with the shores of the Mediterranean, the Hittites had taken the place of the Amorites and become the leading power in the West.
There is, therefore, nothing antecedently improbable in the existence in Southern Palestine of Hittites of the genuine northern stock. But the name may also be due to the Assyrian use of it at the time when the narrative in the book of Genesis was written. The use of the term ‘Amorite’ in several passages of the Pentateuch is certainly of Babylonian origin, and takes us back to the age when all the natives of Palestine were alike included in it; it may be that the ‘Hittites’ of Hebron and Jerusalem owe their title to a similar adoption of a foreign term. If so, the Amorites and Hittites were equally one people; but whereas the name of ‘Amorite’ comes from Babylonia and indicates an earlier date for the sources of the narrative in which it occurs, the name of ‘Hittite’ points to Assyria and the Assyrian epoch of Asiatic history.
Against this is the Babylonian colouring of the story of Abraham’s dealings with the children of Heth. During the last few years thousands of contract-tablets have been discovered in Babylonia which belong to the age of Abraham or to a still earlier period. And these tablets show that in the account of the purchase of the field of Machpelah we have a faithful picture of such transactions as they were conducted at the time in the cities of Babylonia. It reads, in fact, like one of the cuneiform documents which have been unearthed from Babylonian soil. It is conformed to the law and procedure of Babylonia as they were in the patriarchal age. At a later date the law and procedure were altered, and a narrative in which they are embodied must therefore go back to a pre-Mosaic antiquity. It must belong to the Babylonian and not to the Assyrian epoch.
That the law and custom of Babylonia should have prevailed in Canaan is no longer surprising. The same contract-tablets which have revealed to us the commercial and social life of primitive Chaldæa have also shown us that colonies of ‘Amorite’ or Canaanitish merchants were settled in Babylonia, where they enjoyed numerous rights and privileges, and could acquire land and other property. There were special districts called ‘Amorite’ allotted to them, one of which was just outside the walls of the city of Sippara. They had judges of their own, and where disputes arose between themselves and the native Babylonians the case was tried before both the ‘Amorite’ and the native courts. These foreign settlers could act as witnesses in trials that concerned only Babylonians, and could even rise to high offices of state. It must be remembered, however, that the Babylonian kings claimed to be kings also of ‘the land of the Amorites,’ and that consequently the natives of Canaan were as much subjects of the rulers of Chaldæa as the Babylonians themselves.
Through the Canaanitish colonies in Babylonia a knowledge of Babylonian law was necessarily communicated to the commercial world of the West. Moreover, Babylonian rule brought with it Babylonian culture and law as well. The ‘Amorites’ when the Babylonians first met with them were doubtless in a semi-barbarous condition, and their subsequent culture, as we now know, was wholly Babylonian. A very important part of this culture, at all events in the eyes of the trading world, was the law of Babylonia, more especially in its relation to contracts. That the purchase of the field of Machpelah should have been conducted with all the formalities to which Abraham had been accustomed in his Chaldæan home, is consequently what archæological discovery has informed us ought to have been the case.
