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Title: The early history of the Hebrews
Author: A. H. Sayce
Release date: February 8, 2025 [eBook #75324]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Rivingtons, 1897
Credits: Wouter Franssen, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ***
The Early History of the Hebrews
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
_Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d._
THE EGYPT OF THE HEBREWS AND HERODOTOS
CONTENTS.—The Patriarchal Age—The Age of Moses—The Exodus—-The Hebrew
Settlement in Canaan—The Age of the Israelitish Monarchies—The Age of
the Ptolemies—Herodotos in Egypt—In the Steps of Herodotos—Memphis and
the Fayyûm—Appendices—Index.
‘Professor Sayce has written a charming work, which every lover of
Egypt will fly to. He makes the old Egypt live again with all the
vitality of accurate research and of sympathetic explanation; he has
produced one of the most readable, useful, and instructive books we
have ever read.’—=Church Bells.=
‘Professor Sayce has a story of singular fascination to tell. Every
person interested intelligently in Holy Scripture should make it a
matter of duty to read this book.’—=Yorkshire Post.=
‘Truly a valuable addition to existing works on Egypt.’—=Western
Morning News.=
‘On the whole, we know of no more useful handbook to Egyptian
history, summing up in a popular form in a short compass the results
of Egyptian research down to the present time.’—=Church Times.=
LONDON: RIVINGTONS
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS
BY
The Rev. A. H. SAYCE
PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY AT OXFORD
AUTHOR OF ‘EGYPT OF THE HEBREWS AND HERODOTOS’
RIVINGTONS
_KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN_
LONDON
1897
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
There are many histories of Israel, but this is the first attempt to
write one from a purely archæological point of view. During the last few
years discovery after discovery has come crowding upon us from the
ancient East, revolutionising all our past conceptions of early Oriental
history, and opening out a new and unexpected world of culture and
civilisation. For the Oriental archæologist Hebrew history has ceased to
stand alone; it has taken its place in that great stream of human life
and action which the excavator and decipherer are revealing to us, and
it can at last be studied like the history of Greece or Rome. The age of
the Patriarchs is being brought close to us; our museums are filled with
written documents which are centuries older than Abraham; and we are
beginning to understand the politics which underlie the story of the
Pentateuch and the causes of the events which are narrated in it.
Over against the facts of archæology stand the subjective assumptions of
a certain school, which, now that they have ceased to be predominant in
the higher latitudes of scholarship, are finding their way into the
popular literature of the country. Between the results of Oriental
archæology and those which are the logical end of the so-called ‘higher
criticism’ no reconciliation is possible, and the latter must therefore
be cleared out of the way before the archæologist can begin his work.
Hence some of the pages that follow are necessarily controversial, and
it has been needful to show why the linguistic method of the ‘literary
analysis’ is essentially unscientific and fallacious when applied to
history, and must be replaced by the method of historical comparison.
Even while my book has been passing through the press, a new fact has
come to light which supplements and enforces the conclusion I have drawn
in the second chapter from a comparison of the account of the Deluge in
the book of Genesis with that which has been recovered from the
cuneiform inscriptions. At the recent meeting of the Oriental Congress
in Paris, Dr. Scheil stated that among the tablets lately brought from
Sippara to the museum at Constantinople is one which contains the same
text of the story of the Flood as that which was discovered by George
Smith. But whereas the text found by George Smith was written for the
library of Nineveh in the seventh century B.C., the newly-discovered
text was inscribed in the reign of Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of
Khammurabi or Amraphel, in the Abrahamic age. And even then the text was
already old. Here and there the word _khibi_, ‘lacuna,’ was inserted,
indicating that the original from which it had been copied was already
illegible in places. Since this text agrees, not with the ‘Elohist’ or
the ‘Yahvist’ separately, but with the supposed combination of the two
documents in the book of Genesis, it is difficult to see, as the
discoverer remarked, how the ‘literary analysis’ of the Pentateuch can
be any longer maintained. At all events, the discovery shows the minute
care and accuracy with which the literature of the past was copied and
handed down. Edition after edition had been published of the story of
the Deluge, and yet the text of the Abrahamic age and that of the
seventh century B.C. agree even to the spelling of words.
It is the ‘higher critics’ themselves, and not the ancient writers whom
they criticise, that are careless or contemptuous in their use of
evidence. In the preface to my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the
Monuments_ I have referred to a flagrant example of their attempt to
explain away unwelcome testimony. Here it was the inscription on an
early Israelitish weight, which was first pronounced to be a forgery,
then to have been misread, and finally to have been engraved by
different persons at different times! The weight is now in the Ashmolean
Museum in Oxford, to which it was presented by Dr. Chaplin, and the
critics have conveniently forgotten the dogmatic assertions that were
made about it. They have, in fact, been busy elsewhere. Cuneiform
tablets have been found relating to Chedorlaomer and the other kings of
the East mentioned in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, while in the
Tel el-Amarna correspondence the King of Jerusalem declares that he had
been raised to the throne by the ‘arm’ of his god, and was therefore,
like Melchizedek, a priest-king. But Chedorlaomer and Melchizedek had
long ago been banished to mythland, and criticism could not admit that
archæological discovery had restored them to actual history. Writers,
accordingly, in complacent ignorance of the cuneiform texts, told the
Assyriologists that their translations and interpretations were alike
erroneous, that they had misread the names of Chedorlaomer and his
allies, and that the ‘arm of the Mighty King,’ in the letters of
Ebed-Tob, meant the Pharaoh of Egypt. Unfortunately, the infallibility
of the ‘critical’ consciousness can be better tested in the case of
Assyriology than in that of the old Hebrew records, and the
Assyriologist may therefore be pardoned if he finds in such displays of
ignorance merely a proof of the worthlessness of the ‘critical’ method.
A method which leads its advocates to deny the facts stated by experts
when these run counter to their own prepossessions cannot be of much
value. At all events, it is a method with which the archæologist and the
historian can have nothing to do.
This, indeed, is tacitly admitted in a modern German work on Hebrew
history, which is more than once referred to in the following pages. Dr.
Kittel’s _History of the Hebrews_ is partly filled with an imposing
‘analysis’ of the documents which constitute the historical books of the
Old Testament, and we might therefore expect that the history to which
it forms an introduction would be influenced throughout by the results
of the literary disintegration. But nothing of the sort is the case. So
far as Dr. Kittel’s treatment of the history is concerned, the
‘analysis’ might never have been made; all that it does is to prove his
acquaintance with modern ‘critical’ literature. The history is judged on
its own merits without any reference to the age or character of the
‘sources’ upon which it is supposed to rest. The instinct of the
historian has been too strong for the author to resist, and the results
of the linguistic analysis have accordingly been quietly set aside.
But history also has its canons of evidence, and criticism, in the true
sense of the word, is not confined to the philologists. There is no
infallible history any more than there is infallible philology; and if
we are to understand the history of the Hebrews aright, we must deal
with it as we should with the history of any other ancient people. The
Old Testament writers were human; and in so far as they were historians,
their conceptions and manner of writing history were the same as those
of their Oriental contemporaries. They were not European historians of
the nineteenth century, and to treat them as such would be not only to
pursue a radically false method, but to falsify the history they have
recorded. No human history is, or can be, inerrant, and to claim
inerrancy for the history of Israel is to introduce into Christianity
the Hindu doctrine of the inerrancy of the Veda. For the historian, at
any rate, the questions involved in a theological treatment of the Old
Testament do not exist.
The present writer, accordingly, must be understood to speak throughout
simply as an archæologist and historian. Theologically he accepts
unreservedly whatever doctrine has been laid down by the Church as an
article of the faith. But among these doctrines he fails to find any
which forbids a free and impartial handling of Old Testament history.
Perhaps it is necessary to apologise for the multitude of unfamiliar
proper names which make the first chapter of this book somewhat
difficult reading. But they represent the archæological discoveries of
the last few years in their bearing upon the history of the Patriarchs,
and an attempt has been made to lighten the burden of remembering them
by repeating the newly-discovered facts, at all events in outline,
wherever it has been needful to allude to them. Those, however, who find
the burden too heavy and wearisome may pass on to the second chapter.
A. H. SAYCE,
23 CHEPSTOW VILLAS, W.
_September 25, 1897._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE HEBREW PATRIARCHS
Who were the Hebrews?—Origin of the Name—Ur and its Kings—Amraphel or
Khammu-rabi—Canaanites in Babylonia—Harran—The Amorites—Abram in Canaan
and Egypt—The Campaign of Chedorlaomer—Melchizedek—Sodom and
Gomorrha—Circumcision—Name of Abraham—Hebrew and Aramaic—Moab and
Ammon—Amorite Kingdoms—Dedan—Sacrifice of the Firstborn—Mount
Moriah—Purchase of the Field of Machpelah—The Hittites—Babylonian
Law—Isaac as a Bedâwi Shêkh—Esau and the Edomites—Jacob—Settles at
Shechem—His Sons—The Israelitish Tribes—Joseph—The Hyksos in
Egypt—Egyptian Character of Joseph’s History—Goshen—Deaths of Jacob and
Joseph ... Pp. 1-99
CHAPTER II
THE COMPOSITION OF THE PENTATEUCH
The Literary Analysis and its Conclusions—Based on a Theory and an
Assumption—Weakness of the Philological Evidence—Disregard of the
Scientific Method of Comparison—Imperfection of our Knowledge of
Hebrew—Archæeology unfavourable to the Higher Criticism—Analysis of
Historical Sources—Tel el-Amarna Tablets—Antiquity of Writing in the
East—The Mosaic Age highly Literary—Scribes mentioned in the Song of
Deborah—The Story of the Deluge brought from Babylonia to Canaan before
the time of Moses—The Narratives of the Pentateuch confirmed by
Archæeology—Compiled from early Written Documents—Revised and re-edited
from time to time—Three Strata of Legislation—Accuracy in the
Text—Tendencies—Chronology ... Pp. 100-151
CHAPTER III
THE EXODUS OUT OF EGYPT
Goshen—The Pharaohs of the Oppression and Exodus—The Heretic King at Tel
el-Amarna—Causes of the Exodus—The Stela of Meneptah—Moses—Flight to
Midian—The Ten Plagues—The Exodus—Egyptian Version of it—Origin of the
Passover—Geography of the Exodus—Position of Sinai—Promulgation of the
Law—Babylonian Analogies—The Tabernacle—The Levitical Law—The
Feasts—Number of the Israelites—Kadesh-barnea—Failure to conquer
Canaan—The High-priest and the Levites—Edom—Conquests on the East of the
Jordan—Balaam—Destruction of the Midianites—Cities of Refuge and of the
Levites—The Deuteronomic Law—Death of Moses ... Pp. 152-245
CHAPTER IV
THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN
Joshua not the Conqueror of Canaan—The Conquest gradual—The Passage of
the Jordan—Jericho, Ai, and the Gibeonites—Battle of Makkedah—Lachish
and Hazor—The Kenizzites at Hebron and Kirjath-Sepher—Shechem—Death of
Joshua ... Pp. 246-271
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF THE JUDGES
The Condition of Israel—The Destruction of the Benjamites—Story of
Micah and the Conquest of Dan—Chushan-rishathaim and Ramses
III.—Office of Judge—Eglon of Moab—The Philistines—Deborah and
Barak—Sisera and the Hittites—The Song of Deborah—Gideon—Kingdom of
Abimelech—Jephthah—Sacrifice of his Daughter—Defeat and Slaughter of
the Ephraimites—Samson—Historical Character of the Book of Judges ...
Pp. 272-331
CHAPTER VI
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MONARCHY
Influence of Shiloh—Samuel and the Philistines—Duplicate Narratives in
the Books of Samuel—Prophet and Seer—Dervish Monasteries—Capture of the
Ark and Destruction of Shiloh—Saul made King—Quarrels with
Samuel—Delivers Israel from the Philistines—Attacks the
Amalekites—David—Two Accounts of his Rise to Power—Jealousy of
Saul—David’s Flight—Massacre of the Priests at Nob—Wanderings of
David—He sells his Services to the King of Gath—Duties of a
Mercenary—Battle of Gilboa and David’s Position—He is made King of
Judah—War with Esh-Baal—Intrigues with Abner—Murder of Esh-Baal—David
revolts from the Philistines and becomes King of Israel—Capture of
Jerusalem, which is made the Capital—Results of this—Conquest of the
Philistines, of Moab, Ammon, Zobah, and Edom—The Israelitish
Empire—Murder of Uriah and Birth of Solomon—Influence of Nathan—Polygamy
and its Effects in the Family of David—Revolt of Absalom—Of Sheba—Folly
and Ingratitude of David—Saul’s Descendants sacrificed because of a
Drought—The Plague and the Purchase of the Site of the Temple—David’s
Officers and last Instructions—His Character—Chronology—Solomon puts
Joab and Others to Death—His Religious Policy—Queen of Sheba—Trade and
Buildings—Hiram of Tyre—Palace and Temple Built—Tadmor—Zoological and
Botanical Gardens—Discontent in Israel—Impoverishment of the
Country—Jeroboam—Tastes and Character of Solomon ... Pp. 332-480
ABBREVIATIONS
W. A. I. = _Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia._ Published by the
Trustees of the British Museum.
Z.D.M.G. = _Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft._
W. & A. = Winckler and Abel’s edition of the Tel el-Amarna Tablets at
Berlin and Cairo in _Mitthetlungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen_,
i. ii. iii.
CHAPTER I
THE HEBREW PATRIARCHS
Who were the Hebrews?—Origin of the Name—Ur and its Kings—Amraphel
or Khammu-rabi—Canaanites in Babylonia—Harran—The Amorites—Abram in
Canaan and Egypt—The Campaign of Chedor-laomer—Melchizedek—Sodom and
Gomorrha—Circumcision—Name of Abraham—Hebrew and Aramaic—Moab and
Ammon—Amorite Kingdoms—Dedan—Sacrifice of the firstborn—Mount
Moriah—Purchase of the Field of Machpelah—The Hittites—Babylonian
Law—Isaac as a Bedâwi Shêkh—Esau and the Edomites—Jacob—Settles at
Shechem—His Sons—The Israelitish Tribes—Joseph—The Hyksos in
Egypt—Egyptian Character of Joseph’s History—Goshen—Deaths of Jacob
and Joseph.
The historian of the Hebrews is met at the very outset by a strange
difficulty. Who were the Hebrews whose history he proposes to write? We
speak of a Hebrew people, of a Hebrew literature, and of a Hebrew
language; and by the one we mean the people who called themselves
Israelites or Jews, by the other the literary records of this
Israelitish nation, and by the third a language which the Israelites
shared with the older population of Canaan. It is from the Old Testament
that we derive the term ‘Hebrew,’ and the use of the term is by no means
clear.
Abram is called ‘the Hebrew’ before he became Abraham the father of
Isaac and the Israelites. The confederate of the Amorite chieftains of
Mamre, the conqueror of the Babylonian invaders of Canaan, is a
‘Hebrew’; when he comes before us as a simple Bedâwi shêkh he is a
Hebrew no longer. When Joseph is sold into Egypt it is as a ‘Hebrew’
slave; and he tells the Pharaoh that he had been ‘stolen’ out of ‘the
land of the Hebrews.’ The oppressed people in the age of the Exodus are
known as ‘Hebrews’ to their Egyptian taskmasters. Moses was one of ‘the
Hebrews’ children’; and he declares to the Egyptian monarch that Yahveh
of Israel was ‘the God of the Hebrews.’ It would seem, therefore, as if
it were the name by which the people of Canaan, and more especially the
Israelites, were known to the Egyptians.
And yet there is no certain trace of it on the Egyptian monuments. In
the Egyptian texts the south of Palestine is called Khar, perhaps the
land of the ‘Horites’; the coast-land is termed Zahi, ‘the dry’; and the
whole country is indifferently known as that of the Upper Lotan or
Syrians, and of the Fenkhu or Phœnicians. When we come down to the age
of the nineteenth dynasty we find the name of Canaan already established
in Egyptian literature. Seti I. destroyed the Shasu or Bedâwin from the
frontiers of Egypt to ‘the land of Canaan’; and in a papyrus of the same
age we hear of Kan’amu or ‘Canaanite slaves’ from the land of Khar. Of
any name that resembles that of the Hebrews there is not a trace.
It is equally impossible to discover it in the cuneiform records of
Babylonia and Assyria. The Babylonians, from time immemorial, called
Palestine ‘the land of the Amorites,’ doubtless because the Amorites
were the dominant people there in those early ages when Babylonian
armies first made their way to the distant West. The Assyrians called it
‘the land of the Hittites’ for the same reason, while in the letters
from the Asiatic correspondents of the Pharaoh found at Tel el-Amarna,
and dating from the century before the Exodus, it is termed Kinakhna or
Canaan. How then comes Joseph to describe it as ‘the land of the
Hebrews,’ and himself as a ‘Hebrew’ slave?
More than one attempt has been made to identify the mysterious name with
names met with in hieroglyphic and cuneiform texts. The Egyptian
monuments refer to a class of foreigners called ’Apuriu, who were
employed in the time of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties to convey
the blocks of stone needed for the great buildings of Egypt from the
quarries of the eastern desert. We are told how they dragged the great
altar of the Sun-god to Memphis for Ramses II.; and how, at a much later
date, Ramses IV. was still employing eight hundred men of the same race
to transport his stone from the quarries of Hammamât. Chabas and some
other Egyptologists have seen in these ’Apuriu the Hebrews of Scripture,
and have further identified them with the ’Aperu mentioned on the back
of a papyrus, where it is said that one of them acted as a sort of
aide-de-camp to the great conqueror of the eighteenth dynasty, Thothmes
III.
But there are serious objections to these identifications.[1] There are
reasons for believing that the ’Aperu and the ’Apuriu do not represent
the same name; and no satisfactory explanation has hitherto been
forthcoming as to why we should meet with Hebrews of the Israelitish
race still serving as public slaves in Egypt so long after the Exodus as
the reigns of Ramses III. and Ramses IV. Moreover, in one text it is
stated that the ’Apuriu belonged ‘to the ’Anuti barbarians,’ who
inhabited the desert between Egypt and the Red Sea. It is true that some
of the Semitic kinsfolk of the Israelites led a nomad life here in the
old times, as they still do to-day; nevertheless, ‘the ’Anuti
barbarians’ were for the most part of African origin, and the eastern
desert of Egypt is not quite the place where we should expect to find
the nearest kindred of a Canaanitish people. At present, at all events,
the identification of Hebrews and ’Apuriu must be held to be non-proven.
Since the discovery of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna another
attempt has been made to find the name of the Hebrews outside the pages
of the Old Testament. Ebed-Tob, the vassal-king of Jerusalem, in his
letters to Khu-n-Aten, the ‘heretic’ Pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty,
speaks of certain enemies whom he terms Khabiri. They were threatening
the authority of the Egyptian monarch, and had already captured several
of the cities under Ebed-Tob’s jurisdiction. The Egyptian governors in
the south of Palestine had been slain, and the territory of Jerusalem
was no longer able to defend itself. If the Pharaoh could send no troops
at once, all would be lost. The Khabiri, under their leader Elimelech,
were already established in the country, and in concert with the Sutê or
Bedâwin were wresting it out of the hands of Egypt.[2]
Some scholars, with more haste than discretion, have pronounced the
Khabiri of the cuneiform tablets to be the Hebrews of the Old Testament.
If that were the case, Hebrew and Israelite could no longer be
considered to be synonymous terms. In the age of the Khabiri the
Israelites of Scripture were still in Egypt, where the cities of Ramses
and Pithom were not as yet built, and their leader to the conquest of
Canaan was Joshua, and not Elimelech. When in subsequent centuries
Ramses II. and Ramses III. invaded and occupied Palestine, they found no
traces there of the children of Israel. They have left us lists of the
places they captured; we look in vain among them for the name of Israel
or of an Israelitish tribe. We look equally in vain in the Book of
Judges for any allusion to Egyptian conquests.
The Khabiri, then, are not the Hebrews of Scripture, nor does the word
throw any light on the term ‘Hebrew’ itself. Khabiri is really a
descriptive title, meaning ‘Confederates’; it was a word borrowed by
Babylonian from the language of Canaan, but is met with in old
Babylonian and Assyrian hymns.[3] It may be that Hebron, the city of
‘the Confederacy,’ derived its name from these ‘Confederated’ bands; at
all events, the name of Hebron is nowhere mentioned by Ebed-Tob or his
brother governors, and it first appears in the Egyptian records in the
time of Ramses III. under the form of Khibur.[4]
The Tel el-Amarna tablets, accordingly, give us no help in regard to the
name of the Hebrews, nor do any other cuneiform inscriptions with which
we are acquainted. Babylonian records do indeed speak of a people called
the Khabirâ, but they inhabited the mountains of Elam, on the eastern
side of Babylonia, and between them and the Hebrews of Scripture no
connection is possible.[5] In an old Babylonian list of foreign
countries we read of a country of Khubur, which was situated in northern
Mesopotamia in the neighbourhood of Harran; but Khubur is more probably
related to the river Khabur than to the kinsfolk of Terah and Laban.[6]
Moreover, a part of the mountains of the Amanus, overlooking the Gulf of
Antioch, from whence logs of pine were brought to the cities of Chaldæa,
was also known as Khabur.[7]
Archæological discovery, therefore, has as yet given us no help. We must
still depend upon the Old Testament alone for an answer to our question,
Who were the Hebrews? And, unfortunately, the evidence of the Old
Testament is by no means clear. We have seen that on one side by the
Hebrews are meant the Israelites, and that from time to time the
Israelitish descendants of Abraham are characterised by that name. But
on the other side there are passages in which a distinction seems to be
made between them. Though Joseph is a Hebrew slave, it is because he has
been stolen out of ‘the land of the Hebrews.’ Canaan, accordingly, even
before its conquest by the Israelites, was inhabited by a Hebrew people.
So, too, in the early days of the reign of Saul, the Israelites and the
Hebrews appear to be still separate. While ‘the men of Israel’ hide
themselves in caves and thickets, ‘the Hebrews’ cross over the Jordan to
the lands of Gad and Gilead (1 Sam. xiii. 6, 7). Similarly we are told
that in Saul’s first battle with the Philistines ‘the Hebrews’ that were
with the enemy deserted to ‘the Israelites’ that were with Saul (1 Sam.
xiv. 21).
Perhaps, however, all that is intended in these passages is to emphasise
the fact that among the Philistines, as among the Egyptians, the
children of Israel were known as ‘Hebrews.’ The difficulty is that such
a name is not found in the monumental records of Egypt. When Shishak
describes his campaign against Judah and Israel, it is not the Hebrews,
but the Fenkhu and the ’Amu whom he tells us he has conquered.
In fact, the Egyptian equivalent of Hebrew is ’Amu. What Joseph calls
‘the land of the Hebrews’ would have been termed ‘the land of the ’Amu’
by an Egyptian scribe. Joseph himself would have been an ’Amu slave.
’Amu signified an Asiatic in a restricted sense. It denoted the Asiatics
of Syria and of the desert between Palestine and Egypt. It included also
the nomad tribes of Edom and the Sinaitic Peninsula. It was thus larger
in its meaning than the Biblical ‘Hebrew’; but, at the same time, it
conveyed just the same ideas, and was used in much the same way. The
Hyksos conquerors of Egypt were termed ’Amu, and a famous Syrian oculist
in the days of the eighteenth dynasty is described as an ’Amu of Gebal.
The name is probably derived from the Canaanitish and Hebrew word which
signifies ‘a people.’
The name ‘Hebrew’ comes from a root which means ‘to pass’ or ‘cross
over.’ It has been variously explained as ‘a pilgrim,’ ‘a dweller on the
other side,’ ‘a crosser of the river.’ But the second explanation is
that which best harmonises with philological probabilities. We find
other derivatives from the same root. Among them is Abarim, the name of
that mountain-range of Moab on ‘the other side’ of the Jordan, from
whence Moses beheld the Promised Land (Numb. xxvii. 12), as well as
Ebronah, near the Gulf of Aqaba, one of the resting-places of the
children of Israel (Numb. xxxiii. 34). Hebrew genealogists indeed seem
to have connected the name with that of the patriarch Eber. But this is
in accordance with that spirit of Semitic idiom which throws geography
and ethnology into a genealogical form. It is probable that the name of
the patriarch is merely the Babylonian _ebar_, ‘a priest,’ which is met
with in Babylonian contracts of the age of Abraham.
Professor Hommel, however, supplementing a suggestion of Dr. Glaser, has
recently drawn attention to certain facts which throw light on the early
use of the name ‘Hebrew,’ even if they do not remove all the
difficulties connected with it.[8] A Minæan inscription from the south
of Arabia, in which the name of ’Ammi-zadoq occurs, couples together the
countries of Misr or Egypt, of Aashur, the Ashshurim of Gen. xxv. 3, and
of ’Ibr Naharân, ‘the land beyond the river.’ In another Minæan
inscription of the same age, the name of ’Ibr Naharân is replaced by
that of Gaza. It is clear, therefore, that in ’Ibr Naharân we must see
the south of Palestine. But the Minæan texts are not alone in their use
of the term. A broken Assyrian tablet from the library of Nineveh[9]
also refers to Ebir-nâri, ‘the land beyond the river,’ in Canaan, and
associates it with Beth-el, Tyre, and Jeshimon. Professor Hommel is
probably right in assigning the inscription to the reign of
Assur-bel-Kala, the son of Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1080). At all
events, the name seems to be of Babylonian origin, like most of the
geographical expressions adopted by the Assyrians, and it is
consequently very possible that Ebir-nâri primarily signified the
country on the western bank of the Euphrates, where Ur was situated, and
that it was subsequently extended to the country west of the Jordan when
Syria became a province of the Babylonian empire.[10]
However this may be, the question with which we started remains
unanswered. We are still unable to define with exactness who the Hebrews
were. The origin and first use of the name are still a matter of doubt.
We must be content with the fact that it came to be applied—if not
exclusively, at all events predominantly—to the people of Israel in
their dealings with their foreign neighbours. It may be that this
special application of it was first fixed by the Philistines. In any
case it was a name which was accepted by the Israelites themselves, and
gradually became synonymous with all that was specifically Israelitish.
Even the old ‘language of Canaan,’ as it is still called by Isaiah (xix.
18), became ‘the Hebrew language’ of modern lexicographers. For us of
to-day the history of the Hebrew people means the history of the
descendants of Israel. It is with ‘Abram the Hebrew’ that the history
begins. Future ages looked back upon him as the ancestor of the Hebrew
race, ‘the rock’ from whence it was ‘hewn.’ He had come from the far
East, from ‘Ur of the Casdim’ or Babylonians. His younger brother Haran
had died ‘in the land of his nativity’; with his elder brother Nahor and
himself, his father Terah had migrated westward, to Harran in
Mesopotamia. There Terah had died, and there Abram had received the call
which led him to journey still further onwards into the land of Canaan.
He was already married. Already in Babylonia he had made Sarai his wife,
who is also said to have been his step-sister; while the wife, Milcah,
whom his brother Nahor had taken to himself, was his niece. A time came
when both Abram and Sarai took new names in token of the covenant they
had made with God. Abram became Abraham, and Sarai became Sarah.
Upon these beginnings of Hebrew history light has been thrown by the
decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions. The site of ‘Ur of the
Chaldees’ has been found. Geographers are no longer dependent on Arab
legends or vague coincidencies with classical names. Ur was one of the
most ancient and prosperous of Babylonian cities. The very name meant
‘the city’; it was, in fact, the capital of a district, and its kings at
one time had claimed sway over the rest of Chaldæa. Alone among the
great cities of Babylonia, it stood on the western bank of the Euphrates
in close contact with the nomad tribes of Semitic Arabia. More than any
other of the Babylonian towns it was thus able to influence and be
influenced by the Semites of the west; it was an outpost of Babylonian
culture, and its position made it a centre of trade.
Its mounds of ruin are now known as Muqayyar or Mugheir. Highest among
them towers the mound which covers the remains of the great temple of
the moon-god. For it was to Sin, the moon-god, that the city had been
dedicated from time immemorial, and in whose honour its temple had been
built. There was only one other temple of Sin that was equally famous,
and this was the temple which stood at Harran in Mesopotamia, and which,
like that at Ur, had been erected and endowed by Babylonian kings.
It was not only with the Semites of Northern Arabia that Ur carried on
its trade. It lay not very far from the mouth of the Euphrates, which in
early days flowed into the Persian Gulf nearly a hundred miles to the
north of the present coast. We hear in the cuneiform tablets of ‘the
ships of Ur,’ and these ships must have been used in the trade that was
carried on by water. The products of Southern Arabia could thus be
brought to the Chaldean city; perhaps also there was intercourse even
with Egypt.
The kings of Ur grew in power, and a dynasty arose at last which gained
ascendency over the other states of Babylonia. We are beginning to learn
something about these kings and the society over which they ruled.
During the last few years excavations have been carried on by the
Americans, by the French, and even by the Turkish Government, which have
brought to light thousands of early cuneiform records, some of which are
dated in their reigns. A large proportion of these records are contracts
which throw an unexpected light on the commerce and law, the manners and
customs and social life of the inhabitants of Babylonia at the time.
Among the last kings of the dynasty of Ur were Inê-Sin and Pûr-Sin,
whose names, it will be observed, are compounded with that of the
patron-god of the state. Inê-Sin not only invaded Elam, but the distant
west as well. His daughters married the High-Priests both of Ansan in
Elam and of Markhasi, now Mer’ash, in Syria.[11] But it was not the
first time that Babylonian armies had marched to the west. Centuries
before (about B.C. 3800) another Babylonian king, Sargon of Accad, had
made campaign after campaign against the land of the Amorites, as Syria
and Palestine were called, had set up images of himself on the shores of
the Mediterranean, and had united all Western Asia into a single empire,
while his son and successor had marched southward into the Sinaitic
Peninsula.[12] A predecessor of Inê-Sin himself, Gimil-Sin by name, had
overrun the land of Zabsali, which Professor Hommel is probably right in
identifying with Subsalla, from whence an earlier Babylonian prince
obtained stone for his buildings, and which, we are told, was in the
mountains of the Amorites. The stone, in fact, was the limestone of the
Lebanon.[13]
Inê-Sin married his daughter to the High-Priest of Zabsali, but his
successor Pûr-Sin II. appears to have been one of the last of the
dynasty. Babylonia fell under Elamite domination, and a line of kings
arose at Babylon whose names show that they came from Southern Arabia.
The first of them was Khammu-rabi, whose reign lasted for fifty-five
years. He proved himself one of the most able and vigorous of Babylonian
monarchs. Before he died he had driven the Elamites out of the country,
and united it into a single monarchy, with Babylon for its capital.
When Khammu-rabi first mounted the throne, he was a vassal of the king
of Elam. In Southern Babylonia, not far from Ur, though on the opposite
side of the river, was a rival kingdom, that of Larsa, whose king,
Eri-Aku or Arioch, was the son of an Elamite prince. His father
Kudur-Mabug is called ‘the Father of the land of the Amorites,’ implying
not only that Canaan was subject at the time to Elamite rule, but also
that Kudur-Mabug held some official position there. In one of his
inscriptions Eri-Aku entitles himself ‘the shepherd of Ur,’ and tells us
that he had captured ‘the ancient city of Erech.’
In Eri-Aku or Arioch, Assyriologists have long since seen the Arioch of
the book of Genesis, the contemporary of Abram; and their belief has
been raised to certainty by the recent discovery by Mr. Pinches of
certain fragmentary cuneiform tablets in which allusion is made not only
to Khammu-rabi, but also to the kings who were his contemporaries. These
are Arioch, Kudur-Laghghamar or Chedor-laomer, and Tudghula or Tid’al.
Khammu-rabi, accordingly, must be identified with Amraphel, who is
stated in the Old Testament to have been king of Shinar or Babylonia,
and we can approximately fix the period when the family of Terah
migrated from Ur of the Chaldees. It was about 2300 B.C. if the
chronology of the native Babylonian historians is correct.[14]
There was at this time constant intercourse between Babylonia and the
West. The father of Eri-Aku, as we have seen, bore the title of ‘Father
of the land of the Amorites,’ and Khammu-rabi himself claimed
sovereignty over the same part of the world. So, too, did his
great-grandson Ammi-satana (or Ammi-dhitana), who in one of his
inscriptions adds the title of ‘king of the land of the Amorites’ to
that of ‘king of Babylon.’ Indeed, the kings of the dynasty to which
Khammu-rabi belonged bear names which are almost as much Canaanitish or
Hebrew as they are South Arabic in form. The Babylonians had some
difficulty in spelling them, and in the contract-tablets, consequently,
the same name is written in different ways. Thus we learn from a
philological tablet in which the names are translated into Semitic
Babylonian that Khammu and Ammi are but variant attempts to represent
the same word—that of a god whose name appears in those of South Arabian
princes as well as Israelites of the Old Testament, and from whom the
Beni-Ammi or Ammonites derived their name.[15]
The founder of the dynasty had been Sumu-abi (or Samu-abi), ‘Shem is my
father,’ and his son had been Sumu-la-il, ‘Is not Shem a god?’ The
monarchs who ruled at Babylon, therefore, when Abram was born claimed
the same ancestor as did Abram’s family, and worshipped him as a god.
The father of Ammi-satana was Abesukh, the Abishua’ of the Bible; and
his son was Ammi-zaduq, where _zaduq_, ‘righteous,’ is a word well known
to the languages of Southern Arabia and Canaan, but not to that of
Babylonia. The kings who succeeded to the inheritance of the old
Babylonian monarchs of Ur were thus allied in language and race to the
Hebrew patriarch.
But this is not all. We find in the contracts which were drawn up in the
reigns of the kings of Ur and the successors of Sumu-abi not only names
like Sabâ, ‘the Sabæan,’ which carry us to the spice-bearing lands of
Southern Arabia,[16] but names also which are specifically Canaanitish,
or as we should usually term it, Hebrew, in form. Thus Mr. Pinches has
discovered in them Ya’qub-il and Yasup-il, of which the Biblical Jacob
and Joseph are abbreviations, and elsewhere we meet with Abdiel and
Lama-il, the Lemuel of the Old Testament. Even the name of Abram
(Abi-ramu) himself occurs among the witnesses to a deed which is dated
in the reign of Khammu-rabi’s grandfather, and its Canaanitish character
is put beyond question by the fact that he is called the father of ‘the
Amorite.’[17]
From other documents we learn that there were Amoritish or Canaanite
settlements in Babylonia where the foreigner was allowed to acquire land
and carry on trade with the natives. One of these was just outside the
walls of Sippara in Northern Babylonia, and a good many references to it
have already been detected. Thus in the reign of Ammi-zaduq a case of
disputed title was brought before four of the royal judges which related
to certain feddans or ‘acres’ of land ‘in the district of the Amorites,’
‘at the entrance to the city of Sippara’;[18] and a contract dated in
the reign of Khammu-rabi’s father further describes the district as just
outside the principal gate of the city. It included arable and garden
land, pasturage and woods, as well as houses, and was thus like the land
of Goshen, which was similarly handed over to the Israelites to settle
in. An Egyptian inscription of the time of the eighteenth dynasty also
speaks of a similar district close to Memphis, which had been given to
the Hittites by the Pharaohs.[19] The strangers had their own judges. We
learn, for instance, from a lawsuit which was decided in the time of
Khammu-rabi that a Canaanite, Nahid-Amurri (‘the exalted of the Amorite
god’), who was defendant in a case of disputed property, was first
taken, along with the plaintiff, before the judges of Nin-Marki, ‘the
lady of the Amorite land,’ and then before another set of judges and the
assembled people of the city. It is clear from this that the judges who
were deputed to look after the interests of the settlers from the West
also acted when one of the parties was a native of Babylonia.[20]
The migration of Terah and his family thus ceases to be an isolated and
unexplained fact. In the age to which it belonged Canaan and Babylonia
were in close connection one with the other. Babylonian kings claimed
rule over Canaan, and Canaanitish merchants were established in
Babylonia. The language of Canaan was heard in the Babylonian cities,
and even the rulers of the land were of foreign blood. Between Babylonia
and Canaan there was a highway which had been trodden for generations,
and along which soldiers and civil officials, merchants and messengers,
passed frequently to and fro.
Midway, on a tributary of the river Belikh, was the city of Harran, so
called from a Sumerian word which signified ‘a high-road.’ Its name
pointed to a Babylonian foundation, as did also its temple dedicated to
the Babylonian moon-god. The temple, in fact, counted among its founders
and restorers a long line of Babylonian and Assyrian kings, and almost
the last act of the Babylonian Empire was the restoration of the ancient
shrine. Merodach, the god of Babylon, came in a dream to the last of the
Babylonian monarchs, and bade him raise once more from its ruins the
sanctuary of his brother-god. And Nabonidos tells us how he performed
the task laid upon him, how he disinterred the memorial-stones of the
older Assyrian kings, and how ‘by the art of the god Laban, the lord of
foundations and brickwork, with silver and gold and precious stones,
with spices and cedarwood,’ he built again Ê-Khulkhul, ‘the temple of
rejoicing.’ The moon-god, Sin, who was adored within it, was known
throughout the Aramaic lands of Northern Syria as Baal-Kharran, ‘the
Lord of Harran.’
But there was another city of the moon-god besides Harran. This was Ur
in Babylonia. In Babylonian literature it is commonly known as the city
of Sin. Between Ur and Harran there must have been some close
connection, and it may be that Harran owed its foundation to the kings
of Ur. At all events, there was good reason why an emigrant from Ur
should establish his abode in Harran. Both cities were under the same
divine patron, and that meant, in the ancient world, that both lived the
same religious and civil life. Harran obeyed the rule of the Babylonian
kings; its very name showed that it was of Babylonian origin, and its
culture was that of Babylonia. Law and religion, manners and customs,
all were alike in Harran and Ur. The migration from the one city to the
other did not differ from a change of dwelling from London to Edinburgh.
The country in which Harran was built formed part of the vast tract
between the Tigris and Euphrates, which was known to the Babylonians in
early days as Suru or Suri, a name which perhaps survived in that of the
city Suru, the Suriyeh of modern geography. In Semitic times it was
called Subari or Suwari by the Assyrians, sometimes also Subartu. Suru
thus corresponded with our Mesopotamia, though it seems to have included
a part of Northern Syria as well. But to the district in which Harran
stood the Babylonians gave a more special name. It was Padan or Padin,
‘the cultivated plain,’ of which it is said in a cuneiform tablet that
it lies ‘in front of the mountains of the Aramæans,’[21] while an early
Babylonian sovereign entitles himself king of Padan as well as of
Northern Babylonia.[22] The name bore witness to the fertility of the
country to which it was applied. The Babylonian lexicographers make
_padan_ a synonym of words signifying ‘field’ and ‘garden’; it was, in
fact, originally the piece of ground which a yoke of oxen could plough
in a given period of time. Hence it came to mean an ‘acre,’ a sense
which still survives in the Arabic _feddân_. The Babylonian leases and
sales of land which were drawn up in the Abrahamic age repeatedly
describe the ‘feddans’ or ‘acres’ of which the property consists. The
fertile plain of Mesopotamia, accordingly, was not a plain merely; it
was also ‘the field’ or ‘acre’ of Aram where the Semites of the Aramæan
stock ploughed and harvested their corn.[23]
In Egyptian its name was Naharina. The name had been borrowed from the
Aramæans, who called their country the land of Naharain, ‘the two
rivers.’ In Canaan, as we know from the cuneiform tablets of Tel
el-Amarna, it bore the Canaanitish form of Naharaim, Nahrima, the final
nasal of the Aramaic dialects becoming _m_. Aram-Naharaim was thus the
Egyptian and Canaanitish title of the country which the Babylonian spoke
of as Padan Arman, ‘Padan of the Aramæans.’ Both names go back to the
age before the Israelitish Exodus out of Egypt; the one belongs to Egypt
and Palestine, the other to Babylonia.
Before the age of the Exodus, however, the Aramæan population of
Mesopotamia became the subjects of a people who seem to have come from
the north. Mitanni, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from
the modern Birejik, became the capital of a kingdom which extended over
Naharaim on the one side, and to the neighbourhood of the Orontes on the
other. The race which founded the kingdom spoke a language unlike any
other with which we are acquainted; it was, however, agglutinative, and
exhibits certain general resemblances to some of the languages of the
Caucasus. From the sixteenth century B.C. onwards, Mitanni and Naharaim
are synonymous terms, even though, at times, the Egyptian scribes still
observed the old distinction between them; even though also, it may be,
Naharaim had a larger meaning than Mitanni. But the kings of Mitanni
were vigorous and powerful. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence we find them intriguing with the Hittites and Babylonians
in the Egyptian province of Canaan, and Ramses III. of the twentieth
Egyptian dynasty still counts the people of Mitanni among his enemies.
At an earlier date the royal families of Egypt and Mitanni had
intermarried with one another, and the marriages had introduced new
ideas and a revolutionary policy into the ancient monarchy of the Nile.
When the kingdom of Mitanni had been founded we do not know. There is no
trace of it in the earlier records of Babylonia, and we may safely say
that it arose long after the era of Khammu-rabi and Abram.[24]
Terah, we are told, died in Harran, and there Nahor, his second son,
remained to dwell. Terah and Nahor are names which we look for in vain
elsewhere in the Old Testament or in the inscriptions of Babylonia. And
yet light has been thrown upon them by the cuneiform texts. Tablets have
been found in Cappadocia, written in archaic cuneiform characters and in
a dialect of Assyrian, which are at least as old as the the of the Tel
el-Amarna letters; according to some scholars, they are coeval with the
dynasty of Khammu-rabi. In one of these tablets we find the word, or
name, _Nakhur_; what its signification may be, we cannot, unfortunately,
tell; all we can be sure of is that it was known to the Semitic
inhabitants of eastern Cappadocia, not far from the Aramæan border.[25]
The name of Terah points in the same direction, Tarkhu was a god whose
name enters into the composition of Cappadocian and North-Syrian
princes; he was worshipped by the Hittites, and so belongs to the same
region as that in which we have found the name of Nahor.
But neither Tarkhu nor Nakhur is Aramaic in the usual sense of the term.
Both seem to belong to that mixed dialect which has been revealed to us
by German excavation at Sinjerli, north of the Gulf of Antioch, and
about which scholars have disputed whether to call it Hebraised Aramaic
or Aramaised Hebrew. At any rate, it is a dialect which, though Aramaic
in origin, has been profoundly influenced by ‘the language of Canaan.’
It bears witness to the existence of a Hebrew-speaking population in
that part of the world. It would be rash to affirm that this population
already existed there in patriarchal days, though words which seem to be
of Hebrew origin are met with in the Cappadocian tablets. But we now
know that Northern Syria was once the meeting-place of the northern
Semitic languages; that here they mingled with one another and with
other languages which were not Semitic in type, and that here alone,
outside the pages of the Old Testament, are the names of Terah and Nahor
to be found.[26]
Nahor remained in Harran, but Abram moved on still further to the West.
The road was well known to his contemporaries, and probably followed the
later line of march which led past Carchemish, now Jerablûs, Aleppo, and
Hamath. From Hamath southward the land was in the possession of the
Amorites. Their chief seat was immediately to the north of the Palestine
of later days, but they had already occupied large portions of the
territory to the south of them as far as the Dead Sea and the limits of
the cultivated land. They had been for many centuries the dominant
people of the West. Already in the time of Sargon of Akkad they had
given their name among the Babylonians to Central Syria and Canaan. The
name, indeed, goes back to the pre-Semitic days of Babylonian history.
What the Semites called the land of the Amurrâ or Amorites, the
Sumerians had termed Martu. And the two names, Amurrâ and Martu,
continued to designate Syria and Palestine almost to the latest epoch of
Babylonian political life.
The monuments of Egypt have shown us what these Amorites were like. They
belonged to the blond race, like the Libyans of Northern Africa. At
Abu-Simbel their skins are painted yellow—the Egyptian equivalent of
white—their eyes blue, and the beard and eyebrows red. At Medînet Habu
the skin, as Professor Flinders Petrie expresses it, is ‘rather pinker
than flesh-colour,’ while in a tomb of the eighteenth dynasty at Thebes
it is painted white, the eyes and hair being a light red-brown. At
Karnak the names of the places captured by Thothmes III. in Palestine
are surmounted by the figures of Amorites whose skin is alternately red
and yellow, the red denoting sunburn, the yellow what we term white. In
features the Amorites belonged to the Indo-European type. The nose was
straight and regular, the forehead high, the lips thin, and the
cheek-bones somewhat prominent, while they wore whiskers and a pointed
beard. So far as we can judge from the representations of the Egyptian
artists, they belonged to a dolichocephalic or long-headed race.[27]
That they were tall in stature we know from the Old Testament. By the
side of them the Hebrew spies described themselves as grasshoppers. The
cities they built were strong and ‘walled up to heaven’; the thick walls
of one of them have been disinterred on the site of Lachish by Professor
Petrie and Mr. Bliss. But though the Babylonians continued to include
Canaan in the general term, ‘land of the Amorites,’ and spoke of the
Canaanite himself as an ‘Amorite,’ they nevertheless came to know that
there was a distinction between them. The Babylonian king, Burna-buryas,
whose letters to the Egyptian Pharaoh have been found at Tel el-Amarna,
distinguishes Kinakhkhi or Canaan from the land of the Amorites, which
had come to be confined to the country immediately to the north of
Palestine. From the seventeenth century B.C. downwards, Amorite and
Canaanite cease to be synonymous terms. It is only in certain parts of
the Pentateuch that the old Babylonian use of the name ‘Amorite’ still
survives.
It was a use that never prevailed among the Assyrians. When Assyria
became a kingdom, and its rulers first led their armies to the West, the
Amorites were no longer the dominant power. Their place had been taken
by the Hittites. And it is the Khattâ or Hittites, therefore, who in the
Assyrian inscriptions, as distinguished from those of Babylonia, are the
representatives of Western Syria. On the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser
II., now in the British Museum, even Ahab of Israel and Ba’asha of Ammon
are included among the ‘kings of the country of the Hittites.’ But of
this Assyrian use of the term Hittite there are slight, if any, traces
in the Old Testament.[28]
Abram, the Hebrew, first pitched his tent near the future Shechem, under
‘the terebinth of Moreh.’ Moreh is the Sumerian Martu, ‘the Amorite,’ in
Hebrew letters; and the fact gives point to the statement which follows
immediately, that ‘the Canaanite’—and not the Amorite—‘was then in the
land’ (Gen. xii. 6). ‘The mountain of Shechem’ is mentioned in an
Egyptian papyrus which describes the travels of an Egyptian officer in
Palestine, in the fourteenth century B.C.,[29] but the book of Genesis
represents the city as founded only in the lifetime of Jacob (Gen.
xxxiv. 6). Hence we are told that it was to ‘the place’ or ‘site’ of
Shechem that Abram made his way, not to the town itself. And after the
foundation of the town its Canaanite inhabitants are still called
Amorites, in accordance with ancient Babylonian custom (Gen. xlviii.
22).
We next find the Hebrew patriarch in Egypt. There was famine in Canaan,
and Egypt was already the granary of the eastern world. In the Tel
el-Amarna tablets we hear of Egyptian corn being sent to the starving
population of Syria; and Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Exodus,
tells us that he had loaded ships with wheat for the Hittites when they
were suffering from a famine. The want of rain which destroyed the crops
of Canaan did not affect Egypt, where the fertility of the soil depends
upon the irrigating waters of the Nile.
Egypt at the time must have been under the sway of the Hyksos kings.
They were Asiatic invaders who had overrun the country from north to
south, and established themselves on the throne of the Pharaohs. In
three successive dynasties did they govern the land, and the descendants
of the native monarchs sank into _hiqu_ or vassal ‘princes’ of Thebes.
At first, it is said, they laid Egypt waste, destroying the temples and
massacring the people. But the influence of Egyptian culture soon led
them captive. The Hyksos court became Egyptianised; the Hyksos king
assumed the titles and state of the ancient sovereigns; Sutekh, the
Hyksos god, was identified with Ra, the Sun-god of On, and the official
language itself remained Egyptian. A treatise on mathematics, one of the
few scientific works that have survived the shipwreck of Egyptian
literature, was written under the patronage of the Hyksos king, Apophis
I.[30]
Nevertheless, with all this outward varnish of Egyptian culture, the
Hyksos rule continued to be foreign. Even the names of the kings were
not Egyptian, and up to the last the supreme object of their worship was
a foreign deity. According to the Sallier Papyrus, the war of
independence was occasioned by the demand of Apophis II. that Sutekh,
and not Amon, should be acknowledged as the god of Thebes, and a scarab
found at Kom Ombos in 1896 bears upon it, in confirmation of the story,
the name of Sutekh-Apopi.[31] Moreover, the Hyksos capital was not in
any of the old centres of Egyptian government. Zoan, it is true, now
Sân, in the north-eastern part of the Delta, was nominally their
official residence; but they preferred to dwell in the fortress of
Avaris, on the extreme eastern edge of Egypt, and within hail of their
Asiatic kinsmen. It was from Avaris that Apophis had sent his insolent
message to the terrified Prince of Thebes.
The Hebrew visitor to Egypt, therefore, was among friends and not
strangers. Moreover, he had only to cross the frontier to find himself
in the presence of the Pharaoh’s court. Whether at Zoan or at Avaris, it
was alike close at hand to the traveller from Asia.
After leaving Egypt, Abram established himself at Hebron. It would seem
that the name of Hebron, ‘the Confederacy,’ was not yet in existence, as
it was to the ‘terebinth’ of Mamre, and not of Hebron, that Abram
‘removed his tent.’ Indeed, it is more than doubtful whether Mamre and
Hebron occupied precisely the same site. It may be that Mamre was the
older fortress of the Amorites, whose place was taken in after times by
the town which gathered round the adjoining sanctuary of Hebron.
In any case, its population was Amorite, though probably we should
understand ‘Amorite’ here in its Babylonian sense. ‘Abram the Hebrew,’
it is declared, ‘dwelt under the terebinth of Mamre the Amorite, brother
of Eshcol and brother of Aner; and these were confederate with Abram.’
In other words, the Hebrew settler in Canaan had formed an alliance with
the native chiefs.
Then came an event upon which the cuneiform records of Babylonia are
beginning to cast light. Chedor-laomer, king of Elam, and the vassal
kings Amraphel of Shinar, Arioch of Ellasar, and Tid’al of ‘nations,’
marched against the five Canaanitish princes of the Vale of Siddim at
the northern end of the Dead Sea, bent upon obtaining possession of the
naphtha springs that abounded there, and the produce of which had
already made its way to Babylonia. No resistance was made to the
invader; it is clear, in fact, that the invasion was no new thing, and
that the rest of Canaan was already subject to the lords of the East.
For ‘twelve years’ the five Canaanitish kings ‘served Chedor-laomer, and
in the thirteenth year they rebelled.’ Once more, therefore, the forces
of Elam and Babylonia moved westward. The revolt, it would appear, had
spread to other parts of the ‘land of the Amorites,’ and the invading
army marched southward along the eastern side of the Jordan. First, the
Rephaim were overthrown at Ashteroth-Karnaim, in ‘the field of Bashan,’
as it was termed in the days of the Tel el-Amarna tablets; then followed
the turn of the Zuzim in the future land of Ammon, and of the Emim in
what was to be the land of Moab; and after smiting the Horites of Mount
Seir, the invaders penetrated into the wilderness of Paran, fell upon
the desert sanctuary of Kadesh, now called ’Ain el-Qadîs, and returned
northward along the western shore of the Dead Sea. They had thus
partially followed in the footsteps of an earlier Chaldæan king,
Naram-Sin, who centuries before had made his way to the Sinaitic
Peninsula, and there gained possession of the coveted copper-mines.
The native princes in the Vale of Siddim were no match for the foe. A
battle was fought which ended disastrously for the Canaanitish troops.
The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah were slain, their men were driven into
the naphtha-pits of which the plain was full, or else fled to the
mountains. Their cities fell into the hands of the conquerors, who
carried away both captives and spoil.
But Abram heard that among the captives was his ‘brother’ Lot. Thereupon
he started in pursuit of the Chaldæan army, with his three hundred and
eighteen armed followers and the forces of his Amorite allies. The
victorious army was overtaken near Damascus, and its rear surprised in a
night attack. The captives and spoil were recovered, and brought back in
triumph to the south of Canaan. Here at the ‘King’s Dale,’ just outside
the walls of Jerusalem, the new king of Sodom went to welcome him; and
Melchizedek, the priest-king of Jerusalem, blessed the conqueror in the
name of ‘the Most High God.’
The history of the campaign of Chedor-laomer reads like an extract from
the Babylonian chronicles. It is dated in the reign of the king of
Shinar or Babylon, as it would have been had it been written by a
Babylonian scribe, although the Babylonian king was but the vassal and
tributary of the sovereign of Elam. Even the spelling of the names
indicates that they are taken from a cuneiform document. ‘Ham’ for
Ammon, and ‘Zuzim’ for Zamzummim, can be explained only by the
peculiarities of the cuneiform system of writing.[32]
The whole story, however, has been thrown into a Canaanitish form. The
king of Northern Babylonia, whose capital was Babylon, has become a king
of Shinar, that being the name given in the West to the northern half of
Chaldæa.[33] Larsa, the capital of Eri-Aku or Arioch, has been
transformed into Ellasar, perhaps through the influence of the
Babylonian _al_, city.’ Lastly, Tid’al, the Tudghula of the cuneiform
texts, is entitled the ‘king of nations.’
The fragmentary tablets discovered by Mr. Pinches, in which we hear of
Khammu-rabi, king of Babylon, of Eri-Aku or Arioch, and his son
Bad-makh-dingirene, and of Kudur-Laghghamar, the Chedor-laomer of
Genesis, refer to Tudghula or Tid’al as ‘the son of Gazza[ni].’
Unfortunately, the words which follow, and which gave a description of
the prince, have been lost through a fracture of the clay tablet. But
there is another tablet from which we may supply the deficiency. On the
one hand we are told that Tudghula burned the sanctuaries of Babylonia
and allowed the waters of the Euphrates to roll over the ruins of the
great temples of Babylon; on the other hand we read: ‘Who is this
Kudur-Laghghamar who has wrought evil? He has assembled the Umman Manda,
has devastated the land of Bel, and [has marched] at their side.’
Elsewhere Kudur-Laghghamar is called the king of Elam.[34]
The Umman Manda were the barbarous tribes in the mountains which
adjoined the northern part of Elam and formed the eastern boundary of
Babylonia. The term means the ‘Nomad,’ or ‘Barbarous Peoples,’ and is
thus the Babylonian equivalent of the Hebrew Goyyim, ‘Nations.’[35] What
the ‘Gentiles,’ or Goyyim, were to the Hebrews, or the ‘Barbarians’ to
the Greeks, the Umman Manda were to the civilised population of Chaldæa.
The fact that the king of Elam summons them to his help when he invades
Babylonia implies that they acknowledged his suzerainty. It would seem,
therefore, that the ‘Nations’ over which Tid’al is said to have ruled
were the Kurdish tribes to the east of the Babylonian frontier.
Khammu-rabi eventually succeeded in overthrowing the king of Elam, in
crushing his rival Eri-Aku and his Elamite allies, and in making himself
master of an independent Babylonia, which was henceforth a united
kingdom, with its centre and sovereign city at Babylon. Recent
excavations have brought letters of his to light which were written to
his faithful vassal Sin-idinnam, Sin-idinnam had been the king of Larsa
whom Eri-Aku and his Elamite troops had driven from the city of his
fathers, and he had found refuge and protection in the court of
Khammu-rabi at Babylon. When the great war finally broke out, which
ended in leaving Khammu-rabi sole monarch of Babylonia, Sin-idinnam
rendered him active service, and after the conclusion of the struggle he
was reinstated in his ancestral princedom. Khammu-rabi loaded him with
other honours as well; and one of the letters which have been recovered
refers to certain statues which were presented to him as a reward for
his ‘valour on the day of Kudur-Laghghamar’s defeat.’ This was an
Oriental anticipation of the statues which the Greek cities of a later
age bestowed upon those they would honour.[36]
It has been suggested that the reverse sustained by Kudur-Laghghamar in
Palestine at the hands of the ‘Amorites,’ under the leadership of ‘Abram
the Hebrew,’ may have given the king of Babylon his opportunity for
successfully revolting from his liege lord. If so, the Hebrew patriarch
would have influenced the destinies of the country he had forsaken. What
is more certain is that his victory gave him a commanding position in
the country of his adoption. Syrian legend in after days made him a king
in Damascus;[37] and when he buys the rock-tomb of Machpelah, the owners
of the land tell him that he is no ‘stranger and sojourner’ among them,
but ‘a mighty prince,’ ‘a prince of Elohim.’ From henceforth the
‘Hebrew’ occupies a recognised place in ‘the land of the Amorites.’
The figure of Melchizedek, king of Salem, loomed large upon the
imagination of later ages out of the mists that enveloped the history of
Canaanitish Jerusalem. But the romance is now making way for sober
history. The letters on clay tablets in the Babylonian language and
writing, found at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, have come to our help.
Several of them were sent to the Pharaoh from Ebed-Tob, king of
Jerusalem, and they show that Jerusalem was already the dominant state
of Southern Palestine. Its strong position made it a fortress of
importance, and it was the capital of a territory which stretched away
towards the desert of the South. Its name was already Jerusalem or
Uru-Salim, ‘the city of Salim,’ the God of Peace, and the hieroglyphic
texts of Egypt accordingly speak of it simply as Shalama or Salem,
omitting the needless Uru, ‘city.’[38]
Ebed-Tob reiterates that he was not, like the other governors of Canaan,
under Egyptian rule. They had been appointed to their offices by the
Pharaoh, or had inherited them by descent from the older royal lines of
the country whom the Egyptian Government had allowed to remain. He, on
the contrary, was the friend and ally of the Egyptian king. His kingly
dignity had not been derived from either father or mother, but from the
‘Mighty King,’ from the god, that is to say, whose temple stood on ‘the
mountain of Jerusalem.’ He was, therefore, a priest-king, without father
or mother, so far as his royal office was concerned.[39]
That the king of Salem, the priest of the God of Peace, should have come
forth from his city and its temple to welcome the conqueror when he
returned in peace, was both natural and fitting. It was equally natural
and fitting that he should bless the Hebrew in the name of the ‘Most
High God’—the patron deity of Jerusalem, whom Ebed-Tob identifies with
the Babylonian Ninip—and that Abram should in return have given him
tithes of the spoil. From time immemorial, the _esrâ_ or tithe had been
exacted in Babylonia for the temples and their priests, and had been
paid alike by prince and peasant. It passed to the West along with the
other elements and institutions of Babylonian culture.[40]
The destruction of the cities of the Vale of Siddim, which is
represented as occurring not long after the retreat of the king of Elam,
made a profound impression on the Western world. References are made to
the catastrophe up to the latest days of Hebrew literature; and the mist
caused by the evaporation of the salt on the surface of the Dead Sea was
popularly supposed to be the smoke which hung eternally over the ruins
of the doomed cities of the plain. The storm which burst from the
heavens set fire to the naphtha springs that oozed through the soil, and
houses and men alike were enveloped in a sheet of fire. Similar
catastrophes have happened in our own time at Baku on the Caspian, where
the petroleum, accidentally ignited, has blazed for days in columns of
fire.
Ingenious Germans have connected with the destruction of Sodom and its
sister cities a passage in the Latin writer Justin (xviii. 3. 2, 3), in
which it is said that the Phœnicians were driven to the Canaanitish
coast by an earthquake which took place in their original home near ‘the
Assyrian lake.’ Instead of ‘Assyrian,’ some manuscripts read ‘Syrian,’
and the lake has accordingly been imagined to be the Dead Sea, and the
earthquake to be the rain of fire which destroyed the cities of the
plain.[41] But there is no other instance in which the Dead Sea is
called ‘the Syrian lake,’ supposing this to be the true reading, nor is
there any trace of an earthquake in the catastrophe described in
Genesis. Moreover, the unanimous voice of classical antiquity declared
that the Phœnicians had come from the Persian Gulf, not from the valley
of the Jordan, and their seafaring propensities were explained by the
fact that they once lived in the islands of the Erythræan Sea. Whatever
the ‘Assyrian lake’ may have been, it was not the ‘Salt Sea’ of the Old
Testament.
The Israelites traced back to Abram the rite of circumcision which they
practised. The rite, however, was not confined to Israel. So far as
Western Asia is concerned, it seems to have been of African origin. It
is to be found among most of the races and tribes of Africa, and in
Egypt the institution was of immemorial antiquity. According to
Herodotos (ii. 36), the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, and the Kolkhians
alone observed it ‘from the beginning,’ the Phœnicians and Syrians of
Palestine having learned it from the Egyptians, and the Cappadocians
from the people of Kolkhis. But the knowledge of the world possessed by
Herodotos was limited, and his anthropology is not profound. The
practice is met with in various parts of the world; it owes its origin
to considerations of chastity, its maintenance to sanitary reasons. It
is true that Africa was peculiarly its home, and that it seems to have
been common to the aboriginal tribes of that continent, but it is also
true that it was known to aboriginal tribes in other parts of the globe
among whom—so far as our evidence can tell us—the practice originated
independently.[42]
Whether it was originally a Semitic as well as an African rite, we do
not at present know. We have as yet no certain evidence that it was
practised among the Babylonians. Indeed, the fact that Abraham was not
circumcised until after his arrival in Canaan would imply that it was
not. Even in Canaan itself there were tribes, apart from the Philistine
immigrants, to whom it was unknown, as we learn from the story of Hamor
and Shechem (Gen. xxxiv. 14, _sqq._). And though the inhabitants of
Northern Arabia were circumcised in their thirteenth year, as we are
told by Josephus, it is doubtful whether the same custom prevailed in
the southern half of the peninsula. So far as Midian was concerned, we
have express testimony (Exod. iv. 24-26, cf. ii. 19) that the rite was
regarded as peculiar to the stranger from Egypt.
It seems probable, therefore, that Herodotos was right in declaring that
circumcision had been introduced into Palestine by the Egyptians.
Intercourse between Canaan and the Delta went back to the early days of
Egyptian history, and it would not be surprising if Egyptian influences
had found their way into Canaan at the same time. Canaanitish slaves
were carried into the valley of the Nile, and doubtless Egyptian slaves
were at times kidnapped into Canaan.
The circumcision of Abraham and his household may, consequently, have
been in accordance with a custom which had already grown up among the
Amoritish population around him. But whether this were the case or not,
the rite received a new meaning and assumed a new form. It became the
sign and seal of a religious covenant. Those who had been circumcised
were thereby devoted to the God of Abraham and his descendants.
Henceforth there was not only a division between the circumcised and the
uncircumcised, there was also a division between those who had received
the circumcision of Abraham and those who had not. It is noticeable that
the narrative expressly includes among those who were thus outwardly
dedicated to the God of Israel not only the ancestor of the Ishmaelite
tribes of Northern Arabia, but also the foreign slaves who belonged to
the household of the patriarch. They had left the home of their fathers,
and his God accordingly had become theirs. The fact is paralleled by the
law relating to another seal of the covenant between Israel and its God;
the Sabbath had to be kept not only by the Israelite, but also by the
‘stranger’ within his gates.
A change of name accompanied the rite which the patriarch performed. The
Babylonian Abram became the Palestinian Abraham. To the native of the
old Oriental world the name was not merely the representation of a
thing; it was, in a measure, the thing itself. Even Greek philosophy
failed at first to distinguish between an object and its expression in
speech. A thing was known only through its name, and in the name were to
be found its qualities and its essence. A name which brought with it
unlucky associations was itself the bringer of ill-luck, but the
ill-luck would turn to good if once the name were changed. The belief
has lingered on into our own times, and the change of the Cape of Storms
into the Cape of Good Hope is an illustration of its influence. The name
meant personality as well as a thing. The man himself was changed when
his name was changed. Hence it was that the Canaanites or Karians, who
settled in Egypt, and there became Egyptian citizens, at once assumed
Egyptian names. They had left Canaan and Karia behind them, with the
gods and the habits of their ancestors, and had adopted the religion and
manners of another country. They had, as it were, stripped themselves of
their old personality, and had clothed themselves with a new one. It was
thus a new personality that was assumed by the Babylonian Abram when he
became the Abraham of Western Asia. It cut him off, as it were, from the
land of his birth, and gave him a new birth in the country of his
adoption. The merchant-prince of Babylonia, who had overthrown the
rearguard of the host of Chedor-laomer, and whose maid had borne to him
the ancestor of the Ishmaelites, thus passed into the forefather and
founder of the Israelitish race.
The etymology and meaning of the new name are unknown. It would seem
that they had been forgotten even at the time when the book of Genesis
was written. At all events, the explanation of the name given there
(xvii. 5) is one of those plays upon words of which the Biblical
writers, like Orientals generally, are so fond. ‘Ab-(ra)ham,’ it is
said, is Ab-ham(ôn), ‘the father of a multitude,’ in total disregard of
the second syllable of the name. It may be, however, that there was
still a tradition that in _raham_ we have a word which had a similar
signification to that of _hamôn_, ‘a multitude,’ though the attempts
that have been made to discover any word of the kind in the Semitic
languages have hitherto been unsuccessful. We must be content with the
fact that Ab-ram, ‘the exalted father,’ was transformed into the
Israelitish Ab-raham.[43]
The change of name was followed by the birth of Isaac and the expulsion
of Ishmael from his father’s house. Closely allied in blood as the
Ishmaelites of north-western Arabia were to the house of Israel, it was
only in part that they shared in the covenant made with their common
father. Circumcision indeed they also possessed, but to Israel alone was
granted the Law. To Israel alone did God reveal Himself under His name
of Yahveh.
The inscriptions of a later age, which have been found in the Ishmaelite
territory, show that the language then spoken by the Ishmaelitish tribes
was Aramaic rather than what we call Arabic.[44] From the borders of
Babylonia to the Sinaitic Peninsula, and as far north as the
mountain-ranges of the Taurus, Aramaic dialects were used. How far the
difference in language meant that the populations who spoke these
Aramaic dialects differed also in blood from the other members of the
Semitic family, we do not know, but it is probable that the difference
in blood was not great. The Semitic family seems to have been as
homogeneous in race as it was in speech, and the differences in speech
were comparatively slight. In fact, the Semitic languages do not differ
more from one another than the languages of modern Europe which claim
descent from Latin, and it is probable that the speaker of an Aramaic
dialect would not have had very great difficulty in making himself
intelligible to the speakers of what we term Hebrew.
Hebrew was, as Isaiah tells us (xix. 18), ‘the language of Canaan.’ The
fact became clear to European scholars as soon as the Phœnician
inscriptions were deciphered. Between the Hebrew of the Old Testament
and the Phœnician of the older inhabitants of Canaan the differences are
less than those between one English dialect and another. Chief among
them is the absence in Phœnician of the Hebrew article and _waw
conversivum_. But the idiom to which grammarians have given the latter
name seems to have been an independent creation of Hebrew itself, and
even in Hebrew it disappeared in the later stage of the language. The
article is found in the so-called Lihyanian inscriptions of Northern
Arabia,[45] and we may regard it as one of the indications that the
Israelites had been Bedâwin before they entered Palestine and made their
way from the desert into the Promised Land.
The Tel el-Amarna tablets have carried the history of Canaanitish or
Hebrew beyond the age of the Exodus. In some of the letters written from
Palestine the writers have added the Canaanitish equivalents of certain
Assyrian words and phrases. They show that from the pre-Mosaic epoch
down to the period of the Exile the language changed but little; the
words and phrases that have thus been preserved being substantially the
same as those which we find in the pages of the Old Testament.[46]
The northern boundary between Canaanitish and Aramaic dialects was among
the mountains of Gilead. This is made clear by the narrative of the
covenant between Laban and Jacob. At Mizpah, the ‘Watch-tower,’ which
guarded the approaches to the south, a cairn was raised, called
Yegar-sahadutha in the language of Laban, Galeed in that of Jacob (Gen.
xxxi. 47, 48). The two names alike signified the ‘heap of witnesses,’
but while the first was Aramaic, the second was Canaanitish. The fact
that the names survived into later history shows that the line of
demarcation between the two Semitic languages which they represent
continued to remain in the same place.[47]
Jacob, despite his long residence in Aram and his relationship to an
Aramæan family, is nevertheless Canaanite in his language. It is a sign
and proof how completely the ancestors of the Israelites had identified
themselves with the country which their descendants were afterwards to
possess. The Canaanitish history of Israel begins long before the days
of Moses or Joshua; it already dates from the day when the Babylonian
Abram became the Abraham of Canaan, and when the field of Machpelah was
sold to him by the children of Heth.
It is true that Jacob—or it may be, Terah—is once called in the Old
Testament (Deut. xxvi. 5) ‘a wandering Aramæan.’ But he was so only in a
secondary sense. It was not as an Aramæan, but as a wanderer out of
Aramaic lands, that the title is given him. Israel was closely connected
with Aram and Harran, but it was a relationship only.
Discoveries recently made in Northern Syria by the German explorer, Dr.
von Luschan, have thrown some light on the matter. At Sinjerli,
twenty-five miles north-east of the Gulf of Antioch, and nearly midway
between Yarpuz and Aintab, he has excavated the ruins of the capital of
the ancient kingdom of Samâla, and found monuments which make mention of
the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser.[48] Most of them, in fact, were
erected by a prince who acknowledged the supremacy of the Assyrian
monarch, and whose father’s name is met with in the annals of the latter
sovereign. The inscriptions on them are in an Aramaic dialect; but the
dialect is so largely mixed with Hebrew words and idioms as to have made
scholars doubt at first whether it was not an Aramaised form of Hebrew
rather than an Hebraised form of Aramaic. In any case, it is plain that
the dialect was in close contact with a population which spoke ‘the
language of Canaan.’ Far away to the north, therefore, in the heart of
an Aramaic country, there must have been speakers of Hebrew or
Canaanite. Nor is this all. Two or three miles from the ruins of Samâla
are the ruins of another ancient town, the modern name of which is
Girshin. Here, too, the German excavators have found an inscription of
the same age as those of Samâla, and we may gather from it that Girshin
stands on the site of a city which was the capital of the land of
‘Ya’di.’ In the Tel el-Amarna tablets, written in the century before the
Exodus, Yaudâ are mentioned as living in the same part of the world.[49]
Now Yaudâ is also the Assyrian mode of spelling the name of the Jews,
and it would accordingly seem that a tribe which bore a name similar to
that of Judah existed in Northern Syria as far back as the Patriarchal
age.[50]
All this is in singular harmony with the Scriptural narrative which
tells us that a part of Terah’s family lingered at Harran, and that the
wives of both Isaac and Jacob came from their Aramæan kindred in the
north. There were Hebrews in Northern Syria as well as in Canaan, and
Scripture and archæology are alike in agreement in testifying to the
fact.
Even in Babylonia it may be that Abraham had been educated in ‘the
language of Canaan.’ There were colonies of Amorite (or, as we should
say, Canaanitish) merchants in Chaldæa who had special districts and
privileges assigned to them by the Babylonian kings. Reference is not
unfrequently made to them in the contracts of the Abrahamic age. The
proper names, which sometimes make their appearance in deeds of sale or
lease, or in legal suits in which the foreign merchants were involved,
are Canaanitish and not Babylonian. Thus we find names like Ishmael and
Abdiel, Jacob-el (Ya’qub-il), and Joseph-el (Yasup-il), and we even read
of ‘the Amorite the son of Abi-ramu’ or Abram, who appears as a witness
to a deed dated in the reign of the grandfather of Amraphel.
Israel thus stood in close relation to almost all the chief linguistic
divisions of the Semitic world. Its first forefather had been born in
the land where Babylonian—or Assyrian, as we usually term it—was spoken,
and its contact with Aramaic had been early and intimate. Its desert
wanderings had led it into a region into which the Bedâwin tribes of
Central Arabia could make their way, and the Hebrew article seems to be
a relic of its intercourse with them and the Arabic they spoke. But with
all this contact with other Semitic tongues, Israel nevertheless
remained true to that of the land of its destiny: the language of the
Old Testament is the language which was spoken in Canaan before the days
of Moses, the language of the inscriptions of Phœnicia and Carthage, the
language of Hannibal as well as of Joshua.
If Israel was connected by language with Canaan, it was connected by
blood as well as by language with Moab, and Ammon, and Edom. In fact,
Edom and Israel were brothers. While the relationship with Moab and
Ammon was comparatively distant, the relationship with Edom was
peculiarly close. The fact was never forgotten, and in the later days of
Jewish history the unbrotherly conduct of Edom caused a bitterness of
feeling towards it on the part of the Jews such as no other Gentiles
were able to excite.
Moab and Ammon were the children of Lot, and had possessed themselves of
the mountain and fertile plains on the east side of the Dead Sea and
southern course of the Jordan long before Israel had entered into its
inheritance, or even Edom had carved out a possession for itself with
the sword. They were accused of being of incestuous origin, and it was
related how the ancestors of each had been born in hiding and in the
wild solitude of a cave. Moab was the eldest, Ben-Ammi, ‘the Ammonite,’
being the younger of the two.
The name of Moab (or Muab) is engraved among the conquests of the
Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II., on the base of one of the statues which
stand before the northern entrance of the temple of Luxor. Ammi, whose
‘son’ the ancestor of the Ammonites was called, was the supreme God of
Ammon, standing to the Ammonites in the same relation that Chemosh stood
to Moab, or Yahveh to Israel. Ammon, indeed, is but another form of
Ammi. The god was widely worshipped, as we may learn from the proper
names into which his own name enters. Thus the Old Testament knows of
Ammiel, ‘Ammi is god’; of Ammi-shaddai, ‘Ammi is the Almighty’; and of
Ammi-nadab, ‘Ammi is noble.’ Ammi-nadab was king of Ammon in the time of
the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal; the early Minæan inscriptions of
Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-zadoq and Ammi-zadiqa, ‘Ammi is
righteous,’ as well as Ammi-karib and Ammi-anshi; while among the kings
of the south Arabian dynasty which ruled over Babylonia in the age of
Abraham we find Ammi-zadoq, or Ammu-zadoq and Ammi-dhitana; and the
Kadmonite chieftain east of the Jordan, with whom the Egyptian fugitive
Sinuhit found a home in the time of the twelfth dynasty, bore the name
of Ammi-anshi.[51] Balaam the seer, moreover, was summoned by the king
of Moab from his city of Pethor, at the junction of the Euphrates and
the Sajur, in ‘the land of the children of Ammo,’—for such is the
correct translation of the Hebrew text. It may not be an accident that
one who thus belonged to the ‘Beni-Ammo,’ or ‘Ammonites’ of the north,
should have been called to the country which bordered on that of the
Beni-Ammi, or Ammonites of the south.[52]
A few miles to the north of Pethor was Carchemish, now Jerablûs, which
was destined to become one of the most important strongholds of the
Hittite tribes. The Semites explained the name as ‘the fortified wall of
Chemosh’;[53] and whether this etymology were true or not, at all events
it indicates a belief that the worship of Chemosh extended as far
northward into Aram as did the worship of Ammi. Chemosh was the national
god of Moab. Like Yahveh of Israel and Assur in Assyria, he had neither
wife nor children; and on the Moabite Stone even the Babylonian goddess
Ashtar, whose cult had been carried to the West, is identified with him.
She ceases to have any independent existence or sex of her own, and is
absorbed into the one supreme deity of Moabite faith. It is probable
that Ammi also was similarly conceived of as standing alone in jealous
isolation, supreme over all other gods, and having no consort with whom
to share his power.
Moab and Ammon were alike intruders in the lands which subsequently bore
their names. The older inhabitants of Moab were known as the Emim, ‘a
people great and many and tall, as the Anakim, which also were accounted
giants.’ Ammon too had been ‘accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt
therein in old time, and the Ammonites call them Zamzummim.’ The word
rendered ‘giants’ in the Authorised Version is Rephaim; and it is very
possible that a trace of it survives in the name On-Repha, ‘On of the
giant,’ the Raphon or Raphana of classical geography, which is coupled
by the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. with Astartu or
Ashteroth-Karnaim.[54] When Chedor-laomer made his campaign in Canaan
the Rephaim were still living at Ashteroth-Karnaim, and the ‘Zuzim’ or
Zamzummim in ‘Ham.’ The name of the latter seems to occur in the
inscriptions of the kings of Ur, who reigned some centuries before the
birth of Abraham; they mention hostile expeditions against the land of
Zavzala or the Zuzim; and a Babylonian high-priest who owned allegiance
to one of them brought blocks of limestone for his temples and palace
from the same district, which he tells us was situated ‘in the mountains
of the Amorites.’[55]
Whether or not the Emim and Zamzummim were Amorite tribes, we cannot
tell. The physical characteristics ascribed to them in the Old Testament
would, however, seem to indicate that such was the case. Moreover, the
Amorites had at one time been the dominant population, not only in
Palestine itself, but also in the country east of the Jordan as well as
in the Syrian districts to the north. When the Babylonians first became
acquainted with Western Asia in the fifth or fourth millennium before
the Christian era, the inhabitants of Syria were mainly of the Amorite
race. Syria, accordingly, and more especially that part of it which is
known to us as Palestine, was called in the old agglutinative language
of Chaldæa ‘the land of Martu’ or ‘the Amorite,’ a word which has
survived in the book of Genesis under the form of Moreh.[56] When the
older language of Chaldæa made way for Semitic Babylonian, _Martu_
became _Amurru_, and Hadad, the supreme Baal or sun-god of Canaan,
became known as ‘Amurru,’ ‘the Amorite.’ By the Egyptians the Amorites
were termed Amur; and, as has been already stated,[57] the Egyptian
artists have shown us that they were a fair-skinned people, with blue
eyes and reddish hair; that they were also tall and handsome, and wore
short and pointed beards. In fact, they resembled in features the
Libyans of Northern Africa, whose modern descendants—the Kabyles of
Algeria—offer such a striking likeness to the golden-haired Kelt. The
Amorite type may still be seen in its purity among the Arabs of the
El-Arîsh desert, who inhabit the district between the frontiers of
Palestine and Egypt: many of the latter, as we see them to-day, might
well have sat for the portraits of the Amorites depicted on the walls of
the old Egyptian temples and tombs. It would seem that the Amorite race,
fair and tall and energetic, once extended along the northern coast of
Africa into Asia itself, where they occupied the larger part of Southern
Syria. There they have left behind them cromlechs and dolmens which
remind us of those of our own islands. Indeed, if the Amorite were the
eastern branch of the Libyan race, it is probable that he could claim
kindred with the so-called red Kelt of Britain. The physiological
characteristics of the Libyan and fair-haired Kelt are similar; and many
anthropologists assume the existence of a Libyo-Keltic or ‘Eurafrican’
family, which has spread northward through Spain and the western side of
France into the British Isles.[58]
The Emim and Zamzummim, accordingly, whom the descendants of Lot partly
expelled, partly absorbed, may have been of Amorite origin, and
connected in race with a portion of the population of our own country.
At all events, when the Israelites entered Canaan, the Amorites were
already settled on the eastern side of the Jordan. At that time the land
was divided between the Amalekites or Bedâwin of the desert to the
south, the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites ‘in the mountains,’ and the
Canaanites on the coast of the Mediterranean and in the valley of the
Jordan (Numb. xiii. 29). As might have been expected in the case of a
fair-skinned people, the Amorites needed the bracing air of the
mountains in order to hold their own against the other populations of
the country; in the hot plains their vigour was in danger of being lost.
The Egyptian rule, which the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth
dynasties had maintained eastward of the Jordan, passed away with the
fall of the Egyptian empire, and its place was taken by the Amorite
kingdoms of Sihon and Og. Sihon had overthrown the Moabites in battle,
and had wrested their territory from them as far south as the Arnon
(Numb. xxi. 26). They had been driven out of their cities into the
barren mountains which overlooked the Dead Sea. A fragment of the
Amorite Song of Triumph which recorded the conquest has been preserved
to us. ‘Come unto Heshbon,’ it said, ‘let the city of Sihon be built and
fortified. For a fire has gone forth from Heshbon, a flame from the city
of Sihon; it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the Baalim of the high places
of Arnon. Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh:
[Chemosh] hath given his sons that escaped [the battle], and his
daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites’ (Numb. xxi.
27-29).
The southern half of Ammon also, as far north as the Jabbok, was in
Amorite hands. Here, however, the Ammonites had strongly fortified their
‘border’ (Numb. xxi. 24), so that neither Sihon himself, nor his
Israelitish conquerors, succeeded in passing it. But Rabbah, ‘the city
of waters,’ the future capital of Ammon, must have been held by the
Amorites, and the two intrusive populations of Ammon and Moab were
separated from one another by the Amorite conquest.
If the older inhabitants of the country were Amorite by race, the
kingdom of Sihon will have represented an Amorite reaction against the
descendants of Lot. But we must remember that the Babylonians had given
the name of ‘Amorite’ to all the populations of Palestine and the
adjoining districts, whether they were Amorites in blood or not. The old
Babylonian usage is followed in several passages of the Pentateuch, and
points to their origin in those pre-Mosaic days when Babylonian
influence was still dominant in Western Asia. Thus in Gen. xv. 16, God
declares to Abraham that ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full,’
and Jacob reminded his sons (Gen. xlviii. 22) that he had wrested
Shechem ‘out of the hand of the Amorite’ with his sword and bow. Perhaps
the emphatic statement that ‘the Canaanite was then in the land,’ which
we read in Gen. xii. 6, is due to the previous mention of the terebinth
of Moreh’ or Martu, Martu being the primitive Babylonian equivalent of
the later ‘Amorite.’ The terebinth, indeed, was in the country of the
Amorites, but the country was already inhabited by Canaanitish
tribes.[59]
We cannot, then, be certain that the aboriginal peoples of Moab and
Ammon were actually of the Amorite race. They were, it is true, included
by the Babylonians under the common name of ‘Amorites,’ but this was
because all the rest of the population of Southern Syria was known under
the same title. The fact, however, that the Hebrew writers have
described them as tall, like the Anakim, and that popular tradition
should have spoken of them as Rephaim or giants, is in favour of their
having been really of Amorite descent. In this case we may see in them
the easternmost representatives of the blond race, and the builders of
the cromlechs with which the hillsides of Moab are covered.
Southward of Moab came other tribes which, like the Ishmaelites, were
said to have sprung directly from Abraham himself. These were the
Midianites and the merchant tribes of Sheba and Dedan, who possessed
stations on the great desert road that led from the spice-bearing
regions of Southern Arabia to the borders of Canaan. They claimed to be
the descendants of Keturah, or ‘Incence,’ the second wife of the Hebrew
patriarch, after Sarah’s death. Another genealogy (Gen. x. 7) placed
Sheba and Dedan in the extreme south of the Arabian peninsula, among the
children of Cush. Both genealogies, however, are correct. Sheba was the
kingdom of the Sabæans, whose centre was in Southern Arabia, but whose
power and commerce extended far to the north. Their trading settlements
and garrisons were to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of Midian,
at Tema, the modern Teimah, and elsewhere.[60] If Professor Hommel is
right in identifying Dedan with Tidanum, one of the names by which
Palestine was known in early days to the natives of Babylonia, it would
seem that the Dedanites also had become a leading people on the
frontiers of Canaan. At all events, it is clear that Abraham was claimed
as an ancestor by the tribes of Western Arabia from its northern to its
southern extremity, by the descendants of Keturah on the western coast
and caravan-road, as well as by the Ishmaelites further to the east.
They represented the trading and more cultured population of the
peninsula as opposed to the wild Amalekites or Bedâwin hordes, who had
their home among the mountains of Seir and the desert south of
Palestine. The connection between Midian and Israel, which found
expression in a common ancestry, was reasserted in later days when the
great legislator of Israel fled to Midian and married the daughter of
its high-priest.
How nearly that connection had been lost through the death of the
forefather of the Israelitish people was recorded in the story of the
sacrifice of Isaac. A voice came to Abraham, which he believed to be
divine, bidding him offer ‘for a burnt-offering’ the son of his old age,
the heir of the covenant which had been made with him. It was a form of
sacrifice only too well known in Canaan. In time of pestilence or
trouble the parent was called upon to sacrifice to Baal that which was
dearest and nearest to him, his firstborn or his only son. The gods
themselves had set the example. Once when a plague had fallen upon the
land, El had clothed Yeud, his only son, in royal purple, and on one of
the high-places of Palestine had offered him up to the offended
deities.[61] The doctrine of vicarious sacrifice was deeply enrooted in
the minds of the Canaanitish people. But it needed to be a sacrifice
which cost the offerer almost as much as his own life. The fruit of his
own body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul. And the sacrifice
had to be by fire. Only through that purifying element could the stains
of sin and impurity be obliterated, and the offering made acceptable to
heaven.
The practice, horrible as it seems to us, was nevertheless founded on a
truth. The victim, if he were to be accepted, must be the most precious
that the offerer could present. The gods did not require that which cost
him nothing. It needed to be the most costly that could be given; it
needed to be also, in the words of the prophet, the fruit of the
sinner’s own body. Nothing else would suffice: the gods demanded the
firstborn son, still more the only son. In no other way could Baal be
satisfied that the sinner had repented of his guilt or had made to him
an offering which was of equal value to his own life.
The firstborn of all animals, of beasts as well as of men, was owed to
the gods. The belief was not confined to the Canaanites. We find traces
of it in Babylonian literature, and all the denunciations of the
prophets before the Exile failed to eradicate it from the mind of the
Jew. Up to the closing days of the Jewish monarchy, the valley of the
sons of Hinnom was defiled with the smoke of the sacrifices wherein, as
it is euphemistically said, the kings and people of Jerusalem made their
children to pass through the fire. The belief, indeed, was consecrated
by the Mosaic law itself. Human sacrifice, it is true, was forbidden,
but the firstborn, nevertheless, had to be redeemed (Exod. xxxiv. 20).
Like the firstfruits and the firstborn of beasts, Yahveh had declared
that the firstborn of the sons of Israel also belonged to Him (Exod.
xxii. 29). He could claim them, and it was of His own freewill that He
waived the claim. And along with this assertion of His claim to the
firstborn went the doctrine of vicarious punishment. It was not the
firstborn only in whose case a substitution was allowed: once a year the
sins of the whole people were laid upon the head of the scapegoat, which
was then driven like an evil spirit into the wilderness. The idea of
vicarious punishment, which lies at the foundation of historical
Christianity, had already found expression in the Mosaic law.
The sacrifice of the firstborn was thus part of a larger conception
behind which there lay a profound truth. The sins of the father were
visited upon the child in more senses than one; the child, in fact,
could become an expiation for them, and divert to himself the anger of
the gods. Experience had shown how often the son must suffer for the
deeds of the parent, and the inference was drawn that if that suffering
were voluntarily offered to heaven by the parent, he would receive all
the benefits that flowed from it. Moreover, the gods had a right to the
firstborn, if they chose to exercise it; and in offering the firstborn,
accordingly, man was only giving back to them what was strictly their
own.
The heathenism of the Mosaic age went no further. Israel was the first
to learn that the law of the substitution of the firstborn for the sins
of the father was subordinate to a higher and more general law—that of
vicarious punishment. As the firstborn of men could be substituted for
the parent, so, too, could a lower animal, or the price of a lower
animal, be substituted for the firstborn of men. It was not the
sacrifice which the God of Israel demanded, but the spirit of sacrifice;
not the blood of bulls and goats, or even men, but obedience and
readiness to give up all that was dearest and best at the command of
God.
The story of the sacrifice of Isaac was a practical illustration of the
lesson. Abraham was called upon to slay with his own hand his only
child, the son through whom he had believed that he would become the
ancestor of a mighty nation. He was summoned to lead him to one of those
high-places of Canaan where the deity seemed nearer to the worshipper
than in the plain below, and there, like the Phœnician god El, to offer
him up to his God. We are told how he set forth from Beer-sheba, on the
borders of the desert, and on the third day reached the sacred mountain
on whose summit the Canaanitish rite was to be celebrated. It was in
‘the land of Moriah,’ according to the reading of the Hebrew text, a
name which the chronicler (2 Chron. iii. 1) transfers to the
temple-mount at Jerusalem. But the Septuagint changes the name in the
books of Chronicles into that of ‘the mountain of Amoria’ or the
Amorites; while in Genesis the Greek translators must have read Moreh,
since the Hebrew word is rendered by ‘Highlands.’ Moreh is the
Babylonian Martu, the land of the Amorites, so that we need not be
surprised at finding the Syriac version boldly substituting ‘Amorites’
for the Masoretic ‘Moriah.’
In any case, the belief that the scene of Abraham’s sacrifice was the
spot whereon the Jewish temple afterwards stood went back to an early
date. When the book of Genesis assumed its present form it had already
become fixed in the Jewish mind. This is clear from the proverb quoted
to explain the name of Yahveh-yireh. ‘To this day,’ we are told, it was
said: ‘In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen.’ For the Jew there was
but one ‘mount of the Lord,’ that mountain whereon Yahveh revealed
Himself above the cherubim of the ark. It was ‘the hill of God,’ wherein
He desired to dwell (Ps. lxviii. 15), the seat of the sanctuary of
Yahveh the God of Israel. When the Samaritans set up on Gerizim their
rival temple to that of Jerusalem, it was necessary that the scene of
the sacrifice of the Hebrew patriarch should be transferred to the new
site. It was a proof how firm was the conviction that the temple-mount
had been consecrated to the sacrifice of the firstborn by the great
ancestor of the Israelitish family. The spot whereon the victims of the
Jewish ritual were offered up was the very spot to which Abraham had
been led by God that he might offer there the terrible sacrifice of his
only son. Its name had been given to it by Abraham, and this name found
its explanation in a saying that was current at Jerusalem about the
temple-mount.
The actual meaning of the name is not certain, nor indeed is the
original signification of the proverb itself. Already in the time of the
Septuagint translation the meaning of the latter was doubtful, and the
Greek translators have made the divine name the subject of the verb,
reading, ‘In the mountain the Lord was seen.’ But the fact that the
Chronicler calls the temple-mount Moriah shows that such a rendering was
not accepted in Jerusalem.
It may be that the name ‘mount of the Lord’ goes back, at all events in
substance, to patriarchal times. Among the places in Southern Palestine
conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Thothmes III., of the eighteenth
dynasty, and recorded on the temple walls of Karnak, is Har-el, ‘the
mountain of God.’[62] The names found in immediate connection with
Har-el indicate that its site is to be sought in the neighbourhood of
Jerusalem; and as the name of Jerusalem itself does not occur in the
Pharaoh’s list of his conquests, it is probable that we are to see in it
the future capital of Judah. As we now know from the Tel el-Amarna
tablets, Jerusalem was an important city of Canaan long before the
Mosaic age; it was, moreover, the centre of a district which had been
conquered by the Egyptians, and its ruler was a vassal of the Egyptian
monarch. It is therefore difficult to account for the omission of any
reference to it in the catalogue of the conquests of the Pharaoh except
upon the supposition that it is really mentioned among them, though
under another name.
The distance that separates Jerusalem from Beer-sheba would correspond
with the three days’ journey of Abraham to the destined place of
sacrifice. It was on the third day that Abraham lifted up his eyes ‘and
saw the place afar off.’ The main, in fact, the only, argument of any
weight that has been urged against the identification is the fact that
the place of sacrifice seems to have been a desert spot. No spectators
are mentioned as present, and close to it was a thicket in which a ram
was caught by the horns. How can such solitude, it is asked, be
reconciled with the existence of a city in the same spot? How can the
deserted high-place whereon the patriarch raised the altar of sacrifice
for his son be identical with the fortress-city of which Melchizedek was
king?
At first sight the difficulty seems overwhelming. But we must remember
that nothing is said in the narrative about the place being desert and
remote from men, nor even that it was not within the walls of a city.
And we must further remember that the temple of Solomon itself was built
on what had been the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Before the
age of Solomon, therefore, the place must have been open and free from
buildings; it must, too, have been a level platform of rock on the
summit of the hill where the winds could freely play and scatter the
chaff when the grain was threshed. Such open spaces are not infrequent
in Oriental cities, and the visitor sometimes finds himself suddenly
emerging out of close and crowded lanes into a growth of rank brushwood
and weeds.
It is true that in the books of Samuel, where we are told how the
threshing-floor of the Jebusite came to be chosen as the site of the
temple, no allusion is made to Abraham’s sacrifice. Another reason is
assigned for the choice of the spot. But Oriental modes of writing
history are not the same as ours, and the so-called argument from
silence is worthless when applied to them. Archæological discovery has
shown, time after time, that facts and references are passed over in
silence by the writers of ancient Oriental history, not because the
writers did not know them, but because their conception of history was
different from ours.
Mount Moriah, then, may well have been the scene of that temptation of
Abraham when, in accordance with the fierce ritual of Syria, he believed
himself called upon to offer up in sacrifice his only son. At all
events, the belief that it was so can be traced back to an early date
among the Jews. The very fact that the Samaritans transported the place
of sacrifice to Mount Gerizim proves that it had already been associated
with the site of the temple, and the transference of the site was
necessary in support of the claim that the true centre of Hebrew worship
was at Samaria and not in Jerusalem.
Light has been cast on the substitution of a ram for the human victim by
an acute observation of M. Clermont-Ganneau.[63] We know that human
sacrifice occupied a prominent place in the ritual of Phœnicia and
Carthage; and yet in the so-called sacrificial tariffs which have been
discovered at Carthage and Marseilles, and in which the price is stated
of each of the offerings demanded by the gods, there is absolute silence
in regard to it. The place of the human victim is taken by the _ayîl_,
the ‘ram’ of the book of Genesis.[64] The tariffs of Carthage and
Marseilles belong to that later period of Phœnician religion, when
contact with the Greeks had introduced Western ideas of the value of
human life, and a truer conception of what the gods required. The
merchants of Carthage had learned that Baal would be satisfied with a
victim less costly than man, and would accept instead of him the blood
of rams.
The lesson which the Carthaginians learned from contact with the Greeks
had been taught the ancestors of the Hebrews by the Lord. The Law and
the Prophets alike protested against the old belief, hard as it was to
eradicate it from the Semitic mind. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter
stands alone, even in the troublous period of the Judges; the sacrifice
of his eldest son by the king of Moab (2 Kings iii. 27), though it
stayed the Israelitish attack, was the act of one who did not
acknowledge Yahveh of Israel as his God; and the Jewish children who
were burnt in the fire to Moloch were offered by renegades from the
national faith. Israelitish law and history bear upon them the traces of
the old Semitic custom, but they are traces only. The story of Abraham’s
sacrifice is an antitype of the future history of the religion of
Israel. The firstborn, indeed, belonged to Yahveh, if He chose to claim
them; but, unlike the gods of the heathen, He did not claim them when
they were the firstborn of man.
Once again we have a picture of Abraham; but this time it is not as the
shêkh who conforms to the beliefs and practices of Canaan, but as a
foreign prince who acquires land in the country of his adoption. Sarah
is dead, and Abraham accordingly buys a field at Machpelah in the close
neighbourhood of Hebron. The field included a portion of the limestone
cliff which overlooked the city, and was pierced then, as now, by
numerous cavities, partly natural, partly excavated by the hand of man.
They were the burying-places of the inhabitants of the town, the
chambered tombs in which the dead were laid to rest. That Abraham should
choose Hebron as the future home and resting-place of his family was
perhaps natural. It was here that he had lived when he first came, as an
immigrant, into ‘the land of the Amorites’; it was here that he had been
confederate with its Amorite chieftains, and had led his forces against
the invading host of the king of Elam. Moreover, Hebron was one of the
old centres of Canaan. It had been built seven years before Zoan in
Egypt (Numb. xiii. 22), perhaps in the age when the Hyksos kings first
conquered Egypt and rebuilt Zoan, making it the capital of their new
kingdom. The sanctuary of Hebron rivalled that of Jerusalem in sanctity
and fame, at all events in the years immediately succeeding the
Israelitish conquest, and it was at Hebron that David first established
his power and his son Absalom matured his rebellion.
In the age of Abraham the city had not yet received its later name of
Hebron, the ‘Confederacy.’ It was still known as Kirjath-Arba, and the
district in which it stood was that of Mamre. Amorites and Hittites
dwelt there side by side. Arba, we are told, was ‘a great man among the
Amorite Anakim’ (Josh. xiv. 15), but it was from ‘the sons of Heth’ that
the field of Machpelah was bought.
Critics have raised the question who these Hittites of Southern
Palestine may have been. It has been asserted that they are the
invention of a later Hebrew writer, and that the Hittites of Northern
Syria were never settled in the south of Canaan. On the other hand, the
veracity of the Hebrew record has been admitted, but the identity of
‘the sons of Heth’ with the great Hittite tribes of the north has been
denied.
The critics, however, have no grounds for their scepticism. The book of
Genesis does not stand alone in testifying to the existence of Hittites
in Southern Palestine. The prophet Ezekiel does the same. He too tells
us that the origin of Jerusalem was partly Amorite, partly Hittite.
Indeed, throughout the Pentateuch it is assumed that Hittites and
Amorites were mingled together in the mountainous parts of the country.
‘The Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites,’ it is said in the
book of Numbers (xiii. 29), ‘dwell in the mountains,’ and the same
combination of names in the same order is found in the geographical
table of Genesis (x. 15, 16). Between these Hittites and the Hittites of
the north no distinction is made in the Old Testament. ‘The land of the
Hittites,’ mentioned in Judg. i. 26, into which the Canaanite betrayer
of Beth-el made his way, was in the north, like the Hittite kingdoms
whose princes are referred to in 2 Kings vii. 6.
Thanks to archæological discovery, we now know a good deal about these
Hittites of Northern Syria. Their name is found on the monuments of
Egypt, of Assyria, and of Armenia, and they are mentioned in Babylonian
tablets which go back to the age of Abraham. Cappadocia was their
earliest home; from hence they descended on the possessions of the
Aramæans and established their power as far south as the Lake of Homs.
The cuneiform inscriptions of Armenia in the ninth century B.C. describe
them as on the Upper Euphrates in the neighbourhood of Malatiyeh, and
the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) tells us that
Carchemish was one of their capitals. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we
hear of their growing power on the northern frontier of the Egyptian
empire, of their intrigues with the Amorites and the people of Canaan,
and of their steady advance to the south. Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the
Oppression, after twenty years of warfare, was glad to conclude peace on
equal terms with ‘the great king of the Hittites.’ The Hittite capital
was already so near the northern border of Palestine as Kadesh on the
Orontes ‘in the land of the Amorites.’ Here the Hittite monarch gathered
together his vassals and allies from Syria and Asia Minor; even the
distant Lycians and Dardanians came at his call.
The Egyptian artists have left us portraits of the Hittite race. Their
features and dress were alike peculiar, and both reappear without change
on certain monuments which have been found in Asia Minor and Syria, thus
fixing the character of the latter beyond dispute. The monuments are
covered with a still undeciphered system of hieroglyphic writing, and
among the hieroglyphs are numerous human heads with the strange profile
of the Hittite face. The nose and upper jaw protrude, the forehead is
high and receding, the cheeks smooth, while we learn from the paintings
of Egypt that the skin was yellow and the hair and the eyes were black.
The hair was gathered together in a kind of ‘pig-tail,’ and the feet
were shod with the shoes of mountaineers, the toes of which rose upwards
into a point.[65]
Why should not a body of Hittites have settled in Southern Palestine,
and there have been, as it were, interlocked with the older Amorite
inhabitants, as they were according to the testimony of the Egyptian
inscriptions at Kadesh on the Lake of Homs? Indeed, there is indirect
evidence that such was really the case.
Thothmes III., who conquered Syria for the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty,
tells us that he received tribute from the king of ‘the greater Hittite
land.’ There was then a lesser Hittite land; and as the ‘greater Hittite
land’ was in the north, it is reasonable to look for the lesser land in
the south. Half a century later, at a time when the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence was being carried on, the Hittites were actively
interfering in the internal politics of Canaan; and in one of the
bas-reliefs of Ramses II. at Karnak the vanquished population of
Ashkelon—in the near neighbourhood of Hebron—is represented with the
peculiar Hittite type of face.[66] At a still earlier date, when the
Assyrians first became acquainted with Western Asia, the dominant people
there were the Hittites. In the Assyrian inscriptions, accordingly, the
whole of Syria, including Palestine, came to be known as ‘the land of
the Hittites.’ Shalmaneser II. even speaks of Ahab of Israel and Baasha
of Ammon as ‘Hittite’ kings.[67] ‘The land of the Hittites’ in the
Assyrian texts thus corresponds with the ‘land of the Amorites’ in the
texts of Babylonia. Just as Canaan was ‘the land of the Amorites’ to the
Babylonian of the age of Abraham, so too it was ‘the land of the
Hittites’ to the Assyrian of the age of Moses. Before Assyria had become
acquainted with the shores of the Mediterranean, the Hittites had taken
the place of the Amorites and become the leading power in the West.
There is, therefore, nothing antecedently improbable in the existence in
Southern Palestine of Hittites of the genuine northern stock. But the
name may also be due to the Assyrian use of it at the time when the
narrative in the book of Genesis was written. The use of the term
‘Amorite’ in several passages of the Pentateuch is certainly of
Babylonian origin, and takes us back to the age when all the natives of
Palestine were alike included in it; it may be that the ‘Hittites’ of
Hebron and Jerusalem owe their title to a similar adoption of a foreign
term. If so, the Amorites and Hittites were equally one people; but
whereas the name of ‘Amorite’ comes from Babylonia and indicates an
earlier date for the sources of the narrative in which it occurs, the
name of ‘Hittite’ points to Assyria and the Assyrian epoch of Asiatic
history.
Against this is the Babylonian colouring of the story of Abraham’s
dealings with the children of Heth. During the last few years thousands
of contract-tablets have been discovered in Babylonia which belong to
the age of Abraham or to a still earlier period. And these tablets show
that in the account of the purchase of the field of Machpelah we have a
faithful picture of such transactions as they were conducted at the time
in the cities of Babylonia. It reads, in fact, like one of the cuneiform
documents which have been unearthed from Babylonian soil. It is
conformed to the law and procedure of Babylonia as they were in the
patriarchal age. At a later date the law and procedure were altered, and
a narrative in which they are embodied must therefore go back to a
pre-Mosaic antiquity. It must belong to the Babylonian and not to the
Assyrian epoch.
That the law and custom of Babylonia should have prevailed in Canaan is
no longer surprising. The same contract-tablets which have revealed to
us the commercial and social life of primitive Chaldæa have also shown
us that colonies of ‘Amorite’ or Canaanitish merchants were settled in
Babylonia, where they enjoyed numerous rights and privileges, and could
acquire land and other property. There were special districts called
‘Amorite’ allotted to them, one of which was just outside the walls of
the city of Sippara. They had judges of their own, and where disputes
arose between themselves and the native Babylonians the case was tried
before both the ‘Amorite’ and the native courts. These foreign settlers
could act as witnesses in trials that concerned only Babylonians, and
could even rise to high offices of state. It must be remembered,
however, that the Babylonian kings claimed to be kings also of ‘the land
of the Amorites,’ and that consequently the natives of Canaan were as
much subjects of the rulers of Chaldæa as the Babylonians themselves.
Through the Canaanitish colonies in Babylonia a knowledge of Babylonian
law was necessarily communicated to the commercial world of the West.
Moreover, Babylonian rule brought with it Babylonian culture and law as
well. The ‘Amorites’ when the Babylonians first met with them were
doubtless in a semi-barbarous condition, and their subsequent culture,
as we now know, was wholly Babylonian. A very important part of this
culture, at all events in the eyes of the trading world, was the law of
Babylonia, more especially in its relation to contracts. That the
purchase of the field of Machpelah should have been conducted with all
the formalities to which Abraham had been accustomed in his Chaldæan
home, is consequently what archæological discovery has informed us ought
to have been the case.
A simple form of contract for the sale and purchase of landed property
in Babylonia is to be found in one that was drawn up in the reign of
Eri-Aku or Arioch. It is written in Sumerian, the old legal language of
Chaldæa, as Latin was the legal language of Europe in the Middle Ages,
and runs as follows:—‘One and five-sixths _sar_[68] of a terrace with a
house upon it, bounded on three sides by the house of Abil-Sin, and on
the fourth side by the street, has been purchased by Sin-uzilli the son
of Tsili-Istar from Sin-illatsu the son of Nannar-arabit: 2-½ shekels of
silver he has weighed as its full price. In days to come Sin-illatsu
shall never make any claim in regard to the house or dispute the title.
The (contracting parties) have sworn by the names of Sin, Samas, and
king Eri-Aku. Witnessed by Abu-ilisu the son of Tsili-Istar, Abil-Sin
the son of Uruki-bansum, Nur-Amurri the son of Abi-idinnam, Ibku-Urra,
son of Nabi-ilisu, and Sin-semê his brother. The seals of the witnesses
(are attached).’[69]
Still more insight into the character and procedure of Babylonian
commercial law is given by the record of a case of disputed property
which came before the judges in the reign of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel.
The following is a translation of it:—‘Concerning the garden of
Sin-magir which Naid-Amurri bought for silver, but to which Ilu-bani
laid claim on the ground that he had bred horses there. They went before
the judges, and the judges took them to the gate of the goddess
Nin-Martu (the mistress of the land of the Amorites), and to the judges
of the gate of Nin-Martu Ilu-bani thus declared in the gate of
Nin-Martu: I am indeed the son of Sin-magir; he adopted me as his son;
the sealed documents (recording the fact) he never destroyed. Thus he
declared, and under (king) Eri-Aku they adjudged the garden and house to
Ilu-bani. Then came Sin-mubalidh and claimed the garden of Ilu-bani; so
they went before the judges, and the judges (said): To us and the elders
they have been taken, and must stand in the gate of the gods Merodach,
Sussa, Sin, Khusa, and Nin-Martu the daughter of Merodach ... and the
elders who have already appeared in the case of Naid-Amurri have heard
Ilu-bani declare in the gate of Nin-Martu that “I am indeed the son (of
Sin-magir)”; accordingly, they adjudged the garden and house to
Ilu-bani. Sin-mubalidh cannot come again and make a claim. Oaths have
been sworn by the names of Sin, Samas, Merodach, and king Khammu-rabi.
Witnessed by Sin-imguranni the noble, Elilka-Sin, Abil-irzitim, Ubarrum,
Zanbil-arad-Sin, Akhiya, Bel-dugul (?), Samas-bani the son of
Abid-rakhas, Zanik-pisu, Izkur-Ea the major-domo, and Bau-ila. The seals
of the witnesses (are attached). The 4th day of the month Tammuz, the
year when Khammu-rabi the king offered prayers to Tasmit.’[70]
It is needless to quote other documents of a similar nature, unless it
be to add that when a field or garden is sold, the palms and other trees
planted in it are carefully specified. So they were also in the case of
the field of Machpelah. Here, too, the transaction took place before the
‘elders’ of the city, at ‘the gate’ through which the people entered,
and it was duly witnessed by ‘the children of Heth.’[71] The fact that
‘a stranger and a sojourner’ could thus acquire landed property and hand
it down to his descendants was in strict accordance with Babylonian law.
As the Canaanite in Babylonia could buy land and leave it to his
children, so too the Babylonian in Canaan could do the same. Even the
technical words used in recording the deed of sale are of Babylonian
origin. The shekel is the Babylonian _siqlu_, and the Babylonian was the
first who spoke of ‘weighing silver’ in the sense of ‘paying money.’[72]
The statement that the shekels were ‘current with the merchant’ takes us
back to those Babylonian ‘merchants’ who played so great a part in the
early Babylonian world. It was for them that Dungi, king of Ur, long
before the birth of Abraham, had fixed the monetary standard which
remained in use down to the later days of the Chaldæan monarchy. He had
determined by law the weight and value of the maneh, of which the
sixtieth part was a shekel, and only those manehs and shekels which
conformed to it could be accepted by the Babylonian trader. The words of
Genesis are a curious indication of the period of society to which they
must belong.[73]
There was evolution in Babylonian law as in the law of all other
countries; and though the early contracts remained a model for those of
a later epoch, their style and form underwent change. The Assyrian and
later Babylonian contracts resemble them, it is true, in their main
outlines; but they have become more complicated, and the older
phraseology is altered in many respects. The ‘elders’ no longer appear
as witnesses; it is no longer needful to try cases of disputed title at
the various gates of the city; and it is questionable whether foreigners
could claim the same rights in regard to possessions in land that they
did in the days of Amraphel and Arioch. The sale of the field of
Machpelah belongs essentially to the early Babylonian and not to the
Assyrian period.
It is only fragments of the life of Abraham that are brought before us
in the pages of Genesis. They are like a series of pictures which have
been saved from the shipwreck of the past. And the pictures are not
always painted in the same colours. At one time the patriarch appears as
‘a mighty prince,’ as a rich and cultured Chaldæan immigrant, with armed
bands of warriors under him with whom he can venture to attack even the
army of the king of Elam. He is the confederate of the Amorite
chieftains, the prince whom the Hittites of Hebron hear with respect.
But at another time the colours on the canvas seem quite different. When
the angels warn the patriarch of the approaching overthrow of the cities
of the plain, they find him in the tent of a Bedâwi, leading the simple
life of an uncultured nomad, and preparing the food of his guests with
his own hands. Between this Bedâwi shêkh and the companion of the king
of Gerar or the Pharaoh of Egypt the contrast is indeed great.
To the Western mind, however, the contrast is greater than it would be
to the Oriental. The traveller in the East is well acquainted with
wealthy Bedâwin shêkhs who live in the desert in barbaric simplicity,
but, nevertheless, have their houses at Cairo or Damascus, where they
indulge in all the luxury and splendour of Oriental life. Moreover, the
narratives which have been combined in the book of Genesis do not all
come from the same source. Some of them have been taken from written
historical documents which breathe the atmosphere of the cultured city,
of the educated scribe, and the luxurious court. Others, derived it may
be from oral tradition, are filled with the spirit of the wanderer in
the desert, and set before us the simple life and rude fare of the
dweller in tents. The history of the patriarchs is, in fact, like
Joseph’s coat of many colours. It is a series of pictures rather than a
homogeneous whole. The materials of which it is composed differ widely
in both character and origin. Some of them can be shown to have been
contemporaneous with the events they record; some again to have been
like the tales of their old heroes recounted by the nomad Arabs in the
days before Islam as they sat at night round their camp-fires. The
details and spirit of the story have necessarily caught the colour of
the medium through which they have passed. The life of Abraham,
doubtless, presented the contrasts still presented by that of a rich
Bedâwi shêkh; at one time spent in the wild freedom and privations of
the desert; at another amid the luxuries and culture of the town; but
the contrasts have been heightened by the difference in the sources
through which they have been handed down. Naturally, while the scribe
would record only those phases of Abraham’s history which brought him
into contact with the great world of kings and princes, of war and
trade, the nomad reciter of ancient stories would dwell rather on such
parts of it as he and his hearers could understand. For them Abraham
would become a desert-wanderer like themselves.
This difference in the sources of the narrative explains why it is that
the figure of Abraham so largely overshadows that of his son Isaac.
Isaac seems almost swallowed up in that darkness of antiquity through
which the figure of his father looms so largely. Apart from his dispute
with Abimelech of Gerar, which reads like a repetition of the dispute
between Abimelech and Abraham, there is little told of the life of Isaac
which is not connected with his more famous father or son. Between
Abraham and Jacob, the great ancestors of Israel, Isaac seems to
intervene as merely a connecting link.
