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Title: Patriarchal Palestine
Author: Archibald Henry Sayce
Release Date: December 21, 2004 [EBook #14405]
Language: English
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PATRIARCHAL PALESTINE
BY
THE REV. A.H. SAYCE
PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY, OXFORD
WITH A MAP
PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE TRACT COMMITTEE
LONDON:
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE,
NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, CHARING CROSS, W.C.;
43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C.
BRIGHTON: 129, NORTH STREET.
NEW YORK: E. & J.B. YOUNG & CO.
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON & BUNGAY.
[Illustration: THE CHIEF PLACES MENTIONED IN THE BOOKS OF GENESIS AND
EXODUS]
PREFACE
A few years ago the subject-matter of the present volume might have been
condensed into a few pages. Beyond what we would gather from the Old
Testament, we knew but little about the history and geography of Canaan
before the age of its conquest by the Israelites. Thanks, however, to
the discovery and decipherment of the ancient monuments of Babylonia and
Assyria, of Egypt and of Palestine, all this is now changed. A flood of
light has been poured upon the earlier history of the country and its
inhabitants, and though we are still only at the beginning of our
discoveries we can already sketch the outlines of Canaanitish history,
and even fill them in here and there.
Throughout I have assumed that in the narrative of the Pentateuch we
have history and not fiction. Indeed the archaeologist cannot do
otherwise. Monumental research is making it clearer every day that the
scepticism of the so-called "higher criticism" is not justified in fact.
Those who would examine the proofs of this must turn to my book on _The
Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_. There I have written
purely as an archaeologist, who belongs to no theological school, and
consequently readers of the work must see in it merely the irreducible
minimum of confidence in the historical trustworthiness of the Old
Testament, with which oriental archaeology can be satisfied. But it is
obvious that this irreducible minimum is a good deal less than what a
fair-minded historian will admit. The archaeological facts support the
traditional rather than the so-called "critical" view of the age and
authority of the Pentateuch, and tend to show that we have in it not
only a historical monument whose statements can be trusted, but also
what is substantially a work of the great Hebrew legislator himself.
For those who "profess and call themselves Christians," however, there
is another side to the question besides the archaeological. The modern
"critical" views in regard to the Pentateuch are in violent
contradiction to the teaching and belief of the Jewish Church in the
time of our Lord, and this teaching and belief has been accepted by
Christ and His Apostles, and inherited by the Christian Church. It is a
teaching and belief which lies at the root of many of the dogmas of the
Church, and if we are to reject or revise it, we must at the same time
reject and revise historical Christianity. It is difficult to see how we
can call ourselves Christians in the sense which the term has borne for
the last eighteen hundred years, and at the same time repudiate or
modify, in accordance with our individual fancies, the articles of faith
which historical Christianity has maintained everywhere and at all
periods. For those who look beyond the covers of grammars and lexicons,
the great practical fact of historical Christianity must outweigh all
the speculations of individual scholars, however ingenious and elaborate
they may be. It is for the individual to harmonize his conclusions with
the immemorial doctrine of the Church, not for the Church to reconcile
its teaching with the theories of the individual. Christ promised that
the Spirit of God should guide His Apostles and their followers into
"all truth," and those who believe the promise cannot also believe that
the "Spirit of Truth" has been at any time a Spirit of illusion.
Oriental archaeology, at all events, is on the side of those who see in
the Hebrew patriarchs real men of flesh and blood, and who hold that in
the narratives of the Pentateuch we have historical records many of
which go back to the age of the events they describe. Each fresh
discovery made by the archaeologist yields fresh testimony to the truth
of the Old Testament stories. Since the manuscript of the present work
was ready for the press, two such discoveries have been made by Mr.
Pinches, to whom oriental archaeology and Biblical research are already
under such deep obligations, and it has been possible only to glance at
them in the text.
He has found a broken cuneiform tablet which once gave an account of the
reign of Khammurabi, the contemporary of Chedor-laomer and Arioch, of
the wars that he carried on, and of the steps by which he rose to the
supreme power in Babylonia, driving the Elamites out of it, overthrowing
his rival Arioch, and making Babylon for the first time the capital of a
united kingdom. Unfortunately the tablet is much broken, but what is
left alludes to his campaigns against Elam and Rabbatu--perhaps a city
of Palestine, of his reduction of Babylon, and of his successes against
Eri-Aku or Arioch of Larsa, Tudghulla or Tidal, the son of Gazza ... and
Kudur-Lagamar or Chedor-laomer himself. The Hebrew text of Genesis has
thus been verified even to the spelling of the proper names. The other
discovery of Mr. Pinches is still more interesting. The name of Ab-ramu
or Abram had already been found in Babylonian contracts of the age of
Khammurabi; Mr. Pinches has now found in them the specifically Hebrew
names of Ya'qub-ilu or Jacob-el and Yasup-ilu or Joseph-el. It will be
remembered that the names of Jacob-el and Joseph-el had already been
detected among the places in Palestine conquered by the Egyptian monarch
Thothmes III., and it had been accordingly inferred that the full names
of the Hebrew patriarchs must have been Jacob-el and Joseph-el. Jacob
and Joseph are abbreviations analogous to Jephthah by the side of
Jiphthah-el (Josh. xix. 14), of Jeshurun by the side of Isra-el, or of
the Egyptian Yurahma by the side of the Biblical Jerahme-el. As is
mentioned in a later page, a discovery recently made by Prof. Flinders
Petrie has shown that the name of Jacob-el was actually borne not only
in Babylonia, but also in the West. Scarabs exist, which he assigns to
the period when Egypt was ruled by invaders from Asia, and on which is
written the name of a Pharaoh Ya'aqub-hal or Jacob-el.
Besides the names of Jacob-el and Joseph-el, Mr. Pinches has met with
other distinctively Hebrew names, like Abdiel, in deeds drawn up in the
time of the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged. There were therefore
Hebrews--or at least a Hebrew-speaking population--living in Babylonia
at the period to which the Old Testament assigns the lifetime of
Abraham. But this is not all. As I pointed out five years ago, the name
of Khammurabi himself, like those of the rest of the dynasty of which he
was a member, are not Babylonian but South Arabian. The words with which
they are compounded, and the divine names which they contain, do not
belong to the Assyrian and Babylonian language, and there is a cuneiform
tablet in which they are given with their Assyrian translations. The
dynasty must have had close relations with South Arabia. This, however,
is not the most interesting part of the matter. The names are not South
Arabian only, they are Hebrew as well. That of Khammu-rabi, for
instance, is compounded with the name of the god 'Am, which is written
'Ammi in the name of his descendant Ammi-zaduqa, and 'Am or 'Ammi
characterizes not only South Arabia, but the Hebrew-speaking lands as
well. We need only mention names like Ammi-nadab or Ben-Ammi in
illustration of the fact. Equally Hebrew and South Arabian is _zaduqa_
or _zadoq_; but it was a word unknown to the Assyrian language of
Babylonia.
When Abraham therefore was born in Ur of the Chaldees, a dynasty was
ruling there which was not of Babylonian origin, but belonged to a race
which was at once Hebrew and South Arabian. The contract tablets prove
that a population with similar characteristics was living under them in
the country. Could there be a more remarkable confirmation of the
statements which we find in the tenth chapter of Genesis? There we read
that "unto Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg," the
ancestor of the Hebrews, while the name of the other was Joktan, the
ancestor of the tribes of South Arabia. The parallelism between the
Biblical account and the latest discovery of archaeological science is
thus complete, and makes it impossible to believe that the Biblical
narrative would have been compiled in Palestine at the late date to
which our modern "critics" would assign it. All recollection of the
facts embodied in it would then have long passed away.
Even while I write Prof. Hommel is announcing fresh discoveries which
bear on the early history of the Book of Genesis. Cuneiform tablets have
turned up from which we gather that centuries before the age of Abraham,
a king of Ur, Ine-Sin by name, had not only overrun Elam, but had also
conquered Simurru, the Zemar of Gen. x. 18, in the land of Phoenicia. A
daughter of the same king or of one of his immediate successors, was
high-priestess both of Elam and of Markhas or Mer'ash in Northern Syria,
while Kimas or Northern Arabia was overrun by the Babylonian arms.
Proofs consequently are multiplying of the intimate relations that
existed between Babylonia and Western Asia long before the era of the
Patriarchs, and we need no longer feel any surprise that Abraham should
have experienced so little difficulty in migrating into Canaan, or that
he should have found there the same culture as that which he had left
behind in Ur. The language and script of Babylonia must have been almost
as well known to the educated Canaanite as to himself, and the records
of the Patriarchal Age would have been preserved in the libraries of
Canaan down to the time of its conquest by the Israelites.
Perhaps a word or two is needed in explanation of the repetitions which
will be found here and there in the following pages. They have been
necessitated by the form into which I have been obliged to cast the
book. A consecutive history of Patriarchal Palestine cannot be written
at present, if indeed it ever can be, and the subject therefore has to
be treated under a series of separate heads. This has sometimes made
repetitions unavoidable without a sacrifice of clearness.
In conclusion it will be noted, that the name of the people who were
associated with the Philistines in their wars against Egypt and
occupation of Palestine has been changed from Zakkur to Zakkal. This has
been in consequence of a keen-sighted observation of Prof. Hommel. He
has pointed out that in a Babylonian text of the Kassite period, the
people in question are mentioned under the name of Zaqqalu, which
settles the reading of the hieroglyphic word. (See the _Proceedings_ of
the Society of Biblical Archaeology for May 1895.)
A.H. SAYCE.
_September_ 30, 1895.
THE KINGS OF EGYPT AND BABYLONIA DURING THE PATRIARCHAL AGE.
EGYPT.
Dynasties XV., XVI., and XVII.--Hyksos or Shepherd-kings (from Manetho).
Dynasty XV.--
yrs. mths.
1. Salatis reigned 13 0
2. Beon, or Bnon reigned 44 0
3. Apakhnas, or Pakhnan reigned 36 7
4. Apôphis I reigned 61 0
5. Yanias or Annas reigned 50 1
6. Assis reigned 49 2
Of the Sixteenth Dynasty nothing is known. Of the Seventeenth the
monuments have given us the names of Apôphis II. (Aa-user-Ra) and
Apôphis III. (Aa-ab-tani-Ra), in whose reign the war of independence
began under the native prince of Thebes, and lasted for four
generations.
Dynasty XVIII.-- Manetho.
1. Neb-pehuti-Ra, Ahmes (more than 20 Amosis.
years).
2. Ser-ka-Ra, Amon-hotep I., his son (20 years Amenophis I.
7 months.)
3. Aa-kheper-ka-Ra, Thothmes I., his son, and Chebron.
queen Amen-sit.
4. Aa-kheper-n-Ra, Thothmes II., his son, and Amensis.
wife Hatshepsu I. (more than 9 years).
5. Khnum-Amon, Hatshepsu II., Mâ-ka-Ra ...
his sister (more than 16 years).
6. Ra-men-Kheper, Thothmes III., her brother Misaphris.
(57 years, 11 months, 1 day, from March
20, B.C. 1503 to Feb. 14, B.C. 1449).
7. Aa-khepru-Ra, Amon-hotep II., his son Misphragmuthosis.
(more than 5 years).
8. Men-khepru-Ra, Thothmes IV., his son Touthmosis.
(more than 7 years).
9. Neb-mâ-Ra, Amon-hotep III., his son (more Amenophis II.
than 35 years), and queen Teie.
10. Nefer-khepru-Ra, Amon-hotep IV., Khu-n-Aten Horos.
(also called Khuriya), his son
(more than 17 years).
11. Ankh-khepru-Ra and queen Meri-Aten. Akherres.
12. Tut-ânkh-Amon Khepru-neb-Ra, and queen Rathotis.
Ankh-nes-Amon.
13. Aten-Ra-nefer-nefru-mer-Aten. ...
14. Ai kheper-khepru-ar-mâ-Ra, and queen ...
Thi (more than 4 years).
15. Hor-m-hib Mi-Amon Ser-khepru-ka (more Armais.
than 3 years).
Dynasty XIX.--
1. Men-pehuti-Ra, Ramessu I. (more than 2 years). Ramesses.
2. Men-mâ-Ra, Seti I., Mer-n-Ptah I. (more than Sethos.
27 years), his son.
3. User-mâ-Ra, Sotep-n-Ra, Ramessu II., Mi-Amon ...
(B.C. 1348-1281), his son.
4. Mer-n-Ptah II., Hotep-hi-ma Ba-n-Ra, Mi-Amon, Ammenephthes.
his son.
5. User-khepru-Ra, Seti II., Mer-n-Ptah III., his Sethos Ramesses.
brother.
6. Amon-mesu Hik-An Mer-Khâ-Ra Sotep-n-Ra, usurper. Amenemes.
7. Khu-n-Ra Sotep-n-Ra, Mer-n-Ptah IV., Si-Ptah Thuoris.
(more than 6 years), and queen Ta-user.
Dynasty XX.--
1. Set-nekht, Merer-Mi-Amon (recovered the kingdom from the
Phoenician Arisu).
2. Ramessu III., Hik-An, his son (more than 32 years).
3. Ramessu IV., Hik-Mâ Mi-Amon (more than 11 years).
4. Ramessu V., User-Mâ-s-Kheper-n-Ra Mi-Amon (more than 4 years).
5. Ramessu VI., Neb-mâ-Ra Mi-Amon Amon-hir-khopesh-f (Ramessu
Meri-Tum, a rival king in Northern Egypt).
6. Ramessu VII., At-Amon User-mâ-Ra Mi-Amon.
7. Ramessu VIII., Set-hir-khopesh-f Mi-Amon User-mâ-Ra Khu-n-Amon.
8. Ramessu IX., Si-Ptah S-khâ-n-Ra Mi-Amon (19 years).
9. Ramessu X., Nefer-ka-Ra Mi-Amon Sotep-n-Ra (more than 10 years).
10. Ramessu XI, Amon-hir-khopesh-f Kheper-mâ-Ra Sotep-n-Ra.
11. Ramessu XII., Men-mâ-Ra Mi-Amon Sotep-n-Ptah Khâ-m-Uas
(more than 27 years).
* * * * *
Dynasty I. of Babylon--
1. Sumu-abi, 15 years, B.C. 2458.
2. Sumu-la-ilu, his son, 35 years.
3. Zabû, his son, 14 years.
4. Abil-Sin, his son, 18 years.
5. Sin-muballidh, his son, 30 years.
6. Khammu-rabi, his son, 55 years (at first under the sovereignty of
Chedor-laomer, the Elamite; by the conquest of Eri-Aku and the Elamites
he unites Babylonia, B.C. 2320).
7. Samsu-iluna, his son, 35 years.
8. Ebisum, or Abi-esukh, his son, 25 years.
9. Ammi-satana, his son, 25 years.
10. Ammi-zaduga, his son, 21 years.
11. Samsu-satana, his son, 31 years.
Dynasty II. of Uru-azagga, B.C. 2154--
1. Anman, 51 (or 60) years.
2. Ki-nigas, 55 years.
3. Damki-ili-su, 46 years.
4. Iskipal, 15 years.
5. Sussi, his brother, 27 years.
6. Gul-kisar, 55 years.
7. Kirgal-daramas, his son, 50 years.
8. A-dara-kalama, his son, 28 years.
9. A-kur-du-ana, 26 years.
10. Melamma-kurkura, 6 years.
11. Bel-ga[mil?], 9 years.
Dynasty III., of the Kassites, B.C. 1786--
1. Gandis, or Gaddas, 16 years.
2. Agum-Sipak, his son, 22 years.
3. Guya-Sipak, his son, 22 years.
4. Ussi, his son, 8 years.
5. Adu-medas, ... years.
6. Tazzi-gurumas, ... years.
7. Agum-kak-rimi, his son, ...
years.
* * * * *
(The following order of succession is taken from Dr. Hilprecht.)
14. Kallimma-Sin.
15. Kudur-Bel.
16. Sagarakti-buryas, his son.
17. Kuri-galzu I.
18. Kara-indas,
19. Burna-buryas, his nephew, B.C. 1400.
20. Kara-Khardas, son of Kara-indas.
21. Nazi-bugas, or Su-zigas, an usurper.
22. Kuri-galzu II., son of Burna-buryas, 2. years.
23. Nazi-Maruttas, his son, 26 years.
24. Kadasman-Turgu, his son, 17 years.
25. Kadasman-Burias, his son, 2 years.
26. Gis-amme ti, 6 years.
27. Saga-rakti-suryas 13 years.
28. Kasbat, or Bibe-yasu, his son, 8 years.
29. Bel-nadin-sumi, 1 year 6 months.
30. Kadasman-Kharbe, 1 year 6 months.
31. Rimmon-nadin-sumi, 6 years.
32. Rimmon-sum-utsur, 30 years (including 7 years of occupation of
Babylon by the Assyrian king, Tiglath-Ninip).
33. Mile-Sipak, 15 years.
34. Merodach-baladan I., his son, 13 years.
35. Zamania-nadin-sunii I., 1 year.
36. Bel-sum-iddin, 3 years.
CHAPTER I
THE LAND
Patriarchal Palestine! There are some who would tell us that the very
name is a misnomer. Have we not been assured by the German critics and
their English disciples that there were no patriarchs and no Patriarchal
Age? And yet, the critics notwithstanding, the Patriarchal Age has
actually existed. While criticism, so-called, has been busy in
demolishing the records of the Pentateuch, archaeology, by the spade of
the excavator and the patient skill of the decipherer, has been equally
busy in restoring their credit. And the monuments of the past are a more
solid argument than the guesses and prepossessions of the modern
theorist. The clay tablet and inscribed stone are better witnesses to
the truth than literary tact or critical scepticism. That Moses and his
contemporaries could neither read nor write may have been proved to
demonstration by the critic; yet nevertheless we now know, thanks to
archaeological discovery, that it would have been a miracle if the
critic were right. The Pentateuch is, after all, what it professes to
be, and the records it contains are history and not romance.
The question of its authenticity involves issues more serious and
important than those which have to do merely with history or
archaeology. We are sometimes told indeed, in all honesty of purpose,
that it is a question of purely literary interest, without influence on
our theological faith. But the whole fabric of the Jewish Church in the
time of our Lord was based upon the belief that the Law of Moses came
from God, and that this God "is not a man that He should lie." And the
belief of the Jewish Church was handed on to the Christian Church along
with all its consequences. To revise that belief is to revise the dogmas
of the Christian Church as they have been held for the last eighteen
centuries; to reject it utterly is to reject the primary document of the
faith into which we have been baptized.
It is not, however, with theological matters that we are now concerned.
Patriarchal Palestine is for us the Palestine of the Patriarchal Age, as
it has been disclosed by archaeological research, not the Palestine in
which the revelation of God's will to man was to be made. It is
sufficient for us that the Patriarchal Age has been shown by modern
discovery to be a fact, and that in the narratives of the Book of
Genesis we have authentic records of the past. There was indeed a
Patriarchal Palestine, and the glimpses of it that we get in the Old
Testament have been illustrated and supplemented by the ancient
monuments of the Oriental world.
Whether the name of Palestine can be applied to the country with strict
accuracy at this early period is a different question. Palestine is
Philistia, the land of the Philistines, and the introduction of the name
was subsequent to the settlement of the Philistines in Canaan and the
era of their victories over Israel. As we shall see later on, it is
probable that they did not reach the Canaanitish coast until the
Patriarchal Age was almost, if not entirely, past Their name does not
occur in the cuneiform correspondence which was carried on between
Canaan and Egypt in the century before the Exodus, and they are first
heard of as forming part of that great confederacy of northern tribes
which attacked Egypt and Canaan in the days of Moses. But, though the
term Canaan would doubtless be more correct than Palestine, the latter
has become so purely geographical in meaning that we can employ it
without reference to history or date. Its signification is too familiar
to cause mistakes, and it can therefore be used proleptically, just as
the name of the Philistines themselves is used proleptically in the
twenty-first chapter of Genesis. Abimelech was king of a people who
inhabited the same part of the country as the Philistines in later
times, and were thus their earlier representatives.
The term "Palestine" then is used geographically without any reference
to its historical origin. It denotes the country which is known as
Canaan in the Old Testament, which was promised to Abraham and conquered
by his descendants. It is the land in which David ruled and in which
Christ was born, where the prophets prepared the way for the Gospel and
the Christian Church was founded.
Shut in between the Desert of Arabia and the Mediterranean Sea on the
east and west, it is a narrow strip of territory, for the most part
mountainous, rugged, and barren. Northward the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon
come to meet it from Syria, the Anti-Lebanon culminating in the lofty
peaks and precipitous ravines of Mount Hermon (9383 feet above the level
of the sea), while Lebanon runs southward till it juts out into the sea
in its sacred headland of Carmel. The fertile plain of Esdraelon or
Megiddo separates the mountains of the north from those of the south.
These last form a broken plateau between the Jordan and the Dead Sea on
the one side and the Plain of Sharon and the sea-coast of the
Philistines on the other, until they finally slope away into the arid
desert of the south. Here, on the borders of the wilderness, was
Beersheba the southern limit of the land in the days of the monarchy,
Dan, its northern limit, lying far away to the north at the foot of
Hermon, and not far from the sources of the Jordan.
Granite and gneiss, overlaid with hard dark sandstone and masses of
secondary limestone, form as it were the skeleton of the country. Here
and there, at Carmel and Gerizim, patches of the tertiary nummulite of
Egypt make their appearance, and in the plains of Megiddo and the coast,
as well as in the "Ghor" or valley of the Jordan, there is rich alluvial
soil. But elsewhere all is barren or nearly so, cultivation being
possible only by terracing the cliffs, and bringing the soil up to them
from the plains below with slow and painful labour. It has often been
said that Palestine was more widely cultivated in ancient times than it
is to-day. But if so, this was only because a larger area of the
cultivable ground was tilled. The plains of the coast, which are now
given over to malaria and Beduin thieves, were doubtless thickly
populated and well sown. But of ground actually fit for cultivation
there could not have been a larger amount than there is at present.
It was not in any way a well-wooded land. On the slopes of the Lebanon
and of Carmel, it is true, there were forests of cedar-trees, a few of
which still survive, and the Assyrian kings more than once speak of
cutting them down or using them in their buildings at Nineveh. But south
of the Lebanon forest trees were scarce; the terebinth was so unfamiliar
a sight in the landscape as to become an object of worship or a
road-side mark. Even the palm grew only on the sea-coast or in the
valley of the Jordan, and the tamarisk and sycamore were hardly more
than shrubs.
Nevertheless when the Israelites first entered Canaan, it was in truth a
land "flowing with milk and honey." Goats abounded on the hills, and the
bee of Palestine, though fierce, is still famous for its honey-producing
powers. The Perizzites or "fellahin" industriously tilled the fields,
and high-walled cities stood on the mountain as well as on the plain.
The highlands, however, were deficient in water. A few streams fall into
the sea south of Carmel, but except in the spring, when they have been
swollen by the rains, there is but little water in them. The Kishon,
which irrigates the plain of Megiddo, is a more important river, but it
too is little more than a mountain stream. In fact, the Jordan is the
only river in the true sense of the word which Palestine possesses.
Rising to the north of the waters of Merom, now called Lake Hûleh, it
flows first into the Lake of Tiberias, and then through a long deep
valley into the Dead Sea. Here at a depth of 1293 feet below the level
of the sea it is swallowed up and lost; the sea has no outlet, and parts
with its stagnant waters through evaporation alone. The evaporation has
made it intensely salt, and its shores are consequently for the most
part the picture of death.
In the valley of the Jordan, on the other hand, vegetation is as
luxuriant and tropical as in the forests of Brazil. Through a dense
undergrowth of canes and shrubs the river forces its way, rushing
forward towards its final gulf of extinction with a fall of 670 feet
since it left the Lake of Tiberias. But the distance thus travelled by
it is long in comparison with its earlier fall of 625 feet between Lake
Hûleh and the Sea of Galilee. Here it has cut its way through a deep
gorge, the cliffs of which rise up almost sheer on either side.
The Jordan has taken its name from its rapid fall. The word comes from a
root which signifies "to descend," and the name itself means "the
down-flowing." We can trace it back to the Egyptian monuments of the
nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the
Oppression, has inscribed it on the walls of Karnak, and Ramses III.,
who must have reigned while the Israelites were still in the wilderness,
enumerates the "Yordan" at Medînet Habu among his conquests in
Palestine. In both cases it is associated with "the Lake of Rethpana,"
which must accordingly be the Egyptian name of the Dead Sea. Rethpana
might correspond with a Hebrew Reshphôn, a derivative from Resheph, the
god of fire. Canaanite mythology makes the sparks his "children" (Job v.
7) and it may be, therefore, that in this old name of the Dead Sea we
have a reference to the overthrow of the cities of the plain.
Eastward of the Dead Sea and the Jordan the country is again mountainous
and bare. Here were the territories of Reuben and Gad, and the
half-tribe of Manasseh; here also were the kingdoms of Moab and Ammon,
of Bashan and the Amorites. Here too was the land of Gilead, south of
the Lake of Tiberias and north of the Dead Sea.
We can read the name of Muab or Moab on the base of the second of the
six colossal statues which Ramses II. erected in front of the northern
pylon of the temple of Luxor. It is there included among his conquests.
The statue is the only Egyptian monument on which the name has hitherto
been found. But this single mention is sufficient to guarantee its
antiquity, and to prove that in the days before the Exodus it was
already well known in Egypt.
To the north of Moab came the kingdom of Ammon, or the children of Ammi.
The name of Ammon was a derivative from that of the god Ammi or Ammo,
who seems to have been regarded as the ancestor of the nation, and "the
father of the children of Ammon" was accordingly called Ben-Ammi, "the
son of Ammi" (Gen. xix. 38). Far away in the north, close to the
junction of the rivers Euphrates and Sajur, and but a few miles to the
south of the Hittite stronghold of Carchemish, the worship of the same
god seems to have been known to the Aramaean tribes. It was here that
Pethor stood, according to the Assyrian inscriptions, and it was from
Pethor that the seer Balaam came to Moab to curse the children of
Israel. Pethor, we are told, was "by the river (Euphrates) of the land
of the children of Ammo," where the word represents a proper name (Num.
xxii. 5). To translate it "his people," as is done by the Authorized
Version, makes no sense. On the Assyrian monuments Ammon is sometimes
spoken of as Beth-Ammon, "the house of Ammon," as if Ammon had been a
living man.
Like Moab, Ammon was a region of limestone mountains and barren cliffs.
But there were fertile fields on the banks of the Jabbok, the sources of
which rose not far from the capital Rabbath.
North of Gilead and the Yarmuk was the volcanic plateau of Bashan,
Ziri-Basana, or "the Plain of Bashan," as it is termed in the cuneiform
tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Its western slope towards the Lakes of Merom
and Tiberias was known as Golan (now Jolân); its eastern plateau of
metallic lava was Argob, "the stony" (now El Lejja). Bashan was included
in the Haurân, the name of which we first meet with on the monuments of
the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal. To the north it was bounded by
Ituraea, so named from Jetur, the son of Ishmael (Gen. xxv. 15), the
road through Ituraea (the modern Jedur) leading to Damascus and its
well-watered plain.
The gardens of Damascus lie 2260 feet above the sea. In the summer the
air is cooled by the mountain breezes; in the winter the snow sometimes
lies upon the surface of the land. Westward the view is closed by the
white peaks of Anti-Lebanon and Hermon; eastward the eye wanders over a
green plain covered with the mounds of old towns and villages, and
intersected by the clear and rapid streams of the Abana and Pharphar.
But the Abana has now become the Barada, or "cold one," while the
Pharphar is the Nahr el-Awaj.
The Damascus of to-day stands on the site of the city from which St.
Paul escaped, and "the street which is called Straight" can still be
traced by its line of Roman columns. But it is doubtful whether the
Damascus of the New Testament and of to-day is the same as the Damascus
of the Old Testament. Where the walls of the city have been exposed to
view, we see that their Greek foundations rest on the virgin soil; no
remains of an earlier period lie beneath them. It may be, therefore,
that the Damascus of Ben-Hadad and Hazael is marked rather by one of the
mounds in the plain than by the modern town. In one of these the stone
statue of a man, in the Assyrian style, was discovered a few years ago.
An ancient road leads from the peach-orchards of Damascus, along the
banks of the Abana and over Anti-Lebanon, to the ruins of the temple of
the Sun-god at Baalbek. The temple as we see it is of the age of the
Antonines, but it occupies the place of one which stood in Heliopolis,
the city of the Sun-god, from immemorial antiquity. Relics of an older
epoch still exist in the blocks of stone of colossal size which serve as
the foundation of the western wall. Their bevelling reminds us of
Phoenician work.
Baalbek was the sacred city of the Bek'a, or "cleft" formed between
Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon by the gorge through which the river Litâny
rushes down to the sea. Once and once only is it referred to in the Old
Testament. Amos (i. 5) declares that the Lord "will break the bar of
Damascus and cut off the inhabitant from Bikath-On"--the Bek'a of On.
The name of On reminds us that the Heliopolis of Egypt, the city of the
Egyptian Sun-god, was also called On, and the question arises whether
the name and worship of the On of Syria were not derived from the On of
Egypt. For nearly two centuries Syria was an Egyptian province, and the
priests of On in Egypt may well have established themselves in the
"cleft" valley of Coele-Syria.
From Baalbek, the city of "Baal of the Bek'a," the traveller makes his
way across Lebanon, and under the snows of Jebel Sannîn--nearly 9000
feet in height--to the old Phoenician city of Beyrout. Beyrout is
already mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna under the
name of Beruta or Beruna, "the cisterns." It was already a seaport of
Phoenicia, and a halting-place on the high road that ran along the
coast.
The coastland was known to the Greeks and Romans as Phoenicia, "the land
of the palm." But its own inhabitants called it Canaan, "the lowlands."
It included not only the fringe of cultivated land by the sea-shore, but
the western slopes of the Lebanon as well. Phoenician colonies and
outposts had been planted inland, far away from the coast, as at Laish,
the future Dan, where "the people dwelt careless," though "they were far
away from the Sidonians," or at Zemar (the modern Sumra) and Arka (still
called by the same name). The territory of the Phoenicians stretched
southward as far as Dor (now Tanturah), where it met the advance guard
of the Philistines.
Such was Palestine, the promised home of Israel. It was a land of rugged
and picturesque mountains, interspersed with a few tracts of fertile
country, shut in between the sea and the ravine of the Jordan, and
falling away into the waterless desert of the south. It was, too, a land
of small extent, hardly more than one hundred and sixty miles in length
and sixty miles in width. And even this amount of territory was
possessed by the Israelites only during the reigns of David and Solomon.
The sea-coast with its harbours was in the hands of the Phoenicians and
the Philistines, and though the Philistines at one time owned an
unwilling allegiance to the Jewish king, the Phoenicians preserved their
independence, and even Solomon had to find harbours for his merchantmen,
not on the coast of his own native kingdom, but in the distant Edomite
ports of Eloth and Ezion-geber, in the Gulf of Aqabah. With the loss of
Edom Judah ceased to have a foreign trade.
The Negeb, or desert of the south, was then, what it still is, the haunt
of robbers and marauders. The Beduin of to-day are the Amalekites of Old
Testament history; and then, as now, they infested the southern frontier
of Judah, wasting and robbing the fields of the husbandman, and allying
themselves with every invader who came from the south, Saul, indeed,
punished them, as Romans and Turks have punished them since; but the
lesson is remembered only for a short while: when the strong hand is
removed, the "sons of the desert" return again like the locusts to their
prey.
It is true that the Beduin now range over the loamy plains and encamp
among the marshes of Lake Hûleh, where in happier times their presence
was unknown. But this is the result of a weak and corrupt government,
added to the depopulation of the lowlands. There are traces even in the
Old Testament that in periods of anarchy and confusion the Amalekites
penetrated far into the country in a similar fashion. In the Song of
Deborah and Barak Ephraim is said to have contended against them, and
accordingly "Pirathon in the land of Ephraim" is described as being "in
the mount of the Amalekites" (Judges xii. 15). In the cuneiform tablets
of Tel el-Amarna, too, there is frequent mention of the "Plunderers" by
whom the Beduin, the Shasu of the Egyptian texts, must be meant, and who
seem to have been generally ready at hand to assist a rebellious vassal
or take part in a civil feud.
Lebanon, the "white" mountain, took its name from its cliffs of
glistening limestone. In the early days of Canaan it was believed to be
the habitation of the gods, and Phoenician inscriptions exist dedicated
to Baal-Lebanon, "the Baal of Lebanon." He was the special form of the
Sun-god whose seat was in the mountain-ranges that shut in Phoenicia on
the east, and whose spirit was supposed to dwell in some mysterious way
in the mountains themselves. But there were certain peaks which lifted
themselves up prominently to heaven, and in which consequently the
sanctity of the whole range was as it were concentrated. It was upon
their summits that the worshipper felt himself peculiarly near the God
of heaven, and where therefore the altar was built and the sacrifice
performed. One of these peaks was Hermon, "the consecrated," whose name
the Greeks changed into Harmonia, the wife of Agenor the Phoenician.
From its top we can see Palestine spread as it were before us, and
stretching southwards to the mountains of Judah. The walls of the
temple, which in Greek times took the place of the primitive altar, can
still be traced there, and on its slopes, or perched above its ravines,
are the ruins of other temples of Baal--at Dêr el-'Ashair, at Rakleh, at
Ain Hersha, at Rashêyat el-Fukhâr--all pointing towards the central
sanctuary on the summit of the mountain.
The name of Hermon, "the consecrated," was but an epithet, and the
mountain had other and more special names of its own. The Sidonians, we
are told (Deut. iii. 9), called it Sirion, and another of its titles was
Sion (Deut. iv. 48), unless indeed this is a corrupt reading for Sirion.
Its Amorite name was Shenir (Deut. iii. 9), which appears as Saniru in
an Assyrian inscription, and goes back to the earliest dawn of history.
When the Babylonians first began to make expeditions against the West,
long before the birth of Abraham, the name of Sanir was already known.
It was then used to denote the whole of Syria, so that its restriction
to Mount Hermon alone must have been of later date.
Another holy peak was Carmel, "the fruitful field," or perhaps
originally "the domain of the god." It was in Mount Carmel that the
mountain ranges of the north ended finally, and the altar on its summit
could be seen from afar by the Phoenician sailors. Here the priests of
Baal called in vain upon their god that he might send them rain, and
here was "the altar of the Lord" which Elijah repaired.
The mountains of the south present no striking peak or headland like
Hermon and Carmel. Even Tabor belongs to the north. Ebal and Gerizim
alone, above Shechem, stand out among their fellows, and were venerated
as the abodes of deity from the earliest times. The temple-hill at
Jerusalem owed its sanctity rather to the city within the boundaries of
which it stood than to its own character. In fact, the neighbouring
height of Zion towered above it. The mountains of the south were rather
highlands than lofty chains and isolated peaks.
But on this very account they played an important part in the history of
the world. They were not too high to be habitable; they were high enough
to protect their inhabitants against invasion and war. "Mount Ephraim,"
the block of mountainous land of which Shechem and Samaria formed the
centre, and at the southern extremity of which the sacred city of Shiloh
stood, was the natural nucleus of a kingdom, like the southern block of
which Hebron and Jerusalem were similarly the capitals. Here there were
valleys and uplands in which sufficient food could be grown for the
needs of the population, while the cities with their thick and lofty
walls were strongholds difficult to approach and still more difficult to
capture. The climate was bracing, though the winters were cold, and it
reared a race of hardy warriors and industrious agriculturists. The want
of water was the only difficulty; in most cases the people were
dependent on rain-water, which they preserved in cisterns cut out of the
rock.
This block of southern mountains was the first and latest stronghold of
Israel. It constituted, in fact, the kingdoms of Samaria and Judah. Out
of it, at Shechem, came the first attempt to found a monarchy in Israel,
and thus unite the Israelitish tribes; out of it also came the second
and more successful attempt under Saul the Benjamite and David the Jew.
The Israelites never succeeded in establishing themselves on the
sea-coast, and their possession of the plain of Megiddo and the southern
slopes of the Lebanon was a source of weakness and not of strength. It
led eventually to the overthrow of the kingdom of Samaria. The northern
tribes in Galilee were absorbed by the older population, and their
country became "Galilee of the Gentiles," rather than an integral part
of Israel. The plain of Megiddo was long held by the Canaanites, and up
to the last was exposed to invasion from the sea-coast. It was, in fact,
the battle-field of Palestine. The army of the invader or the conqueror
marched along the edge of the sea, not through the rugged paths and
dangerous defiles of the mountainous interior, and the plain of Megiddo
was the pass which led them into its midst. The possession of the plain
cut off the mountaineers of the north from their brethren in the south,
and opened the way into the heart of the mountains themselves.
But to possess the plain was also to possess chariots and horsemen, and
a large and disciplined force. The guerilla warfare of the mountaineer
was here of no avail. Success lay on the side of the more numerous
legions and the wealthier state, on the side of the assailant and not of
the assailed.
Herein lay the advantage of the kingdom of Judah. It was a compact
state, with no level plain to defend, no outlying territories to
protect. Its capital stood high upon the mountains, strongly fortified
by nature and difficult of access. While Samaria fell hopelessly and
easily before the armies of Assyria, Jerusalem witnessed the fall of
Nineveh itself.
What was true of the later days of Israelitish history was equally true
of the age of the patriarchs. The strength of Palestine lay in its
southern highlands; whoever gained possession of these was master of the
whole country, and the road lay open before him to Sinai and Egypt. But
to gain possession of them was the difficulty, and campaign after
campaign was needed before they could be reduced to quiet submission. In
the time of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty Jerusalem was already the
key to Southern Palestine.
Geographically, Palestine was thus a country of twofold character, and
its population was necessarily twofold as well. It was a land of
mountain and plain, of broken highlands and rocky sea-coast. Its people
were partly mountaineers, active, patriotic, and poor, with a tendency
to asceticism; partly a nation of sailors and merchants, industrious,
wealthy, and luxurious, with no sense of country or unity, and
accounting riches the supreme end of life. On the one hand, it gave the
world its first lessons in maritime exploration and trade; on the other
it has been the religious teacher of mankind.
In both respects its geographical position has aided the work of its
people. Situated midway between the two great empires of the ancient
Oriental world, it was at once the high road and the meeting-place of
the civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia. Long before Abraham migrated
to Canaan it had been deeply interpenetrated by Babylonian culture and
religious ideas, and long before the Exodus it had become an Egyptian
province. It barred the way to Egypt for the invader from Asia; it
protected Asia from Egyptian assault. The trade of the world passed
through it and met in it; the merchants of Egypt and Ethiopia could
traffic in Palestine with the traders of Babylonia and the far East. It
was destined by nature to be a land of commerce and trade.
And yet while thus forming a highway from the civilization of the
Euphrates to that of the Nile, Palestine was too narrow a strip of
country to become itself a formidable kingdom. The empire of David
scarcely lasted for more than a single generation, and was due to the
weakness at the same time of both Egypt and Assyria. With the Arabian
desert on the one side and the Mediterranean on the other, it was
impossible for Canaan to develop into a great state. Its rocks and
mountains might produce a race of hardy warriors and energetic thinkers,
but they could not create a rich and populous community. The Phoenicians
on the coast were driven towards the sea, and had to seek in maritime
enterprise the food and wealth which their own land refused to grant.
Palestine was essentially formed to be the appropriator and carrier of
the ideas and culture of others, not to be itself their origin and
creator.
But when the ideas had once been brought to it they were modified and
combined, improved and generalized in a way that made them capable of
universal acceptance. Phoenician art is in no way original; its elements
have been drawn partly from Babylonia, partly from Egypt; but their
combination was the work of the Phoenicians, and it was just this
combination which became the heritage of civilized man. The religion of
Israel came from the wilderness, from the heights of Sinai, and the
palm-grove of Kadesh, but it was in Palestine that it took shape and
developed, until in the fullness of time the Messiah was born. Out of
Canaan have come the Prophets and the Gospel, but the Law which lay
behind them was brought from elsewhere.
CHAPTER II
THE PEOPLE
In the days of Abraham, Chedor-laomer, king of Elam and lord over the
kings of Babylonia, marched westward with his Babylonian allies, in
order to punish his rebellious subjects in Canaan. The invading army
entered Palestine from the eastern side of the Jordan. Instead of
marching along the sea-coast, it took the line of the valley of the
Jordan. It first attacked the plateau of Bashan, and then smote "the
Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnaim, and the Zuzim in Ham, and the Emim in the
plain of Kiriathaim." Then it passed into Mount Seir, and subjugated the
Horites as far as El-Paran "by the wilderness." Thence it turned
northward again through the oasis of En-mishpat or Kadesh-barnea, and
after smiting the Amalekite Beduin, as well as the Amorites in
Hazezon-tamar, made its way into the vale of Siddim. There the battle
took place which ended in the defeat of the king of Sodom and his
allies, who were carried away captive to the north. But at Hobah, "on
the left hand of Damascus," the invaders were overtaken by "Abram the
Hebrew," who dwelt with his Amorite confederates in the plain of Mamre,
and the spoil they had seized was recovered from them.
The narrative gives us a picture of the geography and ethnology of
Palestine as it was at the beginning of the Patriarchal Age. Before that
age was over it had altered very materially; the old cities for the most
part still remained, but new races had taken the place of the older
ones, new kingdoms had arisen, and the earlier landmarks had been
displaced. The Amalekite alone continued what he had always been, the
untamable nomad of the southern desert.
Rephaim or "Giants" was a general epithet applied to the prehistoric
population of the country. Og, king of Bashan in the time of the Exodus,
was "of the remnant of the Rephaim" (Deut. iii. 11); but so also were
the Anakim in Hebron, the Emim in Moab, and the Zamzummim in Ammon
(Deut. ii. 11, 20). Doubtless they represented a tall race in comparison
with the Hebrews and Arabs of the desert; and the Israelitish spies
described themselves as grasshoppers by the side of them (Numb. xiii.
33). It is possible, however, that the name was really an ethnic one,
which had only an accidental similarity in sound to the Hebrew word for
"giants." At all events, in the list of conquered Canaanitish towns
which the Pharaoh Thothmes III. of Egypt caused to be engraved on the
walls of Karnak, the name of Astartu or Ashteroth Karnaim is followed by
that of Anaurepâ, in which Mr. Tomkins proposes to see On-Repha, "On of
the Giant(s)." In the close neighbourhood in classical days stood Raphôn
or Raphana, Arpha of the Dekapolis, now called Er-Râfeh, and in Raphôn
it is difficult not to discern a reminiscence of the Rephaim of Genesis.
Did these Rephaim belong to the same race as the Emim and the Anakim, or
were the latter called Rephaim or "Giants" merely because they
represented the tall prehistoric population of Canaan? The question can
be more easily asked than answered. We know from the Book of Genesis
that Amorites as well as Hittites lived at Hebron, or in its immediate
vicinity. Abram dwelt in the plain of Mamre along with three Amorite
chieftains, and Hoham, king of Hebron, who fought against Joshua, is
accounted among the Amorites (Josh. x. 1). The Anakim may therefore have
been an Amorite tribe. They held themselves to be the descendants of
Anak, an ancient Canaanite god, whose female counterpart was the
Phoenician goddess Onka. But, on the other hand, the Amorites at Hebron
may have been intruders; we know that Hebron was peculiarly a Hittite
city, and it is at Mamre rather than at Hebron that the Amorite
confederates of Abram had their home. It is equally possible that the
Anakim themselves may have been the stranger element; we hear nothing
about them in the days of the patriarchs, and it is only when the
Israelites prepare to enter Canaan that they first make their appearance
upon the stage.
Og, king of Bashan, however, was an Amorite; of this we are assured in
the Book of Deuteronomy (iii. 8), and it is further said of him that he
only "remained of the remnant of the Rephaim." The expression is a
noticeable one, as it implies that the older population had been for the
most part driven out. And such, in fact, was the case. At Rabbath, the
capital of Ammon, the basalt sarcophagus of the last king of Bashan was
preserved; but the king and his people had alike perished. Ammonites and
Israelites had taken their place.