A simple form of contract for the sale and purchase of landed property in Babylonia is to be found in one that was drawn up in the reign of Eri-Aku or Arioch. It is written in Sumerian, the old legal language of Chaldæa, as Latin was the legal language of Europe in the Middle Ages, and runs as follows:—‘One and five-sixths sar[68] of a terrace with a house upon it, bounded on three sides by the house of Abil-Sin, and on the fourth side by the street, has been purchased by Sin-uzilli the son of Tsili-Istar from Sin-illatsu the son of Nannar-arabit: 2-½ shekels of silver he has weighed as its full price. In days to come Sin-illatsu shall never make any claim in regard to the house or dispute the title. The (contracting parties) have sworn by the names of Sin, Samas, and king Eri-Aku. Witnessed by Abu-ilisu the son of Tsili-Istar, Abil-Sin the son of Uruki-bansum, Nur-Amurri the son of Abi-idinnam, Ibku-Urra, son of Nabi-ilisu, and Sin-semê his brother. The seals of the witnesses (are attached).’[69]
Still more insight into the character and procedure of Babylonian commercial law is given by the record of a case of disputed property which came before the judges in the reign of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel. The following is a translation of it:—‘Concerning the garden of Sin-magir which Naid-Amurri bought for silver, but to which Ilu-bani laid claim on the ground that he had bred horses there. They went before the judges, and the judges took them to the gate of the goddess Nin-Martu (the mistress of the land of the Amorites), and to the judges of the gate of Nin-Martu Ilu-bani thus declared in the gate of Nin-Martu: I am indeed the son of Sin-magir; he adopted me as his son; the sealed documents (recording the fact) he never destroyed. Thus he declared, and under (king) Eri-Aku they adjudged the garden and house to Ilu-bani. Then came Sin-mubalidh and claimed the garden of Ilu-bani; so they went before the judges, and the judges (said): To us and the elders they have been taken, and must stand in the gate of the gods Merodach, Sussa, Sin, Khusa, and Nin-Martu the daughter of Merodach ... and the elders who have already appeared in the case of Naid-Amurri have heard Ilu-bani declare in the gate of Nin-Martu that “I am indeed the son (of Sin-magir)”; accordingly, they adjudged the garden and house to Ilu-bani. Sin-mubalidh cannot come again and make a claim. Oaths have been sworn by the names of Sin, Samas, Merodach, and king Khammu-rabi. Witnessed by Sin-imguranni the noble, Elilka-Sin, Abil-irzitim, Ubarrum, Zanbil-arad-Sin, Akhiya, Bel-dugul (?), Samas-bani the son of Abid-rakhas, Zanik-pisu, Izkur-Ea the major-domo, and Bau-ila. The seals of the witnesses (are attached). The 4th day of the month Tammuz, the year when Khammu-rabi the king offered prayers to Tasmit.’[70]
It is needless to quote other documents of a similar nature, unless it be to add that when a field or garden is sold, the palms and other trees planted in it are carefully specified. So they were also in the case of the field of Machpelah. Here, too, the transaction took place before the ‘elders’ of the city, at ‘the gate’ through which the people entered, and it was duly witnessed by ‘the children of Heth.’[71] The fact that ‘a stranger and a sojourner’ could thus acquire landed property and hand it down to his descendants was in strict accordance with Babylonian law. As the Canaanite in Babylonia could buy land and leave it to his children, so too the Babylonian in Canaan could do the same. Even the technical words used in recording the deed of sale are of Babylonian origin. The shekel is the Babylonian siqlu, and the Babylonian was the first who spoke of ‘weighing silver’ in the sense of ‘paying money.’[72] The statement that the shekels were ‘current with the merchant’ takes us back to those Babylonian ‘merchants’ who played so great a part in the early Babylonian world. It was for them that Dungi, king of Ur, long before the birth of Abraham, had fixed the monetary standard which remained in use down to the later days of the Chaldæan monarchy. He had determined by law the weight and value of the maneh, of which the sixtieth part was a shekel, and only those manehs and shekels which conformed to it could be accepted by the Babylonian trader. The words of Genesis are a curious indication of the period of society to which they must belong.[73]
There was evolution in Babylonian law as in the law of all other countries; and though the early contracts remained a model for those of a later epoch, their style and form underwent change. The Assyrian and later Babylonian contracts resemble them, it is true, in their main outlines; but they have become more complicated, and the older phraseology is altered in many respects. The ‘elders’ no longer appear as witnesses; it is no longer needful to try cases of disputed title at the various gates of the city; and it is questionable whether foreigners could claim the same rights in regard to possessions in land that they did in the days of Amraphel and Arioch. The sale of the field of Machpelah belongs essentially to the early Babylonian and not to the Assyrian period.