But the life of Isaac was that of a Bedâwi shêkh. The other side of his
father’s life and character was lost. The forefather of Israel had
ceased to be a Chaldæan, and had become simply a dweller in the desert,
like the fugitive slaves from Egypt in after days. Even Hebron was left,
and the life of Isaac was mainly passed on the northern edge of that
desert in which his descendants were in later times to receive the Law.
If he approached Canaan, it was only to Beer-sheba and Gerar on the
southern skirts of Canaanitish territory, where the Bedâwin and their
flocks still claimed to be masters. But his chief residence was further
south, in the very heart of the wilderness.
Isaac was thus essentially a Bedâwi, a fit type of the phase of life
through which the Israelites were destined to pass before their conquest
of the Promised Land. With the politics and trade of the civilised
world, accordingly, he never came into contact. There was nothing in his
existence for the historian to chronicle; nothing which could bring his
name into the written history of the time. If his memory were to be
preserved at all, it could be only through the unwritten traditions of
the desert, through the tales told of him among the desert tribes.
Once indeed, it is said, he had relations with a king. The king was one
of those Canaanitish princelets with whose names the Tel el-Amarna
tablets are filled. The dominions of Abimelech of Gerar were of small
extent, and must have been barren in the extreme. The site of Gerar lies
two hours south of Gaza,[74] and the territory of its king extended
eastward as far as Beer-sheba. It was essentially a desert territory:
during the greater part of the year the whole country is bare and
sterile; only after rain does the wilderness break forth suddenly into
green herbage.
In the story of Isaac’s dispute with Abimelech the writer of Genesis
calls him ‘king of the Philistines,’ and speaks of his subjects as
‘Philistines.’ This, however, is an accommodation to the geography of a
later day. In the age of the patriarchs the south-eastern corner of
Palestine has not as yet been occupied by the Philistine immigrants. We
have learned from the Egyptian monuments that they were pirates from the
islands and coasts of the Greek Seas who did not seize upon the frontier
cities of Southern Canaan until the time of the Pharaoh Meneptah, the
son of Ramses II. Up to then, for more than three centuries, the
frontier cities had been garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and included in
the Egyptian empire. It was not till the period of the Exodus that the
district passed into Philistine hands, and the old road into Egypt by
the sea-coast became known as ‘the way of the Philistines.’
In speaking of the ‘Philistines,’ therefore, the writer of the book of
Genesis is speaking proleptically. And in reading the narrative of
Isaac’s dealings with Abimelech by the side of that of Abraham’s
dealings with the same king, it is difficult to resist the conclusion
that we have before us two versions of the same event. Doubtless,
history repeats itself; disputes about the possession of wells in a
desert-land can frequently recur, and it is possible that two kings of
the same name may have followed one another on the throne of Gerar. But
what does not seem very possible is that each of these kings should have
had a ‘chief captain of his host’ called by the strange non-Semitic name
of Phichol (Gen. xxi. 22; xxvi. 26); that each of them should have taken
the wife of the patriarch, believing her to be his sister; or that
Beer-sheba should twice have received the same name from the oaths sworn
over it.
When we compare the two versions together, it is not difficult to see
which of them is the more original. It is in the second that Abimelech
is called ‘king of the Philistines’; in the first he is correctly
entitled ‘king of Gerar.’ Abraham was justified in calling Sarah his
sister; there was no ground and no reason for Isaac doing the same in
the case of his own wife. Moreover, Beer-sheba had already received its
name from Abraham, who had planted there an _êshel_ or tamarisk, and
‘called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.’
The wife of Isaac was brought from Harran, from the members of Abraham’s
race who had settled in Northern Syria, and there become an Aramæan
family. She was the daughter of Bethuel, ‘the house of God,’ a proper
name which is found in the Tel el-Amarna letters, where it also belongs
to a native of Northern Syria.[75] Bethuel is the older form of Bethel,
that anointed stone which, according to Semitic belief, was the special
residence of divinity. There was something peculiarly appropriate in
such a name at Harran, where the great temple of the Moon-god, the ‘Baal
of Harran,’ was itself a Beth-el on a large scale.
That Isaac should have lived all his life long in the southern desert,
and that his name should have been associated with none of the ancient
sanctuaries of Canaan, Beer-sheba alone excepted, is perhaps curious
when we bear in mind a passage in the prophecies of Amos (vii. 9), where
it is with Northern Israel and not with Judah that the name of the
patriarch is connected. Isaac, however, was as much the forefather of
the Israelites of Samaria as he was of those of Jerusalem; and the use
of his name by the prophet shows only that he was no mere Jewish hero,
but was regarded as an ancestor of the whole Israelitish nation. For the
whole of Israel, Isaac was no less historical than Abraham or Jacob.
That Isaac’s dwelling-place should have been in the desert of the south
agrees well with the fact that he was the father of Edom as well as of
Israel. He thus lived on the borderland of the two peoples who
afterwards boasted of their descent from him.
Esau, from whom the Edomites traced their origin, was the elder of his
two twin sons. The name has been connected with that of the Phœnician
deity Usous, but Usous is really the eponymous god of the city of Usu,
in the neighbourhood of Tyre. Esau took possession of the mountains of
Seir. Here he partly absorbed, partly destroyed the older races, the
Amalekites or Bedâwin whose descendants still prowl among the wadis of
Edom, and the Horites whom a somewhat doubtful etymology would turn into
Troglodytes or dwellers in caves. Edom itself, the ‘Red’ land, took its
name from the red hue of its cliffs. It was a name which went back to a
remote antiquity, for among the Egyptians also the desert-country which
stretched away eastward into Edom was known as Desher, ‘the Red.’ The
punning etymology in Genesis (xxv. 30) preserves a recollection of the
true origin of the name.
The territories of Esau extended southward to the head of the Gulf of
Aqaba. Here were the towns of Elath and Eziongeber, through which the
merchandise of the Indian Ocean was conveyed northward, enriching the
merchants and princes of Edom in its passage through their land. To the
north Edom was in touch with the peoples of Canaan. The wives of Esau,
we are told, were ‘of the daughters of Canaan’ (Gen. xxxvi. 2); one of
them at least was Hittite, and another, according to one account (Gen.
xxvi. 34), bore the name of the ‘Jewess.’ But other wives were taken
from the tribes of Arabia. Bashemath was the daughter of Ishmael and
sister of a Nabathean chief, while Aholibamah was the daughter of a
Horite who belonged to the primeval race of Seir.
Like the Ishmaelites, like the Israelites themselves, it was long before
the Edomites submitted to the rule of a king. At first they were divided
into tribes, each of them under a shêkh. In Israel the shêkhs were
entitled ‘judges,’ a title borrowed from the Canaanite population; in
Edom they bore the name of _alûphim_, which the Authorised Version
renders by ‘dukes.’[76] The old name still survived down to the time of
the Exodus, as we may gather from its use in the Song of Moses (Exod.
xv. 15). But when the wanderings in the wilderness were almost over, and
Israel was preparing to invade Palestine, the ‘dukes’ of Edom had
already been superseded by kings. It was a ‘king of Edom’ to whom Moses
sent messengers from Kadesh praying for a ‘passage through his border,’
and it was a king of Edom who refused the request. But the ancient
spirit of independence still lingered; and, as we may gather from the
extract from the Edomite chronicles preserved in Gen. xxxvi., the
monarchy was elective. The son never succeeded the father on the throne,
the royal dignity passed from one division of the kingdom to the other,
and each city in turn became the capital.[77]
Though Esau was the elder, the birthright passed to the younger brother.
Israelitish tradition knew of more than one occurrence which accounted
for this. It was told how Esau had sold his birthright for a mess of
pottage; it was also told how it had been stolen from him by the craft
of his brother Jacob. Naturally, the first tradition was more favoured
in Israel, the second in Edom, and the union of the two in the book of
Genesis is a proof of the diligence with which the writer of it has
gathered together all that was known of the past of his people as well
as the impartiality with which he has used his materials. Perhaps both
stories owed their preservation to the play upon words which was
connected with them. The ‘red’ pottage served to explain the name of
Edom, the craft of the younger son the name of Jacob.[78]
Upon the real origin of the latter name, however, recent discovery has
thrown light. It is the third person singular of a verb, and is formed
like numerous names of the same class in Arabic and Assyrian. But the
third person singular of a verb implies a nominative, and the nominative
was originally a divine name or title. In familiar use the nominative
came to be dropped, and the shortened form of the name to be alone
employed. The older form of the name Jacob has now been recovered from
the monuments of Babylonia and Egypt. Among the Canaanites who appear as
witnesses to Babylonian contracts of the age of Khammu-rabi, Mr. Pinches
has found a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el, ‘God will recompense,’ ‘God will
add.’[79] The same names, though written a little differently,[80] are
met with in contracts earlier than the time of Moses, which have been
discovered near Kaisariyeh, in Cappadocia, and are inscribed on clay
tablets in cuneiform characters and in a Babylonian dialect. We can thus
trace them from the primitive home of Abraham to the neighbourhood of
that Aramæan district of Northern Mesopotamia in which his father
settled.
But this is not all. Among the places in Palestine conquered by Thothmes
III. of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and recorded on the walls of
his temple at Karnak, we find a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el. In Canaan,
therefore, the names were already current; it may even be that in the
town of Jacob-el we have a reminiscence of the patriarch, in Joseph-el a
connection with the ancestor of the ‘House of Joseph.’ At all events,
the name of Joseph-el follows immediately after that of the ‘Har’ or
‘Mountain’ of Ephraim, while that of Jacob-el is placed in the
neighbourhood of Hebron.[81]
The name of Jacob-el can be carried still further back than the age of
Thothmes III., further back probably than the age of the patriarch
himself. There are Egyptian scarabs which bear the name of a Pharaoh
called Jacob-el. The first part of the name is written just as it would
be in Hebrew, and the Pharaoh is given all the titles of a legitimate
Egyptian king. On one he is ‘the good God,’ on another ‘the son of the
Sun,’ and ‘the giver of life.’ The scarabs belong to the period of the
Hyksos, and in the Pharaoh Jacob-el we must accordingly see one of those
Hyksos conquerors from Asia who ruled over Egypt for so many centuries.
There was thus a Jacob in Egypt before the patriarch migrated there, and
he belonged to that Hyksos race under whom Joseph rose to the highest
honours of the state.[82]
The shortened form of the name is also found in the Babylonian texts;
and it is probable that Egibi, the founder of the great banking and
trading firm which carried on business in Babylonia down to the time of
the Persian kings, had a name which is identical with it. At any rate
the older forms of both ‘Jacob’ and ‘Joseph’ show that ‘Isaac’ too must
be an abbreviation from an earlier ‘Isaac-el’ (_Yitskhaq-êl_). ‘God
smileth’ would have been the primitive signification of the word.
The craft of Jacob was the cause of his flight to his mother’s family in
Padan-Aram. He thus became that ‘wandering Aramæan’ of whom we read in
Deuteronomy (xxvi. 5). On his way he rested at the great Beth-el of
Central Palestine, and there in a vision beheld the angels of God
ascending and descending the steps of limestone that were piled one upon
the other to the gates of heaven.[83] There, too, he poured oil upon the
sacred stone and consecrated it to the deity, and future generations
revered it as a veritable Beth-el or ‘House of God.’
The name, in fact, we are told, was given to it by Jacob himself. ‘If I
come again to my father’s house in peace,’ he said, ‘then shall Yahveh
be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s
house; and of all that Thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth
unto Thee.’ The vow was in accordance with a Canaanitish custom which
had originally come from Babylonia. From time immemorial the Babylonian
temples had been supported by the tenth or tithe, which was levied on
both king and people: it was not thought that the gods were asking too
much when they demanded the tenth of the income which had been given to
man by themselves. Among the Babylonian contract-tablets there are
several which relate to the payment of the tithe as well as to the gifts
that were made to a Bit-ili or Beth-el.[84]
Jacob’s vow was performed, at least in part, when once more he returned
to Canaan. Then again ‘God appeared to him’ and changed the patriarch’s
name. Then again, too, ‘he set up a pillar of stone; and he poured a
drink-offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon. And Jacob called the
name of the place where God spake with him Beth-el.’ This second account
of the naming of the place doubtless comes from a different source from
that which recorded Jacob’s dream, and is the account which was known to
Hosea, the prophet of the northern kingdom. Modern critics have alleged
that it is inconsistent with the first, and that consequently neither
the one nor the other is historical. The compiler of the book of
Genesis, however, thought otherwise; he has made no attempt to smooth
over what the European scholar declares to be inconsistencies, and which
therefore cannot have seemed inconsistencies to him. The Oriental mode
of writing history, it must once more be remarked, is not the same as
ours; and as it is with the ancient East that we are now concerned, it
would be wiser to follow the judgment of the writer of Genesis than that
of his European critics.
At Harran Jacob served his cousin Laban ‘for a wife, and for a wife he
kept sheep.’ Such contracts of voluntary service are to be found in the
Babylonian tablets of the age of Khammu-rabi and his predecessors. It
was not at all unusual for a slave to be hired out to another master for
a definite period of time; it sometimes happened that the master himself
hired out his own services in a similar way.[85] In Babylonia the work
was partly pastoral, partly agricultural; the semi-Bedâwi Jacob was a
herdsman only. His cousin Laban bore a name which was also that of an
Assyrian deity; and it may not be a mere coincidence that when
Nabonidos, the last king of Babylonia, restored the great temple of the
moon-god at Harran, he tells us that he began the task ‘by the art of
the god Laban, the god of foundations and brickwork.’[86]
The two daughters of Laban bore names which had a familiar sound to the
ear of a herdsman. Rachel means ‘ewe’; Leah is the Assyrian _li’tu_, ‘a
cow.’ It is needless to recount the well-known story of the wooing of
the younger daughter, and of the efforts made by Laban to retain Jacob
in his service and marry both the sisters to him. Craft was met by
craft; but in the end the ancestor of Israel proved more than a match
for the wily Syrian. His cattle and riches multiplied like the children
who were born to him, and a time came when the sons of Laban began to
view with envy the poor relative who was robbing them of their
patrimony. So Jacob fled, before harm had come to him, carrying with him
his wives and children and all the wealth he had accumulated. Laban
pursued and succeeded in overtaking the heavily-weighted caravan at the
very spot where the frontiers of Aram and Canaan met together. There the
cairn of stones was raised in which later generations saw a memorial of
the pact that had been sworn between Jacob and his father-in-law.
Henceforth the tie with Aram was broken: the wives of Jacob forgot the
home of their father and looked to Canaan instead of Aram as the native
land of their race. Over the cairn of Gilead the forefathers of Israel
forswore for ever their Aramæan ties.
But Rachel had carried with her her father’s teraphim, those household
gods on whose cult the welfare of the family seemed to depend. What they
were like we may gather from the teraphim of David, which Michal placed
on the couch of her husband, and so deceived the messengers of Saul (1
Sam. xix. 13-16). They must have had the shape of a man, and, at all
events in the case of those of David, must have also been about a man’s
size. Like the ephod and the Urim and Thummim, they were consulted as
oracles (Zech. x. 2), and their use lingered among the Jews as late as
the period of the Captivity. When Hosea depicts the coming desolation of
Israel, he describes it as a time when ‘the children of Israel shall
abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a
sacrifice, and without a sacred pillar, and without an ephod and
teraphim’ (Hos. iii. 4).
The final break between Jacob and the Aramæan portion of Terah’s family
was marked by a change of name. From henceforth Jacob was to be
distinctively the father of the children of Israel. He and his
descendants were severed from the rest of their kinsmen whether in
Padan-Aram, in Edom, or in the lands beyond the Jordan. Abraham had been
the ‘father of many nations’; Jacob was to be the father of but one—of
that chosen people to whom the character and worship of Yahveh were
revealed.
We read of him in Hosea (xii. 3, 4), ‘By his strength he had power with
God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed.’ What the
Authorised Version translates ‘had power’ is _sârâh_ and _yâsar_ in
Hebrew. The story of the mysterious struggle is told in full in the book
of Genesis. The long caravan of Jacob had arrived at length at Mahanaim,
‘the two camps’ by the stream of the Jabbok, and from thence he sent
messengers to his brother, who had already established his power in the
mountains of Seir. In after days the name of the place was connected
with the strange occurrence that there befel the patriarch. He was
visited by the angels of God, nay, by God Himself. In the visions of the
night he wrestled with one whom, when morning dawned, he believed to
have been his God. He had seen God, as it were, face to face, and a
popular etymology saw in the fact an explanation of the name of Peniel.
When Hosea wrote his prophecies, the belief was too well established
that man cannot ‘see God’s face and live,’ and the angel of God
accordingly takes the place of God Himself. But when the narrative in
Genesis was composed, a more primitive conception of the Divine nature
still prevailed, and no reluctance was felt in stating exactly what the
patriarch himself had believed. It was God with whom he had struggled,
and from whom he had extorted a blessing, and a memory of the conflict
and victory was preserved in the name of Israel, which Jacob henceforth
bore.
The etymology, however, is really only one of those plays upon words of
which the Biblical writers, like Oriental writers generally, are so
fond. It has no scientific value, and never was intended to have any.
Israel is, like Edom, not the name of an individual, but of the people
of whom the individual was the ancestor. The name is formed like that of
Jacob-el, and the abbreviated Jeshurun is used instead of it in the Song
of Moses.[87] If the latter is correct, the root will not be _sârâh_,
‘he fought,’ or _yâsar_, ‘he is king,’ but _yâshar_, ‘to be upright,’
‘to direct’; and Israel will signify ‘God has directed.’ Israel, in
fact, will be the ‘righteous’ people who have been called to walk in the
ways of the Lord.
While Jacob was keeping the sheep of his Aramæan father-in-law, Esau was
making a name for himself among the mountains of the Horites. Half
robber, half huntsman, he had gathered about him a band of followers,
and with their help had founded—if not a kingdom—at all events a nation
to the south of Moab. It is true that the ‘red’ land he had occupied was
rocky and barren, but the high-road of commerce from the spice-bearing
regions of Southern Arabia passed through it, and the plunder or tribute
of the merchants who travelled along it brought wealth to him and his
well-armed Bedâwin. What David did in later days, when he made himself
the head of a band of outlaws, and with their assistance eventually
raised himself to the throne of Judah, had already been accomplished by
Esau among the barbarians of Seir.
The message of Jacob led him northward by the desert road which ran to
the east of Moab and Ammon. It is clear from the story that Jacob knew
little about his brother’s power. When news was brought that he was
coming with a troop of four hundred men, Jacob’s heart sank within him,
and his only thought was how to save himself and at least a portion of
his wealth from the powerful robber-chief. The event proved that his
precautions were needless. Esau behaved with a magnanimity which it must
have been hard for a Hebrew writer to describe, and pressed his brother
to accompany him to Seir. Jacob feared to accept the invitation, and
equally feared to refuse it. With characteristic caution and craft, he
promised to come, but urged that the cattle and children that were with
him made it necessary to follow slowly in Esau’s track. So the Edomite
chieftain departed, and Jacob took good care to turn westward across the
Jordan into the land of Canaan. There, among the cities and fields of
the civilised ‘Amorite,’ he felt himself secure from the pursuit of the
desert tribes.
Was it fear of Esau which kept him in Central Palestine and prevented
him so long from venturing near that southern part of the country where
his father and grandfather had mainly dwelt? At all events, while
Abraham had bought land at Hebron, the land purchased by Jacob was near
Shechem. Moreover, it was the ‘parcel of a field where he had spread his
tent,’ not a burying-place for his family. It would seem, therefore,
that it was intended for a permanent residence; here the patriarch
determined to settle and to exchange the free life of the pastoral nomad
for that of a villager of Canaan.[88]
The field was bought from Hamor the father of Shechem, the founder of
the city which was destined to become the seat of the first monarchy in
Israel, and on it was raised the first altar consecrated to the God of
Israel. El-elohê-Israel, ‘El is the God of Israel,’ the altar was
termed, a declaration that the El whom the Canaanites worshipped was the
God of Israel as well. But though the field was bought for one hundred
‘pieces of money’—an expression, be it noted, which is not Babylonian—we
are assured also that Jacob had gained land at Shechem by the right of
conquest. In blessing Joseph he declared to him that to the tribe of his
favourite son there was given ‘a Shechem above’ his ‘brethren which’ he
had taken ‘out of the hand of the Amorite with’ his ‘sword and bow’
(Gen. xlviii. 22); and the story of the ravishment of Dinah recounts how
the sons of the patriarch massacred the men of the city, how they
enslaved their women and carried away their goods. The terrible tale of
vengeance was never forgotten; it is alluded to in the Blessing of Jacob
(Gen. xlix. 5-7), and the disappearance of Simeon and Levi as separate
tribes was looked upon as a punishment for the deed. It would seem that
after the Israelitish conquest of Canaan the population of Shechem
remained half Canaanite, half Israelite,[89] and the Canaanitish
population would naturally remember with horror and indignation the
crime of the sons of Jacob. That the deed should have been attributed to
the ancestors of two of the southern tribes instead of to those of
Issachar or some other tribe of the north is evidence in favour of its
truthfulness.
The sons of Jacob were twelve in number, like the twelve sons of
Ishmael, and corresponded with the twelve tribes of Israel which were
called after their names. And yet the correspondence required a little
forcing. It is questionable whether, at any one time, there ever were
exactly twelve Israelitish tribes. In the Song of Deborah Judah does not
appear at all, Ephraim taking its place and, along with Benjamin,
extending as far south as the desert of the Amalekites, while Machir is
substituted for Manasseh and Gad. Levi never possessed a territory of
its own; had it done so, the tribes would have been thirteen in number
and not twelve. At the same time, it had just as much right to be
considered a separate tribe as Dan, whose cities were in the north as
well as in the south, where, however, they were absorbed by Judah; more
right perhaps than Simeon, which hardly existed except in name. The
territory of Reuben lay outside the boundaries of Palestine, and was
merely the desert-wadis and grazing-grounds of the kingdom of Moab; the
country can be said to have belonged to the tribe only in the sense that
the wadis east of the Delta belong to the Bedâwin, whom the Egyptian
government at present allows to live in them. Manasseh, lastly, was
divided into two halves, in order to bring the number of tribes up to
the requisite figure.
It is clear that the scheme is an artificial one. Israel, after its
conquest of Canaan, could indeed be divided into twelve separate parts,
but such a division was theoretical only. There were no twelve
territories corresponding to the parts, while the parts themselves could
be reckoned as thirteen, eleven, or ten, just as easily as twelve.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious. History credited Jacob
with twelve sons, and it was consequently necessary to bring the number
of Israelitish tribes into harmony with the fact. Modern criticism has
amused itself with reversing the history, and assuming that the twelve
sons of the patriarch owed their origin to the twelve tribes. It has
accordingly drawn inferences from the fact that some of the sons of
Jacob are said to have been the offspring of concubines, and not of his
two legitimate wives, and that Joseph and Benjamin were the youngest of
all. But such inferences fall with the assumption that in the twelve
sons we have merely the eponymous heroes of the twelve tribes. It is a
cheap way of making history, and, after all, what we know of the tribes
does not fit in with the theory. There is nothing in the history of Dan
and Naphtali, or Gad and Asher, which would have caused them to be
regarded of bastard descent, if that bastard descent had not been a
fact; indeed, in the Song of Deborah, which is almost universally
allowed to go back to the early age of the Judges, Naphtali and Zebulun
are placed on exactly the same footing. The distinction between the sons
of Leah and those of Rachel does not answer to the real cleavage between
the tribes of the south and those of the north of Palestine: Benjamin,
after the age of Saul, followed Judah and Simeon, while the sons of
Joseph were joined with Zebulun and Issachar. Moreover, had the sons of
Jacob been mere reflections of the tribes, it would be difficult to
account for the existence of Joseph, or to understand why Machir takes
the place of Manasseh and Gad in the Song of Deborah.
The critical theory is the result of introducing Greek modes of thought
into Semitic history. The Greek tribe, it is true, traced its origin to
an eponymous ancestor, but that ancestor was a god or a hero, and not a
man. Among the Semites, however, as the history of Arabia may still
teach us, the conception of the tribe was something wholly different.
The tribe was an enlarged family which called itself by the name of its
first head. It began with the individual, and to the last styled itself
his children. The Greek tribe, on the contrary, began with the clan, and
its theoretical ancestor, accordingly, was merely the divine personage
whose common cult kept it together. In the Semitic tribe there could be
no cult of its ancestor, for the ancestor was but an ordinary man, who
worshipped the same form of Baal and used the same rites as his
descendants after him.
Nevertheless, there may be an element of truth in the ‘critical’
assumption. The names of the ancestors of some of the Israelitish tribes
may have been the reflex of the later names of the tribes themselves. It
does not follow that the name by which one of the sons of Jacob became
known to later generations was actually the name which he bore himself.
Had Jacob been uniformly called Israel by the Hebrew writers, we should
never have known his original name. And it is possible that the name of
Asher is really a reflex of this kind. The _Travels of the Mohar_,
written in Egypt in the reign of Ramses II. before the Israelitish
conquest of Canaan, speak of ‘the mountain of User’ as being in the very
locality in which the tribe of Asher was afterwards settled. And in the
case of one tribe at least there is evidence that its name must have
been reflected back upon that of its progenitor.
This is the tribe of Benjamin. In the book of Genesis (xxxv. 18)
Benjamin is represented as having received two different names at his
birth. The statement excites our suspicion, for such a double naming is
inconsistent with Hebrew practice, and our suspicion is confirmed when
we find that both names have a geographical meaning. Benjamin is ‘the
son of the South’ or ‘Southerner’; Ben-Oni, as he is also said to have
been called, is ‘the son of On,’ or ‘the Onite.’ On, or Beth-On, it will
be remembered, was an ancient name of Beth-el, the great sanctuary and
centre of the tribe of Benjamin, while ‘the Southerner’ was an
appropriate title for the lesser brother tribe which lay to the south of
the dominant Ephraim. It is of Ephraim that Deborah says, in her Song of
Triumph, ‘Behind thee is Benjamin among thy peoples’ (Judg. v. 14).
The etymology suggested in Genesis for the name of Ben-Oni is a sample
of those plays upon words in which Oriental writers have always
delighted, and of which the Hebrew Scriptures contain so many
illustrations. They all spring from the old confusion between the name
and the thing, which substituted the name for the thing, and believed
that if the name could be explained, the thing would be explained also.
Hence the slight transformations in the form of names which allowed them
to be assimilated to familiar words, or their identification with words
which obviously gave an incorrect sense. Hence, too, the choice of
etymologies which was offered to the reader: where the real origin of
the name was unknown or uncertain, it was possible to explain it in more
than one way. Isaiah (xv. 9) changes the name of the Moabite city of
Dibon into Dimon in order to connect it with the Hebrew _dâm_, ‘blood,’
and the writer of Genesis gives two contradictory derivations of the
name of Joseph (Gen. xxx. 23, 24). The latter fact is of itself a
sufficient proof of the true value of these etymologies, or rather,
popular plays upon words, and the sayings in which they are embodied can
still be matched by the traveller in the East. Similar embodiments of
popular etymologising are still repeated to explain the place-names of
Egypt.[90]
The origin of some of the names of the sons of Jacob is as obscure to us
as it was to the writer of Genesis. We do not know, for instance, the
meaning and derivation of the name of Reuben. Equally doubtful is the
real etymology of the name of Issachar.[91] The name of Simeon is
already found among the places in Canaan conquered by the Egyptian
Pharaoh Thothmes III. before the age of Moses, and in Judah we have a
name which seems to be the same as that of a tribe in Northern
Syria.[92] Levi, like Naphtali, is a gentilic noun, and must be
connected with the _lau’â(n)_, or ‘priest’ of Southern Arabia.[93] Gad
was the god of good fortune, Dan ‘the judge,’ the title of certain
Babylonian deities, and Dinah is the feminine corresponding to Dan.
Jacob, ever timorous, fled from Hivite vengeance after the destruction
of Shechem, forsaking the property he had acquired there by purchase and
the sword. He made his way southward to Beth-el, and there rested on the
edge of the great mountain block of Central Palestine. Hard by was the
city of Luz, soon to be eclipsed by the growing fame of the high-place
on the height above it. Here, at Beth-el, an altar was erected by the
patriarch to the God of the locality who had once appeared to him in a
dream. It was the prototype of the altar that was hereafter to arise
there when Beth-el had become a chief sanctuary of the house of Israel.
Whether the altar stood on the high-place on the summit of the mountain,
where the Beth-el or column of stone had been consecrated by Jacob, we
do not know; there are indications in the prophets, however, that the
high-place and the temple were separate from one another. Indeed, from
the words of Genesis, it would seem that the altar and future temple
were on the lower slope of the hill, close to the old Canaanitish town.
Here, at any rate, on the road to the city, was that Allon-bachuth, that
‘Terebinth of Tears,’ which is referred to by Hosea (xii. 4), and is
connected in the book of Genesis with the death of Deborah, the nurse of
Rachel. In later days another Deborah dwelt under the shadow of a
palm-tree on the same road (Judg. iv. 6), and modern critical ingenuity
has accordingly discovered that the terebinth and the palm were one and
the same tree.
Beth-el, however, was still too near the Hivites of Shechem, and Jacob
continued his journey to the south. The death of Isaac called him to
Hebron, where, for the last time, he met his brother Esau, who came to
take part in his father’s burial. But his own residence was at
Beth-lehem, ‘the Temple of the god Lakhmu,’ called Ephrath in those
early days.[94] Here Rachel died, and here accordingly was raised the
tombstone which marked her grave down to the day when the book of
Genesis assumed its present form.[95]
It was ‘beyond the tower of Edar,’ the tower of ‘the Flock,’ that Jacob,
we are told, ‘spread his tent.’ The tower of the Flock guarded the
city-fortress of Jerusalem (Mic. iv. 8), and it was therefore between
Jerusalem and Beth-lehem that the patriarch made his home. But his
flocks were scattered northwards as far as Shechem, grazing on the
mountain slopes under the charge of his sons. Jacob remained like a
Bedâwi of to-day living among the settled inhabitants of the country,
and yet keeping apart from them and sending his flocks far and wide
wherever there was fresh grass and free pasturage.
It was while he thus lived that the disgraceful events occurred
connected with the marriage of Judah and the Canaanitish Tamar, which
throw an evil light on the manners and morals of the patriarch’s family.
The whole episode stands in marked contrast to the ordinary character of
the history, and its insertion is evidence of the impartiality of the
writer. It is clear that he has put together all that reached him from
the past history of his people, omitting nothing, modifying nothing. All
sides of the past are brought before us, the darker as well as the
lighter, and no attempt is made to spare or condone the forefathers of
Israel. It has indeed been asked by an over-sensitive criticism how the
recital of such abominations can be consistent with the sanctity claimed
for the Mosaic writings. But the question has troubled the minds only of
the critics themselves; and not more than three centuries ago the
compilers of the Anglican lectionary saw no harm in ordering the chapter
to be read publicly to men and maidens in church.
The episode was inserted in the midst of the story of Joseph, one of the
most pathetic and touching ever told. We need not repeat its details, or
describe how Joseph, the spoilt darling of his father, dreamed dreams
which aroused the alarm and jealousy of his brothers, how he was sold by
them into Egypt, how there he became the vizier of the Pharaoh, and how
eventually Jacob and his family were brought into the land of Goshen,
there to enjoy the good things of the valley of the Nile. But the story
brings us back again to the great stream of ancient Oriental history;
once more the history of Israel touches the history of the world, and
ceases to be a series of idyllic pictures, such as the memory of
shepherds and Bedâwin might alone preserve.
The story of Joseph forms a complete whole, distinguished by certain
features that mark it off from the rest of the book of Genesis. It
contains peculiar words, some of them of Egyptian origin,[96] and it
shows a very minute acquaintance with Egyptian life in the Hyksos age.
There are even words and phrases which seem to have been translated into
Hebrew from some other language, and the meaning of which has not been
fully understood: thus it is said that the cupbearer of Pharaoh ‘pressed
the grapes’ into his master’s goblet instead of pouring the wine; and
the word employed to denote an Egyptian official, and translated
‘officer’ in the Authorised Version, properly signifies ‘eunuch.’ Can
the story have been translated from an Egyptian papyrus? The question is
suggested by the fact that one of the most characteristic portions of it
has actually been embodied in an ancient Egyptian tale. This is the
so-called _Tale of the Two Brothers_, written by the scribe Enna for
Seti II. of the nineteenth dynasty while he was crown-prince, and
therefore in the age of the Exodus. Here we have the episode of Joseph
and Potiphar’s wife told in Egyptian form. The fellah Bata takes the
place of Joseph; his sister-in-law plays the part of Potiphar’s
wife.[97]
This part of the story was therefore known among the literary classes of
Egypt in the days when Moses was learned in all their wisdom. And if it
has been preserved among the few fragments that have been saved from the
wreck of ancient Egyptian literature, may we not conclude that had the
whole of that literature come down to us, other portions of the story of
Joseph would have been preserved in it as well? There is a gentleness in
the character of Joseph which reminds us forcibly of Egyptian manners,
and offers a sharp contrast to the rough ways and readiness to shed
blood which distinguished the Hebrew Semite.
At all events, the story must have been written by one who was well
acquainted with the age of the Hyksos. It is true that an attempt has
recently been made, on the strength of certain proper names, to show
that it is not the Egypt of the Hyksos that is described, but the Egypt
of Shishak and his successors. The names of Potipherah or Potiphar and
Asenath are said to have been unknown before that date. A couple of
proper names, however, is an insecure foundation on which to build a
theory, more especially when the argument rests upon the imperfections
of our own knowledge. That no names corresponding in formation to
Potipherah and Asenath should as yet have been met with earlier than the
time of Shishak is no proof that they did not exist. A single example of
each is sufficient to prove the contrary. And, as a matter of fact, such
examples actually occur. A stela of the reign of Thothmes III. records
the name of Pe-tu-Baal, ‘the Gift of Baal,’ as that of the sixth
ancestor of the Egyptian whose name it records;[98] while the Tel
el-Amarna tablets contain the name of Subanda, the Smendes of Greek
writers, which is an exact parallel in form to Asenath.[99] Pe-tu-Baal
must have lived at the close of the Hyksos period, and the Semitic deity
with whose name his own is compounded indicates that it has been formed
under Semitic influence. It was, in fact, as we learn from the Phœnician
inscriptions, an imitation of a Canaanitish name.[100] The Hyksos had
come from Asia, and had imposed their yoke upon Egypt, where they ruled
for more than five hundred years. Though they held all Egypt under their
sway, they had established their capital at Zoan, now called Sân, far to
the north on the eastern frontier of the Delta. Here they were near
their kinsfolk in Canaan, and could readily summon fresh troops from
Asia in case of Egyptian revolt.
The court of the Hyksos Pharaohs, however, soon became Egyptianised.
They adopted the arts and science, the manners and customs, of their
more cultured subjects, and one of the few scientific works of ancient
Egypt that have come down to us—the famous _Mathematical Papyrus_—was
written for a Hyksos king. It was only in physiognomy and religion that
the Hyksos conqueror continued to be distinguished from the native
Egyptian.
Besides Zoan, Heliopolis, or ‘On of the North,’ was a chief centre of
Hyksos power. It was the oldest and most celebrated sanctuary of Egypt,
where ancient schools of learning were established, and from whence the
religious system had been disseminated which made the Sun-god the
supreme ruler of the universe. The Hyksos had no difficulty in
identifying the Sun-god of On with their own supreme deity Sutekh, who
was a form of the Canaanitish Baal. On, consequently, once the chief
seat of the orthodox faith of Egypt, became the centre of foreign
heresy. The Sallier Papyrus, which describes the origin of the war that
resulted in the expulsion of the Hyksos, specially tells us that ‘the
Impure of (On), the city of Ra, were subject to Ra-Apopi,’ the Hyksos
Pharaoh, and the Egyptians changed into Ra, the Egyptian Sun-god, the
name of Sutekh, which a scarab of Apopi shows was really prefixed to
that Pharaoh’s name.[101] The great temple of the Sun-god of On,
accordingly, before which Usertesen of the twelfth dynasty had planted
the obelisks, one of which remains to this day, was transformed into a
temple of the foreign god; and though its high-priest still continued to
bear his ancient title, and perform the ceremonies of the past, it was
Sutekh and not the native divinity whom he served. Potipherah—in
Egyptian, Pa-tu-pa-Ra—was a literal translation of the Canaanitish
Mattan-Baal, ‘the gift of Baal,’ and implied of itself the foreign cult.
Potiphar is an abbreviation of Potipherah, and reminds us of similar
abbreviations met with in the letters of the Canaanitish correspondents
of the Pharaoh in the Tel el-Amarna collection. It is an abbreviation
which points to long familiarity with the name on the part of the Hebrew
people. The titles, however, given to Potiphar are obscure. The second
seems to signify ‘captain of the bodyguard,’ but the first—_saris_ in
Hebrew—means an ‘eunuch.’ Ebers, it is true, has pointed out that
eunuchs in the East have not only held high positions of state, but have
married wives as well;[102] this, however, has been in Turkey, not in
ancient Egypt. Perhaps the word is the Babylonian _saris_, ‘an officer’;
at all events, the Rab-sarîs of 2 Kings xviii. 17 is the Assyrian
Rab-sarisi, or ‘chief officer.’ That Babylonian words should have made
their way into Egypt in the age of the Hyksos is by no means strange. We
have learned from the Tel el-Amarna tablets that Babylonian was for
centuries the literary language of Western Asia, and was studied and
written even on the banks of the Nile, while the monuments of Babylonia
itself have shown that Babylonian culture had made its way to the
frontiers of Egypt at a very remote age. The history of Joseph contains
at least one word which bears testimony to its influence. When Joseph
was made ‘governor over all the land of Egypt,’ the heralds who ran
before his chariot to announce the fact shouted the word ‘abrêk!’ For
this word no explanation can be found either in Hebrew or in Egyptian.
But the language of the Babylonian inscriptions has unexpectedly come to
our aid. In Chaldæa _abarakku_ was the title of one of the highest
officers of State, and _abriqqu_, borrowed from the earlier Sumerian
_abrik_, signified ‘a seer.’
We have said that the history of Joseph is marvellously true in all its
details to what archæology has informed us were the facts of Egyptian
life. Thus the prison in which ‘the king’s prisoners’ were confined is
called by the strange name of ‘the round house.’ Such, at least, would
seem to be the literal meaning of the Hebrew phrase, the second element
of which signifies ‘roundness.’ The word is written _sohar_, though
there is evidence of another reading, _sokhar_. _Sohar_ or _sokhar_,
however, is really an Egyptian word. The royal prison at Thebes, where
the State prisoners were kept under guard, was: called _suhan_, in which
we have the same interchange of final _r_ and _n_ that is still a
characteristic of Egyptian Arabic.[103] The term _bêth has-sohar_, ‘the
house of the Sohar,’ is found nowhere else in the Old Testament: it is,
in fact, one of the peculiarities which distinguish the story of Joseph,
and at the same time testify to the acquaintance of its writer with the
details of Egyptian life.
The titles of the royal cupbearer and the chief of the bakers have been
found in the lists of Egyptian officials; the Pharaoh’s kitchen was
organised on an elaborate scale;[104] and the Egyptians were famed for
their skill in confectionery and in making various kinds of bread.[105]
On the monuments we may see depicted the cupbearer offering the goblet
of wine, and the baker carrying on his head the baskets filled with
round ‘white loaves.’ The ‘birthday of the Pharaoh’ was a general
festival, on which, as the decrees of Rosetta and Canopus have taught
us, the sovereign proclaimed an amnesty and released such prisoners as
were thought deserving of pardon.[106] The dreams that Pharaoh dreamed
are in full accordance with Egyptian mythology and symbolism. The seven
kine fitly represent the Nile, which from time immemorial had been
likened to a milch-cow. The cow-headed goddess Hathor or Isis watched
over the fertility of the country, and the fertilising water of the
river was called the milk that flowed from her breasts. The number seven
denotes the ‘seven great Hathors,’ the seven forms under which the
goddess was adored. The dreams themselves fall in with the Egyptian
belief of the age. Throughout Egyptian history they have been a power
not only in religion, but in politics as well. It was in consequence of
a dream that Thothmes IV. cleared away the sand from before the paws of
the Sphinx, and a thousand years later Nut-Amon of Ethiopia was summoned
by a dream to invade Egypt. The dreams usually needed an interpreter to
explain them, such as is mentioned in a Greek inscription from the
Serapeum at Memphis. Books, however, had been compiled in which the
signification of dreams was reduced to a science; and as in modern
Egypt, so yet more in the past, men spent their lives in pondering over
the signification of the dreams of the night.[107]
Even the statement that the east wind had blasted the ears of corn (Gen.
xli. 6) betrays an acquaintance with the peculiarities of the Egyptian
climate. Those who have sailed up the Nile know that the wind feared
alike by the peasant and the sailor is that which blows from the
south-east; while the crops of spring are matured by the northern
breeze, they are parched and destroyed by the evil wind from the
south-east.
The golden collar placed around the neck of the royal favourite is
equally characteristic of Egyptian customs, at all events in the age of
the Hyksos and the eighteenth dynasty. ‘Captain’ Ahmes, whose tomb is at
El-Kab, and who took a prominent part in the final struggle which drove
the Hyksos strangers out of the Delta, describes the rewards bestowed
upon him by the Pharaoh for his deeds of valour, and chief among the
rewards are the chains of gold. Before Joseph was allowed to enter the
presence of the monarch, he was not only clad in new raiment, but shorn
as well. This, too, was in accordance with Egyptian custom. None could
appear before Pharaoh unless they had been freshly shaven, and in the
eyes of the Egyptian not the least part of the ‘impurity’ of the Asiatic
Semite was his habit of growing a beard.[108]
The change of name, moreover, which marked Joseph’s elevation was again
characteristic of Egypt. The monuments have told us of other cases in
which an Asiatic from Canaan, or a Karian from Asia Minor, became an
Egyptian official, and in so doing was required to adopt an Egyptian
name.[109] That the name of Zaphnath-paaneah is of Egyptian origin has
long been recognised, and that it contains the Egyptian _pa-ânkh_,
‘life’ or ‘the living one,’ is clear. It is only over its first elements
that discussion is possible.
It is hardly necessary to notice further points which prove how
intimately the writer of the history of Joseph was acquainted with
Egyptian life and manners, language and soil. The Egyptians, he notes,
could not eat together with the Hebrews, for that would have been ‘an
abomination’ to them. It would, indeed, have defiled them ceremonially,
and have caused them to participate in the impurity of those whom they
termed ‘the unclean.’ So, too, we read, ‘every shepherd is an
abomination to the Egyptians,’ not indeed, as has been imagined, because
Egypt had been conquered by the ‘Shepherd’ kings, but because the flocks
of the Delta were tended partly by Bedâwin, partly by half-caste
Egyptians, whose unclean habits and unshorn faces were the butt of the
literary world. The ‘marshmen,’ as they were contemptuously called, were
looked upon as pariahs.[110]
While, however, the narrative is thus thoroughly Egyptian in character,
the Egypt it brings before us is the Egypt of the age of the Hyksos.
Chariots and horses have already been introduced. It has been supposed
that the horse came with the Hyksos; at all events, there is no trace of
it before the conquest of the country by the Asiatic stranger. The
Pharaoh, moreover, holds his court in the Delta, not far from the
Canaanitish border and the land of Goshen; and the waggons which carried
Jacob and his family travelled easily from Beth-lehem to the Egyptian
capital. Zoan consequently must still have been the residence of the
Pharaoh; and Thebes, in Upper Egypt, had not as yet taken its place.
There is one fact, furthermore, which stands out prominently in the
history of Joseph, and points unmistakably to the Hyksos age. We are
told that it was his policy which reduced the people of Egypt to the
condition of serfs. Pressed by famine, they were compelled by him to
sell their lands for corn, and to receive it again as tenants of the
Pharaoh, with the obligation of paying him a fifth part of the produce.
The priests, or rather, the temples, were alone allowed to retain their
old possessions; henceforward the land of Egypt was shared between them
and the king. In the language of modern Egypt, it became either
Government property or _waqf_.
Now, this fact corresponds with a change in the tenure of land which the
monuments have informed us must have taken place under the dominion of
the Hyksos dynasties. When Egypt was conquered by the Asiatics, it was
divided among a number of feudal families who were landowners on a large
scale, and at times the rivals of the sovereign himself. By the side of
this higher aristocracy there was also a lower one, answering in some
measure to the yeomen farmers of the northern counties, but equally
owners of land. When, however, the Hyksos were finally driven out, a new
Egypt comes into view. The feudal aristocracy has disappeared—or almost
disappeared—along with the other landowners of the country, and the only
proprietors of land that are left are the Pharaoh and the priests, to
whom in after times the military caste was added. Only in Southern
Egypt, where the struggle against the foreigner first began, do we find
instances of private ownership of land, and this, too, only in the
earlier years of the eighteenth dynasty. Before long the Pharaoh had
absorbed into his own hands all the land that had not been given to the
gods; the old nobility had disappeared, and their place been taken by an
army of officials who derived all their wealth and power from the king.
The Pharaoh, the priests, and the bureaucracy henceforth are the rulers
of Egypt.
This momentous change must have had a cause, but we look in vain for
such a cause in the Egyptian monuments. It has been suggested that the
War of Independence may have brought it about by increasing the power of
the king as leader in the struggle.[111] But this would not explain his
absorption of the land; and even if all the older families had perished
in the war, which is not very probable, the lesser landowners would have
remained. Moreover, the generals of the king would in this case have
claimed similar spoils to those of their leader. What their commander
had seized would have been seized also by the officers under him.
However great may be our reluctance to accept the explanation offered by
the story of Joseph, certain it is that it is the only adequate
explanation forthcoming. And there is one strong argument in its favour.
Under Ahmes, the conqueror of the Hyksos and the founder of the
eighteenth dynasty, there are still instances of land being held by
private individuals. But this was at El-Kab, in Upper Egypt, where the
Hyksos rule had long been nominal rather than real, and where it had not
been obeyed at all for three generations previously.[112] As soon as the
eighteenth dynasty kings were established firmly on the throne of the
Hyksos Pharaohs in the north as well as in their ancestral homes in
Southern Egypt, even these instances of individual ownership in land
came to an end. It was only where the Hyksos supremacy had been weak
that they had lingered on. When once the Prince of Thebes had become in
all respects the successor of the foreign Pharaohs who had reigned at
Zoan, they cease altogether.
The account of Joseph’s procedure is true to facts in another point
also. From the time of the eighteenth dynasty onwards we hear repeatedly
of the public _larits_ or granaries which were under State control.[113]
The peasantry were required to contribute to them yearly in a fixed
proportion, and the corn stored up in them was only sold to the people
in case of need. It was out of these granaries, furthermore, that many
of the Government officials were paid in kind, as well as the workmen
employed by the State. The office of ‘superintendent of the granaries’
was therefore a very important one: once each year he presented to the
king an ‘account of the harvests of the south and the north’; and if the
account was exceptionally good, if the inundation had been abundant and
the harvest better than ‘for thirty years,’ his grateful sovereign would
throw chains of gold around his neck.[114] The origin of these royal
granaries and of the office of their superintendent which thus
characterise the ‘new empire’ of Egypt is explained by the history of
Joseph.
Before the days when the conquests of the eighteenth dynasty had created
an Egyptian empire in Asia, and brought foreign supplies of food to
Egypt, the rise of the Nile was a matter of vital interest. The very
existence of the people depended upon it. Too high a Nile meant
scarcity, too low a Nile famine. It was only when the river rose to its
normal level and overflowed the fields at the stated time that the heart
of the agriculturist was gladdened, and he knew that the gods had given
him a year of plenty.
The seven years’ famine of Joseph’s age is not the only seven years’
famine which Egypt has had to endure. El-Makrîzî, the Arabic historian
of Egypt, describes one which lasted for seven years, from A.D. 1064 to
1071, and, like that of Joseph, was caused by a deficient Nile. A stela
discovered by Mr. Wilbour on the island of Sehêl, in the middle of the
First Cataract, and engraved in the time of the Ptolemies, similarly
records a famine that was wasting the country because ‘the Nile-flood
had not come for seven years.’[115] And it is possible that a memorial
of the famine of Joseph has been discovered by Brugsch in one of the
tombs of El-Kab. Here the dead man, a certain Baba, is made to say,
‘When a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out corn to the
city.’ Baba must have lived in the latter part of the Hyksos domination,
so that the date of his inscription would agree with that of
Joseph.[116]
Whether the power of Joseph and his master would still have extended as
far south as El-Kab in the age of Baba, we do not know. But we do know
that a famine which prevailed in Lower Egypt in consequence of a low
Nile would have equally prevailed in the Thebaid. It would not, however,
have prevailed in Canaan. In Canaan the ground is watered, not by the
Nile, but by the rains of heaven, and in Canaan, therefore, it was only
a want of rain that could have caused a scarcity of food.
Famines, indeed, did occur in Palestine from time to time, and we hear
of Egyptian kings sending corn to that country to supply its needs.[117]
As Egypt was the granary of Italy in the days of the Roman Empire, so
too it had been the granary of Western Asia in an earlier age. A dry
season in Canaan brought famine in its train; and if that dry season
coincided with a deficient Nile in Egypt, there was no other land to
which its inhabitants could look for food. It is quite possible that one
of these famines in Canaan may have happened at the very time when the
Nile refused to irrigate the fields of Egypt. When, however, we read
that ‘the famine was over all the face of the earth,’ and that ‘all
countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn because the famine was
sore in all lands,’ it is evident that the narrative has been written
from an Egyptian point of view. The Egyptians might have supposed that
when a low Nile produced a scarcity of food all other countries would
equally suffer—such, indeed, was the case with Ethiopia—but a
supposition of the kind is inconceivable in the mind of a Canaanite. An
inhabitant of Palestine knew that the crops of his country were
dependent on the rain, not on the waters of the Nile; it was only the
Egyptian who modelled the rest of the world after that part of it which
was known to him.
Here, then, we have a clear indication that the story of Joseph must
have been written in Egypt, and further probability is added to the
theory that it has been translated into Hebrew from an Egyptian
original. But more than this. Is it likely that the Hebrew translator,
if he had been acquainted with the climate of Canaan, would have left
the words of the story just as we find them? Can we imagine that the
language he employed about the extent of the famine would have been so
definite, so comprehensive, so Egyptian in character? Like the Egyptian
words embodied in the narrative, it points to a writer or translator who
lived in Egypt, and not in Canaan.
Who was the Pharaoh under whom Joseph became the first minister of the
State? Chronology shows that he must have been one of the kings of the
last Hyksos dynasty. George the Syncellus makes him Aphophis, Apopi
Ra-aa-kenen, or Apopi II. of the monuments, and the date would suit very
well.[118] Apopi II. was the last powerful Hyksos sovereign. His
authority was still obeyed in Upper Egypt, but it was in his reign that
the War of Independence broke out. According to the story in the Sallier
Papyrus, it was caused by his message to the _hiq_ or vassal prince of
Thebes, requiring him to renounce the worship of Amon of Thebes and
acknowledge Sutekh, the Hyksos Baal, as his supreme god.[119] The war
lasted for four generations, and ended in the expulsion of the
foreigner.
But long before this took place the family of Israel was settled in the
land of Goshen, on the outskirts of Northern Egypt. The geographical
position of Goshen has been rediscovered by Dr. Naville. It corresponded
with the modern Wadi Tumilât, through which the traveller by the railway
now passes on his way from Ismailîyeh to Zagazig. It took its name from
Qosem or Qos, the Pha-kussa of Greek geography, and the capital of the
Arabian nome, the site of which is marked by the mounds of Saft
el-Hennah.[120] The very name of the ‘Arabian nome’ indicates that its
occupants belonged to Arabia rather than to Egypt. It was, in fact, a
district handed over to the Bedâwin by the Pharaohs, as it still is
to-day. Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., says in his great inscription
at Karnak that ‘the country around Pa-Bailos (now Belbeis, near Zagazig)
was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle, because of the
strangers. It was abandoned since the time of the ancestors.’[121]
Abandoned, that is to say, by the Egyptians themselves. But the Semitic
nomad pitched his tent and fed his flocks there, partly because it was
on the road to his own country and countrymen, partly because it was
fitted for grazing and not for agriculture. Here, too, he was not in
immediate contact with the Egyptian fellah, though the court of the
Hyksos Pharaoh at Zoan was nigh at hand.
Joseph’s brethren were made overseers of the royal cattle, an official
post of which we also hear in the native Egyptian texts. After a while,
Jacob died, full of years, and his body was embalmed in the Egyptian
fashion. The actual process of embalming occupied forty days, the whole
period during which ‘the Egyptians mourned for him,’ being threescore
and ten. The statement is in accordance with other testimony as to the
length of time needed to embalm a mummy. Herodotos (ii. 86) states that
the corpse was kept in natron during seventy days, ‘to which period they
are strictly confined.’ According to Diodoros,[122] ‘oil of cedar and
other things were applied to the whole body for upwards of thirty days,’
the full period during which the mourning for the dead and the
preparation of his mummy lasted being seventy-two days. Between the age
of Joseph and that of Diodoros it would seem that little change had
taken place in this part, at any rate, of the Egyptian treatment of
their dead. When, however, the Hebrew text states that the corpse was
embalmed by ‘the physicians, the slaves’ of Joseph; the word
‘physicians’ must be understood in a restricted sense. Pliny,[123] it is
true, avers that during the process of embalming physicians were
employed to examine the body of the dead man and determine of what
disease he had died. But the _paraskhistæ_, who made the needful
incision, were regarded with the utmost abhorrence; they were the
pariahs of society, who lived in a community apart. It was the embalmers
who were the associates of the priests, and whose persons, in the words
of Diodoros, were looked upon as ‘sacred.’ Nor is it easy to see who
could have been the physicians who were the ‘slaves’ of the Hebrew
vizier. The physician in Egypt was usually a free man, who followed a
profession which brought with it honour and respect. The doctor belonged
to the learned classes, and, like the scribe, had no mean opinion of his
worth and dignity. But such physicians were employed in healing the
sick, not in embalming the dead, and must have stood in a very different
position from that of Joseph’s ‘slaves.’ More light is still wanted on
the subject from monumental sources; in spite of the papyri which
describe the ceremonies attendant on the various acts of the embalmment,
we are still ignorant of its practical details.
When at last the days of mourning were past, Joseph spoke, we are told,
to ‘the house of Pharaoh.’ The expression is purely Egyptian, and refers
to the signification of the word ‘Pharaoh’ itself. Pharaoh, the Egyptian
Per-âa, is the ‘Great House’; ‘the son of the Sun-god’ was too highly
exalted to be spoken of as a man, and it was therefore to ‘the Great
House’ that his subjects addressed themselves. Modern Europe is familiar
with a similar phrase; when we allude to the ‘Sublime Porte’ we mean the
Turkish Sultan, who once administered justice from the ‘High Gate’ of
his palace.
Jacob was buried in the cave of Machpelah. A long procession of soldiers
and mourners, partly in chariots, partly on foot, accompanied the mummy
on its way out of Egypt. Such a procession was no unusual thing. The
wealthy Egyptian desired to be buried near the tomb of Osiris at Abydos,
and it was therefore not unfrequently the custom to convey his mummy in
solemn procession to that sacred spot, and then to carry it back once
more to its own final resting-place. The procession which accompanied
the body of the patriarch must have followed the high-road which led
through the Shur, or line of fortification on the eastern border of the
desert, and brought the traveller with little difficulty to Southern
Palestine. The reference in the narrative to the threshing-floor of
Atad, on the eastern side of the Jordan, is an interpolation, which
embodies merely a local etymology. The chariot-road from Egypt to
Palestine naturally never ran near the Jordan; and the threshing-floor
of Atad would have been far out of the way. But popular imagination had
seen in the name of Abel-Mizraim, where the threshing-floor was
situated, a ‘mourning of Egypt,’ and had accordingly connected it with
the great mourning that was made for Jacob. As a matter of fact,
however, Abel-Mizraim really signifies ‘the meadow of Egypt,’ _abel_, ‘a
meadow,’ being a not uncommon element in the geographical names of
ancient Canaan.[124]
Two sons had been born to Joseph by his Egyptian wife, whom the
Israelites knew by their Hebrew names. They had been born before the
death of his father, and had thus received his blessing. Joseph himself
lived ‘an hundred and ten years.’ This was the limit of life the
Egyptian desired for himself and his friends, and in the inscriptions
the boon of a life of ‘an hundred and ten years’ is from time to time
asked for from the gods. It is the term of existence a court poet
promises to Seti II. ‘on earth,’ and Ptah-hotep, the author of ‘the
oldest book in the world,’ who flourished in the days of the fifth
dynasty, assures us that, thanks to his pursuit of wisdom he had already
attained the age.[125]
Joseph was embalmed, but his mummy was not carried to Hebron for burial,
like that of his father. If Apopi II. had been the Pharaoh who had
transformed him from a Hebrew slave into the highest of Egyptian
officials, the War of Independence must have broken out long before his
death. The Hyksos dynasty was hastening to its decay. Its strength had
departed from it, and the Pharaohs of Zoan, who had lost all power in
Upper Egypt, would still more have lost all power in Asia. Their
soldiers were needed for other purposes than that of escorting the
coffin of the dead vizier across the desert of El-Arish. Moreover,
Joseph was an Egyptian official, and by his marriage into the family of
the high priest of Heliopolis had become as much of an Egyptian as his
Hyksos master. We are told that he made the Israelites swear to carry
his corpse with them should they ever return to Palestine; the triumph
of the Theban princes was growing more assured, and Joseph knew well
that the vengeance of the victorious party would be wreaked upon the
dead as well as upon the living. The history of Egypt had already shown
that the tomb and the mummy were the first to suffer.
A change of sepulchre was no unheard-of thing. King Ai of the eighteenth
dynasty had two, if not three, tombs made for himself, and the mummy
could be transported from one place of burial to another. All knew where
it was interred; year by year offerings were made to the spirit of the
dead, and in many cases the estate of the deceased was taxed to support
a line of priests who should perform the stated services at the tomb. As
long as the sepulchre of Joseph was in the neighbourhood of his people
it would have been easy to protect his mummy from violence, and to carry
the coffin out of Egypt when the needful time should come.
Footnote 1:
See Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, Eng. tr., second edit., ii.
p. 134.
Footnote 2:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. pp. 66 _sqq._
Footnote 3:
Thus in an Assyrian hymn (K 890), published by Dr. Brünnow in the
_Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, July 1889, we have (line 8) _istu pan
Khabiriya iptarsanni âsi_, ‘from the face of my confederates he has
cut me off, even me.’
Footnote 4:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., vi. p. 39.
Footnote 5:
Thus Kharbi-Sipak, a Kassite or Kossæan, from the western mountains of
Elam, is called a ‘Khabirâ’ (W. A. I. iv. 34, 2, 5). The name is
probably connected with that of Khapir or Âpir, originally applied to
the district in which Mal-Amir is situated, south-east of Susa, but
afterwards in the Persian period extended to the whole of Elam (see my
memoir on the _Inscriptions of Mal-Amir_ in the Transactions of the
Sixth Oriental Congress at Leyden, vol. ii.). Kharbi-Sipak himself,
however, seems to have been employed by the Assyrian king in Palestine
in the neighbourhood of the cities of Arqa and Zaqqal (Hommel in the
_Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, May 1895, p.
203).
Footnote 6:
W. A. I. ii. 50, 51 (where Khubur is said to be a synonym of Subarti).
Footnote 7:
W. A. I. ii. 51, 4.
Footnote 8:
Hommel, _The ancient Hebrew Tradition as illustrated by the
Monuments_, pp. 196, 245-262, 323-327; Glaser in the _Mittheilungen_
of the Vorderasiatische Gesellschaft, ii. 1897.
Footnote 9:
K 3500.
Footnote 10:
That _Ebir-nâri_ signified the country west of the Euphrates in the
later days of Babylonian history is shown by a contract-tablet, dated
in the third year of Darius Hystaspis, and translated by Peiser
(_Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek_, iv. p. 305), in which mention is
made of ‘Ustanni, the governor of Babylon and Ebir-nâri’ (line 2).
Meissner (_Zeitschrift für Alttestament_, _Wissenschaft_, xvii.) has
pointed out that Ustanni is the Tatnai of Ezra, v. 3, 6; vi. 6, 13,
who is there called the ‘governor of the land beyond the river’
(_’Abar Nahara_).
Footnote 11:
See Hilprecht, _The Babylonian Expedition of the University of
Pennsylvania_, i. 2, p. 31.
Footnote 12:
An inscription of Sargon recently published by M. Dangin (_Revue
Sémitique_, April 1897) states that ‘the governor’ of the subjugated
Amorites was Uru-Malik, where the name of Malik or Moloch is preceded
by the determinative of divinity. Uru-Malik, which is an analogous
formation to Uriel, Urijah, Melchi-ur (or Melchior), etc., shows that
what we call Hebrew was already the language of Canaan. The
inscription has been found at Tello in Southern Chaldæa.
Footnote 13:
Zabsali, also written Savsal(la) or Zavzal(la), probably represents
the Zuzim or Zamzummim of Scripture. See my article in the
_Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, February 1897, p.
74.
Footnote 14:
We possess a list of the kings of Babylonia, divided into dynasties,
from the first dynasty of Babylon, to which Khammu-rabi belonged, down
to the time of the fall of Nineveh. The number of years reigned by
each king is stated, as well as the number of years each dynasty
lasted. But, unfortunately, the compiler has forgotten to say what was
the duration of the dynasty to which Nabonassar (B.C. 747) belonged;
and as the tablet is broken here, the regnal years of most of the
kings who formed the dynasty have been lost. There are, however, a
good many synchronisms between the earlier period of Babylonian
history and that of Assyria, and by means of these the chronology has
been approximately restored. We can also test the date of Khammu-rabi
in the following way. We learn from Assur-bani-pal that
Kudur-Nankhundi, king of Elam, carried off the image of the goddess
Nana from the city of Erech 1635 years before his own conquest of
Elam, and therefore 2280 B.C. As Eri-Aku boasts of his capture of
Erech, and as he was assisted in his wars by his Elamite kinsmen, it
seems probable that the capture of the image by Kudur-Nankhundi was
coincident with the capture of the city by Eri-Aku.
The discovery of Mr. Pinches has been supplemented by that of Dr.
Scheil, who has found letters addressed by Khammu-rabi to Sin-idinnam
of Larsa, in which mention is made of the Elamite king
Kudur-Laghghamar. Sin-idinnam had been driven from Larsa by Eri-Aku
with the help of Kudur-Laghghamar, and had taken refuge at the court
of Khammu-rabi in Babylon. Fragments of other letters of Khammu-rabi
are in the possession of Lord Amherst of Hackney (see _inf._ pp. 27,
28).
Footnote 15:
The name of Khammu-rabi himself is written Ammu-rabi in Bu. 88-5-12,
199 (_Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum_,
Part 2).
Footnote 16:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. p. xvi.
Footnote 17:
Hommel, _Geschichte des alten Morgenlandes_, p. 62, _The Ancient
Hebrew Tradition as illustrated by the Monuments_, p. 96.
Footnote 18:
Published by Budge, _Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, iii. 3, pp. 229,
230.
Footnote 19:
The text, which is on a stela found in the ruined temple of Isis at
the south-east corner of the great pyramid of Gizeh, is now in the
Cairo Museum. It has been published by M. Daressy in the _Recueil des
Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et
assyriennes_ (xvi. 3, 4, 1894), and is dated in the third year of king
Ai. It follows from the inscription that ‘the domain called that of
the Hittites’ lay to the north of the great temple of Ptah, and
immediately to the south of two smaller temples built by Thothmes I.
and Thothmes IV. In the time of Herodotos there was a similar district
assigned to the Phœnicians, and known as ‘the Camp of the Tyrians,’ on
the south side of the temple of Ptah (see my _Egypt of the Hebrews and
Herodotos_, p. 251).
Footnote 20:
Amurru, ‘the Amorite god,’ was a name which had been given by the
Sumerians, the earlier population of Chaldæa, to the Syrian Hadad whom
the Babylonians identified with their Ramman or Rimmon (cf. Zech. xii.
11). A cuneiform text published by Reisner (_Sumerisch-babylonische
Hymnen nach Thontafeln griechischer Zeit_, p. 139, lines 141-144)
couples Amurru, ‘the lord of the mountains,’ with Asratu, the
Canaanitish Asherah, ‘the lady of the plain.’ Asratu is identified
with the Babylonian Gubarra.
Footnote 21:
W. A. I. v. 12, 47.
Footnote 22:
W. A. I. v. 33, i. 37.
Footnote 23:
_Padanu_ also had the meaning of ‘path.’ Whether this is derived from
the other or belongs to a different root is questionable. But in the
sense of ‘path,’ _padanu_ was a synonym of Kharran.
Footnote 24:
This does not imply that the population which founded the kingdom of
Mitanni, and probably came from the mountains of Komagênê or of Ararat
in the north, was unknown in early Babylonia. In fact, one of the
_Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets_, published by the British
Museum in 1896 (Bu. 91-5-9, 296), contains the names of ‘the governor’
Akhsir-Babu and other witnesses to a contract, most of which are
Mitannian.
Footnote 25:
I have given the tablet in transliteration in the _Proceedings_ of the
Society of Biblical Archæology, Nov. 1883, p. 18. The passage reads:
‘14-½ shekels of lead we have weighed in _nakhur_.’
Footnote 26:
See Sachau, _Die altaramäische Inschrift auf der Statue des Königs
Panammu von Sam-al_ and _Aramäische Inschriften_ in the _Mittheilungen
aus den orientalischen Sammlungen d. K. Museums zu Berlin_, ix., and
the _Sitzungsberichte der K. preussischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften_, xli. (1896).
Footnote 27:
See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 110-117, and H. G. Tomkins in
the _Journal_ of the Anthropological Institute, Feb. 1889.
Footnote 28:
In a report of an eclipse of the moon sent to an Assyrian king in the
eighth century B.C., the countries of ‘the Amorites and the Hittites’
represent the whole of Western Asia (R. F. Harper, _Assyrian and
Babylonian Letters_, Part iv. p. 345).
Footnote 29:
The discovery of the name of Shakama or Shechem in the _Travels of the
Mohar_ is due to Dr. W. Max Müller (_Asien und Europa_, p. 394).
Footnote 30:
Or II., according to Maspero, who makes three Hyksos sovereigns of
this name.
Footnote 31:
It is in the possession of Mr. John Ward.
Footnote 32:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monument_, pp. 160,
161.
Footnote 33:
Recent discoveries have made it clear that the Amraphel of Genesis is
the Khammu-rabi of the cuneiform texts. Khammu-rabi is also written
Ammu-rabi (Bu. 88-5-12, 199, l. 17), and Dr. Lindl has pointed out
that the final syllable of Amraphel is the Babylonian _ilu_, ‘god,’ a
title which is frequently attached to the name of Khammu-rabi. We
learn from the Tel el-Amarna tablets that in the pronunciation of
Western Asia a Babylonian _b_ often became _p_.
Footnote 34:
Pinches, _Certain Inscriptions and Records referring to Babylonia and
Elam_, a paper read before the Victoria Institute, Jan. 7, 1896; see
also Hommel, _The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 180 _sqq._
Footnote 35:
Some Assyriologists interpret Manda as ‘much’ or ‘many’; in this case
Umman Manda, ‘much people,’ will be still more literally the Hebrew
_Goyyim_.
Footnote 36:
Dr. Scheil, the discoverer of the letters of Khammu-rabi to
Sin-idinnam which are now in the Museum at Constantinople, gives the
following translations of them (_Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la
Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xix. 1, 2,
pp. 40-44): (1) ‘To Sin-idinnam Khammu-rabi says: I send you as a
present (the images of) the goddesses of the land of Emutbalum as a
reward for your valour on the day (of the defeat) of Kudur-Laghghamar.
If (the enemy) trouble you, destroy their forces with the troops at
your disposal, and let the images be restored in safety to their (old)
habitations.’ (2) ‘To Sin-idinnam Khammu-rabi says: When you have seen
this letter, you will understand in regard to Amil-Samas and
Nur-Nintu, the sons of Gisdubba, that if they are in Larsa, or in the
territory of Larsa, you will order them to be sent away, and that a
trusty official shall take them and bring them to Babylon.’ (3) ‘To
Sin-idinnam Khammu-rabi says: As to the officials who have resisted
you in the accomplishment of their work, do not impose upon them any
additional task, but oblige them to do what they ought to have done,
and then remove them from the influence of him who has brought them.’
All three letters were found at Senkereh, the ancient Larsa. Fragments
of some other letters of Khammu-rabi are in the possession of Lord
Amherst of Hackney. See above, p. 12.
Footnote 37:
Nicolaus of Damascus, in Josephus _Antiq._ i. 7, 2.
Footnote 38:
See my _Patriarchal Palestine_, pp. 160, 165. The figure and name of
the god Salimmu, written in cuneiform characters, are on a gem now in
the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. The same god, under the name of
Shalman, is mentioned on a stela discovered at Sidon, and under that
of Selamanês in the inscriptions of Shêkh Barakât, north-west of
Aleppo (Clermont-Ganneau, _Études d’Archéologie orientale_ in the
_Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études_, cxiii. vol. ii. pp. 36,
48; Sayce in the _Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archeology,
xix. 2. p. 74).
Footnote 39:
As Professor Hommel says (_Expository Times_, Nov. 1896, p. 95), ‘The
“Mighty King” cannot possibly be the Pharaoh.’ But he seems to me to
introduce an unnecessary element of complication into the subject by
supposing that in the Tel el-Amarna letters the epithet has been
transferred to the king of the Hittites from the supreme god of
Jerusalem, to whom it properly belonged. It is true that in a letter
of the governor of Phœnicia (Winckler und Abel, No. 76, l. 66) the
title is given to the king of the Hittites, but it does not follow
that the king of Jerusalem employs it in the same way.
Footnote 40:
It should be noticed that, according to Hesykhios (_s. v._), ‘the most
high God’ of the Syrians was Ramas, that is, Ramman or Rimmon, who was
identified with the sun-god Hadad, the supreme deity of Syria. The
Babylonians called him Amurru ‘the Amorite.’
Footnote 41:
Pietschmann, _Geschichte der Phönizier_, p. 115. The suggestion was
first made by von Bunsen.
Footnote 42:
For a possible explanation of the origin of the practice, see H. N.
Moseley in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, vi. 4, p.
396. Bastian gives another in his description of the practice among
the Polynesians (_Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, vi. pp. 40, 41).
Footnote 43:
A brilliant suggestion of Professor Hommel, however, may prove to be
the true explanation of the mysterious name. In the Minæan
inscriptions of Southern Arabia a long _â_ is constantly denoted in
writing by _h_; and Abraham, therefore, may be merely the Minæan mode
of writing Abram. If so, this would show that the Hebrew scribes were
once under the influence of the Minæan script, and that portions of
the Pentateuch itself may have been written in the letters of the
Minæan alphabet (Hommel, _The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 275-277).
Dr. Neubauer has suggested to me that this also may be the explanation
of the name of Aaron (_Aharôn_), which, like Ab-raham, has no
etymology. Aaron would be the graphic form of Âron, an Arabic name
which appears as Aran in the genealogy of the Horites (Gen. xxxvi.
28).
Footnote 44:
See Berger, _L’Arabie avant Mahomet d’après les Inscriptions_ (1885),
pp. 27, 28.
Footnote 45:
D. H. Müller, _Epigraphische Denkmäler aus Arabien_ (1889), p. 13.
Footnote 46:
Thus we have _anuki_ ‘I,’ Heb. _anochi_; _badiu_ ‘in his hand,’ Heb.
_b’yado_; _akharunu_ ‘after him,’ Heb. _akharono_; _rusu_ ‘head,’ Heb.
_rosh_; _kilubi_ ‘cage,’ Heb. _chelûb_; _har_ ‘mountain,’ Heb. _har_.
See my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 247.
Footnote 47:
On the question of the site of Mizpah of Gilead, see G. A. Smith, _The
Historical Geography of the Holy Land_, pp. 586, 587.
Footnote 48:
_Ausgrabungen in Sendschirli_ in _Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen
Sammlungen_, xi. (1893).
Footnote 49:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. pp. vi, vii.
Footnote 50:
Dussaud (_Revue Archéologique_, iii. xxx. p. 346) states that
according to the Ansarîyeh of the Gulf of Antioch the ‘Yudi’ or
Hebrews formerly occupied their country, and constructed the ancient
monuments found in it, one of which is called after the name of
Solomon. For Neubauer’s suggestion that the Dinhabah of Gen. xxxvi. 32
is identical in name with the Dunip or Tunip of Northern Syria, see
further on.
Hoffmann (_Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, xi. p. 210) maintains that
the origin of the Aramaic dialects is to be sought in a Bedâwin
language allied to that of the Arabs and Sabæans, which underwent
intermixture with Canaanitish (or Phœnician) through the settlement of
its speakers in a Canaanitish country.
Footnote 51:
In Assyrian letters of the Second Empire mention is made of the
Nabathean Â-kamaru, the son of Amme’te’, and the Arabian Ami-li’ti,
the son of Ameri or Omar (Harper, _Assyrian and Babylonian Letters_,
iii. p. 262; iv. p. 437).
Footnote 52:
It is stated in Deut. xxiii. 4 that Balaam was hired from ‘Pethor of
Aram Naharaim,’ not only by the Moabites, but by the Ammonites as well
(though it is true that in the Hebrew text the word _sâkar_, ‘hired,’
is in the singular). It may be noted that the mother of Rehoboam,
whose name is compounded with that of Am or Ammi (compare Rehab-iah, 1
Chron. xxiii. 17), was an Ammonitess (1 Kings xiv. 21). For a full
discussion of the name of ’Ammi or ’Ammu, and the historical
conclusions which may be deduced from it, see Hommel, _The Ancient
Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 89 _sqq._
Footnote 53:
The name of Carchemish is usually written Gargamis in the cuneiform
inscriptions (Qarqamish in the Egyptian hieroglyphs), but
Tiglath-pileser I. (W. A. I. i. 13, 49) calls it ‘Kar-Gamis’ (the
Fortified Wall of Gamis) ‘in the land of the Hittites,’ and from the
Hebrew spelling in the Old Testament we may gather that Gamis was
identified with the Moabite Chemosh. In Babylonian tablets of the age
of Ammi-zadoq mention is made of a wood Karkamisû or ‘Carchemishian’
(Bu. 88-5-12, 163, line 11; 88-5-12, 19, line 8). It may be noted that
the name ‘Jerabîs,’ sometimes assigned to the site of Carchemish
instead of Jerablûs, is, according to the unanimous testimony of
English and American residents in the neighbourhood, erroneous.
Footnote 54:
See _Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 45.
Footnote 55:
For the identity of the Zuzim with the Babylonian Zavzala, see my note
in the _Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, xix. 2,
pp. 74, 75.
Footnote 56:
See above, p. 21.
Footnote 57:
See above, p. 20.
Footnote 58:
We owe the term ‘Eurafrican’ to Dr. Brinton (see his _Races and
Peoples_, 1890, Lecture iv.). For the relationship of the Libyan and
the Kelt, see my Address to the Anthropological Section of the British
Association, 1887.
Footnote 59:
The expression ‘mountain of the Amorites,’ which we meet with in Deut.
i. 7, 19, takes us back to Abrahamic times. One of the campaigns of
Samsu-iluna, the son and successor of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel, was
against ‘the great mountain of the land of the Amorites’ (_kharsag gal
mad Martu-ki_, Bu. 91-5-9, 333; _Rev._ 19).
Footnote 60:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, p. 41; D.
H. Müller, _Epigraphische Denkmäler aus Arabien_, p. 8 (the Minæan
inscriptions of El-Oela, south of Teima, are given pp. 21 _sqq._).
Footnote 61:
Philo Byblius in his work ‘On the Jews,’ as quoted by Eusebius (_Præp.
Evang._ i, 10), stated that ‘Kronos, whom the Phœnicians call El, the
king of the country, who was afterwards deified in the planet Saturn,
had an only son by a nymph of the country called Anôbret. This son was
named Yeud, which signifies in Phœnician an only son. His country
having fallen into distress during a war, Kronos clothed his son in
royal robes, raised an altar, and sacrificed him upon it.’ In his
account of the Phœnician mythology, the same writer describes the
sacrifice a little differently: ‘A plague and a famine having
occurred, Kronos sacrificed his only son to his father the Sky,
circumcised himself, and obliged his companions to do the same’
(Euseb. _l. c._).
Footnote 62:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 49, No. 81.
Footnote 63:
_L’Imagerie Phénicienne_ (1880), p. 105.
Footnote 64:
Which may also be read _ayyal_ or ‘hart.’
Footnote 65:
See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 130 _sq._
Footnote 66:
See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 127, 132, where a photograph
is given of Professor Flinders Petrie’s cast of the Ashkelon profiles.
Footnote 67:
_Black Obelisk_, lines 60, 61, compared with _Monolith Inscription_,
ll. 90-95.
Footnote 68:
One _feddan_ or acre contained 1800 _sari_ (Reisner in the
_Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_, xi. 4, p. 421). The area was not
great, though it was calculated that not more than 120 _sari_ could be
ploughed by a single ox.
Footnote 69:
Published by Strassmaier in the Transactions of the Fifth Oriental
Congress, ii. 1, _Append._ pp. 14, 15; a translation will be found in
Peiser’s _Altbabylonische Urkunden in the Keilschriftliche
Bibliothek_, iv. p. 7. The tablet was found at Tel-Sifr.
Footnote 70:
Published by Meissner, _Beiträge zum altbabylonischen Privatrecht_,
No. 43 (with corrections by Pinches); a translation is given by
Peiser, _Keilschriftliche Bibliothek_, iv. pp. 23-25.
Footnote 71:
Gen. xxiii. 18. The Hebrew expression ‘In the presence of’ is the same
as that which is translated ‘Witnessed by’ in the Babylonian
documents.
Footnote 72:
Babylonian _shaqâlu kaspa_, Hebrew _shâqal [eth-hak-] keseph_.
Footnote 73:
According to Professor Flinders Petrie, the heavy maneh or mina as
fixed by Dungi and restored by Nebuchadrezzar weighed 978,309 grammes.
An example of it is now in the British Museum. See Lehmann in the
_Verhandlungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft_, 1893, p. 27.
Footnote 74:
The identification is, however, doubtful, since only potsherds of the
Roman period are visible at Umm Jerâr, which, moreover, according to
Palmer (_Name-lists_ in the _Survey of Western Palestine_, p. 420), is
merely Umm el-Jerrâr, ‘the mother of water-pots.’
Footnote 75:
Beti-ilu (Winckler’s _Tel el-Amarna Letters_, Nos. 51, 125) is
associated with Tunip and the country of Nukhassê. The reading of the
name is not quite certain, however, as it may be transcribed Batti-ilu
or Mitti-ilu. A Babylonian of the Abrahamic age also has the name of
Beta-ili.
Footnote 76:
The title seems to have been of Horite origin (see Gen. xxxvi. 21, 29,
30).
Footnote 77:
It is noticeable that the Edomite leader who was carried captive to
Egypt by Ramses III. after he had destroyed ‘the tents’ of ‘the Shasu
in Seir,’ is entitled ‘chieftain,’ and not ‘king.’ There is a portrait
of him on the walls of Medînet Habu at Thebes.
Footnote 78:
For another explanation of the name, see Gen. xxv. 26; Hos. xii. 3.
Footnote 79:
Jacob-el is written Ya’akub-ilu; Joseph-el, Yasupu-ilu and Yasup-il,
which is found in a list of slaves of the same early age (Bu. 91-5-9,
324). In the same list mention is made of land belonging to Adunum,
the Heb. _adon_, and to Nakha-ya, which is a parallel formation to the
Heb. Noah. In a tablet dated in the reign of Zabium, the founder of
the dynasty to which Khammu-rabi or Amraphel belonged, we find the
name of Ya-kh-ku-ub-il, _i.e._ Ya’qub-il (Bu. 91-5-9, 387).
Footnote 80:
Iqib-ilu and Asupi-ilu.
Footnote 81:
See _Records of the Past_, new ser., v. pp. 48, 51.
Footnote 82:
One of the scarabs of Ya’qob-el is in the Egyptian Museum of
University College, London. _El_ is written _h(a)l_.
Footnote 83:
On the summit of the hill above Beitîn, the ancient Beth-On or
Beth-el, the strata of limestone rock take the form of vast steps
rising one above the other.
Footnote 84:
Cf. the article of Mr. Pinches on ‘Gifts to a Babylonian Bit-ili’ in
the _Babylonian and Oriental Record_, ii. 6.
Footnote 85:
See, for example, Peiser, _Texte juristischen und geschäftlichen
Inhalts_ (_Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek_, iv.), p. 49, No. iii.,
where Ubarum hires himself out to Ana-Samas-litsi for a month, for
half a shekel of silver.
Footnote 86:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 169.
Footnote 87:
Deut. xxxii. 15. See also Deut. xxxiii. 5, 26; Isa. xliv. 2.
Footnote 88:
According to immemorial tradition, the site of the field is marked by
Jacob’s Well (S. John iv. 6). Dr. Masterman in the _Quarterly
Statement_ of the Palestine Exploration Fund, April 1897, gives for
the first time a satisfactory explanation why this deep well, which is
often dry in summer, should have been sunk in the neighbourhood of a
number of springs:—‘The springs have probably always belonged to the
townsfolk (since they became settled); and, in the case of any
wandering tribes with considerable flocks among them, it is
exceedingly probable that the more settled inhabitants would first
resent and then resist the new-comers marching twice daily into their
midst to water their flocks at their springs, Probably any experienced
nomad with such flocks, accustomed to such a country as this, would
know pretty surely where he might, from the conformation of the hills,
expect to find water. If, then, a quarrel arose, what more probable
than that he should seek to make himself independent of these
disagreeable neighbours. Further, if we can accept the tradition, we
have, in the story of Jacob, two special facts connected with this:
firstly, he bought a piece of ground on which he could make a well for
himself; and then we gather from Genesis xxxiv. that his family made
themselves sufficiently obnoxious to the Shechemites to make it very
necessary for Jacob to be independent of their permission to use their
springs.’
Footnote 89:
Cf. Gen. xlix. 14, 15. The Hebrew word rendered ‘two burdens’ by the
Authorised Version in v. 14 should be translated ‘sheepfolds,’ as it
is in Judg. v. 16.
Footnote 90:
Thus the ancient Abshek, the Abokkis of classical geography, has
become Abu Simbel, or ‘father of an ear of corn’; and Silsila is said
to have derived its name from a ‘chain’ or _silsila_ stretched across
the Nile from the rocks on either bank, though it really has its
origin in the classical Silsilis, the Coptic Joljel or ‘barrier.’
Footnote 91:
In the list of Thothmes III. the name of Nekeb of Galilee (Josh. xix.
33) is followed by that of Ashushkhen, which may be compared with
Issachar, since the interchange of final _n_ and _r_ is not uncommon.
But the substitution of _kh_ for _k_ (_ch_) is difficult to account
for.
Footnote 92:
Shmâna is the thirty-fifth name in the Palestine list of Thothmes, and
follows the name of Chinnereth (Josh. xix. 35; comp. also Shmânau, No.
18. See Tomkins in _Records of the Past_, new series, v. pp. 44, 46).
One of the Tel el-Amarna tablets (W. and A. ii., No. 39) mentions ‘the
Yaudu’ in the neighbourhood of Tunip, now Tennib, north-west of
Aleppo. The name of the Jews is written in the same way in the
cuneiform texts, though the Yaudu of the Tel el-Amarna tablets are
probably to be identified with the land of Ya’di, which the
inscriptions of Sinjerli place in Northern Syria. But it is noticeable
that the Tel el-Amarna correspondence makes Kinza a district near
Kadesh on the Orontes, close to the Lake of Homs, and Kinza is letter
for letter the Biblical Kenaz. The Kenizzites, it will be remembered,
formed an integral part of the later tribe of Judah.
Footnote 93:
Hommel, _Aufsätze und Abhandlungen sur Kunde der Sprachen, Literaturen
und der Geschichte des vorderen Orients_ (1890), p. 31.
Footnote 94:
The Rev. H. G. Tomkins (_Quarterly Statement_ of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, April 1885) first pointed out the true signification
of the name of Beth-lehem, Lakhmu was one of the primeval gods of
Chaldæan religion.
Footnote 95:
The village of Rachel, which was probably where the stone stood, is
referred to in 1 Sam. xxx. 29.
Footnote 96:
_E.g._ _Yeôr_, ‘river,’ Egyptian _aur_; _akhu_, ‘herbage on the river
bank’ (Gen. xli. 2), Egyptian _akhu_; _rebid_, ‘collar,’ Egyptian
_repit_. See Ebers, _Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s_, pp. 337-339.
Footnote 97:
See my _Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos_, pp. 25 _sq._
Footnote 98:
See Tomkins, _Life and Times of Joseph_, p. 184.
Footnote 99:
Asenath is probably Nes-Nit, ‘Attached to Neith,’ as Subanda is
Nes-Bandid, ‘Attached to Bandid.’
Footnote 100:
Mattan-Baal. The corresponding Hebrew name is Mattaniah.
Footnote 101:
A translation of the Sallier Papyrus is given by Maspero in the
_Records of the Past_, new series, ii. pp. 37 _sq._ For the scarab of
‘Sutekh-Apopi’ see Maspero’s _Struggle of the Nations_ (Eng. tr.), p.
vii. The names of Beth-On or Beth-el in Canaan, and of On near
Damascus (Amos i. 5), indicate a connection with the cult of the
Sun-god at On in Egypt. On in the ‘Beka’’ of Damascus is probably the
Heliopolis of Syria, to which the worship of Ra of Heliopolis of Egypt
was brought in the reign of the Pharaoh Senemures (Macrobius,
_Saturnal._ i. 23, 10).
Footnote 102:
_Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s_, p. 299.
Footnote 103:
Maspero, _The Struggle of the Nations_, p. 271, note 5.
Footnote 104:
Cf. Brugsch, _Aegyptologie_, pp. 218 _sq._
Footnote 105:
Ebers, _Aegypten und die Bücher Mose’s_, pp. 323-333.
Footnote 106:
Ebers, _l.c._, pp. 335, 336.
Footnote 107:
See Wiedemann, _Religion der alten Aegypter_, pp. 142-144. The
_khartummîm_ and _khakâmîm_ (Authorised Version, ‘magicians’ and ‘wise
men’) seem to correspond with the Egyptian _kherhebu_, ‘interpreters
of the sacred books,’ and _rekhu khetu_, ‘wise men.’
Footnote 108:
See Tomkins, _Life and Times of Joseph_, p. 44; Erman, _Life in
Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 439.
Footnote 109:
Mariette, _Abydos_, p. 421 (Ben-Mazan from Bashan becomes
Ramses-em-per-Ra); Daninos-Pasha and Maspero in the _Recueil de
Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’ Archéologie égyptienne et
assyrienne_, xii. p. 214; and Sayce in the _Academy_, 1891, p. 461.
Footnote 110:
See Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 439.
Footnote 111:
See Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), pp. 102, 103.
Footnote 112:
Thus ‘Captain’ Ahmes had land given him according to his biographical
inscription, ll. 22, 24; see Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng.
tr.), second edit. i. p. 249.
Footnote 113:
See Virey in _Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. pp. 7 _sqq._ There
were similar public granaries in Babylonia called _sutummi_, under the
charge of an officer who bore the title of _satammu_, and the
institution was probably introduced into Egypt from Asia.
Footnote 114:
Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 108.
Footnote 115:
See Brugsch’s translation of the inscription in his _Die biblischen
sieben Jahre der Hungersnoth_ (1891).
Footnote 116:
See Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), 2nd edit., i. pp.
262, 263. ‘Captain’ Ahmes, who took part in the War of Independence
under Ahmes I., calls himself the son of Abana, and traces his descent
to his ‘forefather Baba.’ In Abana, Maspero (_The Struggle of the
Nations_, p. 85) sees the Semitic Abîna, ‘Our father.’
Footnote 117:
Thus in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, Rib-Hadad, the governor of
Phœnicia, asks the Pharaoh to send corn to Gebal, as the crops there
had failed (Winckler and Abel, No. 48, ll. 8-19), and Meneptah sent
corn to the Hittites when they suffered from a famine (Brugsch, _Egypt
under the Pharaohs_, Eng. tr., 2nd edit., ii. p. 119).
Footnote 118:
According to Abulfarag (_Chron._ p. 14), Joseph became Vizier in the
seventeenth year of the reign of Apopi. Maspero (_Struggle of the
Nations_, pp. 59, 107) makes Apopi Ra-aa-kenen the third of the name.
Footnote 119:
See Maspero’s translation in _Records of the Past_, new ser., ii. pp.
37 _sq._
Footnote 120:
E. Naville, _Goshen and the Shrine of Saft el-Hennah_, Fourth Memoir
of the Egypt Exploration Fund (1887), pp. 14 _sq._
Footnote 121:
See Naville, _Goshen_, p. 26.
Footnote 122:
_Bibl. Hist._, i. 91.
Footnote 123:
N. H. xix. 5.
Footnote 124:
Abel-Mizraim may be the Abel that is mentioned in connection with the
‘gardens,’ the ‘tilth,’ and the ‘spring’ of Carmel of Judah in the
list of places in Canaan conquered by Thothmes III. (No. 92). Another
Abel is mentioned two names earlier (No. 90).
Footnote 125:
See Virey’s translation in _Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. p.
34.
CHAPTER II
THE COMPOSITION OF THE PENTATEUCH
The Literary Analysis and its Conclusions—Based on a Theory and an
Assumption—Weakness of the Philological Evidence—Disregard of the
Scientific Method of Comparison—Imperfection of our Knowledge of
Hebrew—Archæology unfavourable to the Higher Criticism—Analysis of
Historical Sources—Tel el-Amarna Tablets—Antiquity of Writing in the
East—The Mosaic Age highly Literary—Scribes mentioned in the Song of
Deborah—The Story of the Deluge brought from Babylonia to Canaan
before the time of Moses—The Narratives of the Pentateuch confirmed
by Archæology—Compiled from early Written Documents—Revised and
re-edited from time to time—Three Strata of Legislation—Accuracy in
the Text—Tendencies—Chronology.
The book of Genesis ends with the death of Joseph. When the five books
of the Pentateuch were divided from one another we do not know. The
division is older than the Septuagint translation, older too than the
time when the Law of Moses was accepted by the Samaritans as divinely
authoritative. As far back as we can trace the external history of the
Pentateuch, it has consisted of five books divided from one another as
they still are in our present Bibles.
An influential school of modern critics has come to conclusions which
are difficult to reconcile with this external testimony. Instead of the
Pentateuch it offers us a Hexateuch, the Book of Joshua being added to
those of Moses, and of the origin and growth of this Hexateuch it
professes to be able to give a minute and mathematically exact account.
Very little, if any of it, we are told, goes back to the period of
Moses, the larger part of the work having been composed or compiled in
the age of the Exile. It is true, the theories of criticism have changed
from time to time; what was formerly held, for instance, to be the
oldest portion of the Hexateuch being now regarded as the latest; but
each generation of critics has been equally confident that its own
literary analysis was mathematically correct. At present the
hypothetical scheme most in favour is as follows.
The earliest part of the Hexateuch, at all events in its existing form,
is a document distinguished by the use of the name Yahveh, and sometimes
therefore termed Yahvistic or Jehovistic, but more usually designated by
the symbol J. The Yahvist is supposed to have been a Jew who made use of
older materials, and lived in the ninth century B.C. His work begins
with ‘the second’ account of the Creation, in the middle of the fourth
verse of the second chapter of Genesis, and the last trace of it is to
be found in the story of the death and burial of Moses at the end of
Deuteronomy. His style is said to be naïve and lively, and his
conceptions of the Deity grossly anthropomorphic.
Next in order to the Yahvist comes the Second Elohist (symbolised by the
letter E), whose title is derived from the period, not very far distant,
in the history of criticism, when what is now known as the Priestly Code
was assigned to a First Elohist. The Elohist is characterised by the use
of the word Elohim, ‘God,’ rather than Yahveh, and the critics have
discovered in him a native of the northern kingdom. To him belong the
‘Ten Words’ which represent the original form of the Ten Commandments,
as well as the history of Joseph. He is said to have written with a
certain theological tendency, to which is due his predilection for
introducing dreams and angels into his narrative. His date is ascribed
to the eighth century B.C., and the combination of his narrative with
that of the Yahvist (J.E.) produced a composite work to which the name
of Prophetic or Pre-Deuteronomic Redaction has been applied. The
Redactor endeavoured to reconcile the contradictions between the two
narratives by various harmonistic expedients; his success was not great,
and the nineteenth century critic accordingly believes himself able not
only to separate the two original documents, but to point out the
additions of the Redactor as well.
Contemporaneous with this work of redaction was the appearance of a new
book, the so-called Book of the Covenant. This was of small dimensions;
at any rate, all that remains of it is contained in a few chapters of
Exodus (xx. 24-xxiii. 33, xxiv. 3-8). It was added, however, to the
Prophetic Redaction, and the Mosaic Law for the first time was
introduced to the world.
But now appeared a book which was of momentous consequences for both the
history and the religion of Judah. This was the book of Deuteronomy, or
rather the middle portion of the book of Deuteronomy (chaps. xii-xxvi.),
the rest of the book being a subsequent addition. This abbreviated
Deuteronomy, it is assumed, is ‘the book of the Law’ which Hilkiah the
high priest declared he had ‘found in the house of the Lord’ in the
reign of Josiah, and it is further assumed that the word ‘found’ is
intended to cover a ‘pious fraud.’ The Egyptian inscriptions mention
books of early date which had been similarly ‘found’ in the temples, and
some of these books really seem to have been forgeries of a later
date.[126] Modern criticism has determined that Hilkiah and his friends
imitated the example of the Egyptian priests in the case of Deuteronomy.
At all events, the results were instantaneous and revolutionary. The
king and his court believed that they had before them the actual
commands of their God to the great lawgiver of Israel, and the Jewish
religion underwent accordingly a radical reform. Nor did the effect of
the supposed discovery end here. Like the forged Decretals in mediæval
Europe, the book of Deuteronomy had a continuous and wide-reaching
influence upon Jewish thought. Its teaching was matured during the
Exile, and out of it grew that form of Jewish religion of which
Christianity was the heir. The book of Deuteronomy (symbolised by D) in
the first as well as in the second or enlarged edition belongs to the
latter part of the seventh century B.C. But the Hexateuch was still far
from complete. During the Exile a book of the Law, now contained in Lev.
xvii.-xxvi., was written and promulgated, the author, it appears, having
been incited to his work by Ezekiel’s ideal of a theocratic state. This
book of the Law was followed by a far more ambitious production, the
‘Priestly Code’ (generally known as P, and not unfrequently called the
‘Grundschrift’ by German writers). The Priestly Code embodies what
earlier critics knew as the work of the First Elohist; it not only in
the name of Moses shapes the ritual and religion of Israel to the
advantage of the priests, but it attempts to trace the history of the
revelation which resulted in that religion back to the Creation itself.
The name of Elohim is again a distinguishing feature in the narrative,
which is described by the ‘critics’ as formal and pedantic, as
affectedly archaistic, and as disfigured by a strong theological
tendency. Wellhausen and Stade assure us that it transforms the
patriarchs into pious Jews of the Exile. And yet it was just this
narrative, which we are now told bears so plainly on its face the marks
of its late age and sacerdotal character, that hardly twenty years ago
was declared by the critics themselves to be the oldest portion of the
Hexateuch!
By this time the Hexateuch was nearly ready to become the Pentateuch,
which should be read by Ezra before the Jewish community as ‘the law of
God’ (Nem. viii. 8), and be accepted by the hostile Samaritans as alone
authoritative among the sacred books of Israel. All that was needed
further was to combine the existing books into a whole, smoothing over
the inconsistencies between them and supplying links of connection. The
‘final Redactor’ who accomplished this task lived shortly after the
Exile, and has been identified with Ezra by some of the critics. Whoever
he was, he was naturally more in harmony with the spirit and ideas of
the Priestly Code than he was with those of the Prophetic Redaction, or
even of Deuteronomy; indeed, it is hard to understand why he should have
troubled himself about the Prophetic Redaction at all. Between the
Jewish religion of the days of Asa or Jehoshaphat and that of the period
after the Exile a great gulf was fixed.
It is clear that if the modern literary analysis of the Pentateuch is
justified, it is useless to look to the five books of Moses for
authentic history. There is nothing in them which can be ascribed with
certainty to the age of Moses, nothing which goes back even to the age
of the Judges. Between the Exodus out of Egypt and the composition of
the earliest portion of the so-called Mosaic Law there would have been a
dark and illiterate interval of several centuries. Not even tradition
could be trusted to span them. For the Mosaic age, and still more for
the age before the Exodus, all that we read in the Old Testament would
be historically valueless.
Such criticism, therefore, as accepts the results of ‘the literary
analysis’ of the Hexateuch acts consistently in stamping as mythical the
whole period of Hebrew history which precedes the settlement of the
Israelitish tribes in Canaan. Doubt is thrown even on their residence in
Egypt and subsequent escape from ‘the house of bondage.’ Moses himself
becomes a mere figure of mythland, a hero of popular imagination whose
sepulchre was unknown because it had never been occupied. In order to
discredit the earlier records of the Israelitish people, there is no
need of indicating contradictions—real or otherwise—in the details of
the narratives contained in them, of enlarging upon their chronological
difficulties, or of pointing to the supernatural elements they involve;
the late dates assigned to the medley of documents which have been
discovered in the Hexateuch are sufficient of themselves to settle the
question.[127]
The dates are largely, if not altogether, dependent on the assumption
that Hebrew literature is not older than the age of David. A few poems
like the Song of Deborah may have been handed down orally from an
earlier period, but readers and writers, it is assumed, there were none.
The use of writing for literary purposes was coeval with the rise of the
monarchy. The oldest inscription in the letters of the Phœnician
alphabet yet discovered is only of the ninth century B.C., and the
alphabet would have been employed for monumental purposes long before it
was applied to the manufacture of books. As Wolf’s theory of the origin
and late date of the Homeric Poems avowedly rested on the belief that
the literary use of writing in Greece was of late date, so too the
theory of the analysts of the Hexateuch rests tacitly on the belief that
the Israelites of the age of Moses and the Judges were wholly
illiterate. Moses did not write the Pentateuch because he could not have
done so.
The huge edifice of modern Pentateuchal criticism is thus based on a
theory and an assumption. The theory is that of ‘the literary analysis’
of the Hexateuch, the assumption that a knowledge of writing in Israel
was of comparatively late date. The theory, however, is philological,
not historical. The analysis is philological rather than literary, and
depends entirely on the occurrence and use of certain words and phrases.
Lists have been drawn up of the words and phrases held to be peculiar to
the different writers between whom the Hexateuch is divided, and the
portion of the Hexateuch to be assigned to each is determined
accordingly. That it is sometimes necessary to cut a verse in two,
somewhat to the injury of the sense, matters but little; the necessities
of the theory require the sacrifice, and the analyst looks no further.
Great things grow out of little, and the mathematical minuteness with
which the Hexateuch is apportioned among its numerous authors, and the
long lists of words and idioms by which the apportionment is supported,
all have their origin in Astruc’s separation of the book of Genesis into
two documents, in one of which the name of Yahveh is used, while in the
other it is replaced by Elohim.[128]
The historian, however, is inclined to look with suspicion upon
historical results which rest upon purely philological evidence. It is
not so very long ago since the comparative philologists believed they
had restored the early history of the Aryan race. With the help of the
dictionary and grammar they had painted an idyllic picture of the life
and culture of the primitive Aryan family and traced the migrations of
its offshoots from their primeval Asiatic home. But anthropology has
rudely dissipated all these reconstructions of primitive history, and
has not spared even the Aryan family or the Asiatic home itself. The
history that was based on philology has been banished to fairyland. It
may be that the historical results based on the complicated and
ingenious system of Hexateuchal criticism will hereafter share the same
fate.
In fact, there is one characteristic of them which cannot but excite
suspicion. A passage which runs counter to the theory of the critic is
at once pronounced an interpolation, due to the clumsy hand of some
later ‘Redactor.’ Thus ‘the tabernacle of the congregation’ is declared
to have been an invention of the Priestly Code; and therefore a verse in
the First Book of Samuel (ii. 22), which happens to refer to it, is
arbitrarily expunged from the text. Similarly passages in the historical
books which imply an acquaintance on the part of Solomon and his
successors with the laws and institutions of the Priestly Code are
asserted to be late additions, and assigned to the very circle of
writers to which the composition of the Code is credited. Indeed, if we
are to believe the analysts, a considerable part of the professedly
historical literature of the Old Testament was written or ‘redacted’
chiefly with the purpose of bolstering up the ideas and inventions
either of the Deuteronomist or of the later Code. This is a cheap and
easy way of rewriting ancient history, but it is neither scientific nor
in accordance with the historical method, however consonant it may be
with the methods of the philologist.
When, however, we come to examine the philological evidence upon which
we are asked to accept this new reading of ancient Hebrew history, we
find that it is wofully defective. We are asked to believe that a
European scholar of the nineteenth century can analyse with mathematical
precision a work composed centuries ago in the East for Eastern readers
in a language that is long since dead, can dissolve it verse by verse,
and even word by word, into its several elements, and fix the
approximate date and relation of each. The accomplishment of such a feat
is an impossibility, and to attempt it is to sin as much against common
sense as against the laws of science. Science teaches us that we can
attain to truth only by the help of comparison; we can know things
scientifically only in so far as they can be compared and measured one
with another. Where there is no comparison there can be no scientific
result. Even the logicians of the Middle Ages taught that no conclusion
can be drawn from what they termed a single instance. It is just this,
however, that the Hexateuchal critics have essayed to do. The Pentateuch
and its history have been compared with nothing except themselves, and
the results have been derived not from the method of comparison, but
from the so-called ‘tact’ and arbitrary judgment of the individual
scholar. Certain postulates have been assumed, the consequences of which
have been gradually evolved, one after another, while the coherence and
credibility of the general hypothesis has been supported by the
invention of further subordinate hypotheses as the need for them arose.
The ‘critical’ theory of the origin and character of the Hexateuch
closely resembles the Ptolemaic theory of the universe; like the latter,
it is highly complicated and elaborate, coherent in itself, and perfect
on paper, but unfortunately baseless in reality.
Its very complication condemns it. It is too ingenious to be true. Had
the Hexateuch been pieced together as we are told it was, it would have
required a special revelation to discover the fact. We may lay it down
as a general rule in science that the more simple a theory is, the more
likely it is to be correct. It is the complicated theories, which demand
all kinds of subsidiary qualifications and assistant hypotheses, that
are put aside by the progress of science. The wit of man may be great,
but it needs a mass of material before even a simple theory can be
established with any pretence to scientific value.
There is yet another reason why the new theory of the origin of the
Mosaic Law stands self-condemned. It deals with the writers and readers
of the ancient East as if they were modern German professors and their
literary audience. The author of the Priestly Code is supposed to go to
work with scissors and paste, and with a particular object in view, like
a rather wooden and unimaginative compiler of to-day. And so closely did
the minds and methods of the authors of the Hexateuch resemble those of
their modern European critics, that in spite of their efforts to conceal
the piecemeal nature of their work, as well as of the fact that it
actually deceived their countrymen to whom it was addressed, to the
European scholar of to-day it all lies open and revealed. When, however,
we turn to other products of Oriental thought, whether ancient or
modern, we do not find that this is the way in which the authors of them
have written history, or what purports to be history, neither do we find
their readers to be at all like those for whom the Hexateuch is supposed
to have been compiled. The point of view of an Oriental is still
essentially different from that of a European, at all events so far as
history and literature are concerned; and the attempt to transform the
ancient Israelitish historians into somewhat inferior German compilers
proves only a strange want of familiarity with Eastern modes of thought.
But it is not only science, it is common sense as well, which is
violated by the endeavour to foist philological speculations into the
treatment of historical questions. Hebrew is a dead language; it is
moreover a language which is but imperfectly known. Our knowledge of it
is derived entirely from that fragment of its literature which is
preserved in the Old Testament, and the errors of copyists and the
corruptions of the text make a good deal even of this obscure and
doubtful. There are numerous words, the traditional rendering of which
is questionable; there are numerous others in the case of which it is
certainly wrong; and there is passage after passage in which the
translations of scholars vary from one another, sometimes even to
contradiction. Of both grammar and lexicon it may be said that we see
them through a glass darkly. Not unfrequently the reading of the
Septuagint—the earliest manuscript of which is six hundred years older
than the earliest manuscript of the Hebrew text—differs entirely from
the reading of the Hebrew; and there is a marked tendency among the
Hexateuchal analysts to prefer it, though the recently-discovered Hebrew
text of the book of Ecclesiasticus seems to show that the preference is
not altogether justified.
How, then, can a modern Western scholar analyse with even approximate
exactitude an ancient Hebrew work, and on the strength of the language
and style dissolve it once more into its component atoms? How can he
determine the relation of these atoms one to the other, or presume to
fix the dates to which they severally belong? The task would be
impossible even in the case of a modern English book, although English
is a spoken language with which we are all supposed to be thoroughly
acquainted, while its vast literature is familiar to us all. And yet
even where we know that a work is composite, it passes the power of man
to separate it into its elements and define the limits of each. No one,
for instance, would dream of attempting such a task in the case of the
novels of Besant and Rice; and the endeavour to distinguish in certain
plays of Shakespeare what belongs to the poet himself and what to
Fletcher has met with the oblivion it deserved. Is it likely that a
problem which cannot be solved in the case of an English book can be
solved where its difficulties are increased a thousandfold? The
minuteness and apparent precision of Hexateuchal criticism are simply
due, like that of the Ptolemaic theory, to the artificial character of
the basis on which it rests. It is, in fact, a philological mirage; it
attempts the impossible, and in place of the scientific method of
comparison, it gives us as a starting-point the assumptions and
arbitrary principles of a one-sided critic.[129]
Where philology has failed, archæology has come to our help. The needful
comparison of the Old Testament record with something else than itself
has been afforded by the discoveries which have been made of recent
years in Egypt and Babylonia and other parts of the ancient East. At
last we are able to call in the aid of the scientific method, and test
the age and character, the authenticity and trustworthiness of the Old
Testament history, by monuments about whose historical authority there
can be no question. And the result of the test has, on the whole, been
in favour of tradition, and against the doctrines of the newer critical
school. It has vindicated the antiquity and credibility of the
narratives of the Pentateuch; it has proved that the Mosaic age was a
highly literary one, and that consequently the marvel would be, not that
Moses should have written, but that he should not have done so; and it
has undermined the foundation on which the documentary hypothesis of the
origin of the Hexateuch has been built. We are still indeed only at the
beginning of discoveries; those made during the past year or two have
for the student of Genesis been exceptionally important; but enough has
now been gained to assure us that the historian may safely disregard the
philological theory of Hexateuchal criticism, and treat the books of the
Pentateuch from a wholly different point of view. They are a historical
record, and it is for the historian and archæologist, and not for the
grammarian, to determine their value and age.
The investigation of the literary sources of history has been a
peculiarly German pastime. Doubtless such an investigation has been
necessary. But it is exposed to the danger of trying to make bricks
without straw. More often than not the materials are wanting for
arriving at conclusions of solid scientific value. The results announced
in such cases are due partly to the critic’s own prepossessions and
postulates, partly to the imperfection of the evidence. It is easy to
doubt, still easier to deny, especially where the evidence is defective,
and the criticism of the literary sources of a narrative has sometimes
meant an unwarrantable and unintelligent scepticism. To reverse
traditional judgments, to reject external testimony, and to discover
half-a-dozen authors where antiquity knew of but one, may be a proof of
the critic’s ingenuity, but it does not always demonstrate his
appreciation of evidence.
Criticism of the literary sources of our historical knowledge is indeed
necessary, and a recognition of the fact has much to do with the advance
which has been made during the present century in the study of the past.
But it must not be forgotten that such criticism has its weak side.
Internal evidence alone is always unsatisfactory; it offers too much
scope for the play of the critic’s imagination and the impression of his
own idiosyncrasies upon the records of history. It resembles too much
the procedure of the spider who spins his web out of himself. It is
wanting in that element of comparison without which scientific truth is
unattainable. To determine the age and trustworthiness of our literary
authorities is doubtless of extreme importance to the historian, but
unfortunately the materials for doing so are too often absent, and the
fancies and assumptions of the critic are put in their place.
The trustworthiness of an author, like the reality of the facts he
narrates, can be adequately tested in only one way. We must be able to
compare his accounts of past events with other contemporaneous records
of them. Sometimes these records consist of pottery or other products of
human industry which anthropology is able to interpret; often they are
the far more important inscriptions which were written or engraved by
the actors in the events themselves. In other words, it is to archæology
that we must look for a verification or the reverse of the ancient
history that has been handed down to us as well as of the credibility of
its narrators. The written monuments of the ancient East which belong to
the same age as the patriarchs or Moses can alone assure us whether we
are to trust the narrative of the Pentateuch or to see in it a confused
medley of legends the late date of which makes belief in them
impossible.
As has been said above, Oriental archæology has already disclosed
sufficient to show us to which of these two alternatives we must lean.
On the one hand, much of the history contained in the book of Genesis
has been shown, directly or indirectly, to be authentic; on the other
hand, the new-fangled theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has
been decisively ruled out of court. Let us take the second point first.
In 1887 a large collection of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform
characters was found by the Egyptian fellahin among the ruins of the
ancient city now known as Tel el-Amarna, on the eastern bank of the
Nile, about midway between Minieh and Siût. The city had enjoyed but a
brief existence. Towards the close of the eighteenth dynasty, the
Pharaoh, Amenophis III., had died, leaving the throne to his son,
Amenophis IV., a mere lad, who was still under the influence of his
mother Teie. Teie was of Asiatic extraction, and fanatically devoted to
an Asiatic form of faith. This devotion was shared by her son, and soon
began to bear fruit. Amon of Thebes had to make way for a new deity, who
was worshipped under the visible form of the solar disk, and the old
religion of Egypt of which the Pharaoh was the official head was utterly
proscribed. It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful
hierarchy of Thebes were at open war; the very name of Amon was erased
from the monuments where it occurred, and the king changed his own name
to that of Khu-n-Aten, ‘the glory of the Solar Disk.’ But in the end,
Khu-n-Aten had to quit the capital of his fathers and establish himself
with his adherents and courtiers in a new city further north. This city,
Khut-Aten, as. it was called, is now represented by the mounds of Tel
el-Amarna.
Here the Pharaoh was surrounded by his followers, a large proportion of
whom were Asiatics, chiefly from Canaan. The court of Egypt, as well as
its religion, became Asiatised. The revolution in religion was also
accompanied by a revolution in art. The old hieratic canon of Egyptian
art was cast aside, and an excessive realism was aimed at, sometimes
even to the verge of caricature. In the centre of the new city a temple
was raised to the new divinity of Egypt, and hard by the temple rose the
palace of the king. Its ornamentation was surpassingly gorgeous. Its
walls and columns were inlaid with precious stones, with coloured glass
and gold; even its floors were painted with scenes from nature which are
of the highest artistic excellence, and statues were erected, some of
which remind us of the best work of classical Greece.[130]
But the glory of Khut-Aten was short-lived. The latter years of the
reign of its founder were clouded with religious and civil dissension.