The children of Ammon had taken possession of the land once owned by the
Zamzummim (Deut. ii. 20). The latter are called Zuzim in the narrative
of Genesis, and they are said to have dwelt in Ham. But Zuzim and Ham
are merely faulty transcriptions from a cuneiform text of the Hebrew
Zamzummim and Ammon, and the same people are meant both in Genesis and
in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy also the Emim are mentioned, and their
geographical position defined. They were the predecessors of the
Moabites, and like the Zamzummim, "a people great and many and tall,"
whom the Moabites expelled doubtless at the same time as that at which
the Ammonites conquered the Zamzummim. The "plain of Kiriathaim," or
"the two cities," must have lain south of the Arnon, where Ar and Kir
Haraseth were built.
South of the Emim, in the rose-red mountains of Seir, afterwards
occupied by the Edomites, came the Horites, whose name is generally
supposed to be derived from a Hebrew word signifying "a cave." They have
therefore been regarded as Troglodytes, or cave-dwellers, a savage race
of men who possessed neither houses nor settled home. But it is quite
possible to connect the name with another word which means "white," and
to see in them the representatives of a white race. The name of Hor is
associated with Beth-lehem, and Caleb, of the Edomite tribe of Kenaz, is
called "the son of Hur" (1 Chron. ii. 50, iv. 4). There is no reason for
believing that cave-dwellers ever existed in that part of Palestine.
The discovery of the site of Kadesh-barnea is due in the first instance
to Dr. Rowlands, secondly to the archaeological skill of Dr. Clay
Trumbull. It is still known as 'Ain Qadîs, "the spring of Qadis," and
lies hidden within the block of mountains which rise in the southern
desert about midway between Mount Seir and the Mediterranean Sea. The
water still gushes out of the rock, fresh and clear, and nourishes the
oasis that surrounds it. It has been marked out by nature to be a
meeting-place and "sanctuary" of the desert tribes. Its central
position, its security from sudden attack, and its abundant supply of
water all combined to make it the En-Mishpat or "Spring of Judgment,"
where cases were tried and laws enacted. It was here that the Israelites
lingered year after year during their wanderings in the wilderness, and
it was from hence that the spies were sent out to explore the Promised
Land. In those days the mountains which encircled it were known as "the
mountains of the Amorites" (Deut. i. 19, 20). In the age of the
Babylonian invasion, however, the Amorites had not advanced so far to
the south. They were as yet only at Hazezon-tamar, the "palm-grove" on
the western shore of the Dead Sea, which a later generation called
En-gedi (2 Chron. xx. 2). En-Mishpat was still in the hands of the
Amalekites, the lords of "all the country" round about.
The Amalekites had not as yet intermingled with the Ishmaelites, and
their Beduin blood was still pure. They were the Shasu or "Plunderers"
of the Egyptian inscriptions, sometimes also termed the Sitti, the Sute
of the cuneiform texts. Like their modern descendants, they lived by the
plunder of their more peaceful neighbours. As was prophesied of Ishmael,
so could it have been prophesied of the Amalekites, that their "hand
should be against every man, and every man's hand against" them. They
were the wild offspring of the wilderness, and accounted the first-born
of mankind (Numb. xxiv. 20).
From En-Mishpat the Babylonian forces marched northward along the
western edge of the Dead Sea. Leaving Jerusalem on their left, they
descended into the vale of Siddim, where they found themselves in the
valley of the Jordan, and consequently in the land of the Canaanites. As
we are told in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), while "the Amalekites
dwell in the land of the south, and the Hittites and the Jebusites and
Amorites dwell in the mountains, the Canaanites dwell by the sea and by
the coast of Jordan."
The word Canaan, as we have seen, meant "the lowlands," and appears
sometimes in a longer, sometimes in a shorter form. The shorter form is
written Khna by the Greeks: in the Tel el-Amarna tablets it is
Kinakhkhi, while Canaan, the longer form, is Kinakhna. It is this longer
form which alone appears in the hieroglyphic texts. Here we read how
Seti I. destroyed the Shasu or Amalekites from the eastern frontier of
Egypt to "the land of Kana'an," and captured their fortress of the same
name which Major Conder has identified with Khurbet Kan'an near Hebron.
It was also the longer form which was preserved among the Israelites as
well as among the Phoenicians, the original inhabitants of the
sea-coast. Coins of Laodicea, on the Orontes, bear the inscription,
"Laodicea a metropolis in Canaan," and St. Augustine states that in his
time the Carthaginian peasantry of Northern Africa, if questioned as to
their descent, still answered that they were "Canaanites." (_Exp. Epist.
ad Rom._ 13.)
In course of time the geographical signification of the name came to be
widely extended beyond its original limits. Just as Philistia, the
district of the Philistines, became the comprehensive Palestine, so
Canaan, the land of the Canaanites of the coast and the valley, came to
denote the whole of the country between the Jordan and the sea. It is
already used in this sense in the cuneiform correspondence of Tel
el-Amarna. Already in the century before the Exodus Kinakhna or Canaan
represented pretty nearly all that we now mean by "Palestine." It was in
fact the country to the south of "the land of the Amorites," and "the
land of the Amorites" lay immediately to the north of the Waters of
Merom.
In the geographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis Canaan is
stated to be the son of Ham and the brother of Mizraim or Egypt. The
statement indicates the age to which the account must go back. There was
only one period of history in which Canaan could be geographically
described as a brother of Egypt, and that was the period of the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when for a while it was a province
of the Pharaohs. At no other time was it closely connected with the sons
of Ham. At an earlier epoch its relations had been with Babylonia rather
than with the valley of the Nile, and with the fall of the nineteenth
dynasty the Asiatic empire of Egypt came finally to an end.
The city of Sidon, we are further told, was the first-born of Canaan. It
claimed to be the oldest of the Phoenician cities in the "lowlands" of
the coast. It had grown out of an assemblage of "fishermen's" huts, and
Said the god of the fishermen continued to preside over it to the last.
The fishermen became in time sailors and merchant-princes, and the fish
for which they sought was the murex with its precious purple dye. Tyre,
the city of the "rock," which in later days disputed the supremacy over
Phoenicia with Sidon, was of younger foundation. Herodotus was told that
the great temple of Baal Melkarth, "the city's king," which he saw
there, had been built twenty-three centuries before his visit. But Sidon
was still older, older even than Gebal, the sacred city of the goddess
Baaltis.
The wider extension of the name of Canaan brought with it other
geographical relationships besides those of the sea-coast. Hittites and
Amorites, Jebusites and Girgashites, Hivites and the peoples of the
southern Lebanon, were all settled within the limits of the larger
Canaan, and were therefore accounted his sons. Even Hamath claimed the
right to be included in the brotherhood. It is said with truth that
"afterwards were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad."
Hittites and Amorites were interlocked both in the north and in the
south. Kadesh, on the Orontes, the southern stronghold of the Hittite
kingdom of the north, was, as the Egyptian records tell us, in the land
of the Amorites; while in the south Hittites and Amorites were mingled
together at Hebron, and Ezekiel (xvi. 3) declares that Jerusalem had a
double parentage: its birth was in the land of Canaan, but its father
was an Amorite and its mother a Hittite. Modern research, however, has
shown that Hittites and Amorites were races widely separated in
character and origin. About the Hittites we hear a good deal both in the
hieroglyphic and in the cuneiform inscriptions. The Khata of the
Egyptian texts were the most formidable power of Western Asia with whom
the Egyptians of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties had to deal.
They were tribes of mountaineers from the ranges of the Taurus who had
descended on the plains of Syria and established themselves there in the
midst of an Aramaic population. Carchemish on the Euphrates became one
of their Syrian capitals, commanding the high-road of commerce and war
from east to west. Thothmes III., the conqueror of Western Asia, boasts
of the gifts he received from "the land of Khata the greater," so
called, it would seem, to distinguish it from another and lesser land of
Khata--that of the Hittites of the south.
The cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, in the closing days of the
eighteenth dynasty, represent the Hittites as advancing steadily
southward and menacing the Syrian possessions of the Pharaoh.
Disaffected Amorites and Canaanites looked to them for help, and
eventually "the land of the Amorites" to the north of Palestine fell
into their possession. When the first Pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty
attempted to recover the Egyptian empire in Asia, they found themselves
confronted by the most formidable of antagonists. Against Kadesh and
"the great king of the Hittites" the Egyptian forces were driven in
vain, and after twenty years of warfare Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the
Oppression, was fain to consent to peace. A treaty of alliance,
offensive and defensive, was drawn up between the two rivals, and Egypt
was henceforth compelled to treat with the Hittites on equal terms. The
Khattâ or Khatâ of the Assyrian inscriptions are already a decaying
power. They are broken into a number of separate states or kingdoms, of
which Carchemish is the richest and most important. They are in fact in
retreat towards those mountains of Asia Minor from which they had
originally issued forth. But they still hold their ground in Syria for a
long while. There were Hittites at Kadesh in the reign of David. Hittite
kings could lend their services to Israel in the age of Elisha (2 Kings
vii. 6), and it was not till B.C. 717 that Carchemish was captured by
Sargon of Assyria, and the trade which passed through it diverted to
Nineveh. But when the Assyrians first became acquainted with the
coastland of the Mediterranean, the Hittites were to such an extent the
ruling race there that they gave their name to the whole district. Like
"Palestine," or "Canaan," the term "land of the Hittites" came to denote
among the Assyrians, not only Northern Syria and the Lebanon, but
Southern Syria as well. Even Ahab of Israel and Baasha the Ammonite are
included by Shalmaneser II. among its kings.
This extended use of the name among the Assyrians is illustrated by the
existence of a Hittite tribe at Hebron in the extreme south of
Palestine. Various attempts have been made to get rid of the latter by
unbelieving critics, but the statements of Genesis are corroborated by
Ezekiel's account of the foundation of Jerusalem. They are, moreover, in
full harmony with the monumental records. As we have seen, Thothmes III.
implies that already in his day there was a second and smaller land of
the Hittites, and the great Babylonian work on astronomy contains
references to the Hittites which appear to go back to early days.
Assyrian and Babylonian texts are not the only cuneiform records which
make mention of the "Khata" or Hittites. Their name is found also on the
monuments of the kings of Ararat or Armenia who reigned in the ninth and
eighth centuries before our era, and who had borrowed from Nineveh the
cuneiform system of writing. But the Khata of these Vannic or Armenian
texts lived considerably to the north of the Hittites of the Bible and
of the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments. The country they inhabited lay
in eastern Asia Minor in the neighbourhood of the modern Malatiyeh.
Here, in fact, was their original home.
Thanks to the Egyptian artists, we are well acquainted with the Hittite
physical type. It was not handsome. The nose was unduly protrusive,
while the chin and the forehead retreated. The cheeks were square with
prominent bones, and the face was beardless. In colour the Hittites were
yellow-skinned with black hair and eyes. They seem to have worn their
hair in three long plaits which fell over the back like the pigtail of a
Chinaman, and they were distinguished by the use of boots with upturned
toes.
We might perhaps imagine that the Egyptian artists have caricatured
their adversaries. But this is not the case. Precisely the same profile
of face, sometimes even exaggerated in its ugliness, is represented on
the Hittite monuments by the native sculptors themselves. It is one of
the surest proofs we possess that these monuments, with their still
undeciphered inscriptions, are of Hittite origin. They belong to the
people whom Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Armenians united in
calling Hittites.
In marked contrast to the Hittites stood the Amorites. They too are
depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. While the
Hittite type of features is Mongoloid, that of the Amorite is European.
His nose is straight and somewhat pointed, his lips and nostrils thin,
his cheek-bones high, his mouth firm and regular, his forehead
expressive of intelligence. He has a fair amount of whisker, ending in a
pointed beard. At Abu-Simbel the skin is painted a pale yellow--the
Egyptian equivalent for white--his eyes blue, and his beard and eyebrows
red. At Medînet Habu, his skin, as Prof. 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.
The Amorite, it is clear, must be classed with the fair-skinned,
blue-eyed Libyans of the Egyptian monuments, whose modern descendants
are the Kabyles and other Berber tribes of Northern Africa. The latter
are not only European in type, they claim special affinities to the
blond, "golden-haired" Kelt. And their tall stature agrees well with
what the Old Testament has to tell us about the Amorites. They too were
classed among the Rephaim or "giants," by the side of whom the Israelite
invaders were but as "grasshoppers."
While the Canaanites inhabited the lowlands, the highlands were the seat
of the Amorites (Num. xiii. 29). This, again, is in accordance with
their European affinities. They flourished best in the colder and more
bracing climate of the mountains, as do the Berber tribes of Northern
Africa to-day. The blond, blue-eyed race is better adapted to endure the
cold than the heat.
Amorite tribes and kingdoms were to be found in all parts of Palestine.
Southward, as we have seen, Kadesh-barnea was in "the mountain of the
Amorites," while Chedor-laomer found them on the western shores of the
Dead Sea. When Abraham pitched his tent in the plain above Hebron, it
was in the possession of three Amorite chieftains, and at the time of
the Israelitish conquest, Hebron and Jerusalem, Jarmuth, Lachish and
Eglon were all Amorite (Josh. x. 5). Jacob assured Joseph the
inheritance of his tribe should be in that district of Shechem which the
patriarch had taken "out of the hand of the Amorite" (Gen. xlviii. 22),
and on the eastern side of the Jordan were the Amorite kingdoms of Og
and Sihon. But we learn from the Egyptian inscriptions, and more
especially from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, that the chief seat of
Amorite power lay immediately to the north of Palestine. Here was "the
land of the Amorites," to which frequent reference is made by the
monuments, among the ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, from Hamath
southward to Hermon. On the east it was bounded by the desert, on the
west by the cities of Phoenicia.
In early days, long before the age of Abraham, the Amorites must already
have been the predominant population in this part of Syria. When the
Babylonian king, Sargon of Akkad, carried his victorious arms to the
shores of the Mediterranean, it was against "the land of the Amorites"
that his campaigns were directed. From that time forward this was the
name under which Syria, and more particularly Canaan, was known to the
Babylonians. The geographical extension of the term was parallel to that
of "Hittites" among the Assyrians, of "Canaan" among the Israelites, and
of "Palestine" among ourselves. But it bears witness to the important
part which was played by the Amorites in what we must still call the
prehistoric age of Syria, as well as to the extent of the area which
they must have occupied.
Of course it does not follow that the whole of this area was occupied at
one and the same time. Indeed we know that the conquest of the northern
portion of Moab by the Amorite king Sihon took place only a short time
before the Israelitish invasion, and part of the Amorite song of triumph
on the occasion has been preserved in the Book of Numbers. "There is a
fire gone out of Heshbon," it said, "a flame from the city of Sihon: it
hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the lords of the high places of Arnon. Woe
to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: he hath given his
sons that escaped, and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of
the Amorites." (Num. xxi. 28, 29.) In the south, again, the Amorites do
not seem to have made their way beyond Hazezon-Tamar, while the Tel
el-Amarna tablets make it probable that neither Bashan nor Jerusalem
were as yet Amorite at the time they were written. It may be that the
Amorite conquests in the south were one of the results of the fall of
the Egyptian empire and the Hittite irruption.
Between the Hittite and the Amorite the geographical table of Genesis
interposes the Jebusite, and the Book of Numbers similarly states that
"the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites dwell in the
mountains." The Jebusites, however, were merely the local tribe which in
the early days of the Israelitish occupation of Canaan were in
possession of Jerusalem, and they were probably either Hittite or
Amorite in race. At any rate there is no trace of them in the cuneiform
letters of Tel el-Amarna. On the contrary, in these Jerusalem is still
known only by its old name of Uru-salim; of the name Jebus there is not
a hint. But the letters show us that Ebed-Tob, the native king of
Jerusalem and humble vassal of the Pharaoh, was being hard pressed by
his enemies, and that, in spite of his urgent appeals for help, the
Egyptians were unable to send any. His enemy were the Khabiri or
"Confederates," about whose identification there has been much
discussion, but who were assisted by the Beduin chief Labai and his
sons. One by one the towns belonging to the territory of Jerusalem fell
into the hands of his adversaries, and at last, as we learn from another
letter, Ebed-Tob himself along with his capital was captured by the foe.
It was this event, perhaps, which made Jerusalem a Jebusite city. If so,
we must see in the enemies of Ebed-Tob the Jebusites of the Old
Testament.
The Girgashite is named after the Amorite, but who he may have been it
is hard to say. In the Egyptian epic composed by the court-poet Pentaur,
to commemorate the heroic deeds of Ramses II. in his struggle with the
Hittites, mention is twice made of "the country of Qarqish." It was one
of those which had sent contingents to the Hittite army. But it seems to
have been situated in Northern Syria, if not in Asia Minor, so that
unless we can suppose that some of its inhabitants had followed in the
wake of the Hittites and settled in Palestine, it is not easy to see how
they could be included among the sons of Canaan. The Hivites, whose name
follows that of the Girgashites, are simply the "villagers" or fellahin
as opposed to the townsfolk. They are thus synonymous with the
Perizzites, who take their place in Gen. xv. 20, and whose name has the
same signification. But whereas the Perizzites were especially the
country population of Southern Palestine, the Hivites were those of the
north. In two passages, indeed, the name appears to be used in an ethnic
sense, once in Gen. xxxvi. 2, where we read that Esau married the
granddaughter of "Zibeon the Hivite," and once in Josh. xi. 3, where
reference is made to "the Hivite under Hermon in the land of Mizpeh."
But a comparison of the first passage with a later part of the chapter
(vv. 20, 24, 25) proves that "Hivite" is a corrupt reading for "Horite,"
while it is probable that in the second passage "Hittite" ought to be
read for "Hivite."
The four last sons of Canaan represent cities, and not tribes. Arka,
called Irqat in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, and now known as Tel 'Arqa,
was one of the inland cities of Phoenicia, in the mountains between the
Orontes and the sea. Sin, which is mentioned by Tiglath-pileser III.,
was in the same neighbourhood, as well as Zemar (now Sumra), which, like
Arvad (the modern Ruâd), is named repeatedly in the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence. It was at the time an important Phoenician
fortress,--"perched like a bird upon the rock,"--and was under the
control of the governor of Gebal. Arvad was equally important as a
sea-port, and its ships were used for war as well as for commerce. As
for Hamath (now Hamah), the Khamat and Amat of the Assyrian texts, it
was already a leading city in the days of the eighteenth Egyptian
dynasty. Thothmes III. includes it among his Syrian conquests under the
name of Amatu, as also does Ramses III. The Hittite inscriptions
discovered there go to show that, like Kadesh on the Orontes, it fell at
one time into Hittite hands.
Such then was the ethnographical map of Palestine in the Patriarchal
Age. Canaanites in the lowlands, Amorites and Hittites in the highlands
contended for the mastery. In the desert of the south were the Amalekite
Beduin, ever ready to raid and murder their settled neighbours. The
mountains of Seir were occupied by the Horites, while prehistoric
tribes, who probably belonged to the Amorite race, inhabited the plateau
east of the Jordan.
This was the Palestine to which Abraham migrated, but it was a Palestine
which his migration was destined eventually to change. Before many
generations had passed Moab and Ammon, the children of his nephew, took
the place of the older population of the eastern table-land, while Edom
settled in Mount Seir. A few generations more, and Israel too entered
into its inheritance in Canaan itself. The Amorites were extirpated or
became tributary, and the valleys of the Jordan and Kishon were seized
by the invading tribes. The cities of the extreme south had already
become Philistine, and the strangers from Caphtor had supplanted in them
the Avim of an earlier epoch.
Meanwhile the waves of foreign conquest had spread more than once across
the country. Canaan had been made subject to Babylonia, and had received
in exchange for its independence the gift of Babylonian culture. Next it
was Egypt which entered upon its career of Asiatic conquest, and Canaan
for a while was an Egyptian province. But the Egyptian dominion in its
turn passed away, and Palestine was left the prey of other assailants,
of the Hittites and the Beduin, of the people of Aram Naharaim and the
northern hordes. Egyptians and Babylonians, Hittites and Mesopotamians
mingled with the earlier races of the country and obliterated the older
landmarks. Before the Patriarchal Age came to an end, the ethnographical
map of Canaan had undergone a profound change.
CHAPTER III
THE BABYLONIANS IN CANAAN AND THE EGYPTIAN CONQUEST
It is in the cuneiform records of Babylonia that we catch the first
glimpse of the early history of Canaan. Babylonia was not yet united
under a single head. From time to time some prince arose whose conquests
allowed him to claim the imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of
Southern and Northern Babylonia, but the claim was never of long
duration, and often it signified no more than a supremacy over the other
rulers of the country.
It was while Babylonia was thus divided into more than one kingdom, that
the first Chaldæan empire of which we know was formed by the military
skill of Sargon of Akkad. Sargon was of Semitic origin, but his birth
seems to have been obscure. His father, Itti-Bel, is not given the title
of king, and the later legends which gathered around his name declared
that his mother was of low degree, that his father he knew not, and that
his father's brother lived in the mountain-land. Born in secrecy in the
city of Azu-pirani, "whence the elephants issue forth," he was launched
by his mother on the waters of the Euphrates in an ark of bulrushes
daubed with pitch. The river carried the child to Akki the irrigator,
who had compassion upon it, and brought it up as his own son. So Sargon
became an agriculturist and gardener like his adopted father, till the
goddess Istar beheld and loved him, and eventually gave him his kingdom
and crown.
Whatever may have been the real history of Sargon's rise to power,
certain it is that he showed himself worthy of it. He built himself a
capital, which perhaps was Akkad near Sippara, and there founded a
library stocked with books on clay and well provided with scribes. The
standard works on astronomy and terrestrial omens were compiled for it,
the first of which was translated into Greek by Berossos in days long
subsequent. But it was as a conqueror and the founder of the first
Semitic empire in Western Asia that posterity chiefly remembered him. He
overthrew his rivals at home, and made himself master of Northern
Babylonia. Then he marched into Elam on the east, and devastated its
fields. Next he turned his attention to the west. Four times did he make
his way to "the land of the Amorites," until at last it was thoroughly
subdued. His final campaign occupied three years. The countries "of the
sea of the setting sun" acknowledged his dominion, and he united them
with his former conquests into "a single" empire. On the shores of the
Mediterranean he erected images of himself in token of his victories,
and caused the spoil of Cyprus "to pass over into the countries of the
sea." Towards the end of his reign a revolt broke out against him in
Babylonia, and he was besieged in the city of Akkad, but he "issued
forth and smote" his enemies and utterly destroyed them. Then came his
last campaign against Northern Mesopotamia, from which he returned with
abundant prisoners and spoil.
Sargon's son and successor was Naram-Sin, "the beloved of the Moon-god,"
who continued the conquests of his father. His second campaign was
against the land of Magan, the name under which Midian and the Sinaitic
peninsula were known to the Babylonians. The result of it was the
addition of Magan to his empire and the captivity of its king.
The copper mines of Magan, which are noticed in an early Babylonian
geographical list, made its acquisition coveted alike by Babylonians and
Egyptians. We find the Pharaohs of the third dynasty already
establishing their garrisons and colonies of miners in the province of
Mafkat, as they called it, and slaughtering the Beduin who interfered
with them. The history of Naram-Sin shows that its conquest was equally
an object of the Babylonian monarchs at the very outset of their
history. But whereas the road from Egypt to Sinai was short and easy,
that from Babylonia was long and difficult. Before a Babylonian army
could march into the peninsula it was needful that Syria should be
secure in the rear. The conquest of Palestine, in fact, was necessary
before the copper mines of Sinai could fall into Babylonian hands.
The consolidation of Sargon's empire in the west, therefore, was needful
before the invasion of the country of Magan could take place, and the
invasion accordingly was reserved for Naram-Sin to make. The father had
prepared the way; the son obtained the great prize--the source of the
copper that was used in the ancient world.
The fact that the whole of Syria is described in the annals of Sargon as
"the land of the Amorites," implies, not only that the Amorites were the
ruling population in the country, but also that they must have extended
far to the south. The "land of the Amorites" formed the basis and
starting-point for the expedition of Naram-Sin into Magan; it must,
therefore, have reached to the southern border of Palestine, if not even
farther. The road trodden by his forces would have been the same as that
which was afterwards traversed by Chedor-laomer, and would have led him
through Kadesh-barnea. Is it possible that the Amorites were already in
possession of the mountain-block within which Kadesh stood, and that
this was their extreme limit to the south?
There were other names by which Palestine and Syria were known to the
early Babylonians, besides the general title of "the land of the
Amorites." One of these was Tidanum or Tidnum; another was Sanir or
Shenir. There was yet another, the reading of which is uncertain, though
it may be Khidhi or Titi.
Mr. Boscawen has pointed out a coincidence that is at least worthy of
attention. The first Babylonian monarch who penetrated into the
peninsula of Sinai bore a name compounded with that of the Moon-god,
which thus bears witness to a special veneration for that deity. Now the
name of Mount Sinai is similarly derived from that of the Babylonian
Moon-god Sin. It was the high place where the god must have been adored
from early times under his Babylonian name. It thus points to Babylonian
influence, if not to the presence of Babylonians on the spot. Can it
have been that the mountain whereon the God of Israel afterwards
revealed Himself to Moses was dedicated to the Moon-god of Babylon by
Naram-Sin the Chaldæn conqueror?
If such indeed were the case, it would have been more than two thousand
years before the Israelitish exodus. Nabonidos, the last king of the
later Babylonian empire, who had a fancy for antiquarian exploration,
tells us that Naram-Sin reigned 3200 years before his own time, and
therefore about 3750 B.C. The date, startlingly early as it seems to be,
is indirectly confirmed by other evidence, and Assyriologists
consequently have come to accept it as approximately correct.
How long Syria remained a part of the empire of Sargon of Akkad we do
not know. But it must have been long enough for the elements of
Babylonian culture to be introduced into it. The small stone cylinders
used by the Babylonians for sealing their clay documents thus became
known to the peoples of the West. More than one has been found in Syria
and Cyprus which go back to the age of Sargon and Naram-Sin, while there
are numerous others which are more or less barbarous attempts on the
part of the natives to imitate the Babylonian originals. But the
imitations prove that with the fall of Sargon's empire the use of
seal-cylinders in Syria, and consequently of documents for sealing, did
not disappear. That knowledge of writing, which was a characteristic of
Babylonian civilization, must have been carried with it to the shores of
the Mediterranean.
The seal-cylinders were engraved, sometimes with figures of men and
gods, sometimes with symbols only. Very frequently lines of cuneiform
writing were added, and a common formula gave the name of the owner of
the seal, along with those of his father and of the deity whom he
worshipped. One of the seal-cylinders found in Cyprus describes the
owner as an adorer of "the god Naram-Sin." It is true that its
workmanship shows it to belong to a much later date than the age of
Naram-Sin himself, but the legend equally shows that the name of the
conqueror of Magan was still remembered in the West. Another cylinder
discovered in the Lebanon mentions "the gods of the Amorite," while a
third from the same locality bears the inscription: "Multal-ili, the son
of Ili-isme-anni, the worshipper of the god Nin-si-zida." The name of
the god signified in the old pre-Semitic language of Chaldæa "the lord
of the upright horn," while it is worth notice that the names of the
owner and his father are compounded simply with the word _ili_ or _el_,
"god," not with the name of any special divinity. Multal-ili means
"Provident is God," Ili-isme-anni, "O my God, hear me!"
Many centuries have to elapse before the monuments of Babylonia again
throw light on the history of Canaan. Somewhere about B.C. 2700, a
high-priest was ruling in a city of Southern Babylonia, under the
suzerainty of Dungi, the king of Ur. The high-priest's name was Gudea,
and his city (now called Tel-loh by the Arabs) was known as Lagas. The
excavations made here by M. de Sarzec have brought to light temples and
palaces, collections of clay books and carved stone statues, which go
back to the early days of Babylonian history. The larger and better part
of the monuments belong to Gudea, who seems to have spent most of his
life in building and restoring the sanctuaries of the gods. Diorite
statues of the prince are now in the Louvre, and inscriptions upon them
state that the stone out of which they were made was brought from the
land of Magan. On the lap of one of them is a plan of the royal palace,
with the scale of measurement marked on the edge of a sort of
drawing-board. Prof. Petrie has shown that the unit of measurement
represented in it is the cubit of the pyramid-builders of Egypt.
The diorite of Sinai was not the only material which was imported into
Babylonia for the buildings of Gudea. Beams of cedar and box were
brought from Mount Amanus at the head of the Gulf of Antioch, blocks of
stone were floated down the Euphrates from Barsip near Carchemish,
gold-dust came from Melukhkha, the "salt" desert to the east of Egypt
which the Old Testament calls Havilah; copper was conveyed from the
north of Arabia, limestone from the Lebanon ("the mountains of
Tidanum"), and another kind of stone from Subsalla in the mountains of
the Amorite land. Before beams of wood and blocks of stone could thus be
brought from the distant West, it was necessary that trade between
Babylonia and the countries of the Mediterranean should have long been
organized, that the roads throughout Western Asia should have been good
and numerous, and that Babylonian influence should have been extended
far and wide. The conquests of Sargon and Naram-Sin had borne fruit in
the commerce that had followed upon them.
Once more the curtain falls, and Canaan is hidden for a while out of our
sight. Babylonia has become a united kingdom with its capital and centre
at Babylon. Khammurabi (B.C. 2356-2301) has succeeded in shaking off the
suzerainty of Elam, in overthrowing his rival Eri-Aku, king of Larsa,
with his Elamite allies, and in constituting himself sole monarch of
Babylonia. His family seems to have been in part, if not wholly, of
South Arabian extraction. Their names are Arabian rather than
Babylonian, and the Babylonian scribes found a difficulty in
transcribing them correctly. But once in the possession of the
Babylonian throne, they became thoroughly national, and under Khammurabi
the literary glories of the court of Sargon of Akkad revived once more.
Ammi-satana, the great-grandson of Khammurabi, calls himself king of
"the land of the Amorites." Babylonia, therefore, still claimed to be
paramount in Palestine. Even the name of the king is an indication of
his connection with the West. Neither of the elements of which it is
composed belonged to the Babylonian language. The first of them, Ammi,
was explained by the Babylonian philologists as meaning "a family," but
it is more probable that it represents the name of a god. We find it in
the proper names both of Southern and of Northwestern Arabia. The early
Minsaean inscriptions of Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-karib,
Ammi-zadiqa, and Ammi-zaduq, the last of which is identical with that of
Ammi-zaduq, the son and successor of Ammi-satana. The Egyptian Sinuhit,
who in the time of the twelfth dynasty fled, like Moses, for his life
from the court of the Pharaoh to the Kadmonites east of the Jordan,
found protection among them at the hands of their chieftain Ammu-ânshi.
The Ammonites themselves were the "sons of Ammi," and in numerous Hebrew
names we find that of the god. Ammi-el, Ammi-nadab, and Ammi-shaddai are
mentioned in the Old Testament, the Assyrian inscriptions tell us of
Ammi-nadab the king of Ammon, and it is possible that even the name of
Balaam, the Aramaean seer, may be compounded with that of the god. At
all events, the city of Pethor from which he came was "by the river
(Euphrates) of the land of the children of Ammo," for such is the
literal rendering of the Hebrew words.
Ammi-satana was not the first of his line whose authority had been
acknowledged in Palestine. The inscription in which he records the fact
is but a confirmation of what had been long known to us from the Book of
Genesis. There we read how Chedor-laomer, the king of Elam, with the
three vassal princes, Arioch of Ellasar, Amraphel of Shinar, and Tidal
of Goyyim invaded Canaan, and how the kings of the vale of Siddim with
its pits of asphalt became their tributaries. For thirteen years they
remained submissive and then rebelled. Thereupon the Babylonian army
again marched to the west. Bashan and the eastern bank of the Jordan
were subjugated, the Horites in Mount Seir were smitten, and the
invaders then turned back through Kadesh-barnea, overthrowing the
Amalekites and the Amorites on their way. Then came the battle in the
vale of Siddim, which ended in the defeat of the Canaanites, the death
of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrha, and the capture of abundant booty.
Among the prisoners was Lot, the nephew of Abram, and it was to effect
his rescue that the patriarch armed his followers and started in pursuit
of the conquerors. Near Damascus he overtook them, and falling upon them
by night, recovered the spoil of Sodom as well as his "brother's son."
Arioch is the Eri-Aku of the cuneiform texts. In the old language of
Chaldea the name signified "servant of the Moon-god." The king is well
known to us from contemporaneous inscriptions. Besides the inscribed
bricks which have come from the temple of the Moon-god which he enlarged
in the city of Ur, there are numerous contract tablets that are dated in
his reign. He tells us that he was the son of an Elamite, Kudur-Mabug,
son of Simti-silkhak, and prince (or "father") of Yamut-bal on the
borders of Elam and Babylonia. But this is not all. He further gives
Kudur-Mabug the title of "father of the Amorite land." What this title
exactly means it is difficult to say; one thing, however, is certain,
Kudur-Mabug must have exercised some kind of power and authority in the
distant West.
His name, too, is remarkable. Names compounded with Kudur, "a servant,"
were common in the Elamite language, the second element of the name
being that of a deity, to whose worship the owner of it was dedicated.
Thus we have Kudur-Lagamar, "the servant of the god Lagamar,"
Kudur-Nakhkhunte, "the servant of Nakhkhunte." But Mabug was not an
Elamite divinity. It was, on the contrary, a Mesopotamian deity from
whom the town of Mabug near Carchemish, called Bambykê by the Greeks,
and assimilated by the Arabs to their Membij, "a source," derived its
name. Can it be from this Syrian deity that the father of Arioch
received his name?
The capital of Arioch or Eri-Aku was Larsa, the city of the Sun-god, now
called Senkereh. With the help of his Elamite kindred, he extended his
power from thence over the greater part of Southern Babylonia. The old
city of Ur, once the seat of the dominant dynasty of Chaldæan kings,
formed part of his dominions; Nipur, now Niffer, fell into his hands
like the seaport Eridu on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and in one of
his inscriptions he celebrates his conquest of "the ancient city of
Erech." On the day of its capture he erected in gratitude a temple to
his god Ingirisa, "for the preservation of his life."
But the god did not protect him for ever. A time came when Khammurabi,
king of Babylon, rose in revolt against the Elamite supremacy, and drove
the Elamite forces out of the land. Eri-Aku was attacked and defeated,
and his cities fell into the hands of the conqueror. Khammurabi became
sole king of Babylonia, which from henceforth obeyed but a single
sceptre.
Are we to see in the Amraphel of Genesis the Khammurabi of the cuneiform
inscriptions? The difference in the names seems to make it impossible.
Moreover, Amraphel, we are told, was king of Shinar, and it is not
certain that the Shinar of the fourteenth chapter of Genesis was that
part of Babylonia of which Babylon was the capital. This, in fact, was
the northern division of the country, and if we are to identify the
Shinar of scripture with the Sumer of the monuments, as Assyriologists
have agreed to do, Shinar would have been its southern half. It is true
that in the later days of Hebrew history Shinar denoted the whole plain
of Chaldæa, including the city of Babylon, but this may have been an
extension of the meaning of the name similar to that of which Canaan is
an instance.
Unless Sumer and Shinar are the same words, outside the Old Testament
there is only one Shinar known to ancient geography. That was in
Mesopotamia. The Greek geographers called it Singara (now Sinjar), an
oasis in the midst of deserts, and formed by an isolated mountain tract
abounding in springs. It is already mentioned in the annals of the
Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. In his thirty-third year (B.C. 1470),
the king of Sangar sent him tribute consisting of lapis-lazuli "of
Babylon," and of various objects carved out of it. From Sangar also
horses were exported into Egypt, and in one of the Tel el-Amarna
letters, the king of Alasiya in Northern Syria writes to the
Pharaoh,--"Do not set me with the king of the Hittites and the king of
Sankhar; whatever gifts they have sent to me I will restore to thee
twofold." In hieroglyphic and cuneiform spelling, Sangar and Sankhar are
the exact equivalents of the Hebrew Shinar.
How the name of Shinar came to be transferred from Mesopotamia to
Babylonia is a puzzle. The Mesopotamian Shinar is nowhere near the
Babylonian frontier. It lies in a straight line westward of Mosul and
the ancient Nineveh, and not far from the banks of the Khabur. Can its
application to Babylonia be due to a confusion between Sumer and Sangar?
Whatever the explanation may be, it is clear that the position of the
kingdom of Amraphel is by no means so easily determined as has hitherto
been supposed. It may be Sumer or Southern Babylonia; it may be Northern
Babylonia with its capital Babylon; or again, it may be the Mesopotamian
oasis of Sinjar. Until we find the name of Amraphel in the cuneiform
texts it is impossible to attain certainty.
There is one fact, however, which seems to indicate that it really is
either Sumer or Northern Babylonia that is meant. The narrative of
Chedor-laomer's campaign begins with the words that it took place "in
the time of Amraphel, king of Shinar." Chedor-laomer the Elamite was the
leader of the expedition; he too was the suzerain lord of his allies;
and nevertheless the campaign is dated, not in his reign, but in that of
one of the subject kings. That the narrative has been taken from the
Babylonian annals there is little room for doubt, and consequently it
would follow from the dating that Amraphel was a Babylonian prince,
perhaps that he was the ruler of the city which, from the days of
Khammurabi onward, became the capital of the country. In that case we
should have to find some way of explaining the difference between the
Hebrew and the Babylonian forms of the royal name.
Lagamar or Lagamer, written Laomer in Hebrew, was one of the principal
deities of Elam, and the Babylonians made him a son of their own
water-god Ea. The Elamite king Chedor-laomer, or Kudur-Lagamar, as his
name was written in his own language, must have been related to the
Elamite prince Kudur-Mabug, whose son Arioch was a subject-ally of the
Elamite monarch. Possibly they were brothers, the younger brother
receiving as his share of power the title of "father"--not "king"--of
Yamutbal and the land of the Amorites. At any rate it is a son of
Kudur-Mabug and not of the Elamite sovereign who receives a principality
in Babylonia.
In the Book of Genesis Arioch is called "king of Ellasar." But Ellasar
is clearly the Larsa of the cuneiform inscriptions, perhaps with the
word _al_, "city," prefixed. Larsa, the modern Senkereh, was in Southern
Babylonia, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Erech, and
to the north of Ur. Its king was virtually lord of Sumer, but he claimed
to be lord also of the north. In his inscriptions Eri-Aku assumes the
imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of both divisions of
Babylonia, and it may be that at one time the rival king of Babylon
acknowledged his supremacy.
Who "Tidal king of Goyyim" may have been we cannot tell. Sir Henry
Rawlinson has proposed to see in Goyyim a transformation of Gutium, the
name by which Kurdistan was called in early Babylonia. Mr. Pinches has
recently discovered a cuneiform tablet in which mention is made, not
only of Eri-Aku and Kudur-Lagamar, but also of Tudkhul, and Tudkhul
would be an exact transcription in Babylonian of the Hebrew Tidal. But
the tablet is mutilated, and its relation to the narrative of Genesis is
not yet clear. For the present, therefore, we must leave Tidal
unexplained.
The name even of one of the Canaanite kings who were subdued by the
Babylonian army has found its confirmation in a cuneiform inscription.
This is the name of "Shinab, king of Admah." We hear from
Tiglath-pileser III. of Sanibu, king of Ammon, and Sanibu and Shinab are
one and the same. The old name of the king of Admah was thus perpetuated
on the eastern side of the Jordan.
It may be that the asphalt of Siddim was coveted by the Babylonian
kings. Bitumen, it is true, was found in Babylonia itself near Hit, but
if Amiaud is right, one of the objects imported from abroad for Gudea of
Lagas was asphalt. It came from Madga, which is described as being "in
the mountains of the river Gur(?)ruda." But no reference to the place is
to be met with anywhere else in cuneiform literature.
When Abram returned with the captives and spoil of Sodom, the new king
came forth to meet him "at the valley of Shaveh, which is the king's
dale." This was in the near neighbourhood of Jerusalem, as we gather
from the history of Absalom (2 Sam. xviii. 18). Accordingly we further
read that at the same time "Melchizedek, king of Salem," and "priest of
the most High God," "brought forth bread and wine," and blessed the
Hebrew conqueror, who thereupon gave him tithes of all the spoil.
It is only since the discovery and decipherment of the cuneiform tablets
of Tel el-Amarna that the story of Melchizedek has been illustrated and
explained. Hitherto it had seemed to stand alone. The critics, in the
superiority of their knowledge, had refused credit to it, and had denied
that the name even of Jerusalem or Salem was known before the age of
David. But the monuments have come to our help, and have shown that it
is the critics and not the Biblical writer who have been in error.
Several of the most interesting of the Tel el-Amarna letters were
written to the Pharaoh Amenôphis IV. Khu-n-Aten by Ebed-Tob the king of
Jerusalem. Not only is the name of Uru-salim or Jerusalem the only one
in use, the city itself is already one of the most important fortresses
of Canaan. It was the capital of a large district which extended
southwards as far as Keilah and Karmel of Judah. It commanded the
approach to the vale of Siddim, and in one of his letters Ebed-Tob
speaks of having repaired the royal roads not only in the mountains, but
also in the _kikar_ or "plain" of Jordan (Gen. xiii. 10). The possession
of Jerusalem was eagerly coveted by the enemies of Ebed-Tob, whom he
calls also the enemies of the Egyptian king.
Now Ebed-Tob declares time after time that he is not an Egyptian
governor, but a tributary ally and vassal of the Pharaoh, and that he
had received his royal power, not by inheritance from his father or
mother, but through the arm (or oracle) of "the Mighty King." As "the
Mighty King" is distinguished from the "great King" of Egypt, we must
see in him the god worshipped by Ebed-Tob, the "Most High God" of
Melchizedek, and the prototype of "the Mighty God" of Isaiah. It is this
same mighty king, Ebed-Tob assures the Pharaoh in another letter, who
will overthrow the navies of Babylonia and Aram-Naharaim.
Here, then, as late as the fifteenth century before our era we have a
king of Jerusalem who owes his royal dignity to his god. He is, in fact,
a priest as well as a king. His throne has not descended to him by
inheritance; so far as his kingly office is concerned, he is like
Melchizedek, without father and without mother. Between Ebed-Tob and
Melchizedek there is more than analogy; there is a striking and
unexpected resemblance. The description given of him by Ebed-Tob
explains what has puzzled us so long in the person of Melchizedek.
The origin of the name of Jerusalem also is now cleared up. It was no
invention of the age of David; on the contrary, it goes back to the
period of Babylonian intercourse with Canaan. It is written in the
cuneiform documents Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim," the god of peace.
One of the lexical tablets from the library of Nineveh has long ago
informed us that in one of the languages known to the Babylonians _uru_
was the equivalent of the Babylonian _alu_, "a city," and we now know
that this language was that of Canaan. It would even seem that the word
had originally been brought from Babylonia itself in the days when
Babylonian writing and culture first penetrated to the West. In the
Sumerian or pre-Semitic language of Chaldæa _eri_ signified a "city,"
and _eri_ in the pronunciation of the Semites became _uru_. Hence it was
that Uru or Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, received its name at a time
when it was the ruling city of Babylonia, and though the Semitic
Babylonians themselves never adopted the word in common life it made its
way to Canaan. The rise of the "city" in the west was part of that
Babylonian civilization which was carried to the shores of the
Mediterranean, and so the word which denoted it was borrowed from the
old language of Chaldæa, like the word for "palace," _hêkâl_, the
Sumerian _ê-gal_, or "Great House." It is noteworthy that Harran, the
resting-place of Abraham on his way from Ur to Palestine, the half-way
house, as it were, between East and West, also derived its name from a
Sumerian word which signified "the high-road." _Harran_ and _Ur_ were
two of the gifts which passed to Canaan from the speakers of the
primaeval language of Chaldæa.