It is only fragments of the life of Abraham that are brought before us in the pages of Genesis. They are like a series of pictures which have been saved from the shipwreck of the past. And the pictures are not always painted in the same colours. At one time the patriarch appears as ‘a mighty prince,’ as a rich and cultured Chaldæan immigrant, with armed bands of warriors under him with whom he can venture to attack even the army of the king of Elam. He is the confederate of the Amorite chieftains, the prince whom the Hittites of Hebron hear with respect. But at another time the colours on the canvas seem quite different. When the angels warn the patriarch of the approaching overthrow of the cities of the plain, they find him in the tent of a Bedâwi, leading the simple life of an uncultured nomad, and preparing the food of his guests with his own hands. Between this Bedâwi shêkh and the companion of the king of Gerar or the Pharaoh of Egypt the contrast is indeed great.
To the Western mind, however, the contrast is greater than it would be to the Oriental. The traveller in the East is well acquainted with wealthy Bedâwin shêkhs who live in the desert in barbaric simplicity, but, nevertheless, have their houses at Cairo or Damascus, where they indulge in all the luxury and splendour of Oriental life. Moreover, the narratives which have been combined in the book of Genesis do not all come from the same source. Some of them have been taken from written historical documents which breathe the atmosphere of the cultured city, of the educated scribe, and the luxurious court. Others, derived it may be from oral tradition, are filled with the spirit of the wanderer in the desert, and set before us the simple life and rude fare of the dweller in tents. The history of the patriarchs is, in fact, like Joseph’s coat of many colours. It is a series of pictures rather than a homogeneous whole. The materials of which it is composed differ widely in both character and origin. Some of them can be shown to have been contemporaneous with the events they record; some again to have been like the tales of their old heroes recounted by the nomad Arabs in the days before Islam as they sat at night round their camp-fires. The details and spirit of the story have necessarily caught the colour of the medium through which they have passed. The life of Abraham, doubtless, presented the contrasts still presented by that of a rich Bedâwi shêkh; at one time spent in the wild freedom and privations of the desert; at another amid the luxuries and culture of the town; but the contrasts have been heightened by the difference in the sources through which they have been handed down. Naturally, while the scribe would record only those phases of Abraham’s history which brought him into contact with the great world of kings and princes, of war and trade, the nomad reciter of ancient stories would dwell rather on such parts of it as he and his hearers could understand. For them Abraham would become a desert-wanderer like themselves.
This difference in the sources of the narrative explains why it is that the figure of Abraham so largely overshadows that of his son Isaac. Isaac seems almost swallowed up in that darkness of antiquity through which the figure of his father looms so largely. Apart from his dispute with Abimelech of Gerar, which reads like a repetition of the dispute between Abimelech and Abraham, there is little told of the life of Isaac which is not connected with his more famous father or son. Between Abraham and Jacob, the great ancestors of Israel, Isaac seems to intervene as merely a connecting link.
But the life of Isaac was that of a Bedâwi shêkh. The other side of his father’s life and character was lost. The forefather of Israel had ceased to be a Chaldæan, and had become simply a dweller in the desert, like the fugitive slaves from Egypt in after days. Even Hebron was left, and the life of Isaac was mainly passed on the northern edge of that desert in which his descendants were in later times to receive the Law. If he approached Canaan, it was only to Beer-sheba and Gerar on the southern skirts of Canaanitish territory, where the Bedâwin and their flocks still claimed to be masters. But his chief residence was further south, in the very heart of the wilderness.
Isaac was thus essentially a Bedâwi, a fit type of the phase of life through which the Israelites were destined to pass before their conquest of the Promised Land. With the politics and trade of the civilised world, accordingly, he never came into contact. There was nothing in his existence for the historian to chronicle; nothing which could bring his name into the written history of the time. If his memory were to be preserved at all, it could be only through the unwritten traditions of the desert, through the tales told of him among the desert tribes.
Once indeed, it is said, he had relations with a king. The king was one of those Canaanitish princelets with whose names the Tel el-Amarna tablets are filled. The dominions of Abimelech of Gerar were of small extent, and must have been barren in the extreme. The site of Gerar lies two hours south of Gaza,[74] and the territory of its king extended eastward as far as Beer-sheba. It was essentially a desert territory: during the greater part of the year the whole country is bare and sterile; only after rain does the wilderness break forth suddenly into green herbage.