Religious persecution at home had been followed by trouble and revolt
abroad in the Asiatic provinces of the Empire. When Khu-n-Aten died, his
enemies were already pressing around him, and the perils that threatened
him in Egypt obliged him to return no answer to the despairing appeals
for help that came to him from his governors in Palestine. Hardly had
the mummy of the king been deposited in the superb tomb that he had
carved out of a mountain amid the desolation and solitude of a distant
gorge, when the spoiler was at hand. The royal sarcophagus never reached
the niche in which it was intended to be placed; the enemies of the
‘Heretic King’ hacked to pieces its granite sides as it lay upon the
floor of the inner chamber, and scattered to the winds the remains of
its occupant. The destruction of Khut-Aten soon followed; one or two
princes of the family of Khu-n-Aten did indeed struggle for a brief
while to maintain themselves upon his throne, but before long Amon
triumphed over the Solar Disk. The great temple of Aten was razed to the
ground, and its stones carried away to serve as materials for the
sanctuaries of the victorious god of Thebes. The palace of Khu-n-Aten
was destroyed, the religion he had essayed to force upon his subjects
was forgotten, and the Asiatic officials who had filled his court were
driven into exile. The city he had built was deserted, never to be
inhabited again.
The clay tablets found by the fellahin were discovered on the site of
the Foreign Office of the ‘Heretic King,’ the bricks of which were each
stamped with the words ‘The Record Office of Aten-Ra.’[131] It adjoined
the palace, and we learn from a clay seal found among its ruins by
Professor Petrie that it was under the control of a Babylonian. This,
however, was not extraordinary, since the foreign correspondence of the
Pharaoh was carried on in the Babylonian language and the Babylonian
system of writing. In fact, the Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown that
the Western Asia conquered by the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth
dynasty was wholly under the domination of Babylonian culture. All over
the civilised Oriental world, from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates
to those of the Nile, the common medium of literary and diplomatic
intercourse was the language and script of Chaldæa. Not only the writing
material, but all that was written upon it, was borrowed from Babylonia.
So powerful was this Babylonian influence, that the Egyptians themselves
were compelled to submit to it. In place of their own singular and less
cumbrous hieratic or cursive script, they had to communicate with their
Asiatic subjects and allies in the cuneiform characters and the
Babylonian tongue. Indeed, there is evidence that the memoranda made by
the official scribes of the Pharaoh’s court, at all events in Palestine,
were compiled in the same foreign speech and syllabary.[132] That the
Babylonian language and script were studied in Egypt itself we know from
the evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Among them have been found
fragments of dictionaries as well as Babylonian mythological tales. In
one of the latter certain of the words and phrases are separated from
one another in order to assist the learner.
The use of the Babylonian language and system of writing in Western Asia
must have been of considerable antiquity. This is proved by the fact
that the characters had gradually assumed peculiar forms in the
different countries in which they were employed, so that by merely
glancing at the form of the writing we can tell whether a tablet was
written in Palestine or in Northern Syria, in Cappadocia or Mesopotamia.
The knowledge of them, moreover, was not confined to the few. On the
contrary, education must have been widely spread; the Tel el-Amarna
correspondence was carried on, not only by professional scribes, but
also by officials, by soldiers, and by merchants. Even women appear
among the writers, and take part in the politics of the day. The
letters, too, are sometimes written about the most trivial matters, and
not unfrequently enter into the most unimportant details.
They were sent from all parts of the known civilised world. The kings of
Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, the Egyptian
governors of Syria and Canaan, even the chiefs of the Bedâwin tribes on
the Egyptian frontier, who were subsidised by the Pharaoh’s government
like the Afghan chiefs of to-day, all alike contributed to the
correspondence. Letters, in fact, must have been constantly passing to
and fro along the high-roads which intersected Western Asia. From one
end of it to the other the population was in perpetual literary
intercourse, proving that the Oriental world in the century before the
Exodus was as highly educated and literary as was Europe in the age of
the Renaissance. Nor was all this literary activity and intercourse a
new thing. Several of the letters had been sent to Amenophis III., the
father of the ‘Heretic King,’ and had been removed by the latter from
the archives of Thebes when he transferred his residence to his new
capital. And the literary intercourse which was carried on in the time
of Amenophis III. was merely a continuation of that which had been
carried on for centuries previously. The culture of Babylonia, like that
of Egypt, was essentially literary, and this culture had been spread
over Western Asia from a remote date. The letters of Khammu-rabi or
Amraphel to his vassal, the king of Larsa, have just been recovered, and
among the multitudinous contract-tablets of the same epoch are specimens
of commercial correspondence.
We have, however, only to consider for a moment what was meant by
learning the language and script of Babylonia in order to realise what a
highly-organised system of education must have prevailed throughout the
whole civilised world of the day. Not only had the Babylonian language
to be acquired, but some knowledge also of the older agglutinative
language of Chaldæa was also needed in order to understand the system of
writing. It was as if the schoolboy of to-day had to add a knowledge of
Greek to a knowledge of French. And the system of writing itself
involved years of hard and patient study. It consisted of a syllabary
containing hundreds of characters, each of which had not only several
different phonetic values, but several different ideographic
significations as well. Nor was this all. A group of characters might be
used ideographically to express a word the pronunciation of which had
nothing to do with the sounds of the individual characters of which it
was composed. The number of ideographs which had to be learned was thus
increased fivefold. And, unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, the forms of
these ideographs gave no assistance to the memory. They had long since
lost all resemblance to the pictures out of which they had originally
been developed, and consisted simply of various combinations of wedges
or lines. It was difficult enough for the Babylonian or Assyrian to
learn the syllabary; for a foreigner the task was almost herculean.
That it should have been undertaken implies the existence of libraries
and schools. One of the distinguishing features of Babylonian culture
were the libraries which existed in the great towns, and wherever
Babylonian culture was carried this feature of it must have gone too.
Hence in the libraries of Western Asia clay books inscribed with
cuneiform characters must have been stored up, while beside them must
have been the schools, where the pupils bent over their exercises and
the teachers instructed them in the language and script of the
foreigner. The world into which Moses was born was a world as literary
as our own.
If Western Asia were the home of a long-established literary culture,
Egypt was even more so. From time immemorial the land of the Pharaohs
had been a land of writers and readers. At a very early period the
hieroglyphic system of writing had been modified into a cursive hand,
the so-called hieratic; and as far back as the days of the third and
fifth dynasties famous books had been written, and the author of one of
them, Ptah-hotep, already deplores the degeneracy and literary decay of
his own time. The traveller up the Nile, who examines the cliffs that
line the river, cannot but be struck by the multitudinous names that are
scratched upon them. He is at times inclined to believe that every
Egyptian in ancient times knew how to write, and had little else to do
than to scribble a record of himself on the rocks. The impression is the
same that we derive from the small objects which are disinterred in such
thousands from the sites of the old cities. Wherever it is possible, an
inscription has been put upon them, which, it seems taken for granted,
could be read by all. Even the walls of the temples and tombs were
covered with written texts; wherever the Egyptian turned, or whatever
might be the object he used, it was difficult for him to avoid the sight
of the written word. Whoever was born in the land of Egypt was perforce
familiarised with the art of writing from the very days of his infancy.
Evidence is accumulating that the same literary culture which thus
prevailed in Egypt and Western Asia had extended also to the peninsula
of Arabia. Dr. Glaser and Professor Hommel, two of the foremost
authorities on the subject, believe that some of the inscriptions of
Southern Arabia go back to the age of the eighteenth and nineteenth
Egyptian dynasties; and if they are right, as they seem to be, in
holding that the kingdom of Ma’n or the Minæans preceded that of Saba or
Sheba, the antiquity of writing in Arabia must be great.[133] The fact
that the Babylonian dynasty to which Amraphel belonged was of South
Arabian origin supports the belief in the existence of Arabian culture
at an early period, as do also the latest researches into the source of
the so-called Phœnician alphabet. We now know that in the Mosaic age it
was the cuneiform syllabary, and not the Phœnician alphabet, that was
used in Canaan, while the oldest inscription in Phœnician letters yet
found is later than the reign of Solomon. On the other hand, the South
Arabian form of the alphabet contains letters which denote sounds once
possessed by all the Semitic languages, but lost by the language of
Canaan; and though some of these letters may be derived from other
letters of the alphabet, there are some which have an independent
origin. The caravan-road along which the spices of the South were
carried to Syria and Egypt passed through the territory of Edom;
inscriptions of the kings of Ma’n have already been discovered near
Teima, not far from the frontiers of Midian; and it may be that we shall
yet find records among the ranges of Mount Seir which will form a link
between the early texts of Southern Arabia and the oldest text that has
come from Phœnician soil.
The Exodus from Egypt, then, took place during a highly literary period,
and the people who took part in it passed from a country where the art
of writing literally stared them in the face to another country which
had been the centre of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence and the home of
Babylonian literary culture for unnumbered centuries. Is it conceivable
that their leader and reputed lawgiver should not have been able to
write, that he should not have been educated ‘in the wisdom of Egypt,’
or that the upper classes of his nation should not have been able to
read? Let it be granted that the Israelites were but a Bedâwin tribe
which had been reduced by the Pharaohs to the condition of public
slaves; still, they necessarily had leaders and overseers among them,
who, according to the State regulations of Egypt, were responsible to
the Government for the rest of their countrymen, and some at least of
these leaders and overseers would have been educated men. Moses could
have written the Pentateuch, even if he did not do so.
Moreover, the clay tablets on which the past history of Canaan could be
read were preserved in the libraries and archive-chambers of the
Canaanitish cities down to the time when the latter were destroyed. If
any doubt had existed on the subject after the revelations of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets, it has been set at rest by the discovery of a similar
tablet on the site of Lachish. In some cases the cities were not
destroyed, so far as we know, until the period when it is allowed that
the Israelites had ceased to be illiterate. Gezer, for example, which
plays a leading part in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, does not seem
to have fallen into the hands of an enemy until it was captured by the
Egyptian Pharaoh and handed over to his son-in-law Solomon. As long as a
knowledge of the cuneiform script continued, the early records of Canaan
were thus accessible to the historian, many of them being
contemporaneous with the events to which they referred.
A single archæological discovery has thus destroyed the base of
operations from which a one-sided criticism of Old Testament history had
started. The really strong point in favour of it was the assumption that
the Mosaic age was illiterate. Just as Wolf founded his criticism and
analysis of the Homeric Hymns on the belief that the use of writing for
literary purposes was of late date in Greece, so the belief that the
Israelites of the time of Moses could not read or write was the ultimate
foundation on which the modern theory of the composition of the
Hexateuch has been based. Whether avowed or not, it was the true
starting-point of critical scepticism, the one solid foundation on which
it seemed to rest. The destruction of the foundation endangers the
structure which has been built upon it.
In fact, it wholly alters the position of the modern critical theory.
The _onus probandi_ no longer lies on the shoulders of the defenders of
traditional views. Instead of being called upon to prove that Moses
could have written a book, it is they who have to call on the disciples
of the modern theory to show reason why he should not have done so. And
it is always difficult to prove a negative.
It may be said that the positive arguments of the modern hypothesis
remain as they were. That is possible, but their background is gone. And
how conscious the Hexateuchal analysts were of the importance of this
background, before the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, may be
seen from their desperate efforts to rid themselves of the counter
evidence afforded by the Song of Deborah. ‘Out of Machir,’ it is there
said (Judg. v. 14), ‘came down lawgivers, and out of Zebulun they that
handle the stylus of the scribe.’ In defiance of philology, the latter
words were translated ‘the baton of the marshal’! But _sopher_ is
‘scribe’ here, as elsewhere in Hebrew; and his _shebhet_, or ‘stylus,’
is often depicted on the Egyptian monuments. In the Blessing of Jacob,
which is allowed to be of early date, like the Song of Deborah, the
_shebhet_ is associated with the _m’khoqêq_ or ‘lawgiver’ (Gen. xlix.
10). The word _m’khoqêq_, however, meant literally an ‘engraver,’ one
who did not write his laws on papyrus or parchment, as the scribe would
have done, but caused them to be engraved on stone, or metal, or
clay.[134] In either case they were written down; and written documents
are thus implied not only in the expression ‘the stylus of the scribe,’
but in the word ‘lawgiver’ as well. The Song of Deborah, by general
consent, belongs to the oldest period of the Hebrew settlement in
Palestine; it belongs also to an age of anarchy and national depression;
and, nevertheless, it is already acquainted with Israelitish lawgivers
and scribes, with engravers of the laws and handlers of the pen. It is
little wonder that its evidence was explained away in accordance with a
method which is neither scientific nor historical.
As historians, we are bound to admit the antiquity of writing in Israel.
The scribe goes back to the Mosaic age, like the lawgiver, and in this
respect, therefore, the Israelites formed no exception to the nations
among whom they lived. They were no islet of illiterate barbarism in the
midst of a great sea of literary culture and activity, nor were they
obstinately asleep while all about them were writing and reading.
But even the analysis of the Hexateuchal critics fails to stand the test
of archæological discovery. Nowhere does there seem to be clearer
evidence of the documentary hypothesis than in the story of the Deluge.
Here the combination of a Yahvistic and an Elohistic narrative seems to
force itself upon the attention of the reader, and the advocates of the
disintegration theory have triumphantly pointed to the internal
contradictions and inconsistencies of the story in support of their
views. If anywhere, here, at any rate, the external testimony of
archæeology ought to be given on the side of modern criticism.
And yet it is not. It so happens that among the fragments of ancient
Babylonian epic and legend which have come down to us is a long poem in
twelve books, composed in the age of Abraham, or earlier, by a certain
Sin-liqi-unnini, and recounting the adventures of the Chaldæan hero
Gilgames. It is based on older materials, and is, in fact, the last note
and final summing-up of Chaldæan epic song. Older poems have been
incorporated into it, and the epic itself has been artificially moulded
upon an astronomical plan. Its twelve books, in each of which a new
adventure of its hero is recorded, correspond with the twelve signs of
the zodiac, and the months of the year that were named after them. The
eleventh month was presided over by Aquarius, and was the month of ‘the
Curse of Rain’; into the eleventh book of the poem, accordingly, there
has been introduced the episode of the Deluge.
The story of the Deluge had been the subject of many poems. Fragments of
some of them we possess, and the details of the story were not always
the same. But the version preserved in the epic of Gilgames became what
we may term the standard one; the very fact that it was embodied in the
most famous of the epics made it widely known. When it was discovered by
Mr. George Smith in 1872, its striking resemblance to the story of the
Flood in Genesis was at once apparent to every one. In details as well
as in general outline the two accounts agreed; even in the moral cause
assigned to the Deluge—the sin of man—the Babylonian story alone among
traditions of a Deluge was at one with the Biblical narrative.
A comparison of the Chaldæan and Biblical accounts leads to the
following results. The resemblances between them extend equally to the
Elohistic and the Yahvistic portions of the Hebrew narrative. Like the
Elohist, the epic ascribes the Deluge to the sins of mankind, and the
preservation of Xisuthros, the Chaldæan Noah, and his family to the
piety of the hero; all living things, moreover, are involved in the
calamity, except such as are preserved in the ark; its approach is
revealed to Xisuthros by the god Ea, who instructs him how to build ‘the
ship’; Ea also, like Elohim, prescribes the dimensions of the ark, which
is divided into rooms and stories, and pitched within and without; ‘the
seed of life of all kinds’ is taken into it, together with the family of
Xisuthros; the waters of the Flood are said to cover ‘all the high
mountains,’ and to destroy all living creatures except those that were
in the ark; this latter, too, had a window; and when the Deluge had
subsided and Xisuthros had offered a sacrifice on the peak of the
mountain, Bel blessed him and declared that he would never again destroy
the world by a flood while Istar ‘lifted up’ the rainbow, which an old
Babylonian hymn calls ‘the bow of the Deluge.’[135]
Like the Yahvist, on the other hand, the Babylonian poet sees in the
Flood a punishment for sin, and makes it destroy all living things
except those that were in the ark. He also states that Xisuthros sent
forth three birds, one after the other, in order to discover whether the
waters were subsiding, two of them being a dove and a raven, and that
while the dove turned back to the ark, the raven flew away. After the
descent from the ark, moreover, Xisuthros, we are told, built an altar
and offered sacrifice on the summit of the mountain whereon it had
rested, and there ‘the gods smelled the sweet savour’ of the offering.
In certain cases the epic even explains what is doubtful or obscure in
the Hebrew text. Thus it shows that in the account of the sending forth
of the birds one of the birds has been omitted; and that consequently,
in order to complete the number of times the birds were despatched from
the ark, the dove is sent forth twice, while the raven, instead of being
the last to leave the ark, has been made the first to do so. In the
Babylonian story the order is natural. First, the dove flies forth, then
the swallow or ‘bird of destiny,’ and lastly the raven who feeds on the
corpses that float upon the water, and accordingly does not return. But
the ‘bird of destiny’ carried with it heathen and mythological
associations. It has therefore been omitted by the Biblical writer, the
result being to throw the narrative into confusion.[136]
The Babylonian origin of the Flood, again, alone explains the statement
that it was partly caused by ‘the fountains of the great deep’ being
broken up. The ‘great deep,’ called Tiamat in Babylonian mythology, had
been placed under guard at the Creation, according to Chaldæan belief,
and so prevented from gushing forth and destroying mankind. The whole
conception takes us back to the alluvial plain of Babylonia, liable at
any time to be inundated by the waters of the Persian Gulf, and is
wholly inapplicable to a mountainous country like Palestine, where rain
only could have produced a flood.[137]
There are even indications that in the Biblical narrative the
mythological ideas and polytheistic phraseology of the Babylonian story
have been intentionally contradicted or suppressed. Thus, not only is
the whole colouring of the narrative sternly monotheistic, but God
Himself is made to reveal the approach of the Deluge to Noah, in
contrast with the Babylonian version, according to which the god Ea
announced the coming catastrophe to the Chaldæan Noah without the
knowledge of the supreme god Bel. And when the Flood was past, Bel was
enraged that any should have escaped living from it, and the other
deities had to intercede before he could be pacified. So, too, whereas
the Babylonian poet tells us that the Chaldæan Noah closed the door of
his ship, in the book of Genesis it is Yahveh Himself who does so. In
the view of the Biblical writer, nothing was to be allowed to lessen the
omnipotence of the God of Israel.
It will be noticed that the coincidences between the Babylonian and
Hebrew narratives are quite as much in details as in general outlines,
and these coincidences cover the Hebrew narrative as a whole. It is not
with the Elohist or with the Yahvist alone that the Babylonian poet
agrees, but with the supposed combination of their two documents as we
now find it in the book of Genesis. If the documentary hypothesis were
right, there would be only two ways of accounting for this fact. Either
the Babylonian poet had before him the present ‘redacted’ text of
Genesis, or else the Elohist and Yahvist must have copied the Babylonian
story upon the mutual understanding that the one should insert what the
other omitted. There is no third alternative.
As the Babylonian epic was composed in the age of Khammu-rabi or
Amraphel, neither of the two alternatives is likely to be accepted by
the advocates of the Hexateuchal theory, and the whole theory,
consequently, must be ruled out of court. It breaks down in the first
test case to which the results of archæological discovery can be
applied, a case, moreover, in which its plausibility is unusually great.
Henceforth the historian who pursues a scientific method may safely
disregard the whole fabric of Hexateuchal criticism.
The story of the Deluge itself suggests what may be put in place of it.
With all its likeness to the Babylonian story, the Biblical narrative
has nevertheless undergone a change. It has been clothed not only in a
Hebrew, but also in a Palestinian dress. The ship of the Chaldæan Noah
has become an ark, as was natural in a country where there were no great
rivers or Persian Gulf; the period of the rainfall has been transferred
from Sebet or January and February, when the winter rains fall in
Babylonia, to ‘the second month’ of the Hebrew civil year, our October
and November, the time of the autumn or ‘former rains’ in Canaan, while
the subsidence of the waters is made to begin in the middle of ‘the
seventh month,’ when the ‘latter rains’ of the Canaanitish spring are
over; and the dove is said to have brought back in its mouth a leaf of
the olive, a tree characteristic of the soil of Palestine. Though the
Biblical narrative has been borrowed from Babylonia, it has been
modified and coloured in the West. Even the hero of the Babylonian poem
has become the Noah or Naham of Canaan.
We have learned from the Tel el-Amarna tablets how this could have come
about. There was one period, and, so far as we know, one period only, in
the history of Western Asia, when the literature of Babylonia was taught
and studied there, and when the literary ideas and stories of Chaldæa
were made familiar to the people of Canaan. This was the period of
Babylonian influence which ended with the Mosaic age. With the Hittite
conquests of the fourteenth century B.C., and the Israelitish invasion
of Canaan, it all came to an end. The Babylonian story of the Deluge,
adapted to Palestine as we find it in the Pentateuch, must belong to a
pre-Mosaic epoch. And it is difficult to believe that the identity of
the details in the Babylonian and Biblical versions could have remained
so perfect, or that the Biblical writer could have exhibited such
deliberate intention of controverting the polytheistic features of the
original, if he had not still possessed a knowledge of the cuneiform
script. It is difficult to believe that he belonged to an age when the
Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the syllabary of Babylonia,
and the older literature of Canaan had become a sealed book.
But if so, a new light is shed on the sources of the historical
narratives contained in the Pentateuch. Some of them at least have come
down from the period when the literary culture of Babylonia was still
dominant on the shores of the Mediterranean. So far from being popular
traditions and myths first committed to writing after the disruption of
Solomon’s kingdom, and amalgamated into their present form by a series
of ‘redactors,’ they will have been derived from the pre-Mosaic
literature of Palestine. Such of them as are Babylonian in origin will
have made their way westwards like the Chaldæan legends found among the
tablets of Tel el-Amarna, while others will be contemporaneous records
of the events they describe. We must expect to discover in the
Pentateuch not only Israelitish records, but Babylonian, Canaanitish,
Egyptian, even Edomite records as well.
The progress of archæological research has already in part fulfilled
this expectation. ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ has been found at Muqayyar, and
the contracts of early Babylonia have shown that Amorites—or, as we
should call them, Canaanites—were settled there, and have even brought
to light such distinctively Hebrew names as Jacob-el, Joseph-el, and
Ishmael.[138] Even the name of Abram, Abi-ramu, appears as the father of
an ‘Amorite’ witness to a contract in the third generation before
Amraphel. And Amraphel himself, along with his contemporaries,
Chedor-laomer or Kudur-Laghghamar of Elam, Arioch of Larsa, and Tid’al
or Tudghula, has been restored to the history to which he and his
associates had been denied a claim. The ‘nations’ over whom Tid’al ruled
have been explained, and the accuracy of the political situation
described in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been fully
vindicated. Jerusalem, instead of being a name first given to the future
capital of Judah after its capture by David, is proved to have been its
earliest title; and the priest-king Melchizedek finds a parallel in his
later successor, the priest-king Ebed-Tob, who, in the Tel el-Amarna
letters, declares that he had received his royal dignity, not from his
father or his mother, but through the arm of ‘the mighty king.’ If we
turn to Egypt, the archæological evidence is the same. The history of
Joseph displays an intimate acquaintance on the part of its writer with
Egyptian life and manners in the era of the Hyksos, and offers the only
explanation yet forthcoming of the revolution that took place in the
tenure of land during the Hyksos domination. As we have seen, there are
features in the story which suggest that it has been translated from a
hieratic papyrus. As for the Exodus, we shall see presently that its
geography is that of the nineteenth dynasty, and of no other period in
the history of Egypt.
Thus, then, directly or indirectly, much of the history contained in the
Pentateuch has been shown by archæology to be authentic. And it must be
remembered that Oriental archæology is still in its infancy. Few only of
the sites of ancient civilisation have as yet been excavated, and there
are thousands of cuneiform texts in the Museums of Europe and America
which have not as yet been deciphered. It was only in 1887 that the Tel
el-Amarna tablets, which have had such momentous consequences for
Biblical criticism, were found, and the disclosures made by the early
contracts of Babylonia, even the name of Chedor-laomer itself, are of
still more recent discovery. It is therefore remarkable that so much is
already in our hands which confirms the antiquity and historical
genuineness of the Pentateuchal narratives; and it raises the
presumption that with the advance of our knowledge will come further
confirmations of the Biblical story. At any rate, the historian’s path
is clear; the Pentateuch has been tested by the comparative method of
science, and has stood the test. It contains history, and must be dealt
with accordingly like other historical works. The philological theory
with its hair-splitting distinctions, its Priestly Code and ‘redactors,’
must be put aside, along with all the historical consequences which it
involves.
But it does not follow that because the philological theory is
untenable, all inquiries into the character and sources of the
Pentateuch are waste of time. The philological theory has failed because
it has attempted to build up a vast superstructure on very imperfect and
questionable materials; because, in short, it has attempted to attain
historical results without the use of the historical method. But no one
can study the Pentateuch in the light of other ancient works of a
similar kind without perceiving that it is a compilation, and that its
author—or authors—has made use of a large variety of older materials.
Modern Oriental history has been written in the same manner; a book, for
instance, like the Egyptian history of El-Maqrîzî, though the production
of a single mind, nevertheless embodies older materials which have been
collected from every side. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the
Chaldæan Epic of Gilgames, bears the same testimony. The growth of the
Book of the Dead, the ritual which was needed by the souls of the
Egyptian dead in their passage to the next world, can actually be
traced.[139] It included and combined the doctrines of more than one
school of early Egyptian theological thought, and in later days was
extensively interpolated and modernised. Not only were glosses, once
intended to explain the obscurities of the archaic phraseology,
incorporated into the text, but even whole chapters were added to the
work. The Epic of Gilgames similarly embodies other poems or portions of
poems, of which the Episode of the Deluge is an example. Yet no
Assyriologist would dispute for a moment that from beginning to end it
is the work of one author.
Archæology has already shown us that we are right in believing that the
Pentateuch also has been compiled out of earlier materials. The story of
the campaign of Chedor-laomer must have been derived from a cuneiform
tablet; the story of Joseph seems to have been taken from a hieratic
papyrus. The account of the Deluge has made its way from Babylonia to
Canaan in the days when the culture of Chaldæa extended to the
Mediterranean. We thus have narratives which presuppose an acquaintance
not only with Babylon and Egypt, but also with Babylonian and Egyptian
documents.
So, too, the list of Edomite kings contained in the thirty-sixth chapter
of Genesis must have been extracted from the official annals of Edom. It
is a proof that such annals existed, that the Edomites, like the rest of
their neighbours, were acquainted with the art of writing, and that
their official records were accessible to a Hebrew scribe.
We cannot doubt the authenticity of the list, even though the ancient
territory of Edom has not yet been explored, and no Edomite inscriptions
consequently have as yet been found to verify it. The list, therefore,
does not yet stand in the same fortunate position as the account of
Chedor-laomer and his allies, which has been verified by archæological
discovery. Here even the names of the foreign kings have been preserved
in the Hebrew text with marvellously little corruption. The whole
account must have come from a cuneiform document coeval with the event
it narrates. That is to say, we can here trace one of the Pentateuchal
narratives not only to a written source, but to a written source which
is at the same time a contemporaneous record.
We may conclude, then, that the Pentateuch has been compiled from older
documents—some Babylonian, some Egyptian, some Edomite; others, as we
may gather from the nature of their contents, Canaanite and Aramæan—and
that many of these documents belong to the periods to which they refer.
This, however, is not all. In certain cases we can approximately fix the
latest date at which they could have been employed and combined in the
form in which we now find them. Thus in the geographical chart of
Genesis (x. 6), Canaan is made the brother of Cush and Mizraim. This
takes us back to the time when Canaan was a province of the Egyptian
empire; when that empire came to an end the description ceased to be
possible. After the epoch of the nineteenth dynasty and the Hebrew
Exodus, Canaan and Egypt were cut off from one another geographically
and politically, and Canaan could never again have been called in
Semitic idiom the brother of Mizraim. It became instead the brother of
Aram and Assur.
Here, therefore, the limit of age prescribed by archæology forbids us to
pass beyond the Mosaic epoch. Moses, in short, is the compiler to whom
the archæological evidence indicates that the tenth chapter of Genesis
goes back in its original shape. But by the side of this evidence there
is other evidence also which tells a different tale. Gomer, or the
Kimmerians, as well as Madai, are named among the sons of Japhet, and
the Assyrian monuments assure us that neither the one nor the other came
within the geographical horizon of Western Asia before the ninth century
B.C. It was in the ninth century B.C. that the Assyrian kings first
became acquainted with the Medes, while the Gimirrâ or Kimmerians did
not descend upon Asia from their seats on the Sea of Azof until about
B.C. 680. The same reasoning which gives us the Mosaic age as that of
the geographical chart of Genesis in its primitive shape gives us the
seventh century B.C. or later for the date of another portion of the
same chapter.
The list of the kings of Edom, again, is introduced by the remark that
‘these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there
reigned any king over the children of Israel.’ It was not inserted in
the book of Genesis, therefore, until after the age of Saul, a
conclusion which is supported by the fact that the first king named
seems to be Balaam, the son of Beor, who was a contemporary of Moses.
If, accordingly, the Pentateuch was originally compiled in the Mosaic
age, it must have undergone the fate of the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
and been enlarged by subsequent additions. Insertions and interpolations
must have found their way into it as new editions of it were made.
That such was the case there is indirect testimony. On the one hand the
text of the prophetical books was treated in a similar manner, additions
and modifications being made in it from time to time by the prophet or
his successors in order to adapt it to new political or religious
circumstances. Isaiah, for instance, has copied a prophecy directed by
one of his predecessors against Moab; and after breaking it off in the
middle of a sentence, has adapted it to the needs and circumstances of
his own time. On the other hand, a long-established Jewish tradition,
which has found its way into the Second Book of Esdras (xiv. 21-26),
makes Ezra rewrite or edit the books of Moses. There is no reason to
question the substantial truth of the tradition; Ezra was the restorer
of the old paths, and the Pentateuch may well have taken its present
shape from him. If so, we need not be surprised if we find here and
there in it echoes of the Babylonish captivity.
Side by side with materials derived from written sources, the book of
Genesis contains narratives which, at all events in the first instance,
must have resembled the traditions and poems orally recited in Arab
lands, and commemorating the heroes and forefathers of the tribe. Thus
there are two Abrahams; the one an Abraham who has been born in one of
the centres of Babylonian civilisation, who is the ally of Amorite
chieftains, whose armed followers overthrow the rearguard of the Elamite
army, and whom the Hittites of Hebron address as ‘a mighty prince’; the
other is an Abraham of the Bedâwin camp-fire, a nomad whose habits are
those of the rude independence of the desert, whose wife kneads the
bread while he himself kills the calf with which his guests are
entertained. It is true that in actual Oriental life the simplicity of
the desert and the wealth and culture of the town may be found combined
in the same person; that in modern Egypt Arab shêkhs may still be met
with who thus live like wild Bedâwin during one part of the year, and as
rich and civilised townsmen during another part of it; while in the last
century a considerable portion of Upper Egypt was governed by Bedâwin
emirs, who realised in their own persons that curious duality of life
and manners which to us Westerns appears so strange. But it is also true
that the spirit and tone of the narratives in Genesis differ along with
the character ascribed in them to the patriarch: we find in them not
only the difference between the guest of the Egyptian Pharaoh and the
entertainer of the angels, but also a difference in the point of view.
The one speaks to us of literary culture, the other of the simple circle
of wandering shepherds to whose limited experience the story-teller has
to appeal. The story may be founded on fact; it may be substantially
true; but it has been coloured by the surroundings in which it has grown
up, and archæological proof of its historical character can never be
forthcoming. At most, it can be shown to be true to the time and place
in which its scene is laid, and so contains nothing which is
inconsistent with known facts.
Such, then, are the main results of the application of the archæological
test to the books of the Pentateuch. The philological theory, with its
minute and mathematically exact analysis, is brushed aside; it is as
little in harmony with archæology as it is with common sense. The
Pentateuch substantially belongs to the Mosaic age, and may therefore be
accepted as, in the bulk, the work of Moses himself. But it is a
composite work, embodying materials of various kinds. Some of these are
written documents, descriptive of contemporaneous events, or recording
the cosmological beliefs of ancient Babylonia; others have been derived
from the unwritten traditions of nomad tribes. The work has passed
through many editions; it is full of interpolations, lengthy and
otherwise; and it has probably received its final shape at the hands of
Ezra. But in order to discover the interpolations, or to determine the
written documents that have been used, we must have recourse to the
historical method and the facts of archæology. Apart from these we
cannot advance a step in safety. The archæological evidence, however, is
already sufficient for the presumption that, where it fails us, the text
is nevertheless ancient, and the narrative historical—a presumption, it
will be noticed, the exact contrary of that in which the Hexateuchal
theory has landed its disciples.
But, these same disciples will urge, what becomes of those three strata
of legislation which we have so successfully disentangled one from the
other in the Hexateuch, and have shown to belong to three separate and
mutually exclusive periods of Israelitish history? Has not literary
criticism proved that no reconciliation is possible between the
enactments and point of view of the Book of the Covenant on the one
side, and those of the Deuteronomist on the other, or between the
legislation of the Deuteronomist and that of the Priestly Code? The
altar of earth or rough-hewn stones, which may be built on any high
place, makes way for the altar of the temple at Jerusalem, and this
again for the ideal altar of the tabernacle in the wilderness. One
sanctuary takes the place of many; the priesthood is confined first to
the tribe of Levi, and then more especially to the sons of Aaron; while
the simple feasts of harvest rejoicing, which were celebrated by early
Israel in common with its neighbours, are replaced by sacrifices for sin
and solemn festivals like the Day of Atonement.
It is strange that these inconsistencies were left to European scholars
of the nineteenth century to discover, and that neither the
contemporaries of Ezra, who allowed themselves to be bound to the yoke
of a law which they believed to be divine, nor the Samaritan rivals of
the Jews, should have ever perceived them. The fact seems to the
historian to throw some doubt on their real existence, and he can leave
them to the tender mercies of Dr. Baxter, who has met the literary
critics on their own ground, and seriously damaged their house of
cards.[140] The historian can have nothing to do with a theory which not
only requires the whole of the historical books of the Old Testament to
be rewritten in accordance with it, but also declares at once every
passage which tells against it to be a gloss and interpolation. History,
like science, is not built on subjective judgments.
At the same time, there is an element of truth in the work of the
‘literary analysis.’ Years of labour on the part of able and learned
scholars cannot be absolutely without result, even though the labourers
may have been led astray by the will-o’-the-wisp of a false theory and
have followed a wrong line of research. The minute examination to which
they have subjected the text has revealed much that had never before
been suspected; and they have made it clear that the historical books of
the Old Testament are compilations, not free, moreover, from later
interpolations, even though we cannot share the confidence with which
they separate and distinguish the different elements. They have made it
impossible ever to return to the old conception of the Hebrew Scriptures
and the old method of treating Hebrew history. Where they have been
successful has been on the negative rather than on the reconstructive
side. For reconstruction, the scientific instrument of comparison was
wanted, and this the literary analysts did not possess.
The Old Testament books themselves make no secret of the fact that they
are compilations. The books of the Kings name the sources from which a
large part of them has been drawn, and the books of Samuel (2 Sam. i.
18) quote David’s ‘Song of the Bow’ from the book of Jasher. The same
work is referred to in the book of Joshua (x. 13), and in Numbers (xxi.
14) we have an extract from the lost Book of the Wars of the Lord. Old
poems are introduced into the text, like the Song of Deborah or the
Blessing of Jacob; even an Amorite song of triumph is cited in Numbers
xxi. 27-30. The so-called ‘Book of the Covenant’ of the literary critics
takes its name from a real ‘book of the covenant’ in which the first
legislation promulgated at Sinai was written down by Moses, according to
Exod. xxiv. 4, 7, and read by him ‘in the audience of the people;’ while
the Song of Deborah expressly states that the forces of Zebulun, which
took part in the war against Sisera, were accompanied by scribes, like
the armies of Egypt or Assyria.
That Moses could not have written the account of his own death was
discovered even by the Jewish rabbis; and references to the ‘Book of the
Covenant’ and the ‘Book of the Wars of the Lord’ prove that the
Pentateuch in its present form has not come down to us from the Mosaic
age. The materials may be Mosaic; it may thus be substantially the work
of the great Hebrew lawgiver, but the actual work itself is of later
date.
How far may we trust the accuracy of the traditional Hebrew text? Modern
criticism has been inclined to pronounce the text corrupt, not
unfrequently because the critic himself cannot understand it, and to
deal pretty freely in conjectural emendations. The Greek text of the
Septuagint is invoked against it, and undue weight is often given to its
variant readings or omissions, as, for instance, in the case of the
history of Saul. Doubtless the Septuagint text is of great value; it
goes back to a period centuries older than the oldest Hebrew MS. that
has survived to us; but it was made by Jews of Alexandria, whose
knowledge of the sacred language of their nation was not always complete
or exact. The recent discovery of the original Hebrew text of
Ecclesiasticus has gone far to shake our confidence in the readings of
the Septuagint, as a comparison of it with the Greek translation made
only two generations later has shown that passages are omitted in the
latter, through simple carelessness, or perhaps inability to understand
them. The discovery has also not been in favour of the emendations of
literary and philological criticism, not one of the many attempts made
to restore the lost Hebrew original having turned out to be
correct.[141]
On the other hand, a comparison of the Hebrew Scriptures with the clay
books of Assyria is on the side of accuracy in the text. The scribes
employed in the libraries of Assyria, and presumably, therefore, in the
older libraries of Babylonia, were scrupulously exact in their copies of
earlier texts. Where the tablet which they copied was injured and
defective, it was stated to be so, and the scribe made no attempt to
fill up by conjecture, however obvious, what was missing in the document
before him. He even was careful to note whether the fracture was recent
or not. Where, again, he was not certain about the Assyrian equivalent
of a Babylonian character of unusual form, he gave alternative
representatives of it, or else reproduced the questionable character
itself. Perhaps the most striking example of the textual honesty of the
Assyrian and Babylonian scribes is, however, to be found in a
compilation known as the _Babylonian Chronicle_—a chronological abstract
in which the history of Babylonia is given from a strictly Babylonian
point of view. Here the author candidly confesses that he does ‘not
know’ the year when the decisive battle of Khalulê took place, which
laid Babylon at the feet of Sennacherib; his materials for settling the
matter failed him, and, unlike the modern Hexateuchal critics, he
abstained from conjecture. We are more fortunate than he was; for, as we
possess the annals of Sennacherib, in which the Assyrian king gives a
highly-coloured account of the battle, we are able to determine its
date.
In the later days of the Jewish monarchy there was a library at
Jerusalem similar to those of Assyria and Babylonia, and we hear of the
scribes belonging to it in the days of Hezekiah re-editing the Proverbs
of Solomon (Prov. xxv. 1). There are indications that they were as
careful and honest in their work as the scribes of Assyria whose example
they probably followed. Thus the names of Chedor-laomer and his allies
are preserved with singular correctness, as well as the forms of two
geographical names which seem to imply translation from a cuneiform
original.[142] So, again, the Aramaic inscriptions of a contemporary of
Tiglath-pileser III. found at Sinjerli, north of the Gulf of Antioch,
show that in one case at least the spelling which we find in the books
of Kings has remained unchanged since the eighth century B.C. As in the
books of Kings, so at Sinjerli, the Assyrian name Tukulti-Pal-Esarra is
incorrectly written Tiglath-pileser, with _g_ instead of _k_, and even
the country over which he ruled is in both cases written _plene_ (with
the symbol of the vowel _u_). On the other hand, it cannot be denied
that there are many clear and unmistakable corruptions of the text. In
the fourteenth chapter of Genesis itself the name of the city Larsa has
been transformed into Ellasar;[143] elsewhere glosses have been received
into the text, while there are whole passages which are either
ungrammatical or unmeaning as they now stand. Ancient authors, whether
Hebrew or otherwise, did not write nonsense; and if the natural
rendering of a passage does not make sense, we may feel quite sure that
it is corrupt.
The historian of the Hebrews, then, is bound to treat his authorities as
the Greek historian would treat Herodotos or Thucydides or any other
writer on behalf of whose character and age there is a long line of
external testimony. The results of the ‘literary analysis’ may be left
to the philologist, as well as the conjectures and theories that have
been substituted by scholars of the nineteenth century for early
Israelitish history. They have vanished like bubbles wherever they have
been tested by the archæological evidence, which, on the other hand, has
vindicated the substantial truthfulness of those Old Testament
statements which had been scornfully thrown aside.
Where it is possible, the Biblical narratives must be compared with the
discoveries of archæological research; where this cannot be done, they
must be examined from the historical and not from the philological or
literary point of view. We are bound to assume their general credibility
and faithfulness, except where this can be historically disproved, and
to remember that while on the one hand inconsistencies in detail do not
affect the general historical trustworthiness of a document, the
agreement of such details with the facts of archæology or geography—more
especially when they are of the kind termed ‘undesigned coincidences’—is
a powerful argument in its favour. Above all, we must beware of that
favourite weapon of literary criticism, the argument from silence, which
is really merely an argument from the imperfection of our own knowledge,
and which a single instance to the contrary will overthrow. The literary
criticism of the Old Testament is full of examples of the argument that
have been demolished by the advance of Oriental archæology.
Let this accordingly be the rule of the historian: to believe all
things, to hope all things, but at the same time to test and try all
things. And the test must be scientific, not what we assume to be
probable or natural, but external testimony in the shape of
archæological or geographical facts. The history of the past is not what
ought to have happened according to the ideas of the critic, but what
actually did happen.
Such a manner of treating our authorities does not, of course, exclude
our recognition of what the literary critics call their several
‘tendencies.’ No history, worthy of the name, can be written without a
‘tendency’ of some sort on the part of the writer, even though it be not
consciously felt. We must have some kind of general theory within the
lines of which our facts may be grouped; and however much we may strive
to be impartial, our conception of the facts themselves, and our mode of
presenting them, will be coloured by our beliefs and education. The
historian cannot help writing with an object in view; the necessities of
the subject require it.
That the historical books of the Old Testament should have been written
with a ‘tendency’ is therefore natural. And literary criticism has
successfully pointed out in the case of one of these books what the
‘tendency’ was. If we compare the books of Chronicles with those of
Samuel and Kings, the contrast between them strikes the eye at once. The
interest of the Chronicler is centred in the history of the Jewish
temple and ritual, of its priests and Levites, and the manifold
requirements of the Law. His history of Israel accordingly becomes a
history of Israelitish ritual; all else is put aside or treated in the
briefest fashion. The incidents of David’s reign narrated in the books
of Samuel are subordinated to elaborate accounts of his arrangements for
the services in the tabernacle or temple; the history of the northern
kingdom of Israel, which lay outside that of the temple at Jerusalem, is
passed over in silence; and the Passover held in Hezekiah’s reign, about
which not a word is said in the books of Kings, is dwelt upon to the
exclusion of almost everything else. Nor, had we only the Chronicler in
our hands, should we know that the pious Hezekiah had entered into an
alliance with the Babylonian king and boastfully displayed to his
ambassadors the treasures of the Jewish kingdom, thereby bringing upon
himself the rebuke of the prophet Isaiah. All that the Chronicler has to
say on the matter is that ‘in the business of the ambassadors of the
prince of Babylon, who sent to inquire of the wonder that was done in
the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in
his heart’; and even here a theological turn is given to the occurrence
by the motive assigned for the embassy. As a matter of fact, we know
from the cuneiform inscriptions that the real object of Merodach-baladan
was to form a league with the princes of the West against their common
Assyrian enemy, to which, as the books of Kings inform us, was naturally
added a polite inquiry after Hezekiah’s health.
‘Tendencies’ there are, therefore, in the historical writings of the Old
Testament; they would not be human productions if there were not. The
authors have had one great object in view, that of showing from the past
history of the people that sin brings punishment with it, while a
blessing follows upon righteous action. They believed in the Divine
government of the world, and wrote with that belief clearly before them.
They believed also that Israel was the chosen nation in whose history
that Divine government had been made manifest to mankind, and that the
God of Israel was the one true omnipotent God. In this belief in a
theodicy they were theologians, like most other Oriental writers. But
their theological point of view did not prevent them from being
historians as well. It did not interfere with their honestly recording
the course of events as it had been handed down to them, or reproducing
their authorities without intentional change. Doubtless they may have
made mistakes at times, their judgment may not always have been strictly
critical or correct, and want of sufficient materials may now and then
have led them into error. But when we find that no attempt is made to
palliate or conceal the sins and shortcomings of their most cherished
national heroes, that even the reverses of the nation are chronicled
equally with its successes, and that the early period of its history is
confessed to have been one of anarchy and crime, and not the golden age
of which popular (and even historical) imagination loves to dream, we
are justified in according to them, in spite of their theological
‘tendencies,’ a considerable measure of confidence.
It will have been noticed that chronology—the skeleton, as it were, on
which the flesh of history is laid—has been alluded to in the previous
chapter only in the vaguest possible manner. ‘The age of Abraham,’ ‘the
age of the Exodus,’ ‘the Mosaic age,’ are the phrases that have been
used in referring to Old Testament events. Israelitish chronology in the
true sense of the word does not begin till the reign of David, and even
then we have to deal with probabilities rather than with facts. Like
Egyptian history, which has to be measured by dynasties instead of dates
before the rise of the eighteenth dynasty, the early history of the
Hebrews has no chronological record. Before we can attach dates to the
events of the patriarchal period or the Exodus, it is necessary to find
synchronisms between them and the dated history of other peoples.
It is a commonplace of Biblical students that numbers are peculiarly
liable to corruption, and that consequently little dependence can be
placed on the numbers given in the text of the Old Testament. But the
conclusion does not follow from the premiss. The later dates of
Israelitish history are for the most part reliable, and it would be
strange if the causes of corruption were fatal only to the dates of an
earlier period. Moreover, the numbers fit into a self-consistent system,
the several fractions of which agree with the whole summation. Such a
self-consistent system would perhaps demand acceptance were it not that
there are three such systems, rivals one of the other, and mutually
incompatible. One is that of the Massoretic Hebrew text, which makes the
period from the Creation to the call of Abraham exactly 2000 solar years
(or, 2056 lunar years), 1600 of which extend from the Creation to the
Deluge, and the remaining 400 from the Deluge to the call of Abraham. A
second is that of the Septuagint, according to which the period from the
Creation to the Flood is 2200 solar years (or, 2262 lunar years), 1600
of these elapsing between the Creation and the birth of Noah, and 600
from that event to the Flood, while 1200 are counted from the Flood to
the call of the patriarch. The third is that of the Samaritan text which
divides the period into two halves of 1200 years each; the first 1200
comprising the time from the Creation to the birth of the sons of Noah,
and the second 1200 the rest of the period.
It is obvious that all these systems are like the similar chronological
systems of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, or the Hindus, mere
artificial schemes of an astronomical character, and differing from the
latter only in their more modest computation of time. For historical
purposes they are worthless, and indicate merely that materials for a
chronology were entirely wanting. The ages assigned to the patriarchs
before the Flood, for example, stand on a level with the reigns of the
ten antediluvian kings of Chaldæa which are extended over 120 sari, or
432,000 years. The post-diluvian patriarchs are in no better position;
indeed, one of them, Arphaxad, is a geographical title, and the
Septuagint interpolates after him a certain Kainan, of whom neither the
Hebrew nor the Samaritan text knows anything.
Even after the call of Abraham, Hebrew chronology is equally uncertain.
The length of life assigned to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is surprising,
though not quite impossible, but the dates connected with it do not
always agree together. How, for example, can Abraham have had six
children after the death of Sarah (Gen. xxv. 1, 2), when the birth of
Isaac nearly forty years before had been regarded as extraordinary on
account of the patriarch’s age? Or, again, to quote the words of
Professor Driver[144]: ‘Do we all realise that according to the
chronology of the Book of Genesis (xxv. 26, xxvi. 34, xxxv. 28) [Isaac]
must have been lying upon his deathbed for _eighty years_? Yet we can
only diminish this period by extending proportionately the interval
between Esau’s marrying his Hittite wives (Gen. xxvi. 34), and Rebekah’s
suggestion to Isaac to send Jacob away, lest he should follow his
brother’s example (xxvii. 46), which from the nature of the case will
not admit of any but a slight extension. Keil, however, does so extend
it, reducing the period of Isaac’s final illness to forty-three years,
and is conscious of no incongruity in supposing that Rebekah,
_thirty-seven_ years after Esau has taken his Hittite wives, should
express her fear that Jacob, then aged seventy-seven, will do the same!’
The length of the period during which the Israelites were in Egypt has
been the subject of endless controversy. The Old Testament statements in
regard to it are clear enough. Abraham is told (Gen. xv. 13) that his
descendants shall ‘serve’ the Egyptians and be ‘afflicted’ by them for
400 years. As a generation was counted at thirty years, this implies
that the whole period spent in Egypt was 430 years, though the statement
is not quite exact, since Joseph lived more than thirty years after the
settlement of his brethren in the land of Goshen, and their servitude
and affliction did not begin till after his death. In Exodus (xii. 40)
we are informed explicitly that ‘the sojourning of the children of
Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was 430 years.’ Four hundred and thirty
years, therefore, must have been the length of time during which Israel
was officially regarded as having lived in Goshen.
But it is difficult to reconcile it with another statement in Gen. xv.
16, where it is said that ‘in the fourth generation’ the children of
Israel should return to Canaan. As the words were spoken to Abraham, the
fourth generation would be that of Joseph himself. Since this seems out
of the question, they are usually interpreted to refer to Moses and
Aaron, who are placed in the fourth generation from Levi. Moses and
Aaron, however, did not ‘come again’ to Palestine, and the genealogy of
the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. xxvii. 1) makes the generation that
did so the seventh from Joseph. Time, in fact, cannot be reckoned by
generations; we do not know how many links in the chain may have been
dropped, ‘son’ in Semitic idiom being frequently equivalent to
‘descendant,’ while the names are often merely geographical, like Gilead
and Machir in the genealogy of Zelophehad, and therefore have no
chronological value. It was, however, the mention of ‘the fourth.
generation’ which produced the rabbinical gloss, alluded to by S. Paul
(Gal. iii. 17), according to which the four hundred and thirty years of
Gen. xv. 13 did not mean the time during which the Israelites were
‘afflicted’ in Egypt, but—in spite of the definite assertion to the
contrary—a period which included the lives of the patriarchs as well as
the government of Joseph.
If the statements in regard to the period of the Israelitish settlement
in Egypt are contradictory, the statements in regard to the lapse of
time from the conquest of Canaan to the building of Solomon’s temple are
still more so. In 1 Kings vi. 1 we read that the foundations of the
temple were laid in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign, and four hundred
and eighty years after the Exodus from Egypt. If we add together the
numbers given in the book of Judges, they amount to four hundred and ten
years, thus leaving only seventy years for the wanderings in the desert,
the judgeships of Eli and Samuel, the reigns of Saul and David, and the
first four years of Solomon! The endeavours that have been made to get
over the difficulty have all been fruitless. Wellhausen and others, for
instance, have conjectured that the four hundred and eighty years are
intended to represent twelve generations, each being reckoned at forty
years, and the seventy years assigned to the five ‘lesser judges’ being
overlooked. But the conjecture is destitute of support, and is contrary
to such notices as we have of the number of generations which covered
the period of the judges. Moreover, the five lesser judges do not
constitute a group by themselves.
The period of four hundred and eighty years cannot be reconciled with
the genealogies any better than with the apparent chronology of the book
of Judges. Between Nahshon, who was a contemporary of Moses, and
Solomon, only five generations are given (Ruth iv. 20-22); and between
Phinehas and Zadok, whom Solomon removed from the priesthood, there were
only seven generations of priests (1 Chron. vi. 4-8). Doubtless some of
the links in the ancestry of David have been dropped, but that can
hardly be the case as regards the priests. Seven generations would give,
at the most, not more than two hundred and ten years.
That the number four hundred and eighty, however, has really been based
on the number forty seems probable. Forty years in Hebrew idiom merely
signified an indeterminate and unknown period of time, and the Moabite
Stone shows that the same idiom existed also in the Moabite
language.[145] Thus Absalom is said, in 2 Sam. xv. 7, to have asked
permission to leave Jerusalem ‘after forty years,’ although the length
of time was really little more than two years (2 Sam. xiv. 28 _sqq._),
and Jewish tradition has supplied the lost record of the length of
Saul’s reign with a date of forty years. The period of forty years,
which meets us again and again in the book of Judges, is simply the
equivalent of an unknown length of time; it denotes the want of
materials, and the consequent ignorance of the writer. Twenty, the half
of forty, is equally an expression of ignorance; and the only dates
available for chronology are those which represent a definite space of
time, like the eight years of Chushan-rishathaim’s oppression of Israel,
or the six years of Jephthah’s judgeship.
We can learn nothing, accordingly, from the books of the Old Testament
about the chronology of Israel down to the time of David. For David’s
reign we have the seven years of his rule at Hebron, followed by the
thirty-three years of his sway over the whole of Israel. For the reign
of Solomon we have again the indeterminate ‘forty years’; but since
Rezon of Damascus, like Hadad of Edom, was ‘an adversary to Israel all
the days of Solomon,’ it is probable that the reign did not actually
last more than thirty years at the most. Even the chronology of the
divided kingdom after the death of Solomon, in spite of the synchronisms
the compiler of the books of Kings has endeavoured to establish between
the kings of Judah and those of Israel, has been the despair of
historians, and scheme after scheme has been proposed in order to make
it self-consistent. The Assyrian monuments, however, have now come to
our help, and shown that between the time of Ahab and that of Hezekiah
it is forty years in excess.
For Hebrew chronology, therefore, we must look outside the Bible itself.
At certain points Hebrew history comes into touch with the monumental
records of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria; and if we are to date the
events it records, it must be by their aid. Egypt can assist us only
after the rise of the eighteenth dynasty; before that period it is as
much without a chronology as the Israelites themselves. But the case is
different as regards Babylonia and Assyria. In Babylonia time was dated
by the reigns of the kings and the events of the several years of each
reign. The extensive commercial relations of the country, and the
contracts that were constantly being drawn up, made accurate dating a
matter of necessity. The Assyrians were even more exact than the
Babylonians; they were distinguished among Oriental nations by their
strong historical sense, and at an early epoch had devised an accurate
system of chronology. The years were reckoned by a succession of
officers called _limmi_, each of whom held office for a year and gave
his name to it, the king himself, during the earlier period of Assyrian
history, taking the office in the first year of his reign. Lists of the
_limmi_ were kept, and a reference to them would show at once the exact
age of a document dated by the name of a particular _limmu_. None of the
lists hitherto discovered are, unfortunately, older than the tenth
century B.C.; but, thanks to those that have been found, from B.C. 909
to 666 we have a continuous and accurate register of time.
Abraham was the contemporary of Chedor-laomer and Amraphel, and the
position of Amraphel among the Babylonian kings has been given us by the
native annalists. He was the sixth king of the first dynasty of Babylon,
and reigned fifty-five years. Unfortunately, the only copy we possess at
present of the native Babylonian list of dynasties is broken, and owing
to the fracture of the tablet, a doubt hangs over his precise date. The
most probable restoration of the text would make it about B.C.
2300.[146] Between this and the Exodus there would be an interval of
more than a thousand years.
Dr. Mahler has attempted to fix astronomically the dates of the two
leading Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, Thothmes
III. and Ramses II., and his dates have been accepted by Brugsch and
other Egyptologists. If his calculations are correct, Thothmes III. will
have reigned from the 20th of March B.C. 1503 to the 14th of February
B.C. 1449;[147] and Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the oppression, from B.C.
1348 to 1281. The eighteenth dynasty, accordingly, would have commenced
about B.C. 1600, and the Exodus would have taken place subsequently to
B.C. 1280.
If Apophis II. was the Hyksos king under whom Joseph governed Egypt, he
would have lived four generations before Ahmes, the founder of the
eighteenth dynasty.[148] The ‘four hundred years,’ therefore, during
which Israel was evil-entreated in Egypt (Acts vii. 6) will correspond
with the era of four hundred years mentioned on a stela discovered by
Mariette at San, the ancient Zoan.[149] The stela commemorates a visit
paid to Zoan in the reign of Ramses II. by Seti, the governor of the
frontier, on the fourth day of the month Mesori, and ‘the four hundredth
year of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Set-âa-pehti, the son of the
Sun, who loved him, also named Set-Nubti, beloved of Harmakhis.’ Since
Set or Sutekh was the Hyksos god, and Zoan the Hyksos capital, it is
clear that we have here a Hyksos era, the four hundredth anniversary of
which fell in the reign of Ramses II. It seems probable that it marked
the accession of the third and last Hyksos dynasty. According to
Manetho, as reported by Africanus, this lasted for one hundred and
fifty-one years, which would take us to about B.C. 1720, and the same
date is obtained if we calculate the four hundred years of the stela of
Sân, back from the thirtieth year of Ramses II. One generation more—the
thirty additional years given in Exod. xii. 40—will bring us to the
period of the Exodus, which, as we shall see hereafter, must have taken
place under Meneptah, the son and successor of Ramses II.
The precise connection between the Hyksos and Hebrew eras must be left
to the future to discover. At present, the only reference found to the
first is that on the stela of Sân. Some connection, however, there must
be between them, like the connection between Zoan and Hebron indicated
in Numb. xiii. 22, where it is said that ‘Hebron was built seven years
before Zoan in Egypt.’ The Hyksos were invaders from Asia, and between
them and the Hebrews there may have been a closer relationship than we
now suspect.
Two approximate dates have accordingly been found for early Hebrew
history. One results from the synchronism between Abraham and Amraphel,
and may be set down as about 2300 B.C.; the other is the synchronism
with Egyptian history, which gives us about B.C. 1720 for the settlement
of the Hebrew tribes in Goshen. We must now see what light can be thrown
by the Egyptian monuments on the date of the Exodus.
Various reasons had led an increasing majority of Egyptologists to
regard Ramses II., the most prominent figure in the nineteenth dynasty,
if not in the whole history of the Pharaohs, as the Pharaoh of the
Oppression, and the question was finally settled by Dr. Naville’s
excavations at Tel el-Maskhûta on behalf of the Egypt Exploration
Fund.[150] Tel el-Maskhûta proved to be the site of Pi-Tum, the Biblical
Pithom, and to have had the civil name of Thuku or Thukut from the nome
of the district in which it was situated. Brugsch had already pointed
out that Thukut is the Succoth of the Old Testament, the Egyptian _th_
corresponding to the Hebrew _’s_, and Succoth was the first stage in the
flight of the Israelites after their departure from Raamses (Exod. xii.
37). Pi-Tum was the sacred name of the city, which was dedicated to Tum,
the setting Sun.
The monuments found on the spot showed that the founder of the city was
Ramses II.; and since the Pharaoh of the Oppression was also the builder
of Pithom (Exod. i. 11), those who attach any credit to the historical
character of the Biblical statement must necessarily see in him the
great Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty. The conclusion is further
supported by the name of ‘Raamses,’ or Ramses, the second of the two
cities which it is said the Hebrews were employed in building. Ramses
I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, and the grandfather of Ramses
II., was the first king of Egypt who bore that name; and the shortness
of his reign, which does not seem to have exceeded two years, as well as
the disturbed condition of the country, would have prevented him from
undertaking any architectural works. Ramses II., however, was
essentially a building Pharaoh; he covered Egypt from one end to the
other with his constructions; he founded cities, erected or restored
monuments, and not unfrequently usurped them. There was more than one
city or temple of Ramses which owed its existence to his architectural
zeal and was called after his name. As the date of the third Ramses of
the twentieth dynasty is too late to fit in with any theory of the
Exodus, there remains only Ramses II. for ‘the treasure-city’ mentioned
in Exodus. Ramses II. restored Zoan, and made it a seat of residence;
this will explain why, in Gen. xlvii. 11, Goshen is proleptically said
to have been situated in ‘the land of Rameses.’ Brugsch has made it
probable that ‘the city of Ramses’ referred to in an Egyptian papyrus
was Zoan itself.[151]
If Ramses II. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, the Pharaoh of the
Exodus will have been one of his immediate successors. The choice lies
between Meneptah II., who succeeded him, his grandson, the feeble Seti
II., and the usurper Si-Ptah, with whom the dynasty came to an
inglorious end. The Egyptian legend of the Exodus given by Manetho
places it in the reign of Meneptah; and a stela discovered at Thebes in
1896 by Professor Petrie makes any other dating difficult. Here the
‘Israelites’ are spoken of as having been brought low, ‘so that no seed
should be left to them’; and since their name alone is without the
determinative of locality which is added to the names of all the other
conquered populations associated with them, we may conclude that they
had already been lost in the desert, and, so far at any rate as was
known to the Egyptian scribe, had no fixed local habitation.[152] As
this was in the fifth year of Meneptah’s reign, B.C. 1276, according to
Dr. Mahler’s chronology, the Exodus from Egypt may be approximately
assigned to B.C. 1277. The period of oppression, according to the
calculation in Gen. xv. 13, would consequently have commenced in B.C.
1677, or nearly a hundred years before the expulsion of the Hyksos.
It must be remembered, however, that the date is more precise in
appearance than in reality. It depends partly on the accuracy of Dr.
Mahler’s calculations, which is disputed by Professors Eisenlohr and
Maspero, partly on our regarding the round number 400 as representing an
exact period of time. If we knew in what year of Ramses II.’s long reign
of sixty-seven years the stela of Sân was inscribed, we should be better
able to check the reckoning. As it is, we have to be grateful for what
we have already learned from the excavated monuments of the past, and to
look forward with confidence to more light and certainty in the future.
Footnote 126:
This, however, is beginning to be doubtful, in view of the discoveries
made by Messrs. de Morgan and Amélineau in 1886-87.
Footnote 127:
For the logical goal of the ‘Higher Criticism,’ see Bateson Wright,
_Was Israel ever in Egypt?_ (1895.)
Footnote 128:
The theory of Jean Astruc, the French Protestant physician, was set
forth in his _Conjectures sur la Genèse_ published anonymously at
Paris in 1753. In this he assumes that Moses wrote the book of Genesis
in four parallel columns like a Harmony of the Gospels which were
afterwards mixed together by the ignorance of copyists. Astruc
intended his work to be an answer to those who, like Spinoza, asserted
that Genesis was written without order or plan. It is interesting to
note that Dr. Briggs in his able defence of the ‘critical’ hypothesis
(_The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch_, pp. 138-141) quotes with
approval Professor Moore’s appeal to Tatian’s _Diatessaron_—a mere
‘patchwork’ of the Gospels—in support of the literary analysis of the
Pentateuch.
Footnote 129:
See Bissell, Introduction to _Genesis printed in Colours_ (1892), pp.
xi-xiii; also p. vii, where he says: ‘The argument from language
outside the divine names requires extreme care for obvious reasons. It
is admitted to be relatively weak, and can never have more than a
subordinate and supplementary value. There is no visible cleavage line
among the supposed sources.’ Professor Bissell’s work is an attempt to
represent by different colours the text of Genesis as it has been
analysed and disintegrated by the ‘higher critics,’ and the result at
which he arrives in his Introduction is that the analytical theory is
a house built upon sand. As regards the account of the Flood, in which
‘it is claimed’ that two distinct narratives can be distinguished from
each other, he remarks: ‘Two flood-stories, originating, according to
the theory, hundreds of years apart, and literally swarming with
differences and contradictions ... are found to fit one another like
so many serrated blocks, and to form, united, a consecutive history
whose unity, with constant use for millenniums, has been undisputed
till our day. Is this coincidence, or is it miracle? But let us take a
closer look. We shall find no loosely joined, independent sections,
but mutually dependent parts of one whole. An occasional overlapping
of ideas, a repetition for emphasis, or enlargement, in complete
harmony with Hebrew style, there undoubtedly is. But there is also a
marked interdependence and sequence of thought wholly inconsistent
with the theory proposed. Let the reader test what J’s story would be
alone. Beginning it has none; no preliminary announcement of the
catastrophe; no command to make preparations; no report of Noah’s
attitude.... And so P’s story, taken by itself, would be equally
incomplete.... As to the alleged discrepancies in other respects, they
appear, as we have seen, to be true in other cases, only after the
text is rent asunder. The lighting system of the one does not exclude
the one window of the other; nor the covering for the roof, the door
in the side. Without the door, for which one document alone is
responsible, how is it supposed that the occupants of the ark got in
and out of it? If objects are thrown out of their due perspective, as
in a mirage, it need surprise no one if they appear distorted and
grotesque.... It is particularly in the matter of language and style
that resort is taken to this illogical and dangerous means of
text-mutilation. There are certain stylistic peculiarities of one or
the other document, it is claimed, which are fixed from the usage of
previous chapters. But unfortunately for the scheme, they appear not
unfrequently in the wrong place. For instance, the expression “male
and female” is held to be characteristic of P, J using another for it.
In vii. 3, 9, J uses this expression twice, and our critics must make
the redactor deny it. The oft-recurring formula, “both man, beast, and
creeping thing and fowl of the air,” is found in the first chapter of
Genesis, and so is said to be characteristic of P. Here J has it in
vi. 7 and vii. 23, and the redactor is called in to square the
document to the theory.... In all these changes we are supposed to
have the work of a redactor. How is it possible? What motive could a
redactor have had for it? It is claimed by our critics that he has
left the principal points of contrast between the two great documents
from which he compiled in their original ruggedness. The principal
changes made, with rare exceptions, are of single words, detached
phrases, verses or parts of verses,—every one of them changes in what
was originally homogeneous matter to what is now heterogeneous, from
what was once true, from the point of view of the document, to what is
now false!’
Footnote 130:
Cf. the plates in Flinders Petrie’s _Tel el-Amarna_ (Methuen and Co.,
1894).
Footnote 131:
Literally, ‘Aten-Ra! the Record Office.’ Many of the bricks with the
inscription upon them still lay on the spot when I visited it in 1888.
Footnote 132:
See my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 222.
Footnote 133:
Hommel, _Aufsätze und Abhandlungen zur Kunde der Sprachen, Literaturen
und der Geschichte des vorderen Orients_, pp. 2 _sqq._
Footnote 134:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 56
_sq._
Footnote 135:
The Elohist and the Chaldæan story further agree in making the hero of
the Deluge the tenth in descent from the first man.
Footnote 136:
See my _Archæological Commentary on Genesis_, in the _Expository
Times_, July and August, 1896.
Footnote 137:
Cf. Gunkel, _Schöpfung und Chaos_, p. 114.
Footnote 138:
See above, p. 13.
Footnote 139:
Naville, _Das aegyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII. bis XX. Dynastie_,
Einleitung; Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d’ Archéologie
égyptiennes_, i. pp. 325-387.
Footnote 140:
_Sanctuary and Sacrifice_, by W. L. Baxter (Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1895).
Footnote 141:
Cowley and Neubauer, _The Original Hebrew of a Portion of
Ecclesiasticus_, p. xviii.
Footnote 142:
Ham for Am or Ammon, and Zuzim for Zamzummim (Gen. xiv. 5); see my
_Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 160, 161.
Footnote 143:
This probably stands for the Babylonian al-Larsa, ‘the city of Larsa.’
Footnote 144:
_Contemporary Review_, February 1890, p. 221.
Footnote 145:
Mesha says in the inscription (l. 8): ‘Omri took the land of Medeba,
and [Israel] dwelt in it during his days and half the days of his son,
altogether forty years.’ The real length of time was not more than
fifteen years.
Footnote 146:
Oppert dates the reign B.C. 2394 to 2339; Sayce, B.C. 2336-2281;
Delitzsch, B.C. 2287-2232; Winckler, 2264-2210; and Peiser, 2139-2084;
while Hommel suggests that the compiler of the list of dynasties has
reversed the true order of the first two dynasties in it, and
accordingly brings down the date of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel three
hundred and sixty-eight years. This would better suit the Biblical
data, but so far nothing has been found on the monuments in support of
the suggestion. Dr. Hales’s date for the birth of Abraham was B.C.
2153.
Footnote 147:
_Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, 1889, pp. 97-105.
Footnote 148:
The ‘prince’ of Thebes who revolted against Apophis was Skenen-Ra Taa
I., whose fourth successor was Ahmes.
Footnote 149:
_Revue Archéologique_, March 1865.
Footnote 150:
E. Naville, _The Store-city of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus_
(1885).
Footnote 151:
_Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache_, 1872, p. 18; see also J. de
Rougé, _Géographie ancienne de la Basse-Égypte_, pp. 93-95.
Footnote 152:
Cf. the articles of Sayce and Hommel in the _Expository Times_ for
August, October, and November 1896, pp. 521, 18, and 89.
CHAPTER III
THE EXODUS OUT OF EGYPT
Goshen—The Pharaohs of the Oppression and Exodus—The Heretic
King at Tel el-Amarna—Causes of the Exodus—The Stela of
Meneptah—Moses—Flight to Midian—The Ten Plagues—The
Exodus—Egyptian Version of it—Origin of the Passover—Geography
of the Exodus—Position of Sinai—-Promulgation of the
Law—Babylonian Analogies—The Tabernacle—The Levitical Law—The
Feasts—Number of the Israelites—Kadesh-barnea—Failure to conquer
Canaan—The High-priest and the Levites—Edom—Conquests on the
East of the Jordan—Balaam—Destruction of the Midianites—Cities
of Refuge and of the Levites—The Deuteronomic Law—Death of
Moses.
‘There arose up a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph.’
Commentators on the passage have often imagined that this event followed
almost immediately upon the death of Joseph and his generation. So, too,
it was supposed before the decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions
that the murder of Sennacherib took place immediately after his return
from Palestine. In both cases the student had been misled by the brevity
of the Hebrew narrative, and that foreshortening of the past which
causes events to be grouped together even though they may have been
separated by an interval of many years. In the present instance,
however, the Biblical writer has done his best to indicate that the
interval was a long one. Before the rise of ‘the new king which knew not
Joseph,’ the children of Israel had had time to ‘increase abundantly,’
to ‘multiply’ so that ‘the land was filled with them.’ The family of
Jacob had become a tribe, or rather a collection of tribes. They had
become dangerous to their rulers; the Pharaoh is even made to say that
they were ‘more and mightier than’ the Egyptians themselves. In case of
invasion, they might assist the enemy and expose Egypt to another
Asiatic conquest.
Hence came the determination to transform them into public serfs, and
even to destroy the males altogether. The free Bedâwin-like settlers in
Goshen, who had kept apart from their Egyptian neighbours, and had been
unwilling to perform even agricultural work, were made the slaves of the
State. They were taken from their herds and sheep, from their
independent life on the outskirts of the Delta, and compelled to toil
under the lash of the Egyptian taskmaster and build for the Pharaoh his
‘treasure-cities’ of Pithom and Raamses.
Egypt is the most conservative of countries, and the children of Israel
still have their representatives in it. The Bedâwin still feed their
flocks and enjoy an independent existence on the outskirts of the
cultivated land, and in that very district of Goshen where the
descendants of Jacob once dwelt. Even when they adopt a settled
agriculturist life, like the villagers of Gizeh, they still claim
immunity from the burdens of their fellahin neighbours on the ground of
their Bedâwin descent. They are exempt from the conscription and the
_corvée_, the modern equivalents of the forced brickmaking of the Mosaic
age. The attempt to interfere with these privileges has actually led to
an exodus in our own time.[153] The Wadi Tumilât, the Goshen of old
days, was colonised with Arabs from the Nejd and Babylonia by Mohammed
Ali, who wished to employ them in the culture of the silkworm. Here they
lived with their flocks and cattle, protected by the Government, and
exempt from taxation, from military service, and the _corvée_. Mohammed
Ali died, however, and an attempt was then made to force them into the
army, and lay upon them the ordinary burdens of taxation. Thereupon, in
a single night, the whole population silently departed with all their
possessions, leaving behind them nothing but the hearths of their
forsaken homes. They made their way back to their kinsfolk eastward of
Egypt, and the Wadi remained deserted until M. de Lesseps carried
through it the Freshwater Canal.
We owe to Dr. Naville the recovery of Goshen. In 1884 he excavated at
Saft el-Henna an ancient mound close to the line of railway between
Zagazig and Tel el-Kebîr. The monuments he found there showed that the
mound represents the ancient Qosem or Qos, called Pha-kussa by the Greek
geographers, which was the capital of the Arabian nome. The Septuagint,
with its Gesem instead of Goshen, implies that the site of Goshen was
still remembered in Alexandrine times.[154]
The Arabian nome took its name not only from its proximity to Arabia,
but also from the fact that its inhabitants were mainly of the Arab
race. But the name did not come into existence until after the age of
the nineteenth dynasty. When Ramses II. was Pharaoh, the whole region
from the neighbourhood of Cairo to the Suez Canal was included in the
nome of On or Heliopolis. It was only at a subsequent date that the
nomes of Arabia and of Bubastis were carved out of that of On.
Previously to this, Qosem was the name of a district as well as of its
chief city. It comprised not only the fertile fields immediately
surrounding Saft el-Henna, and stretching from the mounds of Bubastis,
close to Zagazig, on the west to Tel el-Kebîr on the east, but also the
Wadi Tumilât, through which the railway now runs eastward as far as
Ismailiya. Belbeis, south of Zagazig, was also included within its
limits. At the eastern extremity of the Wadi was Pithom, now marked by
the ruins of Tel el-Maskhûta.
Meneptah II., the Pharaoh of the Exodus, thus refers at Karnak to the
arable land about Pi-Bailos, the modern Belbeis. ‘The country around
it,’ he says, ‘is not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because
of the foreigners. It has been abandoned (to them) since ancient times.’
They had settled with their herds in the neighbouring-valley of Tumilât,
and the richer land which adjoined the valley was also assigned to them.
Here they were in the nome of Heliopolis, the daughter of whose
high-priest was married by Joseph, as well as in the near neighbourhood
of Bubastis, where Dr. Naville has found Hyksos remains.
When the great inscription of Meneptah II. was engraved on the walls of
Karnak the Exodus would have already taken place. The ‘foreigners,’
therefore, to whom he alludes must have been the Israelites, who had now
deserted the spot. The district accordingly would once more have needed
inhabitants, and the Pharaoh had the power of handing it over to the
first Bedâwin tribe who begged for pasturage in the Delta. He had not
long to wait. Among the papyri in the British Museum there is a letter
dated in the eighth year of Meneptah’s reign, and addressed to the king.
In this the scribe writes as follows:—‘Another matter for the
consideration of my master’s heart. We have allowed the tribes of the
Shasu from the land of Edom to pass the fortress of Meneptah in the land
of Thukut (Succoth), (and go) to the lakes of Pithom of Meneptah in the
land of Thukut, in order to feed themselves, and to feed their herds on
the great estate of Pharaoh, the beneficent sun of all countries. In the
year 8.’[155]
The Wâdi Tumilât was accordingly regarded as crown-land, as indeed it is
to-day, and it was handed over to the Edomites by officers of the
Pharaoh, just as it had been to the Israelites several centuries before.
But now the Israelites had fled from it, and disappeared into the
wilderness, and it was necessary to fill their place.
The Biblical writer distinguishes the Pharaoh of the Oppression from the
Pharaoh of the Exodus (Exod. ii. 23). It was after the death of the
great royal builder of Egypt that the Hebrews were delivered from their
bondage. The Pharaoh of the Oppression and not the Pharaoh of the Exodus
was ‘the new king which knew not Joseph.’
The full meaning of the phrase has been explained to us by the tablets
of Tel el-Amarna. They have made it clear that towards the end of the
eighteenth dynasty the Egyptian court became semi-Asiatic. The Pharaohs
married Asiatic wives; and eventually Amenophis IV., under the influence
of his mother Teie, publicly abandoned the religion of which he was the
official head, and avowed himself a convert to an Asiatic form of faith.
Amon, the god of Thebes, was dethroned by a new deity, Aten-Ra, ‘the
Solar Disk.’ The Solar Disk, however, was but the visible manifestation
of the one Supreme God, who was diffused throughout nature, and
corresponded in many respects with the Semitic Baal. The Egyptians
accordingly identified him with Ra, the ancient Sun-god of Heliopolis,
who in earlier times had similarly been identified with the Hyksos Baal.
Amenophis, the cast of whose face taken immediately after death displays
the features and expression of a philosopher and enthusiast,[156]
endeavoured to force the new faith upon his unwilling subjects. The very
name of Amon was proscribed and was erased wherever it occurred, the
followers of the old religion of Egypt were persecuted, and the Pharaoh
changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten, ‘the radiance of the Solar
Disk.’ A violent struggle ensued with the powerful hierarchy of Thebes.
Khu-n-Aten was finally compelled to leave the capital of his fathers,
and build himself a new city further north, where its site is now marked
by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna. He carried with him the State-archives,
consisting mainly of foreign correspondence in the Babylonian language
and cuneiform script, and these were deposited in one of the public
buildings adjoining the palace, every brick of which was stamped with
the words, ‘Aten-Ra! the Record-Office.’[157]
The palace itself was a marvel of art. Its walls and columns were
encrusted with precious stones, with gold and with bronze, and it was
adorned with painting and statuary, some of which reminds us of Greek
art in its best period. Even the floors were frescoed with pictures of
birds and animals, of flowers and trees. The new religion was
accompanied by a new form of art, which cast aside the traditions of
Egypt, and looked rather to Asiatic models. It strove after a realism
which was sometimes exaggerated, and was always in strange contrast to
the conventionalism of Egyptian art. Hard by the gardens of the palace
rose the temple of Aten-Ra in the centre of the city. Like the palace,
it was gorgeous with ornament. But it contained no image of the deity to
whom it was consecrated. His symbol, the Disk, was alone permitted to
appear. The pantheistic monotheism of the Pharaoh thus anticipated the
puritanism of the Israelitish Law.
We learn from the inscriptions that Khu-n-Aten was not contented with
making himself the high-priest of the new faith. Daily in the morning he
gave instruction in it, expounding its mysteries to those who would
listen to him. Acceptance of its doctrines was naturally a passport to
the offices of State. Many of these had long been held by Asiatics, more
especially by Syrians and Canaanites, and under Khu-n-Aten these foreign
immigrants more and more usurped the highest functions of the
Government. The native Egyptians saw themselves excluded from the posts
which had brought them not only dignity, but wealth. Naturally,
therefore, the bitter feelings engendered by the war waged against the
old religion of Egypt were increased by this promotion of the stranger
to the offices of State which they had regarded as their own. The Canaan
they had conquered had revenged itself by conquering their king. Not
only religion, but self-interest also, urged the native Egyptian to put
an end to the reforming schemes of the Pharaoh, and to religious
animosity was added race hatred as well.
The storm broke shortly before Khu-n-Aten’s death. His mummy indeed was
laid in the magnificent grave he had excavated in the recesses of a
desolate mountain-valley, but the granite sarcophagus in which it was
deposited was never placed in the niche prepared for it, but was hacked
to pieces by his enemies as it lay in the columned hall of the tomb,
while the body within it was torn to shreds. Nor was his mother Teie
ever laid by his side. Even the bodies of his dead daughters were
maltreated and despoiled.
Khu-n-Aten was followed by one or two short-lived Pharaohs in the city
he had built. Then the end came. The city was destroyed, the stones of
its temple were transported elsewhere to furnish materials for the
sanctuaries of the victorious Amon, and such of the adherents of the new
faith as could not escape from the country either apostatised or were
slain. A new king arose who represented the national party and the
worship of the national god, and the Semitic strangers who had governed
Egypt as European strangers govern it to-day disappeared for a time from
the land. Their kinsfolk who remained, like the Israelites in Goshen,
were reduced to the condition of public slaves.
Here, then, is the explanation of the rise of that ‘new king which knew
not Joseph.’ We must see in him, not the founder of the eighteenth
dynasty who expelled the Hyksos, but Ramses I., the founder of the
nineteenth dynasty, with whom all danger of Asiatic domination in Egypt
came finally to an end. The nineteenth dynasty represented the national
reaction against the Asiatic faith of Khu-n-Aten and the government of
the country by Asiatic officials. It meant Egypt as against Asia. And
the policy of the new rulers of Egypt was not long in declaring itself.
Ramses I. indeed reigned too short a time to do more than establish his
family firmly on the throne; but his son and successor, Seti Meneptah
I., once more overran Syria and made Palestine an Egyptian province;
while Ramses II., who followed him, took measures to prevent such of the
Asiatics as were still in Egypt from ever again becoming formidable to
the native population.
The causes that led to the enslavement of the Israelites and to the
Exodus out of Egypt were the same as those which in our own day led to
the rebellion of Arabi. Religious and race hatreds were mingled
together, and the ‘national party’ which grudged to the foreigner his
share in the spoils of government aimed at destroying both him and his
religion. Ramses I., however, was more fortunate than Arabi. No foreign
power came to the help of the Syrian settlers on the Nile, and the
leader of the Egyptian patriots became the favourite of the Theban
priesthood and the sovereign of Egypt. From this time forward we hear no
more of the use of the Babylonian language and script in the public
correspondence of the Egyptians.
The oppression of the Israelites, then, is a natural and necessary part
of the political history of the nineteenth dynasty. It fits in with the
policy which the dynasty was placed on the throne to carry out. And an
inscription discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1896 supplements
the story in an unexpected way. It was engraved by order of Meneptah
II., the son and successor of Ramses II., on a large slab of granite,
and placed in a temple he built at Thebes, on the western bank of the
Nile. Its twenty-eight lines contain a song of triumph over the defeat
of the Libyans and their allies from the Greek seas which took place in
the fifth year of the king’s reign. Towards the end the poet sums up all
the glorious deeds of the Pharaoh. ‘The chiefs,’ he says, ‘are
overthrown and speak only of peace. None of the Barbarians (literally,
the Nine Bows) lifts up his head. Wasted (?) is the land of the Libyans;
the land of the Hittites is tranquillised; captive is the land of Canaan
and utterly miserable; carried away is the land of Ashkelon; overpowered
is the land of Gezer; the land of Innuam (in Central Syria) is brought
to nought. The Israelites are spoiled so that they have no seed, the
land of Khar (Southern Palestine) is become like the widows of Egypt.’
Here the Israelites alone are described as without local habitation.
They alone had no ‘land’ in which they dwelt, and which was called after
their name. It would seem, therefore, that when the song was composed
they had already fled from Egypt and been lost in the unknown recesses
of the eastern desert. But the poet knew that they were of Canaanitish
origin; that they were, in fact, the kinsmen of the Horites of Southern
Palestine. Their misfortunes, consequently, were equally the misfortunes
of ‘Khar,’ whose women had been made as widows since the male seed of
Israel had been cut off.[158]
After the fashion of court-poets, the author of the hymn of victory is
not careful about ascribing to his royal master such successes as he
could himself really claim. He has skilfully combined the victories of
Meneptah with those of his father, and given him the credit of conquests
which he had not made. The Hittites had been ‘tranquillised’ by Ramses
II., not by Meneptah, and Canaan had been the conquest of Ramses and his
father Seti. We may accordingly conclude that in the case of the
Israelites also Meneptah is made to claim what does not properly belong
to him. According to the book of Exodus, it was the Pharaoh of the
Oppression rather than the Pharaoh of the Exodus who ordered that ‘every
son’ should be ‘cast into the river,’ and only the daughters saved
alive.
The agreement, however, between the Biblical narrative and the
expression used on the stela of Meneptah is very remarkable. It is
almost as if the writer of Exodus had had the inscription before him. In
both it is the male seed which we are told was destroyed: the women were
left as widows, for all ‘the men children’ were cut off. The victory
over the Israelites, of which the poet boasts, was a victory obtained by
slaying, like Herod, all the children who were males.
Nevertheless, ‘the people multiplied.’ It was impossible to carry out
literally the order of the Pharaoh, and there must have been many
children who were saved from death. Among these was Moses, the future
legislator of his race. The story of his preservation is familiar to
every one. We are told how his mother made ‘an ark of bulrushes, and
daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and laid
it in the flags by the river’s brink.’ Then the daughter of the Pharaoh
came to bathe, and taking compassion on the child, brought him up as her
own son.
A similar story had been told centuries before of Sargon of Akkad, the
great Babylonian conqueror and lawgiver. He, too, it was said, had been
placed by his mother ‘in an ark of reeds, the mouth whereof she closed
with pitch,’ and then launched it on the waters of the Euphrates. The
child was carried to Akki the irrigator, who adopted him as his son, and
brought him up until the day came when, through the help of the goddess
Istar, the true origin and birth of the hero were made known, and he
became one of the mightiest of the Babylonian kings.
A like destiny seemed in store for Moses. He was introduced into the
family of the Pharaoh, and took his place at court among the royal
princes. A punning etymology makes the princess who adopted him speak
Hebrew and give him the name of Mosheh or Moses, from the Hebrew
_mâshah_, ‘to draw out.’ Mosheh, however, is really the Egyptian
_messu_, ‘son,’ a very appropriate name for an adopted child. The name
was not uncommon in Egypt; and in the time of Meneptah, the contemporary
of Moses, it was actually borne by a ‘Prince of Kush,’ that is to say,
the Egyptian governor of Ethiopia.[159] The coincidence doubtless was
the origin of that Jewish tradition of the successful campaign of Moses
in Ethiopia as general of the Egyptian army, which is recorded in full
by Josephus.
Conjecture, both ancient and modern, has played freely round the person
of Pharaoh’s daughter. Modern writers have pointed to the fact that the
favourite daughter of Ramses II. bore the Canaanitish name of Bint-Anat,
and had been born of a Syrian mother. That she should have adopted a
Hebrew child would have been nothing strange. Her own sympathies would
naturally have been on the side of her Semitic ancestry. Moses himself
belonged to the tribe of Levi, and future generations remembered that
his father was Amram and his mother Jochebed. He had a brother Aaron,
three years older than himself, and a sister Miriam. The names of all
three were never forgotten in Israel.[160]
Nor did Moses, when he came to man’s estate, forget his own people. One
day, when he was of that unknown age which the Hebrew writers expressed
by the term of forty years, he saw one of his Israelitish brethren
ill-treated by the Egyptian taskmaster; and with the unrestrained
licence of a young Oriental prince, he forthwith remedied the injustice
by slaying the Egyptian with his own hand. The act was soon known and
discussed among the Hebrew slaves; and when he endeavoured to reconcile
two of them who were quarrelling with each other, he was told that
though he might be ‘a prince’ in the eyes of the Egyptians, he had no
authority over the Hebrew tribes. The suspicions of the Pharaoh had
already been aroused against him, and he now fled from Egypt in fear of
his life. An Egyptian papyrus, written in the time of the twelfth
dynasty, tells the story of a similar fugitive from the Pharaoh’s wrath.
This was Sinuhit, who seems to have been accused of conspiring against
the government, and who fled, accordingly, like Moses, alone and on
foot. He made his way to the eastern boundary of Egypt; and there, when
fainting from thirst, was rescued by the Bedâwin of the desert, and
finally reached in safety the land of the Kadmonites among the mountains
of Seir. The shêkh received him kindly, and Sinuhit in course of time
married the daughter of the Bedâwi chieftain, and became one of the
princes of the tribe. Children were born to him, and he possessed herds
and flocks in abundance. But his heart still yearned for his native
land; and when in his old age a new Pharaoh sent messengers to say that
his political offences were forgiven, and that he might return to Egypt,
Sinuhit left his Arab wife and children and went back once more to his
own country.[161]
Like Sinuhit, Moses also fled to the eastern desert, beyond the reach of
the Egyptian power. He did not feel himself safe till he found himself
in Midian. The Sinaitic Peninsula—Mafkat, as it was called—was an
Egyptian province, and the mines of malachite and copper on its western
side were garrisoned by Egyptian troops. The ‘salt’ desert of Melukhkha,
moreover, which lay between Egypt and Palestine, was equally under
Egyptian control; and, as we learn from the Tel el-Amarna tablets,
supplied contingents to the Pharaoh’s army.[162] But in Midian Moses was
safe from pursuit; and the ‘priest of Midian,’ like the shêkh of Kedem
with whom Sinuhit had to do, gave him a kindly welcome, and married him
to Zipporah, one of his daughters.
Government by a priest was a peculiarly Semitic institution. Assur, the
primitive capital of Assyria, had been governed by high-priests before
it had been governed by kings, and so too had Saba or Sheba in the south
of Arabia. There, as we learn from inscriptions, the Makârib, or
High-priests, had preceded the kings.
Tradition has handed down more than one name for the high-priest of
Midian. In one part of the narrative in Exodus he is called Reuel, in
another part Jethro. Jethro is a distinctively north Arabian name, for
which there is monumental evidence, and it is probably more correct than
Reuel.[163] Whatever may have been his name, however, Moses remained
with him for some time; but instead of being treated like a prince, as
Sinuhit had been among the Kadmonites, he was set to keep the flocks of
his father-in-law.
It was while thus shepherding the flocks of Jethro that Moses came one
day to Horeb, ‘the mountain of God,’ which rose into the sky at the back
of the desert. Here he beheld a _seneh_ or ‘thorn-bush,’ lighted up with
fire, which nevertheless did not consume it.[164] Approaching nearer, he
heard a voice which he believed was that of God Himself, and which told
him that the mountain whereon he stood was holy ground. Moses was then
ordered to return to Egypt, and there in the name of the God of Israel
to command Pharaoh to let His people go. Wonders and signs were to be
performed before consent would be wrung from the obdurate heart of the
Egyptian king, and ten sore plagues were to be sent upon the inhabitants
of the Delta who had joined with the Pharaoh in his oppression of the
Israelites. At the same time, God revealed Himself under a new name,
which was henceforth to be that of the national God of Israel. On the
slopes of Horeb the name of Yahveh was first made known to man.[165]
Moses was met by Aaron ‘in the Mount of God,’ and the two brothers
returned to Egypt together, determined to deliver Israel from its
bondage, and to lead it to that sacred mountain whereon the name of its
national God had been revealed. Unlike Sinuhit, Moses took with him his
Midianitish wife and the children she had borne him. At this point in
the narrative there has been inserted the fragment of a story which
harmonises but ill with it, or with the general spirit of Old Testament
history. The anthropomorphising legend that ‘the Lord’ met Moses and
would have killed him had not Zipporah appeased the wrathful Deity by
circumcising her son, belongs to the folklore of a people still in a
state of crude barbarism, and is part of a story which enforced the
necessity of circumcision among the Hebrew worshippers of Yahveh. An
over-minute criticism might find a contradiction between the statement
that Zipporah had but one son to circumcise, and the fact that it was
the ‘sons’ of Moses who accompanied him to Egypt (Exod. iv. 20). Such
verbal criticism, however, is needless; it is sufficient for the
historian that the story is a mere fragment, almost unintelligible as it
stands, and in complete disaccord with the historical setting in which
it is placed.
Moses and Aaron made their way to the court of the Pharaoh, and there
requested that the Israelites might be allowed to journey three days
into the desert, and hold a feast to their God. The gods of the Asiatic
nomads on the outskirts of the Delta were gods of the wilderness, whom
the Egyptians identified with Set, the enemy of Horus, the deity of the
cultivated land.[166] The Pharaoh refused the request. Once lost in the
desert, the royal slaves would be lost for ever, and would never turn
back to the line of fortifications which guarded the eastern frontier of
Egypt, and, at the same time, prevented the escape of those who dwelt
within them. The God of the Hebrews was no god whom the Pharaoh—himself
the offspring and incarnation of the Sun-god—could recognise; they were
the servants of the Egyptian king, and of none else.
The embassy of the representatives of Israel was followed by severer
measures of repression. It indicated a rising spirit of rebellion, a
desire to return to the old free life of the desert, and to be quit for
ever of Egyptian burdens. Strikes were not unknown among the free
workmen of Thebes; but a strike among the royal slaves was a more
serious matter, and seemed to prove that the Bedâwi spirit of
independence and insubordination was still active among the settlers in
Goshen.[167] The Israelites were still employed in building cities and
fortresses, and they were now bidden to find for themselves the _tibn_
or chopped straw, which they mixed with the clay of the bricks, and, at
the same time, to deliver the same number of bricks as before. The
_tibn_ was employed, as it still is, for binding the clay more closely
together, but it is not essential, and many of the ancient bricks of
Egypt, more especially those used in Upper Egypt, are made without it.
In the Delta, however, with its damper climate, the _tibn_ was more
necessary, and the Egyptian taskmasters, accordingly, required it, or
else some substitute for it.[168] The condition of the Israelites thus
became intolerable; they were scattered over the land, seeking for
‘stubble instead of straw,’ and beaten mercilessly in traditional
Egyptian fashion if the full tale of bricks was not delivered. The
‘stubble’ corresponded with the dry stalks of the durra, which are still
sometimes used for a similar purpose, and was obtained from the beds of
dry reeds which lined the marshes in the Eastern Delta.
Once more Moses and Aaron appeared before the Pharaoh, this time
prepared to enforce their petition by signs and wonders. That they
should have had such ready access to the sovereign may seem strange to
the Western mind. But it is in full accordance with the traditions of
the Egyptian court, which have been maintained down to the reign of the
late Khedive. The ruler of the country was accessible to all who had a
complaint to make before him, or a petition to offer. _Bakshish_ might
be needful before the charmed circle of officials by which he was
surrounded could be broken through; but once it was broken, he was bound
to give audience to whosoever came to him. Moses and Aaron, moreover,
were the delegates and representatives of their people, and as such had
a right to be heard. The system they represented is still in full force
in modern Egypt. Each class of the community, each religion, each trade,
each nationality, has its recognised representative or ‘shêkh,’ who
stands between it and the government, and acts on its behalf in all
political and legal matters. He is as much its representative as an
ambassador or consul is the representative of the nation which has
accredited him, and the rights and privileges which belong to an
ambassador belong also to the ‘shêkh.’ The Pharaoh could not exclude
Moses and Aaron from his presence, even though the people they
represented were public slaves.
The Hebrew wonder-workers were confronted by the magicians of Egypt.
Amon-Ra could not yield without a struggle to the God of the ‘impure’
stranger. The miracles performed by the representatives of the
Israelitish people were not beyond the powers of his servants, and the
magical powers of the Egyptian priests had been famous from the
beginning of time. The Egyptian had an intense belief in magic—a belief
which still survives in the modern Egypt of to-day. Books had been
compiled which reduced this magic to a science, and enabled those who
would learn its formulæ and methods to reverse the order of nature and
work whatsoever wonder they desired.[169] To transform a rod into a
serpent, or a serpent into a rod, was a comparatively easy feat, and one
which the jugglers of Cairo can still perform. Equally easy was it to
turn the water of the river into blood, or even to multiply the frogs on
the wet land. It was only when the plague of lice touched themselves
that the power of the magicians failed, and that they confessed
themselves overcome by a stronger deity than those they owned. Their
magic could not remove the plague which had fallen upon them; their own
garments were defiled in spite of their charms and amulets, and they had
become more unclean than the ‘unclean’ foreigner himself.
The account of the ten plagues of Egypt betrays an intimate acquaintance
with the characteristics and peculiarities of the valley of the Nile.
They are all plagues which still recur there; some of them indeed may be
said never to have left the country. Still, each year, the water of the
river becomes like blood at the time of the inundation. When the Nile
first begins to rise, towards the end of June, the red marl brought from
the mountains of Abyssinia stains it to a dark colour, which glistens
like blood in the light of the setting sun.[170] Each year, too, the
inundation brings with it myriads of frogs, which swarm along the banks
of the river and canals, and fill the night air with continuous
croakings. The lice, again, are an ever-present plague among the poorer
natives, while every spring the flies still swarm in the houses and open
air, and irritate the visitor to Egypt almost beyond endurance. Flies
and lice, frogs and blood-red water, are all as much a part of modern
Egypt as they were of the Egypt of the Mosaic age. Natives and strangers
alike suffered from them, and that the plague of flies did not reach to
Goshen must have seemed to the Egyptians a miracle of miracles.
Those who have had experience of the flies of Egypt can sympathise with
the Pharaoh when he hastily summoned the leaders of Israel and bade them
offer sacrifice to the God who had thus shown himself a veritable ‘Lord
of Flies.’ The plague which followed—the murrain upon the cattle[171]—is
of rarer occurrence, though from time to time it still decimates the
cattle and horses of Egypt. A strict quarantine upon animals, however,
is now enforced at the Asiatic frontier, and some years, therefore, have
elapsed since the last outbreak of the cattle-plague. But the plague of
boils and blains is still endemic, and residents in the country seldom
wholly escape it. The plague of the thunder and hail is also not
unfrequent; as recently as the spring of 1895 a violent storm of the
kind swept along the valley of the Nile and destroyed three thousand
acres of cultivated land. The locusts, too, now and again, are carried
by the south-east wind from the shores of the Red Sea to devour the
rising crops, while the darkness that might be felt was but a heightened
form of the darkness occasioned by the _khamasin_ winds and sand-storms
of the spring. Even the death of the firstborn has its parallel in the
epidemic of cholera. In the space of a single year (1895-1896) the Egypt
of our own days has experienced most of the plagues of which we read in
the book of Exodus. Blood-red water, frogs and lice, flies and boils,
hailstorms and darkness, the scourge of cholera, have all visited the
land.
There was nothing, consequently, in the plagues themselves that was
either supernatural or contra-natural. They were all characteristic of
Egypt, and of Egypt alone. They were signs and wonders, not because they
introduced new and unknown forces into the life of the Egyptians, but
because the diseases and plagues already known to the country were
intensified in action and crowded into a short space of time. The
magicians beheld in them ‘the finger’ of the God of the Hebrews, since
they came and went at the command of the Hebrew leader, and all the
magic of Egypt was powerless before them. Amon-Ra had found a mightier
than himself; and the books of Thoth contained no spells or mystical
incantations which could avail against the scourges that afflicted
priest and layman alike. The reluctant Pharaoh could no longer resist
the cries of his people. Egypt was perishing, and his own son had died
of the plague. It was better that his cities should remain unfinished
than that there should be none to fill them when they were built. In the
plagues that had descended on them, his subjects saw the hand of the
wrathful Hebrew Deity, eager for the sacrifices which His people had
been prevented from offering to Him in the desert, and the sceptical
Pharaoh himself at last became a convert to their belief. In fear lest a
worse evil might befall him, he gave the order that the Israelites
should be allowed to pass the fortresses that separated Goshen from the
wilderness beyond, and the royal slaves were free to depart.
For how long a time Egypt had thus been stricken by plague after plague
is hard to determine. The impression left by the narrative is that they
followed quickly one upon the other, and that consequently the period
was of no great length. It is true that the Nile turns ‘red’ in July,
and that the wheat ripens in the spring; but, on the other hand, the
locusts, we are told, eat ‘all that the hail had left.’ At any rate, it
is clear that the Hebrew writer intended us to believe that less than a
year elapsed between the first visit of the Israelitish representatives
to the Pharaoh and the flight into the wilderness. All was over before
the end of March—‘the first month’ of the Hebrew year.
The Egyptian monuments have given us a different version of the causes
which obliged Meneptah to consent to the exodus of his Asiatic serfs. In
the light of the stela discovered by Professor Petrie at Thebes, we can
now understand the mutilated inscription in which the Pharaoh records on
the walls of Karnak his victory over the barbarians in the fifth year of
his reign. Lower Egypt and its civilisation were never nearer to
destruction. The Libyans of Northern Africa had combined with the
populations of the Greek Seas, and the barbarians had overrun the Delta,
destroying its cities, massacring its population, and carrying away its
spoil. While Maraiu, the Libyan king, devastated the eastern banks of
the Nile, his northern allies—the Sardinians and Achæans, the Lycians
and Siculians—landed on the coasts of the Delta, and marched southward
until they joined him.
It would seem that they found allies in Egypt itself. Meneptah tells us
that he endeavoured to save what was left of his dominions by throwing
up fortifications in front of Memphis and Heliopolis, ‘the city of Tum.’
For Egypt was threatened not only on the west and on the north. Eastward
also, in the land of Goshen, there were enemies, pastoral nomads from
Asia, who had been allowed to live there for many generations. Their
‘tents,’ the Pharaoh declares, had been pitched ‘in front of the city of
Pi-Bailos,’ the modern Belbeis, at the western extremity of the region
in which the Israelites were settled. ‘The kings of Lower Egypt’ found
themselves shut up and isolated in their fortified cities, ‘cut off from
everything by the foe, with no mercenaries whom they could oppose to
them.’[172]
But Meneptah had been ‘crowned to preserve the life’ of his subjects. In
the month of Epiphi, our July, the great battle was fought which
annihilated the hordes of the invaders and saved the inhabitants of
Egypt. Six thousand three hundred and sixty-five Libyan slain were
counted on the field of battle, and 2370 of the northern barbarians,
while 9376 prisoners fell into the hands of the conqueror. It was little
wonder that the Egyptian poets composed pæans in honour of the victory,
or that one of these hymns of triumph should have been engraved on a
stela of the temple which Meneptah raised at Thebes to Amon-Ra.
It is in this latter hymn, as has been already said, that the name of
the ‘Israelites’ has been found. They are included among the enemies
over whom the Pharaoh had triumphed; but, unlike his other enemies, they
possessed no land which they could call their own. They had no fixed
habitation, there was no locality which was called after their name. But
the Egyptian poet knew that they had come originally from Southern
Palestine; the destruction of their male ‘seed’ had widowed the women of
‘Khar.’
It was the pressure of the Libyan invasion, therefore, which had placed
Meneptah at the mercy of his Israelitish slaves. With the Libyans and
their allies in the east and north, and a hostile population in the land
of Goshen, he had been forced to fortify Memphis and Heliopolis, and to
yield to those demands for freedom which he was not strong enough to
resist. To the ten plagues of which we have the record in the book of
Exodus there was added the more terrible plague of the Libyan invasion.
In his inscription Meneptah speaks not only of the barbarian enemy who
harassed the frontier and devastated the seaports, but also of the
‘rebels’ who were destroying the country from within, and in these
rebels whose tents were pitched ‘in front of Pi-Bailos’ we must see the
Israelites of the Old Testament. Crushed and unwarlike though they may
have been, they were nevertheless a source of danger, and, like Mohammed
Ali in the presence of the Bedâwin, the Pharaoh found it necessary to
agree to their demands.
Meneptah’s victory was gained in the middle of the summer. It was in the
spring that the Exodus of the Israelites had taken place. Along with the
descendants of Jacob had gone ‘a mixed multitude,’ fragments, it may be,
of that wave of Libyan invasion which was rolling over the Delta. At any
rate, it was not the Israelites only who had made their way towards
Asia. There were other royal slaves also, like the ‘Apuriu who were
employed in drawing the stone that was quarried on the eastern bank of
the Nile. The resemblance between their name and that of the Hebrews may
have led to a confusion between the brickmakers of Pharaoh and the
transporters of his stone.
There was an Egyptian legend of the Israelitish Exodus which was
embodied in the history of Manetho, from whom it has been quoted by
Josephus.[173] The Pharaoh Amenôphis, it was said, desired to see the
gods, as his predecessor Oros (or Khu-n-Aten) had done. On the advice of
the seer, Amenôphis the son of Paapis, he accordingly cleared the land
of the leprous and ‘impure,’ separating them from the rest of the
Egyptians, to the number of eighty thousand, and condemning them to
work, like the ’Apuriu of the monuments, in the quarries on the eastern
side of the Nile. But among them were some priests who were under the
special protection of the gods. When the seer heard of the sacrilege
that had been committed against their persons, he prophesied that the
impure people would find allies, and with their help rule over Egypt for
thirteen years. Not daring to tell the king of his prophecy, he
committed it to writing, and then destroyed himself. After a while the
workers in the quarries begged the Pharaoh to send them to Avaris, the
old fortress of the Hyksos, which lay on the Asiatic frontier of Egypt,
empty and uninhabited. The request was granted; but no sooner were they
settled in their new abode than they rose in rebellion, and chose as
their leader Osarsiph, a priest of On. He gave them new laws, forbidding
them, among other things, to revere the sacred animals, and set them to
rebuild the walls of Avaris. He also sent to the Hyksos at Jerusalem
asking them for their help. A force of two hundred thousand men was
accordingly despatched to Avaris, and this was followed by the invasion
of Egypt. Amenôphis fled to Ethiopia, with the bull Apis and other holy
animals, after ordering the images of the gods to be concealed. His son
Sethos, who was also called Ramesses, after his grandfather Ramesses the
Great, and who was at the time only five years of age, was placed in
charge of a friend. Amenôphis remained in Ethiopia for thirteen years,
while Osarsiph, who had assumed the name of Moses, and his Hyksos allies
committed innumerable atrocities. Temples and towns were destroyed, and
the priests and sacred animals were killed. But at last the fated term
of years was over; Amenôphis returned at the head of an army, and the
enemy was utterly overthrown and pursued to the borders of Syria.
In this legend truth and fiction have been mingled together. The
foreigner, and more especially the Asiatic foreigner, was stigmatised as
‘impure’ by the Egyptians, and in the leprous people who were confined
in the quarries of the eastern desert we must, therefore, see simply a
stranger race. Osarsiph derives his name from Joseph, the latter name
being regarded (as in Psalm lxxxi. 6) as a compound of Yo or Yahveh,
which is identified with the Egyptian Osiris. Amenôphis,[174] the son of
Paapis, is Amenôphis (or rather, Amenôthes), the son of Hapi who erected
the colossal statues of ‘Memnon’ and its companion at Thebes during the
reign of Amenôphis III., and the Pharaoh Amenôphis, the son of Ramesses,
and father of Sethos, is Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., and father of
Seti II.
The return of Amenôphis from Ethiopia was derived from a sort of
Messianic prophecy found already in a papyrus of the age of Thothmes
III. Here we read that ‘a king will come from the South, Ameni the
truth-declaring by name. He will be the son of a woman of Nubia, and
will be born in.... He will assume the crown of Upper Egypt, and will
lift up the red crown of Lower Egypt. He will unite the double crown....
The people of the age of the son of man will rejoice and establish his
name for all eternity. They will be far from evil, and the wicked will
humble their mouths for fear of him. The Asiatics will fall before his
blows, and the Libyans before his flame. The wicked will wait on his
judgments, the rebels on his power. The royal serpent on his brow will
pacify the revolted. A wall shall be built, even that of the prince, so
that the Asiatics may no more enter into Egypt.’[175]
With this prince of ancient prophecy who should save Egypt from its
Asiatic and Libyan foes, it was easy for popular tradition to identify
the Meneptah who had annihilated both Libyans and Asiatics, and to
combine his name with that of Ameni into the compound Amenôphis. At any
rate, the Egyptian legend bears witness to the fact that Meneptah was
the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and that the flight of the Israelites was
connected with the Libyan invasion of the valley of the Nile.[176]
The Israelites themselves connected the flight with the institution of
the feast of the Passover. But the feast of the Passover seems to have
been a combination of two older festivals. One of these was commemorated
by eating for seven days unleavened bread; the other by the sacrifice of
a lamb, the blood of which was smeared on the doorposts and lintel of
the house, the lamb itself being roasted and eaten at midnight with
bitter herbs. The feast of unleavened bread followed immediately upon
the feast of the Passover, which lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth
day of the first month of the Hebrew sacred year.
Dr. Clay Trumbull has shown that the Passover was but an adaptation of
the old rite which he terms the ‘Threshold Covenant.’[177] It was a rite
which went back to the earliest age of mankind, and of which we find
traces in many parts of the world. Even in the Egypt of to-day the
building of a new house or boat is not complete without the slaughter of
a sheep, the blood of which is allowed to fall on the threshold of the
house or the deck and side of a vessel. The blood was the mark of the
sacrifice by which the master of the house entered into covenant with
the stranger, or even with his god. Where it appeared the avenging deity
passed by, mindful of the covenant, and remembering that the house
contained a friend and not an enemy. The threshold became an altar, and
those who passed over it were made members of the family, and shared
with them their rights and their religion. When once the bride had
crossed the threshold of her new home, she left behind her all her old
ties and relations, and became a member of a new family.
To quote the words of Dr. Clay Trumbull, ‘Long before’ the night of the
Exodus, ‘a covenant welcome was given to a guest who was to become as
one of the family, or to a bride or bridegroom in marriage, by the
outpouring of blood on the threshold of the door, and by staining the
doorway itself with the blood of the covenant. And now,’ on the eve of
the flight from Goshen, ‘Jehovah announced that He was to visit Egypt on
a designated night, and that those who would welcome Him should prepare
a threshold covenant, or a passover sacrifice, as a proof of that
welcome; for where no such welcome was made ready for Him by the family,
He must count the threshold as His enemy.’[178]
The belief that sacrifice alone could secure the house from the wrath of
Heaven has been spread widely over the world. Numberless traces of it
are to be found in the folklore of Europe. Popular legend knows of
bridges and castles which refused to stand until the human victim had
been buried beneath their foundations, and even S. Columba was held to
have been unable to build his cathedral at Iona until his companion Oran
had been immured alive beneath its foundation-stones. We learn from the
Old Testament that the belief was strong among the Israelites also. When
Hiel of Beth-el rebuilt the ruined Jericho, we are told that ‘he laid
the foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates
thereof in his youngest son Segub’ (1 Kings xvi. 34). The Deity had a
right to the firstborn; and if this right were not recognised by the
sacrifice either of the firstborn himself or of a substitute, there
could be no covenant between the family and its gods. A new building
implied a new local habitation for the family and the gods it
worshipped; and where there was no covenant between them, the gods would
come as foes and not as friends.
The Passover feast was therefore nothing new. The rite connected with it
and the ideas associated with the rite must have long been familiar to
the Israelites. What was new was the adaptation of the rite to the new
covenant that Yahveh was about to enter into with His people. It became
‘the Lord’s Passover,’ commemorating the deliverance from Egypt when
Yahveh smote the Egyptian firstborn, but ‘passed over the houses of the
children of Israel.’ Like the old springtide feast of unleavened bread,
it was given a new signification, and made a memorial of the first event
in the national life of Israel. A similar significance was given to a
change that was made in the calendar. The Hebrew year had begun in the
autumn with the month of September; but side by side with this
West-Semitic calendar there had also been in use in Palestine another
calendar, that of Babylonia, according to which the year began with
Nisan or March. It was this Babylonian calendar which was now introduced
for ritual purposes. While the civil year still began in the autumn, it
was ordained that the sacred year should begin in the spring. The sacred
year was determined by the annual festivals, and the first of the
festivals was henceforth to be the Passover. The beginning of the new
year was henceforth fixed by the Passover moon.
It was at midnight that the angel of death passed over the land of
Egypt. The plague spared neither rich nor poor. The firstborn of Pharaoh
died like the firstborn of the captive in prison. Vain attempts have
been made to discover which among the sons of Meneptah this may have
been. But Meneptah lived many years after the overthrow of the Libyans,
and consequently after the Exodus of the Israelites, and it may not have
been till late in his reign that his successor, Seti II., became
crown-prince. More than one elder brother may have died meanwhile.
Moreover, none but the son of a princess of the royal solar race could
sit on the throne of the Pharaohs. The reigning king might have elder
sons born to him by foreign princesses, but his successor could not be
chosen from among them. He only who could trace his descent to the
Sun-god, who was, in short, a direct descendant of the Pharaohs, had any
right to the throne.