We can now understand why Melchizedek should have been called the "king
of Salem." His capital could be described either as Jeru-salem or as the
city of Salem. And that it was often referred to as Salem simply is
shown by the Egyptian monuments. One of the cities of Southern
Palestine, the capture of which is represented by Ramses II. on the
walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes, is Shalam or Salem, and "the district
of Salem" is mentioned between "the country of Hadashah" (Josh. xv. 37)
and "the district of the Dead Sea" and "the Jordan," in the list of the
places which Ramses III. at Medînet Habu describes himself as having
conquered in the same part of the world.
It may be that Isaiah is playing upon the old name of Jerusalem when he
gives the Messiah the title of "Prince of Peace." But in any case the
fact that Salim, the god of peace, was the patron deity of Jerusalem,
lends a special significance to Melchizedek's treatment of Abram. The
patriarch had returned in peace from an expedition in which he had
overthrown the invaders of Canaan; he had restored peace to the country
of the priest-king, and had driven away its enemies. The offering of
bread and wine on the part of Melchizedek was a sign of freedom from the
enemy and of gratitude to the deliverer, while the tithes paid by Abram
were equally a token that the land was again at peace. The name of
Salim, the god of peace, was under one form or another widely spread in
the Semitic world. Salamanu, or Solomon, was the king of Moab in the
time of Tiglath-pileser III.; the name of Shalmaneser of Assyria is
written Sulman-asarid, "the god Sulman is chief," in the cuneiform
inscriptions; and one of the Tel el-Amarna letters was sent by
Ebed-Sullim, "the servant of Sullim," who was governor of Hazor. In one
of the Assyrian cities (Dimmen-Silim, "the foundation-stone of peace")
worship was paid to the god "Sulman the fish." Nor must we forget that
"Salma was the father of Beth-lehem" (1 Chron. ii. 51).
In the time of the Israelitish conquest the king of Jerusalem was
Adoni-zedek (Josh. x. 1). The name is similar to that of Melchi-zedek,
though the exact interpretation of it is a matter of doubt. It points,
however, to a special use of the word _zedek_, "righteousness," and it
is therefore interesting to find the word actually employed in one of
the letters of Ebed-Tob. He there says of the Pharaoh: "Behold, the king
is righteous (_zaduq_) towards me." What makes the occurrence of the
word the more striking is that it was utterly unknown to the
Babylonians. The root _zadaq_, "to be righteous," did not exist in the
Assyrian language.
There is yet another point in the history of the meeting between Abram
and Melchizedek which must not be passed over. When the patriarch
returned after smiting the invading army he was met outside Jerusalem
not only by Melchizedek, but also by the new king of Sodom. It was,
therefore, in the mountains and in the shadow of the sanctuary of the
Most High God that the newly-appointed prince was to be found, rather
than in the vale of Siddim. Does not this show that the king of
Jerusalem already exercised that sovereignty over the surrounding
district that Ebed-Tob did in the century before the Exodus? As we have
seen, Ebed-Tob describes himself as repairing the roads in that very
"Kikar," or "plain," in which Sodom and Gomorrha stood. It would seem
then that the priest-king of the great fortress in the mountains was
already acknowledged as the dominant Canaanitish ruler, and that the
neighbouring princes had to pay him homage when they first received the
crown. This would be an additional reason for the tithes given to him by
Abram.
Long after the defeat of Chedor-laomer and his allies, if we are to
accept the traditional belief, Abraham was again destined to visit
Jerusalem. But he had ceased to be "Abram the Hebrew," the confederate
of the Amorite chieftains in the plain of Mamre, and had become Abraham
the father of the promised seed. Isaac had been born to him, and he was
called upon to sacrifice his first-born son.
The place of sacrifice was upon one of the mountains in the land of
Moriah. There at the last moment the hand of the father was stayed, and
a ram was substituted for the human victim. "And Abraham called the name
of that place Yahveh-yireh; as it is said to this day, In the mount of
the Lord it shall be seen." According to the Hebrew text of the
Chronicles (2 Chron. iii. 1), this mount of the Lord where Abraham's
sacrifice was offered was the temple-mount at Jerusalem. The proverb
quoted in Genesis seems to indicate the same fact. Moreover, the
distance of the mountain from Beer-sheba--three days' journey--would be
also the distance of Jerusalem from Abraham's starting-place.
It is even possible that in the name of Yahveh-yireh we have a play upon
the first element in the name of Jeru-salem. The word _uru_, "city,"
became _yeru_ or _yiru_ in Hebrew pronunciation, and between this and
_yireh_ the difference is not great. Yahveh-yireh, "the Lord sees,"
might also be interpreted "the Lord of Yeru."
The temple-hill was emphatically "the mount of the Lord." In Ezekiel
(xliii. 15) the altar that stood upon it is called Har-el, "the mountain
of God." The term reminds us of Babylonia, where the mercy-seat of the
great temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon was termed Du-azagga, "the holy
hill." It was on this "seat of the oracles," as it was termed, that the
god enthroned himself at the beginning of each year, and announced his
will to mankind. But the mercy-seat was entitled "the holy hill" only
because it was a miniature copy of "the holy hill" upon which the whole
temple was erected. So, too, at Jerusalem, the altar is called "the
mount of God" by Ezekiel only because it represents that greater "mount
of God" upon which it was built. The temple-hill itself was the
primitive Har-el.
The list of conquered localities in Palestine recorded by Thothmes III.
at Karnak gives indirect testimony to the same fact. The name of Rabbah
of Judah is immediately preceded in it by that of Har-el, "the mount of
God." The position of this Har-el leads us to the very mountain tract in
the midst of which Jerusalem stood. We now know that Jerusalem was
already an important city in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty,
and that it formed one of the Egyptian conquests; it would be strange
therefore if no notice had been taken of it by the compiler of the list.
May we not see, then, in the Har-el of the Egyptian scribe the sacred
mountain of Israelitish history?
There is a passage in one of the letters of Ebed-Tob which may throw
further light on the history of the temple-hill. Unfortunately one of
the cuneiform characters in it is badly formed, so that its reading is
not certain, and still more unfortunately this character is one of the
most important in the whole paragraph. If Dr. Winckler and myself are
right in our copies, Ebed-Tob speaks of "the city of the mountain of
Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the god Nin-ip, (whose) name
(there) is Salim, the city of the king." What we read "Salim," however,
is read differently by Dr. Zimmern, so that according to his copy the
passage must be translated: "the city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the
city of the temple of the god Nin-ip is its name, the city of the king."
In the one case Ebed-Tob will state explicitly that the god of
Jerusalem, whom he identifies with the Babylonian Nin-ip, is Salim or
Sulman, the god of peace, and that his temple stood on "the mountain of
Jerusalem"; in the other case there will be no mention of Salim, and it
will be left doubtful whether or not the city of Beth-Nin-ip was
included within the walls of the capital. It would seem rather that it
was separate from Jerusalem, though standing on the same "mountain" as
the great fortress. If so, we might identify Jerusalem with the city on
Mount Zion, the Jebusite stronghold of a later date, while "the city of
Beth-Nin-ip" would be that which centred round the temple on Moriah.
However this may be, the fortress and the temple-hill were distinct from
one another in the days of the Jebusites, and we may therefore assume
that they were also distinct in the age of Abraham. This might explain
why it was that the mountain of Moriah on the summit of which the
patriarch offered his sacrifice was not enclosed within the walls of
Jerusalem, and was not covered with buildings. It was a spot, on the
contrary, where sheep could feed, and a ram be caught by its horns in
the thick brushwood.
In entering Canaan, Abraham would have found himself still surrounded by
all the signs of a familiar civilization. The long-continued influence
and government of Babylonia had carried to "the land of the Amorites"
all the elements of Chaldæan culture. Migration from Ur of the Chaldees
to the distant West meant a change only in climate and population, not
in the civilization to which the patriarch had been accustomed.
Even the Babylonian language was known and used in the cities of Canaan,
and the literature of Babylonia was studied by the Canaanitish people.
This is one of the facts which we have learnt from the discovery of the
Tel el-Amarna tablets. The cuneiform system of writing and the
Babylonian language had spread all over Western Asia, and nowhere had
they taken deeper root than in Canaan. Here there were schools and
teachers for instruction in the foreign language and script, and
record-chambers and libraries in which the letters and books of clay
could be copied and preserved.
Long before the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets we might have
gathered from the Old Testament itself that such libraries once existed
in Canaan. One of the Canaanitish cities taken and destroyed by the
Israelites was Debir in the mountainous part of Judah. But Debir, "the
sanctuary," was also known by two other names. It was called
Kirjath-Sannah, "the city of Instruction," as well as Kirjath-Sepher,
"the city of Books."
We now know, however, that the latter name is not quite correct. The
Massoretic punctuation has to be emended, and we must read
Kirjath-Sopher, "the city of the Scribe(s)," instead of Kirjath-Sepher,
"the city of Book(s)." It is an Egyptian papyrus which has given us the
exact name. In the time of Ramses II. an Egyptian scribe composed a
sarcastic account of the misadventures met with by a tourist in
Palestine--commonly known as _The Travels of a Mohar_--and in this
mention is made of two adjoining towns in Southern Palestine called
Kirjath-Anab and Beth-Sopher. In the Book of Joshua the towns of Anab
and Kirjath-Sepher are similarly associated together, and it is plain,
therefore, as Dr. W. Max Müller has remarked, that the Egyptian writer
has interchanged the equivalent terms Kirjath, "city," and Beth,
"house." He ought to have written Beth-Anab and Kirjath-Sopher. But he
has given us the true form of the latter name, and as he has added to
the word _Sopher_ the determinative of "writing," he has further put
beyond question the real meaning of the name. The city must have been
one of those centres of Canaanitish learning, where, as in the libraries
of Babylonia and Assyria, a large body of scribes was kept constantly at
work.
The language employed in the cuneiform documents was almost always that
of Babylonia, which had become the common speech of diplomacy and
educated society. But at times the native language of the country was
also employed, and one or two examples of it have been preserved. The
legends and traditions of Babylonia served as text-books for the
student, and doubtless Babylonian history was carried to the West as
well. The account of Chedor-laomer's campaign might have been derived in
this way from the clay-books of ancient Babylonia.
Babylonian theology, too, made its way to the West, and has left records
of itself in the map of Canaan. In the names of Canaanitish towns and
villages the names of Babylonian deities frequently recur. Rimmon or
Hadad, the god of the air, whom the Syrians identified with the Sun-god,
Nebo, the god of prophecy, the interpreter of the will of Bel-Merodach,
Anu, the god of the sky, and Anat, his consort, all alike meet us in the
names sometimes of places, sometimes of persons. Mr. Tomkins is probably
right in seeing even in Beth-lehem the name of the primeval Chaldæan
deity Lakhmu. The Canaanitish Moloch is the Babylonian Malik, and Dagon
was one of the oldest of Chaldæan divinities and the associate of Anu.
We have seen how ready Ebed-Tob was to identify the god he worshipped
with the Babylonian Nin-ip, and among the Canaanites mentioned in the
letters of Tel el-Amarna there is more than one whose name is compounded
with that of a Babylonian god.
Writing and literature, religion and mythology, history and science, all
these were brought to the peoples of Canaan in the train of Babylonian
conquest and trade. Art naturally went hand in hand with this imported
culture. The seal-cylinders of the Chaldæans were imitated, and
Babylonian figures and ornamental designs were borrowed and modified by
the Canaanitish artists. It was in this way that the rosette, the
cherub, the sacred tree, and the palmette passed to the West, and there
served to adorn the metal-work and pottery. New designs, unknown in
Babylonia, began to develop; among others, the heads of animals in gold
and silver as covers for metal vases. Some of these "vases of Kaft," as
they were called, are pictured on the Egyptian monuments, and Thothmes
III. in his annals describes "the paterae with goats' heads upon them
and one with a lion's head, the productions of Zahi," or Palestine,
which were brought to him as tribute.
The spoil which the same Pharaoh carried away from the Canaanitish
princes gives us some idea of the art which they patronized. We hear of
chariots and tent-poles covered with plates of gold, of iron armour and
helmets, of gold and silver rings which were used in the place of money,
of staves of ivory, ebony, and cedar inlaid with gold, of golden
sceptres, of tables, chairs, and footstools of cedar wood, inlaid some
of them with ivory, others with gold and precious stones, of vases and
bowls of all kinds in gold, silver, and bronze, and of the two-handled
cups which were a special manufacture of Phoenicia. Iron seems to have
been worked in Canaan from an early date. The Israelites were unable to
drive out the inhabitants of "the valley" because of their chariots of
iron, and when the chariot of the Egyptian Mohar is disabled by the
rough roads of the Canaanite mountains the writer of the papyrus already
referred to makes him turn aside at once to a worker in iron. There was
no difficulty in finding an ironsmith in Canaan.
The purple dye of Phoenicia had been famous from a remote antiquity. It
was one of the chief objects of the trade which was carried on by the
Canaanites with Egypt on the one side and Babylonia on the other. It was
doubtless in exchange for the purple that the "goodly Babylonish
garment" of which we are told in the Book of Joshua (vii. 21) made its
way to the city of Jericho, for Babylonia was as celebrated for its
embroidered robes as Canaan was for its purple dye.
We hear something about the trade of Canaan in one of the cuneiform
tablets of Tel el-Amarna. This is a letter from Kallimma-Sin, king of
Babylonia, to the Egyptian Pharaoh urging him to conclude a treaty in
accordance with which the merchants of Babylonia might trade with Egypt
on condition of their paying the customs at the frontier. Gold, silver,
oil, and clothing are among the objects upon which the duty was to be
levied. The frontier was probably fixed at the borders of the Egyptian
province of Canaan rather than at those of Egypt itself.
Babylonia and the civilized lands of the East were not the only
countries with which Canaanitish trade was carried on. Negro slaves were
imported from the Soudan, copper and lead from Cyprus, and horses from
Asia Minor, while the excavations of Mr. Bliss at Lachish have brought
to light beads of Baltic amber mixed with the scarabs of the eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty.
A large part of the trade of Phoenicia was carried on in ships. It was
in this way that the logs of cedar were brought from the forests at the
head of the Gulf of Antioch, and the purple murex from the coasts of the
_Ægean_. Tyre, whose wealth is already celebrated in one of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets, was built upon an island, and, as an Egyptian papyrus
tells us, water had to be conveyed to it in boats. So, too, was Arvad,
whose navy occupies an important place in the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence. The ships of Canaan were, in fact, famous from an early
date. Two classes of vessel known to the Egyptians were called "ships of
Gebal" and "ships of Kaft," or Phoenicia, and Ebed-Tob asserts that "as
long as a ship sails upon the sea, the arm (or oracle) of the Mighty
King shall conquer the forces of Aram-Naharaim (Nahrima) and Babylonia."
Balaam's prophecy--"Ships shall come from Chittim and shall afflict
Asshur and shall afflict Eber," takes us back to the same age.
The Aram-Naharaim of Scripture is the Nahrina of the hieroglyphic texts,
the Mitanni of the native inscriptions. The capital city Mitanni stood
on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, at no great distance from
Carchemish, but the Naharaim, or "Two Rivers," more probably mean the
Euphrates and Orontes, than the Euphrates and Tigris. In one of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets the country is called Nahrima, but its usual name is
Mitanni or Mitanna. It was the first independent kingdom of any size or
power on the frontiers of the Egyptian empire in the age of the
eighteenth dynasty, and the Pharaohs Thothmes IV., Amenophis III., and
Amenophis IV. successively married into its royal family.
The language of Mitanni has been revealed to us by the cuneiform
correspondence from Tel el-Amarna. It was highly agglutinative, and
unlike any other form of speech, ancient or modern, with which we are
acquainted. Perhaps the speakers of it, like the Hittites, had descended
from the north, and occupied territory which had originally belonged to
Aramaic tribes. Perhaps, on the other hand, they represented the older
population of the country which was overpowered and displaced by Semitic
invaders. Which of these views is the more correct we shall probably
never know.
Along with their own language the people of Mitanni had also their own
theology. Tessupas was god of the atmosphere, the Hadad of the Semites,
Sausbe was identified with the Phoenician Ashteroth, and Sekhrus,
Zizanu, and Zannukhu are mentioned among the other deities. But many of
the divinities of Assyria were also borrowed--Sin the Moon-god, whose
temple stood in the city of Harran, Ea the god of the waters, Bel, the
Baal of the Canaanites, and Istar, "the lady of Nineveh." Even Amon the
god of Thebes was adopted into the pantheon in the days of Egyptian
influence.
How far back the interference of Aram-Naharaim in the affairs of Canaan
may have reached it is impossible to say. But the kingdom lay on the
high-road from Babylonia and Assyria to the West, and its rise may
possibly have had something to do with the decline of Babylonian
supremacy in Palestine. The district in which it grew up was called Suru
or Suri by the Sumerian inhabitants of Chaldæa--a name which may be the
origin of the modern "Syria," rather than Assyria, as is usually
supposed, and the Semitic Babylonians gave it the title of Subari or
Subartu. The conquest of Suri was the work of the last campaign of
Sargon of Accad, and laid all northern Mesopotamia at his feet.
We gather from the letters of Tel el-Amarna that the Babylonians were
still intriguing in Canaan in the century before the Exodus, though they
acknowledged that it was an Egyptian province and subject to Egyptian
laws. But the memory of the power they had once exercised there still
survived, and the influence of their culture continued undiminished.
When their rule actually ceased we do not yet know. It cannot have been
very long, however, before the era of Egyptian conquest. In the Tel
el-Amarna tablets they are always called Kassites, a name which could
have been given to them only after the conquest of Babylonia by the
Kassite mountaineers of Elam, and the rise of a Kassite dynasty of
kings. This was about 1730 B.C. For some time subsequently, therefore,
the government of Babylonia must still have been acknowledged in Canaan.
With this agrees a statement of the Egyptian historian Manetho, upon
which the critics, in their wisdom or their ignorance, have poured
unmeasured contempt. He tells us that when the Hyksos were driven out of
Egypt by Ahmes I., the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, they occupied
Jerusalem and fortified it--not, as would naturally be imagined, against
the Egyptian Pharaoh, but against "the Assyrians," as the Babylonians
were called by Manetho's contemporaries. As long as there were no
monuments to confront them the critics had little difficulty in proving
that the statement was preposterous and unhistorical, that Jerusalem did
not as yet exist, and that no Assyrians or Babylonians entered Palestine
until centuries later. But we now know that Manetho was right and his
critics wrong. Jerusalem did exist, and Babylonian armies threatened the
independence of the Canaanite states. In one of his letters, Ebed-Tob,
king of Jerusalem, tells the Pharaoh that he need not be alarmed about
the Babylonians, for the temple at Jerusalem is strong enough to resist
their attack. Rib-Hadad the governor of Gebal bears the same testimony.
"When thou didst sit on the throne of thy father," he says, "the sons of
Ebed-Asherah (the Amorite) attached themselves to the country of the
Babylonians, and took the country of the Pharaoh for themselves; they
(intrigued with) the king of Mitanna, and the king of the Babylonians,
and the king of the Hittites." In another despatch he speaks in a
similar strain: "The king of the Babylonians and the king of Mitanna are
strong, and have taken the country of the Pharaoh for themselves
already, and have seized the cities of thy governor." When George the
Synkellos notes that the Chaldæans made war against the Phoenicians in
B.C. 1556, he is doubtless quoting from some old and trustworthy source.
We must not imagine, however, that there was any permanent occupation of
Canaan on the part of the Babylonians at this period of its history. It
would seem rather that Babylonian authority was directly exercised only
from time to time, and had to be enforced by repeated invasions and
campaigns. It was the influence of Babylonian civilization and culture
that was permanent, not the Babylonian government itself. Sometimes,
indeed, Canaan became a Babylonian province, at other times there were
only certain portions of the country which submitted to the foreign
control, while again at other times the Babylonian rule was merely
nominal. But it is clear that it was not until Canaan had been
thoroughly reduced by Egyptian arms that the old claim of Babylonia to
be its mistress was finally renounced, and even then we see that
intrigues were carried on with the Babylonians against the Egyptian
authority.
It was during this period of Babylonian influence and tutelage that the
traditions and myths of Chaldæa became known to the people of Canaan. It
is again the tablets of Tel el-Amarna which have shown us how this came
to pass. Among them are fragments of Babylonian legends, one of which
endeavoured to account for the creation of man and the introduction of
sin into the world, and these legends were used as exercise-books in the
foreign language by the scribes of Canaan and Egypt who were learning
the Babylonian language and script. If ever we discover the library of
Kirjath-sepher we shall doubtless find among its clay records similar
examples of Chaldæan literature. The resemblances between the
cosmogonies of Phoenicia and Babylonia have often been pointed out, and
since the discovery of the Chaldæan account of the Deluge by George
Smith we have learned that between that account and the one which is
preserved in Genesis there is the closest possible likeness, extending
even to words and phrases. The long-continued literary influence of
Babylonia in Palestine in the Patriarchal Age explains all this, and
shows us how the traditions of Chaldæa made their way to the West. When
Abraham entered Canaan, he entered a country whose educated inhabitants
were already familiar with the books, the history, and the traditions of
that in which he had been born. There were doubtless many to whom the
name and history of "Ur of the Chaldees" were already known. It may even
be that copies of the books in its library already existed in the
libraries of Canaan.
There was one Babylonian hero at all events whose name had become so
well known in the West that it had there passed into a proverb. This was
the name of Nimrod, "the mighty hunter before the Lord." As yet the
cuneiform documents are silent about him, but it is probable that he was
one of the early Kassite kings who established their dominion over the
cities of Babylonia. He is called the son of Cush or Kas, and "the
beginning of his kingdom" was Babylon, which had now for six centuries
been the capital of the country. His name, however, was as familiar to
the Canaanite as it was to the inhabitant of Chaldæa, and the god before
whom his exploits were displayed was Yahveh and not Bel.
It was about 1600 B.C. that the Hyksos were finally expelled from Egypt.
They were originally Asiatic hordes who had overrun the valley of the
Nile, and held it in subjection for several centuries. At first they had
carried desolation with them wherever they went. The temples of the
Egyptian gods were destroyed and their priests massacred. But before
long Egyptian culture proved too strong for the invaders. The rude chief
of a savage horde became transformed into an Egyptian Pharaoh, whose
court resembled that of the ancient line of monarchs, and who surrounded
himself with learned men. The cities and temples were restored and
beautified, and art began to flourish once more. Except in one respect
it became difficult to distinguish the Hyksos prince from his
predecessors on the throne of Egypt. That one respect was religion. The
supreme object of Hyksos worship continued to be Sutekh, the Baal of
Western Asia, whose cult the foreigners had brought with them from their
old homes. But even Sutekh was assimilated to Ra, the Sun-god of On, and
the Hyksos Pharaohs felt no scruple in imitating the native kings and
combining their own names with that of Ra. It was only the Egyptians who
refused to admit the assimilation, and insisted on identifying Sutekh
with Set the enemy of Horus.
At the outset all Egypt was compelled to submit to the Hyksos
domination. Hyksos monuments have been found as far south as Gebelên and
El-Kab, and the first Hyksos dynasty established its seat in Memphis,
the old capital of the country. Gradually, however, the centre of Hyksos
power retreated into the delta. Zoan or Tanis, the modern San, became
the residence of the court: here the Hyksos kings were in close
proximity to their kindred in Asia, and were, moreover, removed from the
unmixed Egyptian population further south. From Zoan, "built"--or rather
rebuilt--"seven years" after Hebron (Num. xiii. 22), they governed the
valley of the Nile. Their rule was assisted by the mutual jealousies and
quarrels of the native feudal princes who shared between them the land
of Egypt. The foreigner kept his hold upon the country by means of the
old feudal aristocracy.
Thebes, however, had never forgotten that it had been the birthplace and
capital of the powerful Pharaohs of the twelfth and thirteenth
dynasties, of the mighty princes who had conquered the Soudan, and ruled
with an iron hand over the feudal lords. The heirs of the Theban
Pharaohs still survived as princes of Thebes, and behind the strong
walls of El-Kab they began to think of independence. Apophis II. in his
court at Zoan perceived the rising storm, and endeavoured to check it at
its beginning. According to the story of a later day, he sent insulting
messages to the prince of Thebes, and ordered him to worship Sutekh the
Hyksos god. The prince defied his suzerain, and the war of independence
began. It lasted for several generations, during which the Theban
princes made themselves masters of Upper Egypt, and established a native
dynasty of Pharaohs which reigned simultaneously with the Hyksos dynasty
in the North.
Step by step the Hyksos stranger was pushed back to the north-eastern
corner of the delta. At length Zoan itself fell into the hands of the
Egyptians, and the Hyksos took refuge in the great fortress of Avaris on
the extreme border of the kingdom. Here they were besieged by the Theban
prince Ahmes, and eventually driven back to the Asia from which they had
come. The eighteenth dynasty was founded, and Ahmes entered on that
career of Asiatic conquest which converted Canaan into an Egyptian
province. At first the war was one of revenge; but it soon became one of
conquest, and the war of independence was followed by the rise of the
Egyptian empire. Thothmes II., the grandson of Ahmes, led his forces as
far as the Euphrates and the land of Aram-Naharaim. The territories thus
overrun in a sort of military reconnaissance were conquered and annexed
by his son Thothmes III., during his long reign of fifty-four years
(March 20, B.C. 1503 to February 14, B.C. 1449). Canaan on both sides of
the Jordan was made into a province, and governed much as India is
to-day. Some of the cities were allowed still to retain their old line
of princes, who were called upon to furnish tribute to the Egyptian
treasury and recruits to the Egyptian army. From time to time they were
visited by an Egyptian "Commissioner," and an Egyptian garrison kept
watch upon their conduct. Sometimes an Egyptian Resident was appointed
by the side of the native king; this was the case, for example, at Sidon
and Hazor. Where, however, the city was of strategical or political
importance it was incorporated into the Egyptian empire, and placed
under the immediate control of an Egyptian governor, as at Megiddo,
Gaza, Gebal, Gezer, and Tyre. Similarly Ziri-Basana, "the field of
Bashan," was under the government of a single _khazan_ or "prefect." The
troops, who also acted as police, were divided into various classes.
There were the _tsabi yidati_ or "auxiliaries," the _tsabi saruti_ or
"militia," the _Khabbati_ or "Beduin plunderers," and the _tsabi
matsarti_ or "Egyptian soldiers of the garrison," as well as the _tsabi
bitati_ or "house-guards," who were summoned in cases of emergency.
Among the auxiliaries were included the Serdani or Sardinians, while the
Sute--the Sati or Sitti of the hieroglyphic texts--formed the larger
portion of the Beduin ("Bashi-bazouks"), and the Egyptian forces were
divided into the cavalry or rather charioteers, and the Misi (called
Mas'u in the hieroglyphics) or infantry.
Fragments of the annals of Thothmes III. have been preserved on the
shattered walls of his temple at Karnak. Here too we may read the lists
of places he conquered in Palestine--the land of the Upper Lotan as it
is termed--as well as in Northern Syria. Like the annals, the
geographical lists have been compiled from memoranda made on the spot by
the scribes who followed the army, and in some instances, at all events,
it can be shown that they have been translated into Egyptian hieroglyphs
from Babylonian cuneiform. The fact is an indication of the conquest
that Asia was already beginning to make over her Egyptian conquerors.
But the annals themselves are a further and still more convincing proof
of Asiatic influence. To cover the walls of a temple with the history of
campaigns in a foreign land, and an account of the tribute brought to
the Pharaoh, was wholly contrary to Egyptian ideas. From the Egyptian
point of view the decoration of the sacred edifice should have been
theological only. The only subjects represented on it, so custom and
belief had ruled, ought to be the gods, and the stereotyped phrases
describing their attributes, their deeds, and their festivals. To
substitute for this the records of secular history was Assyrian and not
Egyptian. Indeed the very conception of annalistic chronicling, in which
the history of a reign was given briefly year by year and campaign by
campaign, belonged to the kingdoms of the Tigris and Euphrates, not to
that of the Nile. It was a new thing in Egypt, and flourished there only
during the short period of Asiatic influence. The Egyptian cared
comparatively little for history, and made use of papyrus when he wished
to record it. Unfortunately for us the annals of Thothmes III. remain
the solitary monument of Egyptian chronicling on stone.
The twenty-second year of his reign (B.C. 1481) was that in which the
Egyptian Pharaoh made his first determined effort to subdue Canaan. Gaza
was occupied without much difficulty, and in the following year, on the
fifth day of the month Pakhons, he set out from it, and eleven days
later encamped at Ihem. There he learned that the confederated
Canaanitish army, under the command of the king of Kadesh on the
Orontes, was awaiting his attack at Megiddo. Not only were the various
nations of Palestine represented in it, but contingents had come from
Naharaim on the banks of the Euphrates, as well as from the Gulf of
Antioch. For a while Thothmes hesitated whether to march against them by
the road which led through 'Aluna to Taanach or by way of Zaft (perhaps
Safed), whence he would have descended southward upon Megiddo. The
arrival of his spies, however, determined him to take the first, and
accordingly, after the officers had sworn that they would not leave
their appointed posts in battle even to defend the person of the king,
he started on his march, and on the nineteenth of the month pitched his
tent at 'Aluna. The way had been rough and impassable for chariots, so
that the king had been forced to march on foot.
'Aluna must have been close to Megiddo, since the rear of the Egyptian
forces was stationed there during the battle that followed, while the
southern wing extended to Taanach and the northern wing to Megiddo. The
advanced guard pushed into the plain below, and the royal tent was set
up on the bank of the brook of Qana, an affluent of the Kishon. The
decisive struggle took place on the twenty-first of the month. Thothmes
rode in a chariot of polished bronze, and posted himself among the
troops on the north-west side of Megiddo. The Canaanites were unable to
resist the Egyptian charge. They fled into the city, leaving behind them
their horses and their chariots plated with gold and silver, those who
arrived after the gates of the town had been shut being drawn up over
the walls by means of ropes. Had the Egyptians not stayed behind in
order to plunder the enemy's camp they would have entered Megiddo along
with the fugitives. As it was, they were compelled to blockade the city,
building a rampart round it of "fresh green trees," and the besieged
were finally starved into a surrender.
In the captured camp had been found the son of the king of Megiddo,
besides a large amount of booty, including chariots of silver and gold
from Asi or Cyprus. Two suits of iron armour were also obtained, one
belonging to the king of Kadesh, the other to the king of Megiddo. The
seven tent-poles of the royal tent, plated with gold, also fell into the
hands of the Egyptians. The catalogue of the spoil was written down on a
leather roll which was deposited in the temple of Amon at Thebes, and in
it were enumerated: 3401 prisoners and 83 hands belonging to the slain,
32 chariots plated with gold, 892 ordinary chariots, 2041 mares, 191
foals, 602 bows, and 200 suits of armour.
Before the campaign was ended the Egyptian army had penetrated far to
the north and captured Inuam, south of Damascus, as well as Anugas or
Nukhasse, and Harankal, to the north of the land of the Amorites. All
these places seem to have belonged to the king of Kadesh, as his
property was carried away out of them. When Thothmes returned to Thebes
the quantity of spoil be brought back with him was immense. "Besides
precious stones," golden bowls, Phoenician cups with double handles and
the like, there were 97 swords, 1784 pounds of gold rings and 966 pounds
of silver rings, which served as money, a statue with a head of gold,
tables, chairs, and staves of cedar and ebony inlaid with gold, ivory
and precious stones, a golden plough, the golden sceptre of the
conquered prince, and richly embroidered stuffs. The fields of the
vanquished province were further measured by the Egyptian surveyors, and
the amount of taxation annually due from them was fixed. More than
208,000 measures of wheat were moreover carried off to Egypt from the
plain of Megiddo. The Canaanitish power was completely broken, and
Thothmes was now free to extend his empire further to the north.
Accordingly in the following year (B.C. 1479) we find him receiving
tribute from the Assyrian king. This consisted of leather bracelets,
various kinds of wood, and chariots. It was probably at this time that
Carchemish on the Euphrates was taken, the city being stormed from the
riverside. Five years later the first part of the annals was engraved on
the wall of the new temple of Amon at Karnak, and it concluded with an
account of the campaign of the year. This had been undertaken in
Northern Syria, and had resulted in the capture of Uarrt and Tunip, now
Tennib, to the north-west of Aleppo. No less than one hundred pounds of
silver and as many of gold were taken from Tunip, as well as
lapis-lazuli from Babylonia, and malachite from the Sinaitic peninsula,
together with vessels of iron and bronze. Some ships also were captured,
laden with slaves, bronze, lead, white gold, and other products of the
Greek seas. On the march home the Egyptian army took possession of
Arvad, and seized its rich stores of wheat and wine. "Then the soldiers
caroused and anointed themselves with oil as they used to do on feast
days in the land of Egypt."
The next year Kadesh on the Orontes, near the Lake of Horns, was
attacked and destroyed, its trees were cut down and its corn carried
away. From Kadesh Thothmes proceeded to the land of Phoenicia, and took
the cities of Zemar (now Sumra) and Arvad. The heirs of four of the
conquered princes were carried as hostages to Egypt, "so that when one
of these kings should die, then the Pharaoh should take his son and put
him in his stead."
In B.C. 1472 the land of the Amorites was reduced, or rather that part
of it which was known as Takhis, the Thahash of Genesis xxii. 24, on the
shores of the Lake of Merna, in which we should probably see the Lake of
Homs. Nearly 500 prisoners were led to Egypt. The Syrian princes now
came to offer their gifts to the conqueror, bringing with them, among
other things, more than 760 pounds of silver, 19 chariots covered with
silver ornaments, and 41 leathern collars covered with bronze scales. At
the same time the whole country was thoroughly organized under the new
Egyptian administration. Military roads were constructed and provided
with posting-houses, at each of which relays of horses were kept in
readiness, as well as "the necessary provision of bread of various
sorts, oil, balsam, wine, honey, and fruits." The quarries of the
Lebanon were further required to furnish the Pharaoh with limestone for
his buildings in Egypt and elsewhere.
Two years later Thothmes was again in Syria. He made his way as far as
the Euphrates, and there on the eastern bank erected a stele by the side
of one which his father Thothmes II. had already set up. The stele was
an imperial boundary-stone marking the frontier of the Egyptian empire.
It was just such another stele that Hadad-ezer of Zobah was intending to
restore in the same place when he was met and defeated by David (2 Sam.
viii. 3).
The Pharaoh now took ship and descended the Euphrates, "conquering the
towns and ploughing up the fields of the king of Naharaim." He then
re-ascended the stream to the city of Ni, where he placed another stele,
in proof that the boundary of Egypt had been extended thus far.
Elephants still existed in the neighbourhood, as they continued to do
four and a half centuries later in the time of the Assyrian king
Tiglath-pileser I. Thothmes amused himself by hunting them, and no less
than 120 were slain.
On his way home the tribute and "yearly tax" of the inhabitants of the
Lebanon was brought to him, and the corvée-work annually required from
them was also fixed. Thothmes indulged his taste for natural history by
receiving as part of the tribute various birds which were peculiar to
Syria, or at all events were unknown in Egypt, and which, we are told,
"were dearer to the king than anything else." He had already established
zoological and botanical gardens in Thebes, and the strange animals and
plants which his campaigns furnished for them were depicted on the walls
of one of the chambers in the temple he built at Karnak.
Before his return to Egypt he received the tribute of "the king of
Sangar," or Shinar, in Mesopotamia, and "of the land of Khata the
greater." The first consisted for the most part of lapis-lazuli, real
and artificial, of which the most prized was "the lapis-lazuli of
Babylon." Among the gifts was "a ram's head of real lapis-lazuli, 15
pounds in weight." The land of the Hittites, "the greater," so called to
distinguish it from the lesser Hittite land in the south of Palestine,
sent 8 rings of silver, 400 pounds in weight, besides "a great piece of
crystal."
The following year Thothmes marched through "the land of Zahi," the "dry
land" of the Phoenician coast, to Northern Syria, where he punished the
king of Anugas or Nukhasse, who had shown symptoms of rebellion. Large
quantities of gold and bronze were carried off, as well as 15 chariots,
plated with gold and silver, 6 iron tent-poles studded with precious
stones, and 70 asses. Lead and various kinds of wood and stone, together
with 608 jars of Lebanon wine, 2080 jars of oil, and 690 jars of balsam,
were also received from Southern Syria, and posting-houses were
established along the roads of the land of Zahi. A fleet of Phoenician
merchant vessels was next sent to Egypt laden with logs of wood from the
forests of Palestine and the Lebanon for the buildings of the king. At
the same time, "the king of Cyprus," which now was an Egyptian
possession, forwarded his tribute to the Pharaoh, consisting of 108
bricks of copper 2040 pounds in weight, 5 bricks of lead nearly 29,000
pounds in weight, 110 pounds of lapis-lazuli, an elephant's tusk, and
other objects of value.
The next year (B.C. 1468) there was a campaign against the king of
Naharaim, who had collected his soldiers and horses "from the extreme
ends of the world." But the Mesopotamian army was utterly defeated. Its
booty fell into the hands of the Egyptians, who, however, took only ten
prisoners, which looks as if, after all, the battle was not on a very
large scale.
In B.C. 1464 Thothmes was again in Northern Syria. Among the booty
acquired during the expedition were "bowls with goats' heads on them,
and one with a lion's head, the work of the land of Zahi." Horses, asses
and oxen, 522 slaves, 156 jars of wine, 1752 jars of butter, 5
elephants' tusks, 2822 pounds of gold besides copper and lead, were
among the spoils of the campaign. The annual tribute was only received
from Cyprus, consisting this time of copper and mares, as well as from
Aripakh, a district in the Taurus.
The next year the Pharaoh led his troops against some country, the name
of which is lost, in "the land of the hostile Shasu" or Beduin. The
plunder which was carried off from it shows that it was somewhere in
Syria, probably in the region of the Lebanon. Gold and silver, a silver
double-handled cup with a bull's head, iron, wine, balsam, oil, butter
and honey, were among the spoils of the war. Tribute arrived also from
"the king of the greater Hittite land," which included a number of negro
slaves.
Revolt, however, now broke out in the north. Tunip rebelled, as did also
the king of Kadesh, who built a "new" fortress to protect his city from
attack. Thothmes at once marched against them by the road along "the
coast," which led him through the country of the Fenkhu or Phoenicians.
First he fell upon the towns of Alkana and utterly destroyed them, and
then poured his troops into the neighbouring land of Tunip. The city of
Tunip was taken and burnt, its crops were trodden under-foot, its trees
cut down, and its inhabitants carried into slavery. Then came the turn
of Kadesh. The "new" fortress fell at the first assault, and the whole
country was compelled to submit.
The king of Assyria again sent presents to the Pharaoh which the
Egyptian court regarded in the light of tribute. They consisted chiefly
of large blocks of "real lapis-lazuli" as well as "lapis-lazuli of
Babylon." More valuable gifts came from the subject princes of Syria.
Foremost among these was "a king's daughter all glorious with [a vesture
of] gold." Then there were four chariots plated with gold and six
chariots of gold, iron armour inlaid with gold, a jug of silver, a
golden helmet inlaid with lapis-lazuli, wine, honey and balsam, ivory
and various kinds of wood, wheat in such quantities that it could not be
measured, and the sixty-five slaves who had to be furnished each year as
part of the annual tax.
The annals of the next two years are in too mutilated a condition to
yield much information. Moreover, the campaigns carried on in them were
mainly in the Soudan. In B.C. 1461 the record closes. It was in that
year that the account of the Pharaoh's victories "which he had gained
from the 23rd until the (4)2nd year" were engraved upon the wall of the
temple. (The inscription has "32nd year," but as the wars extended
beyond the 40th year of the king's reign this must be a sculptor's
error.) And the chronicle concludes with the brief but expressive words,
"Thus hath he done: may he live for ever!"
Thothmes, indeed, did not live for ever, but he survived the completion
of his temple fourteen years. His death was followed by the revolt of
Northern Syria, and the first achievement of his son and successor,
Amenôphis II., was its suppression. Ni and Ugarit, the centres of
disaffection, were captured and punished, and among the prisoners from
Ugarit were 640 "Canaanite" merchants with their slaves. The name of
Canaanite had thus already acquired that secondary meaning of "merchant"
which we find in the Old Testament (Is. xxiii. 8; Ezek. xvii. 4). It is
a significant proof of the commercial activity and trading
establishments of the Canaanite race throughout the civilized world.
Even a cuneiform tablet from Kappadokia, which is probably of the same
age as the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, gives us the name of Kinanim "the
Canaanite" as that of a witness to a deed. It was not always, however,
that the Canaanites were so honourably distinguished. At times the name
was equivalent to that of "slave" rather than of "merchant," as in a
papyrus [Anast. 4, 16, 2.] where mention is made of Kan'amu or
"Canaanite slaves from Khal." So too in another papyrus we hear of a
slave called Saruraz the son of Naqati, whose mother was Kadi from the
land of Arvad. The Egyptian wars in Palestine must necessarily have
resulted in the enslavement of many of its inhabitants, and, as we have
seen, a certain number of young slaves formed part of the annual tax
levied upon Syria.
The successors of Thothmes III. extended the Egyptian empire far to the
south in the Soudan. But its Asiatic limits had already been reached.
Palestine, along with Phoenicia, the land of the Amorites and the
country east of the Jordan, was constituted into an Egyptian province
and kept strictly under Egyptian control. Further north the connection
with the imperial government was looser. There were Egyptian fortresses
and garrisons here and there, and certain important towns like Tunip
near Aleppo and Qatna on the Khabûr were placed under Egyptian prefects.
But elsewhere the conquered populations were allowed to remain under
their native kings. In some instances, as, for example, in Anugas or
Nukhasse, the kings were little more than satraps of the Pharaoh, but in
other instances, like Alasiya, north of Hamath, they resembled the
rulers of the protected states in modern India. In fact, the king of
Alasiya calls the Pharaoh his "brother," and except for the obligation
of paying tribute was practically an independent sovereign.
The Egyptian dominion was acknowledged as far north as Mount Amanus.
Carchemish, soon to become a Hittite stronghold, was in Egyptian hands,
and the Hittites themselves had not yet emerged from the fortresses of
the Taurus. Their territory was still confined to Kataonia and Armenia
Minor between Melitênê and the Saros, and they courted the favour of the
Egyptian monarch by sending him gifts. Thothmes would have refused to
believe that before many years were over they would wrest Northern Syria
from his successors, and contend on equal terms with the Egyptian
Pharaoh.
The Egyptian possessions on the east bank of Euphrates lay along the
course of the Khabûr, towards the oasis of Singar or Shinar. North of
the Belikh came the powerful kingdom of Mitanni, Aram-Naharaim as it is
called in the Old Testament, which was never subdued by the Egyptian
arms, and whose royal family intermarried with the successors of
Thothmes. Mitanni, the capital, stood nearly opposite Carchemish, which
thus protected the Egyptian frontier on the east.
Southward of the Belikh the frontier was formed by the desert. Syria,
Bashan, Ammon, and Moab were all included in the Pharaoh's empire. But
there it came to an end. Mount Seir was never conquered by the
Egyptians. The "city" of Edom appears in one of the Tel el-Amarna
tablets as a foreign state whose inhabitants wage war against the
Egyptian territory. The conquest of the Edomites in their mountain
fastnesses would have been a matter of difficulty, nor would anything
have been gained by it. Edom was rich neither agriculturally nor
commercially; it was, in fact, a land of barren mountains, and the trade
which afterwards passed through the Arabah to Elath and Ezion-geber in
the Gulf of Aqabah was already secured to the Egyptians through their
possession of the Gulf of Suez. The first and last of the Pharaohs, so
far as we know, who ventured on a campaign against the wild tribes of
Mount Seir, was Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty, and his campaign
was merely a punitive one. No attempt to incorporate the "Red Land" into
his dominions was ever made by an Egyptian king.