In the story of Isaac’s dispute with Abimelech the writer of Genesis calls him ‘king of the Philistines,’ and speaks of his subjects as ‘Philistines.’ This, however, is an accommodation to the geography of a later day. In the age of the patriarchs the south-eastern corner of Palestine has not as yet been occupied by the Philistine immigrants. We have learned from the Egyptian monuments that they were pirates from the islands and coasts of the Greek Seas who did not seize upon the frontier cities of Southern Canaan until the time of the Pharaoh Meneptah, the son of Ramses II. Up to then, for more than three centuries, the frontier cities had been garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and included in the Egyptian empire. It was not till the period of the Exodus that the district passed into Philistine hands, and the old road into Egypt by the sea-coast became known as ‘the way of the Philistines.’
In speaking of the ‘Philistines,’ therefore, the writer of the book of Genesis is speaking proleptically. And in reading the narrative of Isaac’s dealings with Abimelech by the side of that of Abraham’s dealings with the same king, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that we have before us two versions of the same event. Doubtless, history repeats itself; disputes about the possession of wells in a desert-land can frequently recur, and it is possible that two kings of the same name may have followed one another on the throne of Gerar. But what does not seem very possible is that each of these kings should have had a ‘chief captain of his host’ called by the strange non-Semitic name of Phichol (Gen. xxi. 22; xxvi. 26); that each of them should have taken the wife of the patriarch, believing her to be his sister; or that Beer-sheba should twice have received the same name from the oaths sworn over it.
When we compare the two versions together, it is not difficult to see which of them is the more original. It is in the second that Abimelech is called ‘king of the Philistines’; in the first he is correctly entitled ‘king of Gerar.’ Abraham was justified in calling Sarah his sister; there was no ground and no reason for Isaac doing the same in the case of his own wife. Moreover, Beer-sheba had already received its name from Abraham, who had planted there an êshel or tamarisk, and ‘called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.’
The wife of Isaac was brought from Harran, from the members of Abraham’s race who had settled in Northern Syria, and there become an Aramæan family. She was the daughter of Bethuel, ‘the house of God,’ a proper name which is found in the Tel el-Amarna letters, where it also belongs to a native of Northern Syria.[75] Bethuel is the older form of Bethel, that anointed stone which, according to Semitic belief, was the special residence of divinity. There was something peculiarly appropriate in such a name at Harran, where the great temple of the Moon-god, the ‘Baal of Harran,’ was itself a Beth-el on a large scale.
That Isaac should have lived all his life long in the southern desert, and that his name should have been associated with none of the ancient sanctuaries of Canaan, Beer-sheba alone excepted, is perhaps curious when we bear in mind a passage in the prophecies of Amos (vii. 9), where it is with Northern Israel and not with Judah that the name of the patriarch is connected. Isaac, however, was as much the forefather of the Israelites of Samaria as he was of those of Jerusalem; and the use of his name by the prophet shows only that he was no mere Jewish hero, but was regarded as an ancestor of the whole Israelitish nation. For the whole of Israel, Isaac was no less historical than Abraham or Jacob.
That Isaac’s dwelling-place should have been in the desert of the south agrees well with the fact that he was the father of Edom as well as of Israel. He thus lived on the borderland of the two peoples who afterwards boasted of their descent from him.
Esau, from whom the Edomites traced their origin, was the elder of his two twin sons. The name has been connected with that of the Phœnician deity Usous, but Usous is really the eponymous god of the city of Usu, in the neighbourhood of Tyre. Esau took possession of the mountains of Seir. Here he partly absorbed, partly destroyed the older races, the Amalekites or Bedâwin whose descendants still prowl among the wadis of Edom, and the Horites whom a somewhat doubtful etymology would turn into Troglodytes or dwellers in caves. Edom itself, the ‘Red’ land, took its name from the red hue of its cliffs. It was a name which went back to a remote antiquity, for among the Egyptians also the desert-country which stretched away eastward into Edom was known as Desher, ‘the Red.’ The punning etymology in Genesis (xxv. 30) preserves a recollection of the true origin of the name.