Amid the terrors of the plague, and under cover of the darkness, the
Israelites and their companions, the ‘mixed multitude,’ departed from
the land of Goshen. They took with them their flocks and herds; they
took also such precious plunder as they could easily carry away from the
houses of their terrified masters. They ‘borrowed,’ according to the
euphemistic expression of the chronicler, ‘jewels of silver and jewels
of gold, and raiment,’ ‘and they spoiled the Egyptians.’ It was little
wonder that the Pharaoh subsequently determined to pursue the retreating
hordes.
They first made their way from ‘Rameses to Succoth.’ Succoth is the
Thukut of the Egyptian texts, the district in which Pithom was situated,
and which extended from the land of Goshen to the line of fortifications
that enclosed Egypt on the East. It is mentioned in the letter sent to
Meneptah three years after the Israelitish Exodus, which we have already
had occasion to quote.[179] The flight of the Israelites had left the
district uninhabited, and it was not very long before it was again
handed over to some of their Edomite kinsmen, who wanted pasture for
their herds.
The site of the town of Rameses is still uncertain. It is called
Pi-Ramses, ‘the House of Ramses,’ in the hieroglyphic texts, and, like
Zoan, it lay near the canal of Pa-shet-Hor. A long description is given
of it by the scribe Paebpasa, who was stationed at Zaru, on the eastern
frontier of Egypt, during the early part of Meneptah’s reign. He tells
us (according to Brugsch’s translation)[180] how he had ‘arrived at the
city of Ramses and found it excellent, for nothing can compare with it
on the Theban land and soil.... Its canals are rich in fish, its lakes
swarm with birds, its meadows are green with vegetables, there is no end
of the lentils; melons with a taste like honey grow in the irrigated
fields. Its barns are full of wheat and durra, and reach as high as
heaven.... The canal, Pa-shet-Hor, produces salt, the lake-region of
Pa-Hirnatron. Their sea-ships enter the harbour, plenty and abundance is
abundant in it.’ And then the scribe goes on to describe the annual
festivities of its inhabitants in honour of their founder Ramses II.
In Thukut or Succoth were fortresses which protected the Delta from
Asiatic incursions, and at the same time prevented those who were in
Egypt from escaping out of it without the permission of the Government.
One of them was called ‘the Khetem,’ or ‘Fortress, of Thukut’; another
the Khetem of Ramses II. Both seem to be mentioned in a report sent to
Meneptah’s successor, Seti II. Here we read: ‘I set out from the hall of
the royal palace (in Zoan) on the 9th day of the month Epiphi, in the
evening, after the two (fugitive) slaves. I arrived at the Khetem of
Thukut on the 10th of Epiphi. I was informed that the men had resolved
to take their way towards the south. On the 12th I reached the Khetem.
There I was informed that grooms who had come from the neighbourhood
[had reported] that the fugitives had already passed the Wall to the
north of the Migdol of king Seti Meneptah.’[181]
The runaway slaves must have taken the same road as that which had been
taken by the Israelites before them. The Israelites had avoided the
nearest and more usual road to Palestine, which ran along the edge of
the Mediterranean and passed through Gaza. The Philistines were already
threatening the southern coast of Canaan, and Gaza was garrisoned by
Egyptian troops. The undisciplined and unwarlike multitude which
followed Moses would have been cut to pieces had they ventured to force
their way through them, or else would have returned to Egypt. They
turned therefore southward towards the desert and ‘the way of the
wilderness of the Yâm Sûph.’
From Succoth, we are told, they marched to Etham ‘in the edge of the
wilderness.’ Brugsch was the first to see that in Etham we have a Hebrew
transcription of the Egyptian Khetem. The only question is, which of the
many Khetemu or ‘Fortresses’ which protected the Asiatic frontier of
Egypt this particular Etham may have been. We hear of ‘the Khetem of
Ramses II., which is in the district of Zaru,’ at the very point where
one of the roads to Asia passed through the great line of fortification,
and the report quoted above tells us of another Khetem, that of Thukut.
It was, however, the second Khetem mentioned in the report which is
referred to in the Old Testament narrative. This second Khetem lay
between Succoth and the lines of fortification, and might therefore be
described as ‘in the edge of the wilderness,’ which began on the eastern
side of the Shur or fortified wall. It was, in fact, the fortress which
guarded one of the roads out of Egypt at the point where it intersected
the lines. To the south of it came the Migdol or Tower of King Meneptah.
It is possible that this may be the Migdol which is stated in the book
of Exodus to have been near the next camping-place of the Israelites.
From the fortress of Etham they had turned to the ‘sea,’ and had there
pitched their tents ‘before Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea,
over against Baal-zephon.’ In Baal-zephon, ‘Baal of the North,’ we have
the name of a Phœnician temple, which is alluded to in an Egyptian
papyrus;[182] and in place of Pi-hahiroth, the Septuagint and Coptic
versions read ‘the farmstead,’ reminding us of the _ahu_ or ‘estate’ of
Pharaoh in the district of Thukut, on which the Edomite herdsmen were
afterwards allowed to settle.
But what is ‘the sea,’ by the side of which the Israelites encamped? Its
identification has been the subject of much controversy—a fact, however,
which ceases to astonish us when we find that the Hebrew writers
themselves were uncertain about it. While in the narrative of the Exodus
‘the sea’ crossed by the Israelites is carefully distinguished from the
‘Yâm Sûph’ or ‘Reedy Sea,’ at which they subsequently arrived, there are
other passages in the Old Testament, more especially of a poetical
nature, in which the two seas are confounded together. Two
irreconcileable systems of geography are thus presented to us which have
hitherto made the geography of the Exodus an insoluble problem.
In the narrative, however, all is clear and exact. The children of
Israel, it was determined, instead of following the northern road to
Palestine, should march along that which led to ‘the wilderness of the
Yâm Sûph.’ But between them and this wilderness lay the Egyptian wall of
fortification, which extended from the marshes in the north to the Gulf
of Suez, or its prolongation, in the south. It was only when they had
turned the southern end of the wall by crossing ‘the sea’ that they
entered ‘the wilderness of the wall,’ where they wandered for three days
without finding water (Exod. xv. 22). Later they came to the palm-grove
of Elim, and then after that to the Yâm Sûph (Numb. xxxiii. 10).
The Yâm Sûph was well known to Hebrew geography, and corresponded with
the modern Gulf of Aqaba. It was upon the Yâm Sûph, at Elath and
Ezion-geber, ‘in the land of Edom,’ that Solomon built his ships (1
Kings ix. 26); and after the capture of Arad, in the extreme south of
Canaan, the Israelites marched ‘from mount Hor by the way of Yâm Sûph,
in order to compass the land of Edom’ (Numb. xxi. 4). Elim is but
another form of Elath, the ruins of which lie close to Aqaba, while the
town of Sûph lay ‘over against’ the wilderness in the plains of Moab
(Deut. i. 1). The Yâm Sûph, in fact, so erroneously rendered ‘the Red
Sea’ in the Authorised Version, was the Gulf of Aqaba. The sister Gulf
of Suez was called by the Hebrews ‘the Egyptian Sea’ (Isa. xi. 15), a
very appropriate name, since it was enclosed on either side by Egyptian
territory. From the days of the third dynasty to those of the Ptolemies,
Mafkat, the Sinaitic peninsula, was included among the provinces of
Egypt.
In the list of the Israelitish stations given in Numb. xxxiii. a careful
distinction is made between the Yâm Sûph (ver. 10) and ‘the sea,’
through the midst of which the fugitives from Pharaoh passed safely into
the wilderness. This ‘sea’ washed the southern extremity of the Shur or
‘Wall’ of fortification, the line of which was approximately that of the
Suez Canal. If Dr. Naville is right, in the days of the Exodus it would
have extended much further to the north than is at present the case; the
Bitter Lakes, in fact, marking its northern boundary. But there are
serious difficulties in the way of this hypothesis. The canal which, in
the time of Seti I., already united the Pelusiac arm of the Nile with
the Gulf of Suez, ran southward as far as the modern town of Suez, where
its mouth can still be traced. Only five miles north of Suez, moreover,
the fragments of a stela can still be seen, on which Darius commemorated
his reopening of the old canal of the Pharaohs. Had the gulf really
extended so far north as Ismailîya and the Bitter Lakes, this southern
prolongation of the canal would be hard to understand.
However this may be, the poets and later writers of the Old Testament
came to forget what was meant by ‘the sea.’ It was confounded with the
Yâm Sûph, and the scene of the Exodus was accordingly transferred from
the Gulf of Suez to the Gulf of Aqaba. Dr. Winckler has recently
endeavoured to show that besides Muzri or Egypt, the Assyrian
inscriptions know of another Muzri or ‘borderland’ in the north-west of
Arabia. If so, this second Muzri or Egypt might help to explain the
confusion between the two seas.
It is in the song of triumph over the destruction of the Egyptians that
the confusion first makes its appearance. Here (Exod. xv. 4) ‘the sea’
and ‘the Yâm Sûph’ are used as equivalents, and the contents of the song
are summed up at the end in the statement that ‘Moses brought Israel
from the Yâm Sûph.’ But elsewhere in the Pentateuch the geography is
accurate, and it is not until we come to the speeches in the book of
Joshua that the two seas are once more confused together.[183] The same
geographical error is repeated in two of the later Psalms, as well as in
a passage of the book of Nehemiah.[184] The older Hebrew geography had
by this time been forgotten; with the loss of Edom and its seaports an
exact knowledge of the two arms of the Red Sea had faded from the
memories of the Jews. But in the historical narrative of the Pentateuch
all is still distinct and clear.
Hardly had the Israelites left Goshen before the Pharaoh repented of his
permission for their departure. The retreating multitude, encumbered
with women and children, with flocks and herds, and with the booty that
had been carried off from the Egyptians, was still encamped within the
lines of fortification, near the southernmost Migdol or ‘Tower,’ and on
the shores of ‘the sea.’ Southward was a waterless desert; behind were
the hostile forces of Egypt. The situation seemed hopeless; ‘the
wilderness,’ as the Pharaoh said, had ‘shut them in,’ and there seemed
no escape from the Egyptian troops which had now been sent in pursuit of
them.
But Israel was saved, as it were, by miracle. All night long the sky was
black with clouds, while a strong east wind drove the shallow waters of
‘the sea’ before it towards the western bank. The fugitives marched in
haste through its dried-up bed, and before morning dawned they had
reached the eastern shore. The Egyptian forces pursued, but it was too
late. The wheels of the chariots sank into the soft sand, and before
they could advance far the wind dropped and the waters returned upon
them. The chariots and host of Pharaoh were overwhelmed by the flowing
tide.
Classical history knew of similar events. Diodoros (xvi. 46) tells us
that when Artaxerxes of Persia led his forces against Egypt, part of his
army perished, swallowed up in the ‘gulfs’ of the Sirbonian Lake on the
Mediterranean Sea. Alexander’s troops, moreover, narrowly escaped being
swallowed up by the waters of the Pamphylian Gulf, through which they
passed during the winter, and their escape was magnified by later
writers into a miracle.[185]
The Pharaoh was not himself among the six hundred chariots which had
pursued the flying Israelites into ‘the sea.’[186] As in the great
battle against the Libyans, Meneptah, while taking the field in person,
nevertheless took care to avoid actual danger and to delegate his
authority to others when there was a prospect of fighting. He lived
several years after the Libyan victory, and therefore after the
Israelitish Exodus; and though his tomb in the Bibân el-Molûk at Thebes
was never finished, he was buried in it at a ripe old age. A dirge,[187]
probably composed at the time of his death, speaks of the king as dying
at an advanced period of life.
With the waters of ‘the sea’ between themselves and Egypt, the
Israelites felt that they were at last free men. The fortified wall of
Egypt was behind them; they were already in the desert-home of their
Asiatic kinsmen, free to move whithersoever they desired. But there was
one road which they could not take. If the fear of ‘seeing war’ had kept
them back from the northern road to Palestine, it would still more keep
them from the road which led into the Egyptian province of Mafkat. Here
on the western side of the Sinaitic peninsula were the mines of copper
and malachite worked by Egyptian convicts, and strongly garrisoned by
Egyptian troops. To venture near them would have been to court again the
danger from which the fugitives had just escaped.[188]
The road was well known. For centuries it had been trodden by Egyptian
troops and miners, by civil officials and the convicts of whom they had
charge. There was no difficulty, therefore, in avoiding it, and in
plunging instead into the desert which led to their kinsfolk in Edom and
that land of Canaan which was their ultimate goal.
Old errors die hard, and the belief that the Sinaitic peninsula was the
scene of the wanderings of the Israelites still prevails among students
of the Old Testament. It originated in the wish of the early Christian
anchorites in the Sinaitic peninsula to find the localities of the
Pentateuch in their own neighbourhood, and has been fostered by the
geographical confusion between ‘the sea’ crossed by the Israelites and
the Yâm Sûph. But the belief is not only irreconcileable with the facts
of Egyptian history, it is also irreconcileable with the narrative of
the Pentateuch itself. It transports the Amalekites or Bedâwin of the
desert south of Judah to the western side of the Sinaitic peninsula, and
performs the same feat for the wilderness of Paran.[189] It makes
Jethro, the high-priest of Midian, cross the Gulf of Aqaba and make his
way through barren gorges and hostile tribes in order to visit his
son-in-law, and sets at defiance the express testimony of Hebrew
literature that Mount Sinai was among the mountains of Seir.[190]
The wilderness into which the Israelites emerged is called indifferently
that of Shur and Etham. Shur was the Semitic equivalent of the Egyptian
Anbu or ‘Wall’ of fortification, while Etham took its name from one of
the Khetemu or ‘Fortresses’ which guarded the approach to the valley of
the Nile. It was a wilderness which stretched away to the shores of the
Gulf of Aqaba, and the Hebrew tribes accordingly marched along it. They
took, we are told, ‘the way of the wilderness of the Yâm Sûph,’
following the Haj road, which is still traversed by the pilgrims from
Egypt to Mecca. But the caravan moved slowly, and for three days they
could find no water. Had they turned southward into the Sinaitic
peninsula, a few hours would have brought them to the Wells of Moses—now
a place of picnic for the visitors to Suez,—while the road to the
Egyptian mines was provided with cisterns and wells. But to have done so
would have been merely to exchange Egypt for one of its
strongly-garrisoned provinces.
How long the wanderers were in crossing the desert we do not know; nor
do we know where Marah was, whose ‘bitter’ waters refreshed them after
three days of scarcity. But at last they reached the oasis of Elim,
which the itinerary in the book of Numbers (xxxiii. 10) couples with the
Yâm Sûph. Elim, in fact, is but a variant form of Elath,[191] and Elath
is the Aila of classical geography, of which Aqaba is the modern
successor. When the Israelites left Elim a whole month had elapsed since
their departure from Egypt (Exod. xvi. 1).
Between Elim or the Yâm Sûph[192] and Mount Sinai lay the Wilderness of
Sin. Sinai and Sin alike derived their names from Sin, the moon-god of
Babylonia, whose worship had long since been brought by Babylonian
conquest to the West. More than two thousand years before the Exodus the
Babylonian conqueror, Naram-Sin, ‘the beloved of Sin,’ had carried his
arms as far as the Sinaitic peninsula, and the inscriptions of Southern
Arabia show that there also the Babylonian deity was adored.[193] It
would seem probable that a temple dedicated to his service stood on the
slopes of Mount Sinai.
Numerous attempts have been made to identify the mountain which the
Israelites regarded as the scene of the first pronouncement of their
Law. Most of these attempts are based on the belief that it is to be
sought in the Sinaitic peninsula. The rival claims of Jebel el-’Ejmeh,
Jebel Umm ’Alawî, Jebel Zebîr-Katarîna, Jebel Serbâl, and Jebel Mûsa
have all been eagerly discussed. Jebel Mûsa alone can claim the support
of tradition, though this does not go back further than the third or
fourth century A.D., when the Christian hermits first settled in its
neighbourhood. The Sinai of S. Paul and Josephus was still in the Arabia
of Roman geography, the kingdom of which Petra was the capital.
In the geography of the Old Testament, however, Mount Sinai was in Edom.
This is expressly stated in the Song of Deborah, one of the oldest
products of Hebrew literature. Here we read (Judg. v. 4, 5), ‘Lord, when
Thou wentest out of Seir, when Thou marchedst out of the field of Edom,
the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped
water. The mountains melted from before the Lord, even that Sinai from
before the Lord God of Israel.’ Similar testimony is borne by the
blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2), ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose
up from Seir unto them; He shined forth from the Mount of Paran,’ an
expression which appears in another form in Habakkuk (iii. 3), ‘God came
from Teman, and the Holy One from the Mount of Paran.’ Teman denoted
Southern Edom, and Paran was the desert which adjoined Edom on the west
and Judah on the south, and in whose midst was the sanctuary of
Kadesh-barnea.[194] In the Blessing of Moses the parallelism of Hebrew
poetry requires that Sinai and Seir should be equivalent terms.
We must, then, look to the frontiers of Edom and the desert of Paran for
the real Sinai of Hebrew history. But it is useless to seek for a more
exact localisation until the mountains of Seir and the old kingdom of
Edom have been explored. Then, if ever, the Sinai of the Pentateuch may
be discovered. It would seem that it formed part of a range that was
known as ‘Horeb,’ the ‘desert’ mountains, and as late as the age of
Elijah it was still reverenced as ‘the Mount of God’ (1 Kings xix.
8).[195]
Before the Israelites actually reached the sacred mountain, they had to
make more than one encampment in ‘the Wilderness of Sin.’ The itinerary
in the book of Numbers gives the names of three—Dophkah, Alush, and
Rephidim—the narrative mentions only the last. Rephidim, the
‘Encampments,’ was the scene of the first conflict the Israelites were
called upon to face. Here they were attacked by the Amalekites, the
Bedâwin tribes who still consider the desert as their own, and whose
hand is against all that pass through it. The attack was repulsed, but
not without loss, and the remembrance of it never faded from the minds
of the Hebrew people. There was henceforth to be war between Amalek and
Israel ‘from generation to generation,’ until the Bedâwin marauders of
the desert should be destroyed. The Song of Deborah (Judg. v. 14) tells
us how the struggle was continued after the settlement in Canaan, and
the first Israelitish king did his utmost to root out these pests of the
Hebrew borderland. Saul smote them, it is said, from Havilah to Shur (1
Sam. xv. 7), from the ‘sandy’ desert of Arabia Petræa to the great Wall
of Egypt. And the Hebrew writer expressly adds that these were the same
Amalekites as those who had lain in wait for Israel ‘in the way when he
came up from Egypt.’ There were no Amalekites in the Sinaitic peninsula;
the desert in which they ranged was that which adjoined Edom, and was
known to the ancient Babylonians as the ‘land of Melukhkha.’ Hence it
was that Edomites and Amalekites were mingled together, and that Amalek
was counted by the genealogists a grandson of Esau.
The battle at Rephidim was followed by the visit of the father-in-law of
Moses, Jethro, ‘the priest of Midian.’ The visit was natural, for the
real Sinai lay on the frontier of Midian. It was while Moses was feeding
the flock of Jethro that he had first come to it and received his
commission from Yahveh. Here, therefore, at ‘the Mount of God,’ he was
within hail of his old home.
Jethro’s visit marked the first step in the organisation of Israel.
Under his guidance and counsel judges of various grades were appointed
before whom minor cases could be brought, and each of whom was invested
with a certain amount of power. The functions of the ‘judge’ were
administrative and executive as well as legal; what was meant by the
term we may learn from the book of Judges as well as from the Shophetim
or judges who at one time took the place of the kings at Tyre. They
corresponded closely with the higher officials in the Turkish provinces,
who possess an undefined and in some respects absolute authority,
subject only to the official who is immediately above them. The ‘judges’
established by Moses on Jethro’s advice derived their titles from the
numerical extent of their jurisdiction. They were judges ‘of thousands,’
‘of hundreds,’ ‘of fifties,’ and ‘of tens.’ The community was divided
into ideal units, of larger and smaller size, the basis of the
arrangement being the decimal system. The whole arrangement may have
been of Midianite origin; at all events, in the Assyrian texts we hear
also of a ‘captain of fifty’ and a ‘captain of ten.’[196]
Moses remained the supreme ‘judge’ and lawgiver of his people. To him
alone all ‘great matters’ were referred, and from him came all the laws
and ordinances, the rules and regulations which they were called upon to
obey. The leader who had brought them safely out of ‘the house of
bondage’ now became their recognised head and legislator. Moses ‘was
king in Jeshurun,’ exercising all the authority in Israel which in later
times belonged to the king.
Hardly was the political organisation of the new community completed
before the Israelitish tribes reached the venerated sanctuary of Sinai,
and encamped before ‘the Mount of God.’ The first object of their
journey was accomplished, and the promise of Yahveh was fulfilled that
they should ‘serve God’ on the mountain where He had appeared to their
leader. Here at Sinai the earlier portion of the Mosaic legislation was
promulgated. It was subsequently supplemented by the legislation at
Kadesh-Barnea, that second resting-place of the tribes, where by the
side of En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ they prepared themselves
in the security of the heart of the desert for the future invasion of
Canaan.
It was amid the terrors of a thunderstorm that Yahveh declared His laws
to the people of Israel. While darkness rested on the summit of the
mountain, broken only by the flashes of the lightning and the voice of
the thunder, ‘the Ten Words’ were delivered to man. In their forefront
stood that stern, uncompromising declaration of monotheism which
henceforth marked the religion of Israel. They began with the
commandment that Israel should have ‘no other gods before’ the Lord.
Yahveh had brought them forth from Egypt, and Yahveh only must they
therefore serve. The commands which followed were partly general, partly
applicable to the Israelites alone. The prohibition to make ‘the
likeness of any thing in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in
the water under the earth,’ defined the character of the God before whom
no other was to be worshipped. He had no form or attributes which could
be represented by art; it was the gods of the Gentiles only of whom
images or pictures could be made. Egypt had been a land of idols, and in
leaving Egypt Yahveh required that the idols also should be left behind.
In the simple life of the desert there was no place for art: here man
was alone with his Creator, who revealed Himself in the light of the
burning bush or the thunderings of the storm, not under the forms of the
creatures He had made. The second commandment was part of the teaching
which the wanderings in the desert were intended to enforce; and if
Israel was to remain a ‘peculiar people,’ dedicated to the service of
Yahveh, and secure from absorption into the nations that surrounded it,
it was necessary that it should be fenced about with a law of
puritanical strictness, which forbade the introduction of art under any
shape. Art in the world of the Exodus was too closely interwoven with
the religions of Egypt and Canaan and Babylonia to be other than a
forbidden thing. The subsequent history of Israel proved how wise and
needful had been the prohibition. The art which adorned the temple and
palace of Solomon was followed by the erection of altars to the
divinities of the heathen, and even in the wilderness the golden calf
was worshipped in sight of Sinai itself.
The third and fourth commandments were, like the second, Israelitish
rather than general in character. The third forbade taking in vain the
name of Yahveh; the name of the national God of Israel which had been so
specially revealed was too sacred to be lightly spoken of. The ‘name’ of
Yahveh, in fact, was equivalent to Yahveh Himself, and to deal lightly
with the name was to deal lightly with One of whose essence it was. The
obligation to keep the Sabbath was part of the culture which Western
Asia had received from Babylonia. Among the Babylonians the Sabbath had
been observed from early times, and the institution seems to have gone
back to a pre-Semitic period. At all events, it was denoted in Sumerian
by a term which a cuneiform tablet explains as ‘a day of rest for the
heart,’ and its Assyrian name of Sabattu or ‘Sabbath’ was even derived
by the native etymologists from the two Sumerian words _sa_, ‘a heart,’
and _bat_, ‘to rest.’[197] In Babylonia and Assyria, as in Israel, the
Sabbath was observed every seventh day, perhaps in accordance with the
astronomical system which dedicated the seven days of the week to the
seven planets of Babylonian science. These seven-day weeks, however,
were based on the lunar months of the Babylonian year, the Sabbath or
rest-day being on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th of each month. There
was, moreover, another Sabbath on the 19th of the month, that being the
end of the seventh week from the first day of the preceding month. On
these Sabbath days work of all kinds was forbidden to be performed. The
king, it was laid down, ‘must not eat flesh that has been cooked over
the coals or in the smoke, must not change the garments of his body,
must not wear white clothing, must not offer sacrifices, must not ride
in a chariot, must not issue royal decrees.’ Even the diviner was not
allowed to ‘mutter incantations in a secret place.’ Nor was it permitted
to take medicine.
With the other elements of Babylonian culture the institution of the
Sabbath had made its way to the West. But at Sinai it was given a new
and special application. Not only was it to be observed each seventh day
of the week, irrespective of the beginning of the month, it became also
a sign and mark of the covenant between Israel and its national God. In
the book of Exodus, it is true, the reason given for keeping it is that
Yahveh had rested on the seventh day from His work of creation—a reason
which will hardly be accepted by the geologist—but in Deuteronomy (v.
15) it is more fittingly brought into direct connection with the
deliverance from Egypt: ‘Remember that thou wast a servant in the land
of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a
mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God
commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.’
The sanction of the fifth commandment is also one which applied to
Israel alone: children were enjoined to honour their parents that their
days might be long in the land which Yahveh had promised to give them.
But the last five commandments are of general application, and
accordingly no reason is given for keeping them derived from the
accidents of Hebrew history. They apply to all mankind, at all times and
in all parts of the world. Murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and
covetousness are all crimes forbidden everywhere by the legal or moral
code. But it is strange that lying and deceit are not included among
them; in this respect the so-called negative confession, which the soul
of the dead Egyptian was called upon to make in the next world, was more
complete.[198] The lie, however, which does not involve false witness is
apt to be condoned among the nations of the East.
The ten commandments were followed by a series of other laws, many of
which were probably re-enactments of laws or regulations already in
force. The law of retaliation, for instance (Exod. xxi. 23-25), is as
old as human society; so also is the law that murder should be punished
by death (xxi. 12). The law which punished the master for the murder of
a slave if he died on the spot, but allowed him to go scot-free if the
slave lingered for a day or two (xxi. 20, 21), had its parallel in
ancient Babylonia, and the death-penalty exacted from the ox which had
gored a man (xxi. 28-32) is a survival from the days when dumb animals
and even inanimate objects were regarded as responsible for the injuries
they had caused.[199] The regulations in regard to ‘a field or
vineyard,’ or ‘the standing corn’ of a field (xxii. 5, 6), belonged to
the land of Goshen or to Canaan, not to the life in the wilderness, and
the dedication of the firstborn to God (xxii. 29, 30) was one of the
most ancient articles of Semitic faith.
Equally applicable to Egypt or Canaan only are the injunctions to let
the land lie fallow every seventh year (xxiii. 11), and to celebrate the
three great feasts of the year (xxiii. 14-19). They were all feasts of
the agriculturist rather than of the pastoral nomad. The year was
ushered in with the spring festival of unleavened bread; then in the
summer came the feast of harvest, and finally in the autumn—‘the end’ of
the old civil year—the feast of the ingathering of the fruits.
Such were some of the laws promulgated under the shadow of the sacred
mountain, when Israel first encamped before Mount Sinai. They concluded
with an exhortation to march against Canaan. Yahveh declared that He
would send His Angel before His people to guide them in their way, like
the _sukkalli_ or ‘angels’ of the Babylonian gods. Yahveh would fight
for them, and they should drive out the older inhabitants of the land
and take their place. They were in no wise to mingle with them or
worship their gods; like the idolaters themselves, the idols they adored
were to be destroyed. ‘From the Yâm Sûph to the sea of the Philistines
and from the desert to the river’ were to be the bounds of their new
home, a promise which was fulfilled in the kingdom of David.[200] That,
too, extended to ‘the river’ Euphrates, and included the land of Edom
with its two ports on the Yâm Sûph. ‘The sea of the Philistines’ is a
new name for the Mediterranean, and bears testimony to the maritime fame
those pirates from the north had already acquired.[201]
The laws thus promulgated at Sinai became the first code of Israel. They
rested on the covenant that had been made between Yahveh and His people,
of which the first clause was that they should worship none other gods
but Him. The book in which they were written by Moses was accordingly
called the Book of the Covenant, and its words were read aloud to the
assembled multitude (Exod. xxiv. 7). The audience, it must be
remembered, included not the Israelites only, but the ‘mixed multitude’
as well (Numb. xi. 4).
Once more Moses ascended the sacred mountain, to learn the ‘pattern’ of
the tabernacle in which Yahveh was henceforth to be worshipped. It was
to be a tent, moving along with the people, and containing all the
objects of Israelitish veneration. Chief among these was the ark of the
Covenant, surmounted by the mercy-seat and its two cherubim, between
which Yahveh sat enthroned when He revealed Himself to His worshippers.
Babylonia also had its arks, its mercy-seats, and its cherubim, and
Nebuchadrezzar speaks of ‘the seat of the oracles’ in the great temple
of Babylon ‘whereon at the festival of Zagmuku, the beginning of the
year, on the 8th and 11th days, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the
gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with
bowed heads.’[202] The cherubim, indeed, were of Babylonian origin, and
their presence in the tabernacle seems somewhat inconsistent with the
prohibition to make a carven image. But the Israelites were the heirs of
the ancient culture of Western Asia, and the tabernacle and its
furniture embodied familiar forms of architecture and older religious
conceptions.
In Egypt, too, the gods had their shrines, though these were usually
boats which on the days of festival floated over the sacred lakes. Arks,
however, were not unknown, and, as in Babylonia, contained the images of
the gods. Sometimes, however, in Babylonia and Assyria, the ark, like
that of Israel, had no image within it: the stone coffer, for instance,
found by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam in the inner sanctuary of the little temple
of Balawât contained two tables of alabaster on which the annals of king
Assur-nazir-pal were engraved. The native workmen who discovered them
naturally saw in them the two tables of stone which had been similarly
placed by Moses in the ark (Deut. x. 5).[203]
The parallelism between the temples and ritual of Israel and of
Babylonia is indeed close. The temple itself was of the same square or
rectangular form. Outwardly it presented the appearance of a huge box.
Within were the forecourt and court, while at the back came the Holy of
Holies, with its altar and ark. There was, however, one distinguishing
feature in the Babylonian temple which was lacking in the Hebrew
tabernacle. That was the great tower which mounted up towards heaven,
and the topmost stage of which seemed to approach the gods. In the
absence of a tower the Hebrew tabernacle agreed with the temples of
Canaan.
The Israelitish altars found their counterpart in Babylonia. So, too,
did the table of shewbread, which similarly stood in the sanctuaries of
the Chaldæan deities. The sacrifices and offerings were also similar.
Babylonia had its daily sacrifice. its ‘meal-offering,’ and its
offerings for sin; the same animals that were sacrificed to Yahveh were
sacrificed also to Bel; and the Babylonian worshipper sought the favour
of his gods with the same birds and the same fruits of the field. Oil,
moreover, was used for purposes of anointing, and herein the ritual of
Babylonia and Israel differed from that of Egypt, where oil was not
employed.[204]
The contrast between Egypt and Israel, indeed, in the details of
religious service was as great as the agreement in this respect between
Israel and Babylonia. The children of Israel had never forgotten their
Asiatic origin; throughout their long sojourn in Goshen they had
preserved their old culture and habits of thought as tenaciously as they
had preserved their language. Between them and the Egyptians, on the
contrary, there had been antagonism from the outset. And this antagonism
was accentuated by their lawgiver, who was naturally anxious to turn
their thoughts from ‘the fleshpots of Egypt,’ and to prevent them from
lapsing into Egyptian idolatries. Even the Egyptian legend of the Exodus
bears witness to this fact.
In one detail, however, we find an analogy in Egypt. Professor
Hommel[205] has pointed out that the breastplate of the high-priest, the
mysterious Urim and Thummim, with its twelve engraved stones, is
pictured on the breast of an Egyptian priest. Thus Seker-Khâbau, a
high-priest of Memphis in the age of the nineteenth dynasty, wears upon
his breast a sort of double network with four rows of precious stones
set in it, each row consisting of three stones, alternately in the form
of crosses and disks.[206] The Hebrew breastplate was used as an oracle,
like the linen ephod which was worn under it, though how the future was
divined from it we do not know. But in moments of danger it was usual to
consult it; and the fact that ‘when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord
answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets,’ is
brought forward as a proof that he had been forsaken by his God (1 Sam.
xxviii. 6). Like the lawgiver himself, it was the mouthpiece of Yahveh,
and as such it bore the name of ‘the breastplate of judgment.’
The architects of the tabernacle and its adornment in precious metals
were Bezaleel of Judah and Aholiab of Dan.[207] Modern criticism would
hold them to be part of an elaborate fiction, of which the tabernacle
was the subject. But the fiction would be too elaborate, too detailed,
to be conceivable. Moreover, we have references to the tabernacle or
‘tent of meeting’ in the later history of Israel; and to declare these
to be interpolations or the products of the same pen as that which
invented the tabernacle itself may be an easy way of saving a theory,
but it is not scientific. How far the description of the tabernacle is
exact, how far it has not been coloured by the conceptions of a later
age, is, of course, a question that may be asked. Those who maintain
that the Pentateuch goes back in substance to the Mosaic age must
nevertheless allow that it has undergone many changes and modifications
before assuming its present shape. But, except in rare instances, it is
impossible to indicate these changes with the assurance that the
historian demands, and we must therefore be content with the probability
that in the description of the tabernacle we have the revised version of
an old story.
It has been asked how the materials used in the construction of the
tabernacle could have been obtained in the desert, from whence came the
silver and gold, the bronze and precious stones, the rich embroideries
and cloths stained with Tyrian dye? Those who ask such questions have
forgotten that the Israelites were not wild Bedâwin, and that they were
laden with the spoils of Egypt. Like the invading hosts who attacked
Egypt in the reign of Ramses III., they carried with them in their
retreat the treasures of their late masters. And we are specially told
that the gold was obtained from the bracelets and earrings and rings
which were offered by the people and melted down.
It was during the second absence of Moses, when the conception and form
of the tabernacle were being revealed to his mental vision, that his
followers showed how little they understood the spirit and character of
the legislation he was endeavouring to give them. They believed he had
deserted them, and with his departure his religious teaching departed
also. Israelitish religion was no slow growth: like Zoroastrianism or
Buddhism or Christianity itself, it implies an individual founder who
gave it the impress of his own individuality. Modern theories which
attempt to explain it as a process of evolution start with a false
assumption, and arrive consequently at false conclusions. None of the
great religions of the world has been a product of evolution except in
an indirect sense; they are all stamped with individualism, and owe
their existence to the genius or inspiration of an individual. The
religions of Babylonia and Egypt, as far as we know, were the results of
a slow development; but Mosaism and Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and
Christianity derived not only their names, but their essence also from
the individual founders who created them. We cannot understand the
religion of Israel without the Law in its background, and we cannot
understand the Law without the personality of its lawgiver.
The declaration that Israel should serve no other gods before Yahveh
stood or fell with Moses, to whom Yahveh had revealed Himself. And Moses
seemed to have vanished among the clouds that enveloped the summit of
the sacred mountain. Their leader and his God had deserted them, and the
people required another. Aaron the priest was ready to take the place of
the lost lawgiver, and to provide them with a new deity and a new faith.
And, after all, it was but an ancient faith, the faith of the kindred
nations that surrounded them, their own faith, moreover, in the days
before the Exodus. A calf was fashioned out of their golden earrings,
and in it both priest and people beheld the god who had brought them out
of Egypt. Aaron proclaimed a feast in honour of the divinity whose
worship was celebrated with the same shameless rites as those which
characterised the cult of the Semitic populations of Babylonia, of
Canaan, and of Arabia.
But in the midst of the festival Moses suddenly reappeared. The sons of
Levi rallied round their tribesman, and fell with him upon the rebels
against his laws. Some of the latter were slain, the rest were
terrorised, and the golden calf was ground to powder.[208] Aaron was
forgiven, perhaps because he too had gone over to the side of Moses,
perhaps because he was too powerful or too necessary to be removed.[209]
But in his wrath at the defection of his people Moses had dashed to the
ground the two stone tables on which the words of God had been written,
and it was needful that they should be replaced. Once more, therefore,
Moses left the camp and sought solitary communion with Yahveh on the
summit of Sinai. Two fresh tables of stone were hewn, and with these he
ascended the mountain.
We must not picture to ourselves heavy stelæ of stone such as the kings
and princes of Egypt delighted to set up in their tombs and temples, or
the ‘great slab’ which Isaiah was bidden to engrave (Isa. viii. 1). They
were rather like the small alabaster slabs found in the ark of the
Assyrian temple at Balawât, which measure only twelve and a half inches
in length by eight in width and two and a half inches in thickness, and
nevertheless contain a long and valuable text. They were, in fact, stone
tablets cut in imitation of the clay tablets which served as books in
the Asiatic world of the Exodus, and, like the latter, were probably
inscribed with cuneiform characters. That these characters were used for
‘the language of Canaan’ we know from the existence of two seals of the
age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, now in the possession of M. de
Clercq, which record the names of two Sidonians.[210] It is probable
that the first draft of the Ten Commandments was also in the cuneiform
script.
The book of Exodus ends fitly with the conclusion of the legislation
which was promulgated from Mount Sinai and with the building of the
tabernacle. Henceforward Yahveh was to reveal Himself to His people, not
amid the clouds of a mountain in the wilderness, but in the sanctuary
which they had raised in His honour. The first stage in the education of
Israel had been completed; the Israelites had become a nation with a
national God and a national sanctuary. Henceforth the sanctuary was to
be the centre of their religious faith, the place where the law and
judgment of God were to be declared, and to which the tribes were to
resort that they might ask counsel from Him. The tabernacle, nomad
though it still was, like the tribes themselves, had taken the place of
‘the mount of God,’ and with the legislation of Leviticus a new book of
the Pentateuch begins.
We are not to suppose that this legislation has descended to us from the
age of Moses without addition and change. Such a belief would be
contrary to the history of other religious law-books, or indeed to
historical probability. As the utterances of the Hebrew prophets were
modified or enlarged according to the circumstances of the successive
ages to which they were applied, so too the Mosaic legislation must have
undergone revision and enlargement. Laws and regulations which suited
the life in the desert needed adaptation to the changed conditions of
life in Canaan; tribes fresh from their servitude in Egypt required
different guidance from that required by a nation of conquerors; and the
details of a legislation which was adapted to the period of Moses would
have been wholly unsuited to the period of the Judges, and still more to
the period of the Kings. So far as the change and modifications are
concerned, which all institutions in this world must necessarily
undergo, the Mosaic legislation was a matter of growth. But it was the
form and details that changed, not the substance of the legislation. The
spirit and conceptions of the legislator had imprinted themselves too
indelibly upon it ever to be obliterated. The reiteration of the same
law in various forms, and the confused arrangement of many of them, may
indeed show that later hands have been at work, but in essence and
origin they remain his. The book of Leviticus, modernised though it may
be, nevertheless goes back to the age of Moses.
Even in the age of Moses many of its regulations were not new. We find
their parallels in Babylonia and Canaan, and they had doubtless long
been among the unwritten institutions of Israel. But Moses gave them a
new sanction and a new adaptation. The Israelites must have had priests
like the nations round about them; but it was Moses who defined the
priestly character of the sons of Aaron, and consecrated his own tribe
to the service of Yahveh. If Yahveh was the national God of Israel, He
was also in a special way the tribal God of Levi.
We still know too little about the details of Babylonian ritual to be
able to compare it with the religious institutions of Israel. We know,
however, that the peace-offerings and trespass-offerings of the Mosaic
Law were represented in it, that even the heave-offerings found in it
their counterpart, and that solemn fasts and days of atonement were
observed in Babylonia and Assyria as well as among the Israelites. In
Babylonia, too, a distinction was made between clean and unclean
animals, and, as in Israel (Lev. xxi. 17-23), none who was maimed or
diseased was allowed to minister to the gods. Purification with water,
moreover, played much the same part in Babylonian ritual that it played
in the ritual of the Israelites, and tithes were exacted for the support
of the service in the temples.
Similar regulations prevailed in Canaan, as we may learn from the
Phœnician sacrificial tariffs found at Carthage and Marseilles. Both are
mutilated, but the missing portions of the one can to a large extent be
supplied from the other. The text thus obtained is as follows:—
‘In the temple of Baal the following tariff of offerings shall be
observed which was prescribed in the time of the judge ...-Baal, the son
of Bod-Tanit, the son of Bod-Ashmun, and in the time of Halzi-Baal, the
judge, the son of Bod-Ashmun the son of Halzi-Baal, and their comrades.
For an ox as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full
thank-offering, the priests shall receive ten shekels of silver for each
beast, and if it be a full-offering, the priests shall receive besides
this three hundred shekels’ weight of flesh. And for a prayer-offering
they shall receive besides the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but
the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall
belong to the offerer. For a bullock which has horns, but is not yet
broken in and made to serve, or for a ram, as a full-offering, whether
it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall
receive five shekels of silver for each beast, and if it be a
full-offering they shall receive besides this one hundred and fifty
shekels’ weight of flesh; and for a prayer-offering the small joints (?)
and the roast, but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest
of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a sheep or a goat as a
full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering,
the priests shall receive one shekel of silver and two _zar_ for each
beast; and in the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this
the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches
and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For
a lamb or a kid or a fawn as a full-offering, whether it be a
prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive
three-fourths of a shekel of silver and two _zar_ for each beast; and in
the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this the small
joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet
and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a bird,
whether wild or tame, as a full-offering, whether it be _shetseph_ or
_khazuth_, the priests shall receive three-fourths of a shekel of silver
and two _zar_ for each bird, and [a certain amount of flesh besides].
For a bird, or for the offering of the firstborn of an animal, or for a
meal-offering, or for an offering with oil, the priests shall receive
ten pieces of gold for each.... In the case of every prayer-offering
which is offered to the gods, the priests shall receive the small joints
(?) and the roast (?); and the prayer-offering ... for a cake and for
milk and for fat, and for every offering which is offered without
blood.... For every offering which is brought by a poor man in cattle or
birds, the priests shall receive nothing.... Anything leprous or scabby
or lean is forbidden, and no one as regards that which he offers shall
taste of the blood of the dead. The tariff for each offering shall be
according to that which is prescribed in this publication.... As for
every offering which is not prescribed in this table, and which is not
made according to the regulations which have been published in the time
of ...-Baal the son of Bod-Tanit, and of Bod-Ashmun the son of
Halzi-Baal, and of their comrades, every priest who accepts the offering
which is not included in that which is prescribed in this table shall be
punished.... As for the property of the offerer who does not discharge
his debt for his offering [it shall be taken from him].’[211]
The general resemblances between these regulations and those of the
Levitical law are obvious. In both we have the same kind of sacrifices
and offerings—the ox, the sheep and the goat, the lamb and kid, birds
and cakes, meal and oil. Silver shekels were to be paid to the priests,
like the silver shekels of the sanctuary exacted in certain cases from
the Israelite (Lev. v. 15, xxvii. 25), and the blood and the fat were to
be offered to the gods. The necessities of the poor man were remembered
as they were in the Levitical law (Lev. v. 7, xii. 8, xiv. 21), and
whatever was ‘leprous or scabby or lean’ was forbidden to be brought to
the altar. The firstborn could be claimed by Baal as they were claimed
by Yahveh, and the offerer was not permitted to taste of the blood of
the slain beast (compare Lev. vii. 26, 27). The ‘full-offerings’ of the
Phœnician tariffs mean that the whole of the victim had been given to
the gods, and so correspond with the burnt sacrifices of the Mosaic
Code. It is unfortunate that we cannot fix with certainty the exact
signification of the words denoting the parts of the animal which were
the due of the priests, and consequently cannot be sure whether or not
they answer to the breast and shoulder of the peace-offering, which
under the Levitical legislation were assigned to the sons of Aaron (Lev.
vii. 33, 34).
It is true that the tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to a late
period. But they embody regulations and usages which were common to the
Semitic world of Western Asia, as we may gather from a comparison of
them with the ritual of Babylonia, and which therefore must have been—at
least in substance—of great antiquity. Two conclusions result from this
fact. On the one hand the Levitical legislation cannot have been the
invention of the Exilic age, as some adventurous critics have believed;
on the other hand, it is based on customs and ideas which must have been
prevalent in Israel long before the birth of Moses. The Hebrew
legislator did but develop, modify, and define existing rites; the
Levitical Code is not a new creation, but a body of religious and ritual
laws which has been formed deliberately and with individual effort out
of older customs and habits of thought. Doubtless there are laws and
regulations which were the immediate creation of the lawgiver; from time
to time new cases arose for which special legislation was needed, and of
which the cases of Nadab and Abihu (Lev. x. 1-3), of the son of
Shelomith and the Egyptian (Lev. xxiv. 10-16), and of the daughters of
Zelophehad (Numb. xxvii. 1-11) are examples. To assume that such cases
originated in the laws which they illustrated, and not the reverse, is a
gratuitous supposition which is contradicted by the history of modern
European law.[212]
Whether the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Trumpets on the first of each
seventh month and the Year of Jubilee were also new creations of the
lawgiver, may be questioned. The special legislation connected with
them, as well as their association with the Exodus out of Egypt, was
certainly peculiar to the Levitical code, but the same is true of the
three older feasts of the Semitic calendar. These too were made to
illustrate the events of Israelitish history, and new regulations were
laid down for their observance. The Day of Atonement, however, had its
counterpart in Babylonia and Assyria. There also in periods of danger or
distress, days of humiliation and fasting were prescribed, and prayers
and offerings were made to the gods that they might forgive the sins of
the people. When at the beginning of Esar-haddon’s reign Assyria was
threatened by the Kimmerian invasion, ‘religious ordinances and holy
days’ were proclaimed by the priests for ‘a hundred days and a hundred
nights,’ and the sun-god was besought to remove the sin of his
worshippers.[213] So, again, after the suppression of the Babylonian
revolt, Assur-bani-pal tells us that ‘by the command of the prophets I
purified their sanctuaries and cleaned their streets which had been
defiled. Their wrathful gods and angry goddesses I tranquillised with
prayers and penitential hymns. Their daily sacrifice, which had been
discontinued, I restored in peace and established again as it had been
before.’ The Feast of Trumpets reminds us that in Babylonia the first
day of each month was kept as a Sabbath, and the Babylonian analogy is
still more manifest in the case of the Feast of Pentecost, on ‘the
morrow after the seventh Sabbath,’ after the offering of the
firstfruits. This ‘seventh Sabbath’ is the Babylonian Sabbath, on the
19th of the month, forty-nine days after the first Sabbath of the
preceding month. The Year of Jubilee was a Babylonian institution of
exceeding antiquity. We learn from classical writers[214] that once each
year in the month of July the feast of Sakea was held at Babylon, when
the slave changed places with his master, and for five days lived and
was clothed as a free man. We can now carry the history of the
institution back to the age of the third dynasty of Ur. Gudea, the
high-priest of Lagas, B.C. 2700, states in his inscriptions that after
he had finished building the temple of E-ninnu, he celebrated a
festival; and ‘for seven days no obedience was exacted; the female slave
became the equal of her mistress, and the male slave the equal of his
master; the subject became the equal of the chief; and all that was evil
was removed from the temple.’[215]
The Year of Jubilee, it is clear, was but an adaptation and improvement
of one of the oldest institutions of Babylonian culture. To assert that,
together with the other holy days of the Levitical Code, it was borrowed
from Babylonia in the age of the Exile, is to assert what not only
cannot be proved, but is in the highest degree improbable. In the age of
the Exile, Babylonia had become a second Egypt to the Jews, and the
religious party among them regarded with abhorrence all that was
specifically Babylonian. The feasts consecrated to ‘Bel and Nebo,’ the
rites associated with the worship of the Babylonian gods, were the last
things that would be adopted or adapted by a pious Jew. Moreover, we now
know that the culture which had been carried from Chaldæa to the west
long before the period of the Exodus included the gods and sacred rites
of the Babylonians. So distinctive a characteristic of it as ‘the feast
of Sakea,’ or days of prayer and humiliation for ‘the removal of sin,’
would not be forgotten when Anu and Moloch and Ashtoreth and Nin-ip made
their way to Canaan.
There are passages in the Levitical Code which look back very distinctly
to Egypt. Thus marriage with a sister, whether a full sister or a
half-sister, is forbidden (Lev. xviii. 9). This was one of ‘the doings
of the land of Egypt’ (Lev. xviii. 3) which had been consecrated there
both by the civil and by the religious law, and continued in force down
to the time of the Roman conquest. So, too, tattooing the flesh, and
shaving the head or lacerating the flesh for the dead, were prohibited
(Lev. xix. 27, 28, xxi. 5), all of them practices which are still common
in the valley of the Nile. But, on the whole, it is remarkable how
entirely Egypt is ignored. The Mosaic legislation seems intentionally to
close its eyes to all things Egyptian, and, wherever it is possible, to
make enactments which tacitly contradict or set aside the beliefs and
customs of Egypt. Even the doctrine of the resurrection, as Bishop
Warburton long ago observed, is carefully dropped out of sight. There is
no reference to it, no sign that obedience to the laws of Yahveh will
benefit the Israelite in any other world than this. On any theory of the
age and authorship of the Levitical law such a silence is remarkable.
Indeed, if the law is as late as the epoch of the Babylonish exile the
silence would be more than remarkable, since the doctrine of a future
life and of the power of the god Merodach to raise the dead to life had
been firmly established for centuries among the Babylonians. A belief in
the resurrection, or at all events, in a life beyond the grave, could
not but have betrayed itself in the atmosphere of the Exile. For those,
however, who had the Egyptian house of bondage immediately behind them,
and who feared lest the tribes in the desert might again lust after the
flesh-pots and green pastures of the Delta, the silence is intelligible.
The doctrine was closely associated with Egyptian idolatry, with Osiris
and Anubis, with the assessors of the dead, and with the pictured
polytheism of the Egyptian monuments.
The Levitical legislation was accompanied by a census of the people.
What credit we are to attach to the numbers which have been handed down
is a question that has been much debated. On the one hand it has been
shown that the vast multitude presupposed by them could not have moved
about in the desert, as it is represented to have done, and that many of
the regulations in the Levitical Code could not have been carried out
with a nomad population of over two millions.[216] On the other hand,
the 600,000 men above twenty years of age who were ‘able to go forth to
war’ are specified again and again, and the same number is implied in
all the calculations that are made of the numerical strength of Israel.
It is also the sum of the numbers assigned to the fighting men of the
individual tribes. Throughout the history the ciphers are consistent
with one another. If the number is exaggerated, it it is an exaggeration
which has been consistently adhered to. We must either accept it, or
believe that it belongs to an artificial system which has been framed
with deliberate intention. But the same may be said of the chronology of
the early patriarchs as well as of the chronology of the kings of Israel
and Judah, and in both instances we know that the system is wrong. In
the case of the chronology of the early patriarchs, indeed, there are at
least three rival systems, all equally complete and self-coherent, while
the chronology of the kings involves such hopeless anachronisms as have
long since caused it to be rejected by the historian. The difficulties
presented by the census of the Israelites in the wilderness are similar
in character to the anachronisms presented by the chronology of the
kings, and the same reasons which lead us to reject the one ought
equally to induce us to reject the other.
Nevertheless, the chronology of the kings is not wholly incorrect. The
length of reign assigned to the several kings is usually right. It is
only the system into which it has been fitted that is at fault. And
probably this is also the case as regards the numbering of the tribes of
Israel. It may be that the 8580 Levites and the 22,273 firstborn males
are authentic, and that the increase of the population by 3550 (Exod.
xxxviii. 26; Numb. i. 46) a few months after the flight from Egypt, and
its decrease by 1820 at the end of the wanderings (Numb. xxvi. 51), rest
on a foundation of fact. Even the traditional number of 600,000 may have
better support than its being a multiple of the Babylonian _soss_ and
_ner_.[217] Perhaps it originally represented the whole body of
fugitives from Egypt.
At all events, some light may be thrown on the matter by a comparison of
the numbers given in the Pentateuch with those of the Libyans and their
allies as recorded in the inscription of Meneptah. Of the Libyans, 6365
men were slain and 230 (including 12 women) were captured; of their
allies, 2370 fell on the field of battle, and 9146 were taken prisoners,
while no less than 9111 bronze swords were taken from the Maxyes. We
gather from the history of the battle that few, if any, of the enemy
escaped. The whole force of fighting men, therefore, would not have
amounted to very much over 25,000. And yet this was one of the most
formidable hosts that had invaded Egypt; and its male population had not
been decimated by the tyranny of an Egyptian king. On the other hand, a
population of 2,000,000 in the land of Goshen is inconceivable, and
there would hardly have been room in the eastern Delta for 600,000
able-bodied brickmakers. The Sweet-water Canal was dug by only 25,000
fellahin, though 250,000 worked at the Mahmudîya Canal, and for some
years 20,000 fresh labourers were sent monthly to excavate the Suez
Canal. Even in the desert, moreover, the Egyptians required a
considerable number of troops to guard the serfs or convicts who worked
for them. At Hammamât, for example, in the reign of Ramses IV., the 2000
bondservants of the temples who effected the transport of the stone were
attended by 5000 soldiers, 800 mercenaries, and 200 officers; and
provisions for this large body of men were carried across the desert in
ten waggons, each drawn by six pairs of oxen, and laden with bread,
meat, and cakes.[218] For 600,000 Israelites the whole Egyptian army
would not have sufficed. According to Manetho, the Hyksos, when driven
from Egypt, did not number more than 240,000 in all.
We cannot, then, look upon the numbers that have come down to us as
exact. The occupants of the Israelitish camp, continually under the
personal supervision of Moses, and constantly required to assemble
before the tabernacle, could not have been a very large body of men. Had
the fighting population amounted to anything like the number recorded,
there would have been no need of avoiding ‘the way of the land of the
Philistines,’ lest the people should ‘see war,’ or of doubting the issue
of the combat at Rephidim with the Bedâwin tribes.
The year after the flight from Egypt, Sinai, ‘the mount of God,’ was
left behind. The service that Yahveh required had been performed, the
legislation revealed there had been completed, and the tabernacle and
ark had been made. Israel had henceforth another religious centre than
the sacred mountain of the desert, which had now fulfilled its part in
the religious training of the tribes. Canaan, and not the wilderness,
was the destined home of the descendants of Jacob, and to Canaan the ark
and the tabernacle were to accompany them.
The guiding column of cloud moved accordingly from the wilderness of
Sinai to that of Paran (Numb. x. 12). This is in harmony with the rest
of Old Testament geography. In the blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii. 2)
it is said that when God came from Sinai, ‘He shined forth from the
mount of Paran,’ and in Habakkuk (iii. 3) the mount of Paran takes the
place of Sinai itself. Paran, in fact, was the desert which formed not
only the southern boundary of Canaan, but also the western frontier of
Edom. The real Mount Sinai of Hebrew geography, therefore, was upon the
Edomite border; and since Paran was the home of Ishmael (Gen. xxi. 21),
it is not surprising that Esau should have taken one of Ishmael’s
daughters to wife (Gen. xxxvi. 3).
Before Sinai was left, however, Hobab the Midianite, the brother-in-law
of Moses, proposed to return to his own land. Sinai adjoined Midian, if
indeed it was not included in Midianitish territory, and here,
therefore, if at all, it was needful for the Midianite chief to quit the
Israelitish camp. But his knowledge of the district was too valuable to
be lost, and Moses persuaded him to remain with the Israelitish tribes
and guide them to the places where they should encamp. The Kenites in
later days traced their descent to him (Judg. i. 16, iv. 11), and the
rocky nest of the Kenites was visible from the heights of Moab, perhaps
in Petra itself (Numb. xxiv. 21).
The geographical details which follow are confused. In the itinerary
(Numb. xxxiii. 15, 16) the camp is transported at once from the
wilderness of Sinai to Kibroth-hattaavah. In the narrative, however, we
are told that the people first went ‘three days’ journey,’ and then
rested at Taberah, which seems to be identified with Kibroth-hattaavah;
from thence they travelled to Hazeroth, and then pitched their tents ‘in
the wilderness of Paran.’ On the other hand, the book of Deuteronomy
(ix. 22) distinguishes between Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah, and
interpolates Massah between them, which, according to Exod. xvii. 7, was
visited before Sinai. If we follow the official record, we must suppose
that the incident connected with Taberah has been inserted in the wrong
place, or else that Taberah and Kibroth-hattaavah are, like Massah and
Meribah, one and the same. At all events, all these encampments must
have lain on the outskirts of the desert of Paran. Hazeroth, ‘the
enclosures,’ was a common name for the Bedâwin encampments in the desert
south of Judah, and the Hazeroth mentioned here is doubtless that of
which we read in Deut. i. 1. It lay near Paran on the borders of the
plains of Moab.
Taberah, it was said, derived its name from the fire which had here
consumed some of the people, while Kibroth-hattaavah marked the ‘graves’
of the murmurers who had died from a surfeit of quails. Similar flights
of quails still visit the Egyptian Delta in the early spring, when the
sky is sometimes overshadowed by myriads of birds. Hazeroth was
remembered for the rebellion of Aaron and Miriam against their brother
Moses, and the punishment that Miriam the prophetess had in consequence
to endure. The authority of Moses was disputed because he had married an
Ethiopian wife. It is the only passage in the Pentateuch where this
‘Cushite’ wife is alluded to; elsewhere we hear only of Zipporah the
Midianitess. But it points to a traditional recollection of the days
when Moses was still Messu, the Egyptian prince, and when, like that
other Messu, his contemporary, he might have been the Egyptian governor
of Ethiopia.[219] The objection to the Ethiopian wife came but ill from
Aaron, whose grandson bore the Egyptian name of Phinehas, Pi-nehasi,
‘the negro.’ But Yahveh declared that the Cushite affinities of Moses
were no bar to his being a true servant of the God of Israel and the
divinely-appointed leader of the tribes. To him Yahveh had revealed His
will openly, and as it were face to face; not, as to other prophets, in
waking visions and dreams.
In the heart of the wilderness of Paran was the venerable sanctuary of
Kadesh-barnea. Centuries before, the army of Chedor-laomer had swept
through it, slaughtering its Amalekite inhabitants, and drinking the
water of En-Mishpat, ‘the Spring of Judgment,’ where the shêkhs of the
desert had given laws to their people. Its site has been found again in
our own days by Dr. John Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull.[220] The spring
of clear water which fills the oasis with life and verdure is still
called ’Ain Qadîs, the ‘Spring of Kadesh.’ It rises at the foot of a
limestone cliff, in which a two-chambered tomb has been cut in early
times, in the hollow of an amphitheatre of hills. The hills form a block
of mountains which occupy the central part of the desert, midway between
El-Arîsh and Mount Hor, and more than forty miles to the south of
Sebaita, the supposed site of Hormah.
Kadesh, the ‘Sanctuary,’ was destined to be the second resting-place and
scene of Israelitish legislation. The work which had been left
unfinished at Sinai was completed here. The will of Yahveh, which had
first been declared on the summit of the mountain, was now to be more
fully unfolded among the soft surroundings of the oasis in the valley.
Sinai and Kadesh-barnea were the two schools of the desert in which
Israel was trained.
But Kadesh-barnea had other advantages as well. It was on the high-road
from the desert to Canaan, it commanded the approach to the latter
country, and nevertheless within its rocky barriers the Israelites were
safe from attack. Here, therefore, at Kadesh-barnea, the first
preparations were made for the invasion of Palestine. Twelve scouts were
sent, in Egyptian fashion, to explore the land, and bring back a report
of its capabilities for defence. They made their way as far as
Hebron,[221] where a popular etymology derived the name of the valley of
Eshcol from the cluster of grapes they had cut there.[222] But the
report with which they returned was discouraging. The Amorites were tall
and strong; by their side the children of Israel appeared but as
grasshoppers; while the cities in which they dwelt were ‘very great,’
and walled, as it were, to heaven. It was folly for the desert tribes to
dream of assaulting them; that would need the disciplined army of a
Pharaoh, with its chariots and horses and machines for scaling the
walls. ‘We be not able to go up against the people,’ they declared, ‘for
they are stronger than we.’
Here, then, was an end to all the promises of Moses. The Promised Land
was in sight, and they were excluded from it for ever. ‘Let us make
another captain,’ they cried, ‘and return to Egypt.’ The leader who had
brought them thus far had failed on the very threshold of their goal.
The Hyksos, when they forsook Egypt, had found a refuge in Canaan; but
the barren wastes of the wilderness were all that the Israelites could
expect. It was little wonder that a rebellion broke out in the
Israelitish camp, and that the supporters of Moses were threatened with
stoning.
But experience soon showed that the Israelitish tribes were as yet no
match for the people whose possessions they desired to seize. Despite
the report of the spies, they climbed the cliff which formed the
northern boundary of the oasis, and attempted to force their way beyond
the frontiers of Canaan. But their enemies proved the stronger. When
Seti I. had attacked the frontier fortress of Canaan, not far from
Hebron, he had found it defended by Shasu or Bedâwin, and so, too, the
Israelites now found themselves confronted not by the Canaanites only,
but also by their Amalekite or Bedâwin allies. The assailants were
utterly defeated and ‘discomfited even unto Hormah.’
Hormah was more usually known as Zephath (Judg. i. 17), and its site
must be looked for south of Tell ’Arad. It was one of the cities of
Palestine which Thothmes III. claims to have captured, and it lay
towards the southern end of the Dead Sea, on the road to Hazezon Tamar
(Gen. xiv. 7). The mention of it makes it clear that the Israelitish
invasion of Canaan had been a serious attempt. The invaders had marched
along the same military road as that followed by Chedor-laomer, and had
penetrated as far as the hill country of what was afterwards Judah. But
they did not succeed in getting further, and their shattered relics must
have made their way with difficulty back to the fastness of Kadesh. The
first attempt to conquer Palestine had failed.[223]
The disaster was never forgotten. It was some years before the
Israelites again attempted to cross the Canaanitish boundary, and when
they did so it was from a different quarter. A new generation had to
grow up before they were strong enough to renew the attack; indeed, it
is probable that most of the fighting men had been lost in the earlier
expedition. When at last Israel felt able once more to march against
Canaan, it was already in possession of land on the east of the Jordan,
but its great ‘captain’ and lawgiver was dead. Israelitish history found
its leader to the conquest of Palestine not in Moses, but in Joshua.
The history of the period that followed the disaster left little that
was worth recording. The chief incidents of the life in the desert had
been crowded into the first few months of the wanderings. But it was
during this later period that trouble arose with Moses’ own tribesmen,
the Levites. It was again a question of authority. The democratic spirit
of the Israelites resented claims to superior power; and just as Aaron
and Miriam had disputed the authority of Moses, so now the Levites
disputed that of Aaron. It was a dispute which, if we are to believe
modern criticism, was continued into later Jewish history, when it
ended, as it did in the desert, in the triumph of the high-priest.
Aaron and his sons, like Moses, were at the outset Levites, and as such
doubtless had no claim to superior sanctity and power. But circumstances
had placed them at the head of their tribe; and when that tribe became
the ministers of the sanctuary, Aaron and his descendants necessarily
occupied the foremost place in its services. They were in a special
sense the guardians of the ark, and thus alone privileged to enter the
Holy of Holies, where Yahveh revealed Himself above the cherubim. As
long as there was but one sanctuary, it was easy to maintain the
distinction between the priest of the house of Aaron and the ordinary
Levite. But with the conquest of Canaan all this was changed.
Sanctuaries were multiplied all over the land; the old high-places
became seats of the worship of Yahveh, and there were rival centres of
religious authority, like that of Baal-berith at Shechem, or that of the
graven image at Dan (Judg. xviii. 14, etc.). Local temples or
tabernacles took the place of the one that was hallowed by the presence
of the ark, and the line of Aaron fell into the background. In the age
of national trouble and disintegration which preceded the accession of
Saul, the character of the high-priestly family itself had much to do
with the loss of its power and influence. Eli, its representative at
Shiloh, was old and feeble, and his sons set at defiance the Mosaic law,
which required that Yahveh’s portion of the sacrifice should be burned
on the altar before the priests received their share, and so they made
‘the offering of the Lord’ to be ‘abhorred.’ The capture of the ark by
the Philistines and the massacre of the priests at Nob by order of Saul
completed the dissolution of the high-priestly authority; and when the
temple at Jerusalem was built under Solomon, a new branch of the family
of Aaron was appointed to minister in it, and his descendants became
little more than hereditary court-chaplains. It has even been doubted
whether there was any high-priest, properly so called, under the kings;
if there were, he had been divested of the power and position which had
been given him by the Levitical law.
To conclude, however, as has sometimes been done by modern criticism,
that because the priests of Solomon’s temple were no longer the
high-priests of the Pentateuchal law, therefore there had been no such
high-priests at all, is contrary to the evidence of archæology.
Monumental discovery has disclosed the fact that among the Semitic
kinsmen of the Israelites as well as in Chaldæa the high-priest preceded
the king. Not to speak of the _patesis_ or high-priests of the
Babylonian cities who exercised royal sway within the limits of their
territories, like the Popes within the limits of the Romagna, the
earliest rulers both of Assyria and of Saba or Sheba in Southern Arabia
were high-priests. The Assyrian kings followed the high-priests of the
god Assur, and the Makârib or ‘high-priests’ of Saba came before the
kings. Israel also had the same experience. The Israelitish kings
appeared at a comparatively late period on the scene of Hebrew history,
and Saul was preceded by the high-priest Eli.
In the book of Deuteronomy, it is true, we do not find the distinction
between ‘the priests, the sons of Aaron,’ and the rest of the Levites
that is made in the Levitical law. Here the priests are all alike called
Levites; it is not ‘the priests, the sons of Aaron,’ but ‘the priests
the Levites’ who are appointed to perform the highest offices of the
sanctuary. How far the phraseology is due to a different conception of
the Mosaic law, or how far it testifies to an older usage of language,
is a question which need not concern us; what is important to observe is
that the difference of expression is linguistic and not historical.
Historically all the priests were Levites, though from the outset some
of them must have been assigned higher positions than others, and have
been invested with more sacred functions. The Levitical law draws the
distinction which the book of Deuteronomy is not so careful to do. In
fact, there was not the same necessity for doing so in the case of the
Deuteronomic retrospect.
The tabernacle had been constructed, its services arranged, and the
grades and duties of its ministers appointed. Now, therefore,
disappointed in their hope of invading Canaan from the south, the
Israelites settled themselves tranquilly at Kadesh, in the heart of the
wilderness of Zin, and slowly developed into a strong and united
community. Here it was, by the waters of En-Mishpat, that the
legislation of Moses was completed, and the undisciplined horde of
fugitive serfs from Egypt was moulded into a formidable band of warriors
knit together by a common religion and worship, and continually
gathering increased confidence in its own strength.[224]
How long the Israelites remained in their desert fastness we do not
know. A time came when they once more resumed their wanderings, or at
all events a portion of them must have done so. The Itinerary in Numb.
xxxiii. gives a long list of their encampments before they again found
themselves in the oasis of Kadesh. One of the places at which they
rested was Mount Shapher, another was Moseroth, of which we hear in the
book of Deuteronomy (x. 6). Moseroth was in the territory of the Horite
tribe of Beni-Yaakan,[225] and it was from the Beeroth or ‘Wells’ of the
Beni-Yaakan—Hashmonah, as it is called in the Itinerary—that they had
made their way to it.
At Mosera or Moseroth, according to Deuteronomy, Aaron died, and was
succeeded in his office by his son Eleazar. The statement, however, is
not easily reconcileable with what we are told in the book of Numbers.
There it is said that the death of the high-priest took place on the
summit of Mount Hor after the departure from Kadesh.[226] The fact that
Gudgodah was also called Hor-hagidgad, ‘the mountain of clefts,’ may
have been the cause of the transference.
But it must be remembered that Kadesh was merely the headquarters of
Israel during its weary years of waiting in the wilderness. The scanty
notice of the unsuccessful invasion of Southern Palestine shows that it
was only the camp as a whole which remained fixed there. Like the
Bedâwin of to-day, portions of the tribes made distant expeditions, and
the Itinerary may relate rather to their encampments than to that of the
stationary part of the people. Kadesh was a sort of centre from which
fragments of the main body could be sent forth to scour the frontiers of
Seir and Edom, or to encamp at the foot of Ezion-geber on the Yâm Sûph.
In the book of Numbers (xxi. 14, 15) there is a quotation from ‘the Book
of the Wars of the Lord,’ one of the old documents on which the history
of Israel in the wilderness is based. The introductory words are
unintelligible as they stand, thus testifying to the antiquity of the
passage; all that can be made out of them is that they relate not only
to the struggle between Israel and the Amorites at ‘the brooks of
Arnon,’ but also to a previous war carried on by the Israelites ‘in
Suphah,’ near the gulf of Aqaba.[227] Here the Israelites would have
been on the borders of Edom, if indeed they were not in Edom itself; and
it is therefore noticeable that the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses III., whose
reign coincided with the period of the wanderings of the Israelites in
the desert, declares that he had ‘smitten the Shasu (or Bedâwin) tribes
of Seir and plundered their tents’ (_ohélu_). Ramses III. was the only
Pharaoh of Egypt who had ventured to attack the Edomite Bedâwin in their
mountain strongholds; while Canaan and the plateau east of the Jordan
had been Egyptian provinces the inhabitants of Mount Seir had retained
their independence. The synchronism, therefore, of this Egyptian
expedition against, not the Edomites only, but ‘the Bedâwin of Seir’ and
the war in which Israel was engaged ‘in Suphah,’ is, at least, worthy of
notice. It may be that part of the training undergone by the Israelites
in the desert for their future conquest of Canaan was the help they had
rendered their kinsfolk of Edom in their contest with the old
taskmasters of the Hebrew tribes.
However this may be, of the three leaders who had brought Israel out of
the house of bondage, Moses alone survived the long sojourn at Kadesh.
Miriam had died there; the death of Aaron also, if we may trust
Deuteronomy, had taken place before the final departure from the great
desert sanctuary. In any case, it had happened in sight of Kadesh, and
before the march had commenced which was to lead the Israelitish tribes
to the Promised Land. The time had now arrived when Israel felt strong
enough once more to attempt its conquest; not, this time, by the road
through the mountains of the south along which Chedor-laomer had marched
to Kadesh, but from the plateau eastward of the Jordan where the kindred
nations of Moab and Ammon had already established themselves. Here, too,
the Israelites made their first permanent settlements in the land which
they had marked out for their own.
The Canaanite population east of the Jordan was sparse and weak compared
with that to the west. It had been further weakened by foreign conquest.
Between the fall of the Egyptian empire and the Israelitish invasion the
Amorites under Sihon had formed a kingdom and occupied the territory of
Moab as far south as the Arnon. As in the age of the eighteenth dynasty,
so too under the kings of the nineteenth dynasty, Egyptian rule extended
over what is called in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets ‘the field of
Bashan.’ The so-called Sakhret Eyyûb, or ‘Stone of Job,’ a little to the
north of Tell ’Ashtereh, eastward of the Jordan, has been discovered by
Dr. Schumacher to be a monument of Ramses II.[228] The figure of the
Pharaoh is engraved upon it, with his name beside him, as well as the
figure of a deity who wears the crown of Osiris, and is represented with
a full face, while his Canaanitish name is written in hieroglyphs.[229]
At Luxor[230] Ramses claims Moab among his conquests, and we may
therefore gather that up to the time of the Exodus the authority of
Egypt had been restored throughout the country east of the Jordan. But
the Libyan invasion shattered the strength of Egypt, and long before the
close of the nineteenth dynasty its possessions in Palestine passed from
it forever. This is precisely the period to which the Pentateuch refers
the kingdom of Og in Bashan and the conquests of Sihon in Moab, and the
Biblical and monumental evidence thus stand in complete agreement.
Moses had requested permission from the Edomite king to pass through his
dominions. The Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 15) still speaks of the
_alûphim_, or ‘dukes,’ of Edom, who had originally governed the country;
but while the Israelites had been lingering in the desert, the ‘dukes’
had made way for an elective monarchy. The dissolution of the Egyptian
power may have had something to do with this; possibly the invasion of
Mount Seir by Ramses III. had produced the same result in Edom that the
Philistine invasion produced among the Israelites, and had obliged them
to elect a king. At all events, the first king of Edom, we read, was
‘Bela, the son of Beor.’ Bela, however, is merely a contracted form of
Balaam, and in the first Edomite king we must therefore see Balaam, the
son of Beor. What relation he bore to the seer from Pethor will have to
be considered later on.[231]
It is not surprising that the Edomite king refused the request that had
been made to him. To have admitted within his frontiers a large body of
emigrants like the Israelites, many of whom were armed, might have been
as dangerous as the passage of the Crusaders through the Eastern Empire
proved to Constantinople. The Israelites were not strong enough to force
their way through a hostile country, and very reluctantly, therefore,
they once more turned southward to the Gulf of Aqaba, and from thence
marched northward again to the east of Edom. Their route brought them to
the southeastern part of Moab.
The people, we are told, bitterly complained of the length of ‘the way.’
It was not strange. The Promised Land, so constantly in sight, seemed
always to recede as soon as it was approached. They had vainly attempted
to enter it from the south; the Philistines kept garrison in the cities
on the Mediterranean coast; and now, when a third and last mode of
approach was undertaken, their brethren of Edom closed the path. The
road, too, which they were thus forced to adopt led them through a
desert, which the Assyrian king Esar-haddon describes as a land of
drought, inhabited only by ‘snakes and scorpions, which filled the
ground like locusts.’[232] These were the ‘fiery serpents’ that bit the
Israelites and increased their miseries. A memorial of their sufferings
lasted down to the age of Hezekiah. The brazen ‘seraph’ or ‘fiery
serpent’ which had been wrought by order of Moses, and planted on the
top of a pole, was religiously preserved in the chief sanctuary of the
nation. Incense was burned before it, for it had been the means of
preserving the people from the fiery poison of the snakes. But the
idolatry of which it was the object brought about its destruction. The
relic, which had been spared by the earlier kings and priests of Judah,
was destroyed by Hezekiah, who realised at last that it was but ‘a piece
of brass.’ It is true that doubts have been cast upon its having
actually been a monument of the life in the wilderness; but it is
difficult for the historian to understand how a modern critic can be
better informed on such a point than the contemporaries of
Hezekiah.[233]
Zalmonah, Punon, and Oboth were the next stages on the journey after
Mount Hor. Then came Iye-ha-Abârim, ‘the Ruins of the Hebrews’—a name,
it may be, which contained a reminiscence of the settlement of the
Israelites in the country.[234] Iye-ha-Abârim was in the plain east of
Moab, under the shadow of the mountain-range of Abarim. Then the stream
of the Zered was crossed, and the emigrants found themselves in Moab.
The banks of the Arnon were the next resting-place.
The nation retained but little recollection of the dreary years that had
been passed in the wilderness. A few incidents alone were recorded which
had broken the monotony of their desert life. But here, on the verge of
Canaan and of conquest, the national consciousness awakened into new
life. The song was handed down which had been sung when at some station
in the desert the ground had been pierced and water found. ‘Spring up, O
well!’ it said; ‘sing ye unto it. O well that hast been dug by princes,
that hast been pierced by the nobles of the people, by (the direction
of) the lawgiver, with their staves!’ Similar songs, according to
Professor Goldziher, were sung in old days by the Arab kinsmen of the
Israelites when they too dug wells in the desert and the refreshing
water bubbled up from below.[235]
Arnon was now the boundary between Moab and the new kingdom of Sihon the
Amorite. Sihon refused permission to the Israelites to pass through his
territories, along the ‘royal highway,’ and endeavoured to stop their
advance. But the tribes were no longer the undisciplined rabble who had
fled from the Canaanites of Zephath, and the result of the struggle was
the complete overthrow of the Amorite forces. The district between the
Arnon and the Jabbok, which had been taken by Sihon from ‘the former
king of Moab,’ was occupied by the Israelites, who accordingly
established themselves midway between Moab and Ammon. It is on the
occasion of this conquest that the Hebrew historian has preserved the
fragment of an Amorite song of triumph which had celebrated the capture
of Ar, the Moabite capital, and which was now embodied by the Israelites
in a similar song of triumph for their own victory over Sihon.
Ammon was too strong to be attacked (Numb. xxi. 24), but ‘Moses sent to
spy out Jaazer,’ not far from Rabbah, the future capital of the
Ammonites, and the fall of the Amorite city of Jaazer brought with it
the conquest of Gilead. The tribes of Reuben and Gad were settled in the
newly-acquired districts, on condition, however, that they should
acknowledge their relationship to the rest of the tribes, and help the
latter in case of necessity (Numb. xxxii. 29-32; Judg. v. 15-17). Gilead
had been conquered by Machir, a branch of the tribe of Manasseh (Numb.
xxxii. 39; Deut. iii. 15; Judg. v. 14), and the conquest was
subsequently extended further by armed bands under chieftains, like Jair
and Nobah, who occupied outlying districts on their own account.[236]
The Havoth-Jair, or ‘Villages of Jair,’ were in the ‘stony’ region of
Argob, the Trachonitis of Greek geography, which extended northward to
the Aramaic kingdoms of Geshur and Maachah. It formed part of the ‘Field
of Bashan,’ which in the Mosaic age was ruled by Og ‘of the remnant of
the Rephaim.’ Like Sihon, he is called an Amorite, and his two capitals
were at Edrei and Ashtaroth-Karnaim.[237] His rule was acknowledged from
the Haurân in the south to Mount Hermon in the north, and he must thus
have been one of the native princes who arose out of the ruins of the
Egyptian empire. But his power was shortlived. He was unable to
withstand the shock of the invaders from the desert, and his dominions
became Israelitish territory. It would seem that what was afterwards the
eastern side of Ammon was included in his kingdom, since in after ages a
huge sarcophagus of black basalt, which was preserved in Rabbah of
Ammon, was pointed out as his ‘iron bed’ (Deut. iii. 11).
These conquests of the Israelites doubtless occupied a considerable
space of time. Some of them, indeed, were made after the Mosaic age, and
were merely extensions of the conquests made at that time. But the
overthrow of Og must have followed quickly on that of Sihon. A year or
two would have sufficed to allow the Israelitish bands to overrun the
districts to the north-east of the Arnon.
It is not wonderful that the Moabites should have wished to rid
themselves of such dangerous neighbours. But their king, Balak the son
of Zippor,[238] was uncertain how to act. The Moabite forces were no
match for the fierce desert-tribes who had overthrown Sihon and burnt
his towns. An embassy was accordingly sent to the seer, Balaam the son
of Beor, who lived at Pethor on the Euphrates, in ‘the land of the
children of Ammo.’ The site of Pethor has been recovered from the
Assyrian monuments. It lay on the west bank of the Euphrates, a little
to the north of its junction with the Sajur, and consequently only a few
miles south of the Hittite capital Carchemish, now Jerablûs. The
Beni-Ammo must have claimed the same ancestry as the Beni-Ammi or
Ammonites, and the name is probably to be found in that of the country
of Ammiya or Ammi, which is mentioned in the Tel el-Amarna tablets.[239]
The fame of Balaam must have been widespread. But it is permissible to
ask whether the only object of the embassy was that the seer should
‘curse’ the descendants of Jacob. A curse usually meant something more
substantial than a form of words; and, as we have already seen, the
first Edomite king given in the extract from the chronicles of Edom
bears the same name and has the same father as Balaam. Did Balaam end by
becoming elected king of Edom, and finally falling in battle against the
Israelites, along with his allies the Midianitish chiefs?[240] The
materials for an answer are not yet before us.
The story of Balaam seems to form an episode by itself. The narrative
and the prophecies constitute a single whole, which cannot be torn
apart. It is the first example in the Old Testament of a written
prophecy, and that the prophet should have been a Gentile diviner is of
itself significant. Nothing can be more vivid and lifelike than the
picture that is presented to us. We see the ambassadors of Balak
persuading the half-reluctant seer to accompany them; we read of the
strange miracles that accompanied the journey, and of the altars that
were reared, and the sacrifices that were offered in the hope that his
enchantments might prevail over those of Israel. He was taken from
high-place to high-place, whence he could look down upon the distant
hosts of the enemy, and upon each, in Babylonian fashion, seven altars
were erected. But all was unavailing. The God of Jacob refused to be
turned from His purpose by the bullocks and the rams that were offered
Him, and the curses of the Aramæan seer were turned into blessings. When
Balaam fell into the prophetic trance, seeing ‘the vision of the
Almighty, but having his eyes open,’ the words which were put into his
mouth were words which predicted the future glories of Israel. ‘A star
should come out of Jacob, and a sceptre should arise out of Israel,
which should smite the corners of Moab and destroy all the children of
Sheth.’[241] Edom, too, should at last become the possession of his
younger brother, and the Amalekites of the desert should perish for
ever.
The age of the episode has been often disputed. Much depends on the
question whether the references in the last prophecy to the Kenites and
others belong to the original document, or are later insertions. The
Assyrians did not penetrate into the desert south of Judah, where the
Kenites lived, until the time of Tiglath-pileser III. and Sargon in the
eighth century B.C. The Amalekites were destroyed by Saul; Moab and Edom
were conquered by David. But the concluding verse of the prophecy is at
present difficult to explain. When was it that ships came from Cyprus
and ‘afflicted’ Assyria and the Hebrews, so that they too perished for
ever? In the age of the Exodus, the pirates of the Greek seas joined
their forces with those of the Libyans in the invasion of Egypt, and the
Philistines and their allies sailed from Krete and other islands of the
Mediterranean, and established themselves on the coast of Palestine. Was
it here that the Hebrews lived who were to perish for ever? It is, at
any rate, worthy of note that it was the Philistines more especially
among whom the Israelites were known as the ‘Hebrews.’ In the time of
the Tel el-Amarna tablets we already hear of Assyrian intrigues in the
far West. The Babylonian king asks the Pharaoh why the Assyrians, his
‘vassals,’ have been allowed to come to Canaan and enter into relations
with the Egyptian court.[242] At a later period, while Israel was ruled
by judges, more than one Assyrian monarch actually made his way to the
Mediterranean coast.[243]
As the historical chapters of the book of Isaiah, including the
prophecies contained in them, have been embodied in the book of Kings,
so, too, the history of Balaam and Balak has been embodied in the book
of Numbers. There is no reason for denying its substantial authenticity.
Written prophecies were already known both in Egypt and in
Babylonia,[244] and it is almost inconceivable that a Jewish fabricator
of prophecies would have made a Gentile diviner the mouthpiece of
Yahveh. Moreover, there is nothing in the narrative or the prophecies
themselves which is inconsistent with the date to which they profess to
belong, unless indeed it is maintained that the conquest of Moab and
Edom by the Israelites could not have been predicted at the time. But,
apart from theological considerations which lie outside the province of
the historian, it did not require much political foresight to conclude
that a people which had begun by destroying the power of Sihon was
likely to end by conquering the nations surrounding them. In fact, it
would seem from the enumeration of the cities occupied by Reuben and Gad
(Numb. xxxii. 34-38) that at one time little, if any, territory was left
to the Moabite king.
In the embassy to Balaam ‘the elders of Midian’ are united with those of
Moab. In fact, it is to the ‘elders of Midian,’ and not to those of
Moab, that Balak first addresses himself (Numb. xxii. 4). It is the
Midianites, moreover, and not the Moabites, who tempted Israel to sin
‘in the matter of Baal-Peor,’ and who were accordingly massacred in the
war that followed, although ‘the people had begun to commit whoredom’
with ‘the daughters of Moab’ (Numb. xxv. 1). It is clear, therefore,
that Moab was at the time occupied by the Midianites, just as the
eastern portion of Israelitish territory was occupied by them in later
days before it was freed by Gideon. Then they had swarmed up from the
south along with the Amalekite Bedâwin and the Kadmônim of the
south-east, and under their five shêkhs had overrun the land of Israel.
Moab had now undergone the same fate, perhaps in consequence of its
weakened condition after the unsuccessful war against Sihon. At any
rate, it is probable that the Moabites had eventually to thank their
Edomite neighbours for their deliverance from the invaders, since in the
list of the Edomite kings we are told that the fourth of them, Hadad,
the son of Bedad, ‘smote Midian in the field of Moab’ (Gen. xxxvi. 35).
The age of Hadad and that of Gideon could not have been far apart, and
Gideon’s success may therefore have been one of the results that
followed upon the Midianite defeat in Moab. The losses sustained by the
Midianites, however, in their struggle with the invading Israelites,
must have weakened their hold upon the territories of the Moabite king.
The storm-cloud which had terrified Balak passed over him to his
Midianite foes.
The conquest of the Moabite cities brought with it intermarriages
between the Israelites and their inhabitants as well as an adoption of
the native forms of faith. Yahveh was deserted for Baal-Peor, the
Moabite Baal of Mount Peor, but it was not long before He avenged
Himself. Pestilence broke out in the camp, and the people saw in it the
finger of God. By command of Moses ‘all the heads of the people’ were
‘hanged before the Lord in face of the sun’; while Phinehas, the son of
the high-priest, jealous of the rights of Yahveh, stabbed to the death
an Israelite and his Midianitish wife who had dared to show themselves
before the sanctuary of the Lord. The time had passed when Moses was
justified in marrying a wife of Midianitish race; Israel had now become
a peculiar people, dedicated to Yahveh, who would allow ‘no other god’
to share His place. The Midianitish wife was a sign and evidence that
Yahveh of Israel had been forsaken for a Midianitish Baal.
Thus far, it would seem, Israel and Midian had mixed together on
friendly terms. Both were desert tribes, both were connected together by
old traditions and intercourse, and claimed descent from a common
ancestor. But it was now a question of rival deities and forms of faith.
The very existence of the Law that had been promulgated from Sinai and
Kadesh was at stake; and if Israel and its religion were not to be
absorbed into the world of heathenism around them, it was time for the
tribe of Levi—the keepers of the sanctuary—to awake. Moses and Phinehas
saw the danger, and swift punishment descended on the backsliders within
Israel itself. How formidable, however, the danger had been may be
gathered from the statement that ‘all the heads of the people’ were put
to death.
The turn of Midian came next. The Midianite tribes were overthrown, and
their five shêkhs slain, one of whom, Rekem, gave his name to the city
which is better known as Petra. ‘Balaam also, the son of Beor, they slew
with the sword.’ The Midianite villages and forts were burned to the
ground, and the captives and spoil were brought to the Israelitish camp.
Here they were divided among the people, Yahveh and His priests
receiving their share. Out of a total of 16,000 captives, thirty-two
slaves were given to the Lord. Henceforth it became the rule that the
spoil taken in war should be divided into two equal parts, one-half for
the fighting men, the rest for the people as a whole; and that while the
fighting men had to deliver up only one share in five hundred to the
Levites, the priestly tribute levied on the rest of the ‘congregation’
was as much as one in fifty. The regulation was reinforced by David
after his defeat of the Amalekites when his companions clamoured for the
whole of the spoil (1 Sam. xxx. 24, 25), at all events in so far as the
equal division of it was concerned between the combatants and those who
remained at home.
The Midianites were driven from Moab and its frontiers. Their overthrow
meant the triumph of the priestly tribe in Israel. The war had been
waged not against Midian only, but against the allies and kinsmen of
Midian in Israel itself. The old relationship between Israel and Midian
had been severed on the confines of the Promised Land; the supremacy of
Yahveh in Israel had been once more asserted, and Israel had become more
than ever His peculiar people. Before they entered Canaan, it was
needful that the last links that bound them to the wild tribes of the
desert should be cut in two.
The work of Moses was completed. He had led Israel from the house of
bondage, had given it laws and made it a nation in the wilderness, and
had fitted it for the conquest of Canaan. The land flowing with milk and
honey, which the Semitic settlers in Egypt seem always to have regarded
as a home of refuge to which they should ultimately return, was now
within their grasp. Egyptian troops no longer garrisoned it, and its
population was weakened by intestine troubles, by the long war between
Egypt and the Hittites, and, above all, by the invasion of the
Philistines and other pirates from the Greek seas. A large portion of
the cultivated territory on the east side of the Jordan was already in
Israelite hands; all that was needed was to cross the river and take
possession of ‘the land of promise.’ Israel never forgot that it was
from hence that its ancestors had come, and tradition recorded that the
bodies of the patriarchs still lay in the rock-tomb of Machpelah. Even
now the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh carried with them the mummy of
Joseph, from whom they claimed their origin, ready to deposit it
wherever they could gain a permanent foothold and build for themselves a
central sanctuary.
The scene of the last legislation of Moses is laid in the plains of
Moab, in the newly-won territory of Israel, and almost within sight of
the mountains of Canaan. The additional laws and regulations which
needed to be made were not many. Reuben and Gad were settled in the
districts which subsequently bore their names, the Reubenites pasturing
their flocks like nomad Bedâwin among the northern wadis of Moab, while
Gad occupied the greater portion of the Amorite kingdom of Sihon. Part
of the tribe of Manasseh also made its home in the districts of Gilead
and Bashan, which it had won by the sword.
The institution of the six cities of refuge, moreover, as well as of the
forty-eight cities of the Levites, is assigned to the same period.
Modern criticism, however, has shown itself unwilling to accept its
Mosaic authorship. But sacred cities, to which the homicide could flee
for refuge, were an ancient institution in both Syria and Asia Minor. We
find them also in the region of the Hittites. Such _asyla_, as the
Greeks called them, lasted down to the classical period, and played a
considerable part in the local history of Asia Minor. Wherever we find a
Kadesh or a Hierapolis, there we may expect to find also an asylum in
which the gods and their ministers would protect the unintentional
shedder of blood from the vengeance of man. It was a means of checking
the _vendetta_ or blood feud, which was in full harmony with primitive
law.[245]
In establishing the cities of refuge, therefore, the Israelites did but
carry on the traditions of the past. And two at least of the cities,
which were subsequently set apart for the purpose, were sanctuaries, and
consequently ‘asyla,’ long before the children of Jacob entered
Palestine. These were Kadesh in Galilee and Hebron (Josh. xx. 7). The
name of Kadesh declares its sacred character, and the sanctuary of
Hebron had been famous for centuries.
The institution of the Levitical cities, again, was a result of the new
position assigned to the tribe of Levi as the priests and
representatives of the national God. The overthrow of the Midianites and
their Israelitish allies had definitely settled the place of the tribe
in Israel. Yahveh had prevailed over all other gods, and those who
worshipped another god had been put to the sword. It had been the work
of Levi, of those who had been chosen to be the ministers of Yahveh or
had voluntarily devoted themselves to the service of the sanctuary. On
the day that the spoil of Midian was divided it was recognised that Levi
was not a tribe in the sense that the other tribes were so; it
represented the priests and ministers of Yahveh, whoever and wheresoever
they might be. And as, in the division of the spoil, due care was taken
of Yahveh and His priests, so, too, in the division of the land, it was
needful that similar care should be taken for them. The priests of Egypt
had their lands, out of the revenues of which the temples were
supported, and Egypt was not the only country of the Oriental world in
which the same practice prevailed. Indeed, while Canaan was an Egyptian
province temples had been built in it by the Pharaohs, and doubtless
endowed in the same way as the temples of Egypt itself. The revenues of
Syrian towns, moreover, had been given to Egyptian temples; Thothmes
III., for example, immediately after the conquest of Syria, settled
three of its towns (Anaugas, Innuam, and Harankal) upon Amon of
Thebes.[246] The custom lingered on into late times; the Persian king
assigned the three cities of Magnesia, Myos, and Lampsacus for the
maintenance of Themistoklês,[247] and the taxes of the Fayyûm in Egypt
formed the ‘pin-money’ of Queen Arsinoê Philadelphos.[248]
Later ages misunderstood the regulations that related to the Levitical
cities, and, misled by the belief that the tribe of Levi was constituted
like the other tribes of Israel, imagined that they were intended to be
places where the Levites should dwell and none else. This misconception
has coloured the existing text of Numb. xxxv. 2-8, but we have only to
turn to the list of the cities given in Josh. xxi. to see how unfounded
it is. In fact, the Levites, as ministers of the national God, lived
wherever there was a sanctuary of Yahveh to be served; in the days of
the Judges we find a Levite even in the private house of Micah, on Mount
Ephraim, from whence he is taken by the Danite raiders along with the
image of his God (Judg. xviii.). There was no intention of shutting up
the Levites in certain cities apart from the rest of the people; on the
contrary, they were to be ‘scattered’ throughout Israel, the priests and
representatives everywhere of the national God.
The book of Deuteronomy is the testament of Moses. Even the most
sceptical criticism admits that such was already the belief in the age
of Josiah, so far, at any rate, as regards the main portion of the book.
At the same time, the stoutest advocates of the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch also admit that it cannot all have come from his hand. The
account of his death, which forms the close of the book, cannot have
been written by the great legislator himself. Here, as elsewhere, it is
for the historian to decide where the narrative may belong to the Mosaic
age, and where it transports us to the atmosphere of a later period.
The original Deuteronomy of philological criticism begins with the
twelfth chapter, without introduction or even explanation. The
Deuteronomy of Hebrew tradition is the fitting conclusion of the
Pentateuch. Moses, worn out with years and labour, addresses his people
for the last time. They are about to cross the Jordan and enter Canaan;
here on the threshold of the Promised Land his task is done, and he must
leave the work of conquest to other and younger hands. He has been the
legislator of Israel, Joshua must be its general.
We have, first, a recapitulation of the chief events of the wanderings
in the wilderness from the day that the Covenant was made in Horeb, the
mount of God.[249] They are intermingled with antiquarian notes, which
may, or may not, be of the Mosaic age, as well as with exhortations to
obedience to the Law. Then follows a series of enactments which
constitute the Deuteronomic Law itself. The enactments necessarily go
over some of the ground already traversed by the previous legislation;
in some points they even seem to contradict it. But the contradictions
are more apparent than real, like the reason assigned for observing the
Sabbath. Sometimes they are supplementary to the Levitical laws,
sometimes are supplemented by the latter; at other times the same
regulation is repeated from a different point of view.[250]
A special characteristic of the Deuteronomic Law is its tenderness and
care for animals as well as for the poor, ‘the stranger, the fatherless,
and the widow.’[251] Even the Egyptian is not to be ‘abhorred’ (Deut.
xxiii. 7), and all Hebrew slaves are to be released every seventh year.
Along with this, however, we find the ferocity which distinguished the
Semites in time of war. If the enemy lived afar off, all the males of a
vanquished city were to be mercilessly slain, and the children and women
spared, only to become the slaves and concubines of the conquerors. But
even this amount of mercy was forbidden in the case of the Canaanitish
cities; here the massacre was to be universal, lest the Israelites
should take wives from the conquered population and fall away from the
worship of Yahveh. A similar spirit of ferocity breathes through the
Assyrian inscriptions, where the kings boast of the multitudes of the
vanquished whom they had tortured and slain in honour of their god
Assur. Alone of the ancient nations of the East the Egyptians seem to
have understood what we mean by humanity in war.
Like the poor, the Levite is commended to the care and support of the
people. He has no land or property of his own—much less a ‘Levitical
city,’—the Lord alone ‘is his inheritance,’ and consequently those who
remember the Levite remember at the same time the Lord whom he serves.
The portion of the offering is defined which is to be the due of the
Levites, and tithe is to be paid to them upon all the produce of the
land. No distinction is drawn in the book of Deuteronomy between the
Levites and the priests, ‘the sons of Aaron,’ and therefore the laws
relating to the Levites apply to all the priests alike.
Another characteristic of the Deuteronomic Law is its insistence on a
central sanctuary. It was to this central sanctuary that the God-fearing
Israelite was commanded to ‘go up’ three times in the year at each of
the great feasts, and there offer his firstlings and sacrifices to the
Lord. This central sanctuary, however, did not exclude the existence of
local altars or shrines. The Levite is described as living in the
families of the other tribes throughout the land (xii. 19, xiv. 27), and
as deciding cases at law, wherever they might occur, along with the
judges (xvi. 18, xvii. 9, xix. 17, xxi. 6). Nor was it necessary when an
animal was slaughtered, and its life-blood poured out before Yahveh,
that this should be done in the one chief temple of the nation. It was
only such offerings as had been specially vowed to the national God that
were required to be brought there. They had been dedicated to Yahveh as
God of the whole nation, and it was therefore to that sanctuary in which
Yahveh was worshipped by the nation as a whole that they had to be
taken. In his individual or local capacity the Israelite was free to
offer his sacrifices where he would. For, it must be remembered, the
very fact that the life-blood was shed made the death of the animal a
sacrifice to the Lord, and the feast on its flesh which followed was a
feast eaten in the presence of the Lord.
The insistence on the central sanctuary implied an equal insistence on
the absolute supremacy of Yahveh in Israel. Idolaters and enticers to
idolatry were to be cut off without pity; even the prophet who spoke in
the name of another god, and whose words came to pass, was to be stoned
to death. The fulfilment of a prediction guaranteed its truth only if
the prophet was the messenger of Yahveh. Yahveh would suffer no other
gods to be worshipped at His side, and the Deuteronomic Law accordingly
forbids all such practices as were connected with the heathenism of the
neighbouring peoples. The Israelites were forbidden to tattoo themselves
like the Syrian worshippers of Hadad, to scarify their flesh like the
Egyptians in mourning for the dead, far less like the Canaanites around
them to sacrifice their firstborn by fire. Every effort was made to
preserve them from contact with their neighbours; their king was
forbidden to ‘multiply’ horses and wives; for the one would lead to
intercourse with Egypt, the other would introduce into Israel the
worship and the images of foreign deities. The sacred trees which from
time immemorial had been planted near the altars of the gods, some of
them by the patriarchs themselves, were to be destroyed like the conical
pillar of the goddess Asherah and the upright column which symbolised
the sun-god.
Few aspects of Hebrew life are left untouched by the enactments of
Deuteronomy. Marriage and divorce, murder and other crimes, the
institution of the cities of refuge, the observance of the great feasts,
the election and duty of a king, sanitary laws including the distinction
between clean and unclean meats, slavery, commerce, and usury, are all
alike subjects of the Deuteronomic legislation. And the whole
legislation is marked by a spirit of compassion for the poor and
suffering, at all events if they belong to the house of Israel, or have
been allowed to share some of its privileges. The creditor is enjoined
to give back to the poor man before nightfall the raiment he had taken
in pledge, and the master is bidden to pay at the close of the day the
wages of ‘the hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy
brethren or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates.’
Even the curious prohibition to mix like and unlike together, as in the
case of a garment of wool and linen (xxii. 11), seems to be a reduction
from the principle which forbade the yoking together of the ox and ass.
The legislation relating to the king is perhaps somewhat striking,
especially when we bear in mind the protest raised by Samuel against the
election of one (1 Sam. vii. 6-18). Samuel, however, was not altogether
disinterested in the matter; and it was obvious that as soon as the
conquest of Canaan was completed, there could be no national unity
without a monarch who could represent the people and lead them in war.
Before the time of Samuel, Abimelech had established a kingdom in
Central Palestine, and tradition spoke of Moses also as ‘king in
Jeshurun’ (Deut. xxxiii. 5). The Israelites, if ever they were to form a
nation, were destined to follow the example of their neighbours; even in
the wild fastnesses of Mount Seir the ‘dukes’ of Edom had been succeeded
by kings. The idea of kingship was so familiar to the Mosaic age, that
it is difficult to conceive of any legislation which did not contemplate
it. Whether the legislation would have taken precisely the same form as
that which we find in Deuteronomy is another question.
The commandments enjoined by Moses were ordered to be written on the
stuccoed face of ‘great stones.’ Whether the whole of the Deuteronomic
legislation is meant is more than doubtful. But that the chief
enactments of the code should be thus placed before the eyes of the
people was in accordance with the customs of the age. The acts and
events of the reign of Augustus engraved on the marble slabs of Ancyra
are a late example of the same usage; and the great inscription of
Darius on the cliff of Behistun has similarly preserved to us the
history of the foundation of the Persian empire. To cover stone or rock
with stucco, which was then painted white and written upon, was a common
practice in Egypt. It seems to imply, however, that the writing could be
painted with the brush, and thus to exclude the use of cuneiform
characters. At the same time, these characters could be cut in stucco as
well as in stone, and it is possible that the stucco was intended to be
a substitute for clay, where a large surface had to be covered. However
this may be, the monument was ordered to be erected on Mount Ebal, by
the side of an altar of unwrought stones.
On Ebal, moreover, and the opposite height of Gerizim, it was prescribed
that a strange ceremony should be performed. While half the tribes stood
on the one mountain, and the other half on the other mountain, the
Levites were to curse from Ebal all those who disobeyed the law, and to
bless from Gerizim those who obeyed it.[252] Unfortunately, as might
have been expected, the curses much predominated over the blessings. We
hear afterwards in the book of Joshua that the ceremony was duly
performed, excepting only that Joshua read the words of cursing and
benediction in place of ‘the priests the Levites.’ Critics have doubted
the historical character of the occurrence, but it is inconsistent with
no known fact, and it is difficult to find a reason for its gratuitous
invention.
The latter part of the book of Deuteronomy brings the life of Moses to
an end. It includes the final covenant made between himself on behalf of
Yahveh and the people of Israel, to which are attached the various
calamities that would await the breaking of it. It also tells us that
the law contained in Deuteronomy was really written by the legislator,
and delivered to the priests the sons of Levi with an injunction that it
should be read every seventh year (xxxi. 9-11). Like the ‘witness’ to S.
John’s Gospel, therefore, the compiler of the Pentateuch in its present
form wishes to add his testimony to the belief that the Mosaic law was
written by Moses himself.
Two songs, attributed to Moses, are also incorporated in the book. They
seem to be a reflection of the curses and blessings pronounced
respectively on Ebal and Gerizim. The one paints the sufferings which
forgetfulness of Yahveh was to bring upon Israel; the other describes
the future happiness and glory of the several tribes. Chiefest among
them are Levi and the house of Joseph; ‘the precious things’ of the
Promised Land are reserved for Ephraim and Manasseh, whose warriors
shall drive the enemies of Yahveh to the ends of the earth. Levi shall
be the lawgiver and instructor of Israel, while Benjamin shall be the
‘beloved of the Lord,’ who shall ‘dwell between his shoulders’ at
Shiloh. Judah, on the other hand, stands in the background; little is
said of him except a prayer that he should be delivered from his
enemies. And Simeon is passed over altogether. It is plain that this
second song or ‘blessing’ must be of early date. It cannot be later than
the early days of the conquest of Canaan, when Ephraim and Manasseh were
still the most powerful of the tribes, and when the tabernacle of Yahveh
was erected at Shiloh. The tribes were still united among themselves;
they still recognised a common God and a common worship, and had not as
yet fallen upon the evil days depicted in the book of Judges. The tone
of the song throughout is that of triumph and success; the Israelites
must have still been in their first flush of victory, and the house of
Joseph have still been their leader in war. But history knows of only
two periods when such was the case; the one period that which followed
the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms east of the Jordan, the other
period that which saw Joshua the Ephraimite at the head of the armies of
Israel. Hebrew antiquity decided that it was to the first period that
the song belonged.[253]
The death of Moses was placed on the summit of one of the mountains of
Abarim—the mountains of the ‘Hebrews’—in the land of Moab over against
the temple of Baal-Peor. On the one side he looked down upon the scene
of his last victory over the opponents of his law, on the place where
the Midianites and their Israelitish sympathisers had been slain; on the
other side lay the Land of Promise, to the borders of which he had led
his people. The peak of Pisgah on which he stood had been dedicated in
old days to the worship of Nebo, the Babylonian god of prophecy and
literature, the interpreter of the will of Merodach, the supreme
divinity of Babylon. It was no accident that the prophet and legislator
of Israel, the interpreter of the will of Yahveh, should die on the same
mountain-peak.
The high-places which the kindred Semitic nations dedicated to the gods
become in the history of Israel the scenes of the death of its great
men. Aaron dies on the summit of Mount Hor, and even to-day the tomb of
the prophet Samuel is pointed out on the lofty top of Mizpah. But no
tomb marked the spot where Moses died; alone among the heroes of Hebrew
history he was buried in a foreign land, and the place where he was
buried was unknown. The legislator of Israel, he who had made Israel a
nation, and with whom Israelitish history began, vanished utterly out of
sight. The fact is a strange one, whatever be the explanation we attempt
to give of it. Can it be that Moab had been more completely conquered by
Israel than the narrative in the Pentateuch would lead us to suppose,
but that with the death of Moses the dominion of Israel passed
away?[254] In that case Moab would have had little interest in
preserving a memory of the last resting-place of its conqueror, and the
time would soon have come when its site was forgotten.
Footnote 153:
See Sayce, _The Higher Criticism and the Monuments_, p. 249.
Footnote 154:
E. Naville, _Goshen and the Shrine of Saft el-Hennah_, Fourth Memoir
of the Egypt Exploration Fund (1887).
Footnote 155:
Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. p.
133.
Footnote 156:
Flinders Petrie, _Tel el-Amarna_, pp. 40-42.
Footnote 157:
See above, p. 115.
Footnote 158:
For Khar, the Horites of the Old Testament, see Maspero, _Struggle of
the Nations_, p. 121.
Footnote 159:
On the road from Assuan to Shellâl, ‘Messui, the royal son of Kush,
the fan-bearer on the right of the king, the royal scribe,’ has left
his name and titles on a granite rock (Petrie, _A Season in Egypt_,
No. 70). Below the inscription is Meneptah in a chariot, with Messui
holding the fan and bowing before him.
Footnote 160:
For Dr. Neubauer’s suggestion that the name of Aaron, otherwise so
inexplicable, is the Arabic Âron or Âran written in the Minæan
fashion, see above, p. 34, note 1. If the suggestion is right, it was
specially appropriate that Aaron should have met Moses in ‘the Mount
of God,’ on the frontiers of Midian (Exod. iv. 27).
Footnote 161:
A translation of the papyrus has been given by Professor Maspero in
_The Records of the Past_, new series, ii. pp. 11-36.
Footnote 162:
See Preface to Maspero’s _Dawn of Civilisation_, p. v.
Footnote 163:
Reuel, ‘Shepherd of God,’ was a son of Esau, according to Gen. xxxvi.
4. It may have been a title of the high-priest, since _rêu_,
‘shepherd,’ is one of the titles given to the kings and high-priests
of early Babylonia. The high-priest Gudea, for instance, calls himself
‘the shepherd of the god Nin-girsu.’ On the other hand, Hommel (_The
Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, p. 278) compares the name Reuel-Jethro with
the Minæan Ridsvu-il Vitrân.
Footnote 164:
In the word _seneh_ a popular etymology seems to have been found for
the name of Mount Sinai. Hence it is that in Deut. xxxiii. 16, Yahveh
is described as ‘him that dwelt in the _seneh_.’ The _seneh_ was
probably the small prickly _acacia nilotica_.
Footnote 165:
No satisfactory etymology of the name Yahveh has yet been found. This,
however, is not strange, considering that the etymology was unknown to
the Hebrews themselves, as is shown by the explanation of the name in
Exod. iii. 14, where it is derived from the Aramaic _hewâ_, the Hebrew
equivalent being _hâyâh_, with _y_ instead of _w_ (or _v_). The
Babylonians were also ignorant of the original meaning of the word,
since one of the lexical cuneiform tablets gives _Yahu_ or Yahveh as
meaning ‘god’ (in Israelitish), and identifies it with the Assyrian
word _yahu_, ‘myself’ (83, 1-18, 1332 _Obv._; Col. ii. 1). No certain
traces of the name have been found except among the Israelites. It is
a verbal formation like _Jacob_, _Joseph_, etc.
Footnote 166:
Maspero, _Dawn of Civilisation_, pp. 132-134.
Footnote 167:
For ‘strikes’ among the Egyptian artisans, see Spiegelberg, _Arbeiter
und Arbeiterbewegung im Pharaonreich unter den Ramessiden_ (1895).
Footnote 168:
At Tel el-Maskhuta, or Pithom, however, the bricks were not mixed with
straw.
Footnote 169:
See Wiedemann, _Religion der alten Aegypter_, pp. 142 _sq._
Footnote 170:
Exod. vii. 19 contains an exaggeration which could easily be omitted
without any injury to the sense of the narrative. The change of water
in the river would affect the canals and such pools and ponds as were
fed from the Nile, but nothing else. The river-water is not considered
fit for drinking in the early days of the inundation. The green and
slimy vegetation brought from the Equatorial regions renders it quite
poisonous, and it is not until some days after it has become ‘red’
that it is again fit to drink.
Footnote 171:
The ‘camels’ mentioned along with the cattle in Exod. ix. 3 have been
inserted from an Israelitish point of view. The Egyptians had no
camels; and though the Bedâwin doubtless used them from an early
period, none were employed by the Egyptians themselves until the Roman
or Arab age.
Footnote 172:
The passage is, unfortunately, mutilated. What remains reads thus:
‘... the tents in front of the city of Pi-Bailos, on the canal of
Shakana; ... [the adjoining land] was not cultivated, but had been
left as pasture for cattle for the sake of the foreigners. It had been
abandoned since the time of (our) ancestors. All the kings of Upper
Egypt sat within their entrenchments ... and the kings of Lower Egypt
found themselves in the midst of their cities, surrounded with
earthworks, cut off from everything by the (hostile) warriors, for
they had no mercenaries to oppose to them. Thus had it been [until
Meneptah] ascended the throne of Horus. He was crowned to preserve the
life of mankind.’ The word translated ‘tents’ is _ahilu_, the Hebrew
_ôhêl_, which is used by Ramses III. of the ‘tents’ of the Shasu or
Edomites of Mount Seir. For translations of the text, see E. de Rougé,
_Extrait d’un Mémoire sur les Attaques dirigées contre l’Égypte_, pp.
6-13 (1867); Chabas, _Recherches pour servir à l’histoire de la
^{xix}e Dynastie_, pp. 84-92 (1873); Brugsch, _Egypt under the
Pharaohs_, Eng. tr. (2nd edit.), ii. pp. 116-123; Maspero, _The
Struggle of the Nations_, pp. 433-436.
Footnote 173:
_Cont. Apion._ i. 26.
Footnote 174:
This name, however, varied in different versions of the legend.
Chærêmôn makes it Phritiphantes, which may represent Zaphnath-paaneah,
the dental (_t_) taking the place of _z_, and _pa-Ra_, ‘the sun-god’
of _pa-Ankhu_, ‘the living one.’
Footnote 175:
The papyrus is in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg (Golénischeff,
_Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie
égyptiennes et assyriennes_, xv. pp. 88, 89).
Footnote 176:
Dr. Wilcken has pointed out (_Zur Aegyptisch-hellenistischen
Literatur_ in the _Festschrift für Georg Ebers_, 1897, pp. 146-152)
that two fragments of a Greek papyrus published by Wessely in the
_Denkschriften der Wiener Akademie_, 42, 1893, pp. 3 _sqq._, contain a
legend which closely resembles that of the Egyptian version of the
Exodus. In this, however, a potter takes the place of the seer
Amenôphis, the desire of the king to see the gods is explained by his
wish to know the future, the ‘impure people’ are called the
‘girdle-wearers,’ and the beginning of a Sothic cycle is apparently
combined with the story. Moreover, it would seem that the papyrus does
not yet know of the identification of the ‘impure people’ with the
Jews.
Footnote 177:
_The Threshold Covenant or the Beginning of Religious Rites_ (New
York, 1896).
Footnote 178:
_The Threshold Covenant_, pp. 203, 204.
Footnote 179:
See above, p. 155.
Footnote 180:
_Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. pp. 96-98.
Footnote 181:
_Anastasi_, v. 19. For the translation, see Brugsch, _Egypt under the
Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), second edit., ii. p. 132.