The Sinaitic peninsula, the province of Mafkat or "Malachite," as it was
called, had been in the possession of the Egyptians since the time of
Zosir of the third dynasty, and it continued to be regarded as part of
the Egyptian kingdom up to the age of the Ptolemies. The earliest of
Egyptian rock-sculptures is engraved in the peninsula, and represents
Snefru, the founder of the fourth dynasty, slaughtering the Beduin who
inhabited it. Its possession was valued on account of its mines of
copper and malachite. These were worked by the Egyptian kings with the
help of convict labour. Garrisons were established to protect them and
the roads which led to them, colonies of officials grew up at their
side, and temples were built dedicated to the deities of Egypt. Even as
late as the reign of Ramses III. the amount of minerals produced by the
mines was enormous. They existed for the most part on the western side
of the peninsula, opposite the Egyptian coast; but Ramses III. also
opened copper mines in the land of 'Ataka further east, and the name of
the goddess Hathor in hieroglyphics has been found by Dr. Friedmann on
the shores of Midian.
Vanquished Syria was made to contribute to the endowments of the
Egyptian temples. Thus the temple of Amon at Thebes was endowed by
Thothmes III. with the revenues of the three cities Anugas, Inu'am, and
Harankal; while Seti I., the father of Ramses II., bestowed upon it "all
the silver, gold, lapis-lazuli, malachite, and precious stones which he
carried off from the humbled land of Syria." Temples of the Egyptian
gods, as well as towns, were built in Syria itself; Meneptah founded a
city in the land of the Amorites; Ramses III. erected a temple to Amon
in "the land of Canaan, great as the horizon of heaven above, to which
the people of Syria come with their gifts"; and hieroglyphic
inscriptions lately discovered at Gaza show that another temple had been
built there by Amenophis II. to the goddess Mut.
Amenophis had suppressed the rebellion in Northern Syria with little
trouble. Seven Amorite kings were carried prisoners to Egypt from the
land of Takhis, and taken up the river as far as Thebes. There six of
them were hung outside the walls of the city, as the body of Saul was
hung by the Philistines outside the walls of Beth-shan, while the
seventh was conveyed to Napata in Ethiopia, and there punished in the
same way in order to impress a lesson of obedience upon the negroes of
the Soudan.
Amenophis II. was succeeded by Thothmes IV., who was called upon to face
a new enemy, the Hittites. It was at the commencement of his reign that
they first began to descend from their mountain homes, and the frontier
city of Tunip had to bear the brunt of the attack. It was probably in
order to strengthen himself against these formidable foes that the
Pharaoh married the daughter of the king of Mitanni, who changed her
name to Mut-em-ua. It was the beginning of those inter-marriages with
the princes of Asia which led to the Asiatized court and religion of
Amenophis IV., and finally to the overthrow of the eighteenth dynasty.
The son of Mut-em-ua was Amenophis III., whose long reign of
thirty-seven years was as brilliant and successful as that of
Thothmes III. At Soleb between the second and third cataracts he built a
temple to his own deified self, and engraved upon its columns the names
of his vassal states. Among them are Tunip and Kadesh, Carchemish and
Apphadana on the Khabûr. Sangar, Assyria, Naharaim, and the Hittites
also appear among them, but this must be on the strength of the tribute
or presents which had been received from them. The Pharaoh filled his
harîm with Asiatic princesses. His queen Teie, who exercised an
important influence upon both religion and politics, came from Asia, and
among his wives were the sisters and daughters of the kings of Babylonia
and Mitanni, while one of his own daughters was married to Burna-buryas
the Babylonian sovereign. His marriage with Gilu-khipa, the daughter of
Sutarna, king of Aram-Naharaim, was celebrated on a scarab, where it is
further related that she was accompanied to Egypt by three hundred and
seventeen "maids of honour." Besides allying himself in marriage to the
royal houses of Asia, Amenophis III. passed a good deal of his time in
Syria and Mesopotamia, amusing himself with hunting lions. During the
first ten years of his reign he boasts of having killed no less than one
hundred and two of them. It was in the last of these years that he
married queen Teie, who is said on scarabs to have been the daughter of
"Yua and Tua." Possibly these are contracted forms of Tusratta and Yuni,
who were at the time king and queen of Mitanni. But if so, it is curious
that no royal titles are given to her parents; moreover, the author of
the scarabs has made Yua the father of the queen and Tua her mother.
Tuya is the name of an Amorite in one of the Tel el-Amarna letters,
while from another of them it would seem as if Teie had been the
daughter of the Babylonian king. One of the daughters of Tusratta,
Tadu-khipa, was indeed married to Amenophis, but she did not rank as
chief queen. In the reign of Meneptah of the nineteenth dynasty the
vizier was a native of Bashan, Ben-Mazana by name, whose father was
called Yu the elder. Yua may therefore be a word of Amorite origin; and
a connection has been suggested between it and the Hebrew Yahveh. This,
however, though possible, cannot be proved.
When Amenophis III. died his son Amenophis IV. seems to have been still
a minor. At all events the queen-mother Teie became all-powerful in the
government of the state. Her son, the new Pharaoh, had been brought up
in the religious beliefs of his mother, and had inherited the ideas and
tendencies of his Asiatic forefathers. A plaster-cast of his face, taken
immediately after death, was discovered by Prof. Petrie at Tel
el-Amarna, and it is the face of a refined and thoughtful theorist, of a
philosopher rather than of a king, earnest in his convictions almost to
fanaticism.
Amenophis IV. undertook no less a task than that of reforming the State
religion of Egypt. For many centuries the religion of the priests and
scribes had been inclining to pantheism. Inside the temples there had
been an esoteric teaching, that the various deities of Egypt were but
manifestations of the one supreme God. But it had hardly passed outside
them. With the accession of Amenophis IV. to the throne came a change.
The young king boldly rejected the religion of which he was officially
the head, and professed himself a worshipper of the one God whose
visible semblance was the solar disk. Alone of the deities of Egypt Ra,
the ancient Sun-god of Heliopolis, was acknowledged to be the
representative of the true God. It was the Baal-worship of Syria,
modified by the philosophic conceptions of Egypt. The Aten-Ra of the
"heretic" Pharaoh was an Asiatic Baal, but unlike the Baal of Canaan he
stood alone; there were no other Baals, no Baalim, by the side of him.
Amenophis was not content with preaching and encouraging the new faith;
he sought to force it upon his subjects. The other gods of Egypt were
proscribed, and the name and head of Amon, the patron god of Thebes, to
whom his ancestors had ascribed their power and victories, were erased
from the monuments wherever they occurred. Even his own father's name
was not spared, and the emissaries of the king, from one end of the
country to the other, defaced that portion of it which contained the
name of the god. His own name was next changed, and Amenophis IV. became
Khu-n-Aten, "the splendour of the solar disk."
Khu-n-Aten's attempt to overthrow the ancient faith of Egypt was
naturally resisted by the powerful priesthood of Thebes. A religious war
was declared for the first time, so far as we know, in the history of
mankind. On the one side a fierce persecution was directed against the
adherents of the old creed; on the other side every effort was made to
impede and defeat the Pharaoh. His position grew daily more insecure,
and at last he turned his back on the capital of his fathers, and built
himself a new city far away to the north. The priests of Amon had thus
far triumphed; the old idolatrous worship was carried on once more in
the great temple of Karnak, though its official head was absent, and
Khu-n-Aten with his archives and his court had fled to a safer home.
Upper Egypt was left to its worship of Amon and Min, while the king
established himself nearer his Canaanite possessions.
Here on the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minyeh and
Siût, the new capital was founded on a strip of land protected from
attack by a semi-amphitheatre of cliffs. The city, with its palaces and
gardens, extended nearly two miles in length along the river bank. In
its midst rose the temple of the new god of Egypt, and hard by the
palace of the king. Both were brilliant with painting and sculpture, and
inlaid work in precious stones and gold. Even the floors were frescoed,
while the walls and columns were enamelled or adorned with the most
costly materials that the Egyptian world could produce. Here and there
were statues of alabaster, of bronze or of gold, some of them almost
Greek in form and design. Along with the reform in religion there had
gone a reform in art. The old conventionalized art of Egypt was
abandoned, and a new art had been introduced which aimed at imitating
nature with realistic fidelity.
The mounds which mark the site of Khu-n-Aten's city are now known as Tel
el-Amarna. It had a brief but brilliant existence of about thirty years.
Then the enemies of the Pharaoh and his work of reform finally
prevailed, and his city with its temple and palaces was levelled to the
ground. It is from among its ruins that the wondering fellah and
explorer of to-day exhume the gorgeous relics of its past.
But among these relics none have proved more precious than the clay
tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters, which have revolutionized
our conceptions of the ancient East. They were preserved in the Foreign
Office of the day. This formed part of the public buildings connected
with the palace, and the bricks of which it was built were stamped with
an inscription describing its character. Many of the tablets had been
brought from the archive chamber of Thebes, but the greater part of the
collection belongs to the reign of Khu-n-Aten himself. It consists
almost entirely of official correspondence; of letters from the kings of
Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and Kappadokia, and of despatches
from the Egyptian governors and vassal-princes in Syria and Palestine.
They furnish us with a living and unexpected picture of Canaan about
1400 B.C.
Fragments of dictionaries for the use of the scribes have also been
recovered from the _débris_ of the building, as well as the seal of a
servant of Samas-akh-iddin who looked after the cuneiform
correspondence. Like several of the Canaanitish governors, he bore a
Babylonian name. Even the brother of Amenophis III., who had been made
king of Nukhasse, had received the Babylonian name of Rimmon-nirari. No
stronger proof could be found of the extent and strength of Babylonian
influence in the West.
At Khut-Aten, as the "heretic" Pharaoh called his new capital, he was
surrounded by the adherents of the new faith. Many of them were
doubtless Egyptians, but many, perhaps the majority, were of Asiatic
extraction. Already under his father and grandfather the court had been
filled with Canaanites and other natives of Asia, and the great offices
of state had been occupied by them. Now under Khu-n-Aten the Asiatic
character of the government was increased tenfold. The native Egyptian
had to make way for the foreigner, and the rule of the Syrian stranger
which seemed to have been expelled with the Hyksos was restored under
another form. Canaan was nominally a subject province of Egypt, but in
reality it had led its conqueror captive. A semi-Asiatic Pharaoh was
endeavouring to force an Asiatic form of faith upon his subjects, and
entrusting his government to Asiatic officials; even art had ceased to
be Egyptian and had put on an Asiatic dress.
The tombs of Khu-n-Aten's followers are cut in the cliffs at the back of
the city, while his own sepulchre is towards the end of a long ravine
which runs out into the eastern desert between two lofty lines of
precipitous rock. But few of them are finished, and the sepulchre of the
king himself, magnificent in its design, is incomplete and mutilated.
The sculptures on the walls have been broken, and the granite
sarcophagus in which the body of the great king rested has been
shattered into fragments before it could be lifted into the niche where
it was intended to stand. The royal mummy was torn into shreds, and the
porcelain figures buried with it dashed to the ground.
It is clear that the death of Khu-n-Aten must have been quickly followed
by the triumph of his enemies. His capital was overthrown, the stones of
its temple carried away to Thebes, there to adorn the sanctuary of the
victorious Amon, and the adherents of his reform either slain or driven
into exile. The vengeance executed upon them was national as well as
religious. It meant not only a restoration of the national faith, but
also the restoration of the native Egyptian to the government of his
country. The feelings which inspired it were similar to those which
underlay the movement of Arabi in our own time, and there was no English
army to stand in the way of its success. The rise of the nineteenth
dynasty represents the triumph of the national cause.
The cuneiform letters of Tel el-Amarna show that already before
Khu-n-Aten's death his empire and power were breaking up. Letter after
letter is sent to him from the governors in Canaan with urgent requests
for troops. The Hittites were attacking the empire in the north, and
rebels were overthrowing it within. "If auxiliaries come this year,"
writes Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem, "the provinces of the king my lord will be
preserved; but if no auxiliaries come the provinces of the king my lord
will be destroyed." To these entreaties no answer could be returned.
There was civil and religious war in Egypt itself, and the army was
needed to defend the Pharaoh at home.
The picture of Canaan presented to us by the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence has been supplemented by the discovery of Lachish. Five
years ago Prof. Flinders Petrie undertook to excavate for the Palestine
Exploration Fund in the lofty mound of Tel el-Hesi in Southern
Palestine. Tel el-Hesi stands midway between Gaza and Hebron on the edge
of the Judaean mountains, and overlooking a torrent stream. His
excavations resulted in the discovery of successive cities built one
upon the ruins of the other, and in the probability that the site was
that of Lachish. The excavations were resumed by Mr. Bliss in the
following year, and the probability was raised to practical certainty.
The lowest of the cities was the Lachish of the Amorite period, whose
crude brick walls, nearly twenty-nine feet in thickness, have been
brought to light, while its pottery has revealed to us for the first
time the characteristics of Amorite manufacture. The huge walls bear out
the testimony of the Israelitish spies, that the cities of the Amorites
were "great and walled up to heaven" (Deut. i. 28). They give
indications, however, that in spite of their strength the fortresses
they enclosed must have been captured more than once. Doubtless this was
during the age of the Egyptian wars in Canaan.
As at Troy, it is probable that it was only the citadel which was thus
strongly fortified. Below it was the main part of the town, the
inhabitants of which took refuge in the citadel when an enemy threatened
to attack them. The fortified part, indeed, was not of very large
extent. Its ruins measured only about two hundred feet each way, while
the enclosure within which it stands is a quarter of a mile in diameter.
Here a regular series of pottery has been found, dating from the
post-exilic age through successive strata back to the primitive
Amoritish fortress. To Prof. Petrie belongs the credit of determining
the characteristics of these various strata, and fixing their
approximate age.
The work begun by Prof. Petrie was continued by Mr. Bliss. Deep down
among the ruins of the Amoritish town he found objects which take us
back to the time of Khu-n-Aten and his predecessors. They consist of
Egyptian beads and scarabs of the eighteenth dynasty, and on one of the
beads are the name and title of "the royal wife Teie." Along with them
were discovered beads of amber which came from the Baltic as well as
seal-cylinders, some of them imported from Babylonia, others western
imitations of Babylonian work. The Babylonian cylinders belong to the
period which extends from 3000 to 1500 B.C., while the imitations are
similar in style to those which have been found in the pre-historic
tombs of Cyprus and Phoenicia.
But there was one discovery made by Mr. Bliss which far surpasses in
interest all the rest. It is that of a cuneiform tablet, similar in
character, in contents, and in age to those which have come from Tel
el-Amarna. Even the Egyptian governor mentioned in it was already known
to us from the Tel el-Amarna correspondence as the governor of Lachish.
One of the cuneiform letters now preserved at Berlin was written by him,
and Ebed-Tob informs us that he was subsequently murdered by the people
of his own city.
Here is a translation of the letter discovered at Tel el-Hesi:--
"To ... rabbat (?) [or perhaps: To the officer Baya] (thus speaks) ...
abi. At thy feet I prostrate myself. Verily thou knowest that Dan-Hadad
and Zimrida have inspected the whole of the city, and Dan-Hadad says to
Zimrida: Send Yisyara to me [and] give me 3 shields (?) and 3 slings and
3 falchions, since I am prefect (?) over the country of the king and it
has acted against me; and now I will restore thy possession which the
enemy took from thee; and I have sent my ..., and ... rabi-ilu ... has
despatched his brother [with] these words."
(This translation differs in some respects from that previously given by
me, as it is based on the copy of the text made from the original at
Constantinople by Dr. Scheil (_Recueil de Trailaux relatifs à la
Philologie et à l'Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xv. 3, 4,
137). As I stated at the time, my copy was made from a cast and was
therefore uncertain in several places. I am doubtful whether even now
the published text is correct throughout.)
Yisyara was the name of an Amorite, as we learn from one of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets, where he is mentioned along with other rebels as
being sent in fetters of bronze to the king. Of Dan-Hadad we know
nothing further, but Zimrida's letter is as follows:--
"To the king my lord, my god, my Sun-god, the Sun-god who is from
heaven, thus (writes) Zimridi, the governor of the city of Lachish. Thy
servant, the dust of thy feet, at the feet of the king my lord, the
Sun-god from heaven, bows himself seven times seven. I have very
diligently listened to the words of the messenger whom the king my lord
has sent to me, and now I have despatched (a mission) according to his
message."
It was towards the end of Khu-n-Aten's reign, when the Egyptian empire
was falling to pieces, that the murder of Zimrida took place. Ebed-Tob
thus describes it in a letter to the secretary of the Pharaoh: "The
Khabiri (or Confederates) are capturing the fortresses of the king. Not
a single governor remains among them to the king my lord; all are
destroyed. Behold, Turbazu thy officer [has fallen] in the great gate of
the city of Zelah. Behold, the servants who acted against the king have
slain Zimrida of Lachish. They have murdered Jephthah-Hadad thy officer
in the gate of the city of Zelah."
We hear of another governor of Lachish, Yabni-el by name, but he
probably held office before Zimrida. At all events the following
despatch of his has been preserved:--
"To the king my lord, my god, my Sun-god, the Sun-god who is from
heaven, thus (writes) Yabni-el, the governor of the city of Lachish, thy
servant, the dust of thy feet, the groom of thy horses; at the feet of
the king my lord, my god, my Sun-god, the Sun-god who is from heaven,
seven times seven I bow myself. Glorious and supreme [art thou]. I the
groom of [the horses] of the king my lord, listen to the [words] of the
king my lord. Now have I heard all the words which Baya the prefect has
spoken to me. Now have I done everything."
Zimrida of Lachish must be distinguished from another Canaanite of the
same name who was governor of Sidon. This latter was a personal enemy of
Rib-Hadad the governor of Gebal, whose letters to Khu-n-Aten form a
considerable portion of the Tel el-Amarna collection. The authority of
Rib-Hadad originally extended over the greater part of Phoenicia, and
included the strong fortress of Zemar or Simyra in the mountains. One by
one, however, his cities were taken from him by his adversaries whom he
accuses of rebellion against the Pharaoh. His letters to Egypt are
accordingly filled with imploring appeals for help. But none was sent,
and as his enemies equally professed their loyalty to the Egyptian
government, it is doubtful whether this was because the Pharaoh
suspected Rib-Hadad himself of disaffection or because no troops could
be spared.
Rib-Hadad had been appointed to his post by Amenophis III., and in one
of his letters he looks back regretfully on "the good old times." When
his letters were written he was old and sick. Abimelech, the governor of
Tyre, was almost the only friend who remained to him. Not content with
fomenting rebellion in his district, and taking his cities from him, his
enemies accused him to the Pharaoh of disloyalty and misdoing. Those
accusations were in some cases founded on truth. He confesses to having
fled from his city, but he urges that it was to save his life. The
troops he had begged for had not been sent to him, and he could no
longer defend either his city or himself. He also alleges that the
excesses committed by some of his servants had been without his
knowledge. This seems to have been in answer to a despatch of Ammunira,
the prefect of Beyrout, in which he informed the king that he was
keeping the brother of the governor of Gebal as a hostage, and that the
latter had been intriguing against the government in the land of the
Amorites.
Chief among the adversaries of Rib-Hadad was Ebed-Asherah, a native of
the land of Barbarti, and the governor of the Amoritish territory.
Several of his sons are mentioned, but the ablest and most influential
of them was Aziru or Ezer, who possessed a considerable amount of power.
The whole family, while professing to be the obedient servants of the
Pharaoh, nevertheless acted with a good deal of independence, and sought
to aggrandise themselves at the expense of the neighbouring governors.
They had at their disposal a large body of "plunderers," or Beduin from
the eastern desert, and Rib-Hadad accuses them of forming secret
alliances with the kings of Babylonia, of Mitanni and of the Hittites.
The authority of Aziru extended to the northern frontier of the empire;
we find him sent with the Egyptian general Khatip, or Hotep, to oppose
the Hittite invasion, and writing to the king as well as to the prime
minister Dudu to explain why they had not succeeded in doing so. Tunip
had been invested by the enemy, and Aziru fears that it may fall into
their hands. The Hittites had already made their way into the land of
Nukhasse, and were from thence marching up into the land of the
Amorites.
On the heels of these despatches came a long letter from the people of
Tunip, complaining of the conduct of Aziru, and protesting against his
doing to them what he had done to the city of Ni. He was at the time in
the land of the Hittites, doubtless carrying on the war against the
general enemy.
To these accusations Aziru made a full reply. "O my lord," he begins,
"hearken not to the wicked men who slander me before the king my lord: I
am thy servant for ever." He had been charged with want of respect to
the Pharaoh, on the ground that he had not received the royal
commissioner Khani on his arrival at Tunip. But, he replies, he did not
know that the commissioner was coming, and as soon as he heard that he
was on the road he "followed him, but failed to overtake him." In his
absence Khani was duly received by the brethren of Aziru, and Belti-el
(or Bethuel) furnished him with meat and bread and wine. Moreover, on
his way home he was met by Aziru himself, who provided the commissioner
with horses and mules. A more serious charge was that of seizing the
city of Zemar. To this Aziru answers that it was done in self-defence,
as the kings of Nukhasse had always been hostile to him, and had robbed
him of his cities at the instigation of Khatip, who had also carried
away all the silver and gold which the king had placed under his care.
Moreover he had not really seized Zemar, but had won the people over to
himself by means of gifts. Lastly, he denied the accusation that he had
received the envoy of the king of the Hittites and refused to receive
the Egyptian messenger, although the country he governed belonged to the
king, and the king had appointed him over it. Let the Egyptian envoy
make inquiries, he urges, and he will find that Aziru has acted
uprightly.
The capture of Zemar forms the burden of many of the letters of
Rib-Hadad. It had been besieged for two months by Ebed-Asherah, who had
vainly attempted to corrupt the loyalty of the governor of Gebal. For
the time Rib-Hadad managed to save the city, but Aziru allied himself
with Arvad and the neighbouring towns of Northern Phoenicia, captured
twelve of Rib-Hadad's men, demanded a ransom of fifty pieces of silver
for each of them, and seized the ships of Zemar, Beyrout, and Sidon. The
forces sent from Gebal to Zemar were made prisoners by the Amorite chief
at Abiliya, and the position of Rib-Hadad daily became more desperate.
Pa-Hor, the Egyptian governor of Kumidi, joined his opponents, and
induced the Sute or Beduin to attack his Sardinian guards. Yapa-Hadad,
another governor, followed the example of Pa-Hor, and Zimridi the
governor of Sidon had from the first been his enemy. Tyre alone remained
faithful to his cause, though an "Ionian" who had been sent there on a
mission from Egypt had handed over horses, chariots, and men to
Ebed-Asherah, and it was accordingly to Tyre that Rib-Hadad sent his
family for safety. Tyre, however, now began to suffer like Gebal in
consequence of the alliance between Zimridi and Ebed-Asherah.
Zemar eventually fell into the hands of Ebed-Asherah and his sons, its
prefect Khayapa or Khaip being slain during the assault. Abimelech, the
governor of Tyre, accuses Zimridi of having been the cause. Whether this
were so or not, it placed the whole of Northern Phoenicia under the
government or the influence of the Amorite chiefs. If Rib-Hadad spoke
the truth, Ebed-Asherah had "sent to the soldiers in Bit-Ninip, saying,
'Gather yourselves together, and let us march up against Gebal, if
therein are any who have saved themselves from our hands, and we will
appoint governors throughout all the provinces;' so all the provinces
went over to the Beduin." Provisions began to be scarce in Gebal, and
the governor writes to Egypt for corn.
Rib-Hadad now threatened the Pharaoh with deserting to his enemies if
succour was not forth-coming immediately, and at the same time he
appealed to Amon-apt and Khayapa, the Egyptian commissioners who had
been sent to inquire into the condition of affairs in Canaan. The appeal
was so far successful that troops were despatched to Zemar. But it was
too late: along with Arka it had already been occupied by Ebed-Asherah,
who thereupon writes to the Pharaoh, protesting his loyalty to
Khu-n-Aten, declaring that he is "the house-dog" of the king, and that
he guards the land of the Amorites for "the king" his lord. He further
calls on the Egyptian commissioner Pakhanate, who had been ordered to
visit him, to bear witness that he was "defending" Zemar and its fields
for the king. That Pakhanate was friendly to Ebed-Asherah may be
gathered from a despatch of Rib-Hadad, in which he accuses that officer
of refusing to send any troops to the relief of Gebal, and of looking on
while Zemar fell. Ebed-Asherah goes on to beg the king to come himself,
and see with his own eyes how faithful a governor he really was.
The letters of Abimelech of Tyre told a different tale, and the
unfortunate Pharaoh might well be excused if he was as much puzzled as
we are to know on which side the truth lay, or whether indeed it lay on
either. Abimelech had a grievance of his own. As soon as Zimridi of
Sidon learned that he had been appointed governor of Tyre, he seized the
neighbouring city of Usu, which seems to have occupied the site of
Palætyros on the mainland, thereby depriving the Tyrians of their
supplies of wood, food, and fresh water. The city of Tyre was at the
time confined to a rocky island, to which provisions and water had to be
conveyed in boats. Hence the hostile occupation of the town on the
mainland caused many of its inhabitants to die of want. To add to their
difficulties, the city was blockaded by the combined fleet of Sidon,
Arvad, and Aziru. Ilgi, "king of Sidon," seems to have fled to Tyre for
protection, while Abimelech reports that the king of Hazor had joined
the Beduin under Ebed-Asherah and his sons. It may be noted that a
letter of this very king of Hazor has been preserved, as well as another
from Ebed-Sullim, the Egyptian governor of the city, whose powers were
co-extensive with those of the king.
Soon afterwards, however, the Sidonian ships were compelled to retreat,
and the Tyrian governor made ready to pursue them. Meanwhile he sent his
messenger Elimelech to Khu-n-Aten with various presents, and gave the
king an account of what had been happening in "Canaan." The Hittite
troops had departed, but Etagama--elsewhere called Aidhu-gama--the
_pa-ur_ or "prince" of Kadesh, in the land of Kinza, had joined Aziru in
attacking Namya-yitsa, the governor of Kumidi. Abimelech adds that his
rival Zimridi of Sidon had collected ships and men from the cities of
Aziru against him, and had consequently defeated him, but if the Pharaoh
would send only four companies of troops to his rescue all would be
well.
Zimridi, however, was not behindhand in forwarding his version of events
to the Egyptian court, and assuring the king of his unswerving fidelity.
"Verily the king my lord knows," he says, "that the queen of the city of
Sidon is the handmaid of the king my lord, who has given her into my
hand, and that I have hearkened to the words of the king my lord that he
would send to his servant, and my heart rejoiced and my head was
exalted, and my eyes were enlightened, and my ears heard the words of
the king my lord.... And the king my lord knows that hostility is very
strong against me; all the [fortresses] which the king gave into [my
hand] had revolted" to the Beduin, but had been retaken by the commander
of the Egyptian forces. The letter throws a wholly different light on
the relations of the two rival parties in Phoenicia.
The assertions of Rib-Hadad, however, are supported by those of his
successor in the government of Gebal, El-rabi-Hor. Rib-Hadad himself
disappears from the scene. He may have died, for he complains that he is
old and sick; he may have been driven out of Gebal, for in one of his
despatches he states that the city was inclined to revolt, while in
another he tells us that even his own brother had turned against him and
gone over to the Amorite faction. Or he may have been displaced from his
post; at all events, we hear that the Pharaoh had written to him, saying
that Gebal was rebellious, and that there was a large amount of royal
property in it. We hear also that Rib-Hadad had sent his son to the
Egyptian court to plead his cause there, alleging age and infirmities as
a reason for not going himself. However it may have been, we find a new
governor in Gebal, who bears the hybrid name of El-rabi-Hor, "a great
god is Horus."
His first letter is to protest against Khu-n-Aten's mistrust of Gebal,
which he calls "thy city and the city of [thy] fathers," and to assert
roundly that "Aziru is in rebellion against the king my lord." Aziru had
made a league (?) with the kings of Ni, Arvad, and Ammiya (the Beni-Ammo
of Num. xxii. 5) (See above, p. 64.), and with the help of the Amorite
Palasa was destroying the cities of the Pharaoh. So El-rabi-Hor asks the
king not to heed anything the rebel may write about his seizure of Zemar
or his massacre of the royal governors, but to send some troops to
himself for the defence of Gebal. In a second letter he reiterates his
charges against Aziru, who had now "smitten" Adon, the king of Arka, and
possessed himself of Zemar and the other towns of Phoenicia, so that
Gebal "alone" is on the side of the king, who "looks on" without doing
anything. Moreover a fresh enemy had arisen in the person of Eta-gama of
Kadesh, who had joined himself with the king of the Hittites and the
king of Naharaim.
Letters to Khu-n-Aten from Akizzi the governor of Qatna, which, as we
learn from the inscriptions of Assur-natsir-pal, was situated on the
Khabûr, represent Aziru in the same light. First of all, the Egyptian
government is informed that the king of the Hittites, together with
Aidhu-gama (or Eta-gama) of Kadesh has been invading the Egyptian
territory, burning its cities, and carrying away from Qatna the image of
the Sun-god. Khu-n-aten, it is urged, could not allow the latter crime
to go unpunished. The Sun-god had created him and his father, and had
caused them to be called after his own name. He was the supreme object
of the Pharaoh's worship, the deity for whose sake Khu-n-Aten had
deserted Thebes.
The Hittite king had been joined in his invasion of Syria by the
governors of some otherwise unknown northern cities, but the kings of
Nukhasse, Ni, Zinzar (the Sonzar of the Egyptian texts), and Kinanat
(the Kanneh of Ezek. xxvii. 23) remained faithful to the Egyptian
monarch. The rebel governors, however, were in the land of Ube,--the Aup
of the hieroglyphics,--which they were urging Aidhu-gama to invade.
Another letter brings Aziru upon the scene. He is accused of having
invaded the land of Nukhasse, and made prisoners of the people of Qatna.
The Pharaoh is prayed to rescue or ransom them, and to send chariots and
soldiers to the help of his Mesopotamian subjects. If they come all the
lands round about will acknowledge him as lord, and he will be lord also
of Nukhasse; if they do not come, the men of Qatna will be forced to
obey Aziru.
It is probable that the misdeeds of Aziru which are here referred to
were committed at the time he was in Tunip, professedly protecting it
against Hittite attack. It would seem from what Akizzi says, that
instead of faithfully performing his mission, he had aimed at
establishing his own power in Northern Syria. While nominally an officer
of the Pharaoh, he was really seeking to found an Amorite kingdom in the
north. In this he would have been a predecessor of Og and Sihon, whose
kingdoms were built up on the ruins of the Egyptian empire.
A despatch, however, from Namya-yitsa, the governor of Kumidi, sets the
conduct of Aziru in a more favourable light. It was written at a
somewhat later time, when rebellion against the Egyptian authority was
spreading throughout Syria. A certain Biridasyi had stirred up the city
of Inu'am, and after shutting its gate upon Namya-yitsa had entered the
city of Ashtaroth-Karnaim in Bashan, and there seized the chariots
belonging to the Pharaoh, handing them over to the Beduin. He then
joined the kings of Buzruna (now Bosra) and Khalunni (near the Wadi
'Allân), in a plot to murder Namya-yitsa, who escaped, however, to
Damascus, though his own brothers turned against him. The rebels next
attacked Aziru, captured some of his soldiers, and in league with
Etu-gama wasted the district of Abitu. Etakkama, however, as Etu-gama
spells his own name, professed to be a loyal servant of the Egyptian
king, and one of the Tel el-Amarna letters is from him.
We next hear of Namya-yitsa in Accho or Acre, where he had taken refuge
with Suta, or Seti, the Egyptian commissioner. Seti had already been in
Jerusalem, and had been inquiring there into the behaviour of Ebed-Tob.
The picture of incipient anarchy and rebellion which is set before us by
the correspondence from Phoenicia and Syria is repeated in that from the
centre and south of Palestine. In the centre the chief seats of the
Egyptian government were at Megiddo, at Khazi (the Gaza of 1 Chron. vii.
28), near Shechem, and at Gezer. Each of these towns was under an
Egyptian governor, specially appointed by the Pharaoh.
The governor of Khazi bore the name of Su-yarzana, Megiddo was under the
authority of Biridî, while the governor of Gaza was Yapakhi. There are
several letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection from the latter
official, chiefly occupied with demands for help against his enemies.
The district under his control was attacked by the Sute or Beduin, led
by a certain Labai or Labaya and his sons. Labai, though of Beduin
origin, was himself professedly an Egyptian official, the Egyptian
policy having been to give the title of governor to the powerful Beduin
sheikhs, and to attach them to the Egyptian government by the combined
influence of bribery and fear. Labai accordingly writes to the Pharaoh
to defend himself against the charges that had been brought against him,
and to assure Khu-n-Aten that he was "a faithful servant of the king";
"I have not sinned, and I have not offended, and I do not withhold my
tribute or neglect the command to turn back my officers." Labai, it
would seem, had been appointed by Amenophis III. governor of Shunem and
Bene-berak (Joshua xix. 45), and had captured the city of Gath-Rimmon
when it revolted against the Pharaoh; but after the death of Amenophis
he and his two sons had attacked the Egyptian officials in true Beduin
style, and had taken every opportunity of pillaging central and Southern
Palestine. As we shall see, Labai and his ally, Malchiel, were among the
chief adversaries of Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem.
On one occasion, however, Labai was actually made prisoner by one of the
Egyptian officers. There is a letter from Biridî stating that Megiddo
was threatened by Labai, and that although the garrison had been
strengthened by the arrival of some Egyptian troops, it was impossible
to venture outside the gates of the town for fear of the enemy, and that
unless two more regiments were sent the city itself was likely to fall.
Whether the additional forces were sent or not we do not know. Labai,
however, had to fly for his life along with his confederate Yasdata, who
was the governor of some city near Megiddo, as we learn from a letter of
his in which he speaks of being with Biridî. Of Yasdata we hear nothing
further, but Labai was captured in Megiddo by Zurata, the prefect of
Acre, who, under the pretext that he was going to send his prisoner in a
ship to Egypt, took him first to the town of Khinatuna ('En'athôn), and
then to his own house, where he was induced by a bribe to set him free
along with his companion, Hadad-mekhir (who, by the way, has bequeathed
to us two letters).
It was probably after this that Labai wrote to the Pharaoh to exculpate
himself, though his language, in spite of its conventional
submissiveness, could not have been very acceptable at the Egyptian
court. In one of his letters he excuses himself partly on the ground
that even "the food of his stomach" had been taken from him, partly that
he had attacked and entered Gezer only in order to recover the property
of himself and his friend Malchiel, partly because a certain Bin-sumya
whom the Pharaoh had sent against him had really "given a city and
property in it to my father, saying that if the king sends for my wife I
shall withhold her, and if the king sends for myself I shall give him
instead a bar of copper in a large bowl and take the oath of
allegiance." A second letter is still more uncompromising. In this he
complains that the Egyptian troops have ill-treated his people, and that
the officer who is with him has slandered him before the king; he
further declares that two of his towns have been taken from him, but
that he will defend to the last whatever still remains of his patrimony.
Malchiel, the colleague of Labai in his attack upon Gezer, as afterwards
upon Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem, does not appear to have been of Beduin
origin. But as long as the Beduin chief could be of use to him he was
very willing to avail himself of his assistance, and it was always easy
to drop the alliance as soon as it became embarrassing. Malchiel was the
son-in-law of Tagi of Gath, and the colleague of Su-yardata, one of the
few Canaanite governors whom the Egyptian government seems to have been
able to trust. Both Su-yardata and Malchiel held commands in Southern
Palestine, and we hear a good deal about them from Ebed-Tob. "The two
sons of Malchiel" are also mentioned in a letter from a lady who bears a
Babylonian name, and who refers to them in connection with an attempt to
detach the cities of Ajalon and Zorah (Joshua xv. 33) from their
allegiance to Egypt. The female correspondents of the Pharaoh are among
the most curious and interesting features of the state of society
depicted in the Tel el-Amarna tablets; they entered keenly into the
politics of the day, and kept the Egyptian king fully informed of all
that was going on.
The letters of Ebed-Tob are so important that it is as well to give them
in full. They all seem to have been written within a few months, or
perhaps even weeks, of one another, when the enemies of the governor of
Jerusalem were gathering around him, and no response came from Egypt to
his requests for help. The dotted lines mark the words and passages
which have been lost through the fracture of the clay tablets.
(I.) "To the king my lord [my] Sun-god, thus [speaks] Ebed-Tob thy
servant: at the feet of the king my lord seven times seven I prostrate
myself. Behold, the king has established his name at the rising of the
sun and the setting of the sun. Slanders have been uttered against me.
Behold, I am not a governor, a vassal of the king my lord. Behold, I am
an ally of the king, and I have paid the tribute due to the king, even
I. Neither my father nor my mother, but the oracle (or arm) of the
Mighty King established [me] in the house of [my] fathers.... There have
come to me as a present 13 [women] and 10 slaves. Suta (Seti) the
Commissioner of the king has come to me: 21 female slaves and 20 male
slaves captured in war have been given into the hands of Suta as a gift
for the king my lord, as the king has ordained for his country. The
country of the king is being destroyed, all of it. Hostilities are
carried on against me as far as the mountains of Seir (Joshua xv. 10)
and the city of Gath-Karmel (Joshua xv. 55). All the other governors are
at peace, but there is war against myself, since I see the foe, but I do
not see the tears of the king my lord because war has been raised
against me. While there is a ship in the midst of the sea, the arm (or
oracle) of the Mighty King shall conquer the countries of Naharaim
(Nakhrima) and Babylonia. But now the Confederates (Khabiri) are
capturing the fortresses of the king. Not a single governor remains
among them to the king my lord; all have perished. Behold, Turbazu, thy
military officer, [has fallen] in the great gate of the city of Zelah
(Josh, xviii. 28). Behold, Zimrida of Lachish has been murdered by the
servants who have revolted against the king. Jephthah-Hadad, thy
military officer, has been slain in the great gate of Zelah.... May the
king [my lord] send help [to his country]! May the king turn his face to
[his subjects]! May he despatch troops to [his] country! [Behold,] if no
troops come this year, all the countries of the king my lord will be
utterly destroyed. They do not say before the face of the king my lord
that the country of the king my lord is destroyed, and that all the
governors are destroyed, if no troops come this year. Let the king send
a commissioner, and let him come to me, even to me, with auxiliary
troops, and we will die with the king [our] lord.--[To] the secretary of
the king my lord [speaks] Ebed-Tob [thy] servant. At [thy] feet [I
prostrate myself]. Let a report of [my] words be laid before the king
[my] lord. Thy [loyal] servant am I."
(II.) "To the king my lord thus speaks Ebed-Tob thy servant: at the feet
of the king my lord seven times seven I prostrate myself. What have I
done against the king my lord? They have slandered me, laying wait for
me in the presence of the king, the lord, saying: Ebed-Tob has revolted
from the king his lord. Behold, neither my father nor my mother has
exalted me in this place; the prophecy of the Mighty King has caused me
to enter the house of my father. Why should I have committed a sin
against the king the lord? With the king my lord is life. I say to the
officer of the king [my] lord: Why dost thou love the Confederates and
hate the governors? And constantly I am sending to the presence of the
king my lord to say that the countries of the king my lord are being
destroyed. Constantly I am sending to the king my lord, and let the king
my lord consider, since the king my lord has appointed the men of the
guard who have taken the fortresses. Let Yikhbil-Khamu [be sent].... Let
the king send help to his country. [Let him send troops] to his country
which protects the fortresses of the king my lord, all of them, since
Elimelech is destroying all the country of the king; and let the king
send help to his country. Behold, I have gone down along with the king
my lord, and I have not seen the tears of the king my lord; but
hostility is strong against me, yet I have not taken anything whatever
from the king my lord; and let the king incline towards my face; let him
despatch a guard [for me], and let him appoint a commissioner, and I
shall not see the tears of the king my lord, since the king [my] lord
shall live when the commissioner has departed. Behold, the countries of
the king [my lord] are being destroyed, yet thou dost not listen to me.
All the governors are destroyed; no governor remains to the king the
lord. Let the king turn his face to his subjects, and let him send
auxiliaries, even the troops of the king my lord. No provinces remain
unto the king; the confederates have wasted all the provinces of the
king. If auxiliaries come this year, the provinces of the king the lord
will be preserved; but if no auxiliaries come the provinces of the king
my lord are destroyed.--[To] the secretary of the king my lord Ebed-Tob
[says:] Give a report of my words to the king my lord: the provinces of
the king my lord are being destroyed by the enemy."
(III.) "[To] the king my lord [speaks] Ebed-Tob [thy] servant: [at the
feet of the king] my lord seven [times seven I prostrate myself. Behold,
let] the king [listen to] the words [of his servant].... Let [the king]
consider all the districts which are leagued in hostility against me,
and let the king send help to his country. Behold, the country of the
city of Gezer, the country of the city of Ashkelon and the city of
La[chish] have given as their peace offerings food and oil and
whatsoever the fortress needs. And let the king send help to his troops;
let him despatch troops against the men who have rebelled against the
king my lord. If troops come this year, there will remain both provinces
[and] governors to the king my lord; [but] if no troops arrive, there
will remain no provinces or governors to the king [my lord]. Behold,
neither my father nor my mother has given this country of the city of
Jerusalem unto me: it was an oracle [of the Mighty King] that gave it to
me, even to me. Behold, Malchiel and the sons of Labai have given the
country of the king to the Confederates. Behold, the king my lord is
righteous towards me. As to the Babylonians, let the king ask the
commissioner how very strong is the temple-[fortress of Jerusalem.]....
Thou hast delivered (?) the provinces into the hands of the city of
Ash[kelon]. Let the king demand of them abundance of food, abundance of
oil, and abundance of wine until Pa-ur, the commissioner of the king,
comes up to the country of the city of Jerusalem to deliver Adai along
with the garrison and the [rest of the people]. Let the king consider
the [instructions] of the king; [let him] speak to me; let Adai deliver
me--Thou wilt not desert it, even this city, sending to me a garrison
[and] sending a royal commissioner. Thy grace [is] to send [them]. To
the king [my lord] I have despatched [a number of] prisoners [and a
number of] slaves. [I have looked after] the roads of the king in the
plain (_kikkar_, Gen. xiii. 10) and in the mountains. Let the king my
lord consider the city of Ajalon. I am not able to direct my way to the
king my lord according to his instructions. Behold, the king has
established his name in the country of Jerusalem for ever, and he cannot
forsake the territories of the city of Jerusalem.--To the secretary of
the king my lord thus speaks Ebed-Tob thy servant. At thy feet I
prostrate myself. Thy servant am I. Lay a report of my words before the
king my lord. The vassal of the king am I. Mayest thou live long!--And
thou hast performed deeds which I cannot enumerate against the men of
the land of Ethiopia.... The men of the country of the Babylonians
[shall never enter] into my house...."
(IV.) (The beginning of the letter is lost, and it is not certain that
Ebed-Tob was the writer of it.) "And now as to the city of Jerusalem, if
this country is still the king's, why is Gaza made the seat of the
king's government? Behold, the district of the city of Gath-Carmel has
fallen away to Tagi and the men of Gath. He is in Bit-Sani
(Beth-Sannah), and we have effected that they should give Labai and the
country of the Sute to the men of the district of the Confederates.
Malchiel has sent to Tagi and has seized some boy-slaves. He has granted
all their requests to the men of Keilah, and we have delivered (or
departed from) the city of Jerusalem. The garrison thou hast left in it
is under the command of Apis the son of Miya-riya (Meri-Ra). Hadad-el
has remained in his house in Gaza...."
(V.) "To the king my lord thus [speaks] Ebed-Tob thy servant: at the
feet of my lord [the king] seven times seven [I prostrate myself].
Behold, Malchiel does not separate himself from the sons of Labai and
the sons of Arzai to demand the country of the king for themselves. As
for the governor who acts thus, why does not the king question him?
Behold, Malchiel and Tagi are they who have acted so, since they have
taken the city of Rubute (Rabbah, Josh. xv. 60).... (Many lines are lost
here.) There is no royal garrison [in Jerusalem]. May the king live
eternally! Let Pa-ur go down to him. He has departed in front of me and
is in the city of Gaza; and let the king send to him a guard to defend
the country. All the country of the king has revolted! Direct
Yikhbil-Khamu [to come], and let him consider the country of the king
[my lord].--To the secretary of the king [my lord] thus [speaks]
Ebed-Tob thy servant: [at thy feet I prostrate myself]. Lay [a report]
of my words [before] the king. Mayest thou live long! Thy servant am I."