The territories of Esau extended southward to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. Here were the towns of Elath and Eziongeber, through which the merchandise of the Indian Ocean was conveyed northward, enriching the merchants and princes of Edom in its passage through their land. To the north Edom was in touch with the peoples of Canaan. The wives of Esau, we are told, were ‘of the daughters of Canaan’ (Gen. xxxvi. 2); one of them at least was Hittite, and another, according to one account (Gen. xxvi. 34), bore the name of the ‘Jewess.’ But other wives were taken from the tribes of Arabia. Bashemath was the daughter of Ishmael and sister of a Nabathean chief, while Aholibamah was the daughter of a Horite who belonged to the primeval race of Seir.
Like the Ishmaelites, like the Israelites themselves, it was long before the Edomites submitted to the rule of a king. At first they were divided into tribes, each of them under a shêkh. In Israel the shêkhs were entitled ‘judges,’ a title borrowed from the Canaanite population; in Edom they bore the name of alûphim, which the Authorised Version renders by ‘dukes.’[76] The old name still survived down to the time of the Exodus, as we may gather from its use in the Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 15). But when the wanderings in the wilderness were almost over, and Israel was preparing to invade Palestine, the ‘dukes’ of Edom had already been superseded by kings. It was a ‘king of Edom’ to whom Moses sent messengers from Kadesh praying for a ‘passage through his border,’ and it was a king of Edom who refused the request. But the ancient spirit of independence still lingered; and, as we may gather from the extract from the Edomite chronicles preserved in Gen. xxxvi., the monarchy was elective. The son never succeeded the father on the throne, the royal dignity passed from one division of the kingdom to the other, and each city in turn became the capital.[77]
Though Esau was the elder, the birthright passed to the younger brother. Israelitish tradition knew of more than one occurrence which accounted for this. It was told how Esau had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage; it was also told how it had been stolen from him by the craft of his brother Jacob. Naturally, the first tradition was more favoured in Israel, the second in Edom, and the union of the two in the book of Genesis is a proof of the diligence with which the writer of it has gathered together all that was known of the past of his people as well as the impartiality with which he has used his materials. Perhaps both stories owed their preservation to the play upon words which was connected with them. The ‘red’ pottage served to explain the name of Edom, the craft of the younger son the name of Jacob.[78]
Upon the real origin of the latter name, however, recent discovery has thrown light. It is the third person singular of a verb, and is formed like numerous names of the same class in Arabic and Assyrian. But the third person singular of a verb implies a nominative, and the nominative was originally a divine name or title. In familiar use the nominative came to be dropped, and the shortened form of the name to be alone employed. The older form of the name Jacob has now been recovered from the monuments of Babylonia and Egypt. Among the Canaanites who appear as witnesses to Babylonian contracts of the age of Khammu-rabi, Mr. Pinches has found a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el, ‘God will recompense,’ ‘God will add.’[79] The same names, though written a little differently,[80] are met with in contracts earlier than the time of Moses, which have been discovered near Kaisariyeh, in Cappadocia, and are inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform characters and in a Babylonian dialect. We can thus trace them from the primitive home of Abraham to the neighbourhood of that Aramæan district of Northern Mesopotamia in which his father settled.