Footnote 182:
First pointed out by Goodwin in the Sallier Papyrus, iv. 1, 6.
Footnote 183:
Josh. ii. 10; iv. 23; xxiv. 6-8.
Footnote 184:
Ps. cvi. 7-9, 22; cxxxvi. 13-15; Neh. ix. 9; see also Acts vii. 36.
Footnote 185:
The event was first recorded by Kallisthenes, and Plutarch (_Alex._
17) states that ‘many historians’ had described it. Arrian (i. 27)
alludes to it, and Menander introduced a scoffing reference to the
miracle in one of his plays. The actual facts are given by Strabo
(_Geog._ xiv. 3, 9), who says that near Phasêlis Mount Klimax juts out
into the sea, but that in calm weather a road runs round its base on
the seaward side. If the wind rises, however, the road is submerged by
the waves. Alexander ventured to march along it while still covered by
the sea, and though the water was up to the waists of the soldiers,
passed safely through it, the wind not being very strong. His success
came to be regarded as a miracle, and the miraculous passage of the
sea by his army is narrated with many embellishments in the fragment
of an unknown historian in a lexicon discovered by Papadopoulos in
1892.
Footnote 186:
The narrative is careful to indicate that this was the case (Exod.
xiv. 23, 28). It is only in the Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 19) that
‘Pharaoh’s horses’ are changed into ‘the horse of Pharaoh,’ a change
which, like the confusion between ‘the sea’ and the Yâm Sûph, shows
either that the Song is of later date or that its language has been
modified and interpolated.
Footnote 187:
_Pap. Anastasi_, iv. A translation of it by Dr. Birch will be found in
_Records of the Past_, first series, vol. iv. pp. 49-52. The poet says
of the king: ‘Amon gave thy heart pleasure, he gave thee a good old
age.’ The name of the king, however, is not given, and it is therefore
possible that Seti II. rather than Meneptah is referred to.
Footnote 188:
The last Pharaoh whose monuments have been found in the Sinaitic
peninsula is Ramses VI. of the twentieth dynasty (De Morgan,
_Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_, p. 237).
Footnote 189:
The Amalekites adjoined Edom (Gen. xxxvi. 12) and southern Israel
(Judg. v. 14), and extended from Shur, or the Wall of Egypt, to
Havilah, the ‘sandy’ desert of Northern Arabia (1 Sam. xv. 7; see Gen.
xiv. 7). That these Amalekites were the same as those conquered by
Moses is expressly stated in 1 Sam. xv. 2 (cf. Exod. xvii. 16). The
latter, therefore, lived miles to the north of the Sinaitic peninsula.
The wilderness of Paran lay on the southern side of Moab (Deut. i. 1)
and Judah (Gen. xxi. 14, 20, 21). Kadesh, now ’Ain Qadîs, was situated
in it (Numb. xiii. 26). The geography of the Exodus is treated with
great ability and logical skill in Baker Greene’s _Hebrew Migration
from Egypt_ (1879).
Footnote 190:
Judg. v. 4, 5; Deut. xxxiii. 2; Hab. iii. 3.
Footnote 191:
First pointed out by Baker Greene, _The Hebrew Migration from Egypt_,
p. 170; Elim is the masculine, and Elath the feminine plural. Compare
El-Paran, perhaps ‘El(im) of Paran,’ in Gen. xiv. 6, as well as Elah
in Gen. xxxvi. 41.
Footnote 192:
Exod. xvi. 1 compared with Numb. xxxiii. 11.
Footnote 193:
The name is found in an inscription of Hadramaut (Osiander,
_Inscriptions in the Himyaritic Character_, p. 29), where the god is
called the son of Atthar or Istar instead of her brother, as in
Babylonia, as well as in a Sabæan text from Sirwaḥ.
Footnote 194:
Numb. xiii. 26. The sanctuary had originally been Amalekite (Gen. xiv.
7).
Footnote 195:
Unfortunately, no calculation of distance can be made from the
statement that Elijah was ‘forty days and forty nights’ on his way
from Jezreel to Horeb, since ‘forty’ merely denotes an unknown number.
Footnote 196:
In the early days of the monarchy the armies of both the Israelites
and the Philistines were similarly divided into companies of a hundred
and a thousand (1 Sam. xxii. 7; xxix. 2; 2 Sam. xviii. 1). The system
could not have been derived from Babylonia, where sixty was the unit
of notation.
Footnote 197:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 74-77,
and Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, pp.
70-77.
Footnote 198:
The text of this is given in the 125th chapter of the Book of the
Dead. A translation of it will be found in Wiedemann’s _Religion der
alten Aegypter_, pp. 132, 133.
Footnote 199:
The conceptions which underlay this were embodied in the mediæval
jurisprudence of Europe, and curious reports exist of the trials of
cocks, rats, flies, dogs, and even ants, which lasted down to the
eighteenth century (see Baring-Gould, _Curiosities of Olden Times_,
second edit., pp. 57-73).
Footnote 200:
The exhortation, together with some of the laws, is given again in a
somewhat changed form in Exod. xxxiv. 10-26.
Footnote 201:
The name belongs to the period when the Philistines were infesting the
sea, before they had settled on the coast of Palestine, and indicates
the early date of the passage in which it occurs. Perhaps the Greek
tradition of the command of the sea by the Kretan Minos is a
reminiscence of the same period.
Footnote 202:
W. A. I. i. 54, Col. ii. 54 _sqq._
Footnote 203:
_Transactions_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, vii. 1, pp. 53,
54.
Footnote 204:
A contract-tablet dated in the 32nd year of Nebuchadrezzar, and
published by Dr. Strassmaier (_Inschriften von Nabuchodonoser_, No.
217), gives us an insight into the details of Babylonian sacrifices,
though, unfortunately, the signification of many of the technical
words employed in it is doubtful or unknown. The tablet begins as
follows: ‘Izkur-Merodach the son of Imbiya the son of Ilei-Merodach of
his own free will has given for the future to Nebo-balásu-ikbi the son
of Kuddinu the son of Ilei-Merodach the slaughterers of the oxen and
sheep for the sacrifices of the king, the prescribed offerings, the
peace-offerings (?) of the whole year, viz., the caul round the heart,
the chine, the covering of the ribs, the ..., the mouth of the
stomach, and the ..., as well as during the year 7000 sin-offerings
and 100 sheep before Iskhara who dwells in the temple of Sa-turra in
Babylon (not excepting the soft parts of the flesh, the trotters (?),
the juicy meat and the salted (?) flesh), and also the slaughterers of
the oxen, sheep, birds, and lambs due on the 8th day of Nisan, (and)
the heave-offering of an ox and a sheep before Pap-sukal of
Bit-Kidur-Kani, the temple of Nin-ip and the temple of Anu on the
further bank of the New Town in Babylon.’
Footnote 205:
_The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 282-284.
Footnote 206:
See the illustration in Erman’s _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p.
298.
Footnote 207:
Mr. G. Buchanan Gray (_Studies in Hebrew Proper Names_, p. 246, note
1) suggests that Aholiab is a foreign name. At all events, while we
find names compounded with _ohel_, ‘tabernacle,’ in Minæan and
Phœnician inscriptions, no other name of the kind is found among the
Israelites.
Footnote 208:
Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_ (Part i.), remarks on this:
‘I would gladly know how Moses, with an actual fire, calcined or burnt
the golden calf into powder; for that mystical metal of gold, whose
solary and celestial nature I admire, exposed unto the violence of
fire, grows only hot and liquefies, but consumeth not.’
Footnote 209:
An interpolation (Exod. xxxiii. 1-5) makes the worship of the golden
calf account for the fact that, as declared in Exod. xxiii. 20, an
angel should lead Israel into Canaan, and not Yahveh Himself. But it
ignores the further fact that Yahveh was really present in the Holy of
Holies as well as in the pillar of fire and cloud.
Footnote 210:
Hadad-sum and his son Anniy (see my _Patriarchal Palestine_, p. 250).
Small stone tablets like those of Balawât, engraved with cuneiform
characters, are in the museums of Europe.
Footnote 211:
Sayce, _Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments_, pp. 79-83.
Footnote 212:
The contrast between such cases, where the names and details are as
circumstantially stated as in the legal tablets of early Babylonia,
and cases which rest merely upon the memory of tradition, will be
clear at once from a reference to Numb. xv. 32-36. Here we have to do
with tradition only, and accordingly no name is given, and the story
is introduced with the vague statement that it happened at some time
or other when the Israelites ‘were in the wilderness.’ The whole of
the chapter is an interpolation which is singularly out of place in
the narrative, and seems to have been substituted for a description of
the disasters which followed on the abortive attempt of the Israelites
to invade Canaan.
Footnote 213:
Sayce, _Babylonian Literature_, pp. 79, 80; Knudtzon, _Assyrische
Gebete an den Sonnengott_, pp. 73 _sqq._
Footnote 214:
Athenæus, _Deipn._ xiv. 639 c.
Footnote 215:
Amiaud’s translation of the Inscriptions of Telloh in the _Records of
the Past_, new ser., ii. pp. 83, 84.
Footnote 216:
This was clearly shown by Colenso, _The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua
critically examined_, Pt. i.
Footnote 217:
The _soss_ was 60, the _ner_ 600.
Footnote 218:
Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 475.
Footnote 219:
So in Josephus, _Antiq._ ii. 10.
Footnote 220:
Trumbull, _Kadesh-barnea_ (1884).
Footnote 221:
Numb. xiii. 21 seems to be a later exaggeration when compared with the
following verse. No argument, however, can be drawn from the statement
that the spies were absent only ‘forty days,’ since here, as
elsewhere, ‘forty’ merely means an unknown length of time.
Footnote 222:
Eshcol, however, was already the name of an Amorite chieftain of Mamre
in the time of Abraham (Gen. xiv. 13).
Footnote 223:
Numb. xxi. 1-3 is a combination of this abortive attempt and the
subsequent conquest of Arad and Zephath by Judah and Simeon (Judg. i.
16, 17), and is intended to resume the thread of the history which had
been broken by the insertion of chapter xv.
Footnote 224:
In Numb. xx. 1-13 a tradition about the waters of Meribah takes the
place of a history of the long period that elapsed between the first
and the second arrival at Kadesh, during which the numerous series of
stations mentioned in Numb. xxxiii. 19-36 was passed. A comparison
with Exod. xvii. 1-7 and Deut. xxxiii. 8 seems to show that the story
of ‘the water of Meribah’ has been transferred from Rephidim to
Kadesh. At Kadesh, indeed, there would have been no want of water (see
Gen. xiv. 7), and it may be that the meaning of the word Meribah,
‘contention,’ has been the cause of the transference. En-Mishpat, ‘the
Spring of Judgment,’ where contentions were decided, had been for
centuries the name of the spring at Kadesh-barnea. As for the name of
Zin, it possibly signifies ‘the dry place.’
Footnote 225:
Gen. xxxvi. 27; 1 Chron. i. 42.
Footnote 226:
In Deut. x. 6, 7 (which has been interpolated in the middle of the
narrative of the legislation at Mount Sinai), the order of events is:
(1) Departure from Beeroth of Beni-Yaakan to Mosera, (2) death of
Aaron at Mosera, (3) departure to Gudgodah, (4) departure to Yotbath.
In Numb. xx., xxxiii. 30-39 it is, on the contrary: (1) Departure from
Hashmonah to Moseroth, (2) departure to Beni-Yaakan, (3) departure to
Hor-hagidgad, the Gudgodah of Deuteronomy, (4) departure to Yotbathah,
(5) departure to Ebronah, (6) departure to Ezion-geber, (7) departure
to Kadesh, (8) departure to Mount Hor, (9) death of Aaron on Mount
Hor.
Footnote 227:
The passage was already corrupt in the time of the Septuagint
translators. But instead of _eth-wâhab_, their text reads _eth-zâhâb_.
If this was correct, the reference would probably be to Dhi-Zahab,
‘(the mines) of gold’ which, according to Deut. i. 1, was not far from
Sûph.
Footnote 228:
_Zeitschrift des Palästina Vereins_, xiv. pp. 142 _sq._ Tell ’Ashtereh
is the Ashteroth-Karnaim of Gen. xiv. 5.
Footnote 229:
Professor Erman reads them Akna-Zapn, perhaps Yakin-Zephon, ‘Jachin of
the North.’ Above the figures is the winged solar disk (Erman, _Der
Hiobstein_ in the _Zeitschrift des Palästina Vereins_, xiv. pp. 210,
211).
Footnote 230:
On the left side of the base of the second statue in front of the
pylon, where it follows the name of Assar, the Asshurim of Gen. xxv.
3; see Daressy, _Notice explicative des Ruines du Temple de Louxor_,
p. 19.
Footnote 231:
Bela’s city is stated to have been Dinhabah (Gen. xxxvi. 32), which
Dr. Neubauer has identified with Dunip, now Tennib, north-west of
Aleppo, which played an important part in the history of Western Asia
during the fifteenth century B.C.
Footnote 232:
W. A. I. i. 46; Col. iii. 29, 30. In another passage Esar-haddon
describes them as ‘serpents with two heads’ (Budge, _History of
Esar-haddon_, p. 120).
Footnote 233:
Bronze serpents were regarded in Babylonia as divine protectors of a
building, and were accordingly ‘set up’ at its entrance. Thus
Nebuchadrezzar says of the walls of Babylon, ‘On the thresholds of the
gates I set up mighty bulls of bronze and huge serpents that stood
erect’ (W. A. I. i. 65, i. 19-21).
Footnote 234:
It is called simply Iyîm in the official itinerary (Numb. xxxiii. 45).
Punon is the Pinon of Gen. xxxvi. 41, where it is coupled with Elah,
the El-Paran of Gen. xiv. 6.
Footnote 235:
Those who wish to see what can be done by ingenious philological
conjectures which satisfy none but their authors may turn to a paper
by Professor Budde in the _Actes du Dixième Congrès Internationale des
Orientalistes_, iii. pp. 13-18, where they will find a ‘revised’
version of Numb. xxi. 17, 18. The two last lines are changed into
‘With the sceptre, with their staves: From the desert a gift!’
Footnote 236:
Numb. xxxii. 41, 42; Deut. iii. 14. We learn from Judg. x. 3, 4, that
Jair was one of the judges, so that the conquest of Havoth-Jair must
have taken place long after the death of Moses.
Footnote 237:
Now Dar’at (pronounced Azr’ât by the Bedâwin) and Tell-Ashtereh.
Footnote 238:
Zippor of Gaza was the name of the father of a certain Baal- ... whose
servant carried letters in the third year of Meneptah II. from Egypt
to Khai, the Egyptian governor of the fellahin or Perizzites of
Palestine, and the king of Tyre (Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_,
Eng. tr., second edit., ii., p. 126).
Footnote 239:
Ammiya is said to have been seized by Ebed-Asherah the Amorite (_The
Tel el-Amarna Tablets in the British Museum_, 12. 25., 15. 27). It is
also called Amma (_ib._ 17. 7., 37. 58, where it is associated with
Ubi, the Aup of the Egyptian inscriptions) and Ammi (W. and A. 89.
13).
Footnote 240:
If the two Balaams, ‘son of Beor,’ are really the same person, Edomite
and Israelitish history will have handed down two different
conceptions of him. The Israelitish chronology, moreover, would make
it impossible for him to have been the _first_ Edomite king (see Numb.
xx. 14).
Footnote 241:
Sheth are the Sutu of the Assyrian inscriptions, the Sittiu or
‘Archers’ of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Bedâwin of modern
geography. The Beni-Sheth will be the Midianite Bedâwin who are
associated with the Moabites in the Pentateuch (Numb. xxii. 4, 7; xxv.
1-18; xxxi. 8).
Footnote 242:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. pp. 61-65.
Footnote 243:
Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) boasts of having sailed upon the
Mediterranean in a ship of Arvad, and of there killing a dolphin,
while his son, Assur-bil-kala, erected statues in the cities of ‘the
land of the Amorites’ (W. A. I. i. 6, No. vi.). A little later
Assur-irbi carved an image of himself on Mount Amanus, near the Gulf
of Antioch, but the capture by the king of Aram of Mutkina, which
guarded the ford over the Euphrates, subsequently cut him off from the
west. Palestine is already called Ebir-nâri, ‘the land beyond the
river,’ in an Assyrian inscription which Professor Hommel would refer
to the age of Assur-bil-kala, the son of Tiglath-pileser I. (_The
Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, p. 196). Professor D. H. Müller (_Die
Propheten_, p. 215) conjecturally emends the Hebrew text of Numb.
xxiii. 23, 24, and sees in it a reference to the kingdom of Samalla,
to the north-east of the Gulf of Antioch. The two verses become in his
translation, ‘[And he saw Samalla], and began his speech, and said,
Alas, who will survive of Samalla? And ships [shall come] from the
coast of Chittim, and Asshur shall oppress him, and Eber shall oppress
him, and he himself is destined to destruction.’ Samalla, however, was
only the Assyrian name of a district called by natives of Northern
Syria Ya’di and Gurgum; nor is it easy to understand how Balaam could
have ‘seen’ the north of Syria from Moab. Professor Hommel is more
probably right in his view that Asshur here does not signify the
Assyrians, but the Asshurim to the south of Palestine (Gen. xxv. 3,
18).
Footnote 244:
For the Messianic prophecy of Ameni, see above, p. 175.
Footnote 245:
Similar cities of refuge, called _puhonua_, existed in Hawaii. ‘A
thief or a murderer might be pursued to the very gateway of one of
those cities; but as soon as he crossed the threshold of that gate,
even though the gate were open and no barrier hindered pursuit, he was
safe as at the city altar. When once within the sacred city, the
fugitive’s first duty was to present himself before the idol and
return thanks for his protection’ (Trumbull, _The Threshold Covenant_,
p. 151, quoting Ellis, _Through Hawaii_, pp. 155 _sq._, and Bird, _Six
Months in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 135 _sq._). For the _asyla_ of
Asia Minor see Barth, _De Asylis Græcis_ (1888); Daremberg et Saglio,
_Dictionnaire des Antiquités, Grecques et Romaines_, i. pp. 505
_sqq._; Pauly’s _Real-Encyclopädie_ (ed. Wissowa), iv. pp. 1884-5.
Footnote 246:
Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_ (Eng. tr.), p. 299.
Footnote 247:
Cornelius Nepos, _Them._ ii. 10.
Footnote 248:
Mahaffy, _The Empire of the Ptolemies_, pp. 144, 156-158. For the
_hiera_ or priestly cities of Asia Minor, see Ramsay, _The Cities and
Bishoprics of Phrygia_, pp. 101 _sqq._; their constitution resembled
very closely that of the Levitical cities in Israel. Examples of such
cities in the history of Israel are Nob in the time of Saul and
Anathoth in the age of Jeremiah.
Footnote 249:
The order of events is in many places confused, which probably points
to later insertions in the text. See, for example, Deut. x. 6-9, which
interrupts the context, and has nothing to do either with what
precedes or with what follows.
Footnote 250:
_E.g._ Deut. xiv. 21, compared with Lev. xvii. 14-16.
Footnote 251:
In this respect it resembles the ‘Negative Confession’ of the Egyptian
Book of the Dead, which the soul of the dead man was required to make
before the judges of the other world (Wiedemann, _Religion der alten
Aegypter_, pp. 132, 133).
Footnote 252:
Levi is included among the six tribes which stood on Mount Gerizim to
bless. This is an inadvertency, as the Levites were placed on both
mountains, it being their duty to utter the curses as well as the
blessings.
Footnote 253:
If it did so, xxxiii. 4 can hardly be original. Perhaps Yahveh rather
than Moses was described as ‘king in Jeshurun’ (cf. _v._ 26). A very
ingenious attempt has been made by Dr. Hayman to explain the
corruptions of the text in the song by the theory that it was
originally written on a clay tablet, a fracture of which has caused
some of the words at the ends of the lines to be lost.
Footnote 254:
Cf. 1 Chron. iv. 22.
CHAPTER IV
THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN
Joshua not the Conqueror of Canaan—The Conquest gradual—The Passage
of the Jordan—Jericho, Ai and the Gibeonites—Battle of
Makkedah—Lachish and Hazor—The Kenizzites at Hebron and
Kirjath-Sepher—Shechem—Death of Joshua.
Hebrew tradition ascribed the conquest of Canaan to Joshua the son of
Nun. But when we come to examine the book of Joshua or the book of
Judges, we find that the extent of his work has been greatly magnified
in the imagination of later ages. The Ephraimitish chieftain
successfully established Israel on the western side of the Jordan,
gained permanent possession of Mount Ephraim, and defeated the
Canaanitish princes to the south and north. But the conquest of Canaan
was a longer work, which was not completed till the days of David and
Solomon.
The first chapter of Judges tells us in outline what the map of
Palestine was like after the settlement of the Israelitish tribes. In
the south the mountainous country was held by the Edomite tribe of Caleb
as well as by the more strictly Israelitish tribe of Judah. But it was
only ‘the mountain’ that was thus held. Though ‘the Lord was with
Judah,’ he ‘could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because
they had chariots of iron.’ Further south, however, Judah and Simeon in
combination succeeded in making themselves masters of the Negeb or
desert plain as far as Zephath, where a mixed population, partly
Israelitish, partly Edomite, and partly Kenite, took the place of the
older inhabitants.
Jerusalem remained in the hands of the Jebusites until it was captured
by David. It is true, we read (Judg. i. 8) that ‘the children of Judah
had fought against Jerusalem, and had taken it and smitten it with the
edge of the sword.’ But if so, it must soon have been again fortified by
its former possessors, since we are expressly told (Judg. i. 21) that
the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited
Jerusalem; but the Jebusites ‘dwell with the children of Judah in
Jerusalem unto this day.’[255] Modern critics have been in the habit of
dismissing the alleged capture of the city as unhistorical, but it is
quite possible that Jerusalem really suffered momentarily from a sudden
raid. The capture of the city is not ascribed to Joshua—indeed, though
he defeated its king and his allies, he seems to have made no effort to
reduce the city itself—and it is said to have been effected by Judah
after Joshua’s death. This may have been at any time during the period
of the Judges. The Tel el-Amarna tablets show us how easily the cities
of Canaan could be taken and retaken in the course of local quarrels,
and the fact that Jerusalem was for a while in Jewish hands seems to
form an integral part of the story of the conquest of Bezek.
Even the great sanctuary of Beth-el, destined to be the possession of
Benjamin as well as of Ephraim,[256] had not fallen into the hands of
‘the house of Joseph’ when Joshua died, though the ‘ruined heap’ of Ai
which lay near it was one of the first of the Israelitish conquests. All
the chief towns in the territory of Manasseh—Megiddo and Taanach, Dor
and Beth-Shean—remained Canaanite, the utmost that Israel could do in
the days of its strength being to exact tribute from them. Gezer defied
the power of Ephraim down to the time when it was given to Solomon by
the Egyptian Pharaoh; while the great cities of Zebulon and Naphtali,
like those of Manasseh, never became Israelitish, but paid tribute to
the Hebrews whenever the latter were ‘strong.’ Asher failed to secure
the territory that had been assigned to him, where Moses in his song had
promised that his foot should be dipped in oil and his sandals should be
of iron and bronze. The Phœnicians continued to hold the coast long
after the Israelitish tribes had been carried into Assyrian captivity,
and even in the mountains that overlooked the shore the Asherites were
forced to live and be lost among the older Canaanites (Judg. i. 32).
‘The children of Dan’ were in even worse case; the Amorites drove them
into the mountains and ‘would not suffer them to come down to the
valley.’ When at last their enemies were made tributary by ‘the house of
Joseph,’ it was too late; the tribe of Dan was merged into that of
Judah, or had found a refuge in the city of Laish in the extreme north.
Joshua, therefore, was not the conqueror of Canaan in any exact sense of
the term. The districts east of the Jordan had been occupied by the
Israelites before the death of Moses, and north of Moab the occupation
had been fairly complete. In Canaan itself the amount of territory won
by Joshua was practically confined to the passage over the Jordan and
the mountainous region of the centre. Few of the Canaanitish cities were
captured by him; and with the exception of Jericho and Lachish, and
perhaps Hazor, none of them was of primary importance. But he succeeded
in doing what had been attempted in vain in earlier days; he led his
people into Palestine, and planted them there so firmly that the future
conquest of the whole country became merely a matter of time.
It was at Jericho, ‘the city of palms,’ that the passage into Canaan was
forced. The army of Israel crossed the Jordan dry-shod, for ‘the waters
which came down from above stood and rose up upon an heap very far from
the city Adam, that is beside Zaretan; and those which came down towards
the sea of the plain, even the Salt Sea, failed, and were cut off.’ A
similar phenomenon is recorded as having occurred in the Middle Ages. M.
Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out a passage in the Arabic historian
Nowairi, in which an account is given of the construction in A.D. 1266
of a bridge across the Jordan by the Sultan Beybars I. of Egypt, when in
consequence of a landslip the bed of the river was for a time left dry.
The bridge was built on five arches between the stream of the Qurawa and
Tel Damieh, perhaps the Adam of the Old Testament. But no sooner was it
completed than ‘part of the piers gave way. The Sultan was greatly
vexed, and blamed the builders, and sent them back to repair the damage.
They found the task very difficult, owing to the rise of the waters and
the strength of the current. But in the night preceding the dawn of the
17th of the month Rabi the First of the year of the Hijra 666 (_i.e._
the 8th of December, A.D. 1267) the water of the river ceased to flow so
that none remained in its bed. The people hurried and kindled numerous
fires and cressets, and seized the opportunity offered by the
occurrence. They remedied the defects in the piers, and strengthened
them, and effected repairs which would otherwise have been impossible.
They then despatched mounted men to ascertain the nature of the event
that had occurred. The riders urged their horses, and found that a lofty
mound (_Kabâr_) which overlooked the river on the west had fallen into
it and dammed it up. A _Kabâr_ resembles a hill, but is not actually a
hill, for water will quickly disintegrate it into mud. The water was
held up, and had spread itself over the valley above the dam. The
messengers returned with this explanation, and the water was arrested
from midnight until the 4th hour of the day. Then the water prevailed
upon the dam and broke it up. The water flowed down in a body equal in
depth to the length of a lance, but made no impression upon the building
owing to the strength given to it.’[257]
The megalithic ‘circle’ of Gilgal commemorated the passage of the
Jordan. The camp was fixed there, and a popular etymology explained the
name by the circumcision that had ‘rolled away the reproach of
Egypt.’[258] Jericho, the city of the ‘Moon-god’ Yârêakh, was next
invested and captured in spite of its strong walls. All its inhabitants
were put to the sword, Rahab only being spared to become the founder of
a family in Israel because she had sheltered the Israelitish spies. The
city was razed to the ground, and was not again rebuilt till the reign
of Ahab.
We can still trace the site of Jericho in the hollow of the deep valley
through which the Jordan flows into the Dead Sea. Its ruins lie round
about the ’Ain es-Sultân, a spring of warm water which gushes into an
ancient basin, overgrown with reeds and brushwood, among which the birds
flutter and watch the fish in the water below. Above towers the huge
mass of Mount Qarantel, while the black soil which forms the floor of
the hollow is covered with small artificial mounds of earth, and is
thick with the decayed relics of a tropical vegetation. In the coldest
weather it is still warm at Jericho; in summer the damp heat is
stifling, and the mosquitoes are innumerable. Now it is given over to
idle Bedâwin, but in the old days when the country was filled with an
industrious population, it was as ‘the garden of the Lord.’ No place in
Palestine was more fertile, and it commanded the ford that led across
the Jordan from the east.
The destruction of Jericho opened to Joshua the way into Canaan. Laden
with its spoil, the Israelites matched westward, up into the mountains
and through the pass of Michmash towards Beth-el. Beth-el itself was too
strong to be attacked. But a neighbouring town, whose later name of Ai,
‘the ruined heap,’ was a lasting record of its fate, was not so
fortunate. The Israelites took it by means of an ambuscade, and the same
merciless treatment was dealt out to it that had been dealt to Jericho.
The inhabitants were all massacred, ‘only the cattle and the spoil
Israel took for a prey unto themselves.’
The conquest of Ai, however, had not been easy. The Canaanites had made
a brave defence, and the invaders had at first suffered a check. The
cause was discovered in the Israelitish camp. A Jew, Achan or Achar, had
hidden under his tent some of the booty of Jericho which ought to have
been either destroyed or dedicated to Yahveh. ‘A goodly Babylonish
garment,’ two hundred shekels of silver, and a tongue-like wedge of gold
fifty shekels in weight, were the objects which he had coveted and
concealed. But the order had been issued that all objects of metal
should be given to the tabernacle, and that all things else should be
burned with fire. Achan accordingly was condemned to be stoned to death,
and along with him the rest of his family as well as his oxen, his
asses, and his sheep. Then the bodies were burnt, and a heap of stones
piled over them in memory of the event.
The mention of the ‘goodly Babylonish garment’ takes us back to the time
when Assyria had not as yet supplanted Babylonia in the west. For
centuries Babylonia had been the home of weavers and embroiderers whose
fabrics were famous all over the east. The cuneiform tablets contain
long lists of articles of clothing, each of which had its own name; and,
as we learn from the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, the merchants of
Babylonia found a ready market for their goods in the cities of Canaan.
The age of the Exodus marks the period when the old peaceful intercourse
with Babylonia was coming to an end; alien peoples had barred the road
across the Euphrates, and Babylon itself was about to fall into the
hands of an Assyrian conqueror. Henceforth it was Assyria, and not
Babylonia, whose name was known or feared in Palestine, and the writer
of a later day would have spoken of the wares of Assyria rather than
those of the Babylonians.[259]
The destruction of Ai gave Joshua a foothold in the mountain of Ephraim.
Then came the league with the Gibeonites, secured, so we are told, by
craft. Modern criticism, with needless scepticism, has seen in the
narrative merely a popular legend to account for the fact that the four
cities which formed the western half of the future territory of Benjamin
were laid under tribute, and not destroyed. But the extermination of the
Canaanites was relative, not absolute; their utter destruction, like
that of the Britons by the Saxon invaders, was the dream of a later day.
As we have seen, the Hebrew occupation of Canaan was a slow and gradual
process, and in the more important cities the older population remained
to the end. Even the temple of Solomon was built on the threshing-floor
of a Jebusite, and the heads of the prisoners which surmount the names
of the places captured by Shishak in the south of Palestine are Amorite
rather than Jewish. The Amorite population was still predominant there;
and the fellahin of to-day, as has been pointed out by M.
Clermont-Ganneau, are the lineal descendants of the old races.[260]
Gibeon, Chephirah, Beeroth, and Kirjath-jearim are not the only cities
of which we hear as having been made tributary. This was also the case
with Megiddo and Taanach, Beth-shean, Dor, and Ibleam (Judg. i. 27), as
well as with the chief cities in the territories of Zebulon and Naphtali
(Judg. i. 30, 33); while, on the other hand, the tribe of Issachar
became tributary to its Canaanitish neighbours (Gen. xlix. 15).[261] It
is more profitable to exact tribute from a wealthy and industrious
population than to exterminate it, as Mohammed found; and the near
neighbourhood of the central sanctuaries of Israel, first at Shiloh,
then at Jerusalem and Beth-el, afforded a special reason why the
Gibeonites should be made ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water for the
house of God.’
The greater part of the future territory of Benjamin was now in
Israelitish hands. The destruction of Jericho had secured the ford
across the Jordan and communication with the Israelitish settlers on the
east side of the river. But it must be remembered that the tribe of
Benjamin as distinct from that of Ephraim did not as yet exist. Its
territory formed the southern part of Mount Ephraim, and for military
and political purposes the two tribes constituted a single whole. This
was still the case as late as the age of Deborah and Barak, when the
power of Ephraim, ‘behind’ Benjamin, is said to extend as far as the
desert of the Amalekites to the south of Judah (Judg. v. 14). The name
of Benjamin, in fact, means ‘the southerner’; the tribe lay southward of
Ephraim; and the second name by which it was known—that of Ben-Oni, ‘the
Onite’—indicated that it was settled round the great sanctuary of
Beth-On. And such indeed was the case when the tribe had vindicated its
individual existence and been definitely separated from Ephraim. Beth-On
or Beth-el was then included within its boundaries (Josh. xviii. 22).
Originally, however, Beth-el belonged to Ephraim, and had been an
Ephraimitish conquest (Judg. i. 22-26).
The conquest of Beth-el did not take place until after Joshua’s death,
and as long as it remained independent it must have been a constant
menace to the Israelitish settlers in Mount Ephraim. With its capture
all danger passed away, and Mount Ephraim—the heart of Palestine—became
at last the secure possession of the ‘house of Joseph.’ From hence, as
from an impregnable fortress, they were able to make descents upon the
fertile lands to the west and attack the cities which stood there. The
powerful city of Gezer was eventually compelled to pay them tribute
(Josh. xvi. 10), and the territory which had been assigned to Dan became
tributary to ‘the house of Joseph’ (Judg. i. 35).
But all this was after Joshua had passed away. Besides crossing the
Jordan and securing a footing in Mount Ephraim, Joshua had made a
successful raid into those mountains in the ‘Negeb’ of Judah which had
been so fatal to the first Israelitish invaders of Canaan. The
destruction of Ai had excited the fears of Adoni-zedek of Jerusalem, and
in the league that had been made between Gibeon and the invaders he saw
danger to his own state. Gibeon lay only a few miles to the north of
Jerusalem, and the Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown us that the
neighbourhood of two Canaanitish cities was a quite sufficient cause of
war between them. When the tablets were written, Ebed-Tob was king of
Jerusalem, and his letters to the Pharaoh are filled with imploring
appeals for help against his enemies. These were partly the neighbouring
‘governors,’ partly the Khabiri or ‘Confederates,’ who seem to have been
of foreign origin, and who had already captured some of his cities. The
situation, therefore, was very much like what it was in the later days
of Adoni-zedek, the place of the Egyptian ‘governors’ being taken by
Gibeon, while the Khabiri were represented by the Israelites. But
Adoni-zedek had no suzerain lord in Egypt to whom he could apply for
aid. He was therefore forced to turn to the Canaanitish princes around
him and form a league with them against the invading hordes from the
desert. Hoham of Hebron, Piram of Jarmuth, Yaphia of Lachish, and Debir
of Eglon rallied to his summons, and the combined forces marched against
Gibeon and besieged the town.[262] The Gibeonites at once sent
messengers to Joshua, who accordingly left the camp at Gilgal and fell
suddenly on the besieging army. The Canaanites were utterly routed, and
fled towards Beth-horon and Makkedah, a hailstorm adding to their
discomfiture. The five kings were discovered hiding in a cave at
Makkedah, and dragged before Joshua, who pitilessly put them all to
death. The bodies were buried in the cave and great stones laid upon its
mouth, which, the compiler of the book of Joshua states, remained there
unto his day (Josh. x. 27).
The defeat of the Canaanite army was followed by the capture of Makkedah
and Libnah, which opened the road to Lachish. The site of Lachish was
rediscovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1890 at Tell el-Hesy,
sixteen miles eastward of Gaza. The great mound that covers its ruins
has been excavated partly by him, partly by Dr. Bliss, and the huge wall
that surrounded it in the days of the Amorites, and before which the
Israelites encamped, has been explored and measured.[263]
The city stood on a natural eminence some forty feet in height. Close to
it rises the only good spring of water in the district, which when
swollen by the winter rains becomes the torrent of the Hesy. The stream
ran past the eastern side of the city, and has eaten away part of the
remains of the successive cities which rose upon the site, one above the
ruins of the other. Fragments of the pottery used by the Amorite
defenders of the city in the days of Joshua can now be seen in the rooms
of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
The walls of Lachish, like those of the cities of Egypt, were built of
crude brick, and were nearly thirty feet in thickness. It had, in fact,
long been one of the principal fortresses of Southern Palestine. Among
the Tel el-Amarna tablets are letters from two of its governors Zimrida
and Yabniel, the first of whom was murdered, and who is mentioned on
another tablet found by Dr. Bliss among the ruins of Lachish itself. Its
capture, therefore, by the Israelites was a serious blow to the
Canaanites in the southern part of the country. But, though Horam king
of Gezer came to its assistance, all was no avail; the strong fortress
fell at last before the invaders, and ‘all the souls’ that were in it
were massacred.[264] For at least a century its site lay desolate and
uninhabited; and the explorers found in the soil that accumulated above
the ruins of the Amorite city nothing but the ashes of the camp-fires of
Bedâwin nomads.
Eglon, now probably Tell Ejlân, close to Tell el-Hesy, naturally shared
the fate of the neighbouring city. According to the compiler of the book
of Joshua, the fall of Hebron and Debir followed immediately after that
of Eglon. But this cannot be correct. Debir, as we afterwards learn, was
taken at a later date by Othniel (Josh. xv. 16, 17; Judg. i. 12, 13),
not by Joshua, and the error seems to have been due to the fact that
Debir was the name of the king of Eglon. It was the king and not the
town of that name who fell before the arms of Joshua.
It is, moreover, difficult to reconcile the statement that Hebron was
captured by Joshua after the defeat of the five kings with the narrative
of its capture by Caleb, which is given in detail elsewhere (Josh. xv.
13, 14; Judg. i. 9, 10). Here, as in other parts of the book of Joshua,
we find a tendency to ascribe the gradual occupation of Canaan to a
single point of time, and to assign all the successive conquests made in
it by the Israelites to the general who first led them across the
Jordan. The individual hero has absorbed all the victories gained by his
people, and the past has been foreshortened in the retrospect of the
later historian. As in the books of Kings the murder of Sennacherib is
made to follow immediately after his flight from Judah twenty years
before, so in the book of Joshua, the conquest of Canaan is all placed
in one age, the lifetime of the hero himself. As Moses was the lawgiver
of Israel and its deliverer from the house of bondage, posterity saw in
his successor the conqueror of Canaan.
It is noticeable, however, that neither Jerusalem nor Gezer is said to
have been taken after the battle of Makkedah. Both cities were doubtless
too strong to be attacked; and though Gezer was subsequently forced to
become the vassal of Ephraim, Jerusalem was destined to fall before a
Jewish and not an Ephraimitish leader.
The battle of Makkedah became the subject of a national song. It was
embodied, like David’s dirge over Saul and Jonathan, in the book of
Jashar, a fragment of which is quoted by the compiler of the book of
Joshua. ‘Sun, be thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, moon, in the valley
of Ajalon!’ cried Joshua, ‘in the sight of Israel,’ ‘when the Lord
delivered up the Amorites’ before them: ‘and the sun was still, and the
moon stayed until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.’
So ran the words of the poem, and the prose historian seems to have
taken them literally.
The alliance with Gibeon and the destruction of Lachish opened the way
to the south. Westward, the sea-coast was in the hands of the
Philistines, whom the Israelites would have found more formidable
enemies than the disunited and effeminate Canaanites. The five
Philistine cities, accordingly, which had been but recently wrested from
Egyptian hands, were left untouched, and the Israelitish raiders made
their way into the Negeb towards the south-east, where they succeeded in
penetrating as far as Arad and Zephath. They had thus reached the very
spot where the first attempt to invade Canaan had failed, and from which
the disappointed tribes had been driven back again into the wilderness.
Zephath was not far distant from Kadesh-barnea, so that it is with a
pardonable exaggeration that the Jewish historian describes Joshua as
smiting his enemies ‘from Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza’ (Josh. x. 41).
It is true that his victories in this part of Canaan have been
questioned. No detailed account is given of them, and it is only in the
list of the ‘kings’ who were overthrown by ‘Joshua and the children of
Israel’ on the western side of the Jordan that the names of Arad and
Zephath, or Hormah, appear (Josh. xii. 14). Moreover, we are told in the
book of Judges (i. 17) that Zephath was destroyed by Judah and Simeon
after the death of the Ephraimitish leader (_v._ 1), a memorial of the
destruction being preserved in the change of name to Hormah. But it must
be noted that it is only the ‘kings’ of Arad and Zephath who are said to
have been ‘smitten’ by Joshua, not the cities over which they ruled. The
expedition to the Negeb was merely a raid, such as the possession of
Lachish and the mountainous country to the north-west of it enabled the
Israelitish chieftain to make with impunity. Indeed, such raids into the
fertile land to the south would have been natural, if not inevitable.
No detailed account was preserved of them, since they were connected
with no striking and important event, like the capture and destruction
of a Canaanitish city. The four military deeds with which history
associated the name of Joshua centered each of them round the overthrow
of a Canaanitish stronghold and gave the Israelites the command of the
surrounding country. They were campaigns which led to the permanent
possession of territory, not mere raids or barren victories. The capture
of Jericho secured the passage across the Jordan, that of Ai planted
Ephraim and Benjamin in the mountains of central Palestine, the
destruction of Lachish opened up communication with that desert of the
south in which the Israelites had received the legislation of
Kadesh-barnea, while the overthrow of the king of Hazor gave them a
foothold in the north. The alliance with the Gibeonites was of equal
importance, for it secured friends and allies in the very heart of the
enemy’s country, and its firstfruits were the victory at Makkedah and
the destruction of Lachish. Jericho, Ai, Lachish, Hazor, and
Gibeon,—these were the names which guaranteed to Joshua his claim to
have been the conqueror of Canaan.
The victory at Hazor seems to have been his last. Hazor stood near
Kadesh of Galilee, now represented by the ruins of Qedes, to the north
of Safed, and on the western side of the marshes of Hûleh, the Lake
Merom of the Old Testament.[265] In the age of the Tel el-Amarna letters
it was still governed by its native kings, and in one of them an
Egyptian officer complains that the king had joined with Sidon in
intriguing with the Bedâwin.[266] When the Israelites entered Palestine
it was the leading city of the northern part of the country. While
Megiddo was the capital of the centre of the country, Hazor was the
capital of the north. Its king, Jabin, now put himself at the head of a
great confederacy which extended from Sidon to Dor on the sea-coast, and
from the slopes of Hermon to the Sea of Galilee in the inland region.
Among the confederates history remembered the names of Jobab, the king
of Madon, and the kings of Shimron and Achshaph. Achshaph is the
Phœnician Ekdippa, now Zîb, on the sea-coast, which is called Aksap by
Thothmes III. But Madon is written Marôn in the Septuagint, though the
reading of the Hebrew text seems to be confirmed by the modern name of
Khurbet Madîn, ‘the ruins of Madîn.’ Shimron, moreover, is Symoôn in the
Septuagint, and this form of the name finds support in the Simônias of
Josephus, Simonia in the Talmud, now Semûnieh, sixteen miles from
Khurbet Madîn. Mr. Tomkins would identify it with the Shmânau of
Thothmes III.[267]
But, again, the reading of the Hebrew text is probably the more correct.
In what may be termed the official list of Joshua’s victories (Josh.
xii. 20), the name appears as Shimronmeron, and this reminds us of
Samsi-muruna (‘the Sun-god is lord’), which is given by the Assyrian
inscriptions as the name of a town in this very neighbourhood. It was
from ‘Menahem, king of Samsi-muruna,’ that Sennacherib received tribute
during his campaign against Hezekiah, and it is possible that Shimron
may be a contracted form of Shem[esh-me]ron or Sam[si-mu]runa.
Once more criticism has raised doubts as to the truth of the narrative.
We hear of another Jabin of Hazor, at a later date, in the time of
Deborah and Barak, and we hear also of another great victory gained by
Israel over Jabin’s troops. It is urged that if Hazor had been burnt to
the ground by Joshua, and all its inhabitants put to the sword, it could
hardly have risen so soon again from its ashes and have assumed a
leading position in the north. Had Joshua’s conquest been as complete as
it is represented to have been, the country would have been Israelitish,
and not Canaanite.
But it does not follow that because there was one king of Hazor called
Jabin, there should not have been another of the same name. Such
repetitions of name have been common in other countries of the world,
and it is difficult to see why the rulers of Hazor should not be allowed
a similar privilege. That a city should rise from its ruins and recover
its former power is again no unique event. Much depends upon its
position and the character of its inhabitants. We gather from the
Egyptian annals that the towns of Canaan were accustomed to capture and
temporary destruction. But they soon recovered themselves, the old
population flocked back, and their ruined walls were again repaired.
It is true that the conquest of the country by Joshua could not have
been as thorough as the narrative describes. But that we already knew
from the first chapter of Judges (vv. 30-33). Oriental expressions and
modes of thought are not to be measured by the precise terminology of
the modern West, and an Eastern writer speaks absolutely where we should
speak relatively. When it is said that ‘all the earth sought to Solomon,
to hear his wisdom’ (1 Kings x. 24), the universality of the statement
must be very considerably limited, and so too when it is said that
‘Joshua took all that land’ (Josh. xi. 16), the expression admits of a
similarly liberal discount. In fact, the narrative itself contains its
own corrective. The words, ‘All the cities of those kings ... did Joshua
take, and smote them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed
them’ (ver. 12), are followed immediately by the conditioning clause,
‘Only the cities which were built upon _tels_, Israel burned none of
them: Hazor alone did Joshua burn.’
Between the story of Joshua’s campaign and that of the rising under
Barak there is no resemblance whatever. In the time of the Hebrew judge
the army of Jabin was commanded by Sisera, not by Jabin himself. The
decisive battle took place on the banks of the Kishon, not on the shores
of Lake Hûleh, miles away to the north, and the city of Hazor was
neither captured nor destroyed. Kadesh of Galilee and other districts
were already in the hands of the Israelites, and must therefore have
been occupied by them at some earlier period. The account in the book of
Joshua, brief as it is, tells us when the occupation took place.
Jabin had summoned his allies and vassals to oppose the northward march
of the Israelites. The Canaanites stood upon the defensive, and the
Israelites therefore must have been the attacking party. That they did
not cross the Jordan from the plains of Bashan we may gather from the
list of the kings vanquished by Joshua.[268] Among them we find the
kings of Taanach and Megiddo, Kadesh of Naphtali and Jokneam, Dor,
Gilgal, and Tirzah.[269] Tirzah would have been the first stage
northward of Shechem; the fortress of Megiddo commanded the plain of
Jezreel. A common danger would thus have forced the kings of the centre
and the north of Canaan to fight together, and the confederacy would
have covered much the same extent of territory as that which confronted
Barak on the banks of the Kishon. But instead of advancing upon the
enemy from the north, as was the case with Barak, Joshua would have
moved up from the south.
It was on the shore of Lake Merom that the Israelites fell suddenly upon
the Canaanitish encampment. The Canaanites were taken by surprise and
fled in all directions. Some made their way across the narrow gorge of
the Jordan towards Mizpeh of Gilead;[270] the larger body was pursued as
far as Sidon, where they at last found a shelter behind the strong walls
of the city. The chariots of their cavalry, useless to mountaineers,
were burned, and their horses were maimed. The flight of the army had
left Hazor undefended; the Israelites accordingly turned back from the
pursuit, and took the city by assault. Its houses were burned, its spoil
carried away, and ‘every man’ was smitten with the edge of the sword,
‘neither left they any to breathe.’ The merciless ferocity of Joshua
finds a close parallel in that of the Assyrian kings.
The life of Joshua was drawing to an end. He was an old man; it was said
he was 110 years of age at his death, the length of time the Egyptian
wished his friends to live. He had brought his people into the Promised
Land, had shown them how to take cities and defeat their adversaries,
and had planted Israel firmly in the mountainous part of Canaan. Before
his death the tribes were provisionally established in the territories
subsequently called after their names. We are not bound to believe that
the division of the land was made with the mathematical precision which
had become possible in the days of the compiler of the book of Joshua,
but to deny that it was made at all is merely an abuse of criticism. In
the period of the Judges we find most of the tribes actually settled in
the very districts which we are told were given to them, and the fact
that in one or two instances—Dan and Simeon, for example—the tribe never
gained possession of the larger part of the territory said to have been
assigned to it, shows that the story of the division could not have been
based on the later geographical position of the tribes. The doctrine of
development may have no limitations in the domain of organic nature, but
history has to take account of individual action and the arbitrary
enactments of great men. To suppose that the tribal division of
Palestine was the result of a process of development has little in
support of it, and fails to explain the geographical position
traditionally assigned to a tribe like Dan.
There was one tribe, however, to whose history the theory of development
is to some extent applicable. This was the tribe of Judah. The tribe was
only partly of Israelitish descent. Its most important family, that of
Caleb and Othniel, belonged to the Edomite tribe of Kenaz; while another
Edomite tribe, that of Jerahmeel, occupied the southern part of the
Jewish territory (1 Chron. ii. 25-33, 42). Even ‘the families of the
scribes which dwelt at Jabez’ were Kenites from Midian (1 Chron. ii.
55).[271] Down to the time of the kings the Israelitish members of the
tribe of Judah mixed freely with their neighbours; David himself was
descended from Ruth the Moabitess, and Bath-sheba, the mother of his
successor, had been the wife of a Hittite. As has been already noticed,
the prisoners whose figures surmount the names of Shishak’s conquests in
Judah have the features of the Amorite and not of the Jew. In the Song
of Deborah the tribe of Judah, like those of Dan and Simeon, is unknown.
It is Ephraim and Benjamin who form the Israelitish vanguard against the
Amalekites of the southern desert. And the deliverers of southern Israel
from its two first oppressors were Othniel the Kenizzite and Ehud the
Benjamite.
The tribe of Judah as a compact and definite whole first makes its
appearance at a later period, and, unlike the other tribes of Israel,
represents a geographical rather than an ethnographical unity.[272] Jews
were commingled in it with Edomites, as well as with other tribes—Dan,
Simeon, and Levi. Its cities were only partly Israelitish; even the
future capital, Jerusalem, retained its Jebusite population, and the
temple was built on land that had been bought from a Gentile owner.
Nevertheless, the fact that both tribe and territory bore to the last
the name of Judah indicates that in this mixture of nationalities the
Hebrew element remained the stronger and more predominant. It is true
that Hebron, the first centre and capital of Judah, had been conquered,
not by a Jew, but by the Kenizzite Caleb, and that his brother Othniel
was the first ‘Judge’; but it is also true that the settlement of the
country was in the main due to an amalgamation of Hebrew and Edomite
elements. Gedor, Socho, Zanoah, Keilah, and Eshtemoa traced their second
foundation to a Kenizzite father and a Jewish mother (1 Chron. iii. 18,
19), and Hebron itself soon ceased to be distinctively Kenizzite and
became Jewish.
Caleb the Kenizzite had been one of the spies sent out from
Kadesh-barnea when the Israelites made their first, and unsuccessful,
attempt to invade Canaan. He consequently belonged to the generation
which had escaped from the bondage of Egypt, of which he and Joshua were
said to have been the only survivors at the time of the passage of the
Jordan. Hebron had been the chief point and goal of exploration on the
part of the spies, and it was from its neighbourhood that the grapes
were brought which testified to the fertility of the land. It was
natural, therefore, that Hebron should again be the object of Caleb’s
aim, and that while the Ephraimitish general was establishing himself in
the north Caleb should lead his followers to its assault. The
destruction of Lachish had opened the way; and the steep path which led
up the limestone hills from Lachish to Hebron was left undefended.
Modern writers have seen in the name of Caleb a mere tribal designation
denoting the ‘Calebites’ or ‘Dog-men.’ But the cuneiform inscriptions
show us that Caleb or ‘Dog’ was the name of an individual, and they also
explain how it came to be so. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets, as well as
in later Assyrian letters, the word _Kalbu_ or ‘Dog’ is used in the
sense of ‘officer’ or ‘messenger’; the king’s officer was his ‘faithful
dog,’ and the term was an honourable one.[273] It conveyed none of those
ideas of contempt or abuse with which it was afterwards associated in
the Semitic mind, and which may have had their origin in Arabia. It is
possible that Caleb had been an ‘officer’ of the Pharaoh before he
became a Hebrew spy.
The capture of Hebron is said to have taken place five years after the
passage of the Jordan (Josh. xiv. 10). At any rate, it was before the
death of Joshua (notwithstanding Judg. i. 1, 10). It was after that
event, however, that the further conquests of the Kenizzites were made.
Somewhere near Hebron, but higher in ‘the mountains,’ was the
Canaanitish city of Debir. Debir signified the ‘Sanctuary’; and it was
here, as in Babylonia and Assyria, that a great library of books was
stored in one of the chambers of the temple. Like the Babylonian cities,
moreover, Debir had more than one name. It was also called
Kirjath-Sannah, ‘the city of Instruction,’ from the schools which
gathered round its library,[274] and in the Old Testament it is further
known as Kirjath-Sepher or ‘Booktown.’ In _The Travels of the Mohar_,
however, a satirical account of a tourist’s adventures in Palestine,
which was written by an Egyptian in the reign of Ramses II., it is
termed Beth-Sopher, ‘the house of the scribe,’ and is coupled with
Kirjath-Anab. It is plain, therefore, that the Massoretic punctuation
Sepher ‘book’ is erroneous, and must be corrected to Sopher or ‘scribe.’
Whether Kirjath, ‘city,’ should also be corrected into Beth, ‘house’ or
‘temple,’ is more doubtful. _Beth_ would be the more appropriate term in
the case of a town which possessed a sanctuary, and it may be that the
word Kirjath has been derived from the neighbouring town of [Kirjath-]
Anab, which is called simply Anab in Josh. xv. 50. But it is also
possible that the Egyptian writer has made a mistake, and has
interchanged the words ‘city’ and ‘house,’ the true names of the two
cities having been Kirjath-Sopher and Beth-Anab.[275]
However this may be, Caleb promised his daughter Achsah as a reward to
the conqueror of Debir. The prize was won by his ‘younger brother’
Othniel, and the Canaanitish city was so completely destroyed that its
very site is still unknown. Its library perished in the ruins, though
the clay tablets with which it was doubtless filled must still be lying
beneath the soil, awaiting the discoverer who shall with their aid
reconstruct the ancient history of southern Canaan. Hebron was more
fortunate. The city was spared after its capture, and became the chief
seat of the Kenizzites, and subsequently, when the Kenizzites were
merged in Judah, the capital of Judah itself.
The Hebrew tribe of Judah was slow in following the example of its
Edomite comrades. The ‘children of Judah,’ it is said, had at first been
content to live with the Midianitish Kenites in the neighbourhood of
Jericho, and when the Kenites returned to the desert of Kadesh-barnea to
settle there along with them (Judg. i. 16). But there were other Jews
who remained behind in Canaan, and there carved out a patrimony for
themselves. Judah and Simeon, we are told, ‘went up’ together into the
country which had been allotted to them, and eventually succeeded in
occupying the greater part of it. The expression is a curious one, and
seems to imply that the invaders started from the desert of
Kadesh-barnea, though Lachish and its neighbourhood may be meant. At all
events, Adoni-bezek, ‘the lord of Bezek,’ was defeated and captured, and
his thumbs and great toes cut off, like those of the seventy vassal
princes who had ‘picked up their meat’ under his own table. It is added
that he was brought to Jerusalem, where he died.
That he was brought there by the Hebrews is not certain. However, the
compiler of the book of Judges seems to have thought so, as he goes on
to say, ‘And the children of Judah fought[276] against Jerusalem, and
took it, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and set the city on
fire.’ It is difficult to reconcile this with the very definite
statement in the book of Joshua (xv. 63), ‘As for the Jebusites, the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them
out: but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem
unto this day’; or with the equally explicit statement in the first
chapter of Judges itself (verse 21), ‘The children of Benjamin did not
drive out the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem; but the Jebusites
dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day.’[277]
The latter passage belongs to the period when Judah had not yet become a
corporate whole, and when, therefore, as in the Song of Deborah,
Benjamin was still regarded as forming the southern boundary of the
tribes of Israel; but the first passage takes us down to the time when
Benjamin had been supplanted by Judah, and Israel was being prepared to
receive a king. It was during the earlier period that the Levite of
Mount Ephraim, when returning from Beth-lehem, would not lodge in
‘Jebus’ because it was a ‘city of the Jebusites’ (Judg. xix. 10, 11);
the later period extended to the time when Jerusalem was taken by David,
and when the Jewish king, so far from massacring its inhabitants and
setting it on fire, allowed the Jebusites in it to retain their property
(2 Sam. xxiv. 18-24), and made it the capital of his empire. Doubtless
Jerusalem might have been captured by the ‘children of Judah,’ and
nevertheless have continued to exist. We may gather from the Tel
el-Amarna tablets that such an occurrence actually took place at the
close of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and one of the cities of
southern Canaan taken by Ramses II. was Shalama or Salem. But if so,
there could have been no massacre of the population and burning of the
town; the passages of the Old Testament which describe the Jebusites as
living uninterruptedly in their city are too clear and definite to admit
of such a supposition. On the contrary, the Jebusites lived in peace and
harmony along with both Jews and Benjamites; and were it not for the
words of the Levite (Judg. xix. 11), that Jerusalem was still ‘the city
of a stranger,’ we could well believe that the fate which overtook it in
the time of David had been anticipated in an earlier century. But
neither Benjamin nor Judah could ‘drive out the Jebusites that
inhabited’ the great fortress-city of Southern Palestine.
The rise of Judah dated from the overthrow of Adoni-bezek, ‘Afterwards,’
we read, ‘the children of Judah went down to fight against the
Canaanites that dwelt in the mountain, and in the Negeb of the south,
and in the plain.’ It was all long subsequent to the death both of
Joshua and of Caleb. The last survivors of the first attempt to
penetrate into that part of Canaan had passed away before it at last
fell—if only partially—into Israelitish hands. The first dreams of
conquest had long since made way for a sober and disappointing reality.
Canaan had proved for Israel a more difficult prize to secure than
Britain proved for the Saxons. It was only in the mountains and a few
isolated cities that the invaders succeeded in holding their own.
Elsewhere the walls and chariots of the Canaanites kept them at bay,
while the strongholds of the Philistines and Phœnicians barred them from
the coast. The children of Israel were compelled to dwell ‘among the
Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and
Jebusites,’ and there was little cause for wonder that ‘they took their
daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and
served their gods’ (Judg. iii. 5, 6).
Before Joshua died the tabernacle was set up at Shiloh, on the slopes of
Mount Ephraim, in the heart of the newly-conquered land. That the
central sanctuary should thus be under the protection of Ephraim was a
token that ‘the house of Joseph’ was paramount among the tribes of
Israel. A further token was the burial of the mummy of Joseph at
Shechem. Here, too, at Shechem were the two mountains Ebal and Gerizim,
on which the curses and the blessings of the Law had been ordered to be
pronounced. History has left no record of the conquest of the place, and
the name of the king of Shechem is not even found in the list of the
kings vanquished by Joshua. But the city must have fallen during the
early period of the invasion, and the narrative in Josh. viii. 33 would
imply that its capture followed closely upon the destruction of Ai.
We may gather from the silence of history that there was neither siege
nor massacre to make an impression on the memory of posterity. And the
inference is confirmed by what we know of the subsequent history of
Shechem. In the time of Gideon and Abimelech its population was still
half-Amorite (Judg. ix. 28). As at Jerusalem, the older inhabitants
cannot have been destroyed or driven out. Like the Gibeonites, they must
have made terms with the invaders, or mixed peaceably with them in the
course of years.
At the outset, however, Shechem would have been the capital of Ephraim.
Here was the sepulchre of the founder of ‘the house of Joseph,’ here
were the two sacred mountains of the Law, and here, too, it was that
Joshua gathered the people together to hear his last words. Like Moses
at Sinai and Kadesh-barnea, ‘Joshua made a covenant with the people ...
and set them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem. And Joshua wrote
these words in the book of the Law of God, and took a great stone, and
set it up there under the terebinth that was in the sanctuary of the
Lord.’ Here, therefore, was the local sanctuary of Ephraim, separate
from the central one at Shiloh, and a sacred terebinth stood within its
precincts. Criticism finds no reason to doubt that ‘the great stone’
spoken of in the text was actually set up, like a ‘Beth-el,’ under the
shadow of the tree, and it is hard to see why it should be more
sceptical towards the further statement that the covenant which the
stone commemorated was written by Joshua ‘in the book of the Law of
God.’
While Shechem was thus the local sanctuary of Ephraim, the tribes east
of the Jordan had consecrated a ‘great altar’ of their own on the banks
of the river. The altar was the occasion of a dispute between the two
branches of the house of Israel, which nearly resulted in war. But the
danger was averted through the mediation of the priests; and although
the tribes east and west of the Jordan necessarily had different
interests, it was long ere this led to open hostility, or even to
forgetfulness of their common ancestry and common God. Deborah
reproaches Reuben and Gilead for having stood aloof while Zebulon and
Naphtali were hazarding their lives in the field, and the son of Gideon
had his kingdom on the eastern side of the Jordan.
Joshua was buried at Timnath-serah or Timnath-heres[278] in Mount
Ephraim, in a piece of ground which had become the property of himself
and his family. The Israelites of a later day looked back upon his
memory with gratitude and veneration; he had been the hero who had
succeeded in doing what Moses had failed to accomplish, and had led his
people into the Promised Land. But history judges somewhat differently.
He was not a lawgiver or a leader of men like Moses, and even from a
military point of view the conquest of the Amorite kingdoms of Sihon and
Og was a greater achievement than securing a foothold in the mountains
of central Palestine. Joshua was not the conqueror of Canaan, as the
pious imagination of a later age supposed him to be: he merely opened
the way to it. He taught the Israelites how to defeat the Canaanites,
and he succeeded in destroying a few of their cities. But that was all;
and the wholesale massacres which marked his progress, the wanton
destruction of everything which could not be carried away as spoil, and
the barbaric extermination of the elements of culture, find their match
only in the sanguinary campaigns of some of the Assyrian kings and the
Saxon invasion of Britain.
Footnote 255:
This passage must have been written at a time when Judah had not yet
come to occupy a definite place among the tribes in Canaan, and when,
as in the Song of Deborah, the territory of Benjamin was regarded as a
sort of appendage of that of Ephraim, and as extending as far south as
the desert of the Amalekites. (See also Josh. xv. 63.)
Footnote 256:
Josh. xviii. 22.
Footnote 257:
Colonel Watson in the _Quarterly Statement_ of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, July 1895, pp. 253-261; see also Quatremère,
_Histoire des Sultans Mamluks_, ii. p. 26; and Mr. Stevenson in the
_Quarterly Statement_ October 1895, pp. 334-338.
Footnote 258:
The play is on the verb _gâlal_, ‘to roll.’ Gilgal, however, means the
‘circle’ of stones, or ‘cairn.’ Moreover, the Egyptians were
circumcised, so that uncircumcision could not correctly be called ‘the
reproach of Egypt.’ Some of the Israelites may have been circumcised
at Gilgal, but it is incredible that none of the males born in the
desert had been so. This would have been a flagrant violation of the
Mosaic law (see Lev. xii. 3; Gen. xvii. 14).
Footnote 259:
The tongue-like wedge of gold finds its parallel in six tongue-like
wedges of silver discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the ‘Third
prehistoric City’ of Hissarlik or Troy, and figured by him in _Ilios_,
pp. 470-472. Mr. Barclay V. Head has shown that they each represent
the third of a Babylonian maneh.
Footnote 260:
See my _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 75-77; _Quarterly Statement_
of the Palestine Exploration Fund, July 1876 and July 1877.
Footnote 261:
Gezer was similarly laid under tribute by Ephraim (Josh. xvi. 10).
Footnote 262:
The Septuagint has Elam instead of Hoham, from which we may perhaps
infer that the older reading of the Hebrew text was Yeho-ham. If so,
we should have an example of the use of the name of the national God
of Israel among the Hebronites. The substitution of El for Yeho would
be parallel to the fact that in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king
Sargon the contemporary king of Hamath is called both Yahu-bihdi and
Ilu-bihdi. Cf. also Joram and Hado-ram (2 Sam. viii. 10; 1 Chron.
xviii. 10). Piram resembles the Egyptian Pi-Romi; the name was also
Karian (Sayce, _The Karian Language and Inscriptions_ in the
_Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, ix. 1, No. ii.
3). The Jarmuth of which Piram was king cannot be the same as the
Yarimuta of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, as that seems to have been in
the north, though Karl Niebuhr makes it the Delta. For Piram the
Septuagint has Phidôn; and it changes Yaphia into Jephthah and Eglon
into Adullam.
Footnote 263:
See Flinders Petrie, _Tell el-Hesy (Lachish)_ (1891) and Bliss, _A
Mound of Many Cities_.
Footnote 264:
For Horam the Septuagint again has Elam. Perhaps the original reading
was Yehoram. There is no ground for supposing that Hoham of Hebron and
Horam of Gezer are one and the same.
Footnote 265:
It is called Huzar in the list of the conquests of Thothmes III. at
Karnak, where it follows Liusa or Laish, and precedes Pahil,
identified with Pella by Mr. Tomkins, and Kinnertu or Chinnereth.
Footnote 266:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 89.
Footnote 267:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 44, No. 18.
Footnote 268:
See also Josh. xi. 2.
Footnote 269:
Josh. xii. 21-24. Probably the kings of Tappuah, Hepher, Aphek, and
Sharon are to be included in the confederacy (verses 17, 18). We do
not know where Tappuah was (though it is usually placed in the Wadi
el-Afranj; G. A. Smith, _Hist. Geog. of the Holy Land_, p. 202).
Hepher can hardly be the southern Hepher referred to in 1 Kings iv.
10, but is probably Gath-Hepher west of the Sea of Galilee. Aphek (1
Sam. xxix. 1) was a few miles to the south of it, and the plain of
Sharon began at Dor. Cf., however, Beth-Tappuah (in the Wadi
el-Afranj) and Aphekah near Hebron, in Judah (Josh. xv. 53).
Footnote 270:
In Josh. xi. 3, ‘the land of Mizpeh’ is said to include ‘the
Hittite’—so we should probably read instead of ‘Hivite’—‘under
Hermon.’
Footnote 271:
The main body of the Kenites, however, who, like ‘the children of
Judah,’ had settled in the neighbourhood of Jericho after its capture,
moved afterwards into the desert south of Arad (Judg. i. 16; 1 Sam.
xv. 6), and lived here along with a portion of the tribe of Judah.
Footnote 272:
Beth-lehem has been supposed to have been the original headquarters of
the tribe, as it is called Beth-lehem-Judah (xix. 1). But this was
merely to distinguish it from another Beth-lehem in Zebulon.
Footnote 273:
Thus, in a despatch sent to one of the later Assyrian kings, the
writer says, ‘I am a dog, a dog of the king his lord’ (Harper,
_Assyrian and Babylonian Letters_, iv. p. 460).
Footnote 274:
Josh. xv. 49. In one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets Ebed-Tob of
Jerusalem, when referring to the Khabiri or ‘Hebronites,’ speaks of
Bit-Sâni, which may be the Kirjath-Sannah of the Old Testament.
Winckler (_Tell el-Amarna Letters_, 185) has given a wrong translation
of the passage, which is partly based on an incorrect copy of the
text. The translation should be, ‘Behold Gath-Carmel has fallen to
Tagi and the men of Gath. He is in Bit-Sâni, and we will bring it
about that they give Labai and the land of the Sutê (Bedâwin) to the
district of the Khabiri.’
Footnote 275:
The determinative of ‘writing’ is attached to the word Sopher, showing
that the Egyptian scribe was acquainted with its meaning. The name of
Beth-Sopher (_Baitha-Thupar_) was first deciphered on the papyrus by
Dr. W. Max Müller, and published in his _Asien und Europa_.
Footnote 276:
Not the pluperfect, as in the Authorised Version.
Footnote 277:
See above, p. 247.
Footnote 278:
The latter reading (Judg. ii. 9) is probably the more correct. The
name of Timnath-heres, ‘the portion of the Sun-god,’ may have been
changed to Timnath-serah, ‘the portion of abundance,’ on account of
its idolatrous associations. Perhaps it is the modern Kafr Hâris, nine
miles south of Shechem.
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF THE JUDGES
The Condition of Israel—The Destruction of the Benjamites—Story of
Micah and the Conquest of Dan—Chushan-rishathaim- and Ramses
III.—Office of Judge—Eglon of Moab—The Philistines—Deborah and
Barak—Sisera and the Hittites—The Song of Deborah—Gideon—Kingdom of
Abimelech—Jephthah—Sacrifice of his Daughter—Defeat and Slaughter of
the Ephraimites—Samson—Historical Character of the Book of Judges.
Israel has at last forced its way into the Promised Land. Mount Ephraim
is in its hands, and it has already planted itself in other parts of
Palestine. Joshua, the leader who taught it how to cross the Jordan and
defeat the princes of Canaan, is dead. The age of wandering is over; the
age of settlement has begun.
But the age of settlement was a stormy one. The Canaanites were but
partially subdued; the Israelites themselves were little better than a
collection of raiding bands. They had brought with them, moreover, the
nomadic habits of the desert, and were but little inclined to rebuild
the cities which they had so ruthlessly destroyed. And in almost every
direction they were encircled by enemies, better organised, better
armed, or more numerous than themselves, who from time to time succeeded
in overrunning their fields and reducing them to subjection. The tribes
who had dreamed of conquering Canaan found themselves, instead, the prey
of others.
It was a period of anarchy and perpetual war. Without a head, and
without cohesion, it seems strange that they did not perish utterly or
become absorbed by the older population of the land. That the nation
should have survived admits of only one explanation. It possessed a
common faith, a common sanctuary, and a common code of sacred laws. As
in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire the Church preserved the
fabric of society, and eventually brought order out of chaos, so, too,
in ancient Israel, the nation owed its continued existence to the law
which had been given by Moses. Only the iron fetters of a written law,
with its organised priesthood and sanctions, and, above all, the
knowledge that it existed, could have prevented the process of political
and social disintegration from rapidly running its course. Had the
religion of Israel been merely that result of evolution which is dreamed
of by some modern writers, and the law of Moses the invention of a later
age, there would have been no Israel in which a religion could have
developed, or a code of laws have been compiled. The outward unity of
the tribes in Egypt and the desert was shattered by the settlement in
Canaan, and all that remained was the inward and religious unity that
had been forced upon them by the genius of an individual legislator. The
place of the political head and leader was supplied by the organised
cult and elaborate code of laws which he had bequeathed to the nation.
To all external appearance, indeed, Israel had ceased to be a nation,
and had been reduced to a scattered and anarchical collection of
marauding tribes; but the elements which could again bind them together
still existed—the belief in the same national God, the rites with which
He was worshipped, and the priesthood and sanctuary where the tradition
of the law was preserved.
That this is no imaginary picture is proved by the Song of Deborah. The
Song is admitted by the most sceptical of critics to belong to the age
to which it is assigned, and consequently to reflect the ideas of the
Israelite shortly after the settlement in Canaan. No composition of the
Exilic period could be more uncompromising in its monotheism, and its
assertion that Yahveh alone is the God of Israel. And the Song further
assumes that the tribes of Israel, disunited though they otherwise may
be, are nevertheless bound together by a common faith in the one
national God. Nor is this all. Israel still possesses, even among its
northern tribes, ‘legislators’ like Moses, and scribes who handle the
pen (Judg. v. 14). Writing, therefore, is still known and practised even
among a people so oppressed by their enemies that ‘the highways were
unoccupied,’ and the fellahin of the villages had ceased to exist. Laws,
too, were still promulgated in continuation of the laws of Moses, and
the people of Israel are ‘the people of the Lord.’
And yet there was another side to the picture. While Zebulon and
Naphtali were hazarding ‘their lives unto the death’ ‘on behalf of
Yahveh,’ there were tribes and cities which forgot their duty to their
God and their brethren, and ‘came not to the help of the Lord.’ Such was
the case with the inhabitants of Meroz; such, too, was the conduct of
Reuben and Gilead, of Dan and Asher. The description given by the
compiler of the Book of Judges of the condition of the tribes after the
death of Joshua cannot be far from the truth. They were planted in the
midst of enemies whom they had found too strong to be destroyed or
driven out. On all sides of them were ‘the Philistines, and all the
Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hittites that dwelt in Mount
Lebanon from Mount Baal-Hermon unto the entering in of Hamath.’[279]
‘And the children of Israel,’ we are told, dwelt among them, and ‘took
their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their
sons, and served their gods. And the children of Israel did evil in the
sight of the Lord, and forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals
and the Ashêrahs.’[280] Even more expressive are the words with which
the Book of Judges ends: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel;
every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’ It was an age of
individual lawlessness; the bands of society were unloosed, and none was
strong enough to lead and control. Outside the influence of the
representatives of the Mosaic law there was neither curb nor order.
Two incidents have been recorded which throw a lurid light on the
manners and character of the age which immediately followed the
settlement in Canaan. In one of them we hear of a Levite of Mount
Ephraim ‘who took to him a concubine out of Beth-lehem in Judah.’
Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, had succeeded his father Eleazar as
high-priest at Shiloh (Judg. xx. 28), where ‘the ark of the covenant’
had been placed. The concubine proved unfaithful to the Levite, and
eventually fled to her father’s house in Beth-lehem. Thither the Levite
followed her, and persuaded her to return with him to his home. The
woman’s father, however, highly pleased at the reconciliation, continued
to press his hospitality upon his guest, and it was not until the
afternoon of the fifth day that the Levite succeeded in getting away.
The evening soon fell upon him, and, rejecting the advice of his slave
that he should spend the night in Jerusalem, on the ground that it was
‘the city of a stranger,’ he pressed on with his concubine to Gibeah,
which belonged to Benjamin. It had been better for him, however, to have
sought hospitality from ‘the stranger’ rather than from his own people;
for, in spite of the fact that he had with him food in plenty both for
himself and for his asses, he was left to spend the night in the street.
But at the last moment an old man, who was not a native of Gibeah, came
in from his work in the fields, and seeing the Levite in the street,
asked him and his companions into the house. While they were eating and
drinking, the rabble gathered about the house and demanded that the man
should be brought out to them that they might ‘know him.’ It was a
repetition of the scene enacted in Sodom when the angels visited the
house of Lot, with the difference that the actors were Israelites
instead of Canaanites, whom the Hebrews had been called upon to destroy
for their sins. In vain ‘the master of the house’ intreated his
fellow-townsmen not to act ‘so wickedly,’ offering them his own daughter
as well as his guest’s concubine in place of the guest himself. Finally,
however, they were satisfied with the unfortunate concubine, whom they
‘abused’ all night, and then left dead on the doorstep of the house. The
first thing ‘her lord’ saw when he opened the door in the morning was
the woman’s corpse. This he placed on his ass and carried to his home,
where he divided it into twelve pieces, which he sent ‘into all the
coasts of Israel.’[281] The horror of the deed, or perhaps of the
visible proofs with which it was announced, aroused the Israelites, and
they demanded the punishment of the guilty. The crime had been committed
against a Levite, whose brethren were to be found wherever the
Israelites were settled, and who had on his side the priesthood of the
central sanctuary at Shiloh. He was, too, a Levite of Mount Ephraim, and
the sympathy of the powerful tribe of Ephraim was accordingly assured to
him. The Benjamites, however, refused to hand over their
fellow-tribesman to justice, and the result was an inter-fraternal war.
Before the tribes had conquered half the country which had been promised
them, they were already fighting among themselves.
The Benjamites at first were successful, and their opponents were
defeated with considerable slaughter in two successive battles. Then
they fell into an ambuscade: the main body of their troops being drawn
away after the retreating enemy towards the north, while an ambush rose
up from ‘the meadows of Gibeah’ in their rear, and set fire to the city.
The retreating foe now turned back; and the Benjamites, enclosed as it
were between two fires, were cut to pieces almost to a man. Six hundred
only escaped ‘towards the wilderness unto the rock of Rimmon,’ where
they maintained themselves for four months. Meanwhile ‘the men of
Israel’ treated their Benjamite brethren like Canaanitish outcasts,
smiting ‘them with the edge of the sword, from the men of each city even
unto the beasts and all that was found; and all the cities they came to
did they set on fire.’
Benjamin was almost exterminated. A few men alone survived. But at the
outset of the war they had been placed under the same ban as the
Canaanites, and a solemn vow had been made that no Israelitish woman
should be married to them. When peace was restored with the practical
annihilation of the guilty tribe, the prohibition was evaded by a
stratagem, which, however inconsequent it may appear to the European of
to-day, was fully in keeping with the ideas of the ancient East.
Jabesh-Gilead had refused to take part in the war against Benjamin, and
the victors accordingly resolved to take summary vengeance upon it. The
city was taken by surprise, and every male in it massacred in cold
blood, as well as ‘every woman that had lain by man.’ About four hundred
unmarried maidens were carried off to Shiloh, and there forcibly married
to the surviving Benjamites. But even these did not suffice, and the
Benjamite youths were consequently encouraged to hide in the vineyards
near Shiloh, and there capture and make wives of the maidens of the
place who came out to dance at the yearly ‘feast of the Lord.’ The
place, we are told, was northward of Beth-el, ‘on the east side of the
highway that goeth up from Beth-el to Shechem, and on the south of
Lebonah.’
Recent critics have seen in this story merely a popular legend intended
to account for the fact that marriage by capture was practised among the
Benjamites. We might just as well assert that the story of Gunpowder
Plot is a legend which has grown out of the customs of the 5th of
November. The critics have not even the justification that marriage by
capture was common among the Israelites. In fact, this is the only
instance of it which we meet with in the Old Testament history of
Israel—an instance so exceptional as to be inexplicable unless it had
originated under special circumstances. It was certainly not the
survival of an earlier custom common to the rest of the tribes, nor is
there any trace of its having been general in the tribe of Benjamin
itself. In fact, we look in vain for any other example of it alike among
Israelites and Canaanites, or even among the Benjamites in any other
period of their history.
It is true, however, that the account of the war between Benjamin and
its brother tribes has passed through the magnifying lenses of later
history. The exaggerated numbers of the combatants and the slain, like
the use of the universal ‘all’ and ‘every’ where the partial ‘some’ is
intended, are in thorough accordance with Oriental habits of expression.
The modern resident in the East is only too familiar with such
exaggerations of language, and in studying Oriental history due
allowance must always be made for them. In the account of the war,
moreover, its real character has been somewhat obscured. Benjamin has
been regarded too much as a separate entity, distinct and cut off from
the rest of Israel, rather than as the tribe which had once gathered
round the sanctuary of Beth-On, and which continued to form the
‘southern’ frontier of the house of Joseph. The war against Benjamin, in
fact, was like the war against Jabesh-Gilead—a quarrel not with a tribe,
but with certain Israelitish cities. It is even possible that in this
quarrel Jabesh-Gilead was from the beginning associated with Gibeah and
the other cities of Benjamin. At all events, we find it so allied in the
age of Saul. Saul’s first act as king was to rescue Jabesh-Gilead from
the Ammonites, and it was the men of Jabesh-Gilead who took down the
bodies of Saul and Jonathan from the walls of Beth-Shan and gave them
honourable burial.[282]
The second incident, which tells us something of the manners of Israel
in the years that immediately followed the invasion of Palestine, is
recorded in language which has been little, if at all, altered by the
compiler of the Book of Judges. The gruesome horror of the story of the
Levite’s concubine is absent from it, but it equally shows how far from
the truth is the idyllic picture sometimes painted of the first
Israelitish conquerors of Canaan. It is again a Levite who is the
central personage of the story. An Ephraimite named Micah, we are told,
stole eleven hundred shekels of silver from his mother, but, terrified
by her imprecations upon the thief, confessed the deed and restored the
money. His mother thereupon informed him that the treasure had been
dedicated to Yahveh by her on his behalf, in order that a graven and a
molten image might be made out of it for him. Two hundred of the shekels
were accordingly taken, and the silver employed to make the images.
These were set up in the house of Micah, along with ‘an ephod and
teraphim,’ and one of his sons was consecrated as priest. This, however,
was recognised as contrary to the law, and when therefore a wandering
Levite from Beth-lehem, ‘of the family of Judah,’ came seeking
employment, he was welcomed by Micah, who asked him if he would be his
priest. His wages for undertaking the office were to be ten shekels of
silver each year, as well as ‘a suit of apparel’ and food. The terms
were accepted, and ‘Micah consecrated’ him his priest. The provisions of
the Mosaic law had been satisfied, and the Ephraimite complacently
remarked, ‘Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a
Levite to my priest.’
His complacency, however, was of no long duration. The Danites, unable
to establish themselves in the south of Canaan, sent out five spies from
their camp near Kirjath-jearim[283] who on their way northward were
hospitably received in Micah’s house. Here they found the Levite, with
whom, it would appear, they had been previously acquainted, and asked
him to inquire ‘of God’ whether their journey would be prosperous or
not. The priest’s reply was favourable: ‘before Yahveh is your way
wherein you go.’
Far away, to the north of the other Hebrew settlements, the spies found
the Phœnician city of Laish, already mentioned in the geographical lists
of the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. Its inhabitants were living in
peaceful security, ‘after the manner of the Zidonians,’ with no one to
interfere with them, and no enemy of whom they could be afraid. The
spies saw at once that the city was unprepared for a sudden attack by
armed men; that, in short, ‘God had given it into’ their hands. They
returned therefore to Mahaneh-Dan, the Camp of Dan, and reported what
they had seen. Thereupon the Danites determined to seize an inheritance
for themselves in the north, and six hundred men ‘girded with weapons of
war,’ along with their families and cattle, started for Laish.[284] On
the road the spies led them to the house of Micah, whom they robbed of
his images, ephod and teraphim, as well as of his priest. The latter at
first protested; but on being told that he would be the priest of ‘a
tribe,’ his ‘heart was glad,’ and ‘he took the ephod and the teraphim
and the graven image and went into the midst of the people.’ Micah and
his friends on discovering the robbery pursued after the Danites, but
finding they were too strong for him he judged it prudent to return
home.
The Danites continued their march, and had little difficulty in
capturing the unguarded Laish, in massacring its inhabitants, and
burning the houses with fire. On the ruins they built a new city, the
Dan of future Israelitish history. Here the graven image of Micah was
erected, and worship carried on ‘all the time that the house of God was
in Shiloh.’ The Levite who presided over the sanctuary became the
ancestor of a long line of priests who continued to be ‘priests to the
tribe of Dan until the day of the captivity of the land.’[285] The
compiler of the Book of Judges adds that his name was Jonathan, the
grandson of Moses, whose name has been changed to Manasseh in the
majority of Hebrew manuscripts.[286] The statement fixes the date of the
conquest of Laish, and shows that, like the war against Benjamin, it
took place only two generations after the great legislator’s death.
The picture presented to us by the narrative stands in sharp contrast to
the ideal aimed at in the legislation of the Pentateuch. The golden calf
has been revived in an intensified form, and the ordinary Israelite,
including a Levite who was the grandson of Moses, takes it for granted
that Yahveh must be adored in the shape of a twofold idol. Nay, more; by
the side of the graven and molten images which were meant to represent
the God of Israel in defiance of the second commandment, we find also
the images of the household gods or teraphim, whose cult forms part of
that which was paid to the national deity. The cult, in fact, survived
to the latest days of the northern kingdom; it was practised in the
household of David (1 Sam. xix. 13), and is even regarded by a prophet
of Samaria as an integral portion of the established religion of the
state (Hos. iii. 4). The priestly powers of the Levite, however,
suffered in no way from the idolatrous nature of the worship over which
he presided. Like David in a later age (1 Sam. xxiii. 2, 4, 9, xxx. 8; 2
Sam. v. 19, 23) when the men of Dan inquired through him whether their
journey would be successful, he was able to answer them in the name of
the Lord.
But this is not all. Micah, the Ephraimite, consecrates his own son as
priest, while the Levite wanders through the land, seeking employment
and begging his bread. There is no endowment that is his by right; no
Levitical city where he can claim a shelter and a field; no central
sanctuary where his services are required. He is said to be ‘of the
family of Judah,’ not a descendant of Levi, though the compiler implies
that the expression must not be understood in a literal sense. And the
priesthood which he established at Dan continued to be a rival of that
of ‘the sons of Aaron’ through nearly five centuries of Israelitish
national life.
Criticism has drawn the conclusion that the Pentateuchal legislation
could not have been in existence at the time when the city of Laish was
taken by the tribe of Dan. The conclusion, however, by no means follows.
It is quite certain that it was not drawn by the compiler of the Book of
Judges, who has preserved the narrative for us; and, after all, he is
more likely to have understood the ideas and feelings of the Israelites
of an earlier generation than is a European critic of the nineteenth
century. In fact, he has given us an explanation of the contradiction
between the Mosaic law and early Israelitish practice, which not only
satisfies all the conditions of the problem, but is on the whole more
probable than the rough-and-ready solution of modern criticism. Israel
in Canaan in the first throes of the invasion was a very different
Israel from that which had lived in the desert under the immediate
control and superintendence of the legislator. It was disorganised, it
was lawless, it was broken up into fragments which were surrounded on
all sides by an alien population whose superior culture and wealth, when
it could not be seized or destroyed, necessarily exercised a profound
influence over the ruder tribes of marauders from the desert. The
Israelites inevitably fell under the spell; they intermarried with the
natives, and adopted their gods and religious ideas.
The proof that this is the true explanation of the disregard or
forgetfulness of the Mosaic law which characterised the age of the
Judges is furnished by the fact that this disregard or forgetfulness was
not universal. Throughout the age of the Judges Israel possessed a
central sanctuary, little though it seems to have been frequented, and
in this central sanctuary the worship of Yahveh was conducted by ‘the
sons of Aaron,’ who kept alive the memory of the legislation in the
wilderness. At Shiloh there was no image, whether graven or molten, no
figures of the teraphim, no idolatrous rites. Instead of an image there
was the ark of the covenant, with nothing within it except the tables of
the law.[287] Shiloh was the only place in Israel where the Pentateuchal
enactments could be observed, and it is only at Shiloh that we find them
to have been so.
But the influence of Shiloh did not extend far. It did not even become
the central sanctuary of Ephraim. The history of Micah is alone
sufficient to prove this. Ephraimite as he was, Shiloh and its
priesthood had no existence for him; his gods and his priests were part
of his own household. Equally conclusive is the history of Gideon.
The ephod after which Israel went ‘a whoring,’ was not dedicated at
Shiloh but at Ophrah, a few miles to the north; and Baal-berith in the
Ephraimitish city of Shechem had more worshippers than Yahveh of Shiloh.
Just as the spirit of Judaism was kept alive in the age of the Maccabees
among a small remnant of the people, amid the obscurity of a country
town, so in the time of the Judges the spirit of the law was preserved
among the mountains of Ephraim in the midst of an insignificant body of
priests.
It was not only with the Canaanites and with its own internal
disorganisation and dissensions that the infant nation of Israel was
called upon to contend. Foreign invasion followed quickly on the
settlement in Palestine. We have learnt from the tablets of Tel
el-Amarna that already before the days of the Exodus the kings of
Mesopotamia had cast longing eyes upon Canaan. To the Semites of the
west Mesopotamia was known as Naharaim, or Aram Naharaim, ‘Aram of the
Two Rivers,’ the Euphrates and Tigris, and the name was borrowed by the
Egyptians under its Aramaic form of Naharain or Nahrina.[288] The
leading state of Mesopotamia had for some centuries been Mitanni, on the
eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Carchemish, and the rulers
of Mitanni had made themselves masters not only of the district between
the Euphrates and the Tigris, but also of the country westward to the
Orontes. In the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty Mitanni was the
most powerful of the Asiatic kingdoms, and the Pharaohs themselves did
not disdain to unite their solar blood with that of its royal family.
From time to time, the Tel el-Amarna correspondence teaches us, the
princes of Mitanni had interfered in the affairs of Palestine.
Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia, declares that ‘from of old’ the
kings of Mitanni had been hostile to the ancestors of the Pharaoh, and
his letters are filled with complaints that the Amorites to the north of
Palestine had revolted against Egypt with the help of Mitanni and
Babylonia. Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem, who uses the name Nahrina or Naharain
like the writers of the Old Testament, refers to the struggles that had
taken place on the waters of the Mediterranean when Nahrina and
Babylonia held possession of Canaan. ‘When the ships,’ he says, ‘were on
the sea, the arm of the Mighty King (the god of Jerusalem) overcame
Nahrima and Babylonia; yet now the Khabiri have overcome the cities of
the king’ (of Egypt in Southern Palestine).[289]
It was not the last time that Mitanni and Egypt were ranged on opposite
sides. Ramses II. claims to have defeated the forces of Mitanni, and the
name of the same country appears among the conquests of Ramses III. of
the twentieth dynasty.[290] It is coupled with Carchemish the Hittite
capital among the kingdoms over which the last of the conquering
Pharaohs had gained a victory. In the great struggle which Egypt had to
face against the Philistines and other piratic hordes from the Greek
seas, the northern invaders had carried with them in their train
contingents from the various peoples of Northern Syria through whose
lands they had passed. The Hittites and Amorites, the inhabitants of
Carchemish and Arvad, even the people of Elishah or Cyprus, joined the
invaders of Egypt, and among the captured leaders of the enemy recorded
on the walls of Medinet Habu are the kings of the Hittites and Amorites.
The king of Mitanni, however, is wanting; enemy though he was of the
Pharaoh, he never ventured into Egypt, and his name therefore does not
appear among the conquered chiefs. All that the Pharaoh could do was to
include the name of his kingdom among those whose forces he had
overthrown.[291]
The reign of Ramses III. brings us to the moment when the Israelites
under Joshua were about to enter Canaan. Egypt had annihilated the
enemies who had invaded it, and had carried a war of vengeance into
Palestine and Syria. The Israelite had not as yet crossed the Jordan.
Among the places in Southern Palestine subdued by Ramses are Beth-Anoth
(Josh. xv. 59), Carmel of Judah, Hebron, Ir-Shemesh, Hadashah (Josh. xv.
37), Shalam or Jerusalem, the districts of the Dead Sea and the Jordan,
even Korkha in the land of Moab.[292] There is as yet no trace of
Israel, and Hebron had not as yet become the spoil of the Kenizzite.
The chronology, however, makes it certain that though the Israelites had
not entered Palestine at the time of the Egyptian campaign in that
country, it could not have been very long before they actually did so.
The campaign of Ramses III., in fact, prepared the way for the
Israelitish invasion by weakening the forces of the Canaanites. In any
case, the victory over the northern nations and their allies,
commemorated in the temple of Medinet Habu, must have taken place only a
few years before the Israelitish conquest of southern Canaan.[293]
The king of Mitanni was numbered among the enemies of Egypt;
nevertheless he had not joined the invading hordes in their attack upon
the valley of the Nile. Can it have been that he lingered in what had
once been an Egyptian province, that land of Canaan which his
forefathers had coveted before him? The Egyptian Empire had fallen, the
very existence of Egypt itself was at stake, and the favourable
opportunity had come at last when Naharaim might make herself the
mistress of Western Asia. Babylonia was powerless like Egypt, Assyria
had not yet put forth its strength, and the Hittites barred the old road
which had led from Chaldæa to the West.
The armies of Chushan-rishathaim[294] of Naharaim, accordingly, made
their way through Syria to the southern frontiers of Palestine. They
were no longer associated with those of Babylonia, as in the days of
Ebed-Tob; for a short while Naharaim ruled supreme on the eastern coasts
of the Mediterranean. For eight years both the Canaanites and their
Israelite and Kenizzite invaders were forced to submit to its sway. The
work of conquest was checked by the stronger hand of the foreign power.
How soon after the Israelitish settlement in Canaan the invasion of
Chushan-rishathaim must have been is shown by the fact that Othniel, the
Kenizzite, the brother of Caleb, and the conqueror of Kirjath-Sepher,
was the hero who ‘delivered’ Israel from the foreign yoke. How the
deliverance was effected we do not know, whether through the death of
the king of Naharaim, or through a revolt of the Canaanites and Syrians,
or whether it was only the Israelitish tribes and not the Canaanitish
cities to which it came. What is certain is that both the ‘oppression’
and the deliverance followed closely on the occupation of Palestine by
the Israelites. Caleb belonged to the same generation as Moses and
Joshua, and though Othniel was his ‘younger brother,’ he too must be
counted in it. Joshua can hardly have been dead before Israel had passed
under the yoke of Naharaim.
The supremacy of Naharaim extended to the southernmost borders of
Palestine. It was not an Ephraimite who ‘delivered’ Israel, but the
Edomite chief at Hebron, where the tribe of Judah had not yet
established itself. The fact is noteworthy: the first of the ‘Judges’
was a Kenizzite of Edomite origin, and the yoke which he shook off was
one which pressed equally upon Israelites and Canaanites. In the very
act of conquering and exterminating the Canaanites, Israel was forced to
sympathise and join with them against a common foe.
The sign which gave Othniel the right to be a _Shophêt_ or ‘Judge’ was
twofold. ‘The spirit of Yahveh came upon him,’ and he delivered Israel
from its oppressor. The Shophêt was thus marked out by Yahveh for his
office, and his success in war was a visible token that he had been
called to be the leader of his people. The office was a peculiarly
Canaanitish institution. When Kingship was abolished at Tyre in the time
of Nebuchadrezzar, the kings were replaced by ‘Judges,’ and at Carthage
the ‘Sufetes’ or ‘Judges’ were the chief magistrates of the state.[295]
Whether the institution existed elsewhere in the Semitic world we do not
know. But it was as it were indigenous to the soil of Canaan, and in
submitting themselves to the rule of the Judges, the Israelites
submitted themselves at the same time to Canaanitish influence. It was a
step backward, a step towards absorption into the population around
them, and it is therefore not without reason that the period of the
Judges is a synonym for the period when the religion and manners of
Canaan were dominant among the Israelitish tribes. The Pentateuch
recognised the priest, the lawgiver, and the king; the judge was the
creation of an age in which the Baalim seemed to have gained the mastery
over Yahveh.
That the first of the Judges should have been of Edomite descent is a
striking commentary on what may be termed the catholicity of pre-exilic
Israel. It was not race so much as participation in the worship and
favour of Yahveh, that gave a right to be included among ‘the chosen
people.’ The ancestress of David was a Moabitess, and the Deuteronomic
law lays down that the children of an Edomite, or even of an Egyptian,
‘shall enter into the congregation of the Lord in their third
generation’ (Deut. xxiii. 7, 8).[296] A ‘mixed multitude’ accompanied
the Israelites in their flight from Egypt, and the Kenites, with whom
Moses was allied, shared like the Kenizzites in the conquest of Canaan.
Hebron, the future capital of Judah, and a Levitical city, was a
Kenizzite possession, and the Judah of later days was itself a mixture
of Israelitish and Edomite elements.
How far the authority of Othniel extended it is difficult to say. But
the fact that the enemy, whose yoke he had broken, was an invader from
the north makes it probable that his rule was acknowledged in Mount
Ephraim as well as among the northern tribes. That it was also
acknowledged on the east side of the Jordan there is no proof. Though
the Song of Deborah shows that the solidarity of Israel was recognised,
it also shows that this feeling of a common God and of a common history
had but little political effect. The eastern tribes lived apart from
those of the west, and the judges whom we hear of as rising among them
had purely local powers. Indeed, between Jephthah and the Ephraimites
there was internecine war.
The rule of Othniel could not have lasted long. If he belonged to the
generation which had witnessed the Exodus out of Egypt, he would have
been already an old man at the time of the war with Chushan-rishathaim.
Hardly was he dead before Israel was again under the yoke of an
oppressor. Moab had recovered from its reverses at the hands of the
Amorites and Israelites, the Reubenites had degenerated into mere
Bedâwin squatters in the wadis of the Arnon,[297] and Eglon, the Moabite
king, now prepared to possess himself of southern Canaan. Jericho was
seized, or rather ‘the city of palm-trees’ which had succeeded to the
Canaanitish Jericho, and the ford over the Jordan was therefore secure.
Eglon was followed by bands of Amalekite Bedâwin, eager for spoil, like
the Sutê who in the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence were hired
by the rival princes of Canaan in their quarrels with one another. He
was also allied with the Ammonites, from which we may infer that the
Israelites north of the Arnon, between Moab and Ammon, had been either
expelled or brought into subjection.
The capture of Jericho opened the road to Mount Ephraim to Eglon as it
had done a few years previously to Joshua. But the Israelites were
treated more mercifully than Joshua had treated the Canaanites. Perhaps
they lived in unwalled villages rather than in fortified towns, and
their culture was not high enough to tempt an enemy with the prospect of
a rich booty. At all events we hear of no massacres or burnt cities; the
Israelites are laid under tribute, that is all.
For eighteen years they served Eglon. Then Ehud, the Benjamite, who like
so many of his tribe was left-handed,[298] was chosen to carry the
yearly tribute to the conqueror. Eglon was encamped at Gilgal, in the
very spot where the Israelitish camp had so long stood, and received the
envoys in the upper story of his house, immediately under the roof. When
the tribute-bearers had been dismissed, Ehud, who had gone as far as the
sacred ‘circle’ of hallowed stones,[299] turned back with the excuse
that he had a secret message for the king, which demanded the utmost
privacy. Taking advantage of his solitude, Ehud seized his sword with
his left hand and plunged it into the body of Eglon, then, locking the
door of the room behind him, he escaped through the columned verandah.
Before the murder was discovered he had made his way to Seirath, and
gathered around him the Israelites of Mount Ephraim. The fords across
the Jordan were occupied, and the flying Moabites slain at them to a
man.
It would seem that the Moabite ‘oppression’ did not extend beyond Mount
Ephraim. Ephraim and Benjamin were the tribes who had suffered from it,
and it was over them accordingly that Ehud was judge. His authority does
not appear to have been recognised further to the north or to the south.
In the south, indeed, there were other enemies to be contended against,
and there was another hero who had risen up against them. The Edomite
and Jewish settlers found themselves confronted by those formidable
sea-robbers who had once dared the whole power of Egypt, and were now
established on the southern coast of Palestine. The Philistines, called
Pulista by the Egyptians, Palastâ and Pilistâ by the Assyrians, were
new-comers like the Israelites. They had come from Caphtor, which modern
research tends to identify with the island of Krete, and, along with
their kinsfolk the Zakkal, had taken part in the invasion of Egypt by
the barbarians of the north at the beginning of the reign of Ramses
III.[300] It is the first time that their name is mentioned in the
Egyptian annals. But the Zakkal, who afterwards settled on the
Canaanitish coast to the north of them, and whom they resembled in dress
and features, are mentioned among the invaders against whom Meneptah II.
had to contend, and it is therefore possible that the Philistines also
were included in the host whose assault upon Egypt seems to have been
connected with the Hebrew Exodus. At any rate, at the very moment when
the Israelites were making ready to enter Canaan, the Philistines had
already possessed themselves of the five cities which guarded its
southern frontier. The date of the conquest can be fixed within a few
years. Ramses III. tells us that the barbarians had swept through Syria,
where they had established their camp in the ‘land of the Amorites’
northward of Canaan. Then they fell upon Egypt partly by land, partly by
sea. This may be the time when the five cities of Gaza, Ashkelon,
Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath were captured by the Philistines; if so, Gaza
must have again become Egyptian after the overthrow of the invading
hordes, since Ramses III. includes it among the conquests of his
campaign in southern Palestine. But it could not have remained long in
his hands. The key of Syria, the frontier town which had so long been
garrisoned by Egyptian troops, at last ceased to be Egyptian, and became
Philistine. Henceforth Egypt was cut off from Asia; ‘the way of the
Philistines’ was guarded by the Philistines themselves.[301]
The actual occupation of ‘Philistia’ was doubtless preceded by piratical
descents upon the coast. This, in fact, seems to be indicated by the
statement in the book of Exodus that the Israelitish fugitives were not
led by ‘the way of the Philistines’ lest they should ‘see war.’ From the
time when the northern barbarians first attacked Egypt in the reign of
Meneptah II. down to the final settlement of the Philistines on the
Syrian coast after the Asiatic campaign of Ramses III., the conquest of
the Canaanitish coast was slowly going on. All the while that the
Israelites were in the desert, the Philistines of Caphtor were creating
their new kingdom for themselves. They were one of the ‘hornets’ which
Yahveh had sent before Israel into the Promised Land. When Judah and
Simeon eventually took possession of southern Canaan, they found the
Philistines too firmly established to be dislodged.[302]
It was not only from their walled cities in Palestine that the
Philistines derived their strength. They were within easy reach of their
kinsmen in Krete, and fresh supplies of emigrants were doubtless brought
to them from time to time in Kretan ships. Greek tradition knew of a
time when Minôs, the Kretan king, held command of the sea, and it is
said that the sea between Gaza and Egypt was called ‘the Ionian.’[303]
In the reign of Hezekiah we learn from the Assyrian king Sargon that
when the people of Ashdod deposed their prince the usurper whom they
placed on the throne was still a ‘Greek’ (_Yavani_).
The features of the Philistine are known to us from the Egyptian
sculptures. They offer a marked contrast to those of his Semitic
neighbours. They are, in fact, the features of the typical Greek, with
straight nose, high forehead, and thin lips. Like the Zakkal he wears on
his head a curious sort of pleated cap, which is fastened round the chin
by a strap. Besides the cap, and sometimes a cuirass of leather, his
dress consisted of a kilt, or perhaps a pair of drawers, similar to
those depicted on objects of the ‘Mykenæan’ period, and he was armed
with a small round shield with two handles, a spear, and a short but
broad sword of bronze. The kilt and arms were the same as those of the
Shardana or Sardinians.[304]
The Philistines were thus aliens on the soil of Canaan. Their Hebrew
neighbours stigmatised them as the ‘uncircumcised,’ and in the
Septuagint they are called the Allophyli or ‘Foreigners.’ But they mixed
in time with the Avim whom they had displaced.[305] The Amoritish Anakim
survived at Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod (Josh. xi. 22), and Goliath of Gath
was reputed one of their descendants. The Philistines borrowed,
moreover, numerous words from the Semitic vocabulary, if indeed they did
not adopt ‘the language of Canaan’ altogether. Their five ‘lords’ took
the Semitic title of _seren_, and the supreme god of Gaza was called by
the Semitic name of Marna or ‘Lord.’ Dagon, whose temple stood at Gaza,
was a Babylonian god whose name and worship had been brought to the West
in early days.[306]
The Israelites soon found that the Philistines were dangerous
neighbours. From their five strongholds in the south they issued forth
to plunder and destroy. Judah and Simeon were the first to suffer, while
such parts of the heritage assigned to Dan as had not been annexed to
Ephraim or Benjamin passed into Philistine hands.[307] But the central
and northern tribes did not escape. We learn from an unpublished
Egyptian papyrus in the possession of M. Golénischeff that Dor, a little
to the south of Mount Carmel, had been occupied by the Zakkal, the
kinsmen of the Philistines, so that the whole coast from Gaza to Carmel
may be said to have become Philistine. From hence their raiding parties
penetrated into the interior, and depopulated the villages of Ephraim
and Manasseh, of Zebulon and of Naphtali.
Such at least is the conclusion to be drawn from a comparison of the
Song of Deborah with the statement that the Shamgar ben Anath, Shamgar
the son of Anath, ‘delivered Israel,’ by slaying six hundred Philistines
with an ox-goad. Shamgar, as we gather from the Song, lived but a short
while before Deborah herself, and it was in his days, we further read,
that the Israelitish peasantry were almost exterminated by their
enemies. The Philistine invasion in the time of Samuel was but a
repetition of earlier raids.
The name of Shamgar testifies to the survival of Babylonian influence in
Canaan. It is the Babylonian Sumgir, while Anath is the Babylonian
goddess Anat, the consort of Anu, the god of the sky. In one of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets two Syrians are referred to, who bear the names of
Ben-Ana and Anat.[308] Does this survival of Babylonian names imply a
survival also of the Babylonian script and language? At all events the
worship of Babylonian deities still survived, and an Israelite and a
‘judge’ was named after one of them.
Deborah couples with Shamgar the otherwise unknown Jael. The reading is
possibly corrupt, another name having been assimilated to that of the
wife of the Kenite. But it is also possible that it is due to a marginal
gloss which has crept into the text.
However this may be, the age of Shamgar overlapped that of the
prophetess Deborah. ‘In the days of Shamgar,’ she says, ‘the highways
were unoccupied ... until that I, Deborah, arose—that I arose a mother
in Israel.’ It was not only from the incursions of the Philistines that
the Israelites suffered. In the north the tribes were called upon to
face a confederacy of the Canaanitish states. It was the last effort of
Canaan to stem the gradual advance of Israel, and the struggle was
decided in the plain of Megiddo, as it had been in the older days of
Egyptian invasion and conquest.
Megiddo and Taanach were still Canaanitish fortresses; so, too, was
Beth-shean, in the valley of the Jordan,[309] and the Israelites of
Mount Ephraim were thus cut off from their brethren in the north. Here
Jabin, the king of Hazor, was the dominant Canaanite prince, whose
standard was followed by the other ‘kings of Canaan.’ Twenty years long,
we are told, ‘he mightily oppressed the children of Israel,’ ‘for he had
nine hundred chariots of iron.’[310] Two accounts of the ‘oppression’
and the war that put an end to it have been handed down, one a prose
version, which the compiler of the book of Judges has made part of his
narrative, while the other is contained in the song of victory composed
by Deborah after the overthrow of the foe.
Critics have found discrepancies between the two accounts, and have
maintained that where they differ the prose version is unhistorical. In
the latter the Canaanitish leader is the king of Hazor, Sisera being his
general, who ‘dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles,’ whereas in the song
there is no mention of Hazor, and Sisera appears as a Canaanitish king.
Moreover, it is alleged that, according to the Song (v. 12), Barak seems
to have belonged to the tribe of Issachar, while in the prose narrative
he is said to have come from Kadesh of Naphtali, and it is further
asserted that Hazor had already been taken and destroyed in the time of
Joshua.
The author of the book of Judges, however, failed to see the
discrepancies which have been discovered by the modern European critic,
and he has accordingly set the prose narrative by the side of the Song
without note or comment. As the king of Hazor did not personally take
part in the battle on the banks of the Kishon, there was no occasion for
any reference to him in the Song, and that the commander of his army
should have been one of his royal allies is surely nothing
extraordinary. In the Song, Barak is expressly distinguished from ‘the
princes of Issachar,’[311] and the question of the destruction of Hazor
by Joshua has already been dealt with. It is a gratuitous supposition
that the introduction of Jabin into the narrative, and the reference to
Harosheth, are the inventions of popular legend or interested
historians.
The prophetess Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, ‘judged Israel’ at the
time of the war. Her name means ‘Bee,’ and a connection has been sought
between it and the fact that the priestesses of Apollo at Delphi, of
Dêmêter, of Artemis, and of Kybelê, were called ‘bees,’ while the high
priest of Artemis at Ephesus bore the title of the ‘king-bee.’[312] We
might as well look for a connection between the name of her husband and
the ‘lamps’ of the sanctuary. Deborah ‘judged Israel’ because she was a
prophetess, because she was the interpretress of the will of Yahveh,
whose spirit breathed within her. The ‘judgments’ she delivered were
accordingly the judgments of Yahveh Himself, and the indwelling of His
spirit was the sign of her claim to the office of ‘judge.’ We hear of
other prophetesses in Israel besides Deborah; Huldah, for example, who
was consulted by the king and the priests in the reign of Josiah. The
position held by the prophetess prevented the Israelitish women from
sinking into the abject condition of the women among some of the Arab
and other Semitic tribes. In fact, women have played a leading part in
Hebrew history. It has long ago been noticed that the mother had much to
do with the character of the successive kings of Judah, and Athaliah of
Samaria filled a prominent place in the history of the northern kingdom.
Prophecy was no respecter of persons; it came to rich and poor, to
learned and simple, to men and women alike, and upon whomsoever the
spirit of prophecy fell, it made him fit to be the leader and the
counsellor of his people. Deborah had been marked out by Yahveh Himself
to be the judge of Israel.
She dwelt, we are told, under the palm-tree of Deborah, between Ramah
and Beth-el in Mount Ephraim. She was, therefore, presumably of
Ephraimitish descent, though the conclusion does not necessarily follow,
and the palm-tree which was called after her continued to be a landmark
on the high-road down to the time when the narrative in the book of
Judges was written. There was another tree, a terebinth, and not a palm,
which stood within the sacred precincts of Beth-el itself, and also bore
the name of Deborah, but this Deborah was said to have been Rebekah’s
nurse, whose tomb was pointed out under the branches of the tree.[313]
The writers of the Old Testament have carefully distinguished between
the two trees; it has been reserved for modern criticism to confound
them.
With a woman’s insight and enthusiasm, Deborah perceived that the time
had come when the highways should no longer be deserted, and when the
northern tribes of Israel should be freed from their bondage to the
Canaanite, and she also perceived who it was that was destined to lead
the Israelitish troops to victory. This was Barak of Kadesh in Naphtali,
the near neighbour of Jabin and Sisera. Like the Carthaginian Barcas, he
bore a name—‘the Lightning’—which fitly symbolised the vengeance he was
born to take on the enemies of Israel.[314] But Barak shrank from the
undertaking at first, and it was not until the prophetess had consented
to go with him to Kadesh that he summoned his countrymen together, and
occupied the summit of Mount Tabor. Here, protected by the forests which
clothed its slopes, he trained and multiplied his forces until he felt
strong enough to attack the foe. Then he descended into the plain of
Megiddo, where the Canaanitish host was marching from Harosheth to meet
him. It was the old battlefield of Canaan; it was there that in the days
of the Egyptian conquerors the fate of the country had been decided and
the Canaanitish princes under Hittite commanders from Kadesh on the
Orontes had been utterly overthrown.
In the camp on the lofty summit of Tabor, Barak had done more than train
his men. Time had been given them in which to provide themselves with
arms. Deborah declares that in the days of the oppression a shield or
spear had not been seen ‘among forty thousand in Israel.’[315] The
statement receives explanation from what we are told of the policy of
the Philistines at a later date. When they had laid the Israelites under
tribute in the time of Samuel, they banished all the smiths from the
land of Israel, to prevent ‘the Hebrews’ from making themselves ‘swords
and spears’ (1 Sam. xiii. 19). Agricultural implements alone were
allowed (ver. 20). It would seem that a similar policy had been pursued
by the Philistines and Canaanites in the earlier age of Deborah, though
probably with less success. At all events Heber the Kenite, or itinerant
‘smith,’ still pitched his tent in Israelitish territory, and his wife
Jael sympathised with the Israelites rather than with their Canaanitish
lords.
When Thothmes III. of Egypt met the confederated kings of Canaan in the
plain of Megiddo, they were led by the Hittite sovereign of Kadesh on
the Orontes. It is possible that Barak was called upon to meet a similar
combination of forces. Sisera is not a Semitic name, while, as Mr.
Tomkins has pointed out, it finds striking analogies in such Hittite
names as Khata-sar, Khilip-sar, and Pi-siri[s]. The Hittite power at
Kadesh on the Orontes had not yet passed away. It still existed in the
time of David, when it formed one of the frontiers of the Israelitish
kingdom.[316] In the age of the Tel el-Amarna letters we find the
Hittites intriguing in Palestine along with Mitanni or Naharaim, and it
is not likely that they would have been less disposed to resume their
old influence in that country when Egypt was no longer to be feared.
Sisera may not only have been the commander of the Canaanitish forces,
but also a Hittite prince, nominally the ally of Jabin, but in reality
his suzerain lord. He dwelt, we are told, in ‘Harosheth of the
Gentiles,’ an otherwise unknown place. It may have been in ‘Galilee of
the Gentiles’ (Is. ix. 1), but it may also have been further north among
the Gentile Hittites of Kadesh.[317]
The battle took place on the banks of the Kishon, and ended in a
complete victory for the Israelites. The nine hundred iron chariots of
Sisera availed him nothing; ‘the stars in their courses’ had fought
against him. He escaped on foot to the tent of Heber the Kenite, whose
wife Jael received him as a guest, and then murdered him by driving a
peg of the tent through his temples while he lay asleep. When Barak
arrived in pursuit, Jael showed him the corpse of his enemy.