(VI.) "[To] the king my lord thus speaks Ebed-Tob thy servant: at the
feet of the king my lord seven times seven I prostrate myself. [The king
knows the deed] which they have done, even Malchiel and Su-ardatum,
against the country of the king my lord, commanding the forces of the
city of Gezer, the forces of the city of Gath, and the forces of the
city of Keilah. They have seized the district of the city of Rabbah. The
country of the king has gone over to the Confederates. And now at this
moment the city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the city of the temple of
the god Nin-ip, whose name is Salim (?)," (Or, adopting the reading of
Dr. Zimmern, "The city whose name is Bit-Nin-ip.") "the city of the
king, is gone over to the side of the men of Keilah. Let the king listen
to Ebed-Tob thy servant, and let him despatch troops and restore the
country of the king to the king. But if no troops arrive, the country of
the king is gone over to the men even to the Confederates. This is the
deed [of Su-ar]datun and Malchiel...."
The loyalty of Ebed-Tob, however, seems to have been doubted at the
Egyptian court, where more confidence was placed in his rival and enemy
Su-ardata (or Su-yardata, as the owner of the name himself writes it).
Possibly the claim of the vassal-king of Jerusalem to have been
appointed to his royal office by the "Mighty King" rather than by the
"great king" of Egypt, and consequently to be an ally of the Pharaoh and
not an ordinary governor, may have had something to do with the
suspicions that were entertained of him. At all events we learn from a
letter of Su-yardata that the occupation of Keilah by Ebed-Tob's
enemies, of which the latter complains so bitterly, was due to the
orders of the Egyptian government itself. Su-yardata there says--"The
king [my lord] directed me to make war in the city of Keilah: war was
made; (and now) a complaint is brought against me. My city against
myself has risen upon me. Ebed-Tob sends to the men of the city of
Keilah; he sends silver, and they have marched against my rear. And the
king knows that Ebed-Tob has taken my city from my hand." The writer
adds that "now Labai has taken Ebed-Tob and they have taken our cities."
In his subsequent despatches to the home government Su-yardata complains
that he is "alone," and asks that troops should be sent to him, saying
that he is forwarding some _almehs_ or maidens as a present along with
his "dragoman." At this point the correspondence breaks off.
Malchiel and Tagi also write to the Pharaoh. According to Tagi the roads
between Southern Palestine and Egypt were under the supervision and
protection of his brother; while Malchiel begs for cavalry to pursue and
capture the enemy who had made war upon Su-yardata and himself, had
seized "the country of the king," and threatened to slay his servants.
He also complains of the conduct of Yankhamu, the High Commissioner, who
had been ordered to inquire into the conduct of the governors in
Palestine. Yankhamu, it seems, had seized Malchiel's property and
carried off his wives and children. It was doubtless to this act of
injustice that Labai alludes in his letter of exculpation.
The territory of which Jerusalem was the capital extended southward as
far as Carmel of Judah, Gath-Carmel as it is called by Ebed-Tob, as well
as in the geographical lists of Thothmes III., while on the west it
reached to Keilah, Kabbah, and Mount Seir. No mention is made of Hebron
either in the Tel el-Amarna letters or in the Egyptian geographical
lists, which are earlier than the rise of the nineteenth dynasty. The
town must therefore have existed under some other name, or have been in
the hands of a power hostile to Egypt.
The name of Hebron has the same origin as that of the Khabiri, who
appear in Ebed-Tob's letters by the side of Labai, Babylonia, and
Naharaim as the assailants of Jerusalem and its territory. The word
means "Confederates," and occurs in the Assyrian texts; among other
passages in a hymn published by Dr. Brünnow, where we read, _istu pan
khabiri-ya iptarsanni_, "from the face of my associates he has cut me
off." The word, however, is not Assyrian, as in that case it would have
had a different form, but must have been borrowed from the Canaanitish
language of the West.
Who the Khabiri or "Confederates" were has been disputed. Some scholars
see in them Elamite marauders who followed the march of the Babylonian
armies to Syria. This opinion is founded on the fact that the Khabiri
are once mentioned as an Elamite tribe, and that in a Babylonian
document a "Khabirite" (_Khabirâ_) is referred to along with a "Kassite"
or Babylonian. Another view is that they are to be identified with
Heber, the grandson of Asher (Gen. xlvi. 17), since Malchiel is said to
be the brother of Heber, just as in the letters of Ebed-Tob Malchiel is
associated with the Khabiri. But all such identifications are based upon
the supposition that "Khabiri" is a proper name rather than a
descriptive title. Any band of "Confederates" could be called Khabiri
whether in Elam or in Palestine, and it does not follow that the two
bands were the same. In the "Confederates" of Southern Canaan we have to
look for a body of confederated tribes who made themselves formidable to
the governor of Jerusalem in the closing days of the Egyptian empire.
It would seem that Elimelech, who of course was a different person from
Malchiel, was their leader, and as Elimelech is a Canaanitish name, we
may conclude that the majority of his followers were also of Canaanitish
descent. The scene of their hostilities was to the south of Jerusalem.
Gath-Carmel, Zelah, and Lachish are the towns mentioned in connection
with their attempts to capture and destroy "the fortresses of the king."
"The country of the king" which had "gone over to the Confederates" was
the territory over which Ebed-Tob claimed rule, while the district
occupied by Labai and his Beduin followers was handed over "to the men
of the district of the Confederates." The successes of the latter were
gained through the intrigues of Malchiel and the sons of Labai.
All this leads us to the neighbourhood of Hebron, and suggests the
question whether "the district of the Confederates" was not that of
which Hebron, "the Confederacy," was the central meeting-place and
sanctuary. Hebron has preserved its sacred character down to the present
day; it long disputed with Jerusalem the claim of being the oldest and
most hallowed shrine in Southern Palestine, and it was for many years
the capital of Judah, Moreover, we know that "Hebron" was not the only
name the city possessed. When Abram was "confederate" with the three
Amorite chieftains it was known as Mamre (Gen. xiii. 18), and at a later
day under the rule of the three sons of Anak it was called Kirjath-Arba.
According to the Biblical narrative Hebron was at once Amorite, Hittite,
and Canaanite. Here, therefore, there was a confederation of tribes and
races who would have met together at a common sanctuary. When Ezekiel
says that Jerusalem was both Hittite and Amorite in its parentage, he
may have been referring to its conquest and settlement by such a
confederacy as that of Hebron. At all events we learn from Su-yardata's
letter that Ebed-Tob eventually fell into the hands of his enemies; he
was captured by Labai, and it is possible that his city became at the
same time the prey of the Khabiri.
But all this is speculation, which may or may not prove to be correct.
All we can be sure of is that the Khabiri or "Confederates" had their
seat in the southern part of Palestine, and that we need not go outside
Canaan to discover who they were. Ebed-Tob, at all events, carefully
distinguishes them from either the Babylonians or the people of
Naharaim.
In his letters, as everywhere else in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence,
the Babylonians are called Kassi or Kassites. The name is written
differently in the cuneiform texts from that of the Ethiopians, the Kash
of the hieroglyphic inscriptions. Both, however, are alike represented
in Hebrew by Cush, and hence we have not only a Cush who is the brother
of Mizrairn, but also another Cush who is the father of Nimrod. The name
of the latter takes us back to the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets.
Nahrima, or Naharaim, was the name by which the kingdom of Mitanni was
known to its Canaanite and Egyptian neighbours. Mitanni, in fact, was
its capital, and it may be that Lutennu (or Lotan), as the Egyptians
called Syria and Palestine, was but a mispronunciation of it. Along with
the Babylonians the people of Naharaim had made themselves formidable to
the inhabitants of Canaan, and their name was feared as far south as
Jerusalem. Even the governor of the Canaanite town of Musikhuna, not far
from the Sea of Galilee, bore the Mitannian name of Sutarna. It was not,
indeed, until after the Israelitish conquest that the last invasion of
Canaan by a king of Aram-Naharaim took place.
Gaza and Joppa were at one time under the same governor, Yabitiri, who
in a letter which has come down to us asks to be relieved of the burden
of his office. Ashkelon, however, which lay between the two sea-ports,
was in the hands of another prefect, Yidya by name, from whom we have
several letters, in one of which mention is made of the Egyptian
commissioner Rianap, or Ra-nofer. The jurisdiction of Rianap extended as
far north as the plain of Megiddo, since he is also referred to by
Pu-Hadad, the governor of Yurza, now Yerzeh, south-eastward of Taanach.
But it was more particularly in the extreme south of Palestine that the
duties of this officer lay. Hadad-dan, who was entrusted with the
government of Manahath and Tamar, to the west of the Dead Sea, calls him
"my Commissioner" in a letter in which he complains of the conduct of a
certain Beya, the son of "the woman Gulat." Hadad-dan begins by saying
that he had protected the commissioner and cities of the king, and then
adds that "the city of Tumur is hostile to me, and I have built a house
in the city of Mankhate, so that the household troops of the king my
lord may be sent to me; and lo, Bâya has taken it from my hand, and has
placed his commissioner in it, and I have appealed to Rianap, my
commissioner, and he has restored the city unto me, and has sent the
household troops of the king my lord to me." After this the writer goes
on to state that Beya had also intrigued against the city of Gezer, "the
handmaid of the king my lord who created me." The rebel then carried off
a quantity of plunder, and it became necessary to ransom his prisoners
for a hundred pieces of silver, while those of his confederate were
ransomed for thirty pieces of silver.
The misdeeds of Beya or Bâya did not end here. We hear of him again as
attacking and capturing a body of soldiers who had been sent to defend
the royal palace at Joppa, and as occupying that city itself. He was,
however, subsequently expelled from it by the king's orders. Beya, too,
professed to be an Egyptian governor and a faithful servant of the
Pharaoh, to whom he despatched a letter to say that Yankhamu, the High
Commissioner, was not in his district. Probably this was in answer to a
charge brought against him by the Egyptian officer.
The official duties of Yankhamu extended over the whole of Palestine,
and all the governors of its cities were accountable to him. We find him
exercising his authority not only in the south, but also in the north,
at Zemar and Gebal, and even among the Amorites. Amon-apt, to whom the
superintendence of Phoenicia was more particularly entrusted, was
supplied by him with corn, and frequent references are made to him in
the letters of Rib-Hadad. Malchiel complained of his high-handed
proceedings, and the complaint seems to have led to some confidential
inquiries on the part of the home government, since we find a certain
Sibti-Hadad writing in answer to the Pharaoh's questions that Yankhamu
was a faithful servant of the king.
The country east of the Jordan also appears to have been within his
jurisdiction. At all events the following letter was addressed to him by
the governor Mut-Hadad, "the man of Hadad." "To Yankhamu my lord thus
speaks Mut-Hadad thy servant: at the feet of my lord I prostrate myself.
Since Mut-Hadad has declared in thy presence that Ayab has fled, and it
is certified (?) that the king of Bethel has fled from before the
officers of the king his lord, may the king my lord live, may the king
my lord live! I pray thee ask Ben-enima, ask ... tadua, ask Isuya, if
Ayâb has been in this city of Bethel for [the last] two months. Ever
since the arrival of [the image of] the god Merodach, the city of
Astarti (Ashtaroth-Karnaim) has been assisted, because all the
fortresses of the foreign land are hostile, namely, the cities of Udumu
(Edom), Aduri (Addar), Araru, Mestu (Mosheh), Magdalim (Migdol),
Khinianabi ('En han-nabi), Zarki-tsabtat, Khaini ('En), and Ibi-limma
(Abel). Again after thou hadst sent a letter to me I sent to him (i.e.
Ayâb), [to wait] until thy arrival from thy journey; and he reached the
city of Bethel and [there] they heard the news."
We learn from this letter that Edom was a "foreign country" unsubdued by
the Egyptian arms. The "city of Edom," from which the country took its
name, is again mentioned in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king
Esar-haddon, and it was there that the Assyrian tax-gatherers collected
the tribute of the Edomite nation. It would seem that the land of Edom
stretched further to the north in the age of Khu-n-Aten than it did at a
subsequent period of history, and that it encroached upon what was
afterwards the territory of Moab. The name of the latter country is met
with for the first time among the Asiatic conquests of Ramses II.
engraved on the base of one of the colossal figures which stand in front
of the northern pylon of the temple of Luxor; when the Tel el-Amarna
letters were written Moab was included in the Canaanite province of
Egypt.
A curious letter to Khu-n-Aten from Burnaburyas, the Babylonian king,
throws a good deal of light on the nature of the Egyptian government in
Canaan. Between the predecessors of the two monarchs there had been
alliance and friendly intercourse, and nevertheless the Canaanitish
subjects of the Pharaoh had committed an outrageous crime against some
Babylonian merchants, which if left unpunished would have led to a
rupture between the two countries. The merchants in question had entered
Palestine under the escort of the Canaanite Ahitub, intending afterwards
to visit Egypt. At Ên-athôn, near Acre, however, "in the country of
Canaan," Sum-Adda, or Shem-Hadad, the son of Balumme (Balaam), and
Sutatna, or Zid-athon, the son of Saratum, [His name is written Zurata
in the letter of Biridî, the governor of Megiddo; see above, p. 135.]
who was governor of Acre, set upon them, killing some of them,
maltreating others, and carrying away their goods. Burna-buryas
therefore sent a special envoy, who was instructed to lay the following
complaint before the Pharaoh: "Canaan is thy country and the king [of
Acre is thy servant]. In thy country I have been injured; do thou punish
[the offenders]. The silver which they carried off was a present [for
thee], and the men who are my servants they have slain. Slay them and
requite the blood [of my servants]. But if thou dost not put these men
to death, [the inhabitants] of the high-road that belongs to me will
turn and verily will slay thy ambassadors, and a breach will be made in
the agreement to respect the persons of ambassadors, and I shall be
estranged from thee. Shem-Hadad, having cut off the feet of one of my
men, has detained him with him; and as for another man, Sutatna of Acre
made him stand upon his head and then stood upon his face."
There are three letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection from Sutatna, or
Zid-atna ("the god Zid has given") as he writes his name, in one of
which he compares Akku or Acre with "the city of Migdol in Egypt."
Doubtless satisfaction was given to the Babylonian king for the wrong
that had been done to his subjects, though whether the actual culprits
were punished may be questioned. There is another letter from
Burna-buryas, in which reference is again made to the Canaanites. He
there asserts that in the time of his father, Kurigalzu, they had sent
to the Babylonian sovereign, saying: "Go down against Qannisat and let
us rebel." Kuri-galzu, however, had refused to listen to them, telling
them that if they wanted to break away from the Egyptian king and ally
themselves "with another," they must find some one else to assist them.
Burna-buryas goes on to declare that he was like-minded with his father,
and had accordingly despatched an Assyrian vassal to assure the Pharaoh
that he would carry on no intrigues with disaffected Canaanites. As the
first part of his letter is filled with requests for gold for the
adornment of a temple he was building at Babylon, such an assurance was
very necessary. The despatches of Rib-Hadad and Ebed-Tob, however, go to
show that in spite of his professions of friendship, the Babylonian
monarch was ready to afford secret help to the insurgents in Palestine.
The Babylonians were not likely to forget that they had once been
masters of the country, or to regard the Egyptian empire in Asia with
other than jealous eyes.
The Tel el-Amarna correspondence breaks off suddenly in the midst of a
falling empire, with its governors in Canaan fighting and intriguing one
against the other, and appealing to the Pharaoh for help that never
came. The Egyptian commissioners are vainly endeavouring to restore
peace and order, like General Gordon in the Soudan, while Babylonians
and Mitannians, Hittites and Beduin are assailing the distracted
province. The Asiatic empire of the eighteenth dynasty, however, did not
wholly perish with the death of Khu-n-Aten. A picture in the tomb of
prince Hui at Thebes shows that under the reign of his successor,
Tut-ankh-Amon, the Egyptian supremacy was still acknowledged in some
parts of Syria. The chiefs of the Lotan or Syrians are represented in
their robes of many colours, some with white and others with brown
skins, and coming before the Egyptian monarch with the rich tribute of
their country. Golden trays full of precious stones, vases of gold and
silver, the covers of which are in the form of the heads of gazelles and
other animals, golden rings richly enamelled, horses, lions, and a
leopard's skin--such are the gifts which they offer to the Pharaoh. It
was the last embassy of the kind which was destined to come from Syria
for many a day.
With the rise of the nineteenth dynasty and the restoration of a strong
government at home, the Egyptians once more began to turn their eyes
towards Palestine. Seti I. drove the Beduin before him from the
frontiers of Egypt to those of "Canaan," and established a line of
fortresses and wells along "the way of the Philistines," which ran by
the shore of the Mediterranean to Gaza. The road was now open for him to
the north along the sea-coast. We hear accordingly of his capture of
Acre, Tyre, and Usu or Palætyros, from whence he marched into the
Lebanon and took Kumidi and Inu'am. One of his campaigns must have led
him into the interior of Palestine, since in his list of conquered
cities we find the names of Carmel and Beth-anoth, of Beth-el and Pahil
or Pella, as well as of Qamham or Chimham (see Jer. xli. 17). Kadesh,
"in the land of the Amorites," was captured by a sudden assault, and
Seti claims to have defeated or received the submission of Alasiya and
Naharaim, the Hittites and the Assyrians, Cyprus and Sangar. It would
seem, however, that north of Kadesh he really made his way only along
the coast as far as the Gulf of Antioch and Cilicia, overrunning towns
and districts of which we know little more than the names.
Seti was succeeded by his son Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression,
and the builder of Pithom and Ramses. His long reign of sixty-seven
years lasted from 1348 B.C. to 1281 B.C. The first twenty-one years of
it were occupied in the re-conquest of Palestine, and sanguinary wars
with the Hittites. But these mountaineers of the north had established
themselves too firmly in the old Egyptian province of Northern Syria to
be dislodged. All the Pharaoh could effect was to stop their further
progress towards the south, and to save Canaan from their grasp. The war
between the two great powers of Western Asia ended at last through the
sheer exhaustion of the rival combatants. A treaty of alliance,
offensive and defensive, was drawn up between Ramses II. and Khata-sil,
"the great king of the Hittites," and it was cemented by the marriage of
the Pharaoh to the daughter of the Hittite prince. Syria was divided
between the Hittites and Egyptians, and it was agreed that neither
should under any pretext invade the territories of the other. It was
also agreed that if either country was attacked by foreign foes or
rebellious subjects, the other should come to its help. Political
refugees, moreover, were to be delivered up to the sovereign from whom
they had escaped, but it was stipulated that in this case they should
receive a full pardon for the offences they had committed. The Hittite
copy of the treaty was engraved on a silver plate, and the gods of Egypt
and the Hittites were called upon to witness the execution of it.
The legendary exploits of Sesostris, that creation of Greek fancy and
ignorance, were fastened upon Ramses II., whose long reign, inordinate
vanity, and ceaseless activity as a builder made him one of the most
prominent of the old Pharaohs. It was natural, therefore, at the
beginning of hieroglyphic decipherment that the Greek accounts should be
accepted in full, and that Ramses II. should have been regarded as the
greatest of Egyptian conquerors. But further study soon showed that, in
this respect at least, his reputation had little to support it. Like his
monuments, too many of which are really stolen from his predecessors, or
else sacrifice honesty of work to haste and pretentiousness, a large
part of the conquests and victories that have been claimed for him was
due to the imagination of the scribes. In the reaction which followed on
this discovery, the modern historians of ancient Egypt were disposed to
dispute his claim to be a conqueror at all. But we now know that such a
scepticism was exaggerated, and though Ramses II. was not a conqueror
like Thothmes III., he nevertheless maintained and extended the Asiatic
empire which his father had recovered, and the lists of vanquished
cities which he engraved on the walls of his temples were not mere
repetitions of older catalogues, or the empty fictions of flattering
chroniclers. Egyptian armies really marched once more into Northern
Syria and the confines of Cilicia, and probably made their way to the
banks of the Euphrates. We have no reason for denying that Assyrian
troops may have been defeated by his arms, or that the king of Mitanni
may have sent an embassy to his court. And we now have a good deal more
than the indirect evidence of the treaty with the Hittites to show that
Canaan was again a province of the Egyptian empire. The names of some of
its cities which were captured in the early part of the Pharaoh's reign
may still be read on the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes. Among them
are Ashkelon, Shalam or Jerusalem, Merom, and Beth-Anath, which were
taken by storm in his eighth year. Dapul, "in the land of the Amorites,"
was captured at the same time, proving that the Egyptian forces
penetrated as far as the Hittite frontiers. At Luxor other Canaanite
names figure in the catalogue of vanquished states. Thus we have Carmel
of Judah, Ir-shemesh and Hadashah (Josh. xv. 37), Gaza, Sela and
Jacob-el, Socho, Yurza, and Korkha in Moab. The name of Moab itself
appears for the first time among the subject nations, while we gather
from a list of mining settlements, that Cyprus as well as the Sinaitic
peninsula was under Egyptian authority.
A sarcastic account of the misadventures of a military officer in
Palestine, which was written in the time of Ramses, is an evidence of
the complete occupation of that country by the Egyptians. All parts of
Canaan are alluded to in it, and as Dr. Max Müller has lately pointed
out, we find in it for the first time the names of Shechem and
Kirjath-Sepher. Similar testimony is borne by a hieroglyphic inscription
recently discovered by Dr. Schumacher on the so-called "Stone of Job" in
the Haurân. The stone (_Sakhrat 'Ayyub_) is a monolith westward of the
Sea of Galilee, and not far from Tel 'Ashtereh, the ancient
Ashtaroth-Karnaim, which was a seat of Egyptian government in the time
of Khu-n-Aten. The monolith is adorned with Egyptian sculptures and
hieroglyphs. One of the sculptures represents a Pharaoh above whose
likeness is the cartouche of Ramses II., while opposite the king, to the
left, is the figure of a god who wears the crown of Osiris, but has a
full face. Over the god is his name in hieroglyphics. The name, however,
is not Egyptian, but seems to be intended for the Canaanite Yakin-Zephon
or "Yakin of the North." It is plain, therefore, that we have here a
monument testifying to the rule of Ramses II., but a monument which was
erected by natives of the country to a native divinity. For a while the
hieroglyphic writing of Egypt had taken the place formerly occupied by
the cuneiform syllabary of Babylonia, and Egyptian culture had succeeded
in supplanting that which had come from the East.
The nineteenth dynasty ended even more disastrously than the eighteenth.
It is true that the great confederacy of northern and Libyan tribes
which attacked Egypt by sea and land in the reign of Meneptah, the son
and successor of Ramses II., was successfully repulsed, but the energy
of the Egyptian power seemed to exhaust itself in the effort. The throne
fell into the hands of usurpers, and the house of Ramses was swept away
by civil war and anarchy. The government was seized by a Syrian, Arisu
by name, and for a time Egypt was compelled to submit to a foreign yoke.
The overthrow of the foreigner and the restoration of the native
monarchy was due to the valour of Set-nekht, the founder of the
twentieth dynasty and the father of Ramses III.
It was under one of the immediate successors of Ramses II. that the
exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt must have taken place. Egyptian
tradition pointed to Meneptah; modern scholars incline rather to his
successors Seti II. and Si-Ptah. With this event the patriarchal history
of Canaan ought properly to come to an end. But the Egyptian monuments
still cast light upon it, and enable us to carry it on almost to the
moment when Joshua and his followers entered the Promised Land.
Palestine still formed part of the kingdom of Meneptah, at all events in
the earlier years of his reign. A scribe has left us a record of the
officials who passed to and from Canaan through the frontier fortress of
Zaru during the middle of the month Pakhons in the third year of the
king. One of these was Baal- ... the son of Zippor of Gaza, who carried
a letter for the Egyptian overseer of the Syrian peasantry (or
Perizzites), as well as another for Baal-[sa]lil-ga[b]u, the
vassal-prince of Tyre. Another messenger was Sutekh-mes, the son of
'Aper-dagar, who also carried a despatch to the overseer of the
peasantry, while a third envoy came in the reverse direction, from the
city of Meneptah, "in the land of the Amorites."
In the troubles which preceded the accession of the twentieth dynasty
the Asiatic possessions of Egypt were naturally lost, and were never
again recovered. Ramses III., however, the last of the conquering
Pharaohs, made at least one campaign in Palestine and Syria. Like
Meneptah, he had to bear the brunt of an attack upon Egypt by the
confederated hordes of the north which threatened to extinguish its
civilization altogether. The nations of Asia Minor and the Ægean Sea had
poured into Syria as the northern barbarians in later days poured into
the provinces of the Roman Empire. Partly by land, partly by sea, they
made their way through Phoenicia and the land of the Hittites,
destroying everything as they went, and carrying in their train the
subjugated princes of Naharaim and Kadesh. For a time they encamped in
the "land of the Amorites," and then pursued their southward march.
Ramses III. met them on the north-eastern frontier of his kingdom, and
in a fiercely-contested battle utterly overthrew them. The ships of the
invaders were captured or sunk, and their forces on land were decimated.
Immense quantities of booty and prisoners were taken, and the shattered
forces of the enemy retreated into Syria. There the Philistines and
Zakkal possessed themselves of the sea-coast, and garrisoned the cities
of the extreme south. Gaza ceased to be an Egyptian fortress, and became
instead an effectual barrier to the Egyptian occupation of Canaan.
When Ramses III. followed the retreating invaders of his country into
Syria, it is doubtful whether the Philistines had as yet settled
themselves in their future home. At all events Gaza fell into his hands,
and he found no difficulty in marching along the Mediterranean coast
like the conquering Pharaohs who had preceded him. In his temple palace
at Medînet Habu he has left a record of the conquests that he made in
Syria. The great cities of the coast were untouched. No attempt was made
to besiege or capture Tyre and Sidon, Beyrout and Gebal, and the
Egyptian army marched past them, encamping on the way only at such
places as "the headland of Carmel," "the source of the Magoras," or
river of Beyrout, and the Bor or "Cistern." Otherwise its resting-places
were at unknown villages like Inzath and Lui-el. North of Beyrout it
struck eastward through the gorge of the Nahr el-Kelb, and took the city
of Kumidi. Then it made its way by Shenir or Hermon to Hamath, which
surrendered, and from thence still northward to "the plain" of Aleppo.
In the south of Palestine, in what was afterwards the territory of
Judah, Ramses made yet another campaign. Here he claims to have taken
Lebanoth and Beth-Anath, Carmel of Judah and Shebtin, Jacob-el and
Hebron, Libnah and Aphek, Migdal-gad and Ir-Shemesh, Hadashah and the
district of Salem or Jerusalem. From thence the Egyptian forces
proceeded to the Lake of Reshpon or the Dead Sea, and then crossing the
Jordan seized Korkha in Moab. But the campaign was little more than a
raid; it left no permanent results behind it, and all traces of Egyptian
authority disappeared with the departure of the Pharaoh's army. Canaan
remained the prey of the first resolute invader who had strength and
courage at his back.
CHAPTER IV
THE PATRIARCHS
Abraham had been born in "Ur of the Chaldees." Ur lay on the western
side of the Euphrates in Southern Babylonia, where the mounds of
Muqayyar or Mugheir mark the site of the great temple that had been
reared to the worship of the Moon-god long before the days of the Hebrew
patriarch. Here Abraham had married, and from hence he had gone forth
with his father to seek a new home in the west. Their first
resting-place had been Harran in Mesopotamia, on the high-road to Syria
and the Mediterranean. The name of Harran, in fact, signified "road" in
the old language of Chaldæa, and for many ages the armies and merchants
of Babylonia had halted there when making their way towards the
Mediterranean. Like Ur, it was dedicated to the worship of Sin, the
Moon-god, and its temple rivalled in fame and antiquity that of the
Babylonian city, and had probably been founded by a Babylonian king.
At Harran, therefore, Abraham would still have been within the limits of
Babylonian influence and culture, if not of Babylonian government as
well. He would have found there the same religion as that which he had
left behind him in his native city; the same deity was adored there,
under the same name and with the same rites. He was indeed on the road
to Canaan, and among an Aramaean rather than a Babylonian population,
but Babylonia with its beliefs and civilization had not as yet been
forsaken. Even the language of Babylonia was known in his new home, as
is indicated by the name of the city itself.
Harran and Mesopotamia were not the goal of the future father of the
Israelitish people. He was bidden to seek elsewhere another country and
another kindred. Canaan was the land which God promised to "show" to
him, and it was in Canaan that his descendants were to become "a great
nation." He went forth, accordingly, "to go into the land of Canaan, and
into the land of Canaan he came."
But even in Canaan Abraham was not beyond the reach of Babylonian
influence. As we have seen in the last chapter, Babylonian armies had
already penetrated to the shores of the Mediterranean, Palestine had
been included within the bounds of a Babylonian empire, and Babylonian
culture and religion had spread widely among the Canaanitish tribes. The
cuneiform system of writing had made its way to Syria, and Babylonian
literature had followed in its wake. Centuries had already passed since
Sargon of Akkad had made himself master of the Mediterranean coast and
his son Naram-Sin had led his forces to the Peninsula of Sinai. Istar of
Babylonia had become Ashtoreth of the Canaanites, and Babylonian trade
had long moved briskly along the very road that Abraham traversed. In
the days of the patriarch himself the rulers of Babylonia claimed to be
also rulers of Canaan; for thirteen years did the Canaanite princes
"serve" Chedor-laomer and his allies, the father of Arioch is also "the
father of the land of the Amorites" in his son's inscriptions, and at a
little later date the King of Babylon still claimed sovereignty over the
West.
It was not, therefore, to a strange and unexplored country that Abraham
had migrated. The laws and manners to which he had been accustomed, the
writing and literature which he had learned in the schools of Ur, the
religious beliefs among which he had lived in Chaldæa and Harran, he
found again in Canaan. The land of his adoption was full of Babylonian
traders, soldiers, and probably officials as well, and from time to time
he must have heard around him the language of his birthplace. The
introduction into the West of the Babylonian literature and script
brought with it a knowledge of the Babylonian language, and the
knowledge is reflected in some of the local names of Palestine. The
patriarch had not escaped beyond the control even of the Babylonian
government. At times, at all events, the princes of Canaan were
compelled to acknowledge the suzerainty of Chaldæa and obey the laws, as
the Babylonians would have said, of "Anu and Dagon."
The fact needs dwelling upon, partly because of its importance, partly
because it is but recently that we have begun to realize it. It might
indeed have been gathered from the narratives of Genesis, more
especially from the account of Chedor-laomer's campaign, but it ran
counter to the preconceived ideas of the modern historian, and never
therefore took definite shape in his mind. It is one of the many gains
that the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions has brought to the
student of the Old Testament, and it makes us understand the story of
Abraham's migration in a way that was never possible before. He was no
wild nomad wandering in unknown regions, among a people of alien habits
and foreign civilization. We know now why he took the road which we are
told he followed; why he was able to make allies among the inhabitants
of Canaan; why he understood their language and could take part in their
social life. Like the Englishman who migrates to a British colony,
Abraham was in contact with the same culture in Canaan and Chaldæa
alike.
But when he reached Canaan he was not yet Abraham. He was still "Abram
the Hebrew," and it was as "Abram the Hebrew" that he made alliance with
the Amorites of Mamre and overthrew the retreating forces of the
Babylonian kings. Abram--Abu-ramu, "the exalted father,"--is a
Babylonian name, and is found in contracts of the age of Chedor-laomer.
When the name was changed to Abraham, it was a sign that the Babylonian
emigrant had become a native of the West.
It was under the terebinth of Moreh before Shechem that Abraham first
pitched his tent and erected his first altar to the Lord. Above him
towered Ebal and Gerizim, where the curses and blessings of the Law were
afterwards to be pronounced. From thence he moved southward to one of
the hills westward of Beth-el, the modern Beitin, and there his second
altar was built. While the first had been reared in the plain, the
second was raised on the mountain-slope.
But here too he did not remain long. Again he "journeyed, going on still
towards the south." Then came a famine which obliged him to cross the
frontier of Egypt, and visit the court of the Pharaoh. The Hyksos
kinsmen of the race to which he belonged were ruling in the Delta, and a
ready welcome was given to the Asiatic stranger. He was "very rich in
cattle, in silver and in gold," and like a wealthy Arab sheikh to-day
was received with due honour in the Egyptian capital. The court of the
Pharaoh was doubtless at Zoan.
Among the possessions of the patriarch we are told were camels. The
camel is not included among the Egyptian hieroglyphs, nor has it been
found depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. The name
is first met with in a papyrus of the time of the nineteenth dynasty,
and is one of the many words which the Egyptians of that age borrowed
from their Canaanitish neighbours. The animal, in fact, was not used by
the Egyptians, and its domestication in the valley of the Nile seems to
be as recent as the Arab conquest. But though it was not used by the
Egyptians, it had been a beast of burden among the Semites of Arabia
from an early period. In the primitive Sumerian language of Chaldæa it
was called "the animal from the Persian Gulf," and its Semitic name,
from which our own word _camel_ is derived, goes back to the very
beginnings of Semitic history. We cannot, therefore, imagine a Semitic
nomad arriving in Egypt without the camel; travellers, indeed, from the
cities of Canaan might do so, but not those who led a purely nomadic
life. And, in fact, though we look in vain for a picture of the camel
among the sculptures and paintings of Egypt, the bones of the animal
have been discovered deep in the alluvial soil of the valley of the
Nile.
Abraham had to quit Egypt, and once more he traversed the desert of the
"South" and pitched his tent near Beth-el. Here his nephew Lot left him,
and, dissatisfied with the life of a wandering Bedawi, took up his abode
in the city of Sodom at the northern end of the Dead Sea. While Abraham
kept himself separate from the natives of Canaan, Lot thus became one of
them, and narrowly escaped the doom which afterwards fell upon the
cities of the plain. In forsaking the tent, he forsook not only the free
life of the immigrant from Chaldæa, but the God of Abraham as well. The
inhabitant of a Canaanitish city passed under the influence of its faith
and worship, its morals and manners, as well as its laws and government.
He ceased to be an alien and stranger, of a different race and
fatherland, and with a religion and customs of his own. He could
intermarry with the natives of his adopted country and participate in
their sacred rites. Little by little his family became merged in the
population that surrounded him; its gods became their gods, its
morality--or, it may be, its immorality--became theirs also. Lot,
indeed, had eventually to fly from Sodom, leaving behind him all his
wealth; but the mischief had already been done, and his children had
become Canaanites in thought and deed. The nations which sprang from
him, though separate in race from the older people of Canaan, were yet
like them in other respects. They formed no "peculiar people," to whom
the Lord might reveal Himself through the law and the prophets.
It was not until Lot had separated himself from Abraham that the land of
Canaan was promised to the descendants of the patriarch. "Lift up now
thine eyes," God said to him, "and look from the place where thou art,
northward and southward, and eastward and westward: for all the land
which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever."
Once more, therefore, Abraham departed southward from Shechem; not this
time to go into the land of Egypt, but to dwell beside the terebinth-oak
of Mamre hard by Hebron, where the founder of the Davidic monarchy was
hereafter to be crowned king. It is probable that the sanctuary which in
days to come was to make Hebron famous had not as yet been established
there; at all events the name of Hebron, "the confederacy," was not as
yet known, and the city was called Kirjath-Arba. Whether it was also
called Mamre is doubtful; Mamre would rather seem to have been the name
of the plateau which stretched beyond the valley of Hebron and was
occupied by the Amorite confederates of the Hebrew patriarch.
It was while he "dwelt under the terebinth of Mamre the Amorite" that
the campaign of Chedor-laomer and his Babylonian allies took place, and
that Lot was carried away among the Canaanitish captives. But the
triumph of the conquerors was short-lived. "Abram the Hebrew" pursued
them with his armed followers, three hundred and eighteen in number, as
well as with his Amorite allies, and suddenly falling upon their
rear-guard near Damascus by night, rescued the captives and the spoil.
There was rejoicing in the Canaanitish cities when the patriarch
returned with his booty. The new king of Sodom met him in the valley of
Shaveh, "the king's dale" of later times, just outside the walls of
Jerusalem, and the king of Jerusalem himself, Melchizedek, "the priest
of the most High God," welcomed the return of the victor with bread and
wine. Then it was that Abram gave tithes of the spoil to the God of
Salem, while Melchizedek blessed him in the name of "the most High God."
Outside the pages of the Old Testament the special form assumed by the
blessing has been found only in the Aramaic inscriptions of Egypt. Here
too we find travellers from Palestine writing of themselves "Blessed be
Augah of Isis," or "Blessed be Abed-Nebo of Khnum"! It would seem,
therefore, to have been a formula peculiar to Canaan; at all events, it
has not been traced to other parts of the Semitic world. The temple of
the Most High God--El Elyôn--probably stood on Mount Moriah where the
temple of the God of Israel was afterwards to be erected. It will be
remembered that among the letters sent by Ebed-Tob, the king of
Jerusalem, to the Egyptian Pharaoh is one in which he speaks of "the
city of the Mountain of Jerusalem, whose name is the city of the temple
of the god Nin-ip." In this "Mountain of Jerusalem" it is difficult not
to see the "temple-Mount" of later days.
In the cuneiform texts of Ebed-Tob and the later Assyrian kings the name
of Jerusalem is written Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim." Salim or "Peace"
is almost certainly the native name of the god who was identified with
the Babylonian Nin-ip, and perhaps Isaiah--that student of the older
history of his country--is alluding to the fact when he declares that
one of the titles of the Messiah shall be "the Prince of Peace." At any
rate, if the Most High God of Jerusalem were really Salim, the God of
Peace, we should have an explanation of the blessing pronounced by
Melchizedek upon the patriarch. Abram's victory had restored peace to
Canaan; he had brought back the captives, and had himself returned in
peace. It was fitting, therefore, that he should be welcomed by the
priest of the God of Peace, and that he should offer tithes of the booty
he had recovered to the god of "the City of Peace."
This offering of tithes was no new thing. In his Babylonian home Abraham
must have been familiar with the practice. The cuneiform inscriptions of
Babylonia contain frequent references to it. It went back to the
pre-Semitic age of Chaldæa, and the great temples of Babylonia were
largely supported by the _esra_ or tithe which was levied upon prince
and peasant alike. That the god should receive a tenth of the good
things which, it was believed, he had bestowed upon mankind, was not
considered to be asking too much. There are many tablets in the British
Museum which are receipts for the payment of the tithe to the great
temple of the Sun-god at Sippara in the time of Nebuchadrezzar and his
successors. From one of them we learn that Belshazzar, even at the very
moment when the Babylonian empire was falling from his father's hands,
nevertheless found an opportunity for paying the tithe due from his
sister; while others show us that Cyrus and Cambyses did not regard
their foreign origin as affording any pretext for refusing to pay tithe
to the gods of the kingdom they had overthrown.
The Babylonian army had been defeated near Damascus, and immediately
after this we are told that the steward of Abraham's house was "Eli-ezer
of Damascus." Whether there is any connection between the two facts we
cannot say; but it may be that Eli-ezer had attached himself to the
Hebrew conqueror when he was returning "from the slaughter of
Chedor-laomer." The name of Eli-ezer, "God is a help," is characteristic
of Damascus. More often in place of El, "God," we have Hadad, the
supreme deity of Syria; but just as among the Israelites Eli-akim and
Jeho-iakim are equivalent, so among the Aramaeans of Syria were Eli-ezer
and Hadad-ezer. Hadad-ezer, it will be remembered, was the king of Zobah
who was overthrown by David.
Sarai, the wife of Abraham, was still childless, but the patriarch had a
son by his Egyptian handmaid, the ancestor of the Ishmaelite tribes who
spread from the frontier of Egypt to Mecca in Central Arabia. It was
when Ishmael was thirteen years of age that the covenant was made
between God and Abraham which was sealed with the institution of
circumcision. Circumcision had been practised in Egypt from the earliest
days of its history; henceforth it also distinguished all those who
claimed Abraham as their forefather. With circumcision Abraham received
the name by which he was henceforth to be known; he ceased to be Abram,
the Hebrew from Babylonia, and became Abraham the father of Ishmael and
Israel. The new rite and the new name were alike the seal and token of
the covenant established between the patriarch and his God: God promised
that his seed should multiply, and that the land of Canaan should be
given as an everlasting possession, while Abraham and his offspring were
called upon to keep God's covenant for ever.
It could not have been long after this that the cities of the plain were
destroyed "with brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven." The
expression is found in the cuneiform tablets of Babylonia. Old Sumerian
hymns spoke of a "rain of stones and fire," though the stones may have
been hail-stones and thunderbolts, and the fire the flash of the
lightning. But whatever may have been the nature of the sheet of flame
which enveloped the guilty cities of the plain and set on fire the
naphtha-springs that oozed out of it, the remembrance of the catastrophe
survived to distant ages. The prophets of Israel and Judah still refer
to the overthrow of Sodom and its sister cities, and St. Jude points to
them as "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." Some scholars have
seen an allusion to their overthrow in the tradition of the Phoenicians
which brought their ancestors into the coastlands of Canaan in
consequence of an earth-quake on the shores of "the Assyrian Lake." But
the lake is more probably to be looked for in the neighbourhood of the
Persian Gulf than in the valley of the Jordan.
The vale of Siddim, and "the cities of the plain," stood at the northern
end of the Dead Sea. Here were the "slime-pits" from which the naphtha
was extracted, and which caused the defeat of the Canaanitish princes by
the Babylonian army. The legend which placed the pillar of salt into
which Lot's wife was changed at the southern extremity of the Dead Sea
was of late origin, probably not earlier than the days when Herod built
his fortress of Machaerus on the impregnable cliffs of Moab, and the
name of Gebel Usdum, given by the modern Arabs to one of the
mountain-summits to the south of the sea proves nothing as to the site
of the city of Sodom. Names in the east are readily transferred from one
locality to another, and a mountain is not the same as a city in a
plain.
There are two sufficient reasons why it is to the north rather than to
the south that we must look for the remains of the doomed cities, among
the numerous tumuli which rise above the rich and fertile plain in the
neighbourhood of Jericho, where the ancient "slime-pits" can still be
traced. Geology has taught us that throughout the historical period the
Dead Sea and the country immediately to the south of it have undergone
no change. What the lake is to-day, it must have been in the days of
Abraham. It has neither grown nor shrunk in size, and the barren salt
with which it poisons the ground must have equally poisoned it then. No
fertile valley, like the vale of Siddim, could have existed in the
south; no prosperous Canaanitish cities could have grown up among the
desolate tracts of the southern wilderness. As we are expressly told in
the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), the Canaanites dwelt only "by the coast
of Jordan," not in the desert far beyond the reach of the fertilizing
stream.
But there is another reason which excludes the southern site. "When
Abraham got up early in the morning," we are told, "he looked towards
Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld,
and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."
Such a sight was possible from the hills of Hebron; if the country lay
at the northern end of the Dead Sea, it would have been impossible had
it been south of it.
Moreover, the northern situation of the cities alone agrees with the
geography of Genesis. When the Babylonian invaders had turned northwards
after smiting the Amalekites of the desert south of the Dead Sea, they
did not fall in with the forces of the king of Sodom and his allies
until they had first passed "the Amorites that dwelt in Hazezon-tamar."
Hazezon-tamar, as we learn from the Second Book of Chronicles (xx. 2),
was the later En-gedi, "the Spring of the Kid," and En-gedi lay on the
western shore of the Dead Sea midway between its northern and southern
extremities.
In the warm, soft valley of the Jordan, accordingly, where a
sub-tropical vegetation springs luxuriantly out of the fertile ground
and the river plunges into the Dead Sea as into a tomb, the nations of
Ammon and Moab were born. It was a fitting spot, in close proximity as
it was to the countries which thereafter bore their names. From the
mountain above Zoar, Lot could look across to the blue hills of Moab and
the distant plateau of Ammon.