But this is not all. Among the places in Palestine conquered by Thothmes III. of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and recorded on the walls of his temple at Karnak, we find a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el. In Canaan, therefore, the names were already current; it may even be that in the town of Jacob-el we have a reminiscence of the patriarch, in Joseph-el a connection with the ancestor of the ‘House of Joseph.’ At all events, the name of Joseph-el follows immediately after that of the ‘Har’ or ‘Mountain’ of Ephraim, while that of Jacob-el is placed in the neighbourhood of Hebron.[81]
The name of Jacob-el can be carried still further back than the age of Thothmes III., further back probably than the age of the patriarch himself. There are Egyptian scarabs which bear the name of a Pharaoh called Jacob-el. The first part of the name is written just as it would be in Hebrew, and the Pharaoh is given all the titles of a legitimate Egyptian king. On one he is ‘the good God,’ on another ‘the son of the Sun,’ and ‘the giver of life.’ The scarabs belong to the period of the Hyksos, and in the Pharaoh Jacob-el we must accordingly see one of those Hyksos conquerors from Asia who ruled over Egypt for so many centuries. There was thus a Jacob in Egypt before the patriarch migrated there, and he belonged to that Hyksos race under whom Joseph rose to the highest honours of the state.[82]
The shortened form of the name is also found in the Babylonian texts; and it is probable that Egibi, the founder of the great banking and trading firm which carried on business in Babylonia down to the time of the Persian kings, had a name which is identical with it. At any rate the older forms of both ‘Jacob’ and ‘Joseph’ show that ‘Isaac’ too must be an abbreviation from an earlier ‘Isaac-el’ (Yitskhaq-êl). ‘God smileth’ would have been the primitive signification of the word.
The craft of Jacob was the cause of his flight to his mother’s family in Padan-Aram. He thus became that ‘wandering Aramæan’ of whom we read in Deuteronomy (xxvi. 5). On his way he rested at the great Beth-el of Central Palestine, and there in a vision beheld the angels of God ascending and descending the steps of limestone that were piled one upon the other to the gates of heaven.[83] There, too, he poured oil upon the sacred stone and consecrated it to the deity, and future generations revered it as a veritable Beth-el or ‘House of God.’
The name, in fact, we are told, was given to it by Jacob himself. ‘If I come again to my father’s house in peace,’ he said, ‘then shall Yahveh be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that Thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto Thee.’ The vow was in accordance with a Canaanitish custom which had originally come from Babylonia. From time immemorial the Babylonian temples had been supported by the tenth or tithe, which was levied on both king and people: it was not thought that the gods were asking too much when they demanded the tenth of the income which had been given to man by themselves. Among the Babylonian contract-tablets there are several which relate to the payment of the tithe as well as to the gifts that were made to a Bit-ili or Beth-el.[84]
Jacob’s vow was performed, at least in part, when once more he returned to Canaan. Then again ‘God appeared to him’ and changed the patriarch’s name. Then again, too, ‘he set up a pillar of stone; and he poured a drink-offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon. And Jacob called the name of the place where God spake with him Beth-el.’ This second account of the naming of the place doubtless comes from a different source from that which recorded Jacob’s dream, and is the account which was known to Hosea, the prophet of the northern kingdom. Modern critics have alleged that it is inconsistent with the first, and that consequently neither the one nor the other is historical. The compiler of the book of Genesis, however, thought otherwise; he has made no attempt to smooth over what the European scholar declares to be inconsistencies, and which therefore cannot have seemed inconsistencies to him. The Oriental mode of writing history, it must once more be remarked, is not the same as ours; and as it is with the ancient East that we are now concerned, it would be wiser to follow the judgment of the writer of Genesis than that of his European critics.