The pæan of triumph, ‘sung by Deborah and Barak’ on the day of the
victory, is one of the oldest fragments of Hebrew poetry. To its
antiquity and the archaic character of its language are due the many
corruptions of the text. Some of the passages in it are quite
unintelligible as they stand, and the conjectural emendations that have
been proposed for them are seldom acceptable except to their
authors.[318] But, as a whole, the pæan is not only a magnificent relic
of ancient Hebrew song, full of fire and vivid imagery, it is also a
document of the highest value for the historian. It gives us a picture
of Israelitish life and thought in the age of the Judges, untouched by
the hands of compilers and historians, and few have been hardy enough to
question its genuineness. It is a solid proof that the traditional view
of Israelitish history is more correct than that which modern criticism
would substitute for it, and that the ‘development’ of Israelitish
religion, of which we have heard so much, is a mere product of the
imagination. The belief in Yahveh displayed in the Song is as
uncompromising as that of later Judaism; Yahveh is the God of Israel,
who has fought for His people, and beside Him there is no other god. The
monotheism of Deborah is the monotheism of the Pentateuch. Nor is the
song less of a witness to the truth of the history which we have in the
Pentateuch and the book of Joshua. It tells us that Yahveh revealed
Himself to Israel on Mount Sinai, and it distinguishes the tribes one
from the other, and assigns to them the territories which bore their
names.
The Song began with words which, as we see from Deut. xxxiii. 2, Ps.
lxviii. 7, were a common property of Hebrew poetry.
‘For the avenging of Israel,
When the people gave themselves as a freewill offering,
Praise ye Yahveh!
Hear, O ye kings, give ear, O ye princes,
I will sing unto Yahveh, even I,
I will make music to Yahveh the God of Israel.
O Yahveh, when thou wentest forth from Seir,
When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom,
The earth trembled, the heavens also dropped water.[319]
The mountains melted from the face of Yahveh,
Even Sinai itself from before Yahveh the God of Israel.
In the days of Shamgar ben-Anath,
[In the days of Jael][320] the roads were deserted,
And the travellers walked along by-paths.
The peasantry failed, in Israel did they fail,
Until I, Deborah, arose,
I arose a mother in Israel.
Then was war (in) the gates (?):[321]
A shield was not seen, or a spear,
Among forty thousand in Israel.
My heart (saith) to the lawgivers of Israel,
Who gave themselves as a freewill offering among the people:
Praise ye Yahveh!
Ye that ride on white asses,
Ye that sit on cloths,
And ye that walk on the road, shout ye!
Above the voice of the [noisy ones] at the places of drawing water,
There[322] shall they rehearse the righteous acts of Yahveh,
Even righteous acts towards his peasants in Israel,
(Saying), “Then to the gates descended the people of Yahveh.”
Awake, awake, Deborah,
Awake, awake, utter a song![323]
Arise, Barak,
And capture thy capturers,[324]
O son of Abinoam!
Then to the nobles descended the people of Yahveh (?),[325]
They descended unto me among the heroes.
Out of Ephraim (came they) whose roots[326] (are) in Amalek,
Behind thee, O Benjamin, among thy clans.
Out of Machir descended lawgivers,
And out of Zebulon they that handle the staff of the scribe.
And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah,
For Issachar was as Barak;
In the valley (of the Kishon) were they sped on the feet,
Among the wadis of Reuben great were the searchings of heart.
Why didst thou stray among the sheep-folds
To hear the bleatings of the flocks?
For the wadis of Reuben great were the searchings of heart.
Gilead abode beyond the Jordan;
And Dan, why does he sojourn in ships?
Asher stayed on the sea-shore,
And abides in his havens.
Zebulon is a people that has jeopardied its life unto the death,
And Issachar also on the heights of the plain.
Kings came and fought,
Then fought the kings of Canaan
At Taanach on the waters of Megiddo;
They took no spoil of silver.
From heaven fought the stars,
In their courses they fought against Sisera.[327]
The torrent of Kishon swept them away;
A torrent of slaughters is the torrent Kishon.
Thou hast trodden down the strong ones, O my soul![328]
Then did the horse-hoofs strike (the ground)
Through the prancings of his steeds.
Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of Yahveh,
Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof
Because they came not to the help of Yahveh,
To the help of Yahveh among the heroes.
Blessed above women be Jael,
The wife of Heber the Kenite,
Above women in the tent may she be blessed!
Water he asked, milk she gave,
In a lordly dish she brought forth butter:
Her hand she put to the tent-pin
And her right-hand to the workman’s hammer,
And with the hammer she smote Sisera, she shattered his head,
And struck and pierced his temples.
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down,
At her feet he bowed, he fell;
Where he bowed, there lay he dead.
Behind the window looked and cried
The mother of Sisera behind the lattice:
“Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why tarry the wheels of his cars?”
The wisest of her waiting-women answered her,
Yea, she returned answer to herself:
“Have they not found and divided the spoil,
A damsel or two to each man,
A spoil of many-coloured garments to Sisera,
A spoil of garments of many-coloured needlework,
Two garments of many-coloured needlework for the neck of the
spoiler.”[329]
So may all thine enemies perish, O Yahveh;
But may those who love him be as the rising of the sun in his
might!’
Of Barak and Deborah we hear no more. The next judge and deliverer who
appears upon the canvas is an Abi-ezrite of Manasseh, who came from the
northern borders of Ephraim between Ophrah and Shechem. His father was
Joash, the head, it would seem, of the clan. But he himself bears a
double name. It is as Gideon, the ‘cutter-down’ of his father’s idol,
that he is first introduced to us. In later history his name is
Jerubbaal. The latter name is said to have been given him because he had
thrown down the altar of Baal, and is interpreted to mean ‘Let Baal
plead against him.’[330] But the other Old Testament examples we have
met with of the interpretation of proper names may well make us hesitate
about accepting this. They are all mere plays upon words, mere ‘popular
etymologies,’ which have no claim to be regarded as history. Whether the
philology is that of an ancient Hebrew writer or of a modern critic, its
conclusions do not belong to the domain of the historian.
Jerubbaal signifies ‘Baal will contend,’ not ‘Baal will plead against
him,’ and therefore really has a meaning exactly the reverse of that
ascribed to it in the narrative. The name seems substantially identical
with that of Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia in the age of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets. Joash, the father of Jerubbaal, was a worshipper of
Baal, and consequently there was nothing strange in his calling his son
after his god. It is only as Jerubbaal that the future judge was known
to the generation that followed him,[331] and his successor in the
kingdom of Manasseh was called even in his own day ‘Abimelech the son of
Jerubbaal.’[332] It has been suggested that Jerubbaal and Gideon were
two different personages, whom tradition has amalgamated together,[333]
but double names of the kind were not unknown in Oriental antiquity.
Solomon himself also bore the name of Jedidiah (2 Sam. xii. 25), and
Gideon, ‘the cutter-down,’ was not an inappropriate epithet for the
conqueror of the Midianites. There was a good reason why the pious
Israelite of a later generation should shrink from admitting that one of
his national heroes had borne a name compounded with that of Baal.[334]
The tribes of the desert, Amalekites, Midianites, and those Benê-Qedem
or ‘Children of the East,’ whom an Egyptian papyrus of the twelfth
dynasty places in the neighbourhood of Edom,[335] had fallen upon the
lands of the settled fellahin, as their Bedâwin descendants still do
whenever the Turkish soldiery are insufficient to keep them away. Year
by year bands of raiders swarmed over the cultivated fields, murdering
the peasants and carrying off their crops. At first it was Gilead that
suffered, but the Hebrews were weak and divided, and the robbers of the
desert were soon emboldened to cross the Jordan, and extend their raids
as far as the western frontiers of Israel. ‘They destroyed the increase
of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance for
Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.’
At last the Lord sent a prophet to the people and an angel to Gideon the
Abi-ezrite. Gideon was threshing wheat by the winepress near the sacred
terebinth of Ophrah. Here, under the shadow of the tree, was an altar of
Baal, and by the side of it the cone of stone which symbolised the
goddess Asherah. The angel summoned Gideon to rise and deliver Israel,
and as a sign that he was indeed the angel of Yahveh he touched with his
staff the offerings of flesh and unleavened cakes that Gideon had made
to him, so that fire rose out of the rock and consumed them all. On the
threshing-floor Gideon built an altar to Yahveh, like that more stately
sanctuary which David raised in later days on the threshing-floor of
rock which had belonged to Araunah the Jebusite.
Recent criticism has discovered in the history of Jerubbaal two
different and mutually inconsistent narratives, which are again
subdivided among a variety of writers. To these some critics would add a
third version of the story, which is supposed to be referred to in Is.
x. 26, though others maintain that the reference in the book of Isaiah
is to the first of the two narratives. It cannot be denied that the
history of the war against the Midianites in its present form is
confused, and that it is difficult to construct from it a clear and
intelligible picture of the course of events. That the compiler of the
book of Judges should have made use of more than one narrative, if such
existed, is indeed only natural, and what a conscientious historian
would be bound to do. But to distinguish minutely the narratives one
from the other, much more to analyse them into still smaller fragments,
is the work of Sisyphus. It is even more impossible than to distinguish
between Rice and Besant in _The Golden Butterfly_ or _Celia’s Arbour_.
The historian must leave all such literary trifling to the collectors of
lists of words, and content himself with comparing and analysing the
facts recorded in the story.[336]
The altar raised by Gideon was dedicated to Yahveh-shalom, ‘the Yahveh
of Peace,’ and it was still standing at Ophrah when the narrative
relating to it was written.[337] Its name shows that it could hardly
have been built before Gideon had returned in peace from the Midianitish
war. There was much that had first to be done.
Gideon’s first task was to destroy the symbol of Asherah and the altar
of Baal. The revelation made to him had been made in the name of Yahveh,
and it was in the name of Yahveh alone that he was about to lead his
countrymen to victory. It is true that between Yahveh and Baal the
Israelite villager of the day saw but little difference. Yahveh was
addressed as Baal or ‘Lord,’[338] and the local altars that were
dedicated to Him in most instances did but take the place of the older
altars of a Canaanitish Baal. Mixture between Israelites and Canaanites,
moreover, had brought with it a mixture in religion. Along with the
title, Yahveh had assumed the attributes of a Baal, at all events among
the mass of the people. Joash and the villagers, who demanded that
Gideon should be put to death for destroying the altar of Baal,
doubtless thought that they were zealous for the God of Israel. It was
the symbol of Asherah only which was the token of a foreign cult.
Perhaps the answer made by Joash to the charge against his son has been
coloured by the theology of the later historian. It breathes rather the
spirit of an age when the antagonism between Yahveh and Baal had become
acute than that of one who was himself a worshipper of Baal and Asherah,
and whose son in the hour of victory made an idol out of the enemy’s
spoil. The Baal worshipped by the villagers of Abi-ezer was regarded as
Yahveh himself, and hence it was that the offence committed by Gideon
against him was an offence committed against the national God, and
therefore punishable with death. To set him up as another god in
opposition to the God of Israel carries us down to the age of Elijah,
when the subjects of Ahab were called upon to choose between the Yahveh
who had led them out of Egypt and the Phœnician Baal. It belongs to the
same period as the etymological play on the name of Jerubbaal.
There was a special reason why Jerubbaal should thus have come forward
to deliver his countrymen from the Midianites. The Bedâwin raiders had
slain his brothers in a previous struggle at Mount Tabor (viii. 18-21).
Jerubbaal thus had a blood-feud to avenge. He was the last and
presumably the youngest of his family, and upon him therefore devolved
the duty of revenging his brothers’ death. Moreover, it would appear
from the words of the Midianite chiefs that Joash and his sons were not
only the heads of their clan, but that they also exercised a sort of
kingly authority in Ophrah and its neighbourhood. The history of
Abimelech seems to imply that the family of Abi-ezer had succeeded to
the power and even the name of the Canaanitish ‘kings’ of Shechem, and
that the subsequent ingratitude of the inhabitants of Shechem to the
house of Jerubbaal was due to jealousy of the preference displayed by it
for Ophrah. Shechem contained a large Canaanitish element which was
wanting at Ophrah, where the population was more purely Israelitish. If
Joash were thus king of a mixed population, recognised by Canaanites and
Israelites alike, we can understand why by the side of the altar of Baal
there stood also the symbol of the Canaanitish goddess. The very fact
that the sanctuary of Ophrah belonged to him (vi. 25) indicates that he
possessed royal prerogatives. Even at Jerusalem the temple of Solomon
was as it were the chapel of the kings.[339]
It has been suggested that the Baal whose altar stood on the land of
Joash at Ophrah was the Baal-berith or ‘Baal of the Covenant,’
worshipped at Shechem,[340] and that the ‘covenant’ over which the god
presided was that made between the Canaanites of Shechem and their
Hebrew master. Doubtless the two elements in the population would have
interpreted the name in a different way. For the Hebrews the ‘Baal of
the Covenant’ would have been Yahveh; for the Canaanites he would have
been the local sun-god. But there is nothing to prove that the
attributes of the Baals of Ophrah and Shechem were the same, or that
they were adored under the same form. Indeed, the fact that the altar
erected by Jerubbaal at Ophrah was dedicated to the ‘Yahveh of Peace’
tells rather in a contrary direction. Shechem had its Baal-berith, while
Ophrah may have had its Baal-shalom. While the one commemorated the
covenant that had been entered into between the two parts of the
population, the other would have commemorated its ‘peaceful’ settlement.
For the Canaanite it was a covenant, for the Hebrew it was peace.
The struggle at Mount Tabor, in which the brothers of Jerubbaal had
fallen, laid the fruitful valley of Jezreel at the feet of the Bedâwin
plunderers. The plain of Megiddo was now in the hands of the Israelites.
The battle on the banks of the Kishon had broken for ever the power of
the Canaanites and their ‘chariots of iron,’ and they were now tributary
to Manasseh.[341] The Canaanite townsman and the Israelitish peasant
were now living in peaceful intermixture, and the torrent of raiders
from the desert fell upon both alike. We hear no more of any attempts
made by the older population to shake off the Hebrew yoke; it suffers
from the Midianite invasion equally with its Hebrew masters, and the
family of Joash govern it as much as they govern the Israelites
themselves. Jerubbaal is the deliverer of the Canaanite as well as of
the Israelite.
From Ophrah he sends messengers throughout Manasseh, as well as to the
tribes of Asher, Zebulon, and Naphtali, and their fighting-men gather
together at his summons. He thus acts like a king, and is obeyed like a
king. Though he may not have actually borne the royal title, he was more
than a mere ‘judge.’ Barak may have assumed the name and prerogatives of
the Canaanitish kings he had conquered, and have passed them on to the
family of Ebi-ezer. At any rate the power of Joash must have extended
beyond Shechem and Ophrah; all Manasseh obeys the call of his son, and
even the more distant northern tribes come at his bidding. The
subjugation of the Canaanites had demanded a head to the state, and
their union with their conquerors implied an organised community under a
common king.
It was, however, with three hundred chosen followers that Jerubbaal made
his first attack upon the foe. Encouraged by a dream, he fell upon their
camp by night, and his followers, breaking the pitchers they carried
with them, and waving torches in their left hands, caused such a panic
among the undisciplined hordes of the desert that they fled in all
directions.[342] The rout of the enemy was completed by the rest of the
Israelitish army, which pursued the Midianites eastward towards the
Jordan. Part of them under the shêkhs Oreb and Zeeb made for the ford at
Beth-barah, where, however, they were intercepted by the Ephraimites,
and their chiefs slain at ‘the rock of Oreb’ and the ‘winepress of
Zeeb.’[343]
Meanwhile Jerubbaal was already on the eastern side of the Jordan,
following in hot haste a detachment of the Midianites under two other of
their shêkhs, Zebah and Zalmunna. His road led past Succoth and Penuel,
but their Israelitish inhabitants refused all help, and even bread, to
their brethren of Manasseh. It is clear that between Gilead and the
western tribes there was now a diversity of interests and feelings, and
that the half-nomad Israelites on the eastern side of the Jordan had
more sympathy with the heathen of the desert than with the ruler of the
organised state on the other side of the river. Perhaps they feared that
his arms would next be turned against themselves, and that they too
would be forced to become part of a kingdom of Manasseh.
But if they had hoped that the Midianites would have freed them from all
fears upon this score they were doomed to disappointment. Once more ‘the
sword of Yahveh and of Gideon’ prevailed, and Zebah and Zalmunna were
slain. The claims of the blood-feud were satisfied, and Jerubbaal now
returned to his old home. Condign vengeance was taken on ‘the elders’ of
Succoth and ‘the men’ of Penuel. The first were scourged with the thorns
of the wilderness, the others were put to death, and their tower, which
guarded the approach from the desert, was razed to the ground.
Now, however, Jerubbaal had to meet with more formidable adversaries.
The house of Joseph was divided against itself, and the Ephraimites
resented his conduct in acting independently of the elder tribe.[344] In
the earlier days of the occupation of Palestine it had been Ephraim
which took the leading part; Joshua, who first opened the path into
Canaan, had been an Ephraimite, and Mount Ephraim had been the first
stronghold of Israel on the western side of the Jordan. In the time of
Barak Ephraim had still been the dominant tribe, at least such is the
impression we gather from the Song of Deborah; but it had begun to live
on its past glories rather than on its present achievements. The
Benjamites had definitely separated from it, and become a separate
tribe, and Issachar, Zebulon, and Naphtali had carried on the war
against Jabin and Sisera. Manasseh, however, had not yet appeared on the
political scene; its place was taken by Machir, whose territory lay in
Gilead, not to the west of the Jordan. But between the age of Barak and
that of Jerubbaal a change had occurred. The Canaanitish towns, which
the victory on the banks of the Kishon had laid at the feet of the
northern tribes, passed into the possession of the younger branch of the
house of Joseph, and Issachar had to be content that Shechem also should
become a part of its territory.[345] Manasseh grew at the expense of its
neighbours. It is possible that the clan of the Abi-ezrites at Ophrah
had, by their conquest of Shechem, paved the way for the rise of
Manasseh; if so, the dominant position they occupied in the tribe would
become intelligible. Ophrah would have been the first home and
gathering-place of the tribe. The treaty with Shechem, which united that
city with Ophrah, may have been the beginning of Manasseh’s rise to
power.
But Ephraim could ill brook the growing ascendency of the younger tribe.
Manasseh had become wealthy from the tribute levied on its Canaanitish
subjects; it had united itself with the older inhabitants of the land,
and had borrowed their habits and their culture, and therewith their
idolatries as well. The mountaineers of Ephraim, on the other hand, had
retained much of the roughness and the virtues of the first invaders of
Palestine. They were still warlike and hardy; they held the fortress of
the Israelitish possessions in Canaan; and Shiloh, with its Aaronic
priesthood, its traditions of the Mosaic law, and its purer worship of
Yahveh was in their midst. Jerubbaal was forced to temporise with them.
He pointed out that the destruction of the main body of the Midianites
at the fords of the Jordan was a greater achievement than his own
successful pursuit of the remaining bands. He had slain Zebah and
Zalmunna in revenge for the death of his brothers; the slaughter of Oreb
and Zeeb had been for the sake of all Israel. ‘Is not the gleaning of
the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abi-ezer?’
Jerubbaal was fitted to rule, for he possessed statecraft as well as
military ability. His statecraft was shown not only in his answer to the
Ephraimites, but also in his refusal to accept the title of king. It was
pressed upon him, we are told, by ‘the men of Israel’—that is to say, by
the northern tribes. Whether his father had actually borne the title we
cannot say, though it would seem from the subsequent history of
Abimelech, as well as from the words of Zebah and Zalmunna (viii. 18),
that he must have done so. But at any rate he had exercised the
authority of a king, like his son Jerubbaal, at the outset of the
Midianite war, and it may be that among the Canaanites of Shechem he had
also the name of king. Jerubbaal, however, if we are to regard the
passage as historical, rejected the crown offered him by the Israelites,
declaring that their king was Yahveh alone.
That the passage is historical seems to admit of little doubt.
Jerubbaal’s words were in harmony with the feelings of the time among
the stricter adherents of Yahveh, as we learn from the language of
Samuel when the people demanded of him a king. How different were the
feelings of the compiler of the book of Judges may be gathered from the
words with which it ends. Moreover, Jerubbaal’s refusal of the royal
title was politic. He had already realised that he had powerful enemies
in Ephraim, who viewed his success and claims to power with suspicion
and hostility, and he also knew that it was in Ephraim and among the
priesthood of Shiloh that the belief in the theocratic government of
Israel was strongest. As in Assyria, in Midian, and in Sheba, so too in
Israel, the high priest preceded the king; it was not until the need for
a single head and a leader in war became too urgent to be resisted that
the national God made way for a national king.[346]
Phœnician tradition remembered that Jerubbaal was a priest of Yahveh,
not that he was a king.[347] It was as a priest that he exacted from the
people the golden earrings they had won from the Midianites in order
that he might make with them an image of his God. The Hebrew text has
substituted for the image the ephod which accompanied it.[348] But the
ephod was the linen garment of the priest, which he wore when
ministering, and with the help of which the future was divined.[349] It
was not the vestment but the image, in whose service the vestment was
used, that Jerubbaal set up in Ophrah, and after which ‘all Israel went
a whoring.’ Like his father, Jerubbaal saw no idolatry where it was
Yahveh of Israel who was represented by the idol. The religious beliefs
and practices of Canaan had entered deeply into the soul of Israel; at
Shiloh alone was no image of its God.
High priest among the Israelites, king among his Canaanitish subjects,
Jerubbaal lived long in his father’s home at Ophrah. He acted like a
king, even if he did not take the royal title. Like Solomon, he had
‘many wives,’ and like Solomon also, he built a sanctuary attached to
his own house.[350] The Bedâwin spoilers came no more: there was now a
strong hand ruling over the northern tribes of Israel, checking all
tendency to disunion, and building up an organised community.
But the kingdom of Jerubbaal contained within it those seeds of
dissolution which have brought about the fall of so many Oriental
monarchies. They spring up, not among the people, but in the family of
the ruler. Polygamy brings with it a curse, and the king is hardly dead
before the children of his numerous wives are murdering and fighting
with one another. Even during his lifetime the palace is honeycombed
with the intrigues of the harîm, which break out into open war as soon
as he has passed away. The family of Jerubbaal was no exception to the
rule. Abimelech, the son of his concubine, a Canaanitess of
Shechem,[351] conspired with his mother’s kinsmen in Shechem, and taking
seventy shekels of silver from the temple of Baal-berith, hired with
them a band of mercenaries, who fell upon the other sons of Jerubbaal at
Ophrah and murdered them all save one. Alone of the ‘seventy’ brethren
of Abimelech, Jotham, the youngest, hid himself and escaped. The rest
were slaughtered like oxen on a block of stone. Abimelech then returned
to Shechem, and there under the sacred terebinth, which stood by the
consecrated ‘pillar’ or Beth-el of the city, he was anointed king. The
garrison of the Millo, or fortress, of Shechem took part in the
ceremony.
The report of Abimelech’s usurpation was brought to Jotham. He left his
place of concealment, and, standing on the top of Mount Gerizim,
upbraided the men of Shechem with ingratitude towards Jerubbaal. He
clothed his words in one of those parables of which the East is the
home. ‘The trees went forth,’ he told them, once on a time, ‘to anoint a
king over them; and they said unto the olive-tree, Reign thou over us.
But the olive-tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith
by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? And
the trees said unto the fig-tree, Come thou and reign over us. But the
fig-tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness and my good
fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said the trees unto
the vine, Come thou and reign over us. And the vine said unto them,
Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be
promoted over the trees? Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come
thou and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth
ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow;
and if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of
Lebanon.’
The moral of the parable was so obvious that it did not need Jotham’s
explanation to make it clear. He had been bold in venturing near his
enemies, and as soon as he had finished speaking, he fled to a place of
safety. Beer, ‘the well,’ where he found a refuge, may have been the
place of that name in the extreme north of Naphtali.[352] Here at least
he would have been secure from pursuit.
The usurpation of Abimelech was the revolt of the older Canaanitish
population against their Israelitish masters. It marked the successful
rising of the native element. Ophrah has to make way for Shechem, and
‘the men of Hamor the father of Shechem’ take the place of the children
of Jacob. Yet the deliverance from the Midianites wrought by Jerubbaal
had been achieved as much for the benefit of the Canaanitish part of the
population as for the Israelites themselves. The murder of his sons and
the destruction of his family was a poor requital for all that he had
done for them. Jotham was justified in prophesying that their own god
Baal-berith would avenge the broken ‘covenant,’ and that Abimelech and
his Shechemite conspirators would fall by one another’s hand.
Before three years were ended the prophecy was fulfilled. The ‘god’ of
Shechem ‘sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the Shechemites,’ who
began a plot against his rule. Abimelech had withdrawn from the city and
was living at the otherwise unknown Arumah, the garrison and government
of Shechem being placed under the command of a certain Zebul.[353]
Perhaps the king had already begun to be suspicious of his subjects;
perhaps his retirement to another town had aroused their jealousy.
However it may have been, the Shechemites openly set at naught his
authority. Bands of brigands left the city and infested the neighbouring
mountains, where they robbed all who passed that way. They were soon
joined by another band of bandits, under the leadership of Gaal the son
of Jobaal.[354] Under him the disaffection towards Abimelech came to a
head, and Gaal proposed that the citizens should revolt against
Abimelech and Zebul. Zebul, however, while professing to be upon their
side, sent messengers to Abimelech and urged him to march against
Shechem before it was too late. Abimelech gave heed to the message, and
Gaal’s forces were defeated outside the city, and driven back within its
gates. Abimelech then pretended to retire to Arumah, and the citizens
accordingly once more went out to their work in the fields. But the
royal troops were really lying in ambush, divided into three companies,
two of which fell upon the fellahin in the fields and massacred them;
while the third, with Abimelech himself at their head, rushed into the
city through the open gate. All day long the battle raged in the
streets; then the survivors fled to the ‘crypt’ of the temple of
Baal-berith which adjoined the Millo or fort.[355] By the orders of
Abimelech brushwood was brought from the neighbouring Mount Zalmon,
piled up over the entrance to the crypt and set on fire. All who were
inside, men and women, to the number of about a thousand, perished in
the flames. Shechem itself was razed to the ground, and its site sown
with salt. For a time the old Canaanitish city disappeared from the soil
of Palestine.
The destined punishment had now fallen upon Shechem; it was not long
before it fell also upon its destroyer. The town of Thebez had shared in
the revolt of Shechem, and Abimelech’s next action was to besiege it.
The town itself offered little resistance, but there was a ‘strong
tower’ within it, to which its defenders fled for refuge. Abimelech
again had recourse to fire. But while the wood was being laid against
the gate of the tower, a woman on the parapet above threw a broken
millstone upon his head and shattered his skull. The king felt himself
dying, and besought his armour-bearer to thrust a sword through his
body, lest it might be said that he had been slain by the hand of a
woman. But the request was made in vain, and future generations
remembered that the last king of Shechem, the murderer of his brethren,
had perished ignominiously by a woman’s hands.[356] With Abimelech the
sovereignty of the house of Joash seems to have come to an end. We hear
no more of Jotham, or of any other attempt to found a monarchy among the
northern tribes. The first endeavour to organise Israel into a state had
but little success. Once more the old elements of disorder and disunion
reigned supreme. The tribes stood further and further apart from each
other, and mutual jealousies led to intestine wars. The influence of
Ephraim and of the sanctuary of Shiloh grew daily less, and the power of
the northern tribes waned at the same time. The Israelites on the
eastern side of Jordan began to forget that they had brethren on its
western bank; Reuben is lost among the Bedâwin of Moab, and Gilead and
Ephraim engage in interfraternal war. Meanwhile a new tribe is rising in
the south. Judah has absorbed Simeon and the Kenizzites of Hebron; the
few relics of Dan which have been left in the neighbourhood of Zorah
have become Jews in all but name, and the Kenites and the Jerahmeelites,
and the other foreign settlers in the Negeb have followed the example of
the Kenizzites. A common enemy and a common danger has thus forced them
together.
The enemy were the Philistines. In the early days of the Hebrew
settlement in Canaan the Philistines had already made the raids inland
which had been checked, if not suppressed, by Shamgar ben-Anath. For a
time they had remained quiet in their five cities of the coast. But
fresh immigrants from Krete or other Ægean lands introduced new blood
and warlike energy. Once more their armed bands marched forth to plunder
and destroy. This time they are no longer contented with mere raids;
they now aim at conquest. Hardly have the Canaanites been subjugated
after long generations of struggle, when the Israelites are called upon
to meet a new foe. It is a foe, moreover, which is not enervated by
centuries of luxury and culture, not accustomed to foreign rule or
divided within itself, but a hardy nation of pirates whose whole life
has been passed in fighting, and in seizing the possessions of others.
The first brunt of the Philistine attack was borne by Judah. But it was
not long before the armies of the Philistines made their way northwards,
and even penetrated into the fastnesses of Mount Ephraim.[357] Of all
this, however, the record has been lost. The compiler of the book of
Judges failed to find it in the fragmentary annals of the past, and has
been compelled to fill up the interval between the fall of the kingdom
of Manasseh and the supremacy of the Philistines in Palestine with
notices of judges and events whose exact place in Hebrew history was
uncertain.
It is here, accordingly, that we have the names of the so-called lesser
Judges, of whom little more was known than the names. Two of them, Tola
the son of Puah, and Elon, belonged to Issachar and Zebulon; and it is
somewhat singular that while the book of Numbers makes Tola and Puah the
heads of families in Issachar, it makes Elon the head of a family in
Zebulon.[358] Of Tola we are told that he lived and died at Shamir in
Mount Ephraim, which at that time therefore must have been in the hands
of Issachar, and that he judged Israel twenty-three years. The account
of Elon is equally laconic; he judged Israel ten years, and was buried
at Aijalon in Zebulon. Another judge in Zebulon was Ibzan of
Beth-lehem,[359] who was judge for seven years only, but of whom it was
recorded that he had thirty sons and thirty. daughters. A similar record
has been handed down of another of these minor judges, Abdon the son of
Hillel. He, it is said, had forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode on
seventy colts. Abdon was judge for eight years, and ‘was buried at
Pirathon in the land of Ephraim, in the mount of the Amalekites.’ This
statement seems to push back the date of Abdon to an early period when
Benjamin had not yet separated from the ‘House of Joseph,’ and ‘the land
of Ephraim’ accordingly extended southwards into the Amalekite region.
It would be of the same age as that of the Song of Deborah.
Gilead also had its judges, though the names of only two of them have
been preserved. One was Jair, who ruled as judge for twenty-two years,
and who ‘had thirty sons that rode on thirty ass-colts, and they had
thirty cities which are called the villages of Jair.’ We hear something
more of this Jair in the Pentateuch. He had taken the villages which
were called after his name, and must have lived not long after the
Israelitish conquest of Bashan.[360] He belongs, therefore, to the
earliest period of Israelitish history in Canaan, and may have been a
contemporary of Joshua himself.
The second judge left a more famous record behind him. This was
Jephthah, who delivered Gilead from its bondage to the Ammonites. His
father’s name was doubtful, his mother was a harlot, and ‘the elders’ of
Gilead accordingly expelled him from what he claimed to be his father’s
house.[361] He fled to the desert land of Tob,[362] and there gathering
a band of bandits around him, lived on the spoils of brigandage. He soon
became known, like David in later days, for his skill and courage in
deeds of arms. For eighteen years the Ammonite domination had lasted,
and the Gileadites sighed for independence. But it was long before a
champion could be found. At last the fame of the bandit captain in Tob
reached the ears of the Israelitish elders, and they begged him to come
to their help. Jephthah taunted them with their conduct towards him, but
feelings of patriotism finally prevailed, and he agreed to lead his
followers against the national enemy if the Gileadites would promise to
make him their ‘head.’ The representatives of the people had no choice
but to agree to his terms, and the struggle for independence began. It
ended in the deliverance of the Israelites; the Ammonites were again
driven from the land which had once been theirs, and Gilead was
free.[363]
The rejoicings over the victory, however, were clouded by the rash vow
of the Israelitish chieftain. Before marching forth to attack the
Ammonites, Jephthah had vowed to sacrifice as a burnt-offering to Yahveh
whatever first came out of his house at Mizpeh to meet him should he
return ‘in peace.’ It was his own daughter, his only child, who thus
came forth to meet him, and to celebrate his victory with timbrels and
dances. The spirit of the Gileadites was very far removed from that
which had taught Abraham a newer and better way; the Canaanite belief
was strong in them that their firstborn could be claimed by their God;
and none questioned that Yahveh Himself had selected the victim and led
her forth from the house to welcome the conqueror. The vow had to be
fulfilled; Yahveh had claimed that which was nearest and dearest to the
Gileadite chief in return for the victory He had given him. All Jephthah
could do was to grant his daughter’s request that she might wander for
two months in the mountains with her comrades, bewailing ‘her
virginity,’ before the day of sacrifice arrived.
The memory of the sacrifice was never forgotten. It became a custom in
Israel, we are told, for the Israelitish maidens year by year to
‘lament’ for four whole days the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite. It
has been maintained that this custom was the origin of the story, and
that the lamentation was not for the daughter of a Hebrew judge, but for
some mountain goddess who corresponded with the Phœnician god Adonis. As
the maidens of Phœnicia once each year mourned the death of Adonis, so
the maidens of Gilead bewailed the untimely death of a virgin goddess.
But the theory is part of that reconstruction of ancient Israelitish
history, one of the postulates of which is that a custom has never
arisen out of a historical incident. The historian, on the other hand,
finds in the story evidences of its truth. There is no trace elsewhere
of such a goddess as the story demands, or of an anniversary of
lamentation in her honour, while the account of the vow and its
fulfilment is in thorough harmony with the beliefs and customs of the
time. It is wholly contrary to the spirit of later Israel as well as to
the feelings of those who adhered faithfully to the Mosaic Law. If the
story were an invention, it must have originated either in the days when
human sacrifice was still practised, or else in the later period when it
was regarded with abhorrence. In either case, its invention would be
inconceivable. In the earlier period there would have been no reason to
invent what actually took place; in the later period, the character of a
judge and deliverer of Israel would never have been needlessly
blackened. Moreover, the belief that the first thing met with on leaving
or entering a house is unlucky and devoted to the gods, is a belief
which is probably as old as humanity. It still survives in our own
folklore, and testifies to a time when he who first left the protection
of the hearth and threshold could be claimed by the powers of the other
world.
Jephthah’s term of office as ruler of Gilead was only six years. He
seems to have been already advanced in years when he was called upon to
oppose the Ammonites. But his rule was signalised by a war with Ephraim.
The ever-increasing dissensions between the tribes on the eastern and
western sides of the Jordan came openly to a head, and the elder and
younger branches of the house of Joseph engaged in a struggle to the
death. Ephraim, it seems, still claimed predominance, and asserted its
right to interfere in the concerns of its eastern brethren. ‘Ye
Gileadites,’ it was said, ‘are fugitives of Ephraim among the
Ephraimites and among the Manassites.’ But the ‘fugitives’ soon proved
that they were the stronger of the two. The Ephraimites invaded Gilead,
but were compelled to retreat. Before they could reach the Jordan
Jephthah had seized the fords across it, and the retreat of the
Ephraimites was cut off. A terrible massacre took place; whoever said
_sibboleth_ for _shibboleth_, ‘river-channel,’ was thereby known to
belong to the western bank, and was at once put to death. Altogether
42,000 men of Ephraim perished, and the power of the tribe was broken.
Jephthah, however, did not follow up his success; that would have
brought upon him the hostility of the other western tribes, and he seems
to have returned to Gilead. There he died and was buried in one of its
cities, the name of which was not stated in the sources used by the
compiler of the book of Judges.[364]
The date of Jephthah it is impossible to fix. That the author of the
book of Judges was ignorant of it would appear from his making Jephthah
follow immediately after Jair. But it is clear that he believed it to
have been towards the close of the period of the Judges. This, too,
would agree with the fact that it corresponded with the fall of the
power of Ephraim. In the time of Jerubbaal, the Ephraimites were still
strong enough to command the respect of the conqueror of the Midianites;
when the light once more breaks upon the history of central Israel we
find the Philistines in possession of the passes that led into Mount
Ephraim, and threatening Shiloh itself. The destruction of the
Ephraimite forces at the fords of the Jordan can best explain the
Philistine success.
With the period of the Philistine supremacy the history of the Judges
comes to an end. That supremacy forced Israel to the conviction that
they must either submit to the organised authority of a king or cease to
be a nation at all. The kingdom of Israel was born amid the struggle
with the Philistines; and though the first king perished in the
conflict, his successor succeeded in founding an empire.
The Philistine wars lasted for many years. They began with raids on the
Israelitish territory immediately adjoining that of the Philistines.
Perhaps the conquest of the plain at the foot of the mountains of Judah
first roused their hostility against Judah; at all events, it brought
them into contact with the conquering tribe. A desultory warfare was
carried on for some years; then the plans of the Philistines became more
definite, and they aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the whole
of Canaan. The sea-robbers had been gradually changed into a nation of
soldiers.
Samson, the hero of popular tradition, belongs to the earlier part of
the Philistine wars. The last relics of the tribe of Dan in the
neighbourhood of Zorah and Eshtaol have not as yet been absorbed by
Judah; the Philistines, on the other hand, have gained possession of the
whole plain. Between them and the Israelites there is constant
intercourse, partly friendly, partly hostile; at one time the two
peoples intermarry, visit, and trade with one another; at another time
they carry on a guerilla warfare.
Of late years it has been the fashion to transform Samson into the hero
of a myth.[365] It is true that his name is derived from _Shemesh_, ‘the
sun,’ and it cannot be denied that the stories relating to him have come
rather from popular tradition than from written records. His hair, in
which his strength lay, reminds us of the face of the sun-god engraved
on the platform of the Phœnician temple of Rakleh on Mount Hermon, where
the flaming rays of the sun take the place of human hair. But it must be
remembered that Samson is represented as a Nazarite—a purely Israelitish
institution between which and a solar myth there is no connection—and
that his strength was dependent on the keeping of the vow which
consecrated him to Yahveh as a Nazarite from the day of his birth. With
the loss of the hair the vow was broken, the consecration at an end; the
strength had been given by Yahveh, and Yahveh took it away. Between this
and the fiery locks of the sun-god there is but little connection.
The character of Samson, however, is that of a hero of popular
tradition. His utter ignoring of moral principles, his hankering after
foreign women, his riddle, his devices for deceiving and slaying his
enemies, belong to the tales told by the Easterns at the door of a
_café_, or around the camp-fire, rather than to sober history. When we
hear that Ramath-lehi was so called from the ‘jawbone’ of an ass which
Samson had ‘flung away’ after slaying a thousand men with it, or that
Ên-hakkorê received its name from the water which flowed from the bone
to quench the hero’s thirst, we find ourselves in the presence of those
etymological puns with which the historian has nothing to do.[366]
The compiler of the book of Judges has turned this hero of popular
story, this lover of Philistine women, into a Judge of Israel. He was,
however, merely a Danite champion, the one hero of Danite tradition, of
whom indeed the tribe had little reason to be proud. Even in Judah his
achievements gained him no honour. When the Philistines sought to seize
him after he had burnt their corn, ‘three thousand men of Judah’
ascended to his place of refuge ‘on the top of the rock Etam’ and handed
him over to his enemies. The wiles of a Philistine harlot deprived him
of his strength and his eyes, and he ended his days as a fettered slave
at Gaza, grinding wheat for his Philistine lords. The glory of his
death, however, in the eyes of his fellow-tribesmen redeemed the rest of
his life. Called to make sport for his masters in the temple of Dagon,
while they feasted in honour of their god, he laid hold of the two
central columns on which the building was supported, and brought it down
on the assembled crowd. Samson and the Philistines alike were buried
under its ruins. And ‘so,’ the chronicler adds, ‘the dead which he slew
at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.’
In the story of Samson we hear for the first and the last time in the
book of Judges of ‘the men of Judah.’ It is the first time that they
appear in history. Judah produced no Judges, for Othniel was a
Kenizzite, and throughout the epoch of the Judges its history is a
blank. Nothing can show more clearly how modern a tribe it was as
compared with the other tribes of Israel, and how insignificant was the
power which it possessed. The original Judah had its home at Beth-lehem,
shut in between the Jebusite Jerusalem and the Edomite Hebron, and it
was not until it had absorbed and coalesced with the other occupants of
its future territory that the Judah of history was born. It is possible
that the union was brought about, or at all events completed, by the
Philistine wars; at any rate we find no traces of it at an earlier date.
Even Lachish had been an Ephraimitic conquest, and in the time of
Deborah it must still have been reckoned among the cities of
Ephraim.[367]
Ephraim was yet to have a judge, the last of the race. Though the title
must be denied to Samson, it must be given to Samuel the seer. In Samuel
the judges and the prophets of Israel met together, and the spirit of
Yahveh which had marked out the judge now passed over into the prophet.
But the history of Samuel is not contained in the book of Judges. We
have to look for it in a new book which records the foundation of the
Israelitish kingdom. The books of Samuel take their name from that of
the prophet which appears on their first page. They begin, however, with
the conjunction ‘And,’ and thus presuppose an earlier volume. They are,
in fact, merely the continuation of the book of Judges. Whether or not
the same compiler has worked at the two books we cannot tell; that is a
question which must be left to the philological critics who have long
since settled his character and date, and determined exactly the limits
of his work.
There is one fact, however, connected with the compilation of the book
of Judges which the historian cannot but notice. The narratives embodied
in it differ from one another in tone and character. The religious point
of view of the stories of Jephthah or Micah is wholly different from
that of the stories of Barak or Jerubbaal. Between the account of the
overthrow of the Canaanites on the Kishon and the stories narrated of
Samson, there is the contrast between written history and folklore. Each
narrative preserves its own individuality, its own point of view, its
own reflection of the age and locality to which it belongs.
Here and there, indeed, the pen of the historian who has collected and
combined these fragments of the past history of Israel can be clearly
traced. The speeches sometimes remind us of those in Thucydides, and
exhibit the colouring of a later age. The framework of the narrative,
moreover, is the writer’s own; in fact, he shows himself to be more than
a compiler; he is a historian as well. But with all this, the narratives
he has collected differ as much in character and tone as they do in the
events they record.
What more convincing proof can we have of the faithfulness with which he
has reproduced his materials? In most cases they have not even passed
through the assimilating medium of his own mind; instead of using his
privilege as a historian he has given them to us unchanged and
unmodified. And yet in many cases they must have shocked both his
religious and his patriotic sense. Whatever else he may have been, the
author of the book of Judges possessed a historical restraint and
honesty which is rare even among the modern writers of Europe. He has
given us the older records of his country just as he found them.
They were for the most part written records. The scribes of Zebulon are
alluded to in the Song of Deborah, and the notices of the ‘lesser’
Judges have the same annalistic character as the notices of the early
kings of Egypt in the fragments of Marretho. The Canaanites of Shechem,
from whom Abimelech was sprung, had been acquainted with the art of
writing from untold centuries, and the Canaanitish cities which were
laid under tribute by Manasseh and the neighbouring tribes contained
archive-chambers and libraries where the older literature of the country
was stored. It is only in the future territory of Judah that we hear of
a Kirjath-Sepher, ‘a town of books,’ being destroyed, and it is just
this part of the country whose history in the age of the Judges is a
blank. Between Othniel the destroyer of Kirjath-Sepher and David the
conqueror and embellisher of Jerusalem, the name of no single Judge or
hero has been preserved. Samson belonged to the feeble relics of the
tribe of Dan, and the story of his deeds is the one narrative in the
book of Judges which betrays an origin in folklore instead of written
history.
Footnote 279:
Judg. iii. 3. The ‘Hivites’ of the Hebrew text should probably be
corrected into ‘Hittites.’ The Sidonians are mentioned to the
exclusion of the Tyrians, as in Gen. x. 15-18. This takes us back to
the period before that of David, when Tyre was still a place of small
importance, and Sidon was the leading city on the Phœnician coast.
Cp., however, 1 Kings xvi. 31.
Footnote 280:
Judg. iii. 6, 7.
Footnote 281:
As Israel was theoretically considered to be divided into twelve
tribes, there is no reason for doubting the cypher, even though there
were not actually twelve tribes at the time in Canaan, and one of
tribes, Benjamin, can hardly have had a piece sent to it. The text
carefully avoids saying that the pieces were sent to each of the
tribes. In chap. xx. 2, the word ‘all’ is used in that restricted
sense to which western students of Oriental history have to accustom
themselves, since one at least of the tribes, Benjamin, was absent.
Footnote 282:
The value of modern philological criticism of the Old Testament may be
judged from the fact that Stade pronounces the narrative of the war
against Benjamin to be unhistorical, because the first king of Israel
was a Benjamite! (_Geschichte des Volkes Israel_, p. 161).
Footnote 283:
Judg. xviii. 12, 13, where it is said to be ‘behind’ or west of
Kirjath-jearim. In xiii. 25 the Camp of Dan is placed between Zorah
and Eshtaol, which were west of Kirjath-jearim. See G. A. Smith,
_Historical Geography of the Holy Land_, pp. 220, 221.
Footnote 284:
We hear on other occasions of a regiment of six hundred men among the
Israelites (Judg. xx. 47; 1 Sam. xiii. 15, xxiii. 13), and it would
seem, therefore, that in the division of the troops a memory of the
culture of Babylonia was preserved. Six hundred men represented the
Babylonian _ner_.
Footnote 285:
Judg. xviii. 30. ‘The captivity of the land’ is of course that
described in 2 Kings xv. 29, and shows that the compilation of the
Book of Judges must be subsequent to the conquest of Northern and
Eastern Israel by Tiglath-pileser.
Footnote 286:
Kennicott, _Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum_, i. p. 509. ‘Moses’ is also
the reading of the Vulgate and a few Greek MSS.
Footnote 287:
See 1 Kings viii. 9. The addition of the pot of manna and Aaron’s rod
in the Epistle to the Hebrews (ix. 4) is due to a misunderstanding of
Ex. xvi. 33, 34, and Numb. xvii. 10.
Footnote 288:
The identity of Mitanni and Nahrina is stated in one of the Tel
el-Amarna letters (W. and A. 23) from Mitanni, a hieratic docket
attached to it stating that it came from Nahrina. In one place,
however (W. and A. 79. 13, 14), the Phœnician governor Rib-Hadad seems
to distinguish between ‘the king of Mittani and the king of Nahrina,’
though the passage may also be translated, ‘the king of Mittani, that
is, the king of Nahrina.’ Ilu-rabi-Khur of Gebal (W. and A. 91. 32)
writes the name Narima, and says that the king of Narima in alliance
with the king of the Hittites was destroying the Egyptian cities of
Northern Syria.
Footnote 289:
W. and A. 104. 32-35. Comp. Numb. xxiv. 24, where Assyria and Eber
take the place of Babylonia and Nahrima. The translation given above
is from a corrected copy of the cuneiform text.
Footnote 290:
See _Records of the Past_, new ser., vi. pp. 28, 29, 34, 45.
Footnote 291:
Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_ (Eng. tr.), ii. p. 151; _Records
of the Past_, new ser., vi. pp. 31-45.
Footnote 292:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., vi. pp. 38-41. As only the _qau_ or
‘district’ of Shalam is mentioned, it is possible that the city itself
was not captured by the Egyptian troops. Hebron is written _Khibur_,
_i.e._ the city of the ‘Khabiri.’
Footnote 293:
Was the campaign of Ramses III. the mysterious ‘hornet’ sent before
the children of Israel to destroy the populations of Canaan (Exod.
xxiii. 28, Deut. vii. 20, Josh. xxiv. 12)? At any rate, this is more
probable than the suggestion that _tsir’âh_, rendered ‘hornet,’ is a
variant of _tsâra’ath_, ‘plague.’
Footnote 294:
The name has been Hebraised, and perhaps corrupted, so that it is
difficult to suggest what could have been its Mitannian original. The
Khusarsathaim of the Septuagint, however, reminds us of the name of
Dusratta or Tuisratta, the Mitannian king who corresponded with the
Pharaoh Amenophis IV.
Footnote 295:
Livy, xxviii. 37, xxx. 7.
Footnote 296:
The Welsh laws allowed a stranger to acquire proprietary rights in the
fourth generation, and to become a tribesman in the ninth (Seebohm, in
the _Transactions_ of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1895-96,
pp. 12 _sqq._).
Footnote 297:
This is expressly stated in the Song of Deborah: the Reubenites could
not come to the help of their brethren, for they had become a body of
scattered and nomad shepherds (Judg. v. 15, 16).
Footnote 298:
See Judg. xx. 16.
Footnote 299:
_P’sîlîm_, mistranslated ‘quarries’ in the Authorised Version. They
were the sacred stones, believed to be inspired with divinity, which
formed the Gilgal or ‘Circle.’ Modern critics have raised unnecessary
difficulties about the geography of the narrative, and conjectured
that the name of the capital of Eglon has dropped out of the text in
Judg. iii. 15 (see Budde: _Die Bücher Richter und Samuelis_, p. 99).
The Biblical writer makes it plain that Eglon was at Gilgal, not at
Jericho as his would-be critics assert.
Footnote 300:
Caphtor is written Kptar in hieroglyphics at Kom-Ombo (on the wall of
the southern corridor of the temple), where it heads a list of
geographical names, and is followed by those of Persia and Susa
(Sayce: _The Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, 3rd
edition, p. 173). The name of the Zakkal, formerly read Zakkar or
Zakkur, and identified with the Teukrians, has been pointed out by
Professor Hommel in a Babylonian inscription of the fifteenth century
B.C. (W. A. I. iv. 34, No. 2, ll. 2, 6). Here it is called the city of
Zaqqalu, and we may gather from a papyrus in the possession of M.
Golénischeff that it was situated on the coast of Canaan not far from
Dor.
Footnote 301:
A reminiscence of the event is probably preserved in Justin, xviii. 3,
where we read that in the year before the fall of Troy, ‘the king of
the Ascalonians’ destroyed Sidon, whose inhabitants fled in their
ships and founded Tyre. The date would harmonise with that of the
reign of Ramses III. Lydian history related that Askalos, the son of
Hymenæos, and brother of Tantalos, had been sent by the Lydian king
Akiamos in command of an army to the south of Palestine, and had there
founded Askalon (Steph. Byz. _s.v._ Ἀσκάλων), and according to Xanthos
the Lydian historian, the goddess Derketô was drowned in the lake of
Askalon by the Lydian Mopsos (Athen. _Deipn._ viii. 37, p. 346). In
these legends we have a tradition of the fact that the Philistines and
their allies came from the coast of Asia Minor and the Greek Seas.
Footnote 302:
Josh. xiii. 2, 3; Judg. iii. 1-3. The statement in Judg. i. 18 was
true only theoretically; it was not true in fact until the reign of
David.
Footnote 303:
Stephanus Byzantinus _s.v._ Ἰόνιον, where it is also said that Gaza
was termed Ionê. According to Kastôr the thalassocratia or ‘sea-rule’
of Minôs lasted until B.C. 1180, when it passed into the hands of the
Lydians. By the latter may be meant the expedition sent to the south
of Palestine by the Lydian king Akiamos.
Footnote 304:
Sayce, _Races of the Old Testament_, pp. 126, 127, and pl. i.
Footnote 305:
Deut. ii. 23. Avim is merely a descriptive title signifying ‘the
people of the ruins.’
Footnote 306:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp.
325-327. It is possible that some of the Semitic deities had been
adopted by the Philistines before they left Krete, if indeed they came
from that island. At all events it has been supposed that certain
Canaanitish divinities were adored there, more especially Ashtoreth,
under the title of Diktynna. The presence of Semites in the island
seems indicated by the name of the river Iardanos or Jordan.
Footnote 307:
In the age of Deborah, however, it would seem that the seaport of
Joppa was still in the possession of the Danites (Judg. v. 17). But
cp. Josh. xix. 46.
Footnote 308:
Winckler and Abel, _Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen_,
iii. 143. 37, 43. Anatum or Anat, the son of Sin-abu-su, is also a
witness to the sale of some property in a deed dated in the reign of
the Babylonian king Samsu-iluna, the son of Khammurabi or Amraphel,
and published by Mr. Pinches, _Inscribed Babylonian Tablets in the
Collection of Sir H. Peek_, iii. p. 61.
Footnote 309:
See Judg. i. 27. Beth-shean, the Scythopolis of classical geography,
is the modern Beisân.
Footnote 310:
Twenty is half the indeterminate number forty, and merely denotes that
the exact number of years, though unknown, was less than a generation.
Footnote 311:
Judg. v. 15. Literally the words are: ‘Issachar [is] like Barak.’ The
Heb. _kên_ is the Assyrian _kêmi_, ‘like,’ and is used in the same way
as _kida_ in modern Egyptian Arabic. It is criticism run wild to
assert with Budde, Wellhausen, and others, that Deborah also is
described as belonging to Issachar.
Footnote 312:
Pindar, _Pyth._ iv. 106; _Lactant._ i. 22; _Etym. Mag._ s.v. ἐσσην.
Footnote 313:
Gen. xxxv. 8, where the name of the terebinth, Allon-Bachuth, ‘the
terebinth of weeping,’ is derived from the lamentations over the death
of the nurse. A different origin of the name, however, seems to be
indicated in Hos. xii. 4.
Footnote 314:
Rimmon, one of the chief Assyrian gods, was also entitled Barqu, ‘the
lightning,’ and it is possible that the name had migrated westward
along with that of Rimmon. Noam, whose name enters into that of
Abinoam, the father of Barak, seems to have been a Phœnician god,
whose consort was Naamah.
Footnote 315:
‘Forty thousand’ represents the highest unit, one thousand, in the
division of the army, multiplied by the indeterminate number forty.
Footnote 316:
‘The Hittites of Kadesh,’ according to the reading of Lucian’s
recension of the Septuagint, 2 Sam. xxiv. 6, in place of the corrupt
and unmeaning Tahtim-hodshi of the Massoretic text. See Hitzig, _Z. D.
M. G._, ix. pp. 763 _sqq._; Wellhausen, _T. B. S._, p. 221.
Footnote 317:
It has been generally assumed to have been near the Kishon, on account
of Judges iv. 16. But the inference is not certain, partly because we
do not know how far the pursuit may have extended, partly because
Oriental expressions cannot be interpreted with the mathematical
exactitude of western language. The name of Harosheth means probably
‘[the town of] metal-working,’ or ‘the smithy.’
Footnote 318:
Being a poem, it was probably handed down orally at first. This would
account for variant readings like ‘also the clouds dropped,’ by the
side of ‘also the heavens dropped,’ in _v._ 4; or ‘in the days of
Jael,’ by the side of ‘in the days of Shamgar ben-Anath,’ in _v._ 6.
The name of Jael, however, may have been a marginal gloss like
_sârîd_, ‘a remnant,’ possibly, in _v._ 13. The song was almost
certainly written from the outset in the letters of the so-called
Phœnician alphabet, and not in cuneiform characters. Had it been
written in cuneiform there would have been a confusion between
_aleph_, _hê_ and _’ayin_, which cannot be detected in it. At the same
time, the use of the preposition _bě_ in _vv._ 2 and 15 (_b’ Isrâel_,
_b’ Issachar_) could be explained from the cuneiform syllabary, in
which the character _pi_ (used for _bi_ in the Tel el-Amarna tablets)
also has the value of _yi_. The omission of the article, which is a
characteristic of the Song, reminds us that in Canaanite or Phœnician
the definite article of Hebrew did not exist.
Footnote 319:
A variant reading gave ‘clouds’ instead of ‘heavens.’
Footnote 320:
Probably a marginal gloss.
Footnote 321:
This line also is corrupt, but there is a reference to it again in
verse 11, ‘The people of Yahveh went down to the gates.’
Footnote 322:
_I.e._ on the road.
Footnote 323:
_Dabbĕrî shîr_, with a play on the name of Deborah.
Footnote 324:
The Massoretic text has ‘captives.’
Footnote 325:
The text is here again corrupt. The Septuagint renders it: ‘Then went
down the remnant to the strong.’ But _sârîd_, ‘remnant,’ is possibly a
marginal gloss derived from the name of the place Sarid in Zebulon
(Josh. xix. 10), the meaning being ‘Then the people of Yahveh
descended to Sarid to the nobles.’ The second member of the verse
shows that the ‘nobles’ are Israelites.
Footnote 326:
The text cannot be right here, though the general meaning of it is
clear.
Footnote 327:
The idea is the same as that of the sun and the moon standing still
while Joshua defeated the kings at Makkedah (Josh. x. 12-14).
Babylonian astrology taught that events in this world were dependent
on the motions of the heavenly bodies.
Footnote 328:
Septuagint: ‘My mighty soul has trodden him down.’ The verse seems to
be corrupt. Cheyne translates: ‘Step on, my soul, with strength!’
Footnote 329:
The Massoretic punctuation makes it ‘spoil.’ Ewald conjecturally reads
_sârâh_, ‘princess,’ for _shâlâl_, ‘spoiling.’ The Septuagint has,
equally conjecturally, ‘spoils for his neck.’ The garment referred to
is the white towel worn round the neck as a protection from the sun or
wind, and called _shaqqa_ in Upper Egypt, or the parti-coloured
_milâya_ used for the same purpose in Lower Egypt. Cheyne translates:
‘A coloured stuff, two pieces of embroidery, for my neck, has he taken
for a prey.’
Footnote 330:
Judg. vi. 32.
Footnote 331:
1 Sam. xii. 11, 2 Sam. xi. 21 (where ‘Baal’ has been changed into
‘bosheth,’ ‘shame’).
Footnote 332:
Judg. ix. 1.
Footnote 333:
See Kittel, _Geschichte der Hebräer_, ii. p. 73.
Footnote 334:
If a distinction is to be drawn between the names of Gideon and
Jerubbaal, it might be conjectured that the first was the name under
which the bearer of it was known to the Israelites at Ophrah, the
second that whereby he was known to the Canaanites of Shechem.
According to Porphyry, Phœnician annals spoke of a priest of Ieuô
named Hierombalos, which is clearly Jerubbaal. The Canaanitish kings
could also be priests, as we learn from the history of Melchizedek.
Baethgen makes Jerubbaal practically identical with Meribbaal
(_Beiträge zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte_, p. 143).
Footnote 335:
The Kadmonites of Gen. xv. 19, where they are coupled with the Kenites
and Kenizzites of Southern Palestine: see above, p. 162.
Footnote 336:
Many of the accounts of battles given by Livy are similarly confused,
and are doubtless drawn from more than one source, but no one would
think of distinguishing the sources, much less of splitting the
narrative of the Roman historian into separate documents.
Footnote 337:
Judg. vi. 24.
Footnote 338:
The usage lingered even as late as the time of Hosea (Hos. ii. 16).
Footnote 339:
The name of Abimelech, ‘my father is king,’ cannot be used as an
argument, since the ‘king’ referred to in it is the divine king or
Moloch, not an earthly ruler.
Footnote 340:
Judg. ix. 4, 46. Cf. viii. 33.
Footnote 341:
See Judg. i. 28.
Footnote 342:
The story of the pitchers and torches is pronounced by modern
criticism to be a myth, and has been compared with old Egyptian
romances like that which described the capture of Joppa in the reign
of Thothmes III. by a stratagem similar to that which we read of in
the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. But from the point of
view of history alone there is no reason for discrediting the
narrative. Bedâwin superstition would fully account for the panic and
flight if the camp believed that the spirits of the night had attacked
them. Indeed similar panics have been known to arise not only among
the Bedâwin of the wilderness, but even among disciplined English
soldiers.
Footnote 343:
The names of the chiefs have been said to have been derived from the
two places which local tradition associated with their deaths. But
though ‘the rock of the Raven’ is a very possible geographical name in
the East—there is indeed more than one ‘Raven’s Rock’ in modern
Egypt—‘the winepress of the Wolf’ is quite the reverse. Animal names
like raven and wolf, on the other hand, were frequently applied in
ancient Arabia to individuals and tribes (see W. Robertson Smith in
the _Journal of Philology_, ix. 17, 1880, pp. 79-88).
Footnote 344:
In the narrative the quarrel with Ephraim comes before the defeat of
Zebah and Zalmunna, but Judg. vii. 25 shows that it is misplaced.
Certain critics have maintained that two different versions of the
same story lie before us, and that the Oreb and Zeeb of the one
version are the Zebah and Zalmunna of the other. This, however, is to
exhibit a curious ignorance of Bedâwin organisation and modes of
warfare: there would have been more than one raiding band, and the
different bands would have been under different shêkhs.
Footnote 345:
See above, p. 270. Of the cities mentioned in Judg. i. 27, Dor, as we
learn from the Golénischeff papyrus, had been occupied by the Zakkal,
the kinsfolk of the Philistines, and would not have become Israelitish
until after the conquest of the latter people. (Cf. 1 Kings iv. 11.)
Dor, however, properly belonged to Asher, and Josh. xvii. 11 expressly
states that the Canaanitish cities afterwards possessed by Manasseh
were originally included in the territories of Issachar and Asher.
Issachar could not have lost them until after the time of Barak.
Footnote 346:
Even at Tyre, the title of the supreme Baal, Melek-qiryath (Melkarth),
‘the king of the city,’ shows that at the outset the state had been a
theocracy.
Footnote 347:
See above, p. 306. The priestly character of Jerubbaal has been
suppressed in the narrative in accordance with the feelings of a later
time, when the priesthood was strictly confined to the tribe of Levi.
But at an earlier date the anointed king was regarded as invested by
Yahveh with priestly functions. Saul and Solomon offered sacrifice,
and David’s sons acted as priests (2 Sam. viii. 18).
Footnote 348:
See Judg. xvii. 5; Hos. iii. 4.
Footnote 349:
1 Sam. ii. 18, xxii. 18, xxiii. 9, xxx. 7, 8.
Footnote 350:
Judg. vi. 24, viii. 27.
Footnote 351:
See Judg. ix. 1, 28.
Footnote 352:
2 Sam. xx. 14. The reading of the latter passage, however, is not
certain.
Footnote 353:
See Judg. ix. 41. Verse 31 should be translated, Zebul ‘sent
messengers unto Abimelech to Arumah.’
Footnote 354:
The name of Jobaal, ‘Yahveh is Baal,’ has been preserved in the
Septuagint. Its signification has caused it to be omitted in the
Massoretic text where we have only _ben-’ebed_, ‘the son of a slave,’
corresponding to the expression ‘son of a nobody,’ which we meet with
in the Assyrian inscriptions.
Footnote 355:
It is here called the _Migdal Shechem_ or ‘Tower of Shechem,’ but
seems to have been the same as the _Millo_ of _v._ 6. The fort would
have stood in the same relation to Shechem that the ‘stronghold of
Zion’ taken by David stood to Jerusalem. It was probably built just
outside the walls of the town. We may compare also the ‘Millo’
constructed by Solomon to defend his palace and the temple (1 Kings
ix. 15).
Footnote 356:
See 2 Sam. xi. 21.
Footnote 357:
See Judg. x. 11, 12. All records of the wars with the Zidonians and
the Maonites have perished. Perhaps Professor Hommel is right in
identifying the Maonites with the people of Ma’ân in Southern Arabia,
whose power waned before the rise of that of Sheba, and extended to
the frontiers of Palestine (_Aufsätze und Abhandlungen sur Kunde der
Sprachen, Literaturen und der Geschichte des vorderen Orients_, pp. 2,
47).
Footnote 358:
Numb. xxvi. 23, 26.
Footnote 359:
Had the southern Beth-lehem been meant, it would have been called, as
elsewhere in the book of Judges, Beth-lehem-Judah.
Footnote 360:
Numb. xxxii. 41; Deut. iii. 4, 14. In Deut. iii. 4, the ‘cities’ of
Argob are described as sixty in number, which in Josh. xiii. 30 are
identified with ‘the towns of Jair which are in Bashan.’ This,
however, is incorrect, as it was thirty villages and not sixty cities
that were conquered by Jair.
Footnote 361:
This must mean that he had claimed a portion of his father’s
inheritance from the legitimate sons, and that ‘the elders’ who tried
the case decided it against him. In the narrative he is called merely
‘the son of Gilead.’
Footnote 362:
Tubi (No. 22) is one of the places mentioned by Thothmes III. among
his conquests in Palestine. It is probably the modern Taiyibeh, the
Tôbion of 2 Macc. x. 11, 17.
Footnote 363:
The argument put into the mouth of the Ammonites (Judg. xi. 13), like
the answer made by Jephthah, doubtless expressed the feelings on both
sides, but the language is that of the historian, as in the case of
the speeches in Thucydides. When it is said (_v._ 26) that the
Israelites had occupied the district north of the Arnon for three
hundred years, the chronology is that of the compiler. Three hundred
years are equivalent to ten generations, and the ten generations are
made up by counting the names of the judges given in the book of
Judges, down to Jephthah, as representing so many successive
generations (1. Moses; 2. Joshua; 3. Othniel; 4. Ehud; 5. Shamgar; 6.
Barak; 7. Gideon; 8. Abimelech; 9. Tola; 10. Jair. If Moses and Joshua
are reckoned as one generation, the numeration would be carried on to
Jephthah).
Footnote 364:
The name of Jephthah is a shortened form of Jephthah-el, which we find
as the name of a valley on the borders of Asher (Josh. xix. 27).
Footnote 365:
See Steinthal, _The Legend of Samson_, Eng. tr. by Russell Martineau
in Goldziher’s _Mythology among the Hebrews_, pp. 392-446.
Footnote 366:
Ramath-lehi is ‘the height of Lehi,’ and has nothing to do with
_râmâh_, ‘to throw’; ’Ên-haqqorê is ‘the Spring of the Partridge,’ not
‘of the caller.’
Footnote 367:
It may be gathered from Judg. i. 16, 17, that Simeon preceded Judah in
the occupation of the future Judah. When the expedition against Arad
and Zephath was formed, the Jews and Kenites were still encamped
together at Jericho. The Kenites seem to have remained behind in the
newly-won territory of the Negeb, while the Jews established
themselves at Beth-lehem.
CHAPTER VI
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MONARCHY
Influence of Shiloh—Samuel and the Philistines—Duplicate Narratives
in the Books of Samuel—Prophet and Seer—Dervish Monasteries—Capture
of the Ark and Destruction of Shiloh—Saul made King—Quarrels with
Samuel—Delivers Israel from the Philistines—Attacks the
Amalekites—David—Two Accounts of his Rise to Power—Jealousy of
Saul—David’s Flight—Massacre of the Priests at Nob—Wanderings of
David—He sells his Services to the King of Gath—Duties of a
Mercenary—Battle of Gilboa and David’s Position—He is made King of
Judah—War with Esh-Baal—Intrigues with Abner—Murder of
Esh-Baal—David revolts from the Philistines and becomes King of
Israel—Capture of Jerusalem, which is made the Capital—Results of
this—Conquest of the Philistines, of Moab, Ammon, Zobah, and
Edom—The Israelitish Empire—Murder of Uriah and Birth of
Solomon—Influence of Nathan—Polygamy and its Effects in the Family
of David—Revolt of Absalom—Of Sheba—Folly and Ingratitude of
David—Saul’s Descendants sacrificed because of a Drought—The Plague
and the Purchase of the Site of the Temple—David’s Officers and last
Instructions—His Character—Chronology—Solomon puts Joab and Others
to Death—His Religious Policy—Queen of Sheba—Trade and
Buildings—Hiram of Tyre—Palace and Temple Built—Tadmor—Zoological
and Botanical Gardens—Discontent in Israel—Impoverishment of the
Country—Jeroboam—Tastes and Character of Solomon.
When Samuel was born, the Hebrew settlement in Palestine had long been a
matter of the past. Little by little Canaan had passed into the
possession of the Israelitish tribes. The older population had at first
been massacred, then laid under tribute and amalgamated with the
newcomers. The tribes themselves had changed much. Some had disappeared,
others had grown at their expense. Ephraim, which from the first days of
the conquest had been the most powerful among them, was now in a state
of decadence, and a new force was rising in the south in the shape of
the mixed tribe of Judah. A few of the Canaanite cities in the interior
still remained independent, like Gezer and Jerusalem, as well as all
those on the Phœnician coast.
The tribes had suffered from want of cohesion. The attempt to found a
monarchy in Manasseh had failed; it was too local and limited, and
served only to arouse the jealousy of the tribes which lay outside it.
It had done little more than bring to light the dissensions and
differences that existed within Israel itself. The bond that connected
the tribes had become continually looser, and the ‘House of Joseph’ was
divided into hostile factions. Benjamin had been decimated by its
brother Israelites under the leadership of Ephraim, and Ephraim had
undergone the same treatment at the hands of its brethren from Gilead.
The conquest of Canaan had brought with it the old Canaanitish spirit of
disunion and discord; the spectacle which the Tel el-Amarna letters
present to us of city arrayed against city is reproduced in the Israel
of the period of the Judges. The common brotherhood, which was still
felt in the age of Deborah, tended to be forgotten. The tribes no longer
come to one another’s aid; they fight with one another instead. The
authority of the Judges become more and more circumscribed, their
jurisdiction more and more confined. The tribes on the east of the
Jordan begin to lead a separate life, and hardly acknowledge that the
tribes to the west are kinsmen at all. The incorporation of the
Canaanite element had weakened the recollection of a common descent, and
at the same time had introduced into Israel a spirit of selfish
isolation. The causes which had brought about the conquest of Canaan by
the Israelites were now working among its conquerors, and it seemed as
if the fate of the Canaanites was to be the fate of the Israelites also.
The sanctuary at Shiloh still existed, but it had lost much of its
influence. It had become little more than the local sanctuary of
Ephraim,[368] and as the power of Ephraim waned the influence of Shiloh
declined as well. Elsewhere rival sanctuaries and rival forms of worship
had arisen. The high-places, whereon the Canaanites had adored Baalim
and Ashtaroth, still continued sacred, and though officially the Baal of
Israel was Yahveh, the mass of the people worshipped the local Baal of
the place in which they lived. Yahveh was scarcely remembered, even in
name: His place was taken by the Baalim and Ashtaroth of Canaan.
Manasseh went ‘a whoring’ after the golden image erected by Jerubbaal in
Ophrah, or after the Canaanitish Baal-berith in Shechem; a rival
priesthood to that of Shiloh served before the idols of Micah at Dan;
and Jephthah sacrificed his daughter in accordance with Canaanitish
beliefs. The Law of Moses was forgotten; each man did that which was
right in his own eyes.
Modern criticism has asked how it is possible that all this could have
been the case if a written Law actually existed. But the question
forgets to take account of the circumstances of the time. A knowledge of
reading and writing was confined to a particular class, that of the
scribes; Israel was divided; intercommunication was difficult, and a Law
which presupposed a camp of nomads continually under the eye of their
legislator, was not adapted to the changed conditions in which the
Israelites found themselves. Moreover, it must be remembered that the
Israelites were for the most part a peasantry living in scattered
villages; the inhabitants of the towns were Canaanites either by race or
marriage. The one were too ignorant, the others too alien, to be
affected by the Mosaic Code.
Nevertheless, the Code was preserved at Shiloh. Here there was an
Aaronic priesthood, and the few notices that we possess of the worship
carried on there show that it was in accordance with the Mosaic Law.
Outside Shiloh, among those who still remained true to the faith of
their fathers, the Law was remembered and presumably observed. Of this
the Song of Deborah is a witness. The God of Israel, in whose name Barak
and Deborah went forth against the heathen, is the Yahveh of the
Pentateuch, not the Baal of Canaan. The history of Israel in the age of
the Judges is, religiously as well as politically, the history of
degeneracy, not of development.
In fact, religion and politics cannot be separated one from the other in
the history of the ancient East, least of all in the history of the
Hebrews. The one presupposes the other, and the political decay of the
nation is a sure sign of its religious retrogression. The same causes
which broke up its political unity broke up its religious unity as well.
The knowledge and worship of Yahveh lingered in Ephraim, because in
Ephraim alone the old ideal and spirit of Israel continued to survive.
Ephraim was, as it were, the heart and core of Israel; it had led the
attack upon Palestine, and its blood was purer than that of the other
tribes. It remained more genuinely Israelite, with less admixture of
foreign blood.
After Joshua and Othniel the history of most of the Judges is connected
with that of Ephraim. Ehud is a Benjamite—the Ephraimitic ‘Southerner’;
Shamgar is referred to in the Song of Deborah;[369] Deborah herself
dwelt near ‘Beth-el in Mount Ephraim’; between Ephraim and Jerubbaal,
who reigned on the Ephraimitic frontier, there was smothered hostility,
which burst into open war in the case of Jephthah; Tola was buried in
‘Shamir in Mount Ephraim’; Abdon was an Ephraimite; while Ibzan and Elon
came from adjoining tribes. Jair the Manassite, and Samson from ‘the
camp of Dan,’ are the sole exceptions to the rule. What else can this
mean except that such annals as survived the stormy age of the Judges
were preserved amid the fastnesses of Mount Ephraim? The scribes of
early Israel were not confined to Zebulon, and as in Babylonia or Egypt,
so also in Palestine, the temple was the seat of the library. In the
sanctuary at Shiloh the written records of the country would have found
a safe harbourage along with the tables of the Law and the other
monuments of the Mosaic age.[370]
The lifetime of Samuel separated the age of the Judges from that of the
Kings. It marked the transition from a period of anarchy and disunion to
one of order and organised unity under a single head. But never had the
fortunes of Israel seemed so desperate. Disunited, with its former
leader, Ephraim, disabled and half-exterminated through civil war, it
had become the prey of a foreign enemy. The Philistines were no longer
content with raiding expeditions. They now occupied the districts they
overran, and built forts to secure the passes that led into the very
heart of the Israelitish territory.[371] Their supremacy extended from
one end of Palestine to another, and so gave a name to the country which
it never afterwards lost. The tribes were reduced to a condition of
serfdom; they ceased to be free men who could go forth with arms in
their hands to fight their foes; and were compelled, as in the
subsequent days of Chaldæan domination, to confine themselves to tilling
the soil. The wandering smiths, the Kenite gypsies, were driven from the
land; the Israelite was deprived of all warlike weapons, and was forced
to go to the nearest Philistine post if he wished merely to sharpen his
implements of agriculture. The sons of Jacob had almost ceased to be a
nation.
It was while Samuel was still young that the chief Philistine victories
were gained, and as he grew older the Philistine yoke became heavier and
more severe. In the general wreck, his was the one prominent figure in
Israel. To him the people looked for counsel and help, and saw in him a
prophet of Yahveh. But Samuel was a man of peace, not of war. He could
not lead his people to battle, or check the rising tide of Philistine
success. Other men were wanted for the work, and these were not
forthcoming. Perhaps a time came when Samuel himself was unwilling they
should be found, and that the authority he had possessed should pass to
another. Such, at least, is the impression we derive from his opposition
to the demand of the people that they should have a king.
Samuel possessed, moreover, something more than personal influence. He
was the last representative of the ancient sanctuary at Shiloh. He had
been dedicated to it even before he was born; he had grown up in it
among the last descendants of the earlier high-priests; he had seen the
ark taken from it to fall into the hands of the Philistines; he had also
witnessed, probably, the destruction of the temple itself. All the older
traditions of Mosaic worship gathered about him; he was the living link
in the chain which bound the religious past of Israel with its present.
In his person the doctrines and practices which had been preserved at
Shiloh were handed on to the newer age of the kings.
The Hebrew historian who put together the books of Samuel was no longer
embarrassed, like the compiler of the book of Judges, by a want of
materials. His embarrassment arose from a contrary cause. The documents
before him relating to the history of the seer, to the rise of the
monarchy and the adventures of David, were numerous, and the same event
was sometimes recorded in different forms. He was called upon to
harmonise and combine them together, and he doubtless experienced the
same difficulty in doing so that the Assyriologists at present
experience in reconciling the various accounts they have of the history
of Babylonia in the thirteenth century B.C. That the latter can be
reconciled, if only we knew a little more, we cannot doubt; but for the
present the chronological inconsistencies seem irreconcilable. All that
can be done is to set them side by side.
The compiler of the books of Samuel treated his materials in the same
way. The result is that the picture of the Hebrew prophet which is
presented to us is not always uniform in its colours. Sometimes he is a
priest, sometimes the judge of all Israel, sometimes a mere local seer
whose very name appears to be unknown to Saul.[372] Throughout the
greater part of the narrative the Philistines are represented as the
irresistible masters of the country; once, however, we hear that the
cities they had captured were restored to Israel.[373] But it does not
follow that because the colours of the picture are not uniform, a fuller
knowledge of the history would not show that they are in harmony with
one another. European critics are apt to forget that in the East, and
more especially in the ancient East, conditions of life and society
which are incompatible in Europe may exist side by side. John, the
hermit of Lykopolis in Upper Egypt, was nevertheless on more than one
occasion the arbiter of the destinies of the Roman Empire. And in the
border warfare of Canaan cities passed backwards and forwards from one
side to the other with a rapidity which it is difficult for the modern
historian to realise.
Whether Samuel was a Levite or an Ephraimite by descent has been
disputed. His father came from the village of Ramathaim-zophim in Mount
Ephraim, and was descended from a certain Zuph, who is called ‘an
Ephrathite.’[374] ‘Ephrathite’ signifies ‘a man of Ephraim’ (as in 1
Kings xi. 26). But it also signifies a native of Ephratah or Bethlehem
in Judah (Ruth i. 2, 1 Sam. xvii. 12), and could therefore signify any
other place of the same name. That there were other places of the name,
the very name of Ephraim, ‘the two Ephras,’ is a witness,[375] and we
might therefore see in the ‘Ephrathite’ merely a native of one of them.
The Chronicler (1 Chron. vi. 26, 27, 33-38) definitely makes Samuel a
Levite, and traces his genealogy back to Kohath. It is true that in the
age of Samuel the priests, in spite of the Mosaic law, were not always
of the family of Levi—the fact that David’s sons were ‘priests’ is a
sufficient proof of this,[376]—but it seems hard to believe that such an
infringement of the Levitical tradition would have been permitted at
Shiloh. Nor is it likely that the genealogy given by the Chronicler was
an invention. Samuel had been in a special manner the gift of Yahveh.
His mother Hannah had borne no children to her husband Elkanah, and was
accordingly exposed to the taunts of a second and more fortunate wife.
Once each year did the whole family ‘go up’ to Shiloh, ‘to worship and
to sacrifice unto the Lord of Hosts.’ On one of these occasions Hannah
besought Yahveh with tears that He would grant her a son, promising to
dedicate him to the service of the sanctuary should he be born. A
Babylonian tablet, dated in the fifth year of Kambyses, records a
similar dedication by a Babylonian mother of her three sons to the
service of the sun-god at Sippara.[377] In this case, however, the sons
did not leave their mother’s house until they were grown up, when they
entered the temple, where part of their duty was to attend the daily
service.
Hannah’s prayer was granted, and a son was born. The name which he
received has no relation to the circumstances of his birth, in spite of
the etymology suggested for it in 1 Sam. i. 20, so long as we look only
to its Hebrew spelling. But if this spelling has been derived from a
cuneiform original all becomes clear. Samû-il in Assyrian would mean
‘God hears,’ and there would thus be a fitting connection between the
name and the story of the prophet’s birth. The fact is noteworthy, as it
suggests that the history of Samuel was first written in the cuneiform
characters of Babylonia; and that the cuneiform syllabary was used in
Israel up to the time of the fall of Shiloh.[378]
As soon as the child was weaned he was brought to the sanctuary along
with other gifts. These consisted of meal and wine, and three bullocks,
one of which was slain at the time of the dedication. ‘The priest’ who
presided over the services of the temple was old and infirm, and the
management of the sanctuary was really in the hands of his two sons,
Hophni and Phinehas. His own name was Eli. But he comes before us
without introduction; we know nothing of his parentage and descent, and
even the Chronicler found no record of his genealogy. That he was a
lineal descendant of Aaron, however, admits of no doubt. This, indeed,
is plainly stated not only in the prediction of the destruction that
should overtake Eli’s house (1 Sam. iii. 14), but also in the opening
words of the prophecy of ‘the man of God’ (1 Sam. ii. 27, 28).[379] The
very name of Phinehas, given to Eli’s son, connects him with the line of
Aaron and the long bondage of the Israelites in Egypt. Phinehas is not
Hebrew, but the Egyptian Pi-Nehasi ‘the Negro,’ and could have no sense
or meaning in the Israel of the age of Samuel except as an old family
name.
Samuel was clad in the linen ephod, the sacred vestment and symbol of
the priest, and ‘ministered unto Yahveh before Eli.’ One night, before
‘the lamp of God’ had gone out which burned before the ark of the
covenant,[380] ‘the word of the Lord’ came to the boy in his sleep.
Three times did it call to him, and then came the revelation of the
punishment which Yahveh was about to bring on the house of the high
priest.[381] His sons had been unfaithful to their office; not only had
they lain ‘with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle
of the congregation,’ they had made men abhor the offering of the Lord,
and the weak old man had restrained them not. The law had ordained that
the fat of the sacrifice belonged to Yahveh, and that before it was
burned upon the altar neither priest nor offerer could receive anything
of the victim. Unless the law was complied with, the sacrifice was
useless; Yahveh had been robbed of His portion, and no blessing could
follow upon the offering. But the sons of Eli persistently set at naught
the strict injunctions of the law. Before the fat was burned, their
servant came and struck his three-pronged fork into the flesh that had
been placed in the caldron, demanding that it should be given to him
raw. God’s priests thus mutilated the sacrifices that were made to Him,
and compelled His worshippers to defraud Him of His due. The Israelites
began to shrink from bringing their yearly offerings to Shiloh, and the
downward course of the religion of Israel was hastened by the cynical
greed of its priests.[382]
Eli had already been warned by ‘a man of God’ of the coming vengeance of
Yahveh. The prophet destined to play so important a part in the history
of Israel now appears almost for the first time upon the scene. Deborah,
indeed, had been a prophetess, and a prophet had denounced the idolatry
of his countrymen during the period of Midianitish oppression; but the
spirit of Yahveh, which, in later days, revealed itself in the form of
prophecy, had hitherto rather inspired those upon whom it had fallen to
become leaders in war and ‘judges’ of their people. Now it assumed a new
shape. Out of the misery and confusion produced by the Philistine raids
sprang the first great outburst of Hebrew prophecy. Those who still
believed Israel was the chosen people of Yahveh, and that He alone was
God over all the earth, were profoundly stirred by the triumph of the
uncircumcised. There was an outbreak of that religious enthusiasm,
degenerating at times into fanaticism, which has occurred again and
again in the East. The ‘seer’ took the place of the ‘judge.’ The waking
visions which he beheld revealed the future, and declared to him and the
people the will of Yahveh. The arms of flesh had failed; all that was
left was the ‘open vision,’ where the events of the future were pictured
beforehand, and men learned how to escape disaster.
Around the seer there gathered bands of disciples, closely resembling
the dervishes of to-day. They, too, received a part of the prophetic
spirit, and at times, under the influence of strong emotions, passed, as
it were, out of the body into an ecstatic state. Like the modern
dervishes, however, they were completely under the control of the seer.
At a word from him their ecstasy would cease, and they would once more
become ordinary citizens of the world. But the spirit that moved in them
was easily communicated to religious or excitable natures. The
messengers sent by Saul to arrest David at Ramah were themselves
arrested by the spirit of prophecy which permeated the home of Samuel,
and when Saul himself followed in his wrath, he, too, was suddenly
overcome by the same divine influence. ‘The spirit of God was upon him
also; and he went on and prophesied, until he came to Naioth (the
convent) in Ramah. And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied
before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that night.’
But this ecstatic excitement was not of the essence of Hebrew prophecy,
and the latter soon divested itself of it. The dervish element, indeed,
remained almost to the last; Elijah is a proof of it, and even Hosea and
Isaiah still recur at times to symbolic action. But it became
subordinate and purely symbolical, while the seer himself became a
prophet. The conception that gathered round him was no longer that of a
seer of visions, a revealer of the future, but of an interpreter of the
will of God to man. Prediction there might be in his prophecies; but it
was accidental only, and dependent on conditions which were clearly
expressed. If the people repented of their sins, God’s anger would be
turned away from them; if, on the contrary, they persisted in their evil
ways, disaster and destruction would fall upon them. The message of
Yahveh was conditional; it did not contain the revelation of an
inevitable future.
In this respect the Hebrew prophet was unique. His name _nâbî_ is found
in Babylonian, where it takes the form of _nabium_ or _nabu_, ‘the
speaker.’ It was the name of the prophet-god of Babylon, Nebo, the
interpreter of the will of Bel-Merodach, the supreme deity of the city.
Nebo declared to mankind the wishes and commands of Merodach; he was,
too, the patron of literature, the inventor, it may be, of writing
itself. The name of the mountain whereon Moses died is a testimony that
the worship of Nebo had been carried to the West in the old days of
Babylonian dominion in Canaan, and we need not wonder that the word
_nâbî_, with all that it implied, had been carried to the West at the
same time. But it was not until after the age of Samuel that it made its
way successfully into the Hebrew language. Samuel was still the _roeh_
or ‘Seer,’[383] though the Babylonian word in the form of a verb
(_hithnabbê_) was already applied to his ecstatic companions who
prophesied around him.[384] But the word answered to a need. As the
Hebrew prophet ceased more and more to be a seer, it became necessary to
find some new title for him which should express more accurately his
true nature, and the word _nâbî_ was already at hand. The ‘seer,’
accordingly, fell into the background; the ‘prophet’ occupied his place.
We can trace the beginning of this great religious movement in the age
of Samuel. Samuel has often been called ‘the founder of the prophetic
schools,’ and, to a certain extent, this is true. But they were not
schools in the sense of establishments where his contemporaries could be
educated in the older literature of their country, and be trained to
take upon them the prophetic office. Schools of this kind were to come
later in the history of Israel. They did not even resemble the early
Christian monasteries of Egypt, where bodies of monks lived together
under a head, sometimes in a single building, sometimes in a collection
of separate cells. The earlier disciples of Samuel were wandering bands
of enthusiasts, over whose religious ecstasies he exercised an exciting
and a controlling influence. They were men, to use a Biblical
expression, who were ‘drunk with the spirit’ of God.[385]
The loss of the ark and the destruction of Shiloh must have quickened
the movement which the Philistine troubles had begun. And it should be
remembered that the ‘prophets’ among whom Saul was numbered were not all
of them of the Dervish type. Among them must have been men like Samuel
himself, the true predecessors of the prophets of later Hebrew history.
In the generation which followed, we find men like Gad and Nathan, who
have ceased to be seers and have become the preachers of Israel, the
conscience-keepers of the king himself, and the chroniclers of his
reign.[386] The literary traditions of Shiloh passed to them through the
hands of Samuel.
The prophetic movement did something more than keep alive a belief in
Yahveh as the God of Israel. It preserved at the same time the feeling
of national unity. The ‘prophets’ who surrounded Samuel were drawn from
all classes and from all parts of the Israelitish territory. That Samuel
was ‘established to be a prophet of Yahveh’ was, we are told, known to
‘all Israel,’ ‘from Dan to Beer-sheba.’ That the statement is not too
general is shown by the history of Saul. All Israel demanded a king, and
it was over all the Israelitish tribes that he ruled. As he owed his
power to Samuel, it is clear that the influence of Samuel also must have
extended from one extremity of the Israelitish tribes to another.
Wherever the Philistine supremacy allowed it, the authority of the seer
was recognised and reverenced.[387]
But it follows from this that the veneration in which the temple at
Shiloh had been held was equally widespread. Theoretically, at least,
the Israelite acknowledged a central sanctuary, where the sons of Aaron
served before Yahveh, and the prescriptions of the Mosaic law were
observed. In practice, it is true, the old Canaanitish high places, with
their local Baalim and Ashtaroth, had usurped the place of Shiloh;
private chapels had been set up in the houses of individuals, and
priests ministered in the sacred ephod before a graven image. But all
this was the natural fruit of an ‘age of ignorance,’ and later
generations recognised that such was the case. The purer worship of
Yahveh was no ‘development’ out of an earlier polytheism; it was simply
a return to an ideal, the memory of which was kept alive at Shiloh.
And yet a time came when it seemed as if Yahveh had forgotten the
sanctuary wherein He had set His ‘name at the first.’ The punishment
denounced upon the house of Eli was not slow in coming. Judah was
already in Philistine hands, and the enemy were now attacking the
Israelitish stronghold in Mount Ephraim. The Philistine camp was pitched
at Aphek, not far from Ramah, the birthplace of Samuel.[388] The last
relics of the Hebrew army were encamped opposite them in a spot
subsequently named Eben-ezer, ‘the Stone of Help.’ But it proved no help
to them on this occasion. The Israelites were defeated with a loss of
about four thousand men, and in their despair ‘the elders’ advised that
the ark of the covenant should be brought to the camp. Yahveh, it was
believed, enthroned Himself above it between the wings of the cherubim,
like the Babylonian Bel-Merodach, who on the feast of the New Year
similarly enthroned himself above the ‘mercy-seat’ in his temple at
Babylon.[389] He would therefore be actually among them, visibly, as it
were, leading their troops to victory and blessing them with His
presence. In the old days of the conquest of Canaan, the ark had been
carried before the camp of Israel; the visible presence of ‘Yahveh of
hosts’ had gone with it, and the foe had been scattered before Him like
chaff before the wind.
The ark was accordingly fetched from its resting-place at Shiloh, and
for the first time since the days of Moses and Joshua the safeguard of
Israel was seen by the common eye. Despite the fears and reluctance of
Eli[390] his two sons bore it on their shoulders to the Israelitish
camp. Its arrival was greeted by a shout of joy which resounded across
the valley to the camp of the foe. Thereby the Philistines knew that the
God of the Hebrews had come in person to help his people against their
enemies as he had helped them in old days against the Egyptians. But the
old days were not to come again. The ark had been carried out of its
resting-place by the command of the elders, not of Yahveh. Its sanctity
had been profaned, the mystery that surrounded it rudely stripped away.
It was only when it stood in its appointed place in the Holy of Holies
that the glory of the Lord rested upon it, and Yahveh enthroned Himself
between the wings of its golden cherubim. The tabernacle and the ark
were inseparable like the casket and the treasure within it; either
without the other was forsaken of the Lord.
The presence of the ark in the Israelitish camp availed nothing. The
Israelites fought with desperation, but without a leader they were no
match for the well-armed and well-trained Philistine troops. Their army
was cut to pieces; it was said that thirty thousand of them were left
dead on the field. Worst of all, the two sons of Eli were among the
slain; the ark of Yahveh was captured by the heathen, and the way lay
open to Shiloh.
A Benjamite fled from the slaughter to carry the evil tidings to the
high priest. Eli was ninety-eight[391] years old; his eyes were blind,
and he was sitting on a bench at the entrance to the temple, full of
anxiety for the fate of the ark. The shock of the news was more than he
could bear; when he heard that it had been taken by the Philistines he
fell backwards, and his neck was broken. A single day had deprived
Israel of its ark and of its priests.
Hardly was Eli dead when his daughter-in-law, the wife of Phinehas, was
prematurely delivered of a child. He was born on an evil day, a day when
the light of Israel seemed extinguished for ever. Throughout his life he
bore a name which prevented the terrible circumstances of his birth from
being forgotten. His mother called him I-chabod, ‘the glory is
departed,’ ‘for the ark of God was taken.’[392]
I-chabod had an elder brother, Ahitub, born in happier times.[393]
Through him the line of Shilonite priests was continued, and the high
priesthood still remained in Eli’s house. It was Ahitub’s grandson,
Abiathar, who, after being the faithful servant of David in his
troubles, was banished and deprived of the priesthood on Solomon’s
accession.[394] But Ahitub must still have been young when the
Philistines gained the victory which laid all Palestine at their feet.
The destruction of the temple at Shiloh must have been one of the first
results of the victory. The Israelites had no longer an army, and the
Philistine conquerors could march in safety through the passes of Mount
Ephraim. A fort was built by them to command the pass at Michmash, and
the old sanctuary of Israel was levelled to the ground. No record of its
destruction, indeed, was known to the compiler of the books of Samuel;
it would have been strange, if in that hour of distress and national
disaster, when the storehouse of Hebrew literature was itself destroyed,
a chronicler should have been found to describe the event. But the
memory of it was never forgotten, and it is alluded to both by the
prophet Jeremiah and by the Psalmist (Jer. vii. 12, xxvi. 6; Ps.
lxxviii. 60).
Such of the priests of Shiloh as survived the catastrophe were scattered
through Israel. In the time of Saul we find eighty-five of them at Nob,
which is accordingly called ‘the city of the priests.’ Samuel himself
fled to the home of his fathers at Ramah. There as a seer and prophet,
as the representative of the fallen sanctuary of Israel, and as one of
the few literary men of the age, he became the centre of all that was
left of patriotism and national feeling in Israel. Gradually his
influence grew. Ahitub, the grandson of Eli, was young like himself, and
the destruction of Shiloh had deprived him of such authority as his
service before the ark of the covenant would have conferred.
The ark itself was once more within the confines of Israel. It had been
carried to Ashdod, and there placed in triumph in the temple of Dagon.
But the triumph was short-lived. In the night, the image of Dagon twice
fell from its pedestal and lay on its face before the ark of the
mightier God. On the second occasion, it was broken in pieces by its
fall; when the priests entered the sanctuary in the morning, they found
the head and hands of their god rolled upon the threshold. ‘Therefore,’
we are told, ‘neither the priests of Dagon nor any that come into
Dagon’s house tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod unto this
day.’[395]
Dagon has been supposed to have had the shape partly of a man, partly of
a fish. But the supposition has arisen from a false etymology of the
name, which connects it with the Hebrew _dâg_, ‘a fish.’ We now know
from the cuneiform inscriptions that Dagon was really one of the
primitive deities of Babylonia adored there in days when as yet the
Semite had not become master of the land. Dagon was coupled with Anu,
the god of the sky, and when the name and worship of Anu were carried to
the West, the name and worship of Dagon were carried there too. Sargon
‘inscribed the laws’ of Harran ‘according to the wish of the gods Anu
and Dagon,’ and a Phœnician seal in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has
upon it the name of Baal-Dagon as well as representations of an ear of
corn, a winged solar disk, a gazelle, and several stars. The ear of corn
symbolises the fact that among the Phœnicians Dagon, the brother of El
and Beth-el, was the god of agriculture and the inventor of bread-corn
and the plough.[396] But this was because in the language of Canaan
_dagan_ signified ‘corn.’ In passing to the West the god thus assumed
new attributes, and became an agricultural deity who watched over the
growing crops.[397]
The power of the God of Israel was not shown only in the humiliation of
the Philistine god. The plague broke out in Ashdod, accompanied by its
usual symptom, hæmorrhoidal swellings. The inhabitants of the city were
not slow in recognising in it the wrathful hand of Yahveh, and the ark
was accordingly sent to their neighbours in Gath. But here, too, the
plague followed it, and Ekron, to which it was sent next, fared no
better. For seven months the sacred palladium of Israel remained in the
hands of its captors. Then ‘the priests and the diviners’ advised that
it should be sent back to the people of Yahveh along with offerings to
mitigate the anger of the offended God. Five mice and five hæmorrhoids
of gold were made and placed in a coffer by the side of the ark. They
represented the five Philistine cities, and the mice were symbols of the
wrathful Yahveh, the God of hosts and of battle, who had wreaked his
vengeance on the worshippers of the peaceful god of agriculture. The
mice which devoured the corn were the natural foes of Dagon.
The ark and the coffer were placed on a cart, and two milch-kine were
yoked to draw it. A doubt still lingered in the minds of the Philistines
whether the God who had allowed his people to be conquered and his
dwelling-place to be captured could really, after all, have been the
author of the plague, and they watched, therefore, to see whether the
kine took the road towards Israelitish territory or back to their own
young. But all doubt vanished when the kine marched straight eastward
towards Beth-shemesh, lowing as they went. The villagers were in the
fields reaping when they saw the cart coming towards them, laden with
its precious freight. The kine stood still at last by the side of a
great stone—the stone of Abel ‘in the field of Joshua the Beth-shemite.’
Then the Levites came and took the ark and the offerings from the cart
and laid them on the stone, which thus became a sanctuary and an altar.
The wood of the cart was broken into firewood, and the kine were repaid
for the gift they had brought by being sacrificed to the Lord.
But the plague followed the ark even upon Israelitish soil. The men of
Beth-shemesh believed that it was because they had looked into the
sacred shrine of Yahveh, to see, possibly, whether its original contents
were still within it, and in their terror they begged the inhabitants of
Kirjath-jearim to come and carry it away. To Kirjath-jearim accordingly
it was removed and placed in the house of Abinadab, whose son Eleazar
was consecrated to look after it. That it was not carried to Shiloh is a
sign that the destruction of Shiloh had already taken place.
With the removal of the ark to Kirjath-jearim darkness falls on the
history of Israel. There was little for the patriotic historian to
record. The people were in servitude to the Philistines, the national
sanctuary had been destroyed, the ark itself was hidden away in a
private house. When the curtain is again lifted, it is to chronicle a
local success over the Philistine foe. Samuel is at Mizpeh, ‘the
watch-tower,’ which must have adjoined Ramah, if indeed it was not the
name of one of its two quarters.[398] Here was the last refuge of the
few Israelites who still refused to acknowledge the Philistine rule, and
the surrounding mountains afforded a home and shelter to the bands of
outlaws who still carried on a guerilla warfare with the foreigner. One
of the incidents of this warfare was long remembered. While Samuel was
sacrificing a lamb as a burnt-offering to Yahveh, the Philistines fell
upon the assembled people. But a sudden thunderstorm dismayed the
assailants, who fled down the valley towards Beth-car pursued by the
inhabitants of Mizpeh. It was in memory of the victory that Eben-ezer,
‘the stone of help,’ was set up by the seer between Mizpeh and
Shen.[399]
It would seem that no further attack was made upon Mizpeh and its
neighbourhood during the lifetime of Samuel. At least such appears to be
the conclusion we must draw from the generalising and optimistic
language of the Hebrew historian.[400] For a time, indeed, the whole
district was freed from the presence of the foreigner. The villages
eastward of Ekron and Gath ceased to pay tribute to the conqueror,
though their independence could not have lasted long.[401] Samuel’s
‘circuit’ did not extend beyond Mizpeh, Gilgal and Beth-el, and his sons
judged cases in Beer-sheba.
Ahitub, the high-priest, was doubtless at Nob with the rest of the
Levites of Shiloh, almost within sight of Mizpeh. What had been saved
out of the wreck of the temple at Shiloh must have been there with him.
We know that at Nob the sword of Goliath was subsequently laid up before
Yahveh, and at Nob too was probably preserved the brazen serpent that
had been set up by Moses in the wilderness.[402] According to the
Chronicler,[403] however, the tabernacle and the brazen altar which had
been made by Bezaleel were at Gibeon; how this came to be the case he
does not say.[404] At any rate, if the brazen serpent were preserved,
there is no reason why other things should not have been preserved as
well. And the books of the Law would have been among the first objects
to be carried with them by the fugitive priests. We are told that when
the ark was brought into the temple of Solomon it still contained the
tables of stone which had been placed in it by Moses (1 Kings viii. 9);
if these had been removed from it when it was taken to the Israelitish
camp, they too must have formed part of the temple furniture which was
saved by the priests.
Here, therefore, in a small district of the tribe of Benjamin, a portion
of which was inhabited by the old Gibeonite natives of the land, all
that remained of Israelitish independence, whether religious or
political, found its last refuge. Here the national spirit of Israel
still lingered among the priests and Levites who had fled from Shiloh,
or who lived in the mountains of Ephraim. It is not without significance
that here, too, was the home of the Gibeonite serfs of the
sanctuary;[405] priests, Levites, and Nethinim were gathered together,
as it were, in one spot. Though the temple had fallen, the Mosaic Law
and ritual were enshrined in the hearts of those who had served in it.
The destruction of Shiloh had restored to Beth-el its old
pre-Israelitish renown. Once more its high-place became thronged with
worshippers, and those who had formerly carried their gifts and
sacrifices to Yahveh at Shiloh, now brought them instead ‘to God at
Beth-el.’[406] At Beth-el, accordingly, once each year Samuel offered
sacrifice and adjudged the cases that were brought before him, or
predicted the future to those who consulted him as a seer. It was at a
similar gathering at Mizpeh that the Israelites had been attacked by the
Philistines, and that the victory of Eben-ezer had been gained.
But the results of the victory were local and momentary, and the
condition of the Israelites had become intolerable. Samuel, moreover,
was growing old; his sons Joel and Abiah were corrupt,[407] and his own
influence was that of the seer rather than that of the leader in war or
the administrator in peace. The only hope for Israel lay in its finding
a chieftain who could mould its shattered fragments into unity, could
organise its forces, and break the Philistine yoke. A new Jerubbaal or
Jephthah was required, but one who would lead to victory not a few only
of the tribes, but the whole of Israel.
The people demanded a king. Their instinct was right; in no other way
could the Israelitish nation be saved. Democracy had been tried, and had
failed: the end of the era of the Judges was internal anarchy and decay,
the destruction of the central sanctuary, and servitude to the
foreigner. Naturally Samuel was reluctant to hand such powers as he
still possessed to another. His sons, doubtless, were more reluctant
still. Moreover, he had been brought up in the school of the past. His
boyhood had been spent at Shiloh under the influence of ideas which saw
in a theocracy the divinely-appointed government of Israel.[408] At
first he resisted the demand of the people. But it was in vain that he
protested against their rejection of Yahveh and himself, or pointed out
to them that the establishment of a kingdom meant the loss of their
personal independence. The logic of events was too strong for the seer,
and he was compelled to yield. The time had come when the choice lay
between a king or national extinction, and a king accordingly had to be
found.
Samuel yielded apparently with a good grace. In such a matter the word
of the chief seer and prophet of Israel was law, and he knew that the
selection was in his own hands. And he made it wisely and patriotically.
Saul, the son of Kish, the first king of united Israel, justified his
election to the crown. He saved Israel from destruction, and for a time
succeeded in rolling back the wave of Philistine domination. His
military capacities were unquestionable, as well as his courage and
devotion to his people.[409]
But there was another side to his character, which perhaps commended
itself to Samuel quite as much as his military abilities. A vein of deep
religious fervour ran through his whole nature, which at times
degenerated into the gloomy despondency of the fanatic. Rightly handled,
he was capable of high religious enthusiasm, and of following his
religious guide with the simplicity of a child. But he could not brook
opposition; and, like all men of strong emotions, his hate was as
intense as his love. He was born to be the leader of his countrymen,
whether as a king or as a dervish the future had to decide.
Naturally he was a Benjamite, from that little corner of Palestine which
still remained true to the best traditions of Israel. At first it seemed
as if he was going to be the obedient disciple of Samuel, a crowned
addition to the group of dervish-like prophets who surrounded the seer.
More than one account of his accession to the throne of Israel has been
handed down, and it is not always easy to reconcile them. One thing,
however, is clear: Saul did not seek election, and it came upon him as a
surprise.
But the tallness of his stature had marked him out from among his
companions; it was the outward token of superiority which Yahveh had set
upon him. His first meeting with Samuel was accidental. He had been sent
by his father[410] to seek some asses that had strayed or been stolen,
and, while vainly engaged on his quest, was advised by his slave to
consult a seer who lived in the neighbouring town. The town proved to be
Ramah, and the seer to be Samuel, who was that day offering a solemn
sacrifice on the high place.[411] Samuel invited him to the feast which
followed the sacrifice, and assigned to him the chiefest position among
his guests; then before his departure he secretly anointed his head with
oil, and declared that he was chosen to be ‘captain over Yahveh’s
inheritance.’ Next the seer told him where the asses were that he
sought, and bid him make his way to the sacred circle of stones at
Gilgal, and there remain seven days until the prophet himself should
come.
Hardly had Saul quitted the presence of Samuel than he was met by ‘a
company of prophets’ coming down with music and wild cries from the
high-place of Gibeah.[412] Saul had not yet recovered from the
excitement of the strange and unexpected scene in which he had just been
an actor, and was in no mood to resist the infection of the religious
ecstasy which now seized upon him. He, too, like the spectators at a
modern _zíkr_ in the East, joined the band of enthusiasts, and added his
voice to theirs. It was not until he reached the high-place that his
outburst of religious frenzy had spent itself.
Such is one of the versions of the history of the foundation of the
Israelitish monarchy. Saul is anointed secretly by Samuel, and at once
enrols himself in one of the ‘prophesying’ bands of which Samuel was the
spiritual director. According to another version, his election as king
took place in public at a great assembly convened by Samuel at Mizpeh.
Here the lot fell upon Saul, who had hidden himself ‘among the stuff,’
and Samuel thereupon presented him to the people, who shouted ‘Long live
the king!’ Then the seer ‘wrote in a book’ such regulations regarding
the election and duties of a. king as we find in the book of Deuteronomy
(xvii. 14-20), ‘and laid it up before the Lord.’ As soon as the assembly
was dismissed Saul returned ‘to his house at Gibeah.’[413]
His election, however, was not accepted unanimously, consecrated though
it had been by Yahveh. There were some who failed to see in the tall
enthusiast anything more than the son of a yeoman at Gibeah. But a
sufficient number of his own tribesmen were ready to gather around him
as soon as he should summon them to battle. And the occasion was not
long in coming. Jabesh-Gilead, the old ally of Benjamin, was beleaguered
by Nahash, the Ammonite king. The city was too weak to resist, and its
inhabitants, offered to surrender. But with Semitic ferocity Nahash
answered that he would spare their lives only on condition that the
right eye of each should be torn out. Seven days were granted them in
which to determine whether they should accept his terms or fight to the
death, and during the period of respite the elders of the city sent to
Benjamin to beg for help. Saul was ploughing when the messengers
arrived, and, fired with indignation, he cut his oxen into pieces, which
he sent throughout Israel with the words: ‘Whosoever cometh not forth
after Saul and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen.’[414]
The summons still ran in the name of the old seer.
Men came in from all sides, and Saul found himself at the head of a
small army. It is said that when he numbered his troops at Bezek, ‘the
children of Israel were three hundred thousand, and the men of Judah
thirty thousand.’ Such may have been the full fighting force of Israel
before Saul’s reign was ended; it cannot have represented the number of
those who were able to flock to his standard during the few days that
still remained for the relief of Jabesh. As elsewhere in the Old
Testament, the ciphers are largely exaggerated. Indeed when we consider
the size of the Assyrian army, as recorded in the inscriptions, at a
time when it was the most formidable engine of destruction in Western
Asia, it becomes clear that the number of fighting men in the Hebrew
army can never have been very great. The three hundred and thirty
thousand men in Saul’s army are but an instance of that Oriental
exaggeration of numbers and inability to realise what they actually
mean, which is as common in the East to-day as it was in the age of
Samuel.[415]
Jabesh was rescued, and the Ammonites were scattered in flight. The
victory was a proof of Saul’s military capacity, and justified his
choice as king. The news of it rang from one end of Israel to the other,
and the victorious soldiers demanded the death of those who had
questioned their leader’s right to reign. But Saul refused the demand;
no bloodshed was to mar the glory of the day; from henceforth all true
Israelites were to be united in recognising their king. Yahveh had
chosen him at Mizpeh; it was now needful that he should go to the sacred
enclosure of Gilgal, the first camping-ground of the Israelites in
Canaan, and there be solemnly acclaimed by the assembled multitude. As
Joshua the Ephraimite had started from Gilgal to conquer Canaan, so Saul
the Benjamite, the new ‘captain of the Lord’s inheritance,’ set forth
also from Gilgal to restore its fallen fortunes.
A year had to pass before Saul felt himself strong enough to attack the
Philistine garrisons. By that time he had collected three thousand
Israelites about him, all of them prepared to fight and willing to obey
their leader. But they were armed only with implements of agriculture,
or such other makeshifts for weapons as they could find. The Philistines
had forbidden the wandering blacksmiths to enter Israelitish territory,
and Saul and his son Jonathan, we are told, alone possessed sword and
spear. Out of the three thousand, one thousand were with Jonathan at
Gibeah; the rest were with Saul watching the road that led over the
mountains from Michmash to Beth-el. There was a Philistine fort on the
hill above Gibeah, in the very heart of Saul’s own country; another fort
commanded the pass of Michmash and the approaches to Ephraim.
The Philistines seemed to have made a rising among the Israelites
impossible. Their forts and garrisons commanded the roads, like the
French garrisons in Algeria, and the conquered population was forbidden
the use of arms. Saul, nominally the king of Israel, was in reality
merely the chief of a band of outlaws, desperately holding their own in
the fastnesses of the mountains, and protected by the sympathy of the
priests and the peasantry. The victory over Nahash had confirmed Saul’s
title to lead them among his own countrymen; it had done nothing towards
releasing them from the domination of the Philistines.
Now, however, Jonathan ventured to assail the Philistine outpost at
Gibeah. The attack was successful; the fortress was taken and its
defenders put to the sword.[416] It was open revolt against the
Philistine supremacy, and the news of it quickly spread. Saul sent
messengers throughout Israel, claiming the success for himself and the
monarchy, and formed a camp at Gilgal. Meanwhile the Philistine army was
on the march to suppress the revolt. The Hebrew chronicler describes it
as consisting of ‘thirty thousand chariots and six thousand horsemen,
and people as the sand which is on the seashore for multitude,’[417] and
it pitched its camp at Michmash, a little to the north of Gibeah. Here
it cut Saul off from all communication with the north, and threatened
his rear. He therefore left Gilgal and joined his son at Gibeah. Only
six hundred men remained with him; the rest had fled at the approach of
the enemy, who sent out three bands of raiders from their camp, one of
which marched in a south-eastward direction towards the Dead Sea, while
the other two turned, the one to the north-west, and the other to the
north-east.
The mountainous district from which Saul drew his forces was
panic-stricken. The peasantry fled from their devastated fields, and the
whole country was given up to fire and sword. Pure-blooded Israelites
and Hebrews of mixed descent were united in the common disaster. The one
hid themselves in the caves and forests, even in cisterns and
grain-pits, while the others took refuge in Gad and Gilead, on the
eastern side of the Jordan.[418]
It was again Jonathan who brought deliverance to Israel. Between the
Israelites at Gibeah, and the Philistines at Michmash, lay a deep gorge,
usually identified with the Wadi Suweinît.[419] On either side rose a
precipitous crag of rock which effectually cut off the hostile forces
one from the other. Across this gorge Jonathan determined to make his
way, accompanied only by his armour-bearer, and trusting in the help of
Yahveh of Israel. In broad daylight the two heroes climbed the opposite
cliff, in the face of the Philistines, who believed they were deserters
from the Israelitish camp. But once arrived in the Philistine
stronghold, they fell suddenly on its unprepared defenders and slew
about twenty of them ‘within as it were half a furrow of an acre of
land.’ The Hebrew camp followers of the Philistines thereupon turned
upon their companions, and the camp of the Philistines became a scene of
confusion and dismay. Jonathan had said nothing to his father of his
intended exploit, but Saul soon observed that fighting was going on in
the enemy’s camp.