Meanwhile Abraham had quitted Mamre and again turned his steps towards
the south. This time it was at Gerar, between the sanctuary of
Kadesh-barnea and Shur the "wall" of Egypt that he sojourned. Kadesh has
been found again in our own days by the united efforts of Dr. John
Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull in the shelter of a block of mountains
which rise to the south of the desert of Beer-sheba. The spring of clear
and abundant water which gushes forth in their midst was the
En-Mishpat--"the spring where judgments were pronounced"--of early
times, and is still called 'Ain-Qadîs, "the spring of Kadesh." Gerar is
the modern Umm el-Jerâr, now desolate and barren, all that remains of
its past being a lofty mound of rubbish and a mass of potsherds. It lies
a few hours only to the south of Gaza.
Here Isaac was born and circumcised, and here Ishmael and Hagar were
cast forth into the wilderness and went to dwell in the desert of Paran.
The territory of Gerar extended to Beer-sheba, "the well of the oath,"
where Abraham's servants digged a well, and Abimelech, king of Gerar,
confirmed his possession of it by an oath. It may be that one of the two
wells which still exist at Wadi es-Seba', with the stones that line
their mouths deeply indented by the ropes of the water-drawers, is the
very one around which the herdsmen of Abraham and Abimelech wrangled
with each other. The wells of the desert go back to a great antiquity:
where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the
Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it. The old
wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side.
Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of
the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines. But they had been
new-comers. All through the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth
Egyptian dynasties the country had been in the hands of the Egyptians.
Gaza had been their frontier fortress, and as late as the reign of
Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was still
garrisoned by Egyptian troops and governed by Egyptian officers. The
Pulsata or Philistines did not arrive till the troublous days of Ramses
III., of the twentieth dynasty. They formed part of the barbarian hordes
from the shores of Asia Minor and the islands of the Ægean, who swarmed
over Syria and flung themselves on the valley of the Nile, and the land
of Caphtor from which they came was possibly the island of Krete. The
Philistine occupation of the coastland of Canaan, therefore, did not
long precede the Israelitish invasion of the Promised Land; indeed we
may perhaps gather from the words of Exod. xiii. 17 that the Philistines
were already winning for themselves their new territory when the
Israelites marched out of Egypt. In saying, consequently, that the
kingdom of Abimelech was in the land of the Philistines the Book of
Genesis speaks proleptically: when the story of Abraham and Abimelech
was written in its present form Gerar was a Philistine town: in the days
of the patriarchs this was not yet the case.
At Beer-sheba Abraham planted a tamarisk, and "called on the name of the
Lord, the everlasting God." Beer-sheba long remained one of the sacred
places of Palestine. The tree planted by its well was a sign both of the
water that flowed beneath its soil and of its sacred character. It was
only where fresh water was found that the nomads of the desert could
come together, and the tree was a token of the life and refreshment they
would meet with. The well was sacred; so also was the solitary tree
which stood beside it, and under whose branches man and beast could find
shade and protection from the mid-day heat. Even Mohammedanism, that
Puritanism of the East, has not been able to eradicate the belief in the
divine nature of such trees from the mind of the nomad; we may still see
them decorated with offerings of rags torn from the garments of the
passer-by or shading the tomb of some reputed saint. They are still more
than waymarks or resting-places for the heated and weary; when standing
beneath them the herdsman feels that he is walking upon consecrated
ground.
It was at Beer-sheba that the temptation came to Abraham to sacrifice
his first-born, his only son Isaac. The temptation was in accordance
with the fierce ritual of Syria, and traces of the belief which had
called it into existence are to be found in the early literature of
Babylonia. Thus in an ancient Babylonian ritual-text we read: "The
offspring who raises his head among mankind, the offspring for his life
he gave; the head of the offspring for the head of the man he gave; the
neck of the offspring for the neck of the man he gave." Phoenician
legend told how the god El had robed himself in royal purple and
sacrificed his only son Yeud in a time of pestilence, and the writers of
Greece and Rome describe with horror the sacrifices of the first-born
with which the history of Carthage was stained. The father was called
upon in time of trouble to yield up to the god his nearest and dearest;
the fruit of his body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul, and
Baal required him to sacrifice without a murmur or a tear his first-born
and his only one. The more precious the offering, the more acceptable
was it to the god; the harder the struggle to resign it, the greater was
the merit of doing so. The child died for the sins of his people; and
the belief was but the blind and ignorant expression of a true instinct.
But Abraham was to be taught a better way. For three days he journeyed
northward with his son, and then lifting up his eyes saw afar off that
mountain "in the land of Moriah," on the summit of which the sacrifice
was to be consummated. Alone with Isaac he ascended to the high-place,
and there building his altar and binding to it his son he prepared to
perform the terrible rite. But at the last moment his hand was stayed, a
new and better revelation was made to him, and a ram was substituted for
his son. It cannot be accidental that, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has
pointed out, we learn from the temple-tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles
that in the later ritual of Phoenicia a ram took the place of the
earlier human sacrifice.
Where was this mountain in the land of Moriah whereon the altar of
Abraham was built? It would seem from a passage in the Second Book of
Chronicles (iii. 1) that it was the future temple-mount at Jerusalem.
The words of Genesis also point in the same direction. Abraham, we read,
"called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day,
In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen." It is hard to believe that
"the mount of the Lord" can mean anything else than that _har-el_ or
"mountain of God" whereon Ezekiel places the temple, or that the proverb
can refer to a less holy spot than that where the Lord appeared
enthroned upon the cherubim above the mercy-seat. It is doubtful,
however, whether the reading of the Hebrew text in either passage is
correct. According to the Septuagint the proverb quoted in Genesis
should run: "In the mountain is the Lord seen," and the same authority
changes the "Moriah" of the Book of Chronicles into _Amôr-eia_, "of the
Amorites."
It is true that the distance of Jerusalem from Beer-sheba would agree
well with the three days' journey of Abraham. But it is difficult to
reconcile the description of the scene of Abraham's sacrifice with the
future temple-mount. Where Isaac was bound to the altar was a solitary
spot, the patriarch and his son were alone there, and it was overgrown
with brushwood so thickly that a ram had been caught in it by his horns.
The temple-mount, on the contrary, was either within the walls of a city
or just outside them, and the city was already a capital famous for its
worship of "the most High God." Had the Moriah of Jerusalem really been
the site of Abraham's altar it is strange that no allusion is made to
the fact by the writers of the Old Testament, or that tradition should
have been silent on the matter. We must be content with the knowledge
that it was to one of the mountains "in the land of Moriah" that Abraham
was led, and that "Moriah" was a "land," not a single mountain-peak. (We
should not forget that the Septuagint reads "the highlands," that is,
_Moreh_ instead of _Moriah_, while the Syriac version boldly changes the
word into the name of the "Amorites." For arguments on the other side,
see p. 79.)
Abraham returned to Beer-sheba, and from thence went to Hebron, where
Sarah died. Hebron--or Kirjath-Arba as it was then called--was occupied
by a Hittite tribe, in contradistinction to the country round about it,
which was in the possession of the Amorites. As at Jerusalem, or at
Kadesh on the Orontes, the Hittites had intruded into Amoritish
territory and established themselves in the fortress-town. But while the
Hittite city was known as Kirjath-Arba, "the city of Arba," the
Amoritish district was named Mamre: the union of Kirjath-Arba and Mamre
created the Hebron of a later day.
Kirjath-Arba seems to have been built in the valley, close to the pools
which still provide water for its modern inhabitants. On the eastern
side the slope of the hill is honeycombed with tombs cut in the rock,
and, if ancient tradition is to be believed, it was in one of these that
Abraham desired to lay the body of his wife. The "double cave" of
Machpelah--for so the Septuagint renders the phrase--was in the field of
Ephron the Hittite, and from Ephron, accordingly, the Hebrew patriarch
purchased the land for 400 shekels of silver, or about £47. The cave, we
are told, lay opposite Mamre, which goes to show that the oak under
which Abraham once pitched his tent may not have been very far distant
from that still pointed out as the oak of Mamre in the grounds of the
Russian hospice. The traditional tomb of Machpelah has been venerated
alike by Jew, Christian, and Mohammedan. The church built over it in
Byzantine days and restored by the Crusaders to Christian worship has
been transformed into a mosque, but its sanctity has remained unchanged.
It stands in the middle of a court, enclosed by a solid wall of massive
stones, the lower courses of which were cut and laid in their places in
the age of Herod. The fanatical Moslem is unwilling that any but himself
should enter the sacred precincts, but by climbing the cliff behind the
town it is possible to look down upon the mosque and its sacred
enclosure, and see the whole building spread out like a map below the
feet.
More than one English traveller has been permitted to enter the mosque,
and we are now well acquainted with the details of its architecture. But
the rock-cut tomb in which the bodies of the patriarchs are supposed to
have lain has never been examined by the explorer. It is probable,
however, that were he to penetrate into it he would find nothing to
reward his pains. During the long period that Hebron was in Christian
hands the cave was more than once visited by the pilgrim. But we look in
vain in the records which have come down to us for an account of the
relics it has been supposed to contain. Had the mummified corpses of the
patriarchs been preserved in it, the fact would have been known to the
travellers of the Crusading age. (See the _Zeitschrift des deutschen
Palästina-Vereins_, 1895.)
Like the other tombs in its neighbourhood, the cave of Machpelah has
doubtless been opened and despoiled at an early epoch. We know that
tombs were violated in Egypt long before the days of Abraham, in spite
of the penalties with which such acts of sacrilege were visited, and the
cupidity of the Canaanite was no less great than that of the Egyptian.
The treasures buried with the dead were too potent an attraction, and
the robber of the tomb braved for their sake the terrors of both this
world and the next.
Abraham now sent his servant to Mesopotamia, to seek there for a wife
for his son Isaac from among his kinsfolk at Harran. Rebekah, the sister
of Laban, accordingly, was brought to Canaan and wedded to her cousin.
Isaac was at the time in the southern desert, encamped at the well of
Lahai-roi, near Kadesh. So "Isaac was comforted after his mother's
death."
"Then again," we are told, "Abraham took a wife," whose name was
Keturah, and by whom he was the forefather of a number of Arabian
tribes. They occupied the northern and central parts of the Arabian
peninsula, by the side of the Ishmaelites, and colonized the land of
Midian. It is the last we hear of the great patriarch. He died soon
afterwards "in a good old age," and was buried at Machpelah along with
his wife.
Isaac still dwell at Lahai-roi, and there the twins, Esau and Jacob,
were born to him. There, too, he still was when a famine fell upon the
land, like "the first famine that was in the days of Abraham." The story
of Abraham's dealings with Abimelech of Gerar is repeated in the case of
Isaac. Again we hear of Phichol, the captain of Abimelech's army; again
the wife of the patriarch is described as his sister; and again his
herdsmen strive with those of the king of Gerar over the wells they have
dug, and the well of Beer-sheba is made to derive its name from the
oaths sworn mutually by Isaac and the king. It is hardly conceivable
that history could have so closely repeated itself, that the lives of
the king and commander-in-chief of Gerar could have extended over so
many years, or that the origin of the name of Beer-sheba would have been
so quickly forgotten. Rather we must believe that two narratives have
been mingled together, and that the earlier visit of Abraham to Gerar
has coloured the story of Isaac's sojourn in the territory of Abimelech.
We need not refuse to believe that the servants of Isaac dug wells and
wrangled over them with the native herdsmen; that Beer-sheba should
twice have received its name from a repetition of the same event is a
different matter. One of the wells--that of Rehoboth--made by Isaac's
servants is probably referred to in the Egyptian _Travels of a Mohar_,
where it is called Rehoburta.
Isaac was not a wanderer like his father. Lahai-roi in the desert, "the
valley of Gerar," Beer-sheba and Hebron, were the places round which his
life revolved, and they were all close to one another. There is no trace
of his presence in the north of Palestine, and when the prophet Amos
(vii. 16) makes Isaac synonymous with the northern kingdom of Israel,
there can be no geographical reference in his words. Isaac died
eventually at Hebron, and was buried in the family tomb of Machpelah.
But long before this happened Jacob had fled from the well-deserved
wrath of his brother to his uncle Laban at Harran. On his way he had
slept on the rocky ridge of Bethel, and had beheld in vision the angels
of God ascending and descending the steps of a staircase that led to
heaven. The nature of the ground itself must have suggested the dream.
The limestone rock is fissured into steplike terraces, which seem formed
of blocks of stone piled one upon the other, and rising upwards like a
gigantic staircase towards the sky. On the hill that towers above the
ruins of Beth-el, we may still fancy that we see before us the "ladder"
of Jacob.
But the vision was more than a mere dream. God appeared in it to the
patriarch, and repeated to him the promise that had been made to his
fathers. Through Jacob, the younger of the twins, the true line of
Abraham was to be carried on. When he awoke in the morning the fugitive
recognized the real character of his dream. He took, accordingly, the
stone that had served him for a pillow, and setting it up as an altar,
poured oil upon it, and so made it a Beth-el, or "House of God,"
Henceforward it was a consecrated altar, a holy memorial of the God
whose divinity had been mysteriously imparted to it.
The Semitic world was full of such Beth-els, or consecrated stones. They
are referred to in the literature of ancient Babylonia, and an English
traveller, Mr. Doughty, has found them still existing near the Tema of
the Old Testament in Northern Arabia. In Phoenicia we are told that they
abounded. The solitary rock in the desert or on the mountain-side seemed
to the primitive Semite the dwelling-place of Deity; it rose up
awe-striking and impressive in its solitary grandeur and venerable
antiquity; it was a shelter to him from the heat of the sun, and a
protection from the perils of the night. When his worship and adoration
came in time to be transferred from the stone itself to the divinity it
had begun to symbolize, it became an altar on which the libation of oil
or wine might be poured out to the gods, and on the seals of Syria and
the sculptured slabs of Assyria we accordingly find it transformed into
a portable altar, and merged in the cone-like symbol of the goddess
Ashêrah. The stone which had itself been a Beth-el wherein the Deity had
his home, passed by degrees into the altar of the god whose actual
dwelling-place was in heaven.
The Canaanitish city near which Jacob had raised the monument of his
dream bore the name of Luz. In Israelitish days, however, the name of
the monument was transferred to that of the city, and Luz itself was
called the Beth-el, or "House of God." The god worshipped there when the
Israelites first entered Canaan appears to have been entitled On,--a
name derived, perhaps, from that of the city of the Sun-god in Egypt.
Bethel was also Beth-On, "the temple of On," from whence the tribe of
Benjamin afterwards took the name of Ben-Oni, "the Onite." Beth-On has
survived into our own times, and the site of the old city is still known
as Beitîn.
It is not needful to follow the adventures of Jacob in Mesopotamia. His
new home lay far away from the boundaries of Palestine, and though the
kings of Aram-Naharaim made raids at times into the land of Canaan and
caused their arms to be feared within the walls of Jerusalem, they never
made any permanent conquests on the coasts of the Mediterranean. In the
land of the Aramaeans Jacob is lost for awhile from the history of
patriarchal Palestine.
When he again emerges, it is as a middle-aged man, rich in flocks and
herds, who has won two wives as the reward of his labours, and is
already the father of a family. He is on his way back to the country
which had been promised to his seed and wherein he himself had been
born. Laban, his father-in-law, robbed at once of his daughters and his
household gods, is pursuing him, and has overtaken him on the spurs of
Mount Gilead, almost within sight of his goal. There a covenant is made
between the Aramaean and the Hebrew, and a cairn of stones is piled up
to commemorate the fact. The cairn continued to bear a double name, the
Aramaean name given to it by Laban, and the Canaanitish name of Galeed,
"the heap of witnesses," by which it was called by Jacob. The double
name was a sign of the two populations and languages which the cairn
separated from one another. Northward were the Aramaeans and an Aramaic
speech; southward the land of Canaan and the language which we term
Hebrew.
The spot where the cairn was erected bore yet another title. It was also
called Mizpah, the "watch-tower," the outpost from which the dweller in
Canaan could discern the approaching bands of an enemy from the north or
east. It protected the road to the Jordan, and kept watch over the
eastern plateau. Here in after times Jephthah gathered around him the
patriots of Israel, and delivered his people from the yoke of the
Ammonites.
Once more "Jacob went on his way," and from the "two-fold camp" of
Mahanaim sent messengers to his brother Esau, who had already
established himself among the mountains of Seir. Then came the
mysterious struggle in the silent darkness of night with one whom the
patriarch believed to have been his God Himself. When day dawned, the
vision departed from him, but not until his name had been changed. "Thy
name," it was declared to him, "shall be called no more Jacob, but
Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast
prevailed." And his thigh was shrunken, so that the children of Israel
in days to come abstained from eating "of the sinew which shrank, which
is upon the hollow of the thigh." The spot where the struggle took
place, beside the waters of the Jabbok, was named Penu-el, "the face of
God." There was more than one other Penu-el in the Semitic world, and at
Carthage the goddess Tanith was entitled Peni-Baal, "the face of Baal."
The name of Israel, as we may learn from its equivalent, Jeshurun, was
really derived from a root which signified "to be straight," or
"upright." The Israelites were in truth "the people of uprightness." It
is only by one of those plays upon words, of which the Oriental is still
so fond, that the name can be brought into connection with the word
_sar_, "a prince." But the name of Jacob was well known among the
northern Semites. We gather from the inscriptions of Egypt that its full
form was Jacob-el. Like Jeshurun by the side of Israel, or Jephthah by
the side of Jiphthah-el (Josh. xix. 27), Jacob is but an abbreviated
Jacob-el. One of the places in Palestine conquered by the Pharaoh
Thothmes III., the names of which are recorded on the walls of his
temple at Karnak, was Jacob-el--a reminiscence, doubtless, of the Hebrew
patriarch. Professor Flinders Petrie has made us acquainted with
Egyptian scarabs on which is inscribed in hieroglyphic characters the
name of a king, Jacob-bar or Jacob-hal, who reigned in the valley of the
Nile before Abraham entered it, and Mr. Pinches has lately discovered
the name of Jacob-el among the persons mentioned in contracts of the
time of the Babylonian sovereign Sin-mu-ballidh, who was a contemporary
of Chedor-laomer. We thus have monumental evidence that the name of
Jacob was well known in the Semitic world in the age of the Hebrew
patriarchs.
Jacob and Esau met and were reconciled, and Jacob then journeyed onwards
to Succoth, "the booths." The site of this village of "booths" is
unknown, but it could not have been far from the banks of the Jordan and
the road to Nablûs. The neighbourhood of Shechem, called in Greek times
Neapolis, the Nablûs of to-day, was the next resting-place of the
patriarch. If we are to follow the translation of the Authorised
Version, it would have been at "Shalem, a city of Shechem," that his
tents were pitched. But many eminent scholars believe that the Hebrew
words should rather be rendered: "And Jacob came in peace to the city of
Shechem," the reference being to his peaceable parting from his brother.
There is, however, a hamlet still called Salîm, nearly three miles to
the east of Nablûs, and it may be therefore that it was really at a
place termed Shalem that Jacob rested on his way. In this case the field
bought from Hamor, "before the city of Shechem," cannot have been where,
since the days of our Lord, "Jacob's well" has been pointed out (S. John
iv. 5, 6). The well is situated considerably westward of Salîm, midway,
in fact, between that village and Nablûs, and close to the village of
'Askâr, with which the "Sychar" of S. John's Gospel has sometimes been
identified. It has been cut through the solid rock to a depth of more
than a hundred feet, and the groovings made by the ropes of the
waterpots in far-off centuries are still visible at its mouth. But no
water can be drawn from it now. The well is choked with the rubbish of a
ruined church, built above it in the early days of Christianity, and of
which all that remains is a broken arch. It has been dug at a spot where
the road from Shechem to the Jordan branches off from that which runs
towards the north, though Shechem itself is more than a mile distant. We
should notice that S. John does not say that the well was actually in
"the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph," only that it
was "near to" the patriarch's field.
If Jacob came to Shechem in peace, the peace was of no long continuance.
Simeon and Levi, the sons of the patriarch, avenged the insult offered
by the Shechemite prince to their sister Dinah, by treacherously falling
upon the city and slaying "all the males." Jacob was forced to fly,
leaving behind him the altar he had erected. He made for the Canaanitish
city of Luz, the Beth-el of later days, where he had seen the great
altar-stairs sloping upward to heaven. The idols that had been carried
from Mesopotamia were buried "under the oak which was by Shechem," along
with the ear-rings of the women. The oak was one of those sacred trees
which abounded in the Semitic world, like another oak at Beth-el,
beneath which the nurse of Rebekah was soon afterwards to be buried.
At Beth-el Jacob built another altar. But he could not rest there, and
once more took his way to the south. On the road his wife Rachel died
while giving birth to his youngest son, and her tomb beside the path to
Beth-lehem was marked by a "pillar" which the writer of the Book of
Genesis tells us remained to his own day. It indicated the boundary
between the territories of Benjamin and Judah at Zelzah (1 Sam. x. 2).
At Beth-lehem Jacob lingered a long while. His flocks and herds were
spread over the country, under the charge of his sons, browsing on the
hills and watered at the springs, for which the "hill-country of Judah"
was famous. In their search for pasturage they wandered northward, we
are told, "beyond the tower of the Flock," which guarded the Jebusite
stronghold of Zion (Mic. iv. 8). Beth-lehem itself was more commonly
known in that age by the name of Ephrath. Beth-lehem, "the temple of
Lehem," must, in fact, have been the sacred name of the city derived
from the worship of its chief deity, and Mr. Tomkins is doubtless right
in seeing in this deity the Babylonian Lakhmu, who with his consort
Lakhama, was regarded as a primaeval god of the nascent world.
At Beth-lehem Jacob was but a few miles distant from Hebron, where Isaac
still lived, and where at his death he was buried by his sons Jacob and
Esau in the family tomb of Machpelah. It was the last time, seemingly,
that the two brothers found themselves together. Esau, partly by
marriage, partly by conquest, dispossessed the Horites of Mount Seir,
and founded the kingdom of Edom, while the sons and flocks of Jacob
scattered themselves from Hebron in the south of Canaan to Shechem in
its centre. The two hallowed sanctuaries of the future kingdoms of Judah
and Israel, where the first throne was set up in Israel and the monarchy
of David was first established, thus became the boundaries of the
herdsmen's domain. In both the Hebrew patriarch held ground that was
rightfully his own. It was a sign that the house of Israel should
hereafter occupy the land which the family of Israel thus roamed over
with their flocks. The nomad was already passing into the settler, with
fields and burial-places of his own.
But before the transformation could be fully accomplished, a long season
of growth and preparation was needful. Egypt, and not Canaan, was to be
the land in which the Chosen People should be trained for their future
work. Canaan itself was to pass under Egyptian domination, and to
replace the influence of Babylonian culture by that of Egypt. It was a
new world and a new civilization into which the descendants of Jacob
were destined to emerge when finally they escaped from the fiery furnace
of Egyptian bondage. The Egypt known to Jacob was an Egypt over which
Asiatic princes ruled, and whose vizier was himself a Hebrew. It was the
Egypt of the Hyksos conquerors, whose capital was Zoan, on the frontiers
of Asia, and whose people were the slaves of an Asiatic stranger. The
Egypt quitted by his descendants was one which had subjected Asia to
itself, and had carried the spoils of Syria to its splendid capital in
the far south. The Asiatic wave had been rolled back from the banks of
the Nile, and Egyptian conquest and culture had overflooded Asia as far
as the Euphrates.
But it was not Egypt alone which had undergone a change. The Canaan of
Abraham and Jacob looked to Babylonia for its civilization, its
literature, and its laws. Its princes recognized at times the supremacy
of the Babylonian sovereigns, and the deities of Babylonia were
worshipped in its midst. The Canaan of Moses had long been a province of
the Egyptian Empire; Egyptian rule had been substituted for that of
Babylon, and the manners and customs of Egypt had penetrated deeply into
the minds of its inhabitants. The Hittite invasion from the north had
blocked the high-road to Babylonia, and diverted the trade of Palestine
towards the west and the south. While Abraham, the native of Ur, and the
emigrant from Harran, had found himself in Canaan, and even at Zoan,
still within the sphere of the influences among which he had grown up,
the fugitives from Egypt entered on the invasion of a country which had
but just been delivered from the yoke of the Pharaohs. It was an
Egyptian Canaan that the Israelites were called upon to subdue, and it
was fitting therefore that they should have been made ready for the task
by their long sojourn in the land of Goshen.
How that sojourn came about, it is not for us to recount. The story of
Joseph is too familiar to be repeated, though we are but just beginning
to learn how true it is, in all its details, to the facts which Egyptian
research is bringing more and more fully to light. We see the Midianite
and Ishmaelite caravan passing Dothan--still known by its ancient
name--with their bales of spicery from Gilead for the dwellers in the
Delta, and carrying away with them the young Hebrew slave. We watch his
rise in the house of his Egyptian master, his wrongful imprisonment and
sudden exaltation when he sits by the side of Pharaoh and governs Egypt
in the name of the king. We read the pathetic story of the old father
sending his sons to buy corn from the royal granaries or _larits_ of
Egypt, and withholding to the last his youngest and dearest one; of the
Beduin shepherds bowing all unconsciously before the brother whom they
had sold into slavery, and who now holds in his hands the power of life
and death; of Joseph's disclosure of himself to the conscious-stricken
suppliants; of Jacob's cry when convinced at last that "the governor
over all the land of Egypt" was his long-mourned son. "It is enough;
Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before I die."
Jacob and his family travelled in wagons along the high-road which
connected the south of Palestine with the Delta. It led past Beer-sheba
and El-Arîsh to the Shur, or line of fortifications which protected the
eastern frontier of Egypt. The modern caravan road follows its course
most of the way. It was thus distinct from "the way of the Philistines,"
which led along the coast of the Mediterranean, on the northern edge of
the Sirbonian Lake. In Egypt the Israelitish emigrants settled not far
from the Hyksos capital in the land of Goshen, which the excavations of
Dr. Naville have shown to be the Wâdi Tumilât of to-day. Here they
multiplied and grew wealthy, until the evil days came when the Egyptians
rose up against Semitic influence and control, and Ramses II.
transformed the free-born Beduin into public serfs.
But the age of Ramses II. was still far distant when Jacob died full of
years, and his mummy was carried to the burial-place of his fathers "in
the land of Canaan." Local tradition connected the name of Abel-mizraim,
"the meadow of Egypt," on the eastern side of the Jordan, with the long
funeral procession which wended its way from Zoan to Hebron. We cannot
believe, however, that the mourners would have so far gone out of their
road, even if the etymology assigned by tradition to the name could be
supported. The tradition bears witness to the fact of the procession,
but to nothing more.
With the funeral of Jacob a veil falls upon the Biblical history of
Canaan, until the days when the spies were sent out to search the land.
Joseph was buried in Egypt, not at Hebron, though he had made the
Israelites swear before his death that his mummy should be eventually
taken to Palestine. The road to Hebron, it is clear, was no longer open,
and the power of the Hyksos princes must have been fast waning. The war
of independence had broken out, and the native kings of Upper Egypt were
driving the foreigner back into Asia. The rulers of Zoan had no longer
troops to spare for a funeral procession through the eastern desert.
The Chronicler, however, has preserved a notice which seems to show that
a connection was still kept up between Southern Canaan and the Hebrew
settlers in Goshen, even after Jacob's death, perhaps while he was yet
living. We are told that certain of the sons of Ephraim were slain by
the men of Gath, whose cattle they had attempted to steal, and that
their father, after mourning many days, comforted himself with the birth
of other sons (1 Chron. vii. 21-26). The notice, moreover, does not
stand alone. Thothmes III., the great conqueror of the eighteenth
Egyptian dynasty, states that two of the places captured by him in
Palestine were Jacob-el and Joseph-el. It is tempting to see in the two
names reminiscences of the Hebrew patriarch and his son. If so, the name
of Joseph would have been impressed upon a locality in Canaan more than
two centuries before the Exodus. The geographical lists of Thothmes III.
and the fragments of early history preserved by the Chronicler would
thus support and complete one another. The Egyptian cavalry who
accompanied the mummy of Jacob to its resting-place at Machpelah, would
not be the only evidence of the authority claimed by Joseph and his
master in the land of Canaan; Joseph himself would have left his name
there, and his grand-children would have fought against "the men of
Gath."
But these are speculations which may, or may not, be confirmed by
archaeological discovery. For the Book of Genesis Canaan disappears from
sight with the death of Jacob. Henceforward it is upon Egypt and the
nomad settlers in Goshen that the attention of the Pentateuch is fixed,
until the time comes when the age of the patriarchs is superseded by
that of the legislator, and Moses, the adopted son of the Egyptian
princess, leads his people back to Canaan. Joseph had been carried by
Midianitish hands out of Palestine into Egypt, there to become the
representative of the Pharaoh, and son-in-law of the high-priest of
Heliopolis; for Moses, the adopted grandson of the Pharaoh, "learned in
all the wisdom of the Egyptians," it was reserved, after years of trial
and preparation in Midian, to bring the descendants of Jacob out of
their Egyptian prison-house to the borders of the Promised Land.
CHAPTER V
EGYPTIAN TRAVELLERS IN CANAAN
Palestine has been a land of pilgrims and tourists from the very
beginning of its history. It was the goal of the migration of Abraham
and his family, and it was equally the object of the oldest book of
travels with which we are acquainted. Allusion has already been made
more than once to the Egyptian papyrus, usually known as _The Travels of
a Mohar_, and in which a satirical account is given of a tour in
Palestine and Syria. The writer was a professor, apparently of
literature, in the court of Ramses II., and he published a series of
letters to his friend, Nekht-sotep, which were long admired as models of
style. Nekht-sotep was one of the secretaries attached to the military
staff, and among the letters is a sort of parody of an account given by
Nekht-sotep of his adventures in Canaan, which was intended partly to
show how an account of the kind ought to have been written by an
accomplished penman, partly to prove the superiority of the scribe's
life to that of the soldier, partly also, it may be, for the sake of
teasing the writer's correspondent. Nekht-sotep had evidently assumed
airs of superiority on the strength of his foreign travels, and his
stay-at-home friend undertook to demonstrate that he had himself enjoyed
the more comfortable life of the two. Nekht-sotep is playfully dubbed
with the foreign title of Mohar--or more correctly Muhir--a word
borrowed from Assyrian, where it primarily signified a military
commander and then the governor of a province.
Long before the days of the nineteenth dynasty, however, there had been
Egyptian travellers in Palestine, or at least in the adjoining
countries. One of the Egyptian books which have come down to us contains
the story of a certain Sinuhit who had to fly from Egypt in consequence
of some political troubles in which he was involved after the death of
Amon-m-hat I. of the twelfth dynasty. Crossing the Nile near Kher-ahu,
the Old Cairo of to-day, he gained the eastern bank of the river and
made his way to the line of forts which protected Egypt from its Asiatic
enemies. Here he crouched among the desert bushes till night-fall, lest
"the watchmen of the tower" should see him, and then pursued his journey
under the cover of darkness. At daybreak he reached the land of Peten
and the wadi of Qem-uer on the line of the modern Suez Canal. There
thirst seized upon him; his throat rattled, and he said to
himself--"This is the taste of death." A Bedawi, however, perceived him
and had compassion on the fugitive: he gave him water and boiled milk,
and Sinuhit for a while joined the nomad tribe. Then he passed on to the
country of Qedem, the Kadmonites of the Old Testament (Gen. xv. 19;
Judges vi. 3), whence came the wise men of the East (1 Kings iv. 30).
After spending a year and a half there, 'Ammu-anshi, the prince of the
Upper land of Tenu, asked the Egyptian stranger to come to him, telling
him that he would hear the language of Egypt. He added that he had
already heard about Sinuhit from "the Egyptians who were in the
country." It is clear from this that there had been intercourse for some
time between Egypt and "the Upper Tenu."
It is probable that Dr. W. Max Müller is right in seeing in Tenu an
abbreviated form of Lutennu (or Rutenu), the name by which Syria was
known to the Egyptians. There was an Upper Lutennu and a Lower Lutennu,
the Upper Lutennu corresponding with Palestine and the adjoining
country, and thus including the Edomite district of which 'Ammu-anshi or
Ammi-anshi was king. In the name of 'Ammu-anshi, it may be observed, we
have the name of the deity who appears as Ammi or Ammon in the kingdom
of the Ammonites, and perhaps forms the second element in the name of
Balaam. The same divine name enters into the composition of those of
early kings of Ma'in in Southern Arabia, as well as of Babylonia in the
far East. (See above, p. 64.)
'Ammu-anshi married Sinuhit to his eldest daughter, and bestowed upon
him the government of a district called Aia which lay on the frontier of
a neighbouring country. Aia is described as rich in vines, figs, and
olives, in wheat and barley, in milk and cattle. "Its wine was more
plentiful than water," and Sinuhit had "daily rations of bread and wine,
cooked meat and roast fowl," as well as abundance of game. He lived
there for many years. The children born to him by his Asiatic wife grew
up and became heads of tribes. "I gave water to the thirsty," he says;
"I set on his journey the traveller who had been hindered from passing
by; I chastised the brigand. I commanded the Beduin who departed afar to
strike and repel the princes of foreign lands, and they marched (under
me), for the prince of Tenu allowed that I should be during long years
the general of his soldiers."
Sinuhit, in fact, had given proof of his personal prowess at an early
period in his career. The champion of Tenu had come to him in his tent
and challenged him to single combat. The Egyptian was armed with bow,
arrows, and dagger; his adversary with battle-axe, javelins, and
buckler. The contest was short, and ended in the decisive victory of
Sinuhit, who wounded his rival and despoiled him of his goods.
A time came, however, when Sinuhit grew old, and began to long to see
once more the land of his fathers before he died. Accordingly he sent a
petition to the Pharaoh praying him to forgive the offences of his youth
and allow him to return again to Egypt. The petition was granted, and a
letter was despatched to the refugee, permitting him to return. Sinuhit
accordingly quitted the land where he had lived so long. First of all he
held a festival, and handed over his property to his children, making
his eldest son the chief of the tribe. Then he travelled southward to
Egypt, and was graciously received at court. The coarse garments of the
Beduin were exchanged for fine linen; his body was bathed with water and
scented essences; he lay once more on a couch and enjoyed the luxurious
cookery of the Egyptians. A house and pyramid were built for him; a
garden was laid out for him with a lake and a kiosk, and a golden statue
with a robe of electrum was set up in it. Sinuhit ceased to be an
Asiatic "barbarian," and became once more a civilized Egyptian.
The travels of Sinuhit were involuntary, but a time came when a tour in
Palestine was almost as much the fashion as it is to-day. The conquests
of Thothmes III. had made Syria an Egyptian province, and had introduced
Syrians into the Egyptian bureaucracy. Good roads were made throughout
the newly-acquired territory, furnished with post-houses where food and
lodging could be procured, and communication between Egypt and Canaan
thus became easy and frequent. The fall of the eighteenth dynasty caused
only a momentary break in the intercourse between the two countries;
with the establishment of the nineteenth dynasty it was again resumed.
Messengers passed backward and forward between Syria and the court of
the Pharaoh; Asiatics once more thronged into the valley of the Nile,
and the Egyptian civil servant and traveller followed in the wake of the
victorious armies of Seti and Ramses. _The Travels of a Mohar_ is the
result of this renewed acquaintance with the cities and roads of
Palestine.
The writer is anxious to display his knowledge of Syrian geography.
Though he had not himself ventured to brave the discomforts of foreign
travel, he wished to show that he knew as much about Canaan as those who
had actually been there. A tour there was after all not much to boast
of; it had become so common that the geography of Canaan was as well
known as that of Egypt itself, and the stay-at-home scribe had
consequently no difficulty in compiling a guide-book to it.
The following is the translation given by Dr. Brugsch of the papyrus,
with such alterations as have been necessitated by further study and
research. "I will portray for thee the likeness of a Mohar, I will let
thee know what he does. Hast thou not gone to the land of the Hittites,
and hast thou not seen the land of Aupa? Dost thou not know what Khaduma
is like; the land of Igad'i also how it is formed? The Zar (or Plain) of
king Sesetsu (Sesostris)--on which side of it lies the town of Aleppo,
and how is its ford? Hast thou not taken thy road to Kadesh (on the
Orontes) and Tubikhi? Hast thou not gone to the Shasu (Beduin) with
numerous mercenaries, and hast thou not trodden the way to the
Maghar[at] (the caves of the Magoras near Beyrout) where the heaven is
dark in the daytime? The place is planted with maple-trees, oaks, and
acacias, which reach up to heaven, full of beasts, bears (?), and lions,
and surrounded by Shasu in all directions. Hast thou not ascended the
mountain of Shaua, and hast thou not trodden it? There thy hands hold
fast to the [rein] of thy chariot; a jerk has shaken thy horses in
drawing it. I pray thee, let us go to the city of Beeroth (Beyrout).
Hast thou not hastened to its ascent after passing over the ford in
front of it?
"Do thou explain this relish for [the life of] a Mohar! Thy chariot lies
there [before] thee; thy [feet] have fallen lame; thou treadest the
backward path at eventide. All thy limbs are ground small. Thy [bones]
are broken to pieces, and thou dost fall asleep. Thou awakest: it is the
time of gloomy night, and thou art alone. Has not a thief come to rob
thee? Some grooms have entered the stable; the horse kicks out; the
thief has made off in the night, thy clothes are stolen. Thy groom wakes
up in the night; he sees what has happened to him; he takes what is
left, he goes off to bad company, he joins the Beduin. He transforms
himself into an Asiatic. The police (?) come, they [feel about] for the
robber; he is discovered, and is immovable from terror. Thou wakest,
thou findest no trace of them, for they have carried off thy property.
"Become [again] a Mohar who is fully accoutred. Let thy ear be filled
with that which I relate to thee besides.
"The town 'Hidden'--such is the meaning of its name Gebal--what is its
condition? Its goddess [we will speak of] at another time. Hast thou not
visited it? Be good enough to look out for Beyrout, Sidon, and Sarepta.
Where are the fords of the land of Nazana? The country of Authu (Usu),
what is its condition? They are situated above another city in the sea,
Tyre the port is its name. Drinking-water is brought to it in boats. It
is richer in fishes than in sand. I will tell thee of something else. It
is dangerous to enter Zair'aun. Thou wilt say it is burning with a very
painful sting (?). Come, Mohar. Go forward on the way to the land of
Pa-'Aina. Where is the road to Achshaph (Ekdippa)? Towards which town?
Pray look at the mountain of User. How is its crest? Where is the
mountain of Sakama (Shechem)? Who can surmount it? Mohar, whither must
you take a journey to the land of Hazor? How is its ford? Show me how
one goes to Hamath, Dagara, [and] Dagar-el, to the place where all
Mohars meet? Be good enough to spy out its road; cast a look on Yâ....
When one goes to the land of Adamim, to what is one opposite? Do not
draw back, but instruct us. Guide us, that we may know, O leader!
"I will name to thee other cities besides these. Hast thou not gone to
the land of Takhis, to Kafir-Marona, Tamnah, Kadesh, Dapul, Azai,
Harnammata, and hast thou not seen Kirjath-Anab, near Beth-Sopher? and
dost thou not know Adullam [and] Zidiputa? Or dost thou not know any
better the name of Khalza in the land of Aupa, [like] a bull upon its
frontiers? Here is the place where all the mighty warriors are seen. Be
good enough to look and see the chapel of the land of Qina, and tell me
about Rehob. Describe Beth-sha-el (Beth-el) along with Tarqa-el. The
ford of the land of Jordan, how is it crossed? Teach me to know the
passage that leads to the land of Megiddo, which lies in front of it.
Verily thou art a Mohar, well skilled in the work of the strong hand.
Pray, is there found a Mohar like thee, to place at the head of the
army, or a _seigneur_ who can beat thee in shooting?
"Beware of the gorge of the precipice, 2000 cubits deep, which is full
of rocks and boulders. Thou turnest back in a zigzag, thou bearest thy
bow, thou takest the iron in thy left hand. Thou lettest the old men
see, if their eyes are good, how, worn out with fatigue, thou supportest
thyself with thy hand. _Ebed gamal Mohar n'amu_ ('A camel's slave is the
Mohar! they say'); so they say, and thou gainest a name among the Mohars
and the knights of the land of Egypt. Thy name becomes like that of
Qazairnai, the lord of Asel, when the lions found him in the thicket, in
the defile which is rendered dangerous by the Shasu who lie in ambush
among the trees. They measured four cubits from the nose to the heel,
they had a grim look, without softness; they cared not for caresses.
"Thou art alone, no strong one is with thee, no _armée_ is behind thee,
no _Ariel_ who prepares the way for thee, and gives thee information of
the road before thee. Thou knowest not the road. The hair on thy head
stands on end; it bristles up. Thy soul is given into thy hands. Thy
path is full of rocks and boulders, there is no outlet near, it is
overgrown with creepers and wolf's-bane. The precipice is on one side of
thee, the mountain and the wall of rock on the other. Thou drivest in
against it. The chariot jumps on which thou art. Thou art troubled to
hold up thy horses. If it falls down the precipice, the pole drags thee
down too. Thy _ceintures_ are pulled away. They fall down. Thou
shacklest the horse, because the pole is broken on the path of the
defile. Not knowing how to tie it up, thou understandest not how it is
to be repaired. The _essieu_ is left on the spot, as the load is too
heavy for the horses. Thy courage has evaporated. Thou beginnest to run.
The heaven is cloudless. Thou art thirsty; the enemy is behind thee; a
trembling seizes thee; a twig of thorny acacia worries thee; thou
thrustest it aside; the horse is scratched till at length thou findest
rest.
"Explain to me thy liking for [the life of] a Mohar!
"Thou comest into Joppa; thou findest the date-palm in full bloom in its
time. Thou openest wide thy mouth in order to eat. Thou findest that the
maid who keeps the garden is fair. She does whatever thou wantest of
her.... Thou art recognized, thou art brought to trial, and owest thy
preservation to being a Mohar. Thy girdle of the finest stuff thou
payest as the price of a worthless rag. Thou sleepest every evening with
a rug of fur over thee. Thou sleepest a deep sleep, for thou art weary.
A thief steals thy bow and thy sword from thy side; thy quiver and thy
armour are cut to pieces in the darkness; thy pair of horses run away.
The groom takes his course over a slippery path which rises before him.
He breaks thy chariot in pieces; he follows thy foot-steps. [He finds]
thy equipments which had fallen on the ground and had sunk into the
sand, leaving only an empty space.
"Prayer does not avail thee, even when thy mouth says, 'Give food in
addition to water, that I may reach my goal in safety,' they are deaf
and will not hear. They say not yes to thy words. The iron-workers enter
into the smithy; they rummage in the workshops of the carpenters; the
handicraftsmen and saddlers are at hand; they do whatever thou
requirest. They put together thy chariot; they put aside the parts of it
that are made useless; thy spokes are _façonné_ quite new; thy wheels
are put on; they put the _courroies_ on the axles and on the hinder
part; they splice thy yoke, they put on the box of thy chariot; the
[workmen] in iron forge the ...; they put the ring that is wanting on
thy whip, they replace the _lanières_ upon it.
"Thou goest quickly onward to fight on the battle-field, to do the deeds
of a strong hand and of firm courage.
"Before I wrote I sought me out a Mohar who knows his power and leads
the _jeunesse_, a chief in the _armée_, [who travels] even to the end of
the world.
"Answer me not 'This is good; this is bad;' repeat not to me your
opinion. Come, I will tell thee all that lies before thee at the end of
thy journey.
"I begin for thee with the palace of Sesetsu (Sesostris). Hast thou not
set foot in it by force? Hast thou not eaten the fish in the brook ...?
Hast thou not washed thyself in it? With thy permission I will remind
thee of Huzana; where is its fortress? Come, I pray thee, to the palace
of the land of Uazit, even of Osymandyas (Ramses II.) in his victories,
[to] Saez-el, together with Absaqbu. I will inform thee of the land of
'Ainin (the two Springs), the customs of which thou knowest not. The
land of the lake of Nakhai, and the land of Rehoburta thou hast not seen
since thou wast born, O Mohar. Rapih is widely extended. What is its
wall like? It extends for a mile in the direction of Gaza."