At Harran Jacob served his cousin Laban ‘for a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep.’ Such contracts of voluntary service are to be found in the Babylonian tablets of the age of Khammu-rabi and his predecessors. It was not at all unusual for a slave to be hired out to another master for a definite period of time; it sometimes happened that the master himself hired out his own services in a similar way.[85] In Babylonia the work was partly pastoral, partly agricultural; the semi-Bedâwi Jacob was a herdsman only. His cousin Laban bore a name which was also that of an Assyrian deity; and it may not be a mere coincidence that when Nabonidos, the last king of Babylonia, restored the great temple of the moon-god at Harran, he tells us that he began the task ‘by the art of the god Laban, the god of foundations and brickwork.’[86]
The two daughters of Laban bore names which had a familiar sound to the ear of a herdsman. Rachel means ‘ewe’; Leah is the Assyrian li’tu, ‘a cow.’ It is needless to recount the well-known story of the wooing of the younger daughter, and of the efforts made by Laban to retain Jacob in his service and marry both the sisters to him. Craft was met by craft; but in the end the ancestor of Israel proved more than a match for the wily Syrian. His cattle and riches multiplied like the children who were born to him, and a time came when the sons of Laban began to view with envy the poor relative who was robbing them of their patrimony. So Jacob fled, before harm had come to him, carrying with him his wives and children and all the wealth he had accumulated. Laban pursued and succeeded in overtaking the heavily-weighted caravan at the very spot where the frontiers of Aram and Canaan met together. There the cairn of stones was raised in which later generations saw a memorial of the pact that had been sworn between Jacob and his father-in-law. Henceforth the tie with Aram was broken: the wives of Jacob forgot the home of their father and looked to Canaan instead of Aram as the native land of their race. Over the cairn of Gilead the forefathers of Israel forswore for ever their Aramæan ties.
But Rachel had carried with her her father’s teraphim, those household gods on whose cult the welfare of the family seemed to depend. What they were like we may gather from the teraphim of David, which Michal placed on the couch of her husband, and so deceived the messengers of Saul (1 Sam. xix. 13-16). They must have had the shape of a man, and, at all events in the case of those of David, must have also been about a man’s size. Like the ephod and the Urim and Thummim, they were consulted as oracles (Zech. x. 2), and their use lingered among the Jews as late as the period of the Captivity. When Hosea depicts the coming desolation of Israel, he describes it as a time when ‘the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without a sacred pillar, and without an ephod and teraphim’ (Hos. iii. 4).
The final break between Jacob and the Aramæan portion of Terah’s family was marked by a change of name. From henceforth Jacob was to be distinctively the father of the children of Israel. He and his descendants were severed from the rest of their kinsmen whether in Padan-Aram, in Edom, or in the lands beyond the Jordan. Abraham had been the ‘father of many nations’; Jacob was to be the father of but one—of that chosen people to whom the character and worship of Yahveh were revealed.
We read of him in Hosea (xii. 3, 4), ‘By his strength he had power with God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed.’ What the Authorised Version translates ‘had power’ is sârâh and yâsar in Hebrew. The story of the mysterious struggle is told in full in the book of Genesis. The long caravan of Jacob had arrived at length at Mahanaim, ‘the two camps’ by the stream of the Jabbok, and from thence he sent messengers to his brother, who had already established his power in the mountains of Seir. In after days the name of the place was connected with the strange occurrence that there befel the patriarch. He was visited by the angels of God, nay, by God Himself. In the visions of the night he wrestled with one whom, when morning dawned, he believed to have been his God. He had seen God, as it were, face to face, and a popular etymology saw in the fact an explanation of the name of Peniel. When Hosea wrote his prophecies, the belief was too well established that man cannot ‘see God’s face and live,’ and the angel of God accordingly takes the place of God Himself. But when the narrative in Genesis was composed, a more primitive conception of the Divine nature still prevailed, and no reluctance was felt in stating exactly what the patriarch himself had believed. It was God with whom he had struggled, and from whom he had extorted a blessing, and a memory of the conflict and victory was preserved in the name of Israel, which Jacob henceforth bore.
The etymology, however, is really only one of those plays upon words of which the Biblical writers, like Oriental writers generally, are so fond. It has no scientific value, and never was intended to have any. Israel is, like Edom, not the name of an individual, but of the people of whom the individual was the ancestor. The name is formed like that of Jacob-el, and the abbreviated Jeshurun is used instead of it in the Song of Moses.[87] If the latter is correct, the root will not be sârâh, ‘he fought,’ or yâsar, ‘he is king,’ but yâshar, ‘to be upright,’ ‘to direct’; and Israel will signify ‘God has directed.’ Israel, in fact, will be the ‘righteous’ people who have been called to walk in the ways of the Lord.