Among the Israelitish fugitives with Saul was the high-priest
Ahimelech,[420] the great-grandson of Eli, who had joined the king with
the sacred ephod. The ark, too, had been carried for safety into the
Israelitish camp, and was once more accompanying the army of Israel
against its foes. When, therefore, Saul had numbered his men and found
that Jonathan was absent, he called for the priest and bade him inquire
of Yahveh whether they should go to his help or not. But before the
question could be answered the tumult on the opposite side of the valley
made hesitation impossible. It was clear that the moment had come for
striking a blow at the supremacy of the foreigner. The gorge accordingly
was quickly traversed, and the Israelitish king with his six hundred
followers threw himself on the enemy’s rear. The Philistines resisted no
longer. Attacked in front by the peasants who had followed them, and in
the rear by the soldiers of the king, they fled precipitately up the
pass to Beth-el.[421] The victory was complete, and the Philistine
forces would have been annihilated had Saul’s religious convictions been
less fervent. But when the instinct of the general overcame the zealot,
and he had stayed the priest in the very act of consulting Yahveh, he
salved his conscience by a vow. None should eat or drink until he had
overthrown his enemies, and whoever broke the royal vow should be
devoted to death.
The vow was rash and untimely, but it was registered in heaven. The
Philistines were pursued as far as Aijalon. The Israelites were too weak
from want of food to follow them further. Jonathan alone, who had not
been in the Israelitish camp when the vow was made, ate a little honey
which he saw dropping from a tree. His companions looked at it with
longing eyes, but dared not follow his example. All the more fiercely,
therefore, did they fall upon the spoil which they afterwards found in
the Philistine camp. The sheep and oxen and calves were slaughtered as
they stood upon the ground, ‘and the people did eat them with the
blood.’ The news of this violation of one of the primary laws of
Israelitish religion struck Saul with horror. He caused a great stone to
be rolled towards him, and on this improvised altar the animals were
slain. It was ‘the first altar,’ we are told, that Saul ‘built unto the
Lord.’
But worse was yet to come. Saul proposed to pursue the Philistines in
the night, and accordingly the oracle of Yahveh was again appealed to.
No answer, however, was returned to the questioners. Neither priest nor
ephod availed anything, and it became clear that sin had been committed
in Israel. When the lots were cast, they fell upon Jonathan, who then
confessed that he had, in ignorance of his father’s vow, eaten a little
honey. The religious fanatic was stronger in Saul than the father, and
he pronounced sentence that Jonathan must die. Jonathan, in fact, was
the firstborn whose sacrifice was demanded by Yahveh as the price of the
victory. Fortunately the religious convictions of the Hebrew soldiers
were less intense than those of their king. It was Jonathan to whom the
victory was due, and in the hour of his triumph they refused to allow
him to die. Saul yielded, perhaps willingly; but the Philistines were
permitted to disperse to their own homes.[422]
Was the sacrifice of Jonathan urged by Ahimelech and the priests? They
at any rate did not interfere to prevent it, and the lots were cast
under their supervision. What is certain is that from this time forward
there was an increasing estrangement between Saul and the priesthood,
which ended in the secret anointing of David as king of Israel, and in
the massacre of the priests at Nob. We hear no more of Ahimelech and the
ark in the camp of Saul.
Samuel, the aged and venerated representative of the Shilonite
priesthood, had much to do with this growing estrangement. From the
first he had looked upon Saul as a rival who had robbed him of his
former power. Even after Saul had proved his fitness to rule by the
rescue of Jabesh, and had been publicly acclaimed king by the people at
Gilgal, he could not conceal his mortification and hostility. Were not
he and his sons still with them? he asked the assembled Israelites; why
then had they added this ‘wickedness’ unto ‘all their sins,’ to demand a
king? In the thunder which rolled overhead he bade them recognise the
anger of Yahveh at their thus rejecting His representative, and he ended
with the threat that both they and their king should be ‘consumed.’[423]
Samuel was not long in embodying his hostility in deeds. According to
one of the authorities used by the compiler of the books of Samuel,
seven days only had elapsed after Saul’s election when the seer
upbraided him in the presence of his army and told him that Yahveh had
chosen another king in his place.[424] Here, however, two occurrences
have been confused together—Saul’s confirmation as king by the people at
Gilgal, and his subsequent encampment at the same place in the second
year of his reign. By this time the breach had grown and widened between
the old Judge and the new ‘Captain’ of Israel. Saul, in spite of his
religious convictions and excitability, had not shown himself the
obedient disciple and tool of Samuel that might have been expected; he
proved to have a strong and violent will of his own, which he was fully
ready to exercise when not under the influence of religious excitement.
It was only temporarily that Saul was ‘among the prophets.’ Nor did he
possess that tact and pliability which would have enabled David under
the same circumstances to avoid an open quarrel with the aged seer. Saul
was too earnest, too convinced that what he believed was the truth, to
understand a compromise, much less a course of duplicity.
That the incident at Gilgal is historical, there can be no doubt. It is
only the time of its occurrence that is misplaced. It belonged to those
days of danger and difficulty when the Philistines seemed to have
triumphed finally, and the hope of Israel lay in the six hundred
desperate men who still followed Saul. Saul had waited vainly for the
coming of Samuel, and at length, tired of waiting, had offered the
burnt-offering for the safety and success of the army which Samuel had
agreed to present. Hardly had it been offered when the seer appeared.
Then it was that the king of Israel was told that he had been rejected
by the Lord, and that another had been selected in his place. The
occasion was indeed well chosen; the Israelites were already
sufficiently discouraged and inclined to believe that their king had
been even less successful against the Philistines than Samuel and his
sons. Under the rule of Samuel, at all events, the territory of Benjamin
had not been devastated, and its inhabitants compelled to hide
themselves in the holes of the earth.
Samuel returned from Gilgal to ‘Gibeah of Benjamin.’ The victory at
Michmash, which disappointed his predictions,[425] changed the aspect of
affairs, and Saul’s throne seemed now to be firmly established. Once
more, however, Samuel made an effort to shake it, and it was again at
Gilgal that the event took place. Saul’s power rested on his soldiery,
and the surest way, therefore, of striking at it was through the
soldiery in the camp of Gilgal.
It was after an expedition against the Amalekites. The Israelites had
marched towards El-Arîsh and smitten the Bedâwin of the desert ‘from
Havilah’ in Northern Arabia to the great Wall of Egypt.[426] They had
brought back with them a vast amount of spoil, as well as Agag, the
Bedâwin chief, ‘everything that was vile and refuse,’ including the mass
of the people, having been ‘destroyed utterly.’ But this was not enough.
The Amalekites were to be treated as the Canaanites had been by Joshua;
they and all that belonged to them had been laid under the ban and
condemned to extermination.[427] Samuel, therefore, went in haste to the
Israelitish camp, and there charged Saul with disobedience to the
commands of Yahveh. Saul’s plea that the cattle and herds had been saved
by ‘the people’ in order that they might be sacrificed to the Lord, was
not accepted, and the fierce old seer himself ‘hewed Agag in pieces
before Yahveh.’ At the same time, he told the Israelitish king that the
kingdom had been rent from him and given to a neighbour that was better
than he. It was the last time that the king and the seer met. Samuel
went back to his home at Ramah and Saul returned to Gibeah. Between Saul
and the priesthood there was open war.
The attack upon the Amalekites implies that the Philistines had for a
time ceased to be formidable. The extract from the state chronicles
given in 1 Sam. xiv. 47-52 makes it follow the other wars of Saul. Among
these wars we hear of one against Moab, of another against Edom (or
rather Geshur), and of a third against ‘the kings of Zobah.’[428] The
Aramæans of Zobah, called Tsubitê in the Assyrian texts, and placed
northward of the Haurân, were beginning to be powerful, and as we learn
from the history of David, were about to establish a kingdom under
Hadadezer which extended to the Euphrates and included Damascus. But at
present they were still governed by more than one chief.[429]
The campaign against Zobah makes it clear that Saul’s authority was
acknowledged in Gilead as well as on the western side of the Jordan. It
is not surprising, therefore, that after his death his son should have
resided there, well out of the reach of the Philistines, or that
Eshbaal’s kingdom should have comprised all the northern tribes. Little
by little, in spite of the opposition of Samuel, Saul worked his way to
general acknowledgment and power. The Israelites, for the first time,
were welded into a homogeneous state, and their enemies were kept at
bay. The organisation of the kingdom went hand in hand with the military
successes of its king. Israel at last was not only feared abroad, but at
peace and unity within.
With all this, Saul preserved the old simplicity of his life and
manners. He never yielded to the usual temptations of the Oriental
despot; he had no harîm like David or Solomon, no palaces, no gardens,
no trains of cooks and idle servants.[430] The people were not taxed to
supply him with luxuries, nor dragged from their homes for his buildings
and wars. In some of these royal pleasures doubtless he could not
indulge: the conditions under which he reigned prevented it. But it was
only by his own free choice that he remained faithful to one
wife—Ahinoam, the daughter of Ahimaaz,—and that he held court at Gibeah
under the shade of a tamarisk instead of a palace, with a spear in his
hand in place of a sceptre.[431]
Saul was a born soldier, and he had a soldier’s eye for detecting those
who could best serve him in war. He added to his bodyguard all who were
distinguished by strength or courage, and the border warfare with the
Philistines kept them in constant employment. Among the young recruits
was David, the youngest of the eight sons of Jesse, a Jew of Beth-lehem.
Two different accounts have been preserved of the way in which David was
first introduced to the king. It is difficult to reconcile them; the
compiler of the books of Samuel was content to set them side by side
without attempting to do so, while the Septuagint translators have cut
the Gordian knot by omitting large portions of one of them. The
difficulty is increased by the fact that the second account makes David
the conqueror of Goliath of Gath, who elsewhere (2 Sam. xxi. 19) is said
to have been slain during David’s reign by El-hanan the
Beth-lehemite.[432]
According to this second story, the Philistines had invaded Judah and
pitched their camp on a mountain-slope between Socoh and Azekah. Saul
was encamped on the hill opposite, and between the two armies was the
valley of Elah at the bottom of which was the dry bed of a mountain
stream. The three elder brothers of David were in the Hebrew army, David
himself having been left at home to look after his father’s sheep. From
time to time, however, he was sent with loaves of home-made bread to his
brothers and a present of milk-cheeses to ‘the captain of their
thousand.’ On one of these occasions a Philistine giant, Goliath by
name, came forth from the camp of the enemy to challenge the Israelites
to single combat. He had done so day by day, but none of Saul’s
followers had ventured to accept the challenge. For Goliath of Gath was
a descendant of the ancient Anakim, and of gigantic stature. His height,
it was said, was six cubits and a span, or nearly ten feet,[433] and the
staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam, while its head weighed six
hundred shekels of iron. Like the Greeks, he wore not only a bronze
helmet and coat of mail, but also greaves on his legs; a bronze shield
was hung between his shoulders and a broad-sword at his side.
David offered to accept the challenge of the uncircumcised giant, and in
spite of his brothers’ ridicule his words were repeated to Saul. As a
shepherd he had already proved his strength and daring by slaying both a
lion and a bear; he was now ready to face the Philistine and redeem the
honour of Israel. At first the Israelitish king insisted that he should
be armed, and he was accordingly equipped in the usual Hebrew fashion
with helmet, cuirass, and sword. But the young shepherd felt restricted
and awkward in these unaccustomed accoutrements; nor did he know how to
manage the sword. He therefore stripped them from him, and boldly
approached the Philistine champion with his shepherd’s sling and five
‘smooth stones.’ These he knew how to wield, and with such effect that
one of the stones penetrated the forehead of the Philistine, who fell
dead to the ground. Then his conqueror dissevered his head with his own
sword, while the Israelites shouted and pursued the panic-stricken enemy
to the gates of Ekron.[434] Saul had inquired in vain through Abner, the
commander-in-chief of the army, whose son the young champion of Israel
was; and it was not until David had presented himself before the king,
with the head of the Philistine in his hand, that he learned from his
own lips that he was the son of his ‘servant Jesse the Beth-lehemite.’
David’s fortune was made; Saul at once incorporated him in his
bodyguard, and a warm friendship began between him and Jonathan, a
friendship that ceased only with Jonathan’s death. David was fresh and
handsome, with a charm of manner and a ready tact which won the hearts
of those he was with. It was not long, therefore, before he became first
the favourite, then the general, and eventually the son-in-law of the
Israelitish king.
The other account of David’s introduction to Saul brings Samuel once
more upon the stage. The ‘neighbour’ better than Saul proves to be
David, whom Samuel is accordingly sent to Beth-lehem to anoint secretly.
He goes there under the pretence of wishing to offer a sacrifice, to
which he invites Jesse and his sons. The elders of the city receive him
with fear and trembling, and ask if he has come in peace. He is known to
be the enemy of the king, and his arrival in a city of Judah bodes
nothing good. The sons of Jesse are passed in review before him; none of
them, however, is approved, and the seer asks if there is still no
other. Thereupon Jesse tells him that there is yet the youngest, who is
in the fields tending the sheep. Samuel bids him be sent for, and in
spite of his terror of Saul and the secrecy of his mission, anoints the
youth ‘in the midst of his brethren.’ Then the spirit of Yahveh comes
upon David, and an evil spirit from Yahveh takes possession of Saul.
Saul still reigns, indeed, but the mystic power conferred by the
consecration, which had given him the right to do so, has henceforth
passed to another.
The ‘evil spirit’ shows itself in fits of moody depression, which at
times become insanity. Saul’s mind, always excitable, loses its balance;
he is oppressed by a settled melancholy, which is now and again broken
by outbursts of ungovernable rage. His servants determine that the evil
spirit can be charmed away only by music, and one of them recommends
David, the Beth-lehemite shepherd, who is not only a valiant ‘man of
war,’ but also a skilful player upon the harp. David is hereupon
summoned to the court, where his harping cures the king, who makes him
his armour-bearer.
Such are the two narratives of David’s introduction to Saul. It is plain
that they exclude one another. The king’s handsome armour-bearer, who
soothes his mind and banishes his melancholy by music, cannot be the
shepherd-lad who brings the loaves of home-made bread to his brothers,
and whose very name and parentage are unknown to Saul and Abner. And yet
there are points in each narrative which seem to be historical. It is
true that in a later passage the death of Goliath is ascribed to a
certain El-hanan; but the passage is corrupt, and though the Chronicler
must have had an equally corrupt text before him,[435] it is possible he
may be right in making the Philistine slain by El-hanan the brother of
Goliath. At all events, the fact that the sword of the giant of Gath was
preserved at Nob and was there handed over to David on his flight from
Saul, shows that the death of Goliath must have happened while Saul was
reigning and that David had been the hero of the deed. The priest
expressly says that it was ‘the sword of Goliath the Philistine whom
thou slewest in the valley of Elah.’ On the other hand, David was famous
as a musician, and was even said to have invented instruments of music
(Am. vi. 5), while Saul’s fits of depression were also historical; and
the description given of David’s appearance (1 Sam. xvi. 12) is that of
one who had seen him. Perhaps the harp-playing before the king followed
David’s enrolment in Saul’s bodyguard, and was one of the means whereby
he gained the heart of his royal master.
Are we to accept the anointing by Samuel as a historical incident, or
are the modern critics right in asserting that the story is an
invention, the object of which was to claim for the founder of the
Judæan monarchy the same consecration at the hands of the great Hebrew
seer as that which had been bestowed upon Saul? That David was actually
anointed by a messenger of Yahveh admits of little doubt. Apart from
Psalm lxxxix. 20, the date of which is questionable, and which may refer
to the coronation in Hebron, it is clear from incidental notices in the
historical books of the Old Testament that such consecration by a
prophet or seer was felt to be a necessary prelude to the usurpation of
a throne. It was thus that both Jehu and Hazael were incited to seize
the crowns of Samaria and Damascus.[436] The use of oil in religious
ritual went back to the days when Babylonian culture was predominant in
Western Asia, and the religious texts of Babylonia contain many
references to it. That the prophet was anointed for his office, we know
from the history of Elisha.
On the other hand, it is difficult to conceive that David’s brother
would have treated him with the contempt to which he gave utterance in
the valley of Elah (1 Sam. xvii. 28) had he really been a witness to his
consecration as king, and David’s future friendship with Jonathan, the
heir-apparent to the throne, would have been more than hypocritical.
Possibly the period of the consecration has been transferred from a time
when David had become the son-in-law of Saul and the friend and guest of
Samuel (1 Sam. xix. 18-22) to an earlier time in David’s life to which
it is inappropriate.[437]
Abner, the cousin of Saul, remained the commander-in-chief of the
Israelitish army, the Turtannu or Tartan, as the Assyrians would have
called him. David, however, was made a general—‘the captain of a
thousand’ was the exact title. The desultory war with the Philistines
still continued, and the new general soon justified his appointment. But
his successes and his popularity with the army aroused the jealousy of
the king. Saul began to plot against his life and to hope that he might
fall in one of the skirmishes with the enemy. Merab, Saul’s elder
daughter, had been promised to him in marriage, but she was given to
another, and though her younger sister Michal was offered in her place,
Saul stipulated that David should bring him instead of a dowry a hundred
foreskins of the Philistines. It was the Egyptian mode of counting the
slain, which is still practised in Abyssinia; when Meneptah II. defeated
the Libyans and their northern allies, the number of the enemy who had
fallen was determined partly by the hands, partly by the foreskins cut
off from the slain. The hundred foreskins demanded by Saul were doubled
by David, who thereupon received Michal as his wife.
Saul had already, in one of his fits of frenzy, made an attempt on
David’s life. The day before he had heard the women welcoming David as
he returned from ‘the slaughter of the Philistine’[438] with sounds of
music and the refrain: ‘Saul hath slain his thousands and David his ten
thousands.’ The king brooded over the words, until in his moments of
insanity they overpowered all prudence and restraint. When he recovered
they still sounded in his ears, and his feigned friendship towards his
son-in-law concealed murder in his heart.
At last he openly avowed his desire to be rid of his supposed enemy; and
though in his saner hours he still shrank from murdering him with his
own hand, he suggested both to Jonathan and to his retainers that they
should do so. David, in truth, was becoming a formidable rival. He was
idolised by the army, was popular among the people, and was a member by
marriage of the royal house. He was, moreover, a Jew; and the tribe of
Judah was now beginning to rise into importance and to realise its own
strength. Above all, Samuel and the priests were at bitter feud with
Saul, and favourably disposed to David.
Jonathan betrayed his father’s secret to his unsuspecting friend, and
bade him await the issue of an appeal to the better nature of Saul. The
appeal was successful, and for a time Saul laid aside his suspicions and
there was apparent, if not real, harmony once more between him and his
son-in-law. But another success against the Philistines revived the evil
passions of the king. Again the old depression and gloom came upon him,
and David’s harp, instead of dissipating it, transformed it into
madness. Suddenly he flung his spear at the player, who slipped aside
and fled. The time for mediation and forgiveness was passed. David could
no longer be safe in the presence of a madman who was bent on taking his
life. Royal guards were even sent to watch David’s house, and he escaped
only with the help of his wife. In the night she let him down through
the window of his room, and laid on the bed in his place the image of
the household god covered with a sheet. When the king’s guards arrived
to take him she pretended that he was sick, and it was not until they
had come a second time that they discovered they had been deceived. Saul
reproached his daughter for abetting her husband’s escape; but it was
too late, and David had made his way to the house of Samuel at Ramah.
Here, however, he was not yet safe from pursuit, and he and the seer
accordingly took refuge in the sacred enclosure of the Naioth or
monastery. There, surrounded by the prophet-dervishes, they felt that
even the king in the madness of disappointed fury would not venture to
violate their sanctuary.
That Samuel also should have been compelled to shelter himself from
Saul’s anger, and that David on escaping from Gibeah should at once have
gone to him, makes it evident that the king at least believed in the
complicity of the seer in the plot against his throne. It also raises
the presumption that Saul’s belief was justified, and that Samuel had
played the same part towards David that Ahijah subsequently played
towards Jeroboam, and Elijah towards Jehu. That David and Samuel were
acquainted with one another seems clear; indeed, Gibeah and Ramah were
so close to each other that it would have been strange if the politic
David had not visited the old seer. Had it been on the occasion of one
of these visits that the rising rival of Saul was anointed with the
consecrated oil?
David remained safe in sanctuary. The messengers sent by Saul to fetch
him from it fell under the influence of the place, and joined the
dervishes in their ecstatic exercises; and when Saul himself followed
them, he too was infected by the religious excitement around him. One of
the sources used by the compiler of the books of Samuel ascribes to this
occasion the origin of the saying: ‘Is Saul also among the
prophets?’[439]
But as in the case of the introduction of David to Saul, there is again
a double account of his escape. The two narratives are equally worthy of
credit from a historical point of view, yet it is difficult to reconcile
them together. The compiler has endeavoured to do so by supposing that
David ‘fled’ from the monastery of Ramah to Jonathan after Saul’s return
to Gibeah. But this only makes the difficulty of harmonising the two
accounts the greater. If we accept them both, the only way of
reconciling them is to suppose that a considerable interval of time
elapsed between the events recorded in them, that in the monastery of
Ramah peace was once more established between David and his
father-in-law, and that David consequently returned to his accustomed
place at court. In this case, the statement of the compiler that the
second narrative follows immediately upon the first would be a mistaken
inference.[440]
According to the second account, David came to Jonathan and assured him
that Saul was determined to take away his life. Jonathan protested that
this was impossible, although he had himself previously warned his
friend that such was the case,[441] on the ground that his father
concealed nothing from him. It was then agreed that Jonathan should
discover Saul’s intentions and reveal them three days later to David,
who should meanwhile hide himself in the fields. Jonathan was to shoot
three arrows, and send a boy to gather them up. If he told the boy they
were on the hither side of David’s hiding-place, it meant that all was
well; if, on the contrary, he said they were beyond it, David would know
that his life was in danger. The day following was the feast of the New
Moon, when David ought to have dined with the king. But his place was
empty; only Abner sat by the side of Saul, whose seat was, as usual, ‘by
the wall.’ Saul said nothing, thinking that David was absent for
ceremonial reasons; but when on the next day the place was again empty,
he asked Jonathan what had become of him. Jonathan replied, as had been
agreed upon, that he had given David permission to go to Beth-lehem to
take part in an annual sacrifice of the family. But the answer did not
deceive his father. Saul broke forth into reproaches, accusing Jonathan
of rebellion and folly in preferring friendship to self-interest, and in
saving the life of one who would use it to deprive him of the crown.
Jonathan replied; and the king, mad with rage, flung his spear at his
own son, who left the table and made his way to the place where David
was concealed. There he gave the signal by which David knew that he must
flee for his life, and while the lad was picking up the arrows the two
friends embraced and parted, perhaps for the last time.
David fled to Nob. The priests of Shiloh had settled in it, and he
believed therefore that he would find a shelter there. But Ahimelech was
afraid of Saul; he knew that the king bore no goodwill to his
son-in-law, and it was strange that David should be alone. David,
however, had a ready answer to the question why ‘no man’ was with him.
Saul had sent him out in haste on a secret mission, and his servants
accordingly had been ordered to wait for him ahead. The haste indeed was
such that he had brought with him neither food nor weapons. The priest
had only the shewbread to offer, and at first hesitated about giving it
to those who were not Levites. But David overcame his scruples, assuring
him that his companions had ‘kept themselves from women’ for the past
three days, and that the vessels they carried with them were clean. At
the same time he took Goliath’s sword which had been dedicated to
Yahveh, and lay behind the ephod wrapped in a cloth. Then he continued
his flight, and did not rest until he found himself at the court of the
old enemy of Israel, Achish the son of Maoch, king of Gath.[442]
Recent criticism has maintained that this first visit to Achish of Gath
is but a duplicate version of David’s second visit to the same prince,
like the duplicate accounts of his introduction to Saul and flight from
the Israelitish court. The two visits, however, clearly belong to
different periods of time, and the different treatment experienced by
the fugitive at the hands of the king of Gath was due to the wholly
different circumstances under which he arrived there on the two
occasions. The solitary and defenceless exile, flying for his life from
his own countrymen, was a very different person from the leader of a
numerous band of reckless and well-armed adventurers who came to offer
their services as mercenaries in war. A more serious difficulty is the
fact that Achish, the son of Maoch or Maachah, was still reigning over
Gath in the third year of Solomon (1 Kings ii. 39). But the long reign
of about fifty years, which this presupposes, is no impossibility;
Ramses II. of Egypt, for example, was sixty-seven years on the throne.
David did not remain long in Gath. The Philistines could not forget that
he had been one of their most formidable adversaries, and there must
have been some among them who had blood-feuds to avenge upon him. The
fugitive servant of Saul was no longer to be feared, but there were many
voices crying for his life. For a while Achish was inclined to protect
him in the hope of using him against his countrymen, but how long this
protection would last was doubtful. David accordingly feigned himself
mad, he scrabbled on the gates, and let the spittle fall on his unshorn
beard. The Philistine king gave up all hope of making him his tool, and
allowed him to quit the court. David thereupon made his way to the home
of his boyhood, and took refuge in the limestone caves of Adullam, a few
miles to the south-west of Beth-lehem.
Here at last he was safe. He was among his own tribesmen, in a district
well known to him, and in a place of refuge where the outlaw could defy
his pursuers. Moreover, the home of his family was not far distant, and
it was not long, accordingly, before his brothers and other relatives
joined him in his mountain stronghold. The band of outlaws increased
rapidly, and soon amounted to four hundred men. David’s abilities as a
military leader were known throughout Israel, and all the outlaws and
adventurers of Judah flocked to his standard; among them was the prophet
Gad.
David once more found himself at the head of a considerable force. The
quarrel between him and the king was assuming the character of a civil
war. It was Judah against Israel, the first revolt of the new power that
was rising in the south against the domination of the north. But the
power was still in its infancy. Against the trained veterans of the
royal army, with the prestige of legal authority and resources behind
them, the bandits of the Judæan mountains could hold their own only so
long as they remained among the limestone fastnesses of their own land.
It was like a struggle between Sicilian brigands and the regular troops;
the sympathies of the peasantry were with the brigands, and as long as
they acted on the defensive, their lives were safe.
But the mountains of Judah were barren, and it was needful for David and
his men to descend at times into the valleys and plains below, and there
levy contributions of food. These were the moments of danger. The
townsmen and owners of land could not be trusted like the peasantry;
they looked with no favourable eyes on the armed outlaws who seized what
was not freely given to them, and were ready enough to betray them to
Saul. In the towns and plains the king’s troops had the advantage;
while, on the other side, it was always possible to fall in with a body
of Philistines to whom every Israelite was a foe.
But while David was hidden in the cave of Adullam, Saul committed a deed
which shattered his kingdom and transferred the allegiance of the
priesthood to his Judæan rival. This was the massacre of the priests at
Nob. In reading the story of it we seem to have before us the words of
an eye-witness. Saul was seated under the tamarisk on the hill at
Gibeah, with his spear in his right hand, and his officers standing
around him. Suddenly he broke out into reproaches against them and
against his son. ‘Hear now, ye Benjamites; will the son of Jesse give
every one of you fields and vineyards, and make you all captains of
thousands and captains of hundreds; that all of you have conspired
against me, and there is none that sheweth me that my son hath made a
league with the son of Jesse, and there is none of you that is sorry for
me, or sheweth unto me that my son hath stirred up my servant against
me, to lie in wait, as at this day?’ Then the heathen foreigner, ‘Doeg
the Edomite which was set over the servants of Saul,’ answered and said
that he had seen David come to Ahimelech the priest at Nob, and that
there the priest had consulted Yahveh for him, had given him food and
Goliath’s sword. At once the infuriated king sent for Ahimelech and his
brother priests, and demanded of him why he had conspired with the
rebel. Ahimelech’s answer only increased his anger. David, said the
priest, was the son-in-law of the king, and his most faithful servant;
how then could he have refrained from helping him on his road?
Thereupon, Saul ordered the priests to be put to death, but no Israelite
could be found to perpetrate such an act of sacrilegious atrocity. The
Edomite, however, had no scruples; he fell with a will upon the
defenceless priests, and eighty-five of them were massacred. Saul then
descended upon Nob, ‘the city of the priests,’ and treated it like a
city of the Amalekites, smiting it with the edge of the sword, ‘both men
and women, children and sucklings, and oxen and asses and sheep.’ Only
Abiathar, the son of Ahimelech, escaped, and fled to David, carrying
with him the ephod and the oracles of God. The prophecy of the
destruction of Eli’s house was fulfilled, but in fulfilling it Saul
destroyed his own. The breach between the king and the priests was
complete; he had compelled them, and all who reverenced them, to take
the side of his rival.
It was now that David determined to send his father and mother to the
protection of the Moabite court. His great-grandmother had been a
Moabitess, and it is possible that the war between Saul and Moab,
referred to in 1 Sam. xiv. 47, was continuing at this very time. In this
case, the Moabite king would have given a ready welcome to the parents
of his enemy’s enemy. They would be hostages for David himself, and
David was a person whom it was desirable to attach to the Moabite cause.
Not only was he the son-in-law of Saul, and an able general, but he was
now at the head of a devoted body of men who were waging war on the
Israelitish king. If war was actually going on at the time between
Israel and Moab, alliance with David would divert and weaken the
Israelitish attack. Moreover, as long as David’s parents were in his
power, the king of Moab could compel the Jewish chieftain to serve and,
if need be, to fight for him.
David’s followers had increased to six hundred men, and he now felt
himself strong enough to occupy one of the Judæan cities, and make it a
centre for his war against Saul. A pretext for doing so was soon found.
Keilah was threatened by Philistine raiders, and patriotism demanded its
rescue. The city is mentioned in the Tel el-Amarna letters under the
name of Keltê; it was already a place of military importance, and was
surrounded by walls. David’s followers, however, were reluctant to leave
their retreat in the mountains and venture into a town. But the
representative of the high priests of Shiloh was now with them, and the
oracles of Yahveh, which he consulted through the ephod, admitted of no
contradiction. Keilah was accordingly occupied by David, and its
Philistine invaders repulsed. The citizens, however, showed little
gratitude towards their preservers. Perhaps they thought it was merely
an exchange of masters, and that Philistine pillage would not have been
worse than the exactions of the outlaws. Perhaps they feared the fate of
Nob for harbouring the enemy of Saul. However it might be, they sent
word to Saul that David and his men were in the town. The king marched
to Keilah without delay; had not God delivered David into his hand by
bringing him into a city that had ‘gates and bars’? But once more the
ephod was consulted, and the answer was clear. The people of Keilah were
traitors, and David’s band must seek a shelter elsewhere. This time they
fled to the wooded slopes above the wilderness of Ziph, on the eastern
side of the Dead Sea. Here David and Jonathan met once more[443] under
the shadow of the forest. But the Ziphites betrayed the hiding-place of
the outlaws, and offered to help the king to capture his foe. For a time
the hunted fugitives evaded their pursuers; spies brought David
intelligence of Saul’s movements, and the desolate wadis of Ziph and
Maon, with their deep defiles and precipitous rocks, enabled him to slip
out of the toils. But at last the game became desperate; the outlaws
were encircled on all sides, and the difficulty of procuring food must
have been great. At that moment the Philistines came to their help; a
messenger arrived in haste at the royal camp, urging the king to march
westward at once, for a Philistine army had invaded the land. David was
saved, and he now settled himself in the caves and fastnesses of the
mountains about En-gedi.
From the peaks where only the wild goats trod,[444] David could look
across the Dead Sea to the purple hills of Moab. Here, therefore, he was
in touch with the Moabites, while his inaccessible position rendered him
safe from attack. Below him was the comparatively fertile valley of
Carmel of Judah, where large flocks of sheep fed on the scanty grass. It
was the northern portion of the wilderness of Paran, and the outlaws
exacted from it their supplies of food. The supplies were usually
yielded with a good grace, and in return the shepherds and their flocks
were protected from the Bedâwin and the wild beasts. But on one occasion
the request for food met with a refusal. Nabal, a wealthy farmer at
Maon, was shearing his sheep, and refused to give any of them to the
messengers of David. Perhaps Saul was still in the neighbourhood, and he
was thus emboldened to play the part of the churl. But he was soon
taught that David was strong enough to take without asking. Four hundred
of the outlaws marched down upon Maon, bent upon making him and his
family pay with their lives for the niggardly refusal. The tact of a
woman, however, saved them, and averted the anger of David. Abigail, the
wife of Nabal, met the angry chieftain on the road with presents and
honeyed words, and her fair looks and speeches induced him to turn back.
That night Nabal was holding a shearing feast in fancied security, but
when, the next day, his wife told him of his narrow escape, and of the
band of outlaws that was still in the neighbourhood, his heart failed
him, and ‘he became as a stone.’ The shock was too great for his
strength; a few days later he died. Then Abigail, like a prudent woman,
became the wife of the outlaw, and the wealth of Nabal passed into his
hands. It was a welcome addition to David’s resources, and made him
better able to control his men. Abigail, too, proved a devoted wife,
following her husband in his wanderings, and sharing his wild life. She
was not his only wife, however, though Michal had been given by her
father to a Benjamite named Phaltiel. David, it would seem, had already
married a certain Ahinoam of Jezreel.
It was probably before the marriage of Abigail, and while Saul was still
chasing the outlaws through the wilderness of Ziph,[445] that an
incident occurred, two versions of which had reached the compiler of the
books of Samuel. Saul had with him a force of three thousand men, more
than sufficient gradually to close in upon David and cut off all his
chances of escape. Abner, the commander-in-chief, was with him, and the
king was obstinate in his determination to track his enemy to the death.
According to the one version of the story, Saul was alone in a cave;
according to the other, he was asleep at night in his camp among the
rocky crevices of Mount Hachilah. While he slept, David, with his two
companions, Ahimelech the Hittite and Abishai the brother of Joab, crept
stealthily towards him, and soon reached the unconscious king. Abishai
would have slain him with his spear, but David forbade his touching ‘the
Lord’s anointed,’ and contented himself with carrying away the spear and
cruse of water which stood at his head, or, according to the other
version, with cutting off the skirt of the royal robe. Then, standing on
the opposite side of the gorge, David reproached Abner for his careless
watch over the king. Saul recognised David’s voice, and demanded if it
were not he, whereupon David made an appeal to the king’s better nature,
asked why he was thus driving him from his country and his God, and
pointed to the trophies he had just carried off in proof of his
innocence. If he were really aiming at the throne, would he have spared
the king when Yahveh had delivered him into his hands? The impulsive
Saul yielded for the moment to the voice and words of his former
favourite, but they produced no further effect upon him. David could not
venture to send back the spear by one of his own men; it had to be
fetched by a servant of the king. David had given Saul a lesson in
generosity, but the only result of it was that he had to return to his
old hiding-place. Saul remained resolutely bent on taking his life.
Meanwhile Samuel had died, and there seemed no longer any power left in
Israel to contend against the will of the king. David began to perceive
that his cause was hopeless; he had become a mere chief of brigands, and
against him were arrayed all the forces of order and authority in the
country. It was useless to continue the struggle, and he determined,
therefore, to sell the services of himself and his followers to the
hereditary enemies of his people. Accordingly he passed over to Achish
of Gath, and entered the service of the Philistine.
The use of mercenary soldiers was no new thing. Egypt had long since set
the example, and in the age of the nineteenth dynasty the larger part of
the Egyptian army already consisted of foreigners. Many of these were
kinsfolk of the Philistines from the Greek seas. Such soldiers of
fortune were acceptable to the kings who employed them for more reasons
than one. Their lives were devoted to fighting, and therefore they were
better trained and more amenable to discipline than the native recruits,
who were levied only as occasion required. Moreover, they had everything
to gain and nothing to lose from war, unlike the peasantry, whose fields
might be ravaged while they themselves were away in the camp. Above all,
the mercenaries were faithful to their employer so long as he supplied
them with plunder or pay. They had no party feuds to avenge, no loss of
liberty to chafe at, no spirit of independence to cherish. Their swords
were at the disposal of the king, and of none else; the tyranny which
crushed his subjects found in them a willing instrument. David never
forgot the lesson which his service with Achish had taught him. When at
last he became the king of Israel, he also surrounded himself with a
bodyguard of foreign mercenaries, drawn from much the same countries as
those of the Pharaoh.
It was not as a bodyguard, however, that Achish needed the Jews. It was
rather as an auxiliary force in future contests with their countrymen.
Consequently they were allowed to settle in the country, at some
distance from Gath, and Ziklag was given them as a residence. The
outlaws had ceased to be brigands, and had become part of the regular
army of a foreign prince.
For a year and four months the Hebrew corps dwelt at Ziklag. But they
were not idle all the time. Once David led them on a raiding expedition
against the Bedâwin Amalekites of the south. Men, women, and children
were alike put to the sword, so that none might live to tell the tale.
When the Jews returned with their booty, David professed to Achish that
the raid had been directed against the Hebrews of Judah and their allies
the Kenites and Jerahmeelites. The deception was successful, and the
Philistine king rejoiced in the thought that the captain of his
mercenaries had thus for ever rendered himself hateful to his
countrymen. David had succeeded in disarming the suspicions of his
hosts, in providing his retainers with the spoil they coveted, and yet
at the same time in not alienating from himself the affections of his
own people.
But a further trial was in store for the wily exile. The quarrel between
Saul and his son-in-law had allowed the Philistines to assert once more
their old supremacy in Israel. In David the Israelites had lost one of
their chiefest generals, and the troops which should have been employed
against the common foe were occupied in hunting him through the wilds of
the Judæan mountains. The watchful enemy took speedy advantage of the
fact. Israel was again invaded; the Philistines swept the lowlands of
Judah, and prepared to march northward. Saul returned from his pursuit
of David among the trackless rocks on the shore of the Dead Sea only
just in time to prevent their penetrating again into the heart of Mount
Ephraim. The territory of Benjamin was saved for a time, and the
foreigner did not succeed in reaching the royal residence at Gibeah.
But the respite was not for long. A year and a quarter later the united
forces of the Philistine cities marched northward, along the highroad on
the coast of the Mediterranean, which had been trodden so often by the
former conquerors of Western Asia. They passed Dor, the modern Tantûra,
then occupied by their kinsfolk the Zakkal, and, turning the point of
Mount Carmel, proceeded eastward through the valley of the Kishon
towards the plain of Megiddo. It was the old fighting ground of
Palestine; its possession gave the conqueror the command of the whole
country west of the Jordan, and cut off the Israelitish king in his
rear. With the enemy established at Megiddo, Benjamin and Ephraim would
be effectually severed from the northern tribes.
Saul lost no time in proceeding against his foe. The Philistine camp had
been pitched, first at Shunem, then at Aphek, on the southern slope of
Mount Gilboa;[446] the Israelites now took up their station at a
fountain near Jezreel, a few miles to the north-west. But the sight of
the huge Philistine army, recruited, doubtless, as it had been by the
Zakkal, filled Saul with despair. His own forces were miserably
insufficient to meet it; he had lost his old confidence in Yahveh and
himself, and the priests and prophets had become his enemies. In vain he
sought counsel of Yahveh; such priests as still remained near him
refused their help, and ‘Yahveh answered him not, neither by dreams, nor
by Urim, nor by prophets.’ Abiathar and Gad were with David; the
prophets who had gathered round Samuel were now the bitter foes of the
Israelitish king.
In his despair he turned to the powers of witchcraft and necromancy. In
younger and happier days, before the massacre at Nob, when he was still
the favourite of the servants of Yahveh, still enthusiastic for the
religion of Israel, Saul had driven from his dominions all those who
professed to traffic with the powers of the unseen world. The wizards
and fortune-tellers, the enchanters and the possessed had been expelled
from the land. The fact is a proof of the influence of the Mosaic code
and religion in the priestly and royal circle.[447] Elsewhere in Western
Asia the necromancers’ trade was flourishing; Babylonia, which was the
home of the culture of Western Asia, was the home also of the arts of
magic. Here the magician was held in high honour, and the literature of
magic and omens occupied a large place in the libraries of the country.
We cannot suppose that beliefs which were held by the most cultivated
classes of Babylonia were not also shared by the mass of the population
in Canaan and Israel. And it must be remembered that outside the
Levitical law there was no suspicion or idea that those who practised
magic had dealings with spirits of evil. Heathendom drew no distinction
between spirits of good and spirits of evil; the gods themselves were
destructive as well as beneficent. The Mosaic condemnation of witchcraft
was utterly opposed to the popular belief, and Saul’s expulsion of those
who practised it proves not only the existence of the Law, but also its
recognition as the law of the state by the representatives of the
religion of Yahveh. It was a reform analogous to those of Hezekiah and
of Isaiah in later days; an attempt to conform to the Law of Yahveh,
contrary though it was to the prejudices and the practices of the time.
But the king was now forsaken by the Law and its ministers, and as a
last resource he turned to the forbidden arts. In disguise he went by
night to a witch at Endor, and begged her to raise the shade of Samuel
from the dead. And Samuel came in visible presence to the witch, though
his voice only was heard by the king. But it was a voice that pronounced
judgment. God had indeed departed from Saul and given his kingdom to
another, and the doom was about to be fulfilled. Before the morrow’s sun
was set, where Samuel was there should Saul and his sons be also, and
the host of Israel should be delivered into the hand of the Philistines.
Saul fell to the earth in a swoon; he had fasted all the previous day,
and brain and body were alike worn out.
It was an ill-omened beginning for the day of battle which followed.
Like the army of Israel, that of the Philistines was divided into
companies of a thousand men each, which were further subdivided into
companies of a hundred. Along with the native Philistines and their
allies, the band of Hebrew mercenaries marched past the five generals.
But hardly had they passed when a discussion arose as to their
trustworthiness. Achish, indeed, declared his full confidence in the
fidelity of David and his followers, but the other Philistine ‘lords’
distrusted them. The risk of employing them against their own countrymen
was too great. How could they be trusted not to desert at a critical
moment of the battle, and so make their peace with Saul by the sacrifice
of the uncircumcised foreigner? The wishes of Achish were overruled, and
David was sent back to Ziklag.
What would David have done had the result of the council been otherwise?
It has generally been assumed that the fears of the Philistine lords
were justified, and that he would have betrayed his new masters by going
over to his old one. But in that case it is probable that he would have
found some excuse for not leaving Ziklag and accompanying Achish on his
march. That he followed the Philistine army as far as the field of
battle implies that in selling his services to the king of Gath, he
accepted all the recognised consequences of the act. As he had told
Saul, it was not only from his country that he was driven out, but from
the God of his country as well. In leaving Judah for Gath he had
transferred his duties from Israel to Philistia, from Saul to Achish,
from Yahveh to Dagon. It was the first step that mattered: all else was
contained in it. The duties of the mercenary were well understood: he
ceased to have a country of his own, and became, as it were, the
property of the prince to whom his services were given. In after days,
David would have had no scruple in employing his Philistine bodyguard in
subjugating their kinsmen, any more than the Egyptians had in employing
their Sardinian or Libyan mercenaries in their wars against Libya and
the peoples of the Greek seas.
David, indeed, would not have lifted up his hand personally to attack
‘the anointed of Yahveh.’ But there was a good deal of difference
between a hand-to-hand fight between himself and Saul and assisting his
new masters in overthrowing the power of the northern tribes of Israel.
Between the Jews and these northern tribes there was always a certain
amount of smothered hostility, which broke out into actual war in the
early part of David’s reign, and eventually led to the revolt of the Ten
Tribes. It was not the Israelitish king, but the Israelitish kingdom
which David and his followers were helping to destroy.
We need not question his sincerity, therefore, when he offered his sword
to the lords of the Philistines and protested against their mistrust of
himself. Nor would the fact that he had been on the side of the
Philistine enemy have been prejudicial to his future interests, if he
already cherished the hope of being the successor of Saul. It was in
Judah, among his own tribesmen, and not in Northern Israel, that the
foundations of his kingdom were to be laid; it was only the Jews,
consequently, whose good-will it was needful for him to secure. If he
already aimed at extending his power over all Israel, a defeated and
broken Israel would be more easily won over to him than an Israel proud
of its independence and strength, and attached to the house of a
sovereign who had led them to victory.[448] David’s loyalty to Achish,
however, was never put to the test. He and his mercenaries were sent
back to Ziklag, and their dismissal from the field of battle was in
itself an insult which would serve as a pretext for a quarrel with the
Philistines should the need or opportunity for one ever arise. But when
they reached their homes, they found there only desolation and ruins.
The Bedâwin Amalekites had made a raid upon the undefended town, had
burned its buildings and carried away the women and the spoil. There was
no longer any Saul to repress their attacks, or to exact vengeance for
their incursions.
Mutiny broke out among the mercenaries. They accused David of having
torn them from their families, thus leaving Ziklag to the mercy of the
foe. He was the cause of the disaster, and they began to talk of stoning
him to death. The priest Abiathar came, however, to his rescue, and
announced through the ephod the word of Yahveh that the robbers should
be overtaken and the spoil recovered. At once, therefore, the pursuit
commenced. The Bedâwin tracks were followed in such haste that when the
desert was reached, only four hundred out of the whole band of six
hundred had strength enough to proceed. Then an Egyptian was found who
had been a slave among the Amalekites, and having fallen ill on their
retreat from Palestine had been left to die upon the road. The departure
of the Philistine army had exposed the Negeb to the attack of the
Bedâwin, and they had not been slow to take advantage of it.[449] Only
three days had elapsed since they had passed the spot where the slave
was found, and he offered himself a willing guide to the Hebrews in
their quest of his former masters. The Amalekite tents were soon
reached, and the nomads were found feasting on the abundant plunder they
had gained and dancing in fancied security. Suddenly at twilight the
Hebrews fell upon them, and an indiscriminate slaughter took place. The
massacre went on for twenty-four hours, and none of the Amalekites
escaped except about four hundred young men, who succeeded in mounting
their camels and flying beyond pursuit. All the spoil they had carried
off fell into the hands of their conquerors, including the two wives of
David himself. The flocks and herds were given to David: the rest of the
plunder was divided among his followers, the two hundred men who had
been left on the road being allowed, after some dispute, to share it
equally with their fellows.[450]
David, with characteristic foresight, sent portions of the spoil that
had been allotted to him as a ‘present’ to ‘the elders of Judah’ in the
chief towns of the tribe. The Jerahmeelites and Kenites were not
forgotten, nor the Calebites of Hebron. Some of the plunder was sent as
far south as Hormah and Zephath, as well as to Aroer and Ramoth of the
south. Reuben and Simeon had now ceased to exist as separate tribes,
Simeon having been absorbed into Judah while such cities of Reuben as
still remained Israelite had been occupied by ‘the elders of
Judah.’[451]
David’s object in sending the presents was cloaked under the pretext
that they were made to those who had befriended him in the days of his
wandering. But the pretext was more than transparent. His wanderings had
never extended to Hormah or Aroer, or even to ‘the cities of the
Jerahmeelites.’ A crown was already within measurable distance of the
Jewish chieftain: his soldier’s eye had seen that the Israelitish army
was no match for that of the Philistines, and the priests who were with
him were assured that Yahveh had forsaken Saul, and would work no
miracle in his favour. The Philistines were once more dominant in the
south, and a victory at Gilboa would make that domination secure. David
possessed the confidence of Achish, and as the vassal of the Philistines
he could count on their support were he to make himself the king of
Judah. All that was needed was the good-will of the Jewish elders, and
this his victory over the Amalekites gave him the means of purchasing.
On the other hand, were the Philistines to be defeated, and the Hebrew
army, contrary to all probability, to be victorious, David’s position
would be in nowise affected. He would still be safe among the
Philistines, out of reach of Saul, and at the head of a formidable band
of mercenary troops. The pretext for sending the presents could be urged
with some show of reason: they were merely a return to the friends who
had aided him in the time of his necessity. Now, as ever, David could
indignantly disclaim any intention of plotting against the ‘anointed of
the Lord.’
While David was thus looking after his own interests, events were
fighting for him in the north. The Israelites at Gilboa were utterly
defeated, and all Israel lay helpless at the feet of the heathen. Saul
was slain along with his three elder sons; only a minor, Esh-Baal, was
left, who was carried for safety to the eastern side of the Jordan.
Israel was without either a king or a leader; even its army was lost.
For a time the mercenaries of David were the only armed force that still
remained among the tribes of Israel.
Saul had fallen on his own sword. Wounded by an arrow, he had prayed his
armour-bearer to slay him lest he should fall still living into the
hands of his foes. But his armour-bearer refused to commit the act of
sacrilege, and the king slew himself. His body, like those of his sons,
was stripped and hung in derision from the walls of Beth-shan. But the
inhabitants of Jabesh of Gilead could not forget that Saul had once
saved them from the Ammonite, and they went by night and carried away
the ghastly trophies of Philistine victory; the bodies were first burnt,
then the ashes were buried under a tree at Jabesh, and a fast of seven
days was held for the dead.
The Philistines do not seem to have crossed the Jordan. They contented
themselves with occupying the country west of it, and garrisoning the
cities from which the Israelites had fled. The monarchy had fallen, and
the house of Israel appeared to have fallen with it. From Dan to
Beersheba the Philistine was supreme.
Deliverance came from the south, from the latest born of the Israelitish
tribes. The mixed Israelite, Edomite, and Kenite population, which had
there been slowly forming into a united community, now found a common
head and leader in the son of Jesse. David, too, was of mixed descent.
His great-grandmother had been the Moabitess Ruth, and on his father’s
side he was partly of Calebite origin.[452] Mixed races have always
shown themselves the most vigorous and the most fitted to rule, and the
history of the Israelitish monarchy is no exception to the general law.
A purely Israelitish dynasty had failed, as it was destined to do again
after the revolt of the Ten Tribes; it needed the genius and tact of the
Jewish David to establish the monarchy on a lasting basis and defend it
against all enemies.
The news of the death of the king of Israel was brought to David by an
Amalekite. He had robbed the corpse of its crown and golden bracelets
which he laid at the feet of the Jewish chief. In the hope of a reward
he had come in hot haste and pretended that he had dealt the final blow
which delivered David from his enemy, and opened to him the way to a
throne.[453] But he met with an unexpected reception. The story of the
disaster aroused in David his slumbering patriotism, his affection for
Jonathan, and his old reverence for Saul. Now that he had nothing any
longer to fear from the Hebrew king, and everything to gain by his
death, he could allow his impulse and emotions to have free play. He
turned in anger upon the messenger, demanding of him how he—a stranger
and an Amalekite—had dared to lift up his hand against the anointed of
Yahveh. Then he ordered his followers to cut down the luckless Bedâwi,
whose blood, as he told him, was upon his own head. After their recent
experience the nomad thief was likely to have but a short shrift at the
hands of the mercenaries.
In this act of vengeance there was that mixture of policy and impulse
which is the key to so many of David’s actions. On the one hand, David
freed himself from all responsibility for the death of Saul. The blood
of the king could not be required at his hand either in the form of a
blood-feud with the family of Saul, or in that of the nemesis which
waited on the shedder of blood. On the other hand, it could not be said
that he had gained the crown through the murder of the legitimate king.
Saul indeed had been slain, and David had reaped the advantage of his
death, but he had in no way connived at it. In the eyes of God and man
alike he was innocent of the deed.
David found an outlet for his feelings in a dirge which is one of the
gems of early Hebrew poetry. Future generations knew it as the Song of
the Bow; such was the name under which it was incorporated in the
collection of early Hebrew poems called the book of Jasher, and under
which David ordered that it should be learned in the schools.
‘Thy glory, O Israel, is slain upon thy high places!
How are the mighty fallen!
Tell it not in Gath,
Publish it not in the streets of Askelon;
Lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice,
Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.
Ye mountains of Gilboa,
Let there be no dew nor rain upon you, neither fields of offerings;
For there the shield of the mighty ones was cast away,
The shield of Saul, as of one unanointed with oil.
From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty,
The bow of Jonathan turned not back,
And the sword of Saul returned not empty.
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives,
And in their death they were not divided;
They were swifter than eagles,
They were stronger than lions.
Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,
Who clothed you in scarlet delicately,
Who put ornaments of gold upon your apparel.
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle
Jonathan is slain upon thy high places.
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan;
Very pleasant hast thou been unto me:
Thy love to me was wonderful,
Passing the love of women.
How are the mighty fallen,
And the weapons of war perished!’[454]
David, however, was too practical to spend his time in useless laments.
He had relieved his feelings in a burst of lyric poetry; it was now time
to seize the opportunity which the overthrow and death of Saul had given
him. The oracle of Yahveh was consulted, and the answer was favourable;
let David march to Hebron and there offer himself as king of Judah. The
way had already been prepared: he had secured the good-will of the
Jewish elders; he was the son-in-law of the late king, and a hero of
whom his tribesmen were proud. Above all, he had behind him a body of
armed veterans and devoted adherents, the only armed force now left in
the country.
Hebron was the natural capital of Judah. It is true it had been a
Calebite settlement, but Calebites and Jews were now one. Its ancient
sanctuary had been a gathering-place for the population of the south
from time immemorial, and there was no other city which could rival its
claims to pre-eminence. Here, therefore, the representatives of Judah
assembled, and here they anointed David to be their king. The goal of so
many years of struggle and hardship, of patient waiting and politic
tact, was at length reached. David was king of Judah; it could not be
long before he became king of Israel also.
The Philistines offered no difficulties. David was their vassal; he had
shown himself loyal to them, and they were well content that he should
rule over his countrymen, and collect the tribute due from them year by
year. The territory of Judah, moreover, was small; it adjoined the
cities of the Philistines, and in case of revolt could easily be overrun
and reduced to subjection. That a rival prince should reign in the
north, thus separating the northern tribes from Judah and putting an end
to all joint action, was a further guarantee for Philistine supremacy.
The old Egyptian province of Canaan had become Palestine, the land of
the Philistines.
For seven and a half years David reigned in Hebron. Meanwhile, the
relics of the Israelitish army had found a refuge on the eastern side of
the Jordan. Here, under their old commander-in-chief Abner, the son of
Ner, they once more formed themselves into a disciplined body, and made
Esh-Baal, the surviving son of Saul, their king.[455] Esh-Baal, we are
told, reigned two years. His position was a difficult one. His rule was
titular only; all the real power of the State was in the hands of his
uncle Abner. Judah refused to acknowledge his authority, and had raised
itself into a separate kingdom under a rebel chief; the northern tribes
on the west side of the Jordan were in subjection to the heathen
conqueror who held possession of the highroad from Asia into Egypt, and
therewith of the trade and wealth that passed along it. Cut off from
Mount Ephraim, the subjects of Esh-Baal saw David, the Jewish vassal of
the Philistines, extending his sway over Benjamin, the ancestral
territory of the house of Saul, while they themselves maintained a
precarious struggle against their foes behind the fortified walls of
Mahanaim. Here they would have been under the protection of the
Ammonites, who were threatened by the same enemy as themselves.[456]
The Philistines found the task of forcing the fords of the Jordan too
dangerous or too unprofitable. Terms were made with the Israelites;
Esh-Baal became their vassal, and his nominal rule was allowed to extend
over Western Israel as far south as the frontiers of Judah. Here the two
vassal kingdoms came into collision with one another, and Israel and
Judah were engaged in perpetual war. It was a repetition of what had
been the state of Canaan in the closing days of the Egyptian empire when
the Tel el-Amarna letters passed to and fro.
Esh-Baal was merely the shadow of a king. Whether he was a minor or an
imbecile it is impossible to say with certainty; most probably he was
but a child.[457] Abner, the master of the army, was also the real
master of the kingdom. David’s rise to power must have been as
distasteful to him as it would have been to Saul, and he seized the
first opportunity of endeavouring to overthrow it. The brigand-chief had
become a king, and the outlaws who had gathered round him in the cave of
Adullam had been rewarded with posts of honour. Joab, the nephew of
David,[458] was made the commander-in-chief of the Jewish army, and the
choice was justified by the results. David owed most of his future
successes in war to the military skill and generalship of his
commander-in-chief. He himself ceased more and more to take part in
active warfare; Joab more than supplied his place, and the safety of the
king was too important to the army and its general to allow of his
risking his person in battle. David ruled at home while Joab gained
victories for him in the field.
Joab proved a faithful and a loyal servant. No suspicion was ever
breathed against him that he sought to steal the hearts of his soldiers
away from their master, and to supplant David as David had supplanted
Saul. In the evil days of rebellion and disaster that were to overtake
David, Joab never deserted him, and his restoration to the throne was
the work of his faithful general. The services, however, rendered by
Joab had their drawback. He became indispensable to the king; nay more,
he became the master of the king. As David grew old, he began to fret
under the irksome yoke; gratitude and self-interest alike forbade him to
remove his too powerful servant by those Oriental means which had given
him a wife, and up to the day of his death Joab’s power was checked only
by the influence or the intrigues of Bath-sheba.
Even in the early days when David still reigned at Hebron, there was
ill-feeling between the uncle and the nephew. The masterful nature of
Joab had asserted itself, and David was made to feel that his throne
depended on ‘the sons of Zeruiah.’ War had broken out between Esh-Baal
and David. The Jews, it would seem, had advanced northward into the
territory of Benjamin, where they were met at Gibeon by the Israelite
forces under Abner from Mahanaim. A fierce battle ensued which ended in
the defeat of the Israelite troops. Abner fled across the Jordan, the
north of Israel being in the hands of the Philistines, and the authority
of David was acknowledged as far as Mount Ephraim. The Benjamites were
forced to transfer their allegiance from the house of Saul to that of
Jesse. Nineteen Jews only had fallen in the fight, while 360 of the
enemy were left dead on the field of battle. But among the Jews was
Asahel, the younger brother of Joab, who had been slain by Abner during
his flight. It was the beginning of a blood-feud which could be
extinguished only by Abner’s death.
Abner’s military genius was no match for that of Joab, and the long war
which followed between David and Esh-Baal saw the power of the Jewish
king steadily increase. David began to assume the manners and privileges
of an Oriental despot, to multiply his wives, and to marry into the
families of the neighbouring kinglets. Four more wives were added to his
harîm, one of whom was the daughter of Talmai, the Aramaitish king of
Geshur. The alliance with Talmai had a political object; Geshur lay on
the northern frontier of Esh-Baal’s kingdom, and in Esh-Baal, therefore,
David and Talmai had a common enemy.[459] Absalom was the offspring of
the marriage with the Aramaitish princess.[460]
Enclosed between Geshur and Judah, with Benjamin lost and the north of
Israel garrisoned by the Philistines, the dynasty of Saul grew
continually weaker. The Ammonites made common cause with David (2 Sam.
xi. 2), and in the neighbouring Aramæans found further allies. Abner was
not slow in perceiving that his fortunes were linked with those of a
lost cause, and he determined to betray his nephew and his master. A
pretext was quickly found; he entered the royal harîm and spent a night
with Rizpah, the concubine of Saul. The act was equivalent to claiming
the throne, and Esh-Baal naturally ventured to protest. The protest gave
Abner the opportunity he wanted. He fell with angry words on the
helpless king, told him that his throne depended on his general’s
loyalty, and that that loyalty was at an end. Henceforth Abner’s sword
was at the service of David to transfer to him the kingdom from the
house of Saul, and to establish the rule of the Jewish prince from Dan
to Beer-sheba.
The Israelite general now sent secret messengers to David to arrange the
details of the betrayal. Abner undertook to ‘bring over’ all Israel to
David, in return for which he was to supplant Joab as the commander of
David’s army. The terms were agreed to by the Jewish king, David only
stipulating in addition that Michal should be restored to him. We are
not told what it was proposed to do with Esh-Baal; Abner’s treason,
however, involved putting him out of the way. As long as he lived there
would have been a claimant to the Israelite throne.
The plot prospered at first. Abner tampered successfully with the elders
of Israel, reminding them that they had once wanted David as their
king,[461] and that Yahveh had declared that through him alone the yoke
of the Philistines should be broken. The Benjamites also allowed
themselves to be persuaded by one of their own princes, who was at the
same time the most prominent member of the house of Saul, and Abner
accordingly went to Hebron with a troop of twenty men to announce to
David that his part of the compact had been fulfilled. But the secret
had already oozed out. Abner had timed his visit so that Joab should be
absent on a raid when he had his audience with David. Joab, however,
returned sooner than was expected, and, pretending to be ignorant of the
real object of Abner’s coming, expostulated with the king for allowing
an enemy to penetrate to the court and spy out the weak places of the
land. Meanwhile he had sent a messenger who brought Abner back to
Hebron, where he and his brother Abishai murdered the unsuspecting
Israelite, and thus avenged the blood of Asahel.
The blow was felt keenly by David, who saw in it the destruction of his
hopes. The acquisition of Israel seemed further off than ever, for the
Israelites were not likely to forgive or forget the murder of their
chief. Worst of all, perhaps, his chances of getting rid of Joab were at
an end. It was clear that the Jewish general had discovered the
treachery that had been meditated towards him, and though he was too
politic to reproach the king, it gave him a firmer hold upon David than
before. From the point of view of the monarchy, indeed, this was
fortunate, as Joab had proved himself a better and more loyal general
than Abner, and it is probable that had Abner been thrust into his
place, the future conquests of David would never have been made.
All that David could do was to disavow the murder of Abner, to protest
that though he had been anointed king he had not the power to punish the
perpetrators of it, and ostentatiously to abstain from food at the
public dinner of the court. Abner, moreover, received a sumptuous burial
in Hebron, at which the king was chief mourner. Joab must have
recognised the policy of the king’s action, since he seems to have
accepted it without a word of protest. He had gained his point; his
rival was removed from his path, and his position in the kingdom was
more unquestioned than ever.
The death of Abner reduced the adherents of Esh-Baal to despair. The
seeds of disaffection which he had sown also began to grow up. If Israel
was to be delivered from the Philistines, it was evident that the throne
of Esh-Baal must be occupied by another. Time was on the side of David,
and it was not long before the end came.
Esh-Baal was murdered by two of his own tribesmen. Baanah and Rechab,
the sons of Rimmon, penetrated into his bed-chamber one summer afternoon
while he was taking his _siesta_, and there murdered the sleeping king.
Then they beheaded the corpse, and, taking the head with them, hurried
to David at Hebron without once resting on the road.[462] But David was
too prudent to countenance the deed. While securing all the advantages
of it, he ordered summary punishment to be inflicted on its
perpetrators, and thus cleared himself and his house from the stain of
blood. Like the Amalekite who claimed to have killed Saul, the murderers
of Esh-Baal were put to death, and the divine law, which exacted blood
for blood, was satisfied. The Jewish king could enjoy with an easy
conscience the fruits of a murder of which he was innocent. No other
rival stood in his path, for Merib-Baal, the son of Jonathan, was a
hopeless cripple, with his spine injured by a fall in his childhood.
When he was still but five years of age the fatal battle of Gilboa had
taken place, and his nurse in the hurry of flight had dropped the child
from her arms.[463]
The death of Esh-Baal made David king of what was left of Northern
Israel. Those who had gathered round the son of Saul at Mahanaim now
flocked to Hebron, and there anointed the king of Judah king also of
Israel. They reminded him that they, too, were of his ‘bone and flesh,’
sprung from a common ancestor and acknowledging the same God, that he
had once been their leader against the Philistines, and that it had been
predicted of him that he should again be the captain of Israel.[464]
His coronation as king of Israel led to war with the Philistines. From
the vassal prince who reigned at Hebron, and whose title was not
acknowledged by the majority of his countrymen, there was nothing to
fear; it was different when he had become the king of a united Israel,
and could once more summon the forces around him with which he had
gained the victories of his earlier years. In accepting the crown of
Israel, moreover, without the permission of the Philistines, David had
been guilty of revolt. The Philistines claimed dominion over the whole
of Northern Israel west of the Jordan; if they had condoned his
annexation of the territory of Benjamin, it was because he was still
their tributary vassal, and the annexation meant war between him and the
rival kingdom of Israel. The heathen lords of Palestine were well
content that Judah and Israel should waste their strength in contending
with one another. But the union of the two kingdoms turned that strength
against themselves. The union had been effected without their consent;
it was ‘the men of Israel’ who had anointed David without consulting the
suzerain power.
At first the war went against the newly crowned king. He was taken by
surprise, and the Philistine army had invaded his territories before he
had time to gather his forces together. Beth-lehem, the seat of David’s
forefathers, was seized by the enemy, and made the base of their attack.
Thus cut off from help from the northern and eastern tribes, or even
from Benjamin, David was forced to retire from Hebron, and once more to
take refuge in the ‘hold’ of Adullam.[465] It was a country well known
to him; it had already saved him from the pursuit of Saul, and the
foreign foe did not dare to penetrate into its dark caves and narrow
gorges. Here for a time he carried on a guerilla warfare with the
Philistines until he felt himself strong enough to venture out into the
open field. It was while he was thus keeping the enemy at bay that three
of his followers performed a deed which placed them among the thirty
_gibbôrîm_, or ‘mighty men,’ in immediate attendance on the king.[466]
David had a sudden longing for the water of the well at the gate of
Beth-lehem, of which he had doubtless often drunk in his boyish days.
His wish was overheard by Joshebbasshebeth,[467] Eleazar, and Shammah,
who broke through the host of the Philistines, and succeeded in bringing
the water to their leader. David, however, refused to drink it. It was,
as it were, the price of blood; the three heroes had risked their lives
to bring it, and the king accordingly poured it out as a libation to the
Lord.
How long this guerilla warfare lasted we do not know. Only a meagre
abstract is given us of the wars and conquests of David, and it seems
probable that a detailed history of them has been intentionally omitted
by the compiler of the books of Samuel. A separate work dealing with the
history was doubtless in existence at the time he wrote, and there was
no room for another by the side of it. It was the lesser known portion
of David’s history which he aimed at compiling out of the records of the
past. The story, therefore, of the conquest of the Philistines and then
of the creation of an Israelitish empire has been lost to us; we know
the results, but little more.
When David at length ventured to descend from his mountain fortress, the
Philistines were encamped in the plain of Rephaim, or the ‘Giants,’
which stretched to the south-east of Jerusalem.[468] He was thus cut off
from the north, the road being further barred by the Jebusite stronghold
of Jerusalem, which appears to have peacefully submitted to the
Philistine domination. For a while the two hostile forces watched one
another, neither daring to attack the other. Heroes and champions on
either side performed individual deeds of valour like that which had
first won recognition for David on the part of Saul, but no general
engagement took place.[469] The Philistines were too numerous, the
Israelites too securely posted to be assailed.
At last, however, David judged that his opportunity had come. The oracle
of Yahveh was consulted; the answer was favourable; and the Israelites
descended suddenly on their enemies at a place called Baal-perazim. The
Philistines fled precipitately, leaving behind them the images of their
gods, which fell into the hands of the conquering army. The defeat at
Gilboa was in part avenged.
But the strength of the Philistines was by no means broken, and they
still held possession of the country north of Judah. Once more they
poured through the valley of Rephaim, and once more they were driven
back towards the coast. David had fallen upon them in the rear, the
sound of the approaching footsteps of the Israelites being drowned in
the rustling made by the wind in a grove of mulberry-trees. This time
the invaders were utterly shattered; they retreated from the territory
of Benjamin, and fled to Gezer, which was still in Canaanite hands. The
war was now carried into the country of the enemy. Gath, the most inland
of the Philistine cities, was the primary object of attack; but a long
and desultory war was needed before either it or its sister cities could
be forced to yield. Again opportunities occurred for the display of
individual deeds of prowess, and for winning the rewards of valour from
the Israelitish king. The three brothers of Goliath were slain by three
of the champions of Israel, Jonathan the nephew of David being the
victor in one combat, Abishai the brother of Joab in another. Abishai’s
victory was gained at Gob, where David narrowly escaped death at the
hands of the giant Ishbi-benob.[470] The narrowness of the escape
terrified his subjects, and they determined that he should not again
expose his life in the field. The memory of Saul’s death and its
disastrous results was too recent to be forgotten. Henceforward, except
on rare occasions, David governed his people from the city or the
palace; his armies were led by Joab, and the king became to them a name
rather than an inspiring presence. The personal affection he had once
excited was confined to his bodyguard, and when the evil days of
rebellion came upon him, it was the bodyguard alone which remained
faithful to their king.
Before the war with the Philistines was finished, an event occurred
which had a momentous influence on the future history of Judah. This was
the capture of Jerusalem. The Jebusite city had severed Judah from the
northern tribes, and the struggle with the Philistines had shown what
advantage that gave to an enemy. A united Israel was impossible so long
as the Israelitish territory was thus cut in two by a belt of hostile
country. While Jerusalem remained in the hands of the foreigner, Israel
could never be secure from Philistine attacks, or its king be able to
hurl against the enemy the full force of his dominions. If the
Philistine war was to be brought to a decisive and satisfactory end, if
the king of Judah was also to be king of Israel, it was needful that
Jerusalem should be his. We have learned from the tablets of Tel
el-Amarna how important Jerusalem already was in the days when the
Israelites had not as yet quitted Egypt, and when Canaan formed part of
the Egyptian empire. Its position made it one of the strongest of
Canaanitish fortresses. It was the capital of a larger territory than
usually belonged to the cities of Canaan, and it was already venerable
for its antiquity. Its ruler was also a priest, ‘without father and
without mother,’ and appointed to his office by ‘the Mighty King,’ ‘the
Most High God’ of the book of Genesis. Its name testified to the worship
of a god of peace: Urusalim, as it is written in the cuneiform
characters, signified ‘the City of Salim,’ the god of peace.
The city stood on a hill to which in after days was given the name of
Moriah. A low depression, first recognised in our own days by Dr. Guthe,
separated it from another hill, which sloped southward till it ended in
a point. On one side was the deep limestone valley through which the
torrent of the Kidron had forced its way; on the other side, to the
west, was another valley known in later times as that of the sons of
Hinnom. On the southern hill was a fort which protected the approach to
the upper town to the north.[471]
Its Jebusite defenders believed it to be impregnable. Even the lame and
the blind, they said, could repel the assault of an enemy. But they were
soon undeceived. The Israelites climbed up the cliff through a drain or
aqueduct that had been cut in the rock, and the Jebusite fortress was
taken. It may be that its capture was due to treachery, and that the way
had been shown to the besiegers by one of the garrison; at all events
the inhabitants of the city were spared, and henceforward shared it with
settlers from Judah and Benjamin. The latter would seem to have been
chiefly planted in the new city which David built on the southern hill
of Zion where the Jebusite fortress had stood. In contradistinction to
Jerusalem it came to be known as the City of David; a strong wall of
fortification was built around it, a Millo or citadel was erected on the
site of the Jebusite fort, and the king’s palace was founded in its
midst. The palace seems to have stood on the western side of the hill,
with a flight of steps cut in the rock leading down from it to the
valley below, traces of which have apparently been discovered by Dr.
Bliss in his recent excavations.[472]
It was built by Phœnician artificers from Tyre. War and foreign
oppression had destroyed most of the culture the Israelites had once
possessed, and they no longer had among them skilled artisans like
Bezaleel, who could undertake the construction or adornment of buildings
which might vie with the palaces of the Philistine or Canaanite cities.
Carpenters and stone-masons had to be fetched from Tyre like the beams
of cedar that were cut on the slopes of the Lebanon. Jaffa, the port of
Jerusalem, must already have fallen by war or treaty into David’s hand.
We are told that the cedar and the workmen were sent by Hiram, the
Tyrian king. But if the Israelitish palace had been built in the early
part of David’s reign, this can hardly have been the case. Josephus,
quoting from the Phœnician historian Menander, tells us that Hiram I.,
the son of Abibal, reigned thirty-four years (B.C. 969-936),[473] and
since he was still alive in the twentieth year of Solomon’s reign (1
Kings ix. 10), it would have been Abibal rather than Hiram who first
entered into commercial alliance with David.[474] Abibal seems, like
David, to have been the founder of a dynasty, and his son and successor
was the Solomon of Tyre. He constructed the two harbours of the city,
restored the temples, and built for himself a sumptuous palace, while
his ships traded to the Straits of Gibraltar in the west and to the
Persian Gulf in the east.
Jerusalem became the capital of the Israelitish king, and the choice was
a sign of his usual sagacity. It was an ideal centre for a kingdom such
as his. It lay midway between Judah and the northern tribes, and thus,
as it were, bound them together. At the same time it belonged to
neither; its associations were Canaanite, not Hebrew, and its choice as
a royal residence could excite no jealousies. Moreover, this absence of
past associations with the history of Israel enabled David to do with it
as he liked; it contained nothing the destruction or alteration of which
would offend the prejudices of his countrymen. Situated as it was on the
borders of both Judah and Benjamin, it served to unite the houses of
Saul and Jesse, and the mixed population which soon filled it—partly
Jebusite, partly Jewish, and partly Benjaminite—was a symbol and visible
token of that unification of races and interests in Palestine which it
was the work of David’s reign to effect. In addition to all this,
Jerusalem was a natural fortress, difficult to capture, easy to defend;
it had behind it the traditions of a venerable past, and had once been
the seat of a priest-king.
The spoils of foreign conquest allowed David to fortify and embellish
it. Israel as yet had no trade of its own. The struggle with the
Philistines had effectually prevented it from engaging in the commerce
which had made the name of ‘Canaanite’ synonymous with that of
‘merchant.’ The Philistines had held possession of the highroads that
ran through Palestine as well as of the southern line of coast; the
coasts and harbours to the north were occupied by the Phœnicians. The
capture of Joppa from the Zakkal first opened to Israel and Judah a way
to the sea.
The fortifications of Jerusalem were completed and the royal palace
built. But the God of Israel to whom David owed his power and his
victories had no habitation there. Jerusalem had become the capital of
the Israelitish monarchy, yet it was still under the protection of a
Canaanitish god. The time had come when Yahveh should take his place and
assume the protection of David’s capital and David’s throne.
In Egypt, in Babylonia, in the cities of Canaan itself, the palace of
the king and the temple of the deity stood side by side. It was on the
temple rather than on the palace that the wealth of the nation was
lavished: while the palace might be built of brick and stucco, the
temple was constructed of hewn stone. David naturally desired that
Yahveh also should have a fitting habitation in the city He had given to
His worshippers. But the prophet Nathan, who had at first shared in the
plans of David, was commissioned to arrest the design. David had been a
man of war who had ‘shed much blood upon the earth’;[475] until the wars
were finished ‘which were about him on every side’[476] Yahveh would not
permit him to build Him a house. All he might do was to prepare the
material for his happier and more peaceful son. Jerusalem was ‘the city
of the god of peace,’ and it was as a god of peace and not of war that
Yahveh would consent to dwell within it.
Nevertheless, though the building of a temple was forbidden, the new
capital of the kingdom was not deprived of the presence of Yahveh. The
ark of the covenant was brought from the Gibeah or ‘Hill’ of
Kirjath-jearim,[477] where it had lain so long. Placed in ‘a new cart,’
it was led along by oxen, while David and the Israelites accompanied it
with music and singing. On the road, the oxen stumbled and shook the
sacred palladium of Israel; Uzzah, one of the two drivers, put forth his
hand to steady it, and immediately afterwards fell back dead. His death
was regarded as the punishment of one who, though not a Levite, had
ventured to touch the shrine of Yahveh, and David in terror and dismay
broke up the festal procession, and left the ark in the nearest house,
which happened to belong to a Philistine of Gath named Obed-Edom.[478]
Here it remained three months. Then, David finding that the household of
the Philistine had been blessed and not cursed by its presence, caused
it to be again removed and taken to Jerusalem. Sacrifices were offered
as it passed along, music once more accompanied it, and David, as
anointed king, clad in the priestly ephod, danced sacred dances before
it. But his wife, Michal, who had seen him from a window thus acting
like one of the inferior priests, ‘despised him in her heart,’ and on
his return to the palace upbraided him with his unseemly conduct. David
answered taunt with taunt; the king could not degrade himself by any
service, however mean, that he might perform in honour of his God, but
Michal herself should be degraded by living the rest of her life a
childless wife. Meanwhile the assembled multitude was feasted with
bread, meat, and wine, and the ark was reverently placed in ‘the tent’
set up for the purpose in the midst of Jerusalem. Was this the famous
‘tabernacle of the congregation’ which had accompanied the Israelites in
their wanderings in the desert, and had afterwards formed part of the
temple-buildings at Shiloh? The fact that it is called ‘the tent’ would
seem to imply that such was the case. On the other hand, the Chronicler
evidently thought otherwise,[479] and we are not told that ‘the tent’
had been brought from elsewhere.
It would seem that the war with the Philistines was over when the ark
was brought to Jerusalem. During its continuance it is not probable that
a native of Gath would be living peaceably in Israelitish territory, or
giving hospitality to the sacred safeguard of Israel. The Philistines
must have already been incorporated into David’s kingdom, like the
Jebusites of Jerusalem or the Kenites of the south, and his bodyguard
have been recruited from among them. Unfortunately we do not know how
long the war had lasted. A time came, however, when they acknowledged
themselves the servants of the Israelitish king, and became the vassals
of Judah. They never again were formidable to their neighbours, nor did
they ever seriously dispute the suzerainty of Judah. It is true that
they might now and then take advantage of a foreign invasion, like that
of the Assyrians, to shake off the yoke of their suzerain, but their
independence never lasted long, and the five cities did not always take
the same side. Even when the very existence of Jerusalem was threatened
by Sennacherib, we find Ekron faithfully supporting Hezekiah against the
Assyrian conqueror. David broke the spirit as well as the power of the
Philistines, and took for ever the supremacy they had wielded out of
their hands.[480]
The ‘lords’ or kings of the five Philistine cities were left
undisturbed. But their position towards David was reversed. Instead of
his being their vassal, they became vassals to him, paying him tribute,
and providing him with military service when it was required. David was
well acquainted with the excellence of the Philistines as soldiers in
war. Accordingly he followed the example of the Egyptian Pharaohs who
had transformed their Libyan and Sardinian enemies into mercenary
troops, and of the king of Gath in his own case. He surrounded himself
with a bodyguard of Philistines and Kretans, to whom were afterwards
added Karian adventurers from the south-western coast of Asia Minor.
Already in the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets Lycians from the same
part of the world had served as mercenaries in Syria, and in the time of
Ramses II. the Hittite army contained troops from Lycia, from Ionia, and
from the Troad. Not only could the foreigners be used against David’s
own countrymen in case of disaffection or rebellion; their employment
about the king’s person in an office of trust made them feel that they
were as much his subjects as the Israelites themselves, and forget also
that they had been conquered. It was a means of cementing together the
monarchy which the Israelitish king had created.
The war with the Philistines was followed by one with Moab. Here, too,
David was successful. The Moabites were vanquished, and the captives
massacred in accordance with the cruel fashion of the day. Forced to lie
along the ground, two-thirds of the row were measured off with a line
and pitilessly put to death. The result was the almost complete
destruction of the fighting force of the country; and a century had to
pass before Moab recovered its strength, and once more regained its
independence. It was during the war with Moab that Benaiah, the son of
Jehoiada, who was sprung from the mixed Jewish and Edomite population of
Kabzeel, first came into notice, and was rewarded with a place among the
thirty ‘heroes.’ He slew, we are told, two _ariels_ of Moab.[481] The
word seems to have specially belonged to the language of the Moabites.
Mesha, on the Moabite Stone, states that after the conquest of Ataroth
and Nebo, he took from them the _arels_ (or _ariels_) of Dodah and
Yahveh, and tore them in pieces before Chemosh,[482] and in the Egyptian
_Travels of the Mohar_ the same word is found, having been borrowed from
the Canaanites in the sense of a ‘hero.’[483] The _ariels_ slain by
Benaiah must therefore have been Moabite champions like the Philistine
Goliath of Gath.
Their overthrow was not the only achievement of Benaiah which qualified
him for a place among the _gibbôrîm_. He had found a lion at the bottom
of a cistern in the winter-time when the ground was covered with snow,
and had boldly descended into the pit and killed it. He had, moreover,
slain an Egyptian in single combat, though armed only with a staff,
while his opponent wielded a spear. These and similar deeds raised him
to the rank of captain of the foreign mercenaries, an office which he
retained throughout the reign of David. Between him and Joab, the
commander of the native army, feelings of rivalry and ill-will grew up,
as perhaps was natural. The native troops naturally looked askance at
the mercenaries, who formed, as it were, a check upon themselves, and
were favoured by the king with a confidence which they did not
themselves enjoy. The feelings of the troops they commanded were
reflected back upon the two generals, whose jealousies and counter
intrigues ended, finally, in the destruction of one of them. Benaiah
survived, while Joab perished at the foot of the altar.
Moab was conquered; it was now the turn of Ammon. The Ammonites had
looked on while their neighbours on the eastern side of the Jordan were
being annexed to the kingdom of Israel. Nahash, however, the Ammonite
king, had long been the ally of David. A common hostility to Esh-Baal
had brought them together, and the league against the son of Saul had
included Ammon, Judah, and the Aramæans. It was this alliance which had
largely contributed to the success of David in his war against the
northern tribes; left to himself it is doubtful whether the Jewish
prince would have succeeded in overcoming his rival.
While Nahash lived, the old friendship continued between him and the
king of Israel. But with his death came a change. The ambassadors sent
by David to congratulate his son Khanun on his accession were grossly
insulted, and driven back across the Jordan with their beards half-shorn
and their robes cut off in the middle. Khanun, it was clear, was bent
upon provoking war. He had the Aramæans at his back to support him; the
fate of Moab had alarmed him, and he determined, while he still
possessed allies, to anticipate the war which he foresaw.
The challenge was promptly taken up. Joab and his brother Abishai
marched across the Jordan at the head of a large army of veterans. A
battle took place before ‘the City of Waters,’ Rabbath-Ammon, ‘the
capital of Ammon.’ The Aramæan forces had already come to the help of
their confederates. Hadad-ezer of Zobah had furnished 20,000 men; 12,000
had come from the land of Tob, and 1000 from Maacah.[484] Joab found
himself enclosed between the Aramæans on one side and the Ammonites on
the other. But the Israelitish general was equal to the danger. Leaving
Abishai to resist the Ammonite attack, he put himself at the head of a
picked body of troops and fell upon the Syrians, whom he succeeded in
utterly routing. The Ammonites, seeing the flight of their allies,
retreated behind the walls of their city, and Joab remained master of
the field.
But the battle had been sharply contested, and the Hebrew army had
suffered too severely to be able to pursue its advantage. Joab retired
to Jerusalem, there to recruit his army and prepare for another
campaign. Meantime, the enemy also had not been idle. Hadad-ezer
summoned the vassal princes of Syria from either side of the Euphrates,
and placed the army under the command of a general named Shobach. The
struggle had passed from a mere war with Ammon to a contest for the
supremacy in Western Asia. The time had come for David himself once more
to take the field; the issue at stake was too important to be decided by
an inferior commander, however able and experienced.
The two great powers on the Euphrates and the Nile, which had controlled
the destinies of the Oriental world in earlier days, were now in a state
of decadence. Egypt was the shadow of its former self. Its empire in
Asia had long since fallen, and it was now divided into two hostile and
equally impotent kingdoms. The Tanite Pharaohs reigned in the north, and
though their supremacy was theoretically acknowledged as far as the
First Cataract, Upper Egypt was really governed by the high priests of
Ammon at Thebes, who had blocked the navigation of the Nile by a strong
fortress at El-Hîba, near Feshn, which successfully prevented the rulers
of the Delta from advancing to the south.[485] Babylonia was similarly
powerless. A younger rival had grown up in Assyria, and about B.C. 1290
the Assyrian king Tiglath-Ninip had even captured Babylon and held
possession of it for seven years. Like Egypt, Babylonia had renounced
its claim to rule in Western Asia, not to renew it till the age of
Nebuchadrezzar.
The kingdom of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim, moreover, had passed away; when
Tiglath-pileser I. of Assyria swept over Western Asia, in B.C. 1100, it
had already become a thing of the past. Perhaps its overthrow was due to
the irruption of the Hittites from the mountains of Cappadocia, but if
so it was soon avenged, for the Hittites too had ceased to be
formidable. Their empire had dissolved into a number of small states:
one of these was Carchemish, which commanded the chief ford across the
Euphrates; another was Kadesh, on the Orontes, which had once more sunk
into obscurity.
In place of Mitanni and the Hittites the Semitic Aramæans of Syria had
risen into prominence. They had been the older inhabitants of the
country, and the decay of the intrusive powers of Mitanni and the
Hittites had enabled them to shake off the foreign yoke, and establish
kingdoms of their own. Among these, Zobah, called Zubitê in the Assyrian
inscriptions, acquired the leading place.
In the closing days of the Assyrian empire, the capital of Zobah lay to
the north-east of Moab—perhaps, as Professor Friedrich Delitzsch thinks,
in the neighbourhood of the modern Homs.[486] It was essentially an Arab
state, but had been founded by those Ishmaelite Arabs of Northern
Arabia, who, like the Nabatheans, had by intercourse with a Canaanite
population developed a dialect which we term Aramaic. Saul, as we have
seen, had been already brought into hostile collision with them. At that
time the tribes of Zobah were still disunited, and it was with the
‘kings’ or chieftains of Zobah that the war of the Israelitish ruler had
been carried on. As in Israel, however, so in Zobah, the necessity of
defending themselves against the enemy had led to union, and when David
reigned at Jerusalem they were under the sway of a single sovereign,
Hadad-ezer, ‘the son of Rehob.’ Rehob had given his name to a district a
little to the north of Palestine, of which Hadad-ezer must have been the
hereditary prince.[487]
Hadad-ezer had attempted to establish his empire on the ruins of that of
the Hittites. He had not only unified Zobah, but had reduced the
neighbouring Aramæan princes to subjection. All northern Syria was
tributary to him except the kingdom of Hamath, and Hamath also was
threatened by the rising power. He had erected a stela commemorating his
victories on the banks of the Euphrates, in imitation of the ancient
Pharaohs of Egypt, and his alliance was courted by the Aramæans on the
eastern side of the river.
His career of conquest was suddenly arrested. The Ammonites, threatened
by David, sought his assistance, and in return for his help offered to
acknowledge his suzerainty. The offer was accepted, and the Syrian king
found himself face to face with the upstart power of Israel. The war
which followed must have been a long one, but it ended in the complete
victory of David. In the brief annalistic summary of David’s reign given
in 2 Sam. viii., we hear only of one or two of the later incidents in
the campaign. David, it is said, smote Hadad-ezer ‘as he was marching to
restore his stela on the banks of the river’ Euphrates (_v._ 3). This
implies that the memorial of former conquests had been destroyed either
by the Israelitish king or by the revolted subjects of Hadad-ezer
himself.
The account of the war against Ammon (2 Sam. x.) shows that the
Israelitish victory must have been subsequent to the overthrow of the
Ammonites. The defeat of Hadad-ezer was complete. The Israelites
captured 1000 chariots, 7000 horsemen,[488] and 20,000 foot-soldiers,
besides a large number of horses. The Syrian power, however, was not yet
broken. Damascus rose in defence of its suzerain, and David found
himself once more confronted by a formidable enemy. But fortune again
smiled on the veterans of Israel, and 22,000 Syrians from Damascus were
left dead on the field. Israelitish garrisons were placed in Damascus
and the neighbouring cities, and the rule of David was acknowledged as
far as the frontiers of Hamath.[489] Nevertheless, Hadad-ezer was still
unsubdued. His communications with Mesopotamia were still open across
the desert, and it would seem that the last scene in the war was enacted
as far north as Aleppo.
A final effort to save Hadad-ezer was made by the Aramæan states on the
eastern side of the Euphrates, who were either his vassals or his
allies. Troops poured across the river, under the command of Shobach,
called Shophach by the Chronicler. Once more David made a levy of the
Israelitish forces and led them in person against the foe. He crossed
the Jordan to the south of Mount Hermon, traversed the territories of
Damascus and Homs, and after leaving Hamath on the left found himself at
Helam, where the Aramæan host had pitched their camp. Josephus in his
account of the campaign transforms Helam, which he reads Khalaman, into
the name of the Aramæan king beyond the Euphrates; we may accept his
reading without following him in changing a place into a man. Khalaman
would correspond exactly with Khalman, the Assyrian name of Aleppo,
which lay on the high road from the fords of the Euphrates to the west.
It seems probable, therefore, that in Helam or Khalaman, we must see
Aleppo.
According to Josephus, who appears to have derived his account from some
Midrash or Commentary on the books of Samuel, the army of Shobach
consisted of 80,000 infantry and 1000 horse. At all events, in the
battle which followed, and which resulted in the complete victory of the
Israelites, 7000 of the Syrian cavalry and 40,000 of their foot-soldiers
are said to have been slain.[490] The power of Zobah was utterly
destroyed. All Syria on the western side of the Euphrates hastened to
make peace with the conqueror, and to offer him homage or alliance. The
states on the eastern bank were separated from their Aramæan kinsfolk to
the west, and as long as David lived took good care not again to cross
the river. The old dream of the Israelitish patriot was fulfilled, and
the dominion of Israel extended northwards to the borders of Hamath.
Even the desert tribes to the east of Hamath, who had owned obedience to
Hadad-ezer, passed under the sway of David, and for a time at all events
the Jewish king could boast that his rule was acknowledged as far as the
Euphrates.[491]
The immediate result of the victory was a sudden influx of wealth into
the Jewish capital. Not only were the golden shields carried by the
bodyguard of Hadad-ezer brought to Jerusalem, to be borne on state
occasions by the foreign guards of the conqueror, but immense stores of
bronze were found in two of the cities of northern Syria, Tibhath and
Berothai.[492] It was out of this bronze that the fittings of the temple
were afterwards made by Solomon.[493]
Another result of the war was an embassy from Toi or Tou of Hamath. The
powerful Hebrew prince who had so unexpectedly appeared on the horizon
of northern Syria was a neighbour whose goodwill it was necessary to
purchase at all costs. The embassy sent by Toi to David was accordingly
headed by the Hamathite king’s own son. This was Hadoram, whose name was
changed into the corresponding Hebrew Joram. The change of name was a
delicate way of acknowledging the supremacy of the God of Israel and the
sovereign who worshipped Him, and of declaring that henceforth Hadad of
Syria was to become Yahveh of Israel. As the Assyrian kings professed to
make war in order that they might spread the name and worship of Assur,
so it might be presumed that the campaigns of David were carried on in
order to glorify Yahveh, who had given him the victory.[494]
The ambassadors brought with them various costly gifts, which
Israelitish vanity might, if it chose, interpret as tribute, and which
would certainly have been so interpreted by an Egyptian or Assyrian
scribe. Vessels of gold, silver, and bronze were laid at the feet of
David, and a treaty of alliance formed between him and the ruler of
Hamath. That Hadad-ezer had been the common enemy of both was a
sufficient pretext both for the embassy and for the alliance. The memory
of the alliance lasted down to a late date. Even when Azariah reigned
over Judah in the time of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III., Hamath
could still look to Jerusalem for help; and in the age of Sargon,
Yahu-bihdi, whose name contains that of the national God of Israel, led
the people of Hamath to revolt.
All this while the siege of ‘the City of Waters,’ the Rabbah or
‘Capital’ of Ammon, still dragged on. Joab was encamped before it, while
David was leading a life of ease and luxury in his palace at Jerusalem.
This neglect of his kingly duties finds little favour in the eyes of the
Hebrew historian. At the season of the year when David sent Joab and
‘his servants’ to do his work, other ‘kings’ were accustomed to ‘go
forth to battle,’ and special emphasis is laid upon the words of Uriah:
‘The ark and Israel and Judah abide in tents; and my lord Joab and the
servants of my lord are encamped in the open fields; shall I then go
into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife?’ With a
king who had thus delegated his proper work to others, and had already
forgotten that the very reason for his existence was that he should lead
the people of Yahveh against their enemies, a catastrophe could not be
far distant. First came the act of adultery with Bath-sheba, the wife of
Uriah the Hittite, next the treacherous murder of a faithful guardsman
and brave officer. Uriah was made to carry to Joab the letter which
contained his own death-warrant, as well as that of other servants of
David, equally innocent and equally valorous. A special messenger
brought the king the news of his death, and Bath-sheba was at once added
to the royal harîm. One man only could be found with courage enough to
protest against the deed; this was Nathan the prophet, a successor of
the Samuel who had placed the crown on David’s head. The king professed
his penitence, though he did not offer to put away Bath-sheba, and the
death of the child he had had by her was accepted in expiation of his
guilt. It was an example of that vicarious punishment, that substitution
of ‘the fruit of the body for the sin of the soul,’ a belief in which
was as strong among the Canaanites as it was in Babylonia. The second
son borne by Bath-sheba received the double name of Jedidiah from
Nathan, and Shelomoh or Solomon from his father. Shelomoh, ‘the
peaceful,’ was, in fact, the Hebrew equivalent of Salamanu or Solomon,
the name of a king of Moab in the days of Tiglath-pileser III.[495]
David’s submission gave him a claim upon Nathan which the prophet never
forgot. The death of the first-born of Bath-sheba, moreover, seemed to
indicate that Yahveh had accepted the sacrifice of the child that had
been, as it were, offered for the sin of the father, and that the guilt
of the Israelitish monarch had been atoned. Henceforward Nathan took a
peculiar interest in the new queen and her offspring. One of the four
sons of Bath-sheba was named after him (1 Chron. iii. 5), and it was to
him that Solomon owed in part his succession to the throne. It may be
that Solomon’s training was intrusted to the prophet; such at any rate
may be the significance of the words in 2 Sam. xii. 25.
It was after the birth of Solomon that Rabbah was at length starved into
a surrender. Joab, ever jealous of his master’s fame, sent to tell David
of the fact, and to bid him come at once and occupy the city lest the
glory of its capture should be credited to the general who had besieged
it rather than to the king who had remained at home. David accordingly
proceeded to the camp, and entered the Ammonite capital at the head of
his troops. The crown of gold, inlaid with gems, which had adorned the
image of Malcham, the Ammonite god, was placed over the head of his
human conqueror; the city itself was sacked, and its population treated
with merciless rigour. In the euphemistic language of the historian they
were put ‘under saws and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron,
and made to pass through the brickkiln.’[496]
The war with Ammon was followed by one with Edom. The Amalekites or
Bedâwin had already been taught that a strong power had arisen in
Palestine, thoroughly able to protect its inhabitants from the raids of
the desert robbers (2 Sam. viii. 12); the turn of the Edomites was to
come next. David himself seems to have led the Israelitish army,[497]
and in a decisive battle in a wadi south of the Dead Sea, utterly
crushed the forces of Edom.[498] Eighteen thousand of the enemy were
slain, and all further resistance on the part of disciplined troops was
at an end. For six months longer the inhabitants of Mount Seir carried
on a guerilla warfare with Joab; they were, however, mercilessly hunted
out and massacred, hardly a male being left alive (1 Kings xi. 15). The
child Hadad, the son, it may be, of the last Edomite king Hadar, was
carried by ‘his father’s servants’ to Egypt, where they found shelter in
the court of the Pharaohs, and David took possession of the depopulated
country. Its possession opened up for Israel a new era of wealth and
commercial prosperity. The high road along which the spices of southern
Arabia were carried ran through it, and at its southern extremity were
the two ports of Elath and Ezion-geber on the Sea of Suph, which
connected Western Asia with the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. David now
commanded the caravan-trade from the north of Syria to the Gulf of
Aqaba; on the one side he was in contact with Mesopotamia and Asia
Minor, on the other with Egypt and Arabia. Apart from the trade which
passed through Palestine, leaving riches on its way, the tolls levied on
merchandise must have brought a goodly income to the royal exchequer.
David, indeed, had too much in him of the peasant and the warrior to
realise the full extent of his good fortune; it needed a Solomon to
perceive all the advantages of his position, to fit out merchant vessels
in the Gulf of Aqaba, and to secure a monopoly of the carrying trade.
For the present, David was occupied in fortifying the conquests he had
made. Aramæans from Ammon and Zobah were drafted into his
bodyguard,[499] and Edom was so effectively garrisoned as to make revolt
impossible for more than a century. A firm hold was kept upon the
kinglets of the small Aramæan states to the north who had formerly owned
Hadad-ezer as their suzerain; the king of Geshur was already connected
by marriage with the royal house of Israel. A new and formidable power
had grown up at the entrance to Egypt, effectually cutting off the
monarchy of the Nile from Western Asia, and the commander-in-chief of
the Israelitish army had proved himself the ablest and most irresistible
general of his time.
David appeared to be securely fixed not only on the throne of Israel,
but also on that of an Israelitish empire. But his power after all was
wanting in stability. It depended in great measure upon Joab; Joab alone
commanded the confidence of the veteran soldiery, and was dreaded by the
foreign foe.[500] Moreover, there was as yet but little real adhesion
between the Israelitish tribes. Ephraim could not forget its old
position of pre-eminence, or cease to resent the domination of the
new-born and half-foreign tribe of Judah. The blood-tax demanded by the
wars of David added to the discontent. The wars were wars of aggression
rather than of defence, and were to the advantage of a Jewish dynasty,
not of the people as a whole. Military service became as unpopular in
Israel as it has been of recent years in Egypt: when David proposed to
number his subjects and thereby ascertain what fighting force he
possessed, Joab vainly endeavoured to dissuade him from his intention,
and the people subsequently saw in the plague that followed the
punishment of a royal crime. The bodyguard of Philistines and Kretans,
with its officers of various nationalities and creeds, protected the
person of the king and prevented any open signs of disaffection; but
discontent smouldered beneath the surface, ready to break into flame
whenever a favourable opportunity occurred. The Israelites had too
recently submitted themselves to the rule of a single sovereign to be as
yet amenable to discipline, or to have lost the democratic instincts of
the armed peasant and his guerilla methods of carrying on war.
There was yet another, and a still more potent cause for the instability
of David’s throne. This was to be found in the royal family itself.
Polygamy has been the fatal cancer which has eaten away the strength and
prosperity of the most powerful dynasties of the Oriental world; and the
history of the Israelitish empire proved no exception to the rule. David
had none of the stern and ascetic fanaticism which distinguished Saul;
he enjoyed life to the fullest, and when success came, policy alone set
bounds to his enjoyment of it. Self-indulgent as most other Oriental
despots, he multiplied to himself wives and children, not shrinking even
from the murder of the trustiest of his followers in his determination
to add yet another beauty to his well-stocked harîm. Polygamy brought
with it its usual curse. In the dull and idle seclusion of the palace,
the wives of the king quarrelled one with another for his favour and
love, and the quarrel of the mother was adopted by her children.
Maachah, the daughter of the king of Geshur, claimed precedence for
herself and her son Absalom in virtue of their royal blood; Amnon, as
the first-born of his father, regarded himself as rightful heir to the
throne, and as therefore placed above the ordinary laws of men; while
Bath-sheba, whose unscrupulous ambition had betrayed a husband to
destruction, never ceased intriguing in the interests of Solomon whom
she had destined from the outset for the crown.
The latter years of David’s life were clouded with the crimes and
rebellions of his family. Amnon outraged his half-sister Tamar, and was
murdered by her brother Absalom, and Absalom, his father’s favourite,
fled to Talmai, king of Geshur. Thanks to Joab, the blood-feud was
eventually appeased, and after an exile of three years Absalom was
allowed to return to Jerusalem. Two years later, David consented to
forget the past. Absalom was again received at court, and his beauty and
grace of manner resumed their former sway over the hearts of both king
and people.
But David was growing old; discontent was gathering even among his own
tribesmen, and Absalom was impatient to seize the crown which he
conceived to be his by right. He obtained leave to go to Hebron, there
to offer sacrifice in the ancient sanctuary and capital of Judah. The
place was well chosen: the religious traditions of a venerable past were
associated with the city, and its inhabitants could have looked with
little favour on the rise of Jerusalem. They gave ready ear to the
prince who promised to restore Hebron to its ancient importance, and
make it once more a capital. The cry of Hebron and Judah as against
Jerusalem and a dynastic empire was eagerly responded to.
David was taken by surprise. Even Joab does not seem to have been aware
of the conspiracy which was being formed. There were no troops in
Jerusalem sufficient to defend it against attack, even if its defenders
could be trusted, and of this David was no longer sure. He seemed
deserted by all the world, and his only safety lay in flight. Even his
counsellor Ahitophel had gone over to the rebel son.
The royal household and harîm fled eastwards across the Jordan to those
outlying districts of Israelitish territory in which Esh-Baal had so
long maintained himself. David was accompanied by his bodyguard: the
priests who wished to accompany him with the ark were sent back. So,
too, was Hushai, the fellow-councillor of Ahitophel, in the hope that he
might counteract the schemes of Absalom’s adviser.
The revolt showed David that he had been living in merely fancied
security. His tribesmen had fallen away from him at the first summons of
his more popular son; his old comrades, indeed, still stood by him, and
he could count on the swords and fidelity of his foreign bodyguard. But
what were they against a revolted nation? Even in the days of outlawry,
when he was hunted from cave to cave by Saul, he could reckon on popular
sympathy and help; now the popular sympathy was transferred to another,
and the flood-gates of disaffection and hatred were opened upon him. In
spite of his guards, Shimei of the house of Saul ventured to stone him
as he passed along, and to call him the man of blood who had
unrighteously seized the crown. It was a sign that the fall of Saul’s
dynasty had not been forgotten, and that there were still those in
Benjamin who submitted with reluctance to the rule of his supplanter.
David was saved by the loyalty of Joab. Had that invincible general gone
over to the enemy a new king would have sat on the throne of Israel. The
commander-in-chief would have taken his veterans with him and led them,
as ever, to victory. Fortunately for David, his old friend refused to
forsake the fortunes of the fallen king. Perhaps family jealousies may
have had some influence on his resolution. Absalom conferred the office
of commander-in-chief on Amasa, the son of Joab’s cousin, who had
married a man of Israel.[501] The appointment may indeed have been made
because Joab had already thrown in his lot with that of the king; more
probably it had been promised to Amasa before the beginning of the
revolt.
But the priests and prophets remained faithful to the king of their
choice. Zadok and Abiathar, the chief priests, had returned to Jerusalem
with the sacred symbol of Yahveh’s presence in Israel, but their sons
Ahimaaz and Johanan undertook to keep David informed of the plans of his
enemies in the capital. Fortunately for him, the advice of Ahitophel was
only partially acted upon. Absalom possessed himself of his father’s
concubines, and thereby, in accordance with Hebrew ideas, published to
the world his usurpation of the throne, but the further advice of the
wily counsellor was disregarded. Instead of despatching a body of twelve
thousand men, who should fall upon the fugitives before they could reach
the fords of the Jordan, Absalom and his youthful friends preferred the
counsel of Hushai, and determined first to raise a levy of all Israel.
The idea of marching in person at the head of a great army appealed to
the vanity of the young usurper; and to the inexperience of youth the
possibility of David and his guards hiding in ambush, and thence
descending upon their unwary pursuers, seemed a very real danger.
Ahitophel, the single representative of age and experience among the
conspirators, knew only too well what the rejection of his advice must
mean. The rebellion was self-condemned; it was doomed to failure, and
the return of David would be the destruction of himself. Even at the
council-board of Absalom his rival Hushai had been preferred to himself;
all that was left him was to crawl back to his home in bitter
disappointment, and there hang himself. The conspiracy had lost the
brain which alone could have conducted it to success.
The news of Ahitophel’s advice was brought to David by the young
priests. They had escaped with difficulty from their hiding-place at the
Fuller’s Spring below the southern extremity of the wall of Jerusalem,
and subsequently owed their preservation to a woman’s wit. The priests
were known to be hostile to the new movement; they had therefore been
watched and closely pursued. They reached David while he was still on
the western side of the Jordan, and no time was lost in putting the
river between himself and his enemies. The fugitives, however, did not
consider themselves safe until they found themselves at Mahanaim, where
they were in the midst of a friendly population. Ammonites as well as
Gileadites hastened to do honour to David, and to furnish him with
everything that he and his companions required.[502]
He was soon joined by Joab and his brother Abishai, with the veteran
troops under their command. A third division of the army was placed
under Ittai of Gath, a captain in the royal bodyguard, and the approach
of the rebel army was awaited without anxiety. Amasa made the fatal
mistake of attacking the royal troops in their own territory, on ground
they had chosen for themselves. Not only was it on the further side of
the Jordan, it was also among the trees and dense undergrowth of the
forest of Ephraim.[503] The issue could not be doubtful. David, indeed,
had not been allowed by his followers to enter the field himself. He was
now too old for active service, and his death would involve all the
horrors of a disputed succession and civil war. That Absalom, however,
would be defeated seems to have been taken for granted, and David
accordingly impressed upon his generals that they should spare his son’s
life.
But Joab judged more wisely than the king. He knew that as long as
Absalom lived there would be constant trouble and insecurity, and that
for those who had fought against him on his father’s side there would be
but short shrift. As Absalom, therefore, hung suspended by his hair from
the branches of a tree which had caught him in his flight, he pierced
him with three darts, while his ten armour-bearers despoiled the corpse.
Twenty thousand of the enemy were said to have been slain, partly by the
sword, partly from the nature of the place in which the battle was
fought, and the slaughter would have been greater had not Joab recalled
his men from their pursuit of the foe as soon as Absalom was dead. With
the fall of the usurper all further danger was at an end.
Ahimaaz, the Levite, famous for his fleetness of foot, ran with news of
the victory to the king. But Joab knew how fondly David had doted on his
handsome and selfish son; he knew also that he was weakened in both mind
and body, and that the day was past when his emotions could be kept
under control. Joab, therefore, refused to let Ahimaaz carry the tidings
of his son’s death to the king, and an ‘Ethiopian’ slave was sent with
the news instead. In the end, however, Ahimaaz outran the Ethiopian, and
announced at Mahanaim the victory that had been won. Then came the
foreigner with the message that Absalom was dead.
The conduct of David which followed on the message was indefensible. He
forgot that he was a king, that he had duties towards his people and
those who had risked their lives on his behalf, that the prince who had
fallen in open fight had been the murderer of his brother, a rebel
against his father, and a would-be parricide. All was forgotten and
absorbed in a father’s grief for his dead son. David allowed the passion
of his emotion to sweep him away, and he wept as a woman and not as a
man. It was an outburst of Oriental exaggeration of feeling,
unrestrained and untempered by the reason or the will.
His followers regarded the spectacle with amazement and dismay. Had it
been worth their while to fight for such a king? One by one they slunk
away, and it seemed as if he would soon be left alone to the company of
himself and his harîm. But once more Joab came to the rescue of his old
master and companion in arms. It was indeed with the rough speech of the
soldier, but plain speech was needed even though it was rough and rude.
‘Thou hast shamed this day,’ he said, ‘the faces of all thy servants,
which this day have saved thy life, and the lives of thy sons and of thy
daughters, and the lives of thy wives, and the lives of thy concubines;
in that thou lovest thine enemies, and hatest thy friends. For thou
regardest neither princes nor servants: for this day I perceive, that if
Absalom had lived, and all we had died this day, then it had pleased
thee well. Now therefore arise, go forth, and speak comfortably unto thy
servants: for I swear by the Lord, if thou go not forth, there will not
tarry one with thee this night: and that will be worse unto thee than
all the evil that befell thee from thy youth until now.’
David was roused from his selfish and unworthy grief; weak and
self-indulgent as he had become, the words of Joab nevertheless forced
him to recognise the dangers he had provoked. But he never forgave his
monitor. He soon found an opportunity of punishing Joab for his loyalty,
and his dying orders to his successor were to put his grey-haired
servant to death.
Secret word was sent to the priests at Jerusalem that they should shame
the elders of Judah into demanding the return of the king, seeing that
he was their own tribesman, and that the rest of Israel had already
acknowledged his sovereignty. At the same time Amasa was appointed
commander-in-chief in place of Joab. David thus revenged himself upon
his too outspoken general, and also made a bid for popularity among the
Jewish forces who had followed Amasa.
The act was as foolish as it was unjust, and it soon brought its penalty
with it. The elders of Judah indeed begged the king to return, and he
was led across the Jordan in a sort of triumphal procession by the
delegates of that tribe. But the other tribes resented this
appropriation of the royal person. It was the Jews rather than the rest
of Israel who had revolted and made Absalom their king, while the
veterans of Joab who had remained loyal represented the whole nation.
For the first time since the death of Esh-Baal, the men of Israel and of
Judah stood over against one another with antagonistic interests and
angry rivalry; Israel claimed to have ten parts in the king, whereas
Judah had but one, and yet David’s action had implied that Judah alone
was his rightful heritage. Hardly was he again in Jerusalem before a new
and more dangerous revolt broke out against his rule. Sheba, a
Benjamite, raised the standard of rebellion, and his cry, ‘We have no
part in David,’ found an echo in the hearts of the northern tribes.
‘Every man of Israel,’ we are told, deserted ‘the son of Jesse’; Judah
alone adhered to him. But the strong arm and able brain that had so long
fought for David were no longer there to help him; Joab had been
superseded by Amasa; and the raw levies of Judah who had escaped from
the forest of Ephraim were but a poor substitute for the disciplined
forces which had created an empire. David at last awoke to the fact that
in a moment of weak passion he had done his best to throw away a crown;
Abishai was summoned in haste and sent with the bodyguard and ‘Joab’s
men’ against the new foe.
It would seem that Sheba’s camp had been at Gibeon, not far to the north
of Jerusalem. On the advance of the Jewish army he retreated northward.
Joab had accompanied his brother, and at ‘the great stone’ of Gibeon the
Jewish forces were overtaken by their new commander-in-chief. Amasa
placed himself at the head of them, clad in the robe of office which
Joab had worn for so many years. The provocation was great, and the
murder of Abner with which Joab had begun his career was repeated in the
murder of Amasa at the close of it. Abner, however, had been a general
of considerable ability and influence; and Joab had not yet accumulated
so many claims upon the gratitude of the king. The army took Joab’s side
in the matter: Amasa’s body was thrown into a field with a common cloth
above it, and the Jewish soldiers hurried on along the high-road in
pursuit of the foe. They would have no other commander but Joab, and his
degradation by the king was tacitly set aside.
With Joab once more at their head, the insurrection soon came to an end.
Sheba fled to the northern extremity of Israelitish territory and flung
himself into the city of Abel of Beth-Maachah.[504] Here he was closely
besieged until ‘a wise woman’ persuaded her fellow-citizens to cut off
his head and throw it to Joab. The rebellion was over, and Joab returned
in triumph to Jerusalem.
The last ten years of David’s life were passed in tranquillity. His
bodily and mental powers grew enfeebled, and he sank slowly into the
grave. The hardships of his youth and the self-indulgence and polygamy
of his later years had weakened his constitution prematurely. While his
early companions Joab and Abiathar still retained their vigour, the king
became old and worn-out. The intrigues of the harîm, it is true, still
continued, but there was no Absalom to steal away the hearts of the
people by his beauty and winsomeness of manner; no Amnon to assert in
deeds the rights of a crown-prince.
Israel was at peace with her neighbours. Edom and Zobah had been utterly
crushed; Moab and Ammon feared to move while Joab was alive. The petty
kings of Northern Syria paid intermittently their tribute; Tyre and
Sidon courted their powerful neighbour, whose friendship was preferable
to his hostility. Egypt was divided against herself; more than one
dynasty ruled in the country, and the Tanite sovereigns of the Delta had
neither wealth nor men. Like Egypt, Babylonia had fallen into decay, and
the defeat of the Assyrian king Assur-irbi by the Aramæans had cut off
Assyria from the nations of the West. The Philistines had been compelled
to become the servants of David; and the pirate-hordes who had flocked
to their aid from Krete and the Ægean now passed into the service of the
Israelitish king, or else transferred their attention to other parts of
the Mediterranean Sea. According to Greek legend, Thrace, Rhodes, and
Phrygia occupied the waters of which they had once been the masters.