The French words introduced from time to time by Dr. Brugsch into the
translation represent the Semitic words which the Egyptian writer has
employed. They illustrate the fashionable tendency of his day to fill
the Egyptian vocabulary with the words and phrases of Canaan. It was the
revenge taken by Palestine for its invasion and conquest by the armies
of Seti and Ramses. Thus _armée_ corresponds to the Semitic _tsaba_,
"army," _jeunesse_ to _na'aruna_, "young men." The Egyptian scribe,
however, sometimes made mistakes similar to those which modern novelists
are apt to commit in their French quotations. Instead of writing, as he
intended, _'ebed gamal Mohar na'amu_ ("a camel's slave is the Mohar!
they say"), he has assigned the Canaanite vowel _ayin_ to the wrong
word, and mis-spelt the name of the "camel," so that the phrase is
transformed into _abad kamal Mohar n'amu_ ("the camel of the Mohar has
perished, they are pleasant"). (It is curious that a similar mistake in
regard to the spelling of _'ebed_, "_slave_" or "_servant_" has been
made in an Aramaic inscription which I have discovered on the rocks near
Silsileh in Upper Egypt, where the name of Ebed-Nebo is written
Abed-Nebo.)
Most of the geographical names mentioned in the papyrus can be
identified. Aupa, the Ubi of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, was on the
borders of the land of the Hittites, and not far from Aleppo. The Zar or
"Plain" of Sesostris makes its appearance in the lists of conquered
towns and countries which were drawn up by Thothmes III., Seti I.,
Ramses II., and Ramses III., in order to commemorate their victories in
Syria. The word probably migrated from Babylonia, where the _zeru_
denoted the alluvial plain which lay between the Tigris and the
Euphrates. Kadesh, the southern capital of the Hittites, "in the land of
the Amorites," lay on the Orontes, close to the lake of Horns, and has
been identified by Major Conder with the modern Tel em-Mindeh. Tubikhi,
of which we have already heard in the Tel el-Amarna letters, is also
mentioned in the geographical lists inscribed by Thothmes III. on the
walls of his temple at Karnak (No. 6); it there precedes the name of
Kamta or Qamdu, the Kumidi of Tel el-Amarna. It is the Tibhath of the
Old Testament, out of which David took "very much brass" (1 Chron.
xviii. 8). The Maghar(at) or "Caves" gave their name to the Magoras, the
river of Beyrout, as well as to the Mearah of the Book of Joshua (xiii.
4). As for the mountain of Shaua, it is described by the Assyrian king
Tiglath-pileser III. as in the neighbourhood of the northern Lebanon,
while the city of the Beeroth or "Cisterns" is probably Beyrout.
The Mohar is now carried to Phoenicia. Gebal, Beyrout, Sidon, and
Sarepta, are named one after the other, as the traveller is supposed to
be journeying from north to south. The "goddess" of Gebal was Baaltis,
so often referred to in the letters of Rib-Hadad, who calls her "the
mistress of Gebal." In saying, however, that the name of the city meant
"Hidden," the writer has been misled by the Egyptian mispronunciation of
it. It became Kapuna in the mouths of his countrymen, and since _kapu_
in Egyptian signified "hidden mystery," he jumped to the conclusion that
such was also the etymology of the Phoenician word. In the "fords of the
land of Nazana" we must recognize the river Litâny, which flows into the
sea between Sarepta and Tyre. At all events, Authu or Usu, the next city
mentioned, is associated with Tyre both in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna
and in the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings. It seems to have been the
Palætyros or "Older Tyre" of classical tradition, which stood on the
mainland opposite the more famous insular Tyre. Phoenician tradition
ascribes its foundation to Usôos, the offspring of the mountains of
Kasios and Lebanon, and brother of Memrumus, "the exalted," and
Hypsouranios, "the lord of heaven," who was the first to invent a
clothing of skins, and to sail upon the water in boats, and who had
taught mankind to adore the fire and the winds, and to set up two
pillars of stone in honour of the deity. From Usu the Mohar is naturally
taken to the island rock of Tyre.
Next comes a name which it is difficult to identify. All that is clear
is that between Zar or Tyre and Zair'aun there is some connection both
of name and of locality. Perhaps Dr. Brugsch is right in thinking that
in the next sentence there is a play upon the Hebrew word _zir'âh_,
"hornet," which seems to have the same root as Zair'aun. It may be that
Zair'aun is the ancient city south of Tyre whose ruins are now called
Umm el-'Amûd, and whose older name is said to have been Turân.
Unfortunately the name of the next place referred to in the Mohar's
travels is doubtful; if it is Pa-'A(y)ina, "the Spring," we could
identify it with the modern Râs el-'Ain, "the Head of the Spring." This
is on the road to Zib, the ancient Achshaph or Ekdippa.
"The mountain of User" reminds us curiously of the tribe of Asher, whose
territory included the mountain-range which rose up behind the
Phoenician coast. But it may denote Mount Carmel, whose "crest" faces
the traveller as he makes his way southward from Tyre and Zib. In any
case the allusion to it brings to the writer's mind another mountain in
the same neighbourhood, the summit of which similarly towers into the
sky. This is "the mountain of Shechem," either Ebal or Gerizim, each of
which is nearly 3000 feet above the level of the sea. It is the first
mention that we have of Shechem outside the pages of the Old Testament.
Shechem, however, did not lie in the path of the Mohar, and the
reference to its mountain is made parenthetically only. We are therefore
carried on to Hazor, which afterwards became a city of Naphtali, and of
which we hear in the letters of Tel el-Amarna. From Hazor the road ran
northwards to Hamath, the Hamah of to-day. Hazor lay not far to the
westward of Adamim, which the geographical lists of Thothmes III. place
between the Sea of Galilee and the Kishon, and which is doubtless the
Adami of Naphtali (Josh. xix. 33). Here the tour of the Mohar comes to
an abrupt close. After this the writer contents himself with naming a
number of Syrian cities without regard to their geographical position.
He is anxious merely to show off his knowledge of Canaanitish geography;
perhaps also to insinuate doubts as to the extent of his correspondent's
travels.
Takhis, the Thahash of Gen. xxii. 24, was, as we have seen, in the land
of the Amorites, not very far distant from Kadesh on the Orontes.
Kafir-Marona, "the village of Marona," may have been in the same
direction. The second element in the name is met with elsewhere in
Palestine. Thus one of Joshua's antagonists was the king of
Shim-ron-meron (Josh. xii. 20), and the Assyrian inscriptions tell us of
a town called Samsi-muruna. Tamnah was not an uncommon name. We hear of
a Tamnah or Timnah in Judah (Josh. xv. 57), and of another in Mount
Ephraim (Josh. xix. 50). Dapul may be the Tubuliya of the letters of
Rib-Hadad, Azai, "the outlet," seems to have been near a pass, while
Har-nammata, "the mountain of Nammata," is called Har-nam by Ramses
III., who associates it with Lebanoth and Hebron. The two next names,
Kirjath-Anab and Beth-Sopher, are of peculiar interest, since they
contain the first mention that was come down to us of Kitjath-Sepher,
the literary centre of the Canaanites in the south of Palestine, which
was captured and destroyed by Othniel the Kenizzite. In the Old
Testament (Josh. xv. 49, 50) Kirjath-Sannah or Kirjath-Sepher and Anab
are coupled together just as Kirjath-Anab and Beth-Sopher are by the
Egyptian scribe, and it is therefore evident that he has interchanged
the place of the equivalent terms Kirjath, "city," and Beth, "house."
But his spelling of the second name shows us how it ought to be
punctuated and read in the Old Testament. It was not Kirjath-Sepher,
"the city of book(s)," but Kirjath-Sopher, "the city of scribe(s)," and
Dr. W. Max Müller has pointed out that the determinative of "writing"
has been attached to the word _Sopher_, showing that the writer was
fully acquainted with its meaning. Kirjath-Sannah, "the city of
instruction," as it was also called, was but another way of emphasizing
the fact that here was the site of a library and school such as existed
in the towns of Babylonia and Assyria. Both names, however,
Kirjath-Sopher and Kirjath-Sannah, were descriptive rather than
original; its proper designation seems to have been Debir, "the
sanctuary," the temple wherein its library was established, and which
has caused the Egyptian author to call it a "Beth," or "temple," instead
of a "Kirjath," or "city."
Like Anab and Kirjath-Sopher, Adullam and Zidiputa were also in southern
Canaan. It was in the cave of Adullam that David took refuge from the
pursuit of Saul, and we learn from Shishak that Zidiputa--or
Zadiputh-el, as he calls it--was in the south of Judah. From hence we
are suddenly transported to the northern part of Syria, and the Mohar is
asked if he knows anything about Khalza in the land of Aupa. Khalza is
an Assyrian word signifying "Fortress," and Aupa, the Ubi of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets, was not far from Aleppo. The allusion to the "bull"
is obscure.
Then once more we are summoned back to Palestine. In the annals of
Thothmes III. we are told that "the brook of Qina" was to the south of
Megiddo, so that the name of the district has probably survived in that
of "Cana of Galilee." Rehob may be Rehob in Asher (Josh. xix. 28), which
was near Kanah, though the name is so common in Syria as to make any
identification uncertain. Beth-sha-el, on the contrary, is Beth-el. We
first meet with the name in the geographical lists of Thothmes III., and
the fact that it is Babylonian in form, Bit-sa-ili being the Babylonian
equivalent of the Hebrew Beth-el, is one of many proofs that the lists
were compiled from a cuneiform original. The name of Beth-sha-el or
Beth-el calls up that of Tarqa-el, which contains the name of the
Hittite god Tarqu. But where Tarqa-el was situated it is impossible to
say.
Towards the end of the book reference is made to certain places which
lay on the road between Egypt and Canaan. Rapih is the Raphia of
classical geography, the Rapikh of the Assyrian inscriptions, where two
broken columns now mark the boundary between Egypt and Turkey. Rehoburta
is probably the Rehoboth where the herdsmen of Isaac dug a well before
the patriarch moved to Beer-sheba (Gen. xxvi. 22), while in the lake of
Nakhai we may have the Sirbonian lake of classical celebrity.
There still remain two allusions in the papyrus which must not be passed
over in silence. One is the allusion to "Qazairnai, the lord of Asel,"
the famous slayer of lions. We know nothing further about this Nimrod of
Syria, but Professor Maspero is doubtless right in believing that Asel
ought to be written Alsa, and that the country meant was the kingdom of
Alasiya, which lay in the northern portion of Coele-Syria. Several
letters from the king of Alasiya are preserved in the Tel el-Amarna
collection, and we gather from them that his possessions extended across
the Orontes from the desert to the Mediterranean Sea. Egyptian papyri
tell us that mares were imported into Egypt from Alasiya as well as two
different kinds of liquor. In the age of Samuel and Saul Alasiya was
governed by a queen.
The second allusion is to the ironsmith in Canaan. It is clear that
there were many of them, and that it was to the worker in iron and not
to the worker in bronze that the traveller naturally turned when his
chariot needed mending. Even the word that is employed to denote the
metal is the Canaanitish _barzel_, which has been adopted under the form
of _parzal_. Nothing could show more plainly how characteristic of
Canaan the trade of the ironsmith must have been, and how largely the
use of iron must have there superseded the use of bronze. The fact is in
accordance with the references in the annals of Thothmes III. to the
iron that was received by him from Syria; it is also in accordance with
the statements of the Bible, where we read of the "chariots of iron" in
which the Canaanites rode to war. Indeed there seems to have been a
special class of wandering ironsmiths in Palestine, like the wandering
ironsmiths of mediæval Europe, who jealously guarded the secrets of
their trade, and formed not only a peculiar caste, but even a peculiar
race. The word Kain means "a smith," and the nomad Kenites of whom we
read in the Old Testament were simply the nomad race of "smiths," whose
home was the tent or cavern. Hence it was that while they were not
Israelites, they were just as little Canaanites, and hence it was too
that the Philistines were able to deprive the Israelites of the services
of a smith (1 Sam. xiii. 19). All that was necessary was to prevent the
Kenites from settling within Israelitish territory. There was no
Israelite who knew the secrets of the profession and could take their
place, and the Canaanites who lived under Israelitish protection were
equally ignorant of the ironsmith's art. Though the ironsmith had made
himself a home in Canaan he never identified himself with its
inhabitants. The Kenites remained a separate people, and could
consequently be classed as such by the side of the Hivites, or
"villagers," and the Perizzites, or "fellahin."
If the _Travels of a Mohar_ are a guide-book to the geography of
Palestine in the age of the nineteenth Egyptian dynasty, the lists of
places conquered by Thothmes III., and engraved by his orders on the
walls of his temple at Karnak, are a sort of atlas of Canaanite
geography in the age of the eighteenth dynasty. The name of each
locality is enclosed in a cartouche and surmounted by the head and
shoulders of a Canaanitish captive. The hair and eyes of the figures are
painted black or rather dark purple, while the skin is alternately red
and yellow. The yellow represents the olive tint of the Mediterranean
population, the red denotes the effects of sunburn. An examination of
the names contained in the cartouches makes it clear that they have been
derived from the memoranda made by the scribes who accompanied the army
of the Pharaoh in its campaigns. Sometimes the same name is repeated
twice, and not always in the same form. We may conclude, therefore, that
the memoranda had not always been made by the same reporter, and that
the compiler of the lists drew his materials from different sources. It
is further clear that the memoranda had been noted down in the cuneiform
characters of Babylonia and not in the hieroglyphs of Egypt. Thus, as we
have seen, the name of Beth-el is transcribed from its Babylonian form
of Bit-sa-ili, the Assyrian equivalent of the Hebrew Beth-el.
The names have been copied from the memoranda of the scribes in the
order in which they occurred, and without any regard to their relative
importance. While, therefore, insignificant villages are often noted,
the names of important cities are sometimes passed over. Descriptive
epithets, moreover, like _abel_ "meadow," _arets_ "land," _har_
"mountains," _'emeq_ "valley," _'ên_ "spring," are frequently treated as
if they were local names, and occupy separate cartouches. We must not,
consequently, expect to find in the lists any exhaustive catalogue of
Palestinian towns or even of the leading cities. They mark only the
lines of march taken by the army of Thothmes or by his scouts and
messengers.
Besides the Canaanitish lists there are also long lists of localities
conquered by the Pharaoh in Northern Syria. With these, however, we have
nothing to do. It is to the places in Canaan that our attention must at
present be confined. They are said to be situated in the country of the
Upper Lotan, or, as another list gives it, in the country of the Fenkhu.
In the time of Thothmes III. accordingly the land of the Upper Lotan and
the land of the Fenkhu were synonymous terms, and alike denoted what we
now call Palestine. In the word Fenkhu it is difficult not to see the
origin of the Greek Phoenix or "Phoenician."
The lists begin with Kadesh on the Orontes, the head of the confederacy,
the defeat of which laid Canaan at the feet of the Pharaoh. Then comes
Megiddo, where the decisive battle took place, and the forces of the
king of Kadesh were overthrown. Next we have Khazi, mentioned also in
the Tel el-Amarna tablets, from which we learn that it was in the
hill-country south of Megiddo. It may be the Gaza of 1 Chron. vii. 28
which was supplanted by Shechem in Israelitish days. Kitsuna, the
Kuddasuna of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, follows: where it stood we do
not know. The next name, "the Spring of Shiu," is equally impossible to
identify. The sixth name, however, is Tubikhu, about which the cuneiform
tablets of Tel el-Amarna have told us a good deal, and which seems to be
the Tibhath of 1 Chron. xviii. 8. It was in Coele-Syria like Kamta, the
Kumidi of the tablets, which follows in one list, though its place is
taken by the unknown Bami in another. After this we have the names of
Tuthina (perhaps Dothan), Lebana, and Kirjath-niznau, followed by Marum
or Merom the modern Meirôm, by Tamasqu or Damascus, by the Abel of Atar,
and by Hamath. Aqidu, the seventeenth name, is unknown, but Mr. Tomkins
is probably right in thinking that the next name, that of Shemnau, must
be identified with the Shimron of Josh. xix. 15, where the Septuagint
reads Symeon. That this reading is correct is shown by the fact that in
the days of Josephus and the Talmud the place was called Simonias, while
the modern name is Semûnieh. The tablets of Tel el-Amarna make it
Samkhuna.
Six unknown names come next, the first of which is a Beeroth, or
"Wells." Then we have Mesekh, "the place of unction," called Musikhuna
in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, Qana and 'Arna. Both Qana and 'Arna
appear in the account of the battle before Megiddo, and must have been
in the immediate neighbourhood of that city. One of the affluents of the
Kishon flowed past Qana, while 'Arna was hidden in a defile. It was
there that the tent of Thothmes was pitched two days before the great
battle. The brook of Qana seems to have been the river Qanah of to-day,
and 'Arna may be read 'Aluna.
We are now transported to the eastern bank of the Jordan, to 'Astartu in
the land of Bashan, the Ashtaroth-Karnaim of Genesis, the Tel 'Ashtarah
of modern geography. With 'Astartu is coupled Anau-repa, explained by
Mr. Tomkins to be "On of the Rephaim" (Gen. xiv. 5). At any rate it is
clearly the Raphon or Raphana of classical writers, the Er-Rafeh of
to-day. Next we have Maqata, called Makhed in the First Book of
Maccabees, and now known as Mukatta; Lus or Lius, the Biblical Laish,
which under its later name of Dan became the northern limit of the
Israelitish kingdom; and Hazor, the stronghold of Jabin, whose king we
hear of in the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Then come Pahil or Pella, east of
the Jordan, famous in the annals of early Christianity; Kennartu, the
Chinneroth of the Old Testament (Josh. xi. 2, 1 Kings xv. 20), from
which the Sea of Galilee took one of its names; Shemna, the site of
which is uncertain; and Atmam, the Adami of Josh. xix. 33. These are
followed by Qasuna, in which we find the Kishion of Issachar (Josh. xix.
20); Shanam or Shunem, now Sôlam, north of Jezreel; Mash-al, the Misheal
of Scripture; and Aksap or Ekdippa on the Phoenician coast. Then after a
name which cannot be identified we read those of Ta'anak, the Ta'anach
of the Bible, the Ta'anuk of to-day; Ible'am, near which Ahaziah of
Jadah was slain by the servants of Jehu; Gantu-Asna, "the garden of
Asnah"; Lot-melech, "Lot of the king"; 'Aina, "the Spring"; and 'Aak or
Acre. From Acre we are taken along the coast southward to Rosh Kadesh,
"the sacred headland" of Carmel, whose name follows immediately under
the form of Karimna. Next we have Beer, "the Well," Shemesh-Atum, and
Anakhertu. Anakhertu is the Anaharath of Josh. xix. 19, which belonged
to the tribe of Issachar.
Of Shemesh-Atum we hear again in one of the inscriptions of Amenophis
III. A revolt had broken out in the district of the Lebanon, and the
king accordingly marched into Canaan to suppress it. Shemesh-Atum was
the first city to feel the effects of his anger, and he carried away
from it eighteen prisoners and thirteen oxen. The name of the town shows
that it was dedicated to the Sun-god. In Hebrew it would appear as
Shemesh-Edom, and an Egyptian papyrus, now at Leyden, informs us that
Atum or Edom was the wife of Resheph the Canaanitish god of fire and
lightning. In Shemesh-Atum or Shemesh-Edom we therefore have a compound
name signifying that the Shemesh or Sun-god denoted by it was not the
male divinity of the customary worship, but the Sun-goddess Edom. In
Israelitish times the second element in the compound seems to have been
dropped; at all events it is probable that Shemesh-Atum was the
Beth-Shemesh of the Old Testament (Josh. xix. 22), which is mentioned
along with Anaharath as in the borders of Issachar.
After Anaharath come two unknown Ophrahs; then Khasbu and Tasult, called
Khasabu and Tusulti in the Tel el-Amarna letters; then Negebu, perhaps
the Nekeb of Galilee (Josh. xix. 33), Ashushkhen, Anam, and Yurza. Yurza
is now represented by the ruins of Yerza, south-eastward of Ta'anach,
and there are letters from its governor in the Tel el-Amarna collection.
Its name is followed by those of Makhsa, Yapu or Joppa, and "the country
of Gantu" or Gath. Next we have Luthen or Ruthen, which is possibly
Lydda, Ono, Apuqen, Suka or Socho, and Yahem. Among the cartouches that
follow we read the names of a Migdol, of Shebtuna, the modern Shebtîn,
of Naun which reminds us of the name of Joshua's father, and of Haditha,
now Hadîtheh, five miles to the west of Shebtîn.
The list has thus led us to the foot of Mount Ephraim, and it is not
surprising that the next name should be that of the Har or "Mountain"
itself. This is followed by a name which is full of interest, for it
reads Joseph-el or "Joseph-god." How the name of Joseph came to be
attached in the time of Thothmes to the mountainous region in which "the
House of Joseph" afterwards established itself is hard to explain; we
must remember, however, as has been stated in a former chapter, that
according to the Chronicler (1 Chron. vii. 21, 22), already in the
lifetime of Ephraim his sons were slain by the men of Gath, "because
they came down to take away their cattle." (Mr. Pinches tells me that in
early Babylonian contracts of the age of Chedor-laomer he has found the
name of Yasupu-ilu or Joseph-el, as well as that of Yakub-ilu or
Jacob-el. The discovery is of high importance when we remember that
Abraham migrated from Ur of the Chaldees, and adds another to the many
debts of gratitude due to Mr. Pinches from Biblical students. See
Preface for further details.)
Three names further on we find another compound with _el_, Har-el, "the
mount of God." In Ezek. xliii. 15 Har-el is used to denote the "altar"
which should stand in the temple on Mount Moriah, and Mount Moriah is
itself called "the Mount of the Lord" in the Book of Genesis (xxii. 14).
It may be, therefore, that in the Har-el of the Egyptian list we have
the name of the mountain whereon the temple of Solomon was afterwards to
be built. However this may be, the names which follow it show that we
are in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. One after the other come Lebau,
Na'mana or Na'amah (Josh. xv. 41), Meromim "the heights," 'Ani "the two
springs," Rehob, Ekron, Hekalim "the palaces," the Abel or "meadow" of
Autar'a, the Abel, the Gantau or "gardens," the Maqerput or "tilled
ground," and the 'Aina or "Spring" of Carmel, which corresponds with the
Gath-Carmel of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, the Carmel of Judah of the Old
Testament. Then we have Beth-Ya, a name which reminds us of that of
"Bithia, the daughter of Pharaoh," whom Mered, the descendant of Caleb,
took to wife, and whose stepson was Yered, "the father of Gedor" (1
Chron. iv. 18). Beth-Ya is followed by Tapun, which was fortified by the
Greeks after the death of Judas Maccabaeus (1 Macc. ix. 50), by the Abel
of Yertu or Yered, perhaps the district of the Jordan, by Halkal, and by
Jacob-el, a name formed in the same way as that of Joseph-el. We may see
in it an evidence that the memory of the patriarch was kept alive in the
south of Palestine. The next two names are unknown, but they are
followed by Rabatu or Rabbah of Judah, Magharatu, the Ma'arath of Josh,
xv. 59, 'Emequ, "the valley" of Hebron, Sirta and Bârtu, the _Bar
has-Sirak_, or "Well of Sirah" of 2 Sam. iii. 26. Then come Beth-sa-el
or Beth-el in its Babylonian dress; Beth-Anta or Beth-Anath (Josh. xv.
59), where the Babylonian goddess Anatu was worshipped; Helkath (2 Sam.
ii. 16); the Spring of Qan'am; Gibeah of Judah (2 Sam. vi. 3, 4; see
Josh. xviii. 28); Zelah (Josh. xviii. 28), called Zilu by Ebed-Tob of
Jerusalem; and Zafta, the Biblical Zephath (Judges i. 17). The last
three names in the catalogue--Barqna, Hum, and Aktomes--have left no
traces in Scriptural or classical geography.
The geographical lists of Thothmes III. served as a model for the
Pharaohs who came after him. They also adorned the walls of their
temples with the names of the places they had captured in Palestine, in
Northern Syria, and in the Soudan, and when a large space had to be
filled the sculptor was not careful to insert in it only the names of
such foreign towns as had been actually conquered. The older lists were
drawn upon, and the names which had appeared in them were appropriated
by the later king, sometimes in grotesquely misspelt forms. The climax
of such empty claims to conquests which had never been made was reached
at Kom Ombo, where Ptolemy Lathyrus, a prince who, instead of gaining
fresh territory, lost what he had inherited, is credited with the
subjugation of numerous nations and races, many of whom, like the
Hittites, had long before vanished from the page of history. The last of
the Pharaohs whose geographical list really represents his successes in
Palestine was Shishak, the opponent of Rehoboam and the founder of the
twenty-second dynasty. The catalogue of places engraved on the wall of
the shrine he built at Karnak is a genuine and authentic record.
So too are the lists given by the kings who immediately followed
Thothmes III., Amenophis III. of the eighteenth dynasty, Seti I. and
Ramses II. of the nineteenth, and Ramses III. of the twentieth. It is
true that in some cases the list of one Pharaoh has been slavishly
copied by another, but it is also true that these Pharaohs actually
overran and subjugated the countries to which the lists belong. Of this
we have independent testimony.
At one time it was the fashion to throw doubt on the alleged conquests
of Ramses II. in Western Asia. This was the natural reaction from the
older belief, inherited from the Greek writers of antiquity, that Ramses
II. was a universal conqueror who had carried his arms into Europe, and
even to the confines of the Caucasus. With the overthrow of this belief
came a disbelief in his having been a conqueror at all. The disbelief
was encouraged by the boastful vanity of his inscriptions, as well as by
the absence in them of any details as to his later Syrian wars.
But we now know that such scepticism was over-hasty. It was like the
scepticism which refused to admit that Canaan had been made an Egyptian
province by Thothmes III., and which needed the testimony of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets before it could be removed. As a matter of fact,
Egyptian authority was re-established throughout Palestine and even on
the eastern bank of the Jordan during the reign of Ramses II., and the
conquests of the Pharaoh in Northern Syria were real and not imaginary.
Such has been the result of the discoveries of the last three or four
years.
We have no reason to doubt that the campaigns of Ramses III. in Asia
were equally historical. The great confederacy of northern barbarians
and Asiatic invaders which had poured down upon Egypt had been utterly
annihilated; the Egyptian army was flushed with victory, and Syria,
overrun as it had been by the invaders from the north, was in no
position to resist a fresh attack. Moreover, the safety of Egypt
required that Ramses should follow up the destruction of his assailants
by carrying the war into Asia. But it is noticeable that the places he
claims to have conquered, whether in Canaan or further north, lay along
the lines of two high-roads, and that the names of the great towns even
on these high-roads are for the most part conspicuously absent. The
names, however, are practically those already enumerated by Ramses II.,
and they occur in the same order. But the list given by Ramses III.
could not have been copied from the older list of Ramses II. for a very
sufficient reason. In some instances the names as given by the earlier
monarch are mis-spelt, letters having been omitted in them or wrong
letters having been written in place of the right ones, while in the
list of Ramses III. the same names are correctly written.
Seti I., the father of Ramses II., seems to have been too fully engaged
in his wars in Northern Syria, and in securing the road along the coast
of the Mediterranean, to attempt the re-conquest of Palestine. At
Qurnah, however, we find the names of 'Aka or Acre, Zamith, Pella,
Beth-el (Beth-sha-il), Inuam, Kimham (Jer. xli. 17), Kamdu, Tyre, Usu,
Beth-Anath, and Carmel among those of the cities he had vanquished, but
there is no trace of any occupation of Southern Canaan. That seems to
have come later with the beginning of his son's reign.
On the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes there are pictures of the
storming and capture of the Palestinian cities. Most of them are now
destroyed, but we can still read the names of Ashkelon, of Salem or
Jerusalem, of Beth-Anath and Qarbu[tu], of Dapul in the land of the
Amorites, of Merom, of Damascus, and of Inuam. Elsewhere we have mention
of Yurza and Socho, while at Karnak there are two geographical lists
which mark two of the lines of march taken by the troops of Ramses II.
The first list contains the following names: (1) the district of Salem;
(2) the district of Rethpana; (3) the country of the Jordan; (4) Khilz;
(5) Karhu; (6) Uru; (7) Abel; (8) Carmel; (9) the upper district of
Tabara or Debir; (10) Shimshon; and (n) Erez Hadashta, "the new land."
In the second list we read: (1) Rosh Kadesh, or Mount Carmel; (2) Inzat;
(3) Maghar; (4) Rehuza; (5) Saabata; (6) Gaza; (7) the district of
Sala'; (8) the district of Zasr; (9) Jacob-el; and (10) the land of
Akrith, the Ugarit of the Tel el-Amarna tablets.
We have already seen that long before the time of Ramses II. Jerusalem
was an important city and fortress, the capital of a territory of some
size, known by the name of Uru-Salim, "the city of the god of peace."
"The city of Salem" could easily be abbreviated into "Salem" only; and
it is accordingly Salem which alone is used in the fourteenth chapter of
Genesis as well as in the inscriptions of Ramses II. and Ramses III. The
name of Rethpana, which follows that of Salem, is faultily written in
the list of Ramses II., and it is from that of Ramses III. that we have
to recover its true form. Ramses III., moreover, tells us that Rethpana
was a lake, and since its name comes between those of Jerusalem and the
Jordan it must represent the Dead Sea. The Canaanite form of Rethpana
would be Reshpon, a derivative from the name of Resheph, the god of fire
and lightning, whose name is preserved in that of the town Arsuf, and
whose "children" were the sparks (Job v. 7). The name was appropriate to
a region which was believed to have been smitten with a tempest of
flames, and of which we are told that "the Lord rained upon Sodom and
upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire."
Khilz, the fourth name in the list, is probably the Babylonian _Khalzu_,
or "fortress." At all events it was the first town on the eastern side
of the Jordan, and it may well therefore have guarded the ford across
the river. Karhu is the Korkha of the Moabite Stone, perhaps the modern
Kerak, which was the capital of Moab in the age of Ahab, and Uru is the
Babylonian form of the Moabite Ar, or "city," of which we read in the
Book of Numbers (xxi. 28). The land of "Moab" itself is one of the
countries which Ramses claims to have subdued. The Carmel mentioned in
the list is Carmel of Judah, not the more famous Carmel on the coast. As
for Tabara or Debir, it will be that ancient seat of Canaanite learning
and literature, called Kirjath-Sepher and Debir in the Old Testament,
the site of which is unfortunately still unknown. It must have lain,
however, between Carmel and Shimshon, "the city of the Sun-god," with
which it is probable that the Biblical Ir-Shemesh should be identified
(Josh. xix. 41). Erez Hadashta, "the New Land," is called Hadashah in
the Book of Joshua (xv. 37), where it is included among the possessions
of Judah.
The second list, instead of taking us through Judah and Moab, leads us
southward along the coast from Mount Carmel. Maghar is termed by Ramses
III. "the spring of the Maghar," and is the Magoras or river of Beyrout
of classical geography. The river took its name from the _maghdrat_ or
"caves" past which it runs, and of which we have already heard in the
_Travels of a Mohar_. The two next names which represent places on the
coast to the north of Gaza are quite unknown, but Sala', which is
written Selakh by Ramses III. (from a cuneiform original), is possibly
the rock-city Sela (2 Kings xiv. 7), better known to us as Petra. Of
Jacob-el we have already had occasion to speak.
It is in the ruined temple of Medinet Habu that Ramses III. has recorded
his victories and inscribed the names of the peoples and cities he had
overcome. We gather from the latter that his armies had followed the
roads already traversed by Ramses II., had marched through the south of
Palestine into Moab, and had made their way along the sea-coast into
Northern Syria. One after the other we read the names of Hir-nam or
Har-nam, called Har-Nammata in the _Mohar's Travels_, of Lebanoth, of
Beth-Anath and Qarbutu (Josh. xv. 59), of Carmim, "the vineyards," and
Shabuduna or Shebtîn, of Mashabir (?), of Hebron and its 'Èn or
"Spring," of the "district of Libnah," of 'Aphekah and 'Abakhi (Josh.
xv. 53), of Migdal--doubtless the Migdal-Gad of Josh. xv. 53--and
Qarzak, of Carmel of Judah and the Upper District of Debir, of Shimshon
and Erez Hadasth, of the district of Salem or Jerusalem and the "Lake of
Rethpana," of the Jordan, of Khilz the fortress, of Korkha and of Uru. A
second list gives us the line of march along the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea. First we have 'Akata, perhaps Joktheel in Judah
(Josh. xv. 38), then Karka and [Zidi]puth, Abel and the district of
Sela', the district of Zasr and Jacob-el, Rehuza, Saaba and Gaza,
Rosh-Kadesh, Inzath and the "Spring," Lui-el, which we might also read
Levi-el, Bur, "the Cistern," Kamdu, "Qubur the great," Iha, Tur, and
finally Sannur, the Saniru of the Assyrian texts, the Shenir of the Old
Testament (Deut. iii. 9). This brings us to Mount Hermon and the land of
the Amorites, so that it is not surprising to find after two more names
that of Hamath.
One point about this list is very noticeable. None of the great
Phoenician cities of the coast are mentioned in it. Acre, Ekdippa, Tyre,
Sidon, and Beyrout are all conspicuous by their absence. Even Joppa is
unnamed. After Gaza we have only descriptive epithets like "the Spring"
and "the Cistern," or the names of otherwise unknown villages. With
Kamdu in Coele-Syria the catalogue of cities begins afresh.
It is plain that the northern campaign of the Pharaoh was little better
than a raid. No attempt was made to capture the cities of the coast, and
re-establish in them the Egyptian power. The Egyptian army passed them
by without any effort to reduce them. Possibly the Philistines had
already settled on the coast, and had shown themselves too strong to be
meddled with; possibly the Egyptian fleet was acting in concert with the
troops on land, and Ramses cared only to lead his forces to some spot on
the north Syrian coast, from whence, if necessary, the ships could
convey them home. Whatever may have been the reason, the fact remains
that Gaza alone of the cities of the Canaanitish coast fell into the
hands of the Pharaoh. It was only in the extreme south, in what was so
soon afterwards to become the territory of Judah, that he overran the
country and occupied the large towns.
With the lists of Ramses III. our knowledge of the geography of
Patriarchal Palestine is brought to a close. Henceforward we have to do
with the Canaan of Israelitish conquest and settlement. The records of
the Old Testament contain a far richer store of geographical names than
we can ever hope to glean from the monuments of Egypt. But the latter
show how little change after all was effected by the Israelitish
conquest in the local nomenclature of the country. A few cities
disappeared like Kirjath-Sepher, but on the whole not only the cities,
but even the villages of pre-Israelitish Canaan survived under their old
names. When we compare the names of the towns and villages of Judah
enumerated in the Book of Joshua with the geographical lists of a
Thothmes or a Ramses, we cannot but be struck by the coincidences
between them. The occurrence of a name like Hadashah, "the New (Land),"
in both cannot be the result of chance. It adds one more to the many
arguments in favour of the antiquity of the Book of Joshua, or at all
events of the materials of which it consists. Geography, at all events,
gives no countenance to the theory which sees in the book a fabrication
of later date. Even the leading cities of the Israelitish period are for
the most part already the leading cities of the earlier Palestine. The
future capital of David, for example, was already called Jerusalem long
before the birth of Moses, and already occupied a foremost place among
the kingdoms of Canaan.
CHAPTER VI
CANAANITISH CULTURE AND RELIGION
We have already learned from the annals of Thothmes III. how high was
the state of civilization and culture among the merchant princes of
Canaan in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. Artistically
finished vases of gold and silver, rich bronzes, furniture carved out of
ebony and cedar, and inlaid with ivory and precious stones--such were
some of the manufactures of the land of Palestine. Iron was excavated
from its hills and wrought into armour, into chariots, and into weapons
of war; while beautifully shaped vessels of variegated glass were
manufactured on the coast. The amber beads found at Lachish point to a
trade with the distant Baltic, and it is possible that there may be
truth after all in the old belief, that the Phoenicians obtained their
tin from the isles of Britain. The mines of Cyprus, indeed, yielded
abundance of copper, but, so far as we know, there were only two parts
of the world from which the nations of Western Asia and the Eastern
Mediterranean could have procured the vast amount of tin needed in the
Bronze Age--the Malayan Peninsula and Cornwall. The Malayan Peninsula is
out of the question--there are no traces of any commercial intercourse
so far to the East; and it would seem, therefore, that we must look to
Cornwall for the source of the tin. If so the trade would probably have
been overland, like the amber trade from the Baltic.
Canaan was marked out by Nature to be a land of merchants. Its long line
of coast fronted the semi-barbarous populations of Asia Minor, of the
Ægean, and of the northern shores of Africa, while the sea furnished it
with the purple dye of the murex. The country itself formed the
high-road and link between the great kingdoms of the Euphrates and the
Nile. It was here that the two civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt met
and coalesced, and it was inevitable that the Canaanites, who possessed
all the energy and adaptive quickness of a commercial race, should
absorb and combine the elements of both. There was little except this
combination that was original in Canaanitish art, but when once the
materials were given, the people of Palestine knew how to work them up
into new and graceful forms, and adapt them practically to the needs of
the foreign world.
If we would realize the change brought about by this contact of Canaan
with the culture of the stranger, we must turn to the rude figures
carved upon the rocks in some of the valleys of Phoenicia. Near Tyre,
for example, in the Wadi el-Qana we may still see some of these
primitive sculptures, in which it is difficult even to recognize the
human form. Equally barbarous in style are the early seals and cylinders
made in imitation of those of Babylonia. It seems at first sight
impossible to believe that such grotesque and child-like beginnings
should have ended in the exquisite art of the age of Thothmes III.
At that period, however, Canaan already had behind it a long civilized
past. The country was filled with schools and libraries, with
richly-furnished palaces, and the workshops of the artisans. The cities
on the coast had their fleets partly of merchantmen, partly of warships,
and an active trade was carried on with all parts of the known world.
The result was that the wealth of Palestine was enormous; the amount
carried away by Thothmes is alone sufficient to prove it. Apart from the
natural productions of the country--corn, wine, and oil, or the slaves
which it had to furnish--immense quantities of gold, silver, and
precious stones, sometimes in their native state, sometimes manufactured
into artistic forms, were transported into Egypt. And in spite of this
drain upon its resources, the supply seems never to have failed.
The reciprocal influence of the civilizations of Canaan and Egypt one
upon the other, in the days when Canaan was an Egyptian province, is
reflected in the languages of the two countries. On the one hand the
Canaanite borrowed from Egypt words like _tebah_ "ark," _hin_ "a
measure," and _ebyôn_ "poor," while Canaan in return copiously enriched
the vocabulary of its conquerors. As the _Travels of a Mohar_ have shown
us, under the nineteenth dynasty there was a mania for using Canaanitish
words and phrases, similar to that which has more than once visited
English society in respect to French. But before the rise of the
nineteenth dynasty the Egyptian lexicon was already full of Semitic
words. Frequently they denoted objects which had been imported from
Syria. Thus a "chariot" was called a _merkabut_, a "waggon" being
_agolta_; _hurpu_, "a sword," was the Canaanitish _khereb_, just as
_aspata_, "a quiver," was _ashpâh_. The Canaanitish _kinnor_, "a lyre,"
was similarly naturalized in Egypt, like the names of certain varieties
of "Syrian bread." The Egyptian words for "incense" (_qadaruta_), "oxen"
(_abiri_), and "sea" (_yum_) were taken from the same source, though it
is possible that the last-mentioned word, like _qamhu_, "wheat," had
been introduced from Syria in the earliest days of Egyptian history. As
might have been expected, several kinds of sea-going vessels brought
with them their native names from the Phoenician coast. Already in the
time of the thirteenth dynasty the larger ships were termed _Kabanitu_,
or "Gebalite"; we read also of "boats" called _Za_, the Canaanite _Zi_,
while a transport was entitled _qauil_, the Phoenician _gol_. The same
name was imported into Greek under the form of _gaulos_, and we are told
that it signified "a Phoenician vessel of rounded shape."
The language of Canaan was practically that which we call Hebrew. Indeed
Isaiah (xix. 18) speaks of the two dialects as identical, and the
so-called Phoenician inscriptions that have been preserved to us show
that the differences between them were hardly appreciable. There were
differences, however; the Hebrew definite article, for instance, is not
found in the Phoenician texts. But the differences are dialectal only,
like the differences which the discovery of the Moabite Stone has shown
to have existed between the languages of Moab and Israel.
How the Israelites came to adopt "the language of Canaan" is a question
into which we cannot here enter. There have been other examples of
conquerors who have abandoned the language of their forefathers and
adopted that of the conquered people. And it must be remembered, on the
one hand, that the ancestors of Israel had lived in Canaan, where they
would have learnt the language of the country, and, on the other hand,
that their original tongue was itself a Semitic form of speech, as
closely related to Hebrew as French or Spanish is to Italian.
The Tel el-Amarna tablets have told us something about the language of
Canaan as it was spoken before the days when the Israelites entered the
land. Some of the letters that were sent from Palestine contain the
Canaanite equivalents of certain Babylonian words that occur in them.
Like the Babylonian words, they are written in cuneiform characters, and
since these denote syllables and not mere letters we know exactly how
the words were pronounced. It is an advantage which is denied us by the
Phoenician alphabet, whether in the inscriptions of Phoenicia or in the
pages of the Old Testament, and we can thus obtain a better idea of the
pronunciation of the Canaanitish language in the century before the
Exodus than we can of the Hebrew language in the age of Hezekiah.
Among the words which have been handed down to us by the correspondents
of the Pharaoh are _maqani_ "cattle," _anay_ "a ship," _súsi_ "a horse,"
of which the Hebrew equivalents, according to the Masoretic punctuation,
are _miqneh_, _oni_, and _sûs_. The king of Jerusalem says _anuki_, "I,"
the Hebrew _anochi_, while _badiu_, the Hebrew _b'yado_, and _akharunu_,
the Hebrew _akharono_, are stated to signify "in his hand," and "after
him." "Dust" is _ghaparu_, where the guttural _gh_ represents the
Canaanitish _ayyin_ ('); "stomach" is _batnu_, the Hebrew _beten_; while
_kilubi_, "a cage," corresponds with the Hebrew _chelûb_, which is used
in the same sense by the prophet Jeremiah. Elsewhere we find _risu_, the
Hebrew _rosh_, "a head," _har_ "a mountain," _samama_ "heaven," and
_mima_ "water," in Hebrew _shâmayim_ and _mayim_, which we gather from
the cuneiform spelling have been wrongly punctuated by the Masoretes, as
well as _khaya_ "living," the Hebrew _khai_, and _makhsû_, "they have
smitten him," the Hebrew _makhatsu_.
It was the use of the definite article _ha(n)_ which mainly
distinguished Hebrew and Phoenician or Canaanite one from the other. And
we have a curious indication in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, that the same
distinction prevailed between the language of the Canaanites and that of
the Edomites, who, as we learn from the Old Testament, were so closely
related to the Israelites. In the letter to the Pharaoh, in which
mention is made of the hostilities carried on by Edom against the
Egyptian territory, one of the Edomite towns referred to is called
Khinianabi. Transcribed into Hebrew characters this would be
'En-han-nabi, "the Spring of the Prophet." Here, therefore, the Hebrew
article makes its appearance, and that too in the very form which it has
in the language of Israel. The fact is an interesting commentary on the
brotherhood of Jacob and Esau.
If the language of Canaan was influenced by that of Egypt, still more
was it influenced by that of Babylonia. Long before Palestine became an
Egyptian province it had been a province of Babylonia. And even when it
was not actually subject to Babylonian government it was under the
dominion of Babylonian culture. War and trade alike forced the Chaldæan
civilization upon "the land of the Amorites," and the Canaanites were
not slow to take advantage of it. The cuneiform writing of Babylonia was
adopted, and therewith the language of Babylonia was taught and learned
in the schools and libraries which were established in imitation of
those of the Babylonians. Babylonian literature was introduced into the
West, and the Canaanite youth became acquainted with the history and
legends, the theology and mythology of the dwellers on the Euphrates and
Tigris.
Such literary contact naturally left its impress on the language of
Canaan. Words which the Semites of Babylonia had borrowed from the older
Sumerian population of the country were handed on to the peoples of
Palestine. The "city" had been a Sumerian creation; until brought under
the influence of Sumerian culture, the Semite had been contented to live
in tents. Indeed in Babylonian or Assyrian--the language of the Semitic
inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria--the word which signified "tent"
was adopted to express the idea of "city" when the tent had been
exchanged for city-life. In Canaan, on the other hand, the Sumerian word
itself was adopted in a Semitic form, _'Ir_, _'ar_, or _uru_, "city,"
was originally the Sumerian _eri_.
The Canaanitish _hêkâl_, "a palace," again, came from a Sumerian source.
This was _ê-gal_, or "great house." But it had passed to the West
through the Semitic Babylonians, who had first borrowed the compound
word under the form of _êkallu_. Like the city, the palace also was
unknown to the primitive Semitic nomads. It belonged to the civilization
of which the Sumerians of Chaldæa, with their agglutinative language,
were the pioneers.
The borrowing, however, was not altogether one-sided. Palestine enriched
the literary language of Babylonia with certain words, though these do
not seem to have made their way into the language of the people. Thus we
find words like _bin-bini_, "grandson," and _înu_, "wine," recorded in
the lexical tablets of Babylonia and Assyria. Doubtless there were
writers on the banks of the Euphrates who were as anxious to exhibit
their knowledge of the language of Canaan as were the Egyptian scribes
of the nineteenth dynasty, though their literary works have not yet been
discovered.
The adoption of the Babylonian system of writing must have worked
powerfully on the side of tincturing the Canaanitish language with
Babylonian words. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets there is no
sign that any other system was known in the West. It is true that the
letters sent to the Pharaoh from Palestine were written in the
Babylonian language as well as in the Babylonian script, but we have
evidence that the cuneiform characters were also used for the native
language of the country. M. de Clercq possesses two seal-cylinders of
the same date as the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, on one of which is
the cuneiform inscription--"Hadad-sum, the citizen of Sidon, the crown
of the gods," while on the other is "Anniy, the son of Hadad-sum, the
citizen of Sidon." On the first, Hadad-sum is represented standing with
his hands uplifted before the Egyptian god Set, while behind him is the
god Resheph with a helmet on his head, a shield in one hand and a
battle-axe in the other. On the seal of Anniy, Set and Resheph again
make their appearance, but instead of the owner of the cylinder it is
the god Horus who stands between them.
When the cuneiform syllabary was superseded in Palestine by the
so-called Phoenician alphabet we do not know. The introduction of the
new script was due probably to the Hittite invasion, which separated the
Semites of the West from the Semites of the East. The Hittite occupation
of Carchemish blocked the high-road of Babylonian trade to the
Mediterranean, and when the sacred city of Kadesh on the Orontes fell
into Hittite hands it was inevitable that Hittite rather than Babylonian
influence would henceforth prevail in Canaan. However this may be, it
seems natural to suppose that the scribes of Zebulon referred to in the
Song of Deborah and Barak (Judges v. 14) wrote in the letters of the
Phoenician alphabet and not in the cuneiform characters of Babylonia. As
long, indeed, as the old libraries remained open and accessible, with
their stores of cuneiform literature, there must have been some who
could read them, but they would have been rather the older inhabitants
of the country than the alien conquerors from the desert. When the
Moabite Stone was engraved, it is clear from the forms of the letters
that the Phoenician alphabet had long been in use in the kingdom of
Mesha. The resemblance of these letters to those found in the earliest
of the Greek inscriptions makes it equally clear that the introduction
of the alphabet into the islands of the Ægean must have taken place at
no distant period from the age of the Moabite Stone. Such an
introduction, however, implies that the new alphabet had already taken
deep root among the merchants of Canaan, and driven out before it the
cumbrous syllabary of Chaldæa. It was in this alphabet that Hiram and
Solomon corresponded together, and it is probable that Moses made use of
it. We may even conjecture that the Israelitish settlement in Palestine
brought with it the gift of the "Phoenician" alphabet.
As we have already seen, the elements of Babylonian art were quickly
absorbed by the Canaanites. The seal-cylinder was imitated, at first
with but indifferent success, and such Babylonian ornamental designs as
the rosette, the sacred tree, and the winged cherub were taken over and
developed in a special way. At times the combination with them of
designs borrowed from Egypt produced a new kind of artistic ornament.
But it was in the realm of religion that the influence of Babylonia was
most powerful. Religion, especially in the ancient world, was
inextricably bound up with its culture; it was impossible to adopt the
one without adopting a good deal of the other at the same time.
Moreover, the Semites of Babylonia and of Canaan belonged to the same
race, and that meant a community of inherited religious ideas. With both
the supreme object of worship was Baal or Bel, "the lord," who was but
the Sun-god under a variety of names. Each locality had its own special
Baal: there were, in fact, as many Baals, or Baalim, as there were names
and attributes for the Sun-god, and to the worshippers in each locality
the Baal adored there was the supreme god. But the god resembled his
worshipper who had been made in his image; he was the father and head of
a family with a wife and son. The wife, it is true, was but the
colourless reflection of the god, often indeed but the feminine Baalah,
whom the Semitic languages with their feminine gender required to exist
by the side of the masculine Baal. But this was only in accordance with
the Semitic conception of woman as the lesser man, his servant rather
than his companion, his shadow rather than his helpmeet.
The existence of an independent goddess, unmarried and possessing all
the attributes of the god, was contrary to the fundamental conceptions
of the Semitic mind. Nevertheless we find in Canaan an Ashtoreth, whom
the Greeks called Astarte, as well as a Baal. The cuneiform inscriptions
have given us an explanation of the fact.
Ashtoreth came from Babylonia. There she was known as Istar, the evening
star. She had been one of those Sumerian goddesses who, in accordance
with the Sumerian system, which placed the mother at the head of the
family, were on an equal footing with the gods. She lay outside the
circle of Semitic theology with its divine family, over which the male
Baal presided, and the position she occupied in later Babylonian
religion was due to the fusion between the Sumerian and Semitic forms of
faith, which took place when the Semites became the chief element in
Babylonia. But Sumerian influence and memories were too strong to allow
of any transformation either in the name or in the attributes of the
goddess. She remained Istar, without any feminine suffix, and it was
never forgotten that she was the evening-star.
It was otherwise in the West. There Istar became Ashtoreth with the
feminine termination, and passed eventually into a Moon-goddess "with
crescent horns." Ashtoreth-Karnaim, "Ashtoreth with the two horns," was
already in existence in the age of Abraham. In Babylonia the Moon-god of
ancient Sumerian belief had never been dethroned; but there was no
Moon-god in Canaan, and accordingly the transformation of the Babylonian
goddess into "the queen of the night" was a matter of little difficulty.
Once domesticated in Palestine, with her name so changed as to declare
her feminine character, Ashtoreth soon tended to lose her independence.
Just as there were Baalim or "Baals" by the side of Baal, so there were
Astaroth or "Ashtoreths" by the side of Ashtoreth.
The Semites of Babylonia themselves had already begun the work of
transformation. They too spoke of Istarât or "Istars," and used the word
in the general sense of "goddesses." In Canaan, however, Ashtarôth had
no such general meaning, but denoted simply the various Ashtoreths who
were worshipped in different localities, and under different titles. The
individual Ashtoreth of Gebal was separate from the individual Ashtoreth
of Bashan, although they alike represented the same divine personality.
It is true that even in the West Istar did not always become the
feminine complement of Baal. Here and there the old form of the name was
preserved, without any feminine suffix. But when this was the case, the
necessary result was that the female character of the deity was
forgotten. Istar was conceived of as a god, and accordingly on the
Moabite Stone Ashtar is identified with Chemosh, the patron-god of
Mesha, just as in Southern Arabia also Atthar is a male divinity.
The worship of Ashtoreth absorbed that of the other goddesses of Canaan.
Among them there was one who had once occupied a very prominent place.
This was Ashêrah, the goddess of fertility, whose name is written Asirtu
and Asratu in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Ashêrah was symbolized by a
stem stripped of its branches, or an upright cone of stone, fixed in the
ground, and the symbol and the goddess were at times confounded
together. The symbol is mistranslated "grove" in the Authorized Version
of the Old Testament, and it often stood by the side of the altar of
Baal. We find it thus represented on early seals. In Palestine it was
usually of wood; but in the great temple of Paphos in Cyprus there was
an ancient and revered one of stone. This, however, came to be
appropriated to Ashtoreth in the days when the older Ashêrah was
supplanted by the younger Ashtoreth.
We hear of other Canaanitish divinities from the monuments of Egypt. The
goddess Edom, the wife of Resheph, has already been referred to. Her
name is found in that of the Gittite, Obed-Edom, "the servant of Edom,"
in whose house the ark was kept for three months (2 Sam. vi. 10).
Resheph, too, has been mentioned in an earlier page. He was the god of
fire and lightning, and on the Egyptian monuments he is represented as
armed with spear and helmet, and bears the titles of "great god" and
"lord of heaven." Along with him we find pictures of a goddess called
Kedesh and Kesh. She stands on the back of a lion, with flowers in her
left hand and a serpent in her right, while on her head is the lunar
disk between the horns of a cow. She may be the goddess Edom, or perhaps
the solar divinity who was entitled  in Babylonian, and whose name
enters into that of an Edomite king A-rammu, who is mentioned by
Sennacherib.
But, like Istar, a considerable number of the deities of Palestine were
borrowed from Babylonia. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets the god of
Jerusalem is identified with the warlike Sun-god of Babylonia, Nin-ip,
and there was a sanctuary of the same divinity further north, in
Phoenicia. Foremost among the deities whose first home was on the banks
of the Euphrates were Arm and Anat, and Rimmon. Anu, whose name is
written Anah in Hebrew, was the god of the sky, and he stood at the head
of the Babylonian pantheon. His wife Anat was but a colourless
reflection of himself, a grammatical creation of the Semitic languages.
But she shared in the honours that were paid to her consort, and the
divinity that resided in him was reflected upon her. Anat, like
Ashtoreth, became multiplied under many forms, and the Anathoth or
"Anat" signified little more than "goddesses." Between the Ashtaroth and
the Anathoth the difference was but in name.
The numerous localities in Palestine which received their names from the
god Rimmon are a proof of his popularity. The Babylonian Rimmon or
Ramman was, strictly speaking, the god of the air, but in the West he
was identified with the Sun-god Hadad, and a place near Megiddo bore the
compound title of Hadad-Rimmon (Zech. xii. 11). His naturalization in
Canaan seems to belong to a very early period; at all events, in
Sumerian he was called Martu, "the Amorite," and seal-cylinders speak of
"the Martu gods." One of these has been found in the Lebanon. The
Assyrian tablets tell us that he was also known as Dadu in the West, and
under this form we find him in names like El-Dad and Be-dad, or Ben-Dad.
Like Rimmon, Nebo also must have been transported to Palestine at an
early epoch. Nebo "the prophet" was the interpreter of Bel-Merodach of
Babylon, the patron of cuneiform literature, and the god to whom the
great temple of Borsippa--the modern Birs-i-Nimrud--was dedicated.
Doubtless he had migrated to the West along with that literary culture
over which he presided. There his name and worship were attached to many
localities. It was on the summit of Mount Nebo that Moses died; over
Nebo, Isaiah prophesies, "Moab shall howl;" and we hear of a city called
"the other Nebo" in Judah (Neh. vii. 33).
Another god who had been borrowed from Babylonia by the people of Canaan
was Malik "the king," a title originally of the supreme Baal. Malik is
familiarly known to us in the Old Testament as Moloch, to whom the
first-born were burned in the fire. At Tyre the god was termed
Melech-kirjath, or "king of the city," which was contracted into
Melkarth, and in the mouths of the Greeks became Makar. There is a
passage in the book of the prophet Amos (v. 25, 26), upon which the
Assyrian texts have thrown light. We there read: "Have ye offered unto
me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of
Israel? Yet ye have borne Sikkuth your Malik and Chiun your Zelem, the
star of your god, which ye made to yourselves."
Sikkuth and Chiun are the Babylonian Sakkut and Kaivan, a name given to
the planet Saturn. Sakkut was a title of the god Nin-ip, and we gather
from Amos that it also represented Malik "the king." Zelem, "the image,"
was another Babylonian deity, and originally denoted "the image" or disk
of the sun. His name and worship were carried into Northern Arabia, and
a monument has been discovered at Teima, the Tema of Isaiah xxi. 14,
which is dedicated to him. It would seem, from the language of Amos,
that the Babylonian god had been adored in "the wilderness" as far back
as the days when the Israelites were encamping in it. Nor, indeed, is
this surprising: Babylonian influence in the West belonged to an age
long anterior to that of the Exodus, and even the mountain whereon the
oracles of God were revealed to the Hebrew lawgiver was Sinai, the
mountain of Sin. The worship of Sin, the Babylonian Moon-god, must
therefore have made its way thus far into the deserts of Arabia.
Inscriptions from Southern Arabia have already shown us that there too
Sin was known and adored.
Dagon, again, was another god who had his first home in Babylonia. The
name is of Sumerian origin, and he was associated with Ami, the god of
the sky. Like Sin, he appears to have been worshipped at Harran; at all
events, Sargon states that he inscribed the laws of that city "according
to the wish of Anu and Dagon." Along with Arm he would have been brought
to Canaan, and though we first meet with his name in the Old Testament
in connection with the Philistines, it is certain that he was already
one of the deities of the country whom the Philistine invaders adopted.
One of the Canaanitish governors in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence
bears the Assyrian name of Dagon-takala, "we trust in Dagon." The
Phoenicians made him the god of corn in consequence of the resemblance
of his name to the word which signifies "corn"; primarily, however, he
would have been a god of the earth. The idea that he was a fish-god is
of post-Biblical date, and due to a false etymology, which derived his
name from the Hebrew _dag_, "a fish." The fish-god of Babylonia,
however, whose image is sometimes engraved on seals, was a form of Ea,
the god of the deep, and had no connection with Dagon. Doubtless there
were other divinities besides these whom the peoples of Canaan owed to
the Babylonians. Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing in the name of
Beth-lehem a reminiscence of the Babylonian god Lakhmu, who took part in
the creation of the world, and whom a later philosophizing generation
identified with Anu. But the theology of early Canaan is still but
little known, and its pantheon is still in great measure a sealed book.
Now and again we meet with a solitary passage in some papyrus or
inscription on stone, which reveals to us for the first time the name of
an otherwise unknown deity. Who, for instance, is the goddess
'Ashiti-Khaur, who is addressed, along with Kedesh, on an Egyptian
monument now at Vienna, as "the mistress of heaven" and "ruler of all
the gods"? The votive altars of Carthage make repeated mention of the
goddess Tanit, the Peni or "Face" of Baal, whom the Greeks identified
with Artemis. She must have been known in the mother-land of Phoenicia,
and yet no trace of her worship there has as yet been found. There were
"gods many and lords many" in primitive Palestine, and though a
comprehensive faith summed them up as its Baalim and Ashtaroth they yet
had individual names and titles, as well as altars and priests.
But though altars were numerous, temples were not plentiful. The chief
seats of religious worship were "the high-places," level spots on the
summits of hills or mountains, where altars were erected, and the
worshipper was believed to be nearer the dwelling-place of the gods than
he would have been in the plain below. The altar was frequently some
natural boulder of rock, consecrated by holy oil, and regarded as the
habitation of a god. These sacred stones were termed beth-els, _bætyli_
as the Greeks wrote the word, and they form a distinguishing
characteristic of Semitic faith. In later times many of them were
imagined to have "come down from heaven." So deeply enrooted was this
worship of stones in the Semitic nature, that even Mohammed, in spite of
his iconoclastic zeal, was obliged to accommodate his creed to the
worship of the Black Stone at Mekka, and the Kaaba is still one of the
most venerated objects of the Mohammedan faith.
But the sacred stone was not only an object of worship or the
consecrated altar of a deity, it might also take the place of a temple,
and so be in very truth a beth-el, or "house of God." Thus at Medain
Salih in North-western Arabia Mr. Doughty discovered three upright
stones, which an inscription informed him were the _mesged_ or "mosque"
of the god Aera of Bozrah. In the great temple of Melkarth at Tyre
Herodotus saw two columns, one of gold, the other of emerald, reminding
us of the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, which the Phoenician architect
of Solomon erected in the porch of the temple at Jerusalem (1 Kings vii.
21). Similar columns of stone have been found in the Phoenician temple,
called that of the Giants, in Gozo, one of which is still standing in
its place.
While certain stones were thus regarded as the abode of deity, the high
places whereon so many of them stood also received religious worship.
The most prominent of the mountains of Syria were deified: Carmel became
a Penu-el or "Face of God," Hermon was "the Holy One," and Mount Lebanon
was a Baal. The rivers and springs also were adored as gods, and the
fish which swam in them were accounted sacred. On the Phoenician coast
was a river Kadisha, "the holy," and the Canaanite maiden saw in the red
marl which the river Adonis brought down from the hills the blood of the
slaughtered Sun-god Tammuz.
The temple of Solomon, built as it was by Phoenician architects and
workmen, will give us an idea of what a Canaanitish temple was like. In
its main outlines it resembled a temple in Babylonia or Assyria. There,
too, there was an outer court and an inner sanctuary, with its _parakku_
or "mercy-seat," and its ark of stone or wood, in which an inscribed
tablet of stone was kept. Like the temple of Jerusalem, the Babylonian
temple looked from the outside much like a rectangular box, with its
four walls rising up, blank and unadorned, to the sky. Within the open
court was a "sea," supported at times on oxen of bronze, where the
priests and servants of the temple performed their ablutions and the
sacred vessels were washed.
The Canaanitish altar was approached by steps, and was large enough for
the sacrifice of an ox. Besides the sacrifices, offerings of corn and
wine, of fruit and oil were also made to the gods. The sacrifices and
offerings were of two kinds, the _zau'at_ or sin-offering, and the
_shelem_ or thank-offering. The sin-offering had to be given wholly to
the god, and was accordingly termed _kalil_ or "complete"; a part of the
thank-offering, on the other hand, might be carried away by him who made
it. Birds, moreover, might constitute a thank-offering; they were not
allowed when the offering was made for sin. Such at least was the rule
in the later days of Phoenician ritual, to which belong the sacrificial
tariffs that have been preserved.
In these sacrificial tariffs no mention is made of human sacrifices,
and, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out, the ram takes in them the
place of the man. But this was the result of the milder manners of an
age when the Phoenicians had been brought into close contact with the
Greeks. In the older days of Canaanitish history human sacrifice had
held a foremost place in the ritual of Syria. It was the sacrifice of
the firstborn son that was demanded in times of danger and trouble, or
when the family was called upon to make a special atonement for sin. The
victim was offered as a burnt sacrifice, which in Hebrew idiom was
euphemistically described as passing through the fire.
Side by side with these human sacrifices were the abominations which
were performed in the temples in honour of Ashtoreth. Women acted as
prostitutes, and men who called themselves "dogs" foreswore their
manhood. It was these sensualities practised in the name of religion
which caused the iniquity of the Canaanites to become full.
It is pleasanter to turn to such fragments of Canaanitish mythology and
cosmological speculation as have come down to us. Unfortunately most of
it belongs in its present form to the late days of Greek and Roman
domination, when an attempt was made to fuse the disjointed legends of
the various Phoenician states into a connected whole, and to present
them to Greek readers under a philosophical guise. How much, therefore,
of the strange cosmogony and history of the gods recorded by Philon of
Gebal really goes back to the patriarchal epoch of Palestine, and how
much of it is of later growth, it is now impossible to say. In the main,
however, it is of ancient date.
This is shown by the fact that a good deal of it has been borrowed
directly or indirectly from Babylonia. How this could have happened has
been explained by the Tel el-Amarna tablets. It was while Canaan was
under the influence of Babylonian culture and Babylonian government that
the myths and traditions of Babylonia made their way to the West. Among
the tablets are portions of Babylonian legends, one of which has been
carefully annotated by the Egyptian or Canaanite scribe. It is the story
of the queen of Hades, who had been asked by the gods to a feast they
had made in the heavens. Unable or unwilling to ascend to it, the
goddess sent her servant the plague-demon, but with the result that
Nergal was commissioned to descend to Hades and destroy its mistress.
The fourteen gates of the infernal world, each with its attendant
warder, were opened before him, and at last he seized the queen by the
hair, dragging her to the ground, and threatening to cut off her head.
But Eris-kigal, the queen of Hades, made a successful appeal for mercy;
she became the wife of Nergal, and he the lord of the tomb.
Another legend was an endeavour to account for the origin of death.
Adapa or Adama, the first man, who had been created by Ea, was fishing
one day in the deep sea, when he broke the wings of the south wind. The
south wind flew to complain to Anu in heaven, and Anu ordered the
culprit to appear before him. But Adapa was instructed by Ea how to act.
Clad in a garment of mourning, he won the hearts of the two guardians of
the gate of heaven, the gods Tammuz and Gis-zida ("the firmly-fixed
post"), so that they pleaded for him before Anu. Food and water were
offered him, but he refused them for fear that they might be the food
and water of death. Oil only for anointing and clothing did he accept.
"Then Anu looked upon him and raised his voice in lamentation: 'O Adapa,
wherefore atest thou not, wherefore didst thou not drink? The gift of
life cannot now be thine.'" Though "a sinful man" had been permitted "to
behold the innermost parts of heaven and earth," he had rejected the
food and water of life, and death henceforth was the lot of mankind.
It is curious that the commencement of this legend, the latter portion
of which has been found at Tel el-Amarna, had been brought to the
British Museum from the ruins of the library of Nineveh many years ago.
But until the discovery of the conclusion, its meaning and character
were indecipherable. The copy made for the library of Nineveh was a late
edition of the text which had been carried from Babylonia to the banks
of the Nile eight hundred years before, and the fact emphasizes once
more the Babylonian character of the culture and literature possessed by
Palestine in the Patriarchal Age.
We need not wonder, therefore, if it is to Babylonia that the
cosmological legends and beliefs of Phoenicia plainly point. The watery
chaos out of which the world was created, the divine hierarchies, one
pair of deities proceeding from another and an older pair, or the
victory of Kronos over the dragon Ophioneus, are among the indications
of their Babylonian origin. But far more important than these echoes of
Babylonian mythology in the legendary lore of Phoenicia is the close
relationship that exists between the traditions of Babylonia and the
earlier chapters of Genesis. As is now well known, the Babylonian
account of the Deluge agrees even in details with that which we find in
the Bible, though the polytheism of Chaldæa is there replaced by an
uncompromising monotheism, and there are little touches, like the
substitution of an "ark" for the Babylonian "ship," which show that the
narrative has been transported to Palestine. Equally Babylonian in
origin is the history of the Tower of Babel, while two of the rivers of
Eden are the Tigris and Euphrates, and Eden itself is the Edin or
"Plain" of Babylonia.
Not so long ago it was the fashion to declare that such coincidences
between Babylonian and Hebrew literature could be due only to the long
sojourn of the Jews in Babylonia during the twenty years of the Exile.
But we now know that the traditions and legends of Babylonia were
already known in Canaan before the Israelites had entered the Promised
Land. It was not needful for the Hebrew writer to go to Chaldæa in order
that he might learn them; when Moses was born they were already current
both in Palestine and on the banks of the Nile. The Babylonian colouring
of the early chapters of Genesis is just what archaeology would teach us
to expect it would have been, had the Pentateuch been of the age to
which it lays claim.
Here and there indeed there are passages which must be of that age, and
of none other. When in the tenth chapter of Genesis Canaan is made the
brother of Cush and Mizraim, of Ethiopia and Egypt, we are carried back
at once to the days when Palestine was an Egyptian province. The
statement is applicable to no other age. Geographically Canaan lay
outside the southern zone to which Egypt and Ethiopia belonged, except
during the epoch of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when all
three were alike portions of a single empire. With the fall of that
empire the statement ceased to be correct or even conceivable. After the
era of the Israelitish conquest Canaan and Egypt were separated one from
the other, not to be again united save for a brief space towards the
close of the Jewish monarchy. Palestine henceforth belonged to Asia, not
to Africa, to the middle zone, that is to say, which was given over to
the sons of Shem.
There is yet another passage in the same chapter of Genesis which takes
us back to the Patriarchal Age of Palestine. It is the reference to
Nimrod, the son of Cush, the beginning of whose kingdom was Babel and
Erech, and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar, and who was so
familiar a figure in the West that a proverb was current there
concerning his prowess in the chase. Here again we are carried to a date
when the Kassite kings of Babylonia held rule in Canaan, or led thither
their armies, and when the Babylonians were called, as they are in the
Tel el-Amarna tablets, the Kassi or sons of Cush. Nimrod himself may be
the Kassite monarch Nazi-Murudas. The cuneiform texts of the period show
that the names borne by the Kassite kings were strangely abbreviated by
their subjects; even in Babylonia, Kasbe and Sagarta-Suria, for
instance, being written for Kasbeias and Sagarakti-Suryas, the latter of
which even appears as Sakti-Surias, while Nazi-Murudas itself is found
under the form of Nazi-Rattas. Similarly Duri-galzu and Kurigalzu take
the place of Dur-Kurigalzi. There is no reason, therefore, why
Nazi-Murudas should not have been familiarly known as Na-Muruda, more
especially in distant Canaan.
Indeed we can almost fix the date to which the lifetime of Nimrod must
be assigned. We are told that out of his kingdom "one went forth into
Assyria," and there "builded" Nineveh and Calah, The cuneiform
inscriptions have informed us who this builder of Calah was. He was
Shalmaneser I., who was also the restorer of Nineveh and its temples,
and who is stated by Sennacherib to have reigned six hundred years
before himself. Such a date would coincide with the reign of Ramses II.,
the Pharaoh of the Oppression, as well as with the birth-time of Moses.
It represents a period when the influence of Babylonia had not yet
passed away from Canaan, and when there was still intercourse between
the East and the West. Ramses claims to have overcome both Assyria and
Shinar, and though the Shinar he means was the Shinar of Mesopotamia and
not Chaldæa, it lay within the limits of Babylonian control. The reign
of Ramses II. is the latest period down to which, with our present
knowledge, we can regard the old influence of Babylonia in Canaan as
still continuing, and it is equally the period to which, if we are to
listen to the traditional teaching of the Church, the writer of the
Pentateuch belonged. The voice of archaeology is thus in agreement with
that of authority, and here as elsewhere true science declares herself
the handmaid of the Catholic Church.
INDEX
 (deity), 256
Abel (place), 153
Abel-mizraim, 201
Abiliya, 126
Abimelech, 123, 127, 128, 129
Abram (in Babylonian), 169
Achshaph or Ekdippa, 211, 219, 229
Acre (Akku), 134, 154, 155, 157, 229, 235
Adai, 142
Adami, 219, 228
Adapa or Adama, 265
Addar, 153
Adon, 131
Adoni-zedek, 75
Adullam, 212, 221
Ahitub, 154
Ahmes I., 88, 94
Aia, 207
Ajalon, 137, 142
Akizzi, 131
Akkad, 55
Alasiya, 67, 107, 157, 223
'Aluna or 'Arna, 97, 228
Amalekites, 26, 35, 40, 41, 53
Amanus, 62, 107
Amber, 85, 242
Amenôphis II., 106, 110
Amenôphis III., 111, 112, 135
Amenôphis IV. or Khu-n-Aten, 71, 86, 112 _et seq._
Ammi, 22, 64, 206
Ammi-anshi, 63, 206
Ammi-satana, 63
Ammiya, 131
Ammon, 22, 36, 38, 64, 179
Ammunira, 124
Amon (god), 87, 99, 110, 114
Amon-apt, 128, 152
Amorites, 28, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43 _et seq._, 56, 58, 65, 100,
110, 112, 119, 124 _et seq._, 152, 160, 163, 186, 239
Amorites, god of, 257
Amraphel, 64, 66, 67
Anab, 221
Anaharath, 229
Anakim, 36, 37
Anat, 82, 232, 257
Anu, 82, 169, 257, 259, 260
Anugas or Nukhasse, 98, 102, 107, 110
Aphekah, 239
Apphadana, 111
Aqabah, Gulf of, 26, 108
Aram-Naharaim (Mitanni), 72, 85, 86, 94, 101, 103, 108, 111, 131, 138,
149, 157, 163
Ararat, 46
Argob, 23
_Ariel_, 213
Arioch (_see_ Eri-Aku), 63, 168
Arisu, 162
Arka, 26, 52, 128, 131
Article, definite, 248
Arvad, 52, 85, 100, 106, 129
Arzai, 143
Asher, 219
Ashêrah, 191, 255
Ashiti-Khaur, 260
Ashkelon, 141, 150, 160, 236
Ashtaroth-Karnaim, 35, 36, 133, 153, 161, 228
Ashtoreth, 168, 253 _et seq._, 264
Asphalt, 70
Assyria, 99, 105, 153, 155, 157
Aten-Ra, 113
Augustine, St., 41
Aupa (_see_ Ube), 132
Avim, 54
Ayâb, 152, 153
Aziru, 124 _et seq._, 129, 131, 133
Baal, 253
Baalbek, 24
Babylon, 66, 67, 91, 102, 105
Babylonia, 55, 62, 72, 83, 100, 111, 124, 138, 142, 143
Babylonians, 87, 89
Balaam, 22, 64, 154
Bashan, 23, 35, 36, 38, 64, 95, 112, 133
Bedad, 257
Beduin, 26, 35, 53, 95, 124, 127, 133, 156, 209, 210
Beer-sheba, 180, 182, 183, 189
Bek'a, 25
Belshazzar, 175
Bene-berak, 135
Beth-anath, 157, 160, 164, 232, 235, 236, 239
Beth-el, 152, 153, 157, 190 _et seq._, 196, 212, 222, 232, 235
Bethels, 261 _et seq._
Beth-lehem, 39, 75, 82, 197, 260
Beth-On, 192
Beth-Sannah, 143
Bethuel, 125
Beth-Ya, 232
Beya or Bâya, 151
Beyrout, 25, 124, 126, 164, 210, 211, 217
Bin-sumya, 136
Biridasyi, 133
Biridî, 134, 135
Bliss, Mr., 85, 119
Bosra, 133
Botanical Gardens at Thebes, 102
Burna-buryas, 111, 153 _et seq._
Buzruna, 133
Calah, 269
Camel, 170
Cana, 222
Canaan, 41 _et seq._, 154, 157, 267; art of, 243 _et seq._; merchants
in, 154, 243
Canaanite words, 216, 245-8
Canaanites, 41, 106
Carchemish, 44, 45, 62, 66, 86, 99, 107
Carmel of Judah, 72, 146, 157, 160, 232, 235, 236, 239
Carmel, Mount, 29, 164, 229, 236, 238, 262
Cedars, 19
Chedor-laomer, 35, 64, 168
Chimham, 157, 235
Chinneroth, 228
Chiun, 258
Circumcision, 176
Copper, 57, 62, 85, 109, 242
Creation legends, 267
Cush, 91, 149, 268
Cyprus, 57, 60, 85, 98, 103, 157, 160
Dagon, 82, 169, 259
Damascus, 24, 35, 65, 98, 133, 176, 227, 236
Dapul, 160, 220, 236
Dead Sea, 21, 22, 74, 165, 177
Debir, 80, 221, 236, 237, 239
Deluge story, 267
Dor, 26
Dothan, 227
Doughty, Mr., 262
Dragoman, 146
Dudu, 125
Ea, 87
Ebed-Asherah, 89, 126 _et seq._
Ebed-Sullim, 129
Ebed-Tob, 51, 71, 72, 75, 78, 88, 118, 121, 135, _et seq._, 155, 174
_Ebyôn_, 245
Edom, town of, 153; god, 229, 256
Edomites, 39, 53, 108, 206, 248
Ekron, 231
Elam, 56, 63, 88
Elephants, 101
Eliezer, 176
Elimelech, 140, 148
Elimelech of Tyre, 129
Ellasar (Larsa), 64, 69
El-rabi-Hor, 131
Emim, 36, 37, 38
En-athon, 136, 154
En-gedi, 40
En-han-nabi, 153
Ephraim, Mount, 30; sons of, 202, 231
Eri-Aku (Arioch), 63, 65 _et seq._
Eta-gama (or Aidhu-gama), 129, 131, 132, 133
Ethiopia, 142, 149
Euphrates, 96, 101
Fenkhu, 104, 226
_Galeed_, 192
Gath, 137, 143, 144, 203, 230, 231
Gath-Carmel, 138, 143, 146, 148, 231
Hadad, 82, 257
Hadad-dan, 151
Hadad-el, 143
Hadad-Rimmon, 257
Hadad-sum, 250
Hadashah, 74, 160, 165, 236, 238, 239, 241
Hamath, 43, 53, 164, 211, 219, 227, 239
Harankal, 98, 110
Har-el, 77, 184, 231
Harran, 73, 166, 259
Havilah, 62
Hazezon-tamar, 40, 50, 179
Hazor, 94, 129, 211, 219, 228
Heber, 147
Hebrew language, 246 _et seq._; words in tablets, 247
Hebron, 36, 37, 43, 46, 93, 146, 148, 164, 172, 185 _et seq._, 197, 201,
232, 239
_Hêkâl_, etymology of, 73, 249
_Hêkalim_, 231
Helkath, 232
Hermon, 18, 29, 52, 164, 239, 262
Herodotus, 43, 262
_Hin_, 245
Gath-Rimmon, 135
_Gaulos_, 245
Gaza, 94, 96, 110, 143, 144, 150, 157, 181, 215, 236, 239
Gaza or Khazi, 134, 226
Gebal, 43, 53, 85, 89, 94, 123 _et seq._, 152, 211, 217
Gebel Usdum, 178
Gerar, 181, 189
Gezer, 94, 134, 136, 141, 144, 151
Gibeah, 232
Gilu-khipa, 111
Girgashites, 43, 51
Goshen, 201
Gudea, 62, 70
Hittites, 41, 43, 46 _et seq._, 86, 89, 102, 104, 107, 110, 118, 124,
131, 156, 157, 163, 185, 209, 251
Hivites, 43, 52
Horites, 35, 39, 52, 64
Horus, 92
Hui, 156
Hyksos, 88, 91 _et seq._, 170, 201
Ibleam, 229
Ihem or Iha (_see_ Yahem), 96, 239
Ilgi, 129
Inuam, 98, 110, 133, 157, 235, 236
Ionian, 127
_'Ir_, 249
Ir-Shemesh, 238
Iron, 84, 224, 242
Isaiah, 74
Israel, meaning of name, 194
Istar (Ashtoreth), 87, 168, 253
Ituraea, 23
Jabbok, 193
Jachin and Boaz, 161, 262
Jacob-el, 160, 164, 194, 202, 232, 236, 239
Jacob's well, 195
Jebusites, 43, 51
Jehovah-jireh, 77
Jephthah-Hadad, 122, 139
Jerusalem (_see_ Salem), 29, 43, 50, 51, 71, 75, 77 _et seq._, 88, 142,
143, 160, 165, 173, 236, 239; etymology of name, 73
Joktheel, 239
Joppa, 150, 151, 213, 230
Jordan, 21, 74, 212, 237, 239
Joseph, 200 _et seq._
Joseph-el, 202, 230
Kadesh on the Orontes, 43, 96, 98, 104, 111, 131, 132, 157, 163, 209,
217, 226
Kadesh-barnea, 35, 39, 58, 64, 180
Kadmonites, 63, 206
Kaft, 83, 85
Kana'an, 41, 157
Kanneh, 132
Kassites, 88, 147, 149, 269
Kedesh (goddess), 256
Keilah, 71, 144, 145, 146
Kenites, 224
Khabiri, 51, 122, 138, 141, 143, 144, 146 _et seq._
Khalunni, 133
Khammurabi, 62, 66
Khani, 125
Khata, 44
Khata-sil, 158
Khatip (Hotep), 125, 126
Khayapa, 127
Khazi (Gaza), 134
Khu-n-Aten (Amenôphis IV.), 71, 113 _et seq._, 120
_Kikar_, 72, 76, 142
Kinanat, 132
Kinza, 129
Kiriathaim, 35, 38
Kirjath-Sepher, 81, 161, 220, 221
Kishion, 228
Kudur-Lagamar (Chedor-lao-mer), 65, 69
Kudur-Mabug, 65, 69
Kumidi (or Kamdu), 126, 129, 133, 157, 164, 217, 227, 235, 239
Kuri-galzu, 155
Labai, 51, 134 _et seq._, 141, 143, 145
Lachish, 85, 119, 122, 139, 141, 148
Lagamar, 69
Laish, 25, 228
Lakhmu, 82, 260
Larsa (Ellasar), 65, 66, 69
Lebanon, 27, 60, 62, 101, 262
Levi-el, 239
Libnah, 164, 239
Lot, 65
Lotan (Lutennu), 95, 150, 156, 206
Ma'arath, 232
Mabug, 65
Machpelah, 187, 188
Mad-ga, 70
Mafkat (Sinai), 57, 109
Magan (Sinai), 57, 60
Magoras, 164, 210, 217, 238
Malachite, 109, 110
Malchiel, 135 _et seq._, 141, 143, 144, 146, 152
Manahath, 150
Max Müller, Dr. W., 81, 160, 206, 221
Mearah, 217
Megiddo, 30, 31, 94, 97 _et seq._, 134, 135, 150, 212, 226, 257
Melchizedek, 71 _et seq._, 173
Melkarth, 43
Meneptah, 110, 161, 162, 181
Merom, 160, 227, 236
Midian, 57, 109
Migdol, 153, 155, 165, 230, 239
Misheal, 229
Misi, 95
Mitanni (Aram-Naharaim), 86, 89, 108, 111, 124, 150, 160
Miya-Riya (Meri-Ra), 143
Mizraim, 42
Moab, 21, 36, 38, 53, 153, 165, 180, 237
_Mohar, Travels of a_, 84, 189, 204 _et seq._, 209
Moloch, 82, 258
Moriah, 77, 184 _et seq._
Moses, 267
Mosheh, 153
Most High God, 173
Musikhuna, 150
Mut-Hadad, 152
Na'amah, 231
Namya-yitsa, 129, 133, 134
Naram-Sin, 57, 59, 60, 168
Nazi-Murudas, 269
Nebo, 82, 257
Negela, 26
Ni, 101, 106, 125, 131, 132
Nimrod, 91, 269
Nin-ip, 79, 144, 174, 256, 258;
Bit, 127, 144
Nukhasse (Anugas), 98, 102,
107, 116, 125, 132
On, 25, 92, 191
Pa-Hor, 126
Pakhanate, 128
Palasa, 131
Pa-ur, 142, 144
Pella, 157, 228, 235
Penuel, or Peniel, 193, 262
Perizzites, 20, 52, 162
Pethor, 22, 64
Petrie, Prof., 48, 62, 113, 120
Philistines, 17, 54, 163, 182
Phoenicia, 25, 85, 99, 152, 191
Phoenician alphabet, 251
Phoenicians, 33, 177
Pinches, Mr., 70, 231
Pu-Hadad, 150
Purple-dye, 84, 85
Qana or Qina, 97
Qatna, 107, 132
Ra, 92
Rabbah, 78, 143, 144, 146, 232
Ramses II., 21, 45, 74, 81, 110, 157 _et seq._, 161, 204, 234, 269
Ramses III., 21, 53, 74, 109, 110, 162 _et seq._, 181, 235, 240
Raphia, 222
Raphon, 37, 228
Rehob, 222, 231
Rehoboth, 189, 223
Rephaim, 35, 36, 37, 48, 228
Resheph, 21, 237, 251, 256
Rethpana, Lake of, 21, 165, 237, 239
Rianap, 150
Rib-Hadad, 89, 123 _et seq._, 152
Rimmon, 82, 257
Rimmon-nirari, 116
Rowlands, Dr., 39, 180
Sacrifice of the firstborn, 183, 264
Sacrifices, 263
Salem or Shalem (Jerusalem), 71, 74, 160, 165, 173, 239
Salim (god), 73, 75, 79, 144, 174
Samas-akh-iddin, 116
Sangar (_see_ Singara), 68, 102
Saratum or Zurata, 135, 154
Sarepta, 211
Sardinians, 95, 127
Sargon of Akkad, 49, 55, 87, 167
Scheil, Dr., 121
Schumacher, Dr., 161
Seal-cylinders, 60, 83, 120, 252
Seir, 39, 53, 108, 138, 146
Sela, 160, 236, 239
Set, 251
Seti I., 41, 110, 157, 235
Seti or Suta, 134, 138
Shalem or Salem, 195
Shasu (_see_ Beduin), 40, 41, 104
Shaveh, 71
Shechem, 29, 30, 49, 134, 160, 170, 195, 198, 211, 219
Shenir, 28, 59, 164, 239
Shiloh, 30
Shimron, 227
Shimron-meron, 220
Shinab, 70
Shinar, 67, 68, 269
Ships, 85, 247
Shunem, 135, 229
Sibti-Hadad, 152
Siddim, 35, 40, 64, 177, 178
Sidon, 42, 94, 126, 128, 129, 164, 211, 250
Sihon, 50
Sin (city), 52
Sin (god), 59, 87, 259
Sinai, 57, 58, 100, 109, 160, 259
Singara (_see_ Sangar), 67, 108, 157.
Sinuhit, 63, 205 _et seq._
Sirah, 232
Sirion, 28
Sitti or Sati, 40
Socho, 160, 230, 236
Sodom, 65, 76, 172, 177, 237
Sonzar, 132
Stone of Job, 161
Subari, 87
Subsalla, 62
Sum-Adda, 154
Sumer, 55, 67
Sumerian, 249
Suri, 87
Sutarna, 111, 150
Sutatna or Zid-athon, 154, 155
Sutekh, 92
Sute, 40, 95, 127, 134, 143
Su-yardata or Su-ardatum, 137, 144, 145
Su-yarzana, 134
Taanach, 97, 150, 229
Tadu-khipa, 112
Tagi, 137, 143, 146
Takhis, 100, 110, 211, 220
Tamar (Tumur), 150
Tammuz, 262
Tanit, 194, 260
Tapun, 232
Tarqu, 222
_Tebah_, 245
Teie, 112, 120
Tel el-Amarna, 120 _et seq._
Tel-loh, 61
Temple, 262
Terebinth, 19
Thahash, 100, 220
Thothmes II., 94, 101
Thothmes III., 36, 44, 53, 67, 78, 83, 94 _et seq._, 110, 146, 208, 224,
242
Thothmes IV., 110
Tibhath, 217, 227
Tidal, 64, 70
Tidanum, 59, 62
Timnah, 220
Tithes, 175
Tomkins, Mr., 37, 82
Tree, sacred, 182
Trumbull, Dr., 39, 180
Tunip, 99, 104, 107, 111, 125 _et seq._, 133
Turbazu, 122, 138
Tusratta, 112
Tut-ankh-Amon, 156
Tyre, 43, 85, 94, 123, 127, 129, 157, 162, 211, 218, 235, 244, 262
Ube or Ubi, 132, 216, 222
Ugarit, 106, 236
Ur, 65, 166
_Uru_, 73, 77
Usu, 128, 157, 211, 218, 235
Winckler, Dr., 78
Yabitiri, 150
Yabni-el, 122
Yahem (_see_ Ihem), 230
Yamutbal, 65, 69
Yankhamu, 146, 151
Yapa-Hadad, 127
Yapakhi, 134
Yasdata, 135
Yerzeh, 150, 160, 230, 236
Yidya, 150
Yikhbil-Khamu, 140, 144
Yisyara, 121
Zahi, 83, 103
Zakkal, 163
Zamzummim, 36, 38
_Zedek_, 75
Zelah, 122, 139, 148, 232
Zelem, 258
Zemar, 26, 52, 100, 123, 126 _et seq._, 152
Zephath, 232
Zimmern, Dr., 79
Zimrida or Zimridi, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 129, 130, 139
Zinzar, 132
Zion, 197
Zippor, 162
Zoan, 93, 170, 198
Zorah, 137
Zurata or Saratum, 135, 154
Zuzim, 35
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