Phœnician trading-ships could at last sail peaceably across them, and
Tyre accordingly, under Abibal and Hiram, became a centre of maritime
trade.
In the north, the Hittite empire had long since passed away. Kadesh, on
the Orontes, had become the capital of a small district, formidable to
no one, and on good terms with its Israelitish neighbours.[505] Hamath,
also, was in alliance with the Israelitish king. Among the wadis of the
Lebanon, near Damascus, Rezon, indeed, led the life of a bandit-chief,
and robbed the caravans which passed his way; but it was not until after
David’s death that he succeeded in establishing himself at Damascus, and
there founding a dynasty of kings.
At home, however, though outwardly all seemed calm, the seeds of
disunion and discontent were lying thick below the surface. The
rebellion of Absalom in Judah, of Sheba in Northern Israel, had shown
how fragile were the bonds of union that bound the tribes to one another
and to their king. The affections of Judah were not yet entwined around
the house of David; the feeling that they were a single nation had not
yet penetrated very deeply into the hearts of the other tribes. The
Davidic dynasty itself was not yet secure. It depended for its support
rather on the sword than on the loyalty of the people. The fallen
dynasty still had its followers and secret supporters, and now and then
an event occurred which showed how dangerous they might become. Shimei
the Benjamite doubtless represented the feeling of his tribe when he
cursed David in the hour of his humiliation; and David’s conduct after
his restoration to the throne shows that he could not trust even
Merib-Baal or Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, whom he had treated as
his own son.[506] An incident which had happened in an earlier part of
his reign is another proof of his readiness to root out as far as
possible the family of Saul. Three years in succession Palestine had
suffered from want of rain and consequent famine, and the oracle of
Yahveh declared that the cause of the visitation was Saul’s slaughter of
the Gibeonites. The massacre of the priests at Nob had indeed been
avenged by the death of the Israelitish king and his sons, and by the
fall of his throne, but other temple-servants besides the priests had
suffered from Saul’s outburst of mad anger, and their blood was still
crying out for revenge. Blood demanded blood, and the sacrifice of
Saul’s descendants could alone atone for the guilt of their forefather.
Mephibosheth was spared, partly because of his father Jonathan’s
friendship towards David, whose life he had once saved, partly because
little was to be feared from a lame man. But the five sons of Michal (?)
by Adriel of Meholah were handed over to the executioner.[507] They
stood too near the throne; apart from Mephibosheth they were, in fact,
the only direct descendants of the late king, and David was doubtless
glad of the opportunity of removing them from his path. His dying
injunctions to Solomon proved how merciless he could be when the safety
of his dynasty was at stake.
Two other descendants of Saul still remained, who might possibly be a
source of trouble. These were the sons of his concubine Rizpah, and they
also were condemned to die. The sacred number of seven victims was thus
made up, and David satisfied at once the religious scruples of the
Gibeonites and the political exigencies of his own position. Shimei had
some reason for calling him a ‘man of blood’ who had shed ‘the blood of
the house of Saul.’
The human victims were hanged on the sacred hill of Gibeah ‘before the
Lord,’ and none was allowed to take the bodies down until at last the
rain fell. Then they were buried solemnly in the ancestral tomb of
Saul’s family at Zelah, along with the ashes of Saul and Jonathan, which
David had brought from Jabesh-gilead. The great atonement had been made
and accepted by Yahveh, and at the same time David had cleared himself
from all charges of impiety towards the dead. The fallen dynasty had
ceased to be formidable.
Hence it was that when the northern tribes under Sheba broke away from
the house of David, they could find no representative of the family of
Saul to lead them. Sheba, it is true, was a Benjamite, but he came from
Mount Ephraim, and was not related to Saul. He was rather one of those
military generals who in after days played so large a part in the
history of the northern kingdom in dethroning and founding dynasties.
Nevertheless, the yoke of the royal supremacy was borne with impatience.
In spite of the support of the priesthood and the swords of Joab and the
foreign bodyguard, David’s reign was troubled by rebellion. As long,
indeed, as it was signalised by victories over a foreign foe, by the
conquest of neighbouring states, by the influx of captive slaves and the
acquisition of spoil, his subjects were well content with their
successful leader in war. His influence over those who were brought into
personal contact with him had always been great, and there were few who
could resist his charm of manner. But when the era of conquests was
past, when David had delegated his military duties to others, and had
retired more and more into the privacy of an Oriental palace, the seeds
of discontent began to grow and spread. Even in Judah there were
complaints that justice was neglected (2 Sam. xiv. 2-6); further off the
complaints must have been loud and deep. The unpopularity of the
conscription by which the ranks of the army were filled was patent even
to Joab (2 Sam. xxiv. 3), and the census on which it depended was
regarded as hateful to God as well as to man.
Even David himself half repented of his determination to number the
people (2 Sam. xxiv. 10), and the general feeling was expressed by the
seer Gad when he declared that the punishment of heaven would be visited
for the deed, not indeed upon the guilty king, but upon his innocent
subjects (2 Sam. xxiv. 13, 17). In the plague that devastated Palestine
they saw the anger of Yahveh, and the conscience-stricken king at once
assented to the common view.
The cessation of the plague was connected with the foundation of the
temple. At the very spot where David had seen the angel of death
standing with his sword unsheathed, the altar was built and the
sacrifice offered which appeased the wrath of the Lord. It was the
threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite, on the level summit of Mount
Moriah, where the old Jebusite population of Jerusalem still dwelt. It
may even be that Araunah was the last Jebusite king whose life and
freedom were spared when Jerusalem was surrendered to David.[508]
The threshing-floor was bought by David, and became the great
‘high-place’ of the new capital of the kingdom. Everything marked it out
as the site of that temple which in the Eastern world was a necessary
supplement of the royal palace. It was the highest part of the city; it
was, moreover, a smooth and sunny rock, and the place which it occupied
was open and unconfined. It had been the scene of a special revelation
of Yahveh to the king, and the altar erected on it had been the means of
preserving the people of Israel from death. It is possible, too, that
the spot was already sacred. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets, Ebed-Tob,
king of Jerusalem, speaks of the Temple of Nin-ip as standing on ‘the
mountain of Uru-salim,’ and of all the mountains of Jerusalem the future
temple-mount was the most prominent and commanding.
We do not know when the pestilence occurred which thus had such
momentous consequences for the later religion of Judah. The empire of
David already extended as far as ‘Kadesh of the Hittites,’[509] but Edom
does not as yet seem to have become a province of Israel. The census was
taken in order to ascertain the number of fighting men in Israel, not
with a view to the levying of taxes. In the latter case the conquered
provinces would have been included in the registration. We may gather,
therefore, that the event happened about the middle of David’s reign,
probably at the time when the struggle with Zobah was still going on.
It was at a later period, when ‘the Lord had given him rest round about
from all his enemies’ (2 Sam. vii. 1), that he announced to Nathan his
purpose of building a temple. Nathan had taken Gad’s place as the seer
and confidant of the king, and the palace of David had already been
erected. But Yahveh would not allow him to carry out his plan. His hands
were stained too deeply with blood; the work was destined for the son
whose name signified ‘the peaceful one,’ and in whose birth and training
the seer had taken so profound an interest.[510] All that David could do
was to prepare the way for his successor, to collect the materials for
the work, and to determine the place whereon the temple of God should
stand.
Two lists have come down to us of David’s chief officers, extracted from
the State annals. The first list is given at the end of the annalistic
summary of the events of his reign (2 Sam. viii. 16-18), and belongs to
the earlier portion of it; the second must have been drawn up not long
before his death. From the outset, it is clear, the kingdom was as
thoroughly organised as that of the surrounding states. There was the
‘recorder’ or ‘chronicler’ whose duty it was to hand down the memory of
all that happened to future generations; the scribe or chief secretary
who wrote and answered official letters, and superintended the copying
and re-editing of older documents in the record office; the
commander-in-chief of the army, who corresponded to the _turtannu_ or
tartan of the Assyrians, and the commander of the foreign troops. The
administration, in fact, seems to have closely resembled that of
Assyria, excepting only that there was no Vizier or Prime Minister who
acted as the representative of the king. It presupposes a
long-established use of writing and all the machinery of a civilised
Oriental state. The scribe and the chronicler make their appearance in
Israel simultaneously with the establishment of an organised government.
A knowledge of the art of writing could have been no new thing.
Jehoshaphat, the son of Ahilud, we are told, was the recorder, Seraiah
was the secretary,[511] Benaiah the commander of the Kretan and
Philistine bodyguard. By the side of the civil functionaries were the
two high priests Zadok and Abiathar, while the office of royal chaplains
was filled by the sons of David himself. Their duties were probably to
offer such sacrifices as were not public in the absence or in place of
their father. That there should have been two high priests is difficult
to explain. Zadok was the son of Ahitub, whom the Chronicler makes the
son of Amariah, and a descendant of Phinehas the son of Eleazar (1
Chron. vi. 7), while Abiathar was the son of Ahimelech or Ahiah, the
grandson of Ahitub, and great-grandson of Phinehas the son of Eli.[512]
Abiathar appears to have represented the family of Ithamar the younger
brother of Eleazar the son of Aaron; at any rate, it was to his family
that the safe keeping of the ark had been intrusted as well as the high
priesthood at the sanctuary of Shiloh. The destruction of Shiloh dealt a
blow at its influence and _prestige_, the massacre of the priests at Nob
almost annihilated it. Room was thus given for another line of priests
who claimed descent from the elder branch of Aaron’s family, and who had
probably preserved the Mosaic tradition in another part of Israel. Is it
possible that Zadok had followed the fortunes of Esh-Baal, while
Abiathar attached himself to David? At all events, the unification of
the kingdom brought with it the unification of the high-priestly
families; throughout the greater part of David’s reign the ark at
Jerusalem was served by both Zadok and Abiathar, with numerous Levites
under them (2 Sam. xv. 24-29). That Zadok is always named first, though
Abiathar had been the early friend and priest of David, implies that his
claim to represent the elder branch of the high priest’s family was
recognised.
When the second list of David’s officials was compiled certain important
changes had taken place. Seraiah, the secretary, had been succeeded by
Sheva or Shisha (2 Sam. xx. 25; 1 Kings iv. 3); ‘Ira, the Jairite,’ had
become the chaplain of David, and the growth of the empire had
necessitated the creation of a new office. This was the imperial
treasurership which was held by a certain Hadoram, who seems to have
been of Syrian origin, and whose duty it was to collect the tribute of
the conquered provinces.[513] Possibly he had already gained experience
of the office under one of the Syrian kings.
Other officers of David are enumerated by the Chronicler (1 Chron.
xxvii. 25-34). They had their analogues in Assyria and Egypt, and show
how thoroughly the court of Israel was modelled after those of the
neighbouring states. Among them we read of Azmaveth, the son of Adiel,
who presided over the exchequer; of Jonathan, the son of Uzziah, who
superintended the public granaries, which must therefore have been
established in imitation of those of Egypt and Babylonia;[514] of Ezri,
the superintendent of the peasants who worked on the crown lands; of
Shimei and Zabdi, who had charge of the royal vineyards and
wine-cellars; of Baal-hanan and Joash, to whom were intrusted the olive
plantations and storehouses of oil; of Obil, the Ishmaelite, the chief
of the camel-drivers; of Jehdeiah, the head of the ass-drivers; and of
Jaziz, the Hagarene, who superintended the shepherds of the king.[515]
David sank slowly into the grave, old in mind as well as in years. A
young maiden, Abishag the Shunammite, was brought to lie beside the
king, and so keep up the warmth of his body. But it was all in vain, and
it became clear that he could not last long. The bed of the dying king
was surrounded by intrigue. Adonijah, the eldest of his surviving sons,
naturally looked upon himself as the rightful heir. He could count upon
two powerful supporters. One was the priest Abiathar, who had first
given David’s title to the crown a religious sanction; the other was
Joab, who had created his empire. But Bath-sheba had long since
determined that she should be queen-mother, and that her son Solomon
should wear the crown. Behind her stood Nathan, the spiritual director
both of herself and of her son. The adhesion of Abiathar and Joab to
Adonijah, moreover, drove their rivals Zadok and Benaiah into the
opposite camp, and Benaiah took with him the foreign bodyguard of which
he was commander, and which, as in other countries, thus showed itself
ready from the outset to make and unmake kings. Above all, Bath-sheba
still exercised her old influence over the half-conscious monarch, and
it did not need the incitements of Nathan to induce her to exert it once
more on behalf of Solomon. Backed as she was by the prophet, the issue
was not doubtful, and David did as he was bid. Bath-sheba reminded him
of his old promise to herself, Nathan craftily represented that Adonijah
was already seizing the crown before his father’s life was extinct.
Zadok and Benaiah were accordingly summoned, and ordered to escort the
young prince on David’s own mule to the spring of Gihon, and there, just
outside the eastern wall of Jerusalem, where the Spring of the Virgin
now gushes from the ground, to anoint him with the oil of consecration,
and proclaim his accession by the sound of trumpet. The presence of the
priests and the bodyguard was a visible sign that the kingship and the
power had been transferred from David to Solomon.
Meanwhile Adonijah was holding a feast at the stone of Zoheleth, near
En-Rogel, the Fuller’s Spring, the modern Well of Job south of the Pool
of Siloam. Abiathar and Joab were with him; so also were his brothers,
who seem to have had but little affection for the favourite of Nathan,
as well as those representatives of Judah who had been the mainstay of
Absalom’s rebellion. Solomon appears to have been regarded as tainted by
foreign blood; at all events, Judah followed Adonijah as it had followed
Absalom.[516] But Nathan and Bath-sheba had taken their measures in
time. In the midst of the feast news was brought to the conspirators by
Johanan, the son of Abiathar, that Solomon had been proclaimed king, and
that his person was already protected by the royal bodyguard. The guests
fled in dismay, and Adonijah took refuge at the altar. There the
sovereign-elect promised him that he would spare his life.
Solomon next received the last commands of the dying king. David’s last
thought was for the maintenance of the kingdom and the dynasty. Solomon
was to follow in the footsteps of his father, to obey the law of Yahveh
and His priests. More especially he was to seek an early opportunity of
ridding himself of possible rivals or antagonists whom the weakness or
policy of David himself had hitherto spared. Joab was to be put to
death; he was too powerful a subject to be allowed to live, aged though
he now was, and his complicity with Adonijah made him dangerous to the
new king. Shimei, too, was to be slain; as long as he lived the fallen
dynasty had a leader around whom the disaffected might rally. On the
other hand, the kindness of Barzillai, the Gileadite, was not to be
forgotten; favour to him would win the hearts of the men of Gilead.[517]
David died, leaving behind him a name which his countrymen never forgot.
He became the ideal of a patriot king. He had founded a dynasty and an
empire; and though the empire soon fell to pieces, the dynasty survived
and exercised a momentous influence upon the religious history of the
world. He had established once for all the principle of monarchy in
Israel; never again could the Israelites return to the anarchic days of
the Judges, or forget the lessons of unity which they had been taught.
In character he was generous and kind-hearted, though in his later years
his kindheartedness degenerated into weakness. He was, moreover, brave
and skilful, with a personal charm of manner and readiness of speech
which those about him found it impossible to withstand. Alone of his
sons, Absalom seems to have inherited these gifts of his father, which
may perhaps account for the blind love David had for him. But along with
these gifts went a rich fund of Oriental selfishness, which made him
never lose an opportunity of securing his own advantage or promotion. It
was a selfishness so deep as to be wholly unconscious; whatever made for
his interests was necessarily right. It was combined with clearness of
head and definiteness of aim, which ensured success in whatever he
undertook. A good judge of men, he first attached them to himself by his
gifts of manner, and then knew how to trust and employ them.
With the strong and healthy mind of the peasant there was, however,
combined a depth of passionate emotion which doubtless had much to do
with the influence he possessed over others. David was a man of strong
impulses, and we cannot understand his character unless we remember the
fact. The impulses, it is true, were controlled and regulated by the
cool judgment and politic self-restraint which distinguished more
especially his earlier life; but they swayed him to the end, sometimes
for good, sometimes for evil. Above all, he was a religious man, deeply
attached to the faith into which he had been born, full of trust in
priests and prophets and oracles, and convinced that Yahveh would
protect and befriend him as long as he obeyed the divine law. But there
was neither asceticism nor fanaticism in his religion; it was the firm
faith and religious conviction of a healthy mind.
David was not cruel by nature; if he showed himself merciless at times,
it was either for reasons of policy, or because the action was in
accordance with the public opinion of the age. The Assyrian kings gloat
over the barbarities they practised towards their conquered enemies, and
the Hebrew Semite similarly prayed that Yahveh might dip His foot in the
blood of His foes. David might indeed be a man of blood, but by the side
of the rulers of Nineveh he was mercy itself; and the very fact that the
blood he had shed prevented him from building a temple to his God shows
how different the conception of Yahveh must have been from that which
prevailed among the neighbouring nations of their own deities.
Such, then, was David’s character, with all its apparent anomalies.
Brave and active, clear-headed and politic, generous and kind-hearted,
he was at the same time selfish and impulsive, at times unforgiving and
merciless. He had nevertheless a genuine and fervid trust in Yahveh, and
a fixed belief that Yahveh demanded an upright life and ‘clean hands.’
Up to the last he remained at heart the Oriental peasant, who takes a
healthy view of life, whose shrewdness is crossed and chequered by the
impulses of the moment, and whose religion is deep and unquestioning.
But, like the peasant, he failed to be proof against success and
prosperity. The bold and hardy warrior degenerated into the
self-indulgent and even sensual despot. It is true that he repented of
the crimes to which his self-indulgence had led, and which to most other
Oriental despots would have soon become a second nature; the
self-indulgence, however, remained, and a weak will and infirmity of
purpose marred the latter years of his life.
Future generations saw in him the ‘sweet psalmist of Israel.’ As far
back as we can trace it, tradition averred that a large part of the
psalter owed its origin to him. It has been left for the nineteenth
century to be wiser than the past, and to deny to David the authorship
of even a single psalm. But there are some of them which seem to bear
their Davidic authorship on their face,[518] and if there are many which
belong to a later date, while others are pieced together from earlier
fragments,[519] this is only what we should expect when once the nucleus
of a collection had been formed, and the psalms embodied in it employed
liturgically. Assyrian discovery has shown that penitential psalms,
similar in spirit and form to those of David, had been composed in
Babylonia centuries before his time, and there collected together for
liturgical purposes.[520] In Egypt, what we should call ‘Messianic
psalms’ had been written before the age of the Exodus.[521] There is,
therefore, no reason why a part of the Hebrew psalter should not belong
to the Davidic period, and be the work of David himself. There is
nothing in it inconsistent with the character of David or the ideas of
his time. It is only the false theory of ‘the development of Hebrew
religion’ which finds in it the religious conceptions of a later era.
Those indeed who maintain that in the age of David the law of Moses was
as yet unknown, and that faith in Yahveh was hardly to be distinguished
from that in Baal or Chemosh, may be compelled to deny that any of the
psalms, with their high spiritual level, can belong to the king who was
‘after God’s own heart’; but history cannot take note of theories which
are built upon assumptions and not facts. Even in the northern kingdom
of Israel, where the memory of the founder of the Davidic dynasty was
naturally held in little esteem, tradition was obliged to confess that
he had been the inventor of ‘instruments of music’ (Am. vi. 5).
The exact date of David’s death is doubtful. The chronology of the books
of Kings, so long the despair of chronologists, has at length been
corrected by the synchronisms that have been established between the
history of Israel and Judah and that of Assyria. Thanks to the so-called
Lists of Eponyms or Officers from whom the years of the state calendar
took their name, we now possess an exact chronology of Assyria from B.C.
911. In B.C. 854 Ahab took part in the battle of Qarqar, which was
fought by the princes of the west against their Assyrian invaders, and
his death, therefore, could not have happened till after that date. In
B.C. 842 Jehu offered homage to the Assyrian monarch, and Hazael of
Damascus was defeated in a battle on Mount Shenir. Four years previously
the Syrian opponent of the Assyrians was Hadad-idri or Ben-Hadad.
Lastly, Menahem of Israel paid tribute to Tiglath-pileser III. in B.C.
738, Pekah and Rezin were overthrown in B.C. 734, and Damascus was taken
and destroyed by the Assyrian king in B.C. 732. It is only after the
capture of Samaria by Sargon in B.C. 722, when the kingdom of Judah
stands alone, that the Biblical dates harmonise with the Assyrian
evidence, or indeed with one another. It is evident, therefore, that the
Biblical chronology is more than forty years in excess. Ahab, instead of
dying in B.C. 898, as Archbishop Usher’s chronology makes him do, cannot
have died till some forty-five years later. We have no means of checking
the earlier chronology of the divided kingdom, but assuming its
correctness, the revolt of the Ten Tribes would have taken place about
B.C. 930.
Solomon, like Saul, is said to have reigned forty years. But this merely
means that the precise length of his reign was unknown to the compiler.
It could not have exceeded thirty years. Hadoram, who was ‘over the
tribute’ in the latter part of David’s life (2 Sam. xx. 24), still
occupied the same office in the first year of Rehoboam’s reign (1 Kings
xii. 18), and Rezon, who had fled from Zobah when David conquered the
country, was ‘an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon’ (1 Kings
xi. 24, 25). No clue is given by the statement of Rehoboam’s age in 1
Kings xiv. 21, since when it is said that he was ‘forty and one years’
at the time of his accession this is merely equivalent to ‘_x_ + 1.’
The length of David’s reign is more accurately fixed. Seven years and a
half did he reign in Hebron, and thirty-three years over Israel and
Judah (2 Sam. iv. 5), or forty and a half years in all. Approximately,
therefore, we may date his reign from B.C. 1000 to 960. Saul’s accession
may have been ten or fifteen years earlier.
David’s palace at Jerusalem, it is stated in 2 Sam. v. 11, was built by
the artisans of Hiram of Tyre, who also furnished him with cedar wood.
The fragment of Tyrian annals quoted by Josephus from Menander[522]
throws some light on the chronology of the time. Hiram, we are told, was
the son of Abibal, and the names of his successors are recorded one
after the other, together with the length of their reigns. But
unfortunately the sum of the reigns does not agree with their total as
twice given by Josephus, nor indeed are our authorities agreed among
themselves in regard to the length of certain of them. The fact,
however, that Josephus twice gives the same total raises a presumption
in its favour, more especially when we find that it is possible by a
little manipulation to make the sum of the several reigns harmonise with
it.[523] This total is one hundred and forty-three years and eight
months, which, it is said, elapsed from the building of Solomon’s temple
in the twelfth year of Hiram down to the foundation of Carthage in the
seventh year of Pygmalion. But the date of the foundation of Carthage is
itself not a wholly certain quantity, though B.C. 826 is probably that
which was assigned to it by the native historians.[524] A hundred and
forty-three years and eight months reckoned back from 826 would bring us
to B.C. 969 or 970. As the temple was begun in the fourth year of
Solomon’s reign (1 Kings vi. 1), this would give B.C. 973 for the
accession of Solomon, and B.C. 1013 for that of David. The palace
constructed for David at Jerusalem by the workmen of Hiram must have
been erected at the very end of David’s life, after the suppression of
the revolt of Absalom, unless, indeed, the author of the books of Samuel
has mistaken the name of the Tyrian king, and written Hiram instead of
Abibal.
There is yet another synchronism between Hebrew and profane history
which must not be overlooked. Jerusalem was captured in the fifth year
of Rehoboam by Shishak I., the founder of the twenty-second Egyptian
dynasty. But Egyptian chronology is more disputable even than that of
Israel, and we do not know in what year of the Pharaoh’s reign the
invasion of Palestine took place. Boeckh, on the authority of Manetho,
places the commencement of his reign in B.C. 934; Unger, on the same
authority, in B.C. 930; while Lepsius pushes it back to B.C. 961.
On the whole, then, we must be content with approximate dates for the
founders of the Hebrew monarchy. The revolt of the Ten Tribes will have
taken place somewhere between B.C. 940 and 930; the accession of David
somewhere between B.C. 1010 and 1000. It coincided with the period when
the older kingdoms of the Oriental world—Babylonia, Assyria, and
Egypt—were in their lowest stage of weakness and decay.
Solomon succeeded to a brilliant heritage. The nations which surrounded
him had been conquered or forced into alliance with Israel; there was
none among them adventurous or strong enough to attack the newly risen
power. The caravan-roads which brought the merchandise of both north and
south to the wealthy states of Western Asia passed through Israelitish
territory; Edom, which communicated with the Red Sea and Indian Ocean,
was in Jewish hands, as well as Zobah, which commanded the road to the
Euphrates. The tolls levied on the trade which thus passed through the
empire filled the treasury at Jerusalem with abundant riches, while the
products and luxuries of the whole eastern world flowed into the Hebrew
market. The alliance with the Tyrians gave Solomon a port in the
Mediterranean; the possession of Edom gave him ports of his own in the
Gulf of Aqaba. In return for the use of the Edomite harbours by the
ships of Phœnicia, he was allowed to send forth merchantmen of his own
from the havens of Hiram on the Phœnician coast. The ships themselves
were manned with Phœnician sailors; like the Assyrian kings in later
days he had to turn to the experienced mariners of Phœnicia to work his
fleet.
At home the kingdom had been fully organised. There were an army of
veterans, a foreign bodyguard, who had no interests beyond those of the
master who paid them, a well-selected capital, and a fiscal
administration. The revolts which had disturbed the later years of David
had been suppressed with a heavy hand, and such murmurs as may have been
raised against the enfeebled government and neglected justice of the
late reign were hushed in presence of a young and well-educated prince,
the _protégé_ of priests and prophets, whose very name promised his
people the blessings of peace. The wars of David, with their tax of
blood and treasure, were at an end. Those who had conspired against the
elevation of Solomon to the throne had been put to death at the outset
of his reign: the grey hairs of Joab were stained with his own blood as
he clung to the unavailing altar; Adonijah was executed on the ground
that he had asked to have Abishag for a wife, and it was not long before
a pretext was found for removing Shimei out of the way. Benjamin and
Judah had alike lost their leaders, and Solomon henceforth did his
utmost to win them to himself.
Abiathar was banished to the priests’ city of Anathoth, and the glory of
the high priesthood was left to Zadok and his descendants alone. They
alone were allowed to serve before the ark of the covenant, and the doom
pronounced upon the house of Eli was thus fulfilled. The act placed the
religion of Israel for many generations to come under the domination of
the king. Solomon declared by it his supremacy in the church as well as
in the state. It meant that the king claimed the power and the right to
appoint and dismiss the ministers of the Mosaic law. The central
sanctuary became the royal chapel rather than the temple of the national
God, and its priests were the paid officials of the sovereign rather
than the administrators and interpreters to the people of the divine
law. The democratic element passed out of Hebrew religion, and the king
more than the high priest came to stand at the head of it. The erection
of the temple completed the work which the deposition of Abiathar had
begun; sanctuary, services, and priesthood were all alike under the
royal control. The family of Eli had preserved the tradition of the days
when the priests of Shiloh exercised independent authority, and
interpreted the law which all were called upon to obey. With the
banishment of Abiathar came a break with the past; no venerable memories
were connected with the rival house of Zadok, no recollection of a time
when the word of the priest of Shiloh had been a teacher in Israel.
Under Zadok and his successors the old meaning of the high priesthood
gradually faded out of sight; as in Assyria or Southern Arabia the
priests of an earlier age were supplanted by kings, so too in Israel the
place and influence of the high priest were absorbed by the Davidic
dynasty. Even a Jeroboam could assert his right to establish sanctuaries
and appoint the priests who should serve them.
Solomon had been brought up under the eye and instruction of Nathan, and
to Nathan, therefore, we must probably trace his religious policy. There
was much to be said in favour of it. It prevented friction between the
priesthood and the monarchy; it guaranteed the stability of the dynasty
of David by extending to it the sanction of religion; above all, it
secured the maintenance of the religion itself. It gave it as it were a
local habitation in a costly sanctuary built and endowed out of the
royal revenues, and attached to the royal palace. The ark ceased to be
national, and became instead the sacred treasure of the chapel of the
king. While the monarchy lasted, the religion of the monarchy would last
also, and Nathan and Zadok might be pardoned if they believed that the
Davidic monarchy would last for ever.
The administration of the country next claimed the attention of the new
king. It was organised on an Assyrian model, Palestine being divided
into districts, each of which was placed under a governor who was
responsible for the taxes as well as for the civil and judicial
government of it. Hitherto, it would appear, the old system of tribal
government had been preserved, the tribes owning allegiance to
hereditary chieftains or ‘princes,’ who, like the chieftains of a
Highland clan, represented the tribe, and led its members to war. David
seems to have modified this system for military purposes, if we may
judge from the list of ‘captains’ given in 1 Chron. xxvii., but no
attempt was made to carry out a general system of taxation, or appoint
governors with fiscal powers. The conquered provinces alone were
required to furnish an annual tribute to the treasury, and for this a
single officer, Hadoram, was found sufficient.
The territory of the Israelites themselves was now formed into fiscal
districts. Twelve officers were appointed, who were required to provide
in turn for the necessary expenses of the royal household during the
twelve months of the year. A list of them, extracted from some official
document, is given in 1 Kings iv. 8-19. In the earlier part of the list
the names of the officers have been lost, those only of their fathers
having been preserved. Two of them were married to daughters of Solomon,
indicating that the list must have been drawn up towards the end of
Solomon’s life. One of the king’s sons-in-law was the governor of
Naphtali; the other presided over the Phœnician coast-land south of
Tyre. Here, at Dor, in a country occupied by the Zakkal kinsmen of the
Philistines, and in proximity to Tyre, it was needful that the prefect
should be connected with the king by closer ties than those of
officialism. The direction of the Mediterranean trade was mainly in his
hands, and the resources which were thus at his disposal, as well as the
neighbourhood of Hiram, might have tried the loyalty of any but a
relative of the king. The plateau of Bashan was under the jurisdiction
of one governor who had his residence at Ramoth-gilead; Gilead was under
a second, while a third governor had Mahanaim. We may, therefore, gather
that Ammon and Moab, as well as Geshur, had been absorbed into
Israelitish territory. This may in part explain why at the revolt of the
Ten Tribes Moab went with Israel rather than with Judah.
It is noticeable that there was no governor in Judah. Here, in fact, the
king himself ruled in person. It would seem that Judah was exempt from
the taxes levied on the rest of Palestine. This was in accordance with
the policy which made Solomon court the goodwill of his father’s tribe,
and identify with its interests those of himself and his house. So far
as the continuance of the Davidic dynasty was concerned, the policy
succeeded. Judah identified itself with the house of David, and rallied
faithfully round its king. There was no longer any talk of rebellion, or
of transporting the capital to Hebron; from henceforth Judah and its
kings were one. But the fact only made the breach between Judah and the
rest of Israel wider and more visible, and alienated the other tribes
from the reigning house. They were treated like the conquered Gentiles;
the place of their old hereditary princes and leaders was taken by
governors appointed by the crown, and fixed taxes were rigorously
exacted from them for the support of the royal treasury. They derived no
benefit, however, from the royal expenditure; it was lavished upon
Jerusalem and the Jewish towns which lay near to it. They were too far
off to see even a reflection of that royal glory of which they may have
heard, and for which they certainly had to pay. The same causes which
strengthened the ties of allegiance of Judah to the reigning dynasty
weakened those of Israel.
Throughout the reign of Solomon, Hadoram remained ‘over the tribute,’
and his duties were enlarged by the supervision of the home taxation and
_corvée_ being added to that of the foreign tribute.[525] Jehoshaphat
still continued ‘recorder,’ but the secretary Shisha had been succeeded
by his two sons. The literary correspondence of the empire was
increasing, and one chief secretary was no longer sufficient for it. The
family of Nathan, as might have been expected, was well provided for.
One son was made Vizier; the other became the royal chaplain as well as
‘the king’s friend.’ The latter title, which had been given to Hushai in
the time of David (1 Chron. xxvii. 33), had been borrowed from Egypt;
the title of the Vizier, or ‘head of the officers,’ corresponded with
the Assyrian Rab-saki or Rabshakeh, ‘the chief of the princes.’ Another
office which may have been borrowed from Assyria was that of royal
steward, which was held by Ahishar; along with him the Septuagint
associates a second steward Eliak, and a captain of the bodyguard called
Eliab, the son of Saph or Shaphat.[526] Like the list of governors, the
list of officials must have been drawn up at the end of Solomon’s reign,
since Azariah has already taken the place of his grandfather Zadok as
high priest (see 1 Chron. vi. 9, 10, where a confusion has been made
between Ahimaaz the son of Zadok and Johanan or Jonathan the son of
Abiathar). It is significant that the list begins with the ‘priest,’ not
with the general of the army as in the warlike days of David.
The fame of Solomon’s wealth and magnificence was spread through the
Oriental world. Foreign sovereigns sought his alliance or courted his
favour. Even the Queen of Sheba came to visit him. Modern criticism has
long since banished the Queen to the realm of fiction, but archæological
discovery has again restored her to history. Sheba or Saba was already a
flourishing kingdom in the time of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser
III.; its territories extended from the spice-bearing coasts of Southern
Arabia to the borders of Babylonia and Palestine. If Glaser and Hommel
are right in their interpretation of the south Arabian inscriptions, it
had entered on the older heritage of the kingdom of Ma’ân. The Minæan
kings of Ma’ân had ruled not only in the south but in the north as well;
their records are found near Teima, and they had command of the great
highroad of commerce which led from the Indian Ocean to Egypt and Gaza.
Egypt and Gaza, indeed, are mentioned in Minæan inscriptions.[527] From
an early period the kingdoms of Southern Arabia had been in commercial
contact with Canaan.
The conquest of Edom by David and the Hebrew fleets which sailed from
the Gulf of Aqaba must soon have acquainted the merchant princes of
Ma’ân and Saba with the fact that a new power had risen in Western Asia,
and a new market been opened for their goods. The road to Palestine was
well-known and frequently travelled, and Minæan or Sabæan settlements
existed upon it almost as far as the frontiers of Edom. What more
natural, therefore, than that a Sabæan queen should visit her wealthy
neighbour whose patronage had become important for Sabæan trade? That
queens might rule in the Arabian peninsula we know from the annals of
Tiglath-pileser III., which refer to Zabibê and her successor Samsê,
each of whom is called a ‘queen of the land of the Arabs.’
Even the Pharaoh of Egypt condescended to mingle the blood of the solar
race with that of the grandson of a Hebrew _fellah_. Solomon married the
daughter of the Egyptian monarch. But it was a monarch of the
twenty-first dynasty, who, though acknowledged as the sole legitimate
representative of the line of the Sun-god Ra, had nevertheless been
sadly shorn of his ancient rights and authority. His power was confined
to the Delta, where he held his court in the old Hyksos capital of Tanis
or Zoan, close to the Asiatic frontier, and as far removed as possible
from the rival dynasty which ruled in Upper Egypt. He was doubtless glad
to secure a son-in-law who could defend him from his enemies at home in
case of need, and whose friendship was preferable to his hostility.
The Egyptian princess had brought with her as dowry the Canaanitish city
of Gezer. That it should have been in the power of the Pharaoh to give
it is at first sight surprising. It shows that Egypt had never
relinquished in theory her old claims to be mistress of Canaan. Like the
title of ‘king of France,’ which so long lingered in the royal style of
England, they were never abandoned, but were ready to be revived
whenever an opportunity occurred. Towards the close of the period of the
Judges, but before the Philistines had become formidable, Assyria and
Egypt had met on friendly terms on the coast of Palestine. The Assyrian
conqueror, Tiglath-pileser I. (in B.C. 1100), had found his way to the
Phœnician city of Arvad, and there received from the Egyptian Pharaoh
various presents which included a crocodile and a hippopotamus. The
campaign of the Assyrian king had brought him to the edge of the
territory which the Egyptian rulers of the twenty-first dynasty still
regarded as their own, and they hastened accordingly to propitiate the
invader, and thus to stay his further advance. The embassy and gifts
further show that the occupation of the coast by the Philistines did not
prevent the Egyptians from maintaining their old relations with
Phœnicia, though they may have done so by sea rather than by land. At
all events an expedition sent to Gebal by Hir-Hor, the high priest of
Thebes, at the beginning of the twenty-first dynasty, was despatched in
ships.[528] Had the coast-road been free from danger, the Egyptians
would doubtless have asserted their right to march along it. They seized
the first occasion to do so, when the Philistines had been conquered by
David, and the successor of David was the Pharaoh’s ally.
Solomon engaged in no wars of his own. He was no general himself, and it
may be that he feared to intrust a subject with an army. Joab had taught
him how easily the commander-in-chief might defy his master, Abner how
readily he might betray him. In the list of officials given in the
Hebrew text, Benaiah indeed is stated to have been ‘over the host’ (1
Kings iv. 4), but Benaiah was actually the commander of the bodyguard,
so that his command of the army must have been merely nominal.
Practically the army which had played so large a part in the history of
David had ceased to exist. Hence it was that Rezon was able to establish
an independent kingdom in Damascus, and that when the Ten Tribes
revolted there was no army at hand with which to suppress the rebellion.
Hence, too, the curious fact that just as Solomon sought the help of
Hiram in fitting out his merchant fleet in the Gulf of Aqaba, so also he
sought the help of the Egyptian king in subduing the one Canaanitish
city of importance which still preserved its freedom. Gezer had
maintained its Canaanitish continuity from the days when as yet the
Israelites had not entered Canaan, and the mounds of Tel Jezer which
mark its site must still conceal beneath them the records of its early
history. Doubtless the Egyptian court was gratified at the arrangement
with the Hebrew king. It admitted the Egyptian claim of suzerainty over
Palestine, and admitted the right of its armies to march along its
roads. But the substantial advantages remained with Solomon. He gained
Gezer without either expense or trouble, and at the same time he allied
himself by marriage with the oldest and most exclusive royal race in the
Oriental world. Like the kings of Mitanni in the age of the eighteenth
dynasty, the son-in-law of the Pharaoh was on a footing of equality with
the proudest princes of Asia.
The alliance with Hiram was no less advantageous. Hiram had done for
Tyre what Solomon was doing for Jerusalem. It has been conjectured that
his father Abibal, or Abi-Baal, was the founder of a dynasty; at all
events the accession of Hiram ushered in a new era for the Tyrian state.
He succeeded to the throne at the age of nineteen years, and during his
long reign of thirty-four years he raised Tyre to an unprecedented
height of prosperity and power, and rebuilt the city itself. The ancient
‘rock’ from which it had derived its name was connected by an embankment
with another rocky islet close to it, and a new and splendid city was
erected upon the space thus won from the sea. Excellent harbours were
constructed, massive walls built round the city, and the venerable
temple of Melkarth restored from its foundations, and decorated with all
the sumptuous splendour of Phœnician art.
Tyre had always been famous for its sailors and its ships, and its
wealth is celebrated even in the letters of Tel el-Amarna. But under
Hiram its maritime trade underwent an enormous development. The conquest
of the Philistines by David, and the consequent disappearance of piracy
from the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, were the immediate causes
of this. Tyrian ships could now venture into the bays and havens of the
Greek seas in quest of slaves, or the precious purple-fish, and their
merchants could make voyages in safety as far as Tarshish. Riches poured
into ‘the merchant-city,’ and Hiram had resources in abundance for his
public works.
The Hebrew king was eager to follow the example of his Tyrian neighbour.
It was true that his subjects were neither sailors nor traders; it was
true, also, that the harbours on the Mediterranean coast which the
conquest of the Philistines had added to his dominions were few and
poor. But the conquest of Edom had given him the entrance to the
spice-lands of Southern Arabia, and the gold-mines which recent
discovery has found in Central Africa.[529] An agreement was therefore
come to with Hiram which was to the profit of both. Hiram gave Solomon
sailors and boat-builders, as well as the use of his Mediterranean
ports; in return he received from Solomon the right of using the
harbours of the Red Sea. While the products of Europe made their way to
Solomon through Tyre, the products of the south passed to Hiram from the
Edomite havens of Elath and Ezion-geber.
Hiram was useful to Solomon in yet another way. The age of
empire-building was over; the time had come to create a capital which
should be worthy of the empire. Like Ramses II. of Egypt, Solomon made
himself an imperishable name as a builder. Jerusalem was strongly
fortified; royal palaces were erected; above all, a temple was raised to
Yahveh that vied in splendour with those of Phœnicia and the Nile. But
the architects and artisans had to be brought from the dominions of the
Tyrian king; the Israelites had been too much barbarised by the long
struggle for existence they had had to wage for another Bezaleel to be
born among them, as in the days when they had but just quitted the
cultured land of the Delta. It is true that the master-artificer in
bronze, who designed the bronze-work of the temple, was a Hebrew on his
mother’s side, but he bore the Tyrian name of Hiram, and his father was
‘a man of Tyre.’ Even for his carpenters and masons Solomon was indebted
to his Tyrian ally; it was only the gangs of labourers driven to their
forced work among the forests and quarries of Lebanon that were levied
by Hadoram out of ‘Israel.’ The Israelites had become hewers of wood and
drawers of water for their king, and, as in the old days of Egyptian
bondage, 3300 taskmasters were employed in keeping them to their
work.[530] Like the architects, the skilled artificers were lent by
Hiram; from Hiram came also the logs of cedar and fir that were needed
for the buildings at Jerusalem.
In return Solomon provided his ally with wheat and oil. The island-city
was dependent on others for its corn; on the rock of Tyre and on the
barren crags of the opposite mainland no wheat could be grown. Twenty
cities of Galilee, moreover, were ceded to Hiram. But for these Hiram
had to pay one hundred and twenty talents of gold; and in the end, the
wily Hebrew, like his forefather Jacob, had the best of the bargain.
When the Tyrian king came to inspect his new territory, it ‘pleased him
not.’ Solomon, in fact, had given him what it was not worth his own
while to keep.
The royal palace was thirteen years in building. Attached to it was the
armoury, or House of the Forest of Lebanon as it was called from the
cedar used in its construction. Here the three hundred shields and two
hundred targets of gold were stored, which were made for the bodyguard,
and served also as a reserve fund in case of need. The architecture of
the palace itself culminated, as in Persia, in the audience-chamber with
its throne of ivory overlaid with gold, and approached by six steps
which were guarded on either side by the images of lions. Another palace
was erected for the Egyptian queen; like the palace of the king it was
in the Upper City, close to the spot on which the temple was destined to
stand.
The old palace of David, in the lower town or ‘City of David,’ was
deserted; as soon as the new buildings were completed on Moriah, the
king moved to them with his harîm and court. The palace which had
satisfied the simple tastes of the father was no longer sufficient for
the luxury and display of the more cultured son. The ‘City of David’ was
left to the Jews and Benjamites; the court and the priesthood settled
above them by the side of the old Jebusite population, which had been
reduced to serfdom (1 Kings ix. 20). None but slaves and serfs might
dwell where the monarch lived surrounded by his armed bodyguard; the
free Israelite was confined to another quarter of the town.
The palace was protected by a huge fortress called the Millo, which was
connected with the new walls of Jerusalem, and begun as soon as the
palace of the Egyptian princess had been finished. Whether it stood on
the eastern or western side of the city is doubtful; the topography of
pre-exilic Jerusalem is unfortunately still involved in obscurity. The
pool of Siloam, and the identification of the Upper Gihon or ‘Spring’
with the Virgin’s Fountain, the only natural spring of water in the
immediate neighbourhood of the city, are almost the only two points
which can be fixed with certainty. If the subterranean tunnel which
conveys the water of the Virgin’s Fountain to the pool of Siloam is the
conduit made by Hezekiah when he ‘stopped the upper water-course of
Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of
David’ (2 Chron. xxxii. 30), the west side will be that which overlooks
the Tyropœon valley, where the tunnel ends. In this case the city of
David, which is stated in 2 Sam. v. 7 to have been on Mount Zion, will
be the so-called southern hill or ‘Ophel,’ which lies south of the
Mosque of Omar, and the Tyropœon valley will be the Valley of the Sons
of Hinnom so often referred to in the Old Testament. The Jerusalem of
the kings will thus have been, like most of the cities of the ancient
Oriental world, of no great size according to our modern conceptions;
its population will have been as closely packed together as it is to-day
in the native quarters of Cairo, and the fortifications which surrounded
it would not have occupied too wide a circumference for a Jewish army to
defend. The Tyropœon valley is choked with the rubbish of ancient
Jerusalem to a depth of more than seventy feet; but under it must lie
the tombs of the kings of Judah. The recent excavations of Dr. Bliss
have thrown but little light on the question, since the walls he has
found seem mostly of a late date; but if the rock-cut steps he has
discovered north of the pool of Siloam are really ‘the stairs that go
down from the city of David’ (Neh. iii. 16), a striking verification
will have been given of the theory which sees in the southern hill the
Zion of Scripture, and in the valley of ‘the Cheesemakers’ the gorge of
the sons of Hinnom.[531]
The crown of all the building activity of Solomon was the temple, even
though it did not take so long to construct as his own palace. Materials
for it had already been accumulated by David, and the architects and
workmen came from Tyre. It was built of large blocks of square stone,
the edges of which were probably bevelled as in early Phœnician work,
and the walls inside were covered with panels of cedar. Walls and doors
alike were profusely decorated with the designs of Phœnician art.
Cherubs and palms, lotus flowers and pomegranates were depicted on them
in the forms that have been made familiar to us by the relics of ancient
Phœnician workmanship. The temple itself was of rectangular shape, not
unlike the chapel of King’s College at Cambridge, and in front of it
were two large courts, one of which—the ‘inner’ or ‘upper’ court—stood
on a higher level than the other. The whole design, in fact, was purely
Phœnician; in form and ornamentation the building exactly resembled the
temples of Phœnicia. Like them, it must have looked externally like a
huge rectangular box, which was further disfigured by chambers, in sets
of three, being built one over the other against the walls. The great
temple of Melkarth, which Hiram had just completed at Tyre, probably
served as the model for the temple of Jerusalem.
The entrance was approached by steps, and consisted of a porch, on
either side of which were two lofty columns of bronze, called Jachin and
Boaz.[532] Similar columns were planted before the entrance of a
Phœnician temple where they symbolised the fertilising power of the
Sun-god, and Herodotos (ii. 44) states that the two which stood in front
of the temple at Tyre were made of gold and emerald glass. Two similar
columns of stone, though of small size, have been found in the Temple of
the Giants in the island of Gozo, one of which still remains in its
original place. In the outer court was a bronze ‘sea’ or basin, thirty
cubits in circumference, and supported on twelve oxen. The ‘sea’ had
been imported into the West from Babylonia, where it similarly stood in
the court of a temple, and represented the _apsu_ or ‘watery abyss,’ out
of which Chaldæan philosophy taught that all things had been evolved. A
Babylonian hymn which describes the casting of a copper ‘sea’ for the
temple of Chaos tells us that, like the ‘sea’ at Jerusalem, it rested on
the heads of twelve bulls.[533] Along with the ‘sea’ bronze lavers and
basins were provided for the ablutions of the priests and the vessels of
the sanctuary.
The temple was but a shell for enclosing the innermost shrine or Holy of
Holies where, as in a casket, the ark of the covenant was placed under
the protecting wings of two gilded cherubim. What they were like we may
gather from the Assyrian sculptures, in which the two winged cherubs are
depicted on either side of the sacred tree.[534] The over-shadowing
wings formed a ‘mercy-seat,’ the _parakku_ of the Babylonian texts,
whereon, according to Nebuchadrezzar, Bel seated himself on the festival
of the new year, while the other gods humbly ranged themselves around
him bowing to the ground.[535] At Babylon, moreover, the table of
shewbread which stood before Bel was of solid gold, like the table which
Solomon made for the service of Yahveh.[536] Indeed, the description of
the lavish use of gold in the temple of Jerusalem finds its echo in the
description given by Nebuchadrezzar of the temples he reared in Babylon.
The altar of Yahveh, it is said, was of gold, so too were the
candlesticks and lamps and vessels; even the hinges of the doors that
opened into the Holy of Holies were of the same precious metal, while
the cedar work was richly gilded, and the floor itself was overlaid with
golden plates. In similar terms Nebuchadrezzar describes his decoration
of Ê-Sagila, the temple of Bel, at Babylon. Here too, the beams and
panels of cedar were overlaid with gold, the gates were gilded, and the
vessels for the service of the sanctuary were of solid gold.[537] There
was one point, however, in which the temples of Jerusalem and Babylon
differed from one another; in the shrine of Ê-Sagila was the image of
Bel: the Hebrew shrine contained no likeness of a god. The only graven
figures within it were the cherubim whose wings overshadowed the ark.
The temple was finished in seven (or more exactly seven and a half)
years. Perhaps an effort was made to restrict the years of building to
the sacred number. At all events, it was in the seventh month of the
Hebrew year, the Ethanim of the Phœnicians, that the feast of the
dedication was kept.[538] It coincided with the ancient festival of the
Ingathering of the Harvest, a fitting season for commemorating the
completion of the work.
The dedication of Solomon’s temple is the beginning of a new chapter in
the history of the Jewish state and of Hebrew religion. It became the
visible centre round which the elements of the Israelitish faith
gathered and cohered together until the terrible day came when the enemy
stormed the walls of the capital and laid its temple in the dust. But it
had already exercised a profound influence upon the history of Judah. It
had helped to unify the kingdom; to bind the population of southern
Palestine, mixed in blood though it were, into a single whole. Unlike
the northern tribes with their two great sanctuaries at Dan and Bethel,
Judah and Benjamin had a common centre in the one sanctuary of
Jerusalem. Around it, moreover, were grouped all the traditions and
memories of a venerable past. It alone was connected with the traditions
of the Mosaic Law and the priesthood of Shiloh, with the rites and
ceremonies that had come down from the primeval days of the Israelitish
people, and with the foundation of the monarchy itself. It was the
dwelling-place on earth of Yahveh of Israel; here was the sacred ark of
the covenant which had once been carried before the invaders of Canaan,
and was still the outward sign and symbol of God’s presence among His
people. With the preservation of the temple the preservation of the
Jewish religion itself seemed to be bound up, as well as of the Jewish
state.
But the temple did something more than help to unify the southern
monarchy and preserve the traditions of the Mosaic law. It served also
to strengthen and perpetuate the Davidic dynasty, and to keep alive in
the hearts of the people their allegiance to the line of Solomon. The
temple, as we have seen, was not only a national sanctuary, it was also
a royal chapel. It formed, as it were, part of the royal palace, in
which the king overshadowed the high priest himself. The halo of
veneration which surrounded the temple was thus communicated to the
royal line. The temple and the descendants of David became parts of the
same national conception; the one necessarily implied the other. When
the throne of David fell, the temple also fell with it. While the temple
lasted, Judah remained a homogeneous state, yielding willing obedience
to its theocratic monarchy, and gradually gaining a clearer idea of the
meaning and practice of the Mosaic Law. The temple of Solomon made
Jewish religion conservative, but it was a conservatism which, as time
went on, evolved the consequences of its own principles, and sought how
best to carry them out in ritual and practice.
Jerusalem had become one of the great capitals of the world. Its public
buildings were worthy of the empire which had been created by David, of
the wealth that had poured into the coffers of Solomon from the trade of
the whole Orient, of the culture and art which the young king had done
his best to introduce. But the necessities of defence were not
forgotten. The fortifications of the city were pushed on—though, it
would seem, not with sufficient rapidity to allow them to be finished
before the king’s death—and horses and chariots were imported from Egypt
and the land of the Hittites in the north. With these Solomon equipped a
standing force of 1400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen, who served as
garrisons in Jerusalem and the other fortresses of the country.
Nor were the other cities of the empire neglected in favour of
Jerusalem. Gezer was rebuilt and fortified; so too were ‘Beth-horon the
nether and Baalath’ in Judah, and ‘Tadmor in the wilderness,’ the
Palmyra of later days.[539] It is true that modern criticism would see
in Tadmor the Tamar of the southern desert of Judah which is referred to
by Ezekiel (xlvii. 19, xlviii. 28) as a future border of the Holy Land.
But, though the Kethîbh or text of the Hebrew Scriptures has Tamar, the
reading is corrupt, and has been corrected by the Massoretic scribes
themselves.[540] The Chronicler (2 Chron. viii. 4) shows that Tadmor was
the reading of the text in his time, and he shows further that it was
known to be the desert-city which afterwards became the seat of empire
of the merchant prince Odenathus and his queen, Zenobia. We learn from
him that Solomon had put down a rising in that part of Zobah which
adjoined Hamath, that he had founded ‘store-cities’ in Hamath, and had
built Tadmor in the wilderness beyond. It is strange only that no
allusion is made to building operations in Israel: perhaps Solomon was
disinclined to establish fortresses among the northern tribes which
might be used against his own authority, perhaps David had already put
the cities of northern Israel in a thorough state of defence. At all
events, little danger from abroad was to be apprehended in this part of
the Israelitish dominions; Solomon was in alliance with Tyre, and
presumably also with Hamath, and Zobah was included in his empire.
We gather from the Assyrian inscriptions that Zobah extended from the
neighbourhood of Hamath and Damascus eastward across the desert towards
the Euphrates. Midway stood Palmyra, approached by roads from both
Damascus and Homs, which there united and then led to the ford across
the Euphrates at Thapsacus or Tiphsakh. It was the shortest route from
Palestine to Mesopotamia, and avoided the tolls and possible hostility
of the Hittites in their strong fortress of Carchemish. The conquest of
Zobah would necessarily have laid Palmyra and the roads that passed
through it at the feet of David, and the importance of the place for
commercial purposes could not have failed to strike the mind of Solomon
ever ready to discover fresh channels of trade. Its fortification would
naturally have been one of his first cares; even if there had been no
mention of the fact in the Old Testament, the historian would have been
almost compelled to assume it. It opened to him the merchandise of
Mesopotamia, of Babylonia, and Assyria, and brought him into touch with
the old monarchies of the Asiatic world. For the trade of the east,
Palmyra was to Solomon what the ports of Edom were for the trade of the
south.
To the north his dominions touched on those of the Hittites, who were
still settled in Kadesh on the Orontes, even if Hamath had long since
passed out of their possession. Lenormant was the first to point out
that in 1 Kings x. 28 there is an allusion to the importation of horses
into Judah, not only from Egypt, but also from the Hittite regions on
the Gulf of Antioch. Here lived the Quê of the Assyrian monuments, who
are named in the Hebrew text, though it needed the revelations of
Oriental archæology to discover the fact. Solomon, it is there said,
‘had horses brought out of Egypt and out of Quê; the royal merchants
received it from Quê at a price.’ In the later days of the Assyrian
empire Nineveh obtained its supply of horses and stallions from the same
part of the world, and there are numerous letters to the king which
relate to their importation. The chariots came from Egypt, the value of
each being as much as 600 shekels of silver, or £90; it was only the
horses that were brought from ‘the kings of the Hittites’ and ‘the kings
of Aram.’ The trade in both horses and chariots was a monopoly which
Solomon kept jealously in his own hands; the merchants were those ‘of
the king,’ and none of his subjects was allowed to import materials of
war which might be employed against himself.
It was the trade with the south which introduced into Jerusalem the
greatest novelties and the most costly articles of luxury. In imitation
of the kings of Egypt and Assyria, Solomon established zoological and
botanical gardens where the strange animals and plants that had been
brought from abroad were kept. Such collections had been made by
Thothmes III. at Thebes, and on the foundations of a ruined chamber in
his temple at Karnak we may still see pictures of the trees and plants
and birds which he sent home from his campaigns in Syria and the Soudan.
In Assyria a botanical garden had been similarly planted by
Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100), and stocked with foreign plants.[541]
Solomon’s collections were therefore no new thing in the Oriental world,
though they were a novelty in Palestine; and his subjects went to gaze
and wonder, like the Cairenes of to-day, at the apes which had come from
the far south, or the peacocks whose name (_thukîyîm_) betrayed their
Indian origin. It is even said that he composed books on the animal and
vegetable collections he had made.[542]
Gold and silver and ivory were also brought, with the apes and peacocks,
by the merchant vessels whose voyages of three years’ duration carried
them along the Somali coast, and even, it may be, to the mouths of the
Indus. The gold probably came, for the most part, from the mines of the
Zambesi region, where foreign mining settlements are now known to have
been established at an early date, and where objects have been found,
such as birds carved out of stone, which remind us of the civilisation
of southern Arabia. But the greater part of the silver, which we are
told became as plentiful as ‘stones,’ must have been derived from Asia
Minor. Here were the mines from which the Hittites extracted the metal
for which they seem to have had a special fancy, and it was through them
that it probably made its way to Jerusalem. Copper would have come from
Cyprus, and been brought in the ships which trafficked in the
Mediterranean. It was the Mediterranean trade, moreover, which supplied
the tin needed for the vast quantities of bronze that was used in the
Solomonic age. We know of no source of it equal to such a demand except
the peninsula of Cornwall; but if it really was Cornish tin that found
its way to the eastern basin of the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age
it must have travelled like amber across Europe until it reached the
Adriatic or the Gulf of Lyons. The amber found by Dr. Schliemann in the
prehistoric tombs of Mykenæ is of Baltic origin, and amber beads have
been discovered by Dr. Bliss at Lachish, belonging to the century before
the Exodus; if amber could travel thus far from northern Europe, the tin
might have done the same.
Future generations looked back upon the reign of Solomon as the golden
age of Israel. But there was a reverse side to the picture. The
combination of culture and arbitrary power produced in him the selfish
luxury of an Oriental despot, which is bent on satisfying its own
sensuous desires at the expense of all around it. Solomon’s extravagance
was like that of the Khedive Ismail in our own day, and it led to the
same amount of misery and impoverishment in the nation. He found on his
accession a treasury well filled by the thrifty government of his
father; and his trading monopolies and alliances brought him an
apparently inexhaustible supply of wealth. But a time came when even
this supply began to fail, and to cease to suffice for his reckless
expenditure. Heavier taxes were laid on the subject populations; the
free men of Israel were compelled to work as unpaid serfs under the lash
of the taskmaster, and the older population of the land, who were still
numerous, were turned into veritable bond-slaves. To the Gibeonites, who
had long been the serfs of the Levitical sanctuary, were now added the
Nethinim, a part of whom went under the name of ‘Solomon’s slaves’ (Ezra
ii. 55, 58). The building of the temple had cost the people dear: the
Israelites had been robbed of their freedom to provide for it stone and
wood; the Canaanites had been given to it as actual slaves.
Doubtless the policy of Solomon was partly determined by the same
considerations as those which had moved the Pharaoh of the Oppression.
He mistrusted the Canaanites, he was afraid of the northern tribes. In
either case he endeavoured to break their spirit, and render them
powerless to revolt. But in the case of the Hebrew tribesmen he did not
succeed. Discontent was smothered for awhile, but it was none the less
dangerous on that account. And towards the end of Solomon’s life an
incident occurred which led eventually to the division of the kingdom.
Jeroboam the son of Nebat—in whom Dr. Neubauer has seen the name of a
‘Nabathean’—and whose mother belonged to the tribe of Ephraim, had
distinguished himself by his activity and abilities. Solomon had
finished the Millo or Fort, and was now at work on the other
fortifications of Jerusalem. His notice was drawn to Jeroboam, and he
made the young man the ‘taskmaster’ or overseer of the _corvée_ of
Ephraimites employed upon the walls. Like Moses in old days, Jeroboam’s
sympathy was aroused by the sufferings of his fellow-tribesmen, which
found a mouthpiece in Ahijah the prophet of Shiloh. Ahijah was himself
one of the dispossessed. The glory of Shiloh had passed away from it;
Jerusalem had taken its place. The tabernacle of Shiloh had been
rejected in favour of the temple of the Jewish king. The centre of
Hebrew religion and power had departed from the house of Joseph, and
been transferred to the mixed parvenus of Judah.
In Jeroboam the prophet recognised the leader who should restore the
lost fortunes of Ephraim and revenge its injuries. Jeroboam listened to
the counsels of revolt, but the time for making use of them had not yet
come. His plans and plotting became known to Solomon, and, once more
like Moses, he had to fly for his life. He made his way to the Egyptian
court, where a ready welcome awaited him.
A new dynasty had arisen there. The Libyan mercenaries had dethroned
their feeble masters, and seated Shishak or Sheshanq, their general,
upon the throne of the Pharaohs. The Tanitic dynasty which ruled the
Delta was swept away; so also was the rival dynasty of high-priests who
reigned at Thebes and held possession of Upper Egypt. With the rise of
the twenty-second dynasty at Bubastis, a new and unaccustomed vigour was
infused into the government of Egypt. Shishak proved himself an able and
energetic king. His earlier years were occupied in putting down
opposition at home, and restoring order and unity throughout the
country. When once the task was accomplished, he began to turn his
attention elsewhere. Egypt had never relinquished its theoretical claims
to sovereignty in Canaan; and the new power that had arisen there
menaced the safety of the Asiatic frontier. Solomon, it is true, had
allied himself by marriage with the Pharaohs; but it was with a Pharaoh
of the fallen dynasty, and this in itself made him all the more
dangerous a neighbour. At present Israel was too powerful to be
attacked; but a time might come when the Egyptian monarch might venture
to march again along the roads that had once conducted the armies of
Egypt to the conquest of Syria. Meanwhile Shishak could stir up
disaffection and rebellion in the Israelitish empire, and could harbour
pretenders to the throne who might hereafter undermine the very
existence of the new power.
As long as Solomon lived Jeroboam did not dare to stir. But he was not
the only ‘adversary’ of the Jewish king. Hadad, the representative of
the old kings of Edom, had also found a refuge in the Egyptian court,
and had there married the sister-in-law of the Pharaoh. In spite of the
Pharaoh’s remonstrances he had returned to the mountains of Edom when
David and Joab were dead, and had there carried on a guerilla warfare
with the Israelitish garrisons. Throughout the lifetime of Solomon he
had maintained himself in the fastnesses of Seir, and had been, as it
were, a thorn in the side of the conquerors of his country. But he never
succeeded in seriously injuring the caravan trade that passed through
Edom, or in shaking off the Israelitish yoke. The male population of
Edom had been too mercilessly exterminated for this to be possible, and
all that he could do was to molest the trade with the Red Sea. But even
in this he does not seem to have been successful.
A more formidable opponent of Israel was Rezon of Zobah. He, it would
seem, had established himself at Damascus even before the death of
David, and all the efforts to dislodge him were of no avail. It is
possible that the insurrection in Zobah, which led to the construction
of fortified posts on the borders of Hamath (2 Chron. viii. 3), was
connected with his revolt. At any rate, Rezon founded a kingdom and a
dynasty in the old Syrian capital, which in years to come was to shake
the monarchy of northern Israel to its base. ‘He abhorred Israel,’ we
are told, ‘and reigned over Aram.’
The Jewish historian traces the misfortunes of Solomon to the religious
indifferentism of his later years. His wives were many, his concubines
innumerable. They had been added to his harîm from all parts of the
known world; and they brought with them the worship of their native
deities. Solomon had none of that intense belief in the national God
which had distinguished Saul and David, or which made the Assyrian kings
conquer and slay the unbelievers who would not acknowledge the supremacy
of Assur.[543] He was a cultured and selfish epicure, catholic in his
tastes and sympathies, and doubtless inclined to stigmatise as
narrow-minded fanaticism the objections of those who would have
forbidden him to indulge his wives in their religious beliefs. On the
hill opposite Jerusalem they were allowed to worship in the chapels of
their own divinities, and the king himself did not refuse to bow himself
with them in the house of Rimmon. Shrines were erected and altars blazed
to Ashtoreth of the Sidonians, to Milcom of Ammon, and to Chemosh of
Moab.
Modern criticism has averred that all this was only in accordance with
the general ideas and practice of the time, and that not Solomon alone
but the rest of his people saw little or no difference between Yahveh
and Baal. The Song of Deborah, which reflects the feelings of so much
earlier an epoch, is a sufficient answer to such an assertion. The whole
history of Saul and David points unmistakably to the contrary, and the
temple bears witness that there was a time when Solomon also shared the
belief that Yahveh alone was God in Israel, and that He would brook the
presence of no other god beside Himself. The character of Solomon, his
habits and alliances,—above all, the seductions of the harîm, are quite
enough to account for a gradual change in his views. It is probable,
moreover, that the death of his old guide and instructor Nathan may have
had much to do with what an undogmatic theology might call emancipation
from the narrow and exclusive circle of Hebrew religious ideas; we know
that such was the case with Jehoash after the death of Jehoiada the
priest. The king who began by sending to Phœnicia for the architects and
builders of the temple, ended not unnaturally with the erection of
sanctuaries to a Phœnician goddess.
In fact, the artistic tastes of Solomon ran counter to the puritanical
tendencies and restrictions of the Mosaic Law. It had been made for the
wanderers in the desert, for hardy warriors intent on the conquest of a
foreign land, for the simple peasantry of Palestine. It was directed
against the cultured vices and artistic idolatries of Egypt and Canaan:
on its forefront was the command: ‘Thou shalt not make the likeness of
anything that is in the heaven above, in the earth beneath, or in the
water that is under the earth.’ The temple at Jerusalem, with its costly
decoration and graven images, was in itself a violation of the letter of
the Law. Solomon was called indeed to be king over Israel, but his heart
and his sympathies were with Phœnicia.
He had been carefully educated, and, like our own Henry VIII., was a
learned as well as a cultivated prince. His wisdom was celebrated above
that of the wisest men of his day (1 Kings iv. 30, 31), and he left
behind him a large collection of proverbs. Some of these were re-edited
by the scribes of Hezekiah’s library (Prov. xxv. 1), the foundation of
which may possibly go back to him. Indeed, he showed himself so anxious
to imitate the civilised monarchs of his day that it is hard to believe
he established no library at Jerusalem. The library had been for untold
centuries as essential to the royal dignity in Western Asia or Egypt as
the temple or palace, and the annals of Menander imply that one existed
at Tyre in the age of Hiram. Archæology has vindicated the authenticity
of the letters that passed between Solomon and the Tyrian king (2 Chron.
ii. 3, 11); similar letters were written in Babylonia in the age of
Abraham, and the tablets of Tel el-Amarna have demonstrated how frequent
they were in the ancient East. As in Babylonia and Assyria, so, too, in
Palestine, they would have been preserved among the archives of the
royal library.
Hiram was nineteen years old when he ascended the throne, and he died at
the age of fifty-three. Solomon was probably of about the same age as
his friend both at his accession and at his death. He died, worn out by
excessive self-indulgence, leaving behind him an impoverished treasury,
a discontented people, and a tottering empire. But he had achieved one
great result. Jerusalem had become the capital of a united Judah and
Benjamin, Hebrew religion had obtained a local habitation round which
henceforward it could live and grow, and the dynasty of David was
planted firmly on the Jewish throne. When the disruption of the kingdom
came after Solomon’s death, it did no more than give outward form to the
estrangement that had so long been maturing between Judah and the
northern tribes; the temple, the line of David, and the fortress-capital
of Jerusalem remained unshaken. The work of David and Solomon was
accomplished, though in a way of which they had not dreamed; and a
nation was called into existence whom neither defeat nor exile,
persecution nor contempt, has ever been able to destroy.
Footnote 368:
We hear only of citizens of Mount Ephraim going up yearly to sacrifice
at Shiloh (1 Sam. i. 1-3).
Footnote 369:
It must be remembered that at this time, before the rise of Judah,
Ephraim was the nearest neighbour of the Philistines as well as of the
Amalekites.
Footnote 370:
It cannot be supposed, of course, that an Ephraimite would have
recorded the defeat and slaughter of his tribe at the hands of
Jephthah. But such a momentous disaster could not fail to become known
throughout Canaan, and some notice of it must have been taken by the
chroniclers of Ephraim themselves. Where and by whom, however, the
present account was composed it is vain to inquire, and the question
may be left for discussion to the philological critics. That Samuel,
who was brought up at Shiloh, could write we are assured in 1 Sam. x.
25.
Footnote 371:
1 Sam. ix. 5; xiv. 1.
Footnote 372:
1 Sam. ix. 18, 19. The disintegrating critics have assumed this
narrative to be primitive and contemporary because it presents us with
a picture of Samuel which seems to degrade him into an obscure local
soothsayer, and on the strength of it have disputed the antiquity of
such narratives as assign to him national influence. They might just
as well maintain that the only primitive and contemporary account of
King Alfred that we possess is the story of the burnt cakes at
Athelney.
Footnote 373:
1 Sam. vii. 14.
Footnote 374:
Zuph gave his name to ‘the district of Zuph’ (1 Sam. ix. 5), which has
the plural form in Ramathaim-zophim.
Footnote 375:
Ephraim, however, may be, like Jerusalem, the older form of which has
been recovered from the cuneiform inscriptions, a later Massoretic
mispronunciation of an original plural Ephrim. The Massoretes have
erroneously introduced a dual form into the pronunciation of the name
Chushan-rishathaim, and probably also into that of Naharaim when
compared with the Egyptian Naharin and the Nahrima of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets. Perhaps the dual form Ephraim originated in the
existence of the two Ophrahs (with _’ayin_), which are already
mentioned in the geographical lists of Thothmes III.
Footnote 376:
2 Sam. viii. 18; see also 2 Sam. xx. 26. The Authorised Version
mistranslates the word in both passages.
Footnote 377:
Translated by me in the _Records of the Past_, new ser., IV., pp.
109-113.
Footnote 378:
See above, p. 244. The Hebrew Samuel could also represent a Babylonian
Sumu-il, ‘Sumu is God’ or ‘the name of God,’ which we actually find in
early Babylonian contracts.
Footnote 379:
So, too, the Chronicler states that he was descended from Ithamar the
younger son of Aaron (1 Chron. xxiv. 3).
Footnote 380:
It would seem from 1 Sam. iii. 3, as compared with Exod. xxvii. 21,
and Lev. xxiv. 3, that there was no veil at the time in ‘the temple of
the Lord, where the ark of God was.’
Footnote 381:
‘The priest’ of the narrative is equivalent to ‘high priest’: see
above, p. 219. Eli’s two sons were naturally not on a level of
equality with himself. It has been gravely maintained that there were
only three priests at Shiloh at the time, because nothing is said
about any others; had the narrative not required the mention of Hophni
and Phinehas we should have been told there was only one. Such
trifling with historical documents is unfortunately only too
characteristic of the so-called ‘literary criticism.’
Footnote 382:
It has been assumed that ‘the women that assembled at the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation’ (Exod. xxxviii. 8, 1 Sam. ii. 22) were
religious prostitutes like the _qedashoth_ in the Phœnician temples
(see Deut. xxiii. 17, 18). But the fact that the intercourse of the
sons of Eli with them was a sin in the eyes of both Yahveh and the
people proves the contrary. Here, as in other cases, an old
institution of Semitic religion was retained among the adherents of
the Mosaic law, but it was deprived of its pagan and immoral
characteristics.
Footnote 383:
1 Sam. ix. 9.
Footnote 384:
1 Sam. xix. 23. _Nâbî_ is not of Arabic derivation as is often
supposed, as, for example, by Professor Cornill, _The Prophets of
Israel_, pp. 8-10, where it is erroneously stated that the Babylonian
_nabû_ does not mean ‘to pronounce’ or ‘proclaim.’ The name of Nebo
shows to what antiquity the Babylonian _nabium_ in its special sense
of ‘prophet’ reaches back. The modern Arabic _nebi_ is borrowed from
the Hebrew _nâbî_. _Nâbî_ corresponds with the Greek προφήτης
‘forth-speaker,’ as distinguished from μάντις or ‘diviner,’ the
Babylonian _asipu_. In Babylonia the _asipu_ performed the offices
which the Hebrew _roeh_ had once fulfilled; he determined whether an
army should move or not, whether victory would be on its side, whether
an undertaking would be prosperous or the reverse. While, therefore,
the _asipu_ and the _nabiu_ continued to exist side by side,
performing the functions which had been combined in the Hebrew _roeh_,
and at the outset in the Hebrew _nâbî_, among the Israelites the
_roeh_ disappeared, and the _nâbî_ alone remained with purely
prophetical attributes.
Footnote 385:
Towards the end of Samuel’s life, however, a Naioth or ‘monastery’
grew up around him at Ramah, which must have closely resembled the
Dervish colleges of the modern Mohammedan world; see 1 Sam. xix. 23.
This monastery will have taken the place of Shiloh, and become a
veritable ‘school’ of prophetical training and instruction.
Footnote 386:
Gad, however, still retained the title of ‘seer’ (1 Chron. xxix. 29),
and one of the histories of the reign of Solomon was contained ‘in the
visions of Iddo the seer against Jeroboam’ (2 Chron. ix. 29). Even
Isaiah’s history of Hezekiah was called ‘the vision of Isaiah the
prophet’ (2 Chron. xxxii. 32). But the title was merely a survival.
Footnote 387:
We must, however, distinguish between Samuel’s authority as a seer,
which did not excite the jealousy of his Philistine masters, and his
authority as a dispenser of justice. That was confined to a small area
in the heart of Mount Ephraim. Each year, we are told (1 Sam. vii. 16)
he went on circuit like a Babylonian judge, ‘to Beth-el and Gilgal and
Mizpeh.’ This is the Mizpeh of Benjamin.
Footnote 388:
Ramah, ‘the height,’ is identified in 1 Sam. ii. 11 with Ramathaim,
‘the two heights.’ The village evidently stood on two hills. For the
possible site of Aphek, see G. A. Smith, _The Historical Geography of
the Holy Land_, p. 224. Eben-ezer is identified with the great stone
at Beth-shemesh (1 Sam. vi. 14, 18) by M. Clermont-Ganneau (_Quarterly
Statement_ of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1874, p. 279; 1877, pp.
154 _sqq._), but this is questionable.
Footnote 389:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, p. 154;
and above, p. 196.
Footnote 390:
1 Sam. iv. 13.
Footnote 391:
The Septuagint text omits the ‘eight.’
Footnote 392:
The Septuagint reads Ouai-bar-khabôth, ‘Woe to the son of glory,’ with
the insertion of the Aramaic _bar_, ‘son.’
Footnote 393:
1 Sam. xiv. 3.
Footnote 394:
As Abiathar was the contemporary of David, and his father Ahimelech or
Ahiah of Saul, Ahitub will have been the contemporary of Samuel. If
Solomon came to the throne about B.C. 965, and Saul was about forty
years of age at the time of his death, we should have about B.C. 1045
for the date of Saul’s birth. Samuel was an old man when he died; if
he lived ten years after Saul’s accession, and was ten years old when
the ark was taken, we may place his birth about B.C. 1090. This would
give about B.C. 1180 for the birth of Eli, or very shortly after the
Israelitish invasion of Canaan. The life of Eli would thus cover
almost the whole period of the Judges, and form a single link between
the Mosaic age and that of Samuel. In such a case it is not
astonishing that the records and traditions of the Mosaic age were
preserved at Shiloh. The ark was only seven months among the
Philistines (1 Sam. vi. 1), and it was removed from ‘the house of
Abinadab’ at Kirjath-jearim some time after the seventh year of David
(see, however, 1 Sam. xiv. 18). ‘The sons of Abinadab,’ in 2 Sam. vi.
4, must mean, as is so frequently the case, the descendants of
Abinadab.
Footnote 395:
In Zeph. i. 9 there is an allusion to the practice of the Philistine
priests of ‘leaping’ over the threshold. For the origin and reason of
this sacredness of the threshold see Trumbull, _The Threshold
Covenant_, pp. 10-13, 116-126, 143. ‘In Finland it is regarded as
unlucky if a clergyman steps on the threshold when he comes to preach
at a church.... In the Lapp tales the same idea appears.’ (Jones and
Kropf, _Folk-Tales of the Magyars_, p. 410.)
Footnote 396:
Philo Byblius according to Euseb., _Præp. Evangel._ i. 6.
Footnote 397:
That Dagon was worshipped in Canaan before he was adopted by the
Philistine emigrants we know, not only from the evidence of
geographical names, but also from the fact that one of the Tel
el-Amarna correspondents in Palestine was called Dagan-takala.
Footnote 398:
It is noticeable that Zophim in Ramathaim-zophim means ‘Watchmen.’
Poels (_Le Sanctuaire de Kirjath-jearim_, Louvain, 1894) has,
moreover, made it probable that Kirjath-jearim, Mizpeh, Gibeah, Geba,
and Gibeon all represent the same place.
Footnote 399:
According to 1 Sam. vii. 2, the victory at Eben-ezer took place
‘twenty years’ after the ark had been removed to Kirjath-jearim. But
this is merely the half of an unknown period, and means that the
interval of time was not long.
Footnote 400:
1 Sam. vii. 13, 14. The area of independence, however, must have been
very confined, since there was a garrison of the Philistines in ‘the
hill of God’ at Gibeah (1 Sam. ix. 5), as well as one at Michmash (1
Sam. xiv. 1).
Footnote 401:
There is no reason for doubting the very explicit statement made in 1
Sam. vii. 14, which explains and limits the preceding verse. Its
antiquity is vouched for by the concluding words: ‘And there was peace
between Israel and the Amorites.’ The term ‘Amorite’ instead of
‘Canaanite’ points to an early date, and the sentence reads like an
extract from a contemporary chronicle. The peace was an enforced one,
as both Israelites and Canaanites alike were under the yoke of the
Philistines.
Footnote 402:
See 2 Kings xviii. 4.
Footnote 403:
1 Chron. xvi. 39, xxi. 293; 2 Chron. i. 3, 5.
Footnote 404:
Is it an inference from 1 Kings iii. 4? That the Chronicler sometimes
drew erroneous inferences from his materials, I have shown in _The
Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, p. 463. It is
difficult to understand how ‘fixtures’ like the tabernacle and the
altar escaped destruction when the temple at Shiloh was ruined.
Footnote 405:
Kirjath-jearim was a Gibeonite town (Josh. ix. 17).
Footnote 406:
1 Sam. ix. 3.
Footnote 407:
1 Sam. viii. 2. Joel is called Vashni in 1 Chron. vi. 28, where the
Septuagint reads Sani.
Footnote 408:
As has been noticed above (p. 315, note 1), the title of the supreme
god of Tyre is evidence that there, too, the state had been originally
regarded as a theocracy.
Footnote 409:
The name of Saul corresponds with the Babylonian Savul, a title of the
Sun-god, though it might also be explained as a Hebrew word meaning
‘asked for.’ But one of the Edomite kings was also named Saul, and he
is stated to have come from ‘Rehoboth (Assyrian Rêbit) by the river’
Euphrates (Gen. xxxvi. 37). This points to a Babylonian origin of the
name. Kish, Saul’s father, has also the same name as the Edomite god
Qos (in Assyrian Qaus), of which the Canaanitish Kishon is a
derivative. As Saul’s successors in Edom were Baal-hanan and Hadad,
while Hadad was a contemporary of Solomon, and El-hanan is said in 2
Sam. xxi. 19 to have been the slayer of Goliath, I have proposed (_The
Modern Review_, v. 17, 1884) to see in the Saul and Baal-hanan of Edom
the Saul and David of Israel. Saul is said to have fought against Edom
(1 Sam. xiv. 47), and Doeg the Edomite was his henchman. But the
proposal is excluded by two facts. The kings of Edom recorded in Gen.
xxxvi. 31-39 reigned ‘before there was any king over the children of
Israel,’ and Saul the son of Kish did not come from the Euphrates.
Footnote 410:
1 Sam. ix. 3. In 1 Sam. x. 14-16, Saul’s uncle takes the place of his
father.
Footnote 411:
Much has been made of the supposed fact that Saul had never heard of
Samuel, and did not know that he was a seer. But the narrative only
says that Saul’s slave informed him that a seer was in the town,
without mentioning his name; and if Saul had never previously seen
Samuel, he would naturally not recognise him in the crowd.
Footnote 412:
That the prophets were at Gibeah is shown by the fact that ‘the hill
of God,’ where they met Saul, was also where ‘the garrison of the
Philistines’ was (1 Sam. x. 5, xiii. 2, 3).
Footnote 413:
It has been usually supposed from this verse that ‘Gibeah of Saul’ was
the original home of Saul’s family. But as the family burial-place was
at Zelah (2 Sam. xxi. 14), this can hardly have been the case. Gibeah
was the scene of Jonathan’s first success against the Philistines, and
it was here that Saul fixed his residence during the latter years of
his life.
Footnote 414:
Cp. Judg. xix. 29, where the Levite similarly cuts up his concubine
and sends the pieces to the several tribes of Israel.
Footnote 415:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 463-4.
When Ahab came to the help of the Syrians against the Assyrian king
Shalmaneser, his whole force consisted of only ten thousand men and
two thousand chariots, and ‘Assur-natsir-pal thinks it a subject of
boasting that he had slain fifty or one hundred and seventy-two of the
enemy in battle.’ The whole of the country population of Judah carried
into captivity by Sennacherib was only two hundred thousand one
hundred and fifty, which would give at most an army of fifty thousand
men. The Egyptian armies, with which the victories of the eighteenth
and nineteenth dynasties were gained, were of small size. One of them,
in the time of the nineteenth dynasty, contained only three thousand
one hundred foreign mercenaries and one thousand nine hundred native
troops (Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_, Eng. tr., p. 542). At the same
time, we must not forget that if there were fifty thousand available
fighting men in Judah in the time of Hezekiah, there would have been
about three hundred and fifty thousand among the other seven tribes a
few generations earlier. Consequently the calculation given in the
text of 1 Sam. xi. 8 is approximately correct as a mere calculation.
Between available and actual fighting men there was, of course, a
great difference. In the second year of Saul’s reign, when his
authority was established, he was not able to muster more than three
thousand fighting men (1 Sam. xiii. 2). A larger body, indeed, had
flocked to him, but they were an undisciplined, unarmed multitude, who
had to be dismissed to their homes.
Footnote 416:
As the Hebrew _netsîb_ signifies a ‘governor’ as well as a ‘fortified
post’ or ‘garrison,’ many writers have maintained that the _netsîb_ in
‘the Hill of God’ at Gibeah was the Philistine official. But Jonathan
would not have required a thousand men in order to destroy a single
official and the few soldiers who might have been with him.
Footnote 417:
The Hebrews had, of course, no means of ascertaining the exact numbers
of the enemy. The number of chariots is quite impossible, and they
would have been useless in the mountainous country. In the great
battle in which Meneptah saved Egypt from the combined armies of the
Libyans and their northern allies, nine thousand three hundred and
seventy-six prisoners in all were taken, while the slain amounted to
six thousand three hundred and sixty-five Libyans and two thousand
three hundred and seventy of their Mediterranean confederates. To
these must be added nine thousand one hundred and eleven Maxyes. And
yet it does not seem that any of the invaders escaped from the battle.
Footnote 418:
1 Sam. xiii. 6, 7. For the distinction that is here drawn between ‘the
men of Israel’ and ‘the Hebrews,’ see above, p. 6.
Footnote 419:
The identification is uncertain, as it depends on the position to be
assigned to Gibeah.
Footnote 420:
Ahimelech (1 Sam. xxii. 9, 11, 20) is here called Ahiah, perhaps out
of reluctance to apply the term Melech, ‘King,’ with its heathen
associations, to Yahveh.
Footnote 421:
Here called by its old name of Beth-On, which the Massoretic
punctuation has transformed into Beth-Aven.
Footnote 422:
Some of the literary critics have started the gratuitous supposition
that a prisoner was substituted for Jonathan, though the fact was
suppressed by the later Hebrew historian. It is perhaps natural that
those who re-write history should have a poor opinion of the
trustworthiness of their predecessors.
Footnote 423:
1 Sam. xii.
Footnote 424:
1 Sam. x. 8, compared with xiii. 8-15.
Footnote 425:
1 Sam. xiii. 14. Though Saul’s kingdom did ‘not continue,’ it
nevertheless lasted some time, and was not overthrown at Michmash, as
those who heard Samuel’s words must have expected. As David was not
anointed until some years later, he cannot be ‘the man’ after Yahveh’s
‘heart,’ whom the seer had in his mind at the time.
Footnote 426:
The _nakhal_ (A.V. ‘valley’) is probably the Wadi el-Arîsh, which lay
on the way to the Shur or line of fortifications that protected the
eastern side of the Delta. Havilah, the ‘sandy’ desert, corresponds
with the Melukhkha or ‘Salt’ desert of the Babylonian inscriptions.
The ‘city of Amalek’ may have been El-Arîsh, if this were not in
Egyptian hands at the time.
Footnote 427:
The Israelites had been stirred to vengeance by the murderous raids of
the Bedâwin at a time when the Philistine invasion had made them too
weak to defend themselves (1 Sam. xv. 33).
Footnote 428:
For ‘Edom’ we should probably read ‘Aram,’ as is demanded by the
geographical order of the list of countries which runs from south to
north. In 2 Sam. viii. 13, ‘Aram’ has been substituted for ‘Edom,’
which was still read by the Chronicler (1 Chron. xviii. 12), and the
marriage of David with the daughter of the king of Aram-Geshur (2 Sam.
iii. 3) implies hostility between Saul and the Geshurites.
Footnote 429:
The ‘critics’ have decided that the list of Saul’s wars has been
‘borrowed’ from the history of David. In this case, however, we should
have heard of ‘the king’ of Zobah, not of ‘the kings.’ We happen to
know that Saul fought against Ammon. Had the fact not been mentioned,
the ‘critics’ would have maintained, as in the case of Moab and Zobah,
that such a war never took place. The argument from silence may
simplify the process of reconstructing history, but from a historical
point of view it is worthless.
Footnote 430:
Saul showed himself in other cases such a scrupulous observer of the
Law that we can well understand his obeying the precept of Deuteronomy
that the king should not ‘multiply’ horses or wives (Deut. xviii. 16,
17).
Footnote 431:
1 Sam. xxii. 6.
Footnote 432:
It is clear, however, from 1 Sam. xxi. 9, that there must be some
mistake here, since the sword of Goliath was laid up at Nob while Saul
was king.
Footnote 433:
This must be an exaggeration, since David, who was not above the
ordinary size, afterwards used his sword (1 Sam. xxi. 9).
Footnote 434:
The narrative goes on to say that ‘David took the head of the
Philistine and brought it to Jerusalem; but he put his armour in his
tent.’ This verse is given in the Septuagint, though the next nine
verses are omitted. But the statement cannot be right. Jerusalem was
not captured by David until many years after the battle in the valley
of Elah, and the shepherd lad had no tent of his own at the time.
Footnote 435:
1 Chron. xx. 5. ‘Beth-lehemite’ is turned into ‘Lahmi,’ the name of
the ‘brother’ of Goliath, and the unintelligible _Yaare-oregim_
becomes _Yair_. _Oregim_, ‘weavers,’ however, has crept in from the
end of the verse, and the original reading of 1 Sam. xxi. 19 must have
been, ‘El-hanan, the son of Yaari (the forester) the Beth-lehemite,
slew Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver’s
beam.’
Footnote 436:
1 Kings xix. 15, 16; 2 Kings ix. 2, 3. Ahijah, however, did not anoint
Jeroboam when he suggested to him that he should head a revolt of the
ten tribes against the house of David. When David was made king at
Hebron he was anointed by ‘the men of Judah,’ not by a prophet (2 Sam.
ii. 4), and no mention is made of a prophet or priest when he was
anointed ‘king over Israel’ (2 Sam. v. 3).
Footnote 437:
We must remember that in any case the act of anointing would have been
a secret, and that consequently an erroneous account of it might
easily have been set on foot.
Footnote 438:
1 Sam. xviii. 6. The singular ‘Philistine’ has to be noted, as if
there was a reference in it to the overthrow of Goliath. Cf. xix. 5.
Footnote 439:
See above, p. 342.
Footnote 440:
It is also possible that chapter xx. ought to precede chapter xix.
Footnote 441:
1 Sam. xix. 2.
Footnote 442:
Hitzig identified the name of Achish with that of the Homeric
Ankhisês. Whether this is so or not, Dr. W. Max Müller is probably
right in seeing the same name in that of a native of Keft, or the
northern coast of Syria, mentioned in an Egyptian papyrus where it is
written Akashau (Spiegelberg in the _Zeitschrift für Assyriologie_,
viii. p. 384).
Footnote 443:
Unless, indeed, 1 Sam. xxiii. 16-18 is an interpolation.
Footnote 444:
1 Sam. xxiv. 2. Compare the expression used by Sennacherib when
describing his campaign against the Cilicians: ‘Like a wild goat I
climbed to the high peaks against them’ (W. A. I., i. 39, 77).
Footnote 445:
The name is preserved in the modern Tell Zif.
Footnote 446:
Shunem was a fortified city, already mentioned in the Tel el-Amarna
tablets, Aphek a mere village. Shunem had evidently been captured, and
the Philistine camp subsequently formed outside its walls a little to
the west.
Footnote 447:
See Exod. xxii. 18; Lev. xx. 27; Deut. xviii. 10, 11.
Footnote 448:
We are told in 1 Chron. xii. 19 that even while he was in the
Philistine camp at Aphek, and again when he was on the march back to
Ziklag, ‘some of Manasseh’ deserted to him.
Footnote 449:
The Negeb or ‘South’ was divided at the time into the Negeb of the
Cherethites or Philistines, of the Jews, and of the Calebites (1 Sam.
xxx. 14, 16.) Up to the end of Saul’s reign, therefore, Caleb and
Judah had not been as yet amalgamated into a single tribe.
Footnote 450:
See above, p. 234.
Footnote 451:
Aroer had belonged to Reuben (Josh. xiii. 16), Hormah, Ziklag,
Chor-ashan, and Ramoth of the south to Simeon (Josh. xix. 4-8.) It is
curious that no mention should be made of Beth-lehem, and it is
therefore possible that ‘Beth-lehem’ should be read in place of
‘Beth-el’ in 1 Sam. xxx. 27. The Septuagint has Baith-Sour.
Footnote 452:
Boaz, the grandfather of Jesse, is said to have been the son of Salmon
or Salma, who, according to 1 Chron. ii. 50, 51, was the founder of
Bethlehem, and the son of Caleb.
Footnote 453:
Criticism has seen in the story told by the Amalekite a second version
of the death of Saul inconsistent with that which precedes it. The
inconsistency certainly exists, but that is because the Amalekite’s
story was a fabrication, the object of which was to gain a reward from
David. There was this much truth in it, that Saul had been wounded and
had desired death; the Amalekite could easily have learned this from
those who had witnessed the last scene of Saul’s life. But the fact
that he had robbed Saul’s corpse shows that he must have come to the
ground after the flight of the Israelitish soldiers; he was, in fact,
one of those Bedâwin thieves who, in Oriental warfare, still hang on
the skirts of the battle in the hope of murdering the wounded and
plundering the dead when it is over and the victors are pursuing the
vanquished.
Footnote 454:
The translation is that of the Revised Version, with a slight change
in the 21st verse. The contrast between the preservation of the text
in this Song and in that of the Song of Deborah is great, no passage
in it being corrupt, and points to the more archaic character of the
latter, as well as to a confirmation of the fact that the Song of the
Bow was learnt in the schools from the time of its composition.
Footnote 455:
Ish-Baal or Esh-Baal, ‘the man of Baal,’ is called Ishui in 1 Sam.
xiv. 49 (where the name of Abinadab is omitted; see 1 Chron. viii.
33). Later writers changed Baal into Bosheth, ‘Shame,’ in accordance
with the custom which grew up when the title of Baal came to signify
the god of Phœnicia, rather than Yahveh of Israel.
Footnote 456:
That the reign of David ‘in Hebron’ continued for five years after the
death of Esh-Baal seems the most probable way of explaining the
statement in 2 Sam. ii. 10, that the reign of Saul’s son lasted only
two years. It is certainly preferable to the usual supposition that
‘two’ is a mistake for ‘seven.’
Footnote 457:
The author of the books of Samuel did not know his age (2 Sam. ii.
10). In 1 Sam. xiv. 49 Ishui is named before Melchi-shua, but in 1
Chron. viii. 33 Esh-Baal is the youngest of Saul’s children. That
Esh-Baal did not take part in the battle of Gilboa would suit equally
well with either hypothesis. Abner, the son of Ner, the son of Abiel,
was the great-uncle of Esh-Baal (1 Sam. xiv. 50, 51). As he was still
in the prime of life when he was murdered, it is reasonable to suppose
that his great-nephew was very young.
Footnote 458:
1 Chron. ii. 16.
Footnote 459:
If, as is probable, we should read ‘Geshurites’ for ‘Ashurites’ in 2
Sam. ii. 9, Esh-Baal would have claimed rule over Geshur, and
consequently would have been as much involved in war with the king of
that country as he was with David. We subsequently find the Aramæans
in alliance with the Ammonites (2 Sam. x. 6, etc.), and the king of
Ammon was the ally of David against Esh-Baal (2 Sam. xi. 2). It is
probable that in 1 Sam. xiv. 47, ‘Aram’ must be read for ‘Edom,’ the
geographical position of which was not between Ammon and Zobah (see
above, p. 368); if so, Esh-Baal, in asserting his authority over
Geshur, would only have succeeded to his father’s conquests.
Footnote 460:
Absalom, as the son of a princess, would claim precedence of his two
elder brothers, who, although born after David’s coronation, were
nevertheless not of royal descent on their mother’s side. The name of
the eldest, the son of Ahinoam, was Amnon, that of the second, the son
of Abigail, is given as Chileab in the Hebrew text of Samuel, Daniel
in that of 1 Chron. iii. 1, the Septuagint reading Daluia (Dalbia) and
Damniêl in the two passages. He seems to have died young. The fourth
son of David was Adonijah, the son of Haggith, who, by the death of
his three elder brothers, became the eldest son before his father’s
death, while the fifth and sixth sons were Shephatiah, the son of
Abital, and Ithream, the son of Eglah. All were born in Hebron.
Footnote 461:
2 Sam. iii. 17. This goes to show that Saul’s suspicions of David were
founded on fact.
Footnote 462:
The name of the Babylonian god Rimmon or Ramman implies that the
family of the murderers were idolaters. They are said to have been
originally from Beeroth, the inhabitants of which had fled to Gittaim
(2 Sam. iv. 3). If the flight had been due to Saul, the hostility of
the sons of Rimmon to the son of Saul would be explained. Beeroth was
one of the cities of the Gibeonites (Josh. ix. 17), and Saul, we learn
from 2 Sam. xxi. 1, had slain the Gibeonites.
Footnote 463:
The name Merib-Baal, given by the Chronicler (1 Chron. viii. 34, ix.
40), is doubtless correct. In the books of Samuel Baal has, as usual,
been changed into Bosheth, and Merib corrupted into the senseless
Mephi.
Footnote 464:
See 1 Chron. xi. 2, and xii. 38-40, where it is added that the
coronation-feast lasted for three days.
Footnote 465:
See 2 Sam. xiii. 13-17.
Footnote 466:
It is difficult to say whether the number of the _gibbôrîm_ or
‘heroes’ was actually restricted to thirty, or whether thirty was an
ideal number which was elastic in practice. In 2 Sam. xxiii.
thirty-seven ‘heroes’ are named, but some of these may have been
appointed to supply the place of others who had died or fallen in war.
To be included among the thirty was equivalent to receiving a Victoria
Cross.
Footnote 467:
2 Sam. xxiii. 8, but the text is corrupt, and reads literally: ‘He
that sitteth on the seat, a Takmonite, chief of the third (?); he is
Adino the Eznite, over eight hundred slain at one time.’ The
Septuagint has: ‘Yebosthe the Canaanite is chief of the third; Adino
the Asônæan is he who drew his sword against eight hundred warriors at
once’; while the Chronicler (1 Chron. xi. 11) omitted the name of
Adino, and read: ‘Jashobeam, a Khakmonite, chief of the captains; he
lifted up his spear against three hundred slain at one time.’ For
Jashobeam the Septuagint gives Yesebada. Adino seems to be the Adnah
of 1 Chron. xii. 20, a Manassite who deserted to David when he was at
Ziklag. Jashobeam is the most probable form of the name, and there
must be some confusion between Jashobeam, who brandished his spear
over three hundred enemies, and an unknown Adino, who did the same
over eight hundred enemies.
Footnote 468:
G. A. Smith, _The Historical Geography of the Holy Land_, p. 218.
Footnote 469:
See 2 Sam. xxi. 15-22, xxiii. 8-17.
Footnote 470:
If the name of Ishbi-benob, ‘my seat is in Nob,’ is correct, ‘Gob’
must be corrected into ‘Nob.’ But perhaps it is the name of the giant
which needs correction.
Footnote 471:
See the map given by Stade, _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_, p. 268,
and my ‘Topography of Præ-exilic Jerusalem’ in the _Quarterly
Statement_ of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Oct. 1883, pp. 215
_sqq._
Footnote 472:
Bliss, ‘Excavations at Jerusalem’ in the _Quarterly Statement_ of the
Palestine Exploration Fund, Oct. 1896 and Jan. 1897.
Footnote 473:
_Antiq._ viii. 5, 3; _C. Ap._ i. 18.
Footnote 474:
It is, of course, possible that Abibal had been preceded by an earlier
Hiram of whom we otherwise know nothing, and who is meant in 2 Sam. v.
11. It is also possible that the use of Hiram’s name in this passage
is proleptic, derived from the fact that it was he who subsequently
sent materials to David for the construction of the temple.
Footnote 475:
1 Chron. xxii. 8.
Footnote 476:
1 Kings v. 3.
Footnote 477:
2 Sam. vi. 3. In Josh. xviii. 18 ‘Gibeah of Kirjath’ is given as one
of the cities of Benjamin. Like most of the Egyptian and Babylonian
cities it had a second and sacred name, Baalê-Judah, the city of ‘Baal
of Judah’ (2 Sam. vi. 2).
Footnote 478:
The name of Obed-Edom, ‘the servant of Edom,’ shows that Edom was the
name of a deity as well as of a country, like Ammi, the patron-god of
Ammon, and it is met with in the monuments of Egypt. A papyrus (_Pap.
Leydens._ i. 343. 7) states that Atum or Edom was the wife of the
Canaanitish fire-god Reshpu, and one of the places in Palestine
captured by Thothmes III. was Shemesh-Edom (No. 51), ‘the Sun-god is
Edom’ (_Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 47).
Footnote 479:
2 Chron. i. 3. See above, p. 353.
Footnote 480:
This must be the general signification of the Hebrew expression
_Metheg-ammah_ in 2 Sam. viii. i., which the Septuagint translates τὴν
ἀφωρισμένην, ‘the tribute.’ The Chronicler read Gath for Metheg (1
Chron. xviii. 1), and consequently understood _ammah_ in the sense of
‘mother-city.’ My own belief is that we have in the phrase a Hebrew
transcription of a Babylonian expression which has been derived from a
cuneiform document. The Babylonian _mêtêg ammati_ (for _mêtêq ammati_)
would signify ‘the highroad of the mainland’ of Palestine, and would
refer to the command of the highroad of trade which passed through
Canaan from Asia to Egypt and Arabia. _Ammati_ is the Semitic
equivalent of the Sumerian Sarsar (W. A. I. v. 18, 32 _c._), which was
an early Babylonian name of the land of the Amorites or Syria (W. A.
I. ii. 51, 19; see _Records of the Past_, new ser., v. p. 107); and
_mêtêq_ is given as a rendering of _kharran_, ‘a highroad’ (W. A. I.
ii. 38, 26).
Footnote 481:
2 Sam. xxiii. 20.
Footnote 482:
See my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, p. 367.
Footnote 483:
_Ibid._ pp. 349, 350.
Footnote 484:
The Septuagint has misread ‘Amalek’ for ‘Maacah.’
Footnote 485:
El-Hîba probably stands on the site of the Egyptian town of Hâ-Bennu,
the Greek Hipponon, the capital of the eighteenth nome of Upper Egypt,
and its fortifications were built by the high priest Men-kheper-Ra and
his wife Isis-em-Kheb. The Tanite Pharaohs formed the twenty-first
dynasty.
Footnote 486:
See Delitzsch, _Wo lag das Paradies_, pp. 279-280. Assur-bani-pal
states that he sent his troops against the cities of Azar-el, the
Khiratâqazians, Edom, Yabrudu, Bit-Ammani or Ammon, ‘the district of
the city of the Haurân’ (_Khaurina_), Moab, Sakharri, Khargê, and ‘the
district of the city of Tsubitê, or Zobah.’ Delitzsch identifies
Yabrudu with the Yabruda of Ptolemy, the modern Yabrûd, north-east of
Damascus. In the tribute-lists of the Second Assyrian Empire, Tsubitê
or Tsubutu comes between Dûru (_Tantûra_) and Hamath, Samalla
(_Sinjerli_) and Khatarikka or Hadrach (Zech. ix. 1.), and Zemar
(_Sumra_), and the Quê on the coast of the Gulf of Antioch.
Footnote 487:
The fact that the Assyrian king Shalmaneser II. calls Baasha, the
contemporary king of Ammon, ‘the son of Rukhubi’ or Rehob, just as he
calls Jehu ‘the son of Omri,’ shows that Rehob was a personal name.
The Biblical Beth-Rehob is parallel to Bit-Omri, a designation of
Samaria in the Assyrian texts. Beth-Rehob is placed near Dan in Judg.
xviii. 28. In 1 Chron. xix. 6, Aram-Naharaim is apparently substituted
for Aram-Beth-Rehob, though, as the dominions of Hadad-ezer extended
to the Euphrates, soldiers may have come to the help of the Ammonites
from Mesopotamia, as well as from Beth-Rehob. The name of Hadad-ezer
is incorrectly given as Hadar-ezer in 2 Sam. x. 16. It appears as
Hadad-idri in the Assyrian inscriptions (with the Aramaic change of
_z_ to _d_), where it is the name of the king of Damascus, called
Ben-Hadad II. in the Old Testament.
Footnote 488:
So, according to the Septuagint and 1 Chron. xviii. 4. The Hebrew text
of 2 Sam. viii. 4 has ‘700 horsemen.’ But it is possible that we ought
to read ‘1700 horsemen.’
Footnote 489:
Nicolaus Damascenus, as quoted by Josephus, makes Hadad the king of
Damascus, who thus vainly endeavoured to check the torrent of
Israelitish success. Hadad, however, must be merely Hadad-ezer in an
abbreviated form, Perhaps we may gather from 1 Kings xi. 23, that the
ruling prince in Damascus at the time of David’s conquests was Rezon,
the son of Eliadah.
Footnote 490:
1 Chron. xix. 18. In 2 Sam. x. 18, the numbers are 700 charioteers and
40,000 horsemen, which are clearly wrong.
Footnote 491:
The account of the war with Zobah given above is the most probable
that can be gleaned from the scanty and fragmentary notices that have
been preserved to us. But it must be remembered that it is probable
only. It is not even certain that ‘the Syrians that were beyond the
river’ (2 Sam. x. 16) were not the Aramæans of Damascus rather than
those of Mesopotamia, since, as Professor Hommel has shown (_Ancient
Hebrew Tradition as illustrated by the Monuments_, pp. 195 _sqq._) the
term _Ebir Nâri_, ‘Beyond the river,’ is already used in an Assyrian
poem (K. 3500, l. 9) of the age of David, in the Assyro-Babylonian
sense of the country westward of the Euphrates. Indeed, Professor
Hommel suggests that it already denoted the country westward of the
Jordan. This, however, is inconsistent with 2 Sam. x. 17; and west of
the Jordan, moreover, there were no Aramæan kingdoms.
Footnote 492:
The Chronicler (1 Chron. xviii. 8) has preserved the true form of the
name of Tibhath, which has been corrupted into Betah in 2 Sam. viii.
8. It is the Tubikhi of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, the Dbkhu of the
geographical list of Thothmes III. (No. 6). Instead of Berothai the
Chronicler has Chun.
Footnote 493:
1 Chron. xviii. 8.
Footnote 494:
Hadoram, the older form of the name, is found only in 1 Chron. xviii.
10. The text of the books of Samuel has the Hebraised Joram.
Footnote 495:
Salamanu appears as Shalman in Hos. x. 14, as Sulmanu in
Assyro-Babylonian. Sulmanu was the god of Peace, like Selamanês in a
Greek inscription from Shêkh Barakât in northern Syria, whose name is
also found in a Phœnician inscription from Sidon (Clermont-Ganneau,
_Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études_ CXIII., vol. ii. pp. 40,
48).
Footnote 496:
This is usually supposed to mean that they were tortured in various
ways, but more probably it means only that they were made public
slaves and compelled to cut and saw wood, harrow the ground, and make
bricks. At all events, if tortures are referred to, no parallel to
them can be found elsewhere. As the crown is said to have weighed ‘a
talent’ it can hardly have been worn by an earthly king.
Footnote 497:
2 Sam. viii. 13. In 1 Chron. xviii. 12, however, the victory is
ascribed to Abishai, the brother of Joab.
Footnote 498:
2 Sam. viii. 13, where the mention of ‘the valley of salt’ shows that
we must read ‘Edom’ instead of ‘Aram,’ as indeed is done by the
Chronicler as well as in the superscription of Ps. lx. and in the
Septuagint. The ‘valley of salt’ was part of the Melukhkha or
‘Saltland’ of the cuneiform inscriptions.
Footnote 499:
2 Sam. xxiii. 37, 36, 34.
Footnote 500:
1 Kings xi. 21.
Footnote 501:
This was Ithra who ‘went in’ to Abigail, the daughter of Nahash, the
sister of Zeruiah, Joab’s mother (2 Sam. xvii. 25). The form of
expression may imply that Abigail was seduced. If so, the hostility of
Joab would be easily accounted for.
Footnote 502:
It is probable that ‘Shobi the son of Nahash of Rabbah of the children
of Ammon’ (2 Sam. xvii. 27) was a brother of the last king of Ammon,
and it is even possible that he may have been the cause of the
Ammonite war. If he had been a rival of his brother Khanun, and had
received shelter and protection from David, we should have an
explanation of the otherwise gratuitous insult offered by Khanun to
the ambassadors of the Israelitish king.
Footnote 503:
That the forest was on the eastern bank of the Jordan is plain from
Josh. xvii. 15-18 and 2 Sam. xix. 31.
Footnote 504:
It is called Abel-Maim, ‘Abel of the Waters,’ in 2 Chron. xvi. 4,
compared with 1 Kings xv. 20. In 2 Sam. xx. 14, we should perhaps
read, ‘And all the young warriors’ (_bakhûrîm_ for _bêrîm_) ‘were
gathered together,’ as the Septuagint has ‘all in Kharri,’ and the
Vulgate ‘viri electi.’
Footnote 505:
2 Sam. xxiv. 6, according to Lucian’s recension of the Greek
translation (‘Khettieim Kadês’). See Field, _Origenis Hexaplorum quæ
supersunt_, i. p. 587.
Footnote 506:
2 Sam. xix. 29. Ziba, the steward of Mephibosheth, who was lame, had
accused his master of aiming at the kingdom, and David had accordingly
given him all Mephibosheth’s property. David not only had believed the
accusation, but in spite of Mephibosheth’s protests and excuses, must
have continued to do so, since Ziba, so far from being punished, was
allowed to retain half his master’s possessions. The Jewish historian
evidently takes a different view from that of David, and regards the
accusation as false. Mephibosheth is more correctly written Merib-Baal
in 1 Chron. viii. 34; ix. 40.
Footnote 507:
‘Adriel, the son of Barzillai the Meholathite’ (2 Sam. xxi. 8), cannot
be the same as Phaltiel or ‘Phalti the son of Laish of Gallim’ (1 Sam.
xxv. 44), to whom Saul had given Michal after David’s flight, and from
whom David afterwards took her (2 Sam. iii. 16). As Michal never seems
to have subsequently left the harîm of David (2 Sam. vi. 23), it would
appear that the name of Michal in 2 Sam. xxi. 8 must be a mistake for
that of some other daughter of Saul.
Footnote 508:
See 2 Sam. xxiv. 23, where the Septuagint has ‘Orna(n) the king.’ The
various spellings of the name Araunah, Araniah (2 Sam. xxiv. 18), and
Ornan (1 Chron. xxi. 15) show that it was a foreign word, the
pronunciation of which was not clear to the Israelites. Araniah is an
assimilation to a Hebrew name.
Footnote 509:
2 Sam. xxiv. 6.
Footnote 510:
In 1 Kings v. 3, 4, the reason why David could not build the temple is
given a little differently. It is there stated to have been because of
the constant wars in which he was engaged which prevented him from
securing the needful leisure for the work. This reason, however, does
not apply to the latter part of David’s reign.
Footnote 511:
The Chronicler (1 Chron. xviii. 16) reads Shavsha, apparently through
a confusion with the later Sheva (2 Sam. xx. 25). However, the
Septuagint has Sasa in 2 Sam. viii. 17, and the two scribes of Solomon
at the beginning of his reign were the sons of Shisha (1 Kings iv. 3).
Footnote 512:
The genealogy of the high priests is involved in a confusion which
with our present materials it is hopeless to unravel. In 1 Sam. xiv.
3, Ahimelech is called Ahiah, and in 2 Sam. viii. 17, as well as in
the document used in 1 Chron. xxiv. (verses 3, 6, and 31), he is made
the son of Abiathar instead of his father. In 1 Chron. xviii. 16, the
name is transformed into Abimelech, and in 1 Chron. xxiv. Ahimelech
and Abiathar are stated to have been descended from Ithamar the son of
Aaron, and not from his brother Eleazar. That the genealogy in 1
Chron. vi. 4 _sqq._ is corrupt is evident not only from the repetition
of the triplet Amariah, Ahitub, and Zadok in verses 7, 8, and 11, 12,
but also from the statement that Azariah four generations after Zadok
‘executed the priest’s office’ in Solomon’s temple. In 1 Chron. ix.
11; Neh. xi. 11, again, the order is ‘Zadok the son of Meraioth the
son of Ahitub,’ whereas in 1 Chron. vi. 7, 8, and 52, 53, it is Zadok
the son of Ahitub the son of Amariah the son of Meraioth.
Footnote 513:
Hadoram (2 Chron. x. 18) is written Adoram in 2 Sam. xx. 24, and
Adoniram in 1 Kings iv. 6. Adoni-ram is a Hebraised form of the
original name Addu-ramu, ‘Hadad is exalted.’ His father’s name, Abda,
has an Aramaic termination. An early Babylonian seal-cylinder in the
collection of M. de Clercq has upon it the name of Abdu-ramu.
Footnote 514:
See above, p. 92.
Footnote 515:
1 Chron. xxvii. 25-32.
Footnote 516:
The Jewish historian includes among those who refused to go with
Adonijah the otherwise unknown Shimei and Rei (1 Kings i. 8). They are
referred to as well-known personages, implying that the writer must
have had before him a large collection of documents relating to the
history of the time, most of which have now perished.
Footnote 517:
As Barzillai was already eighty years of age at the time of David’s
flight (2 Sam. xix. 35), the death of David could not have happened
very long after that event. That Joab and Abiathar were still vigorous
implies the same thing. As for the authenticity of David’s dying
instructions, there is no reason to question it. A later writer is not
likely to have gratuitously credited them to David; and inconsistent
though they may seem to us with David’s piety, they were in full
keeping with his character as well as with that of other Israelites of
his age. If they had been falsely ascribed to David by Solomon’s
admirers after the murder of Joab and Shimei, Adonijah also would have
been included among the victims.
Footnote 518:
_E.g._ Ps. lx.
Footnote 519:
_E.g._ Ps. cviii.
Footnote 520:
See my Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_,
pp. 348-356. Thus we read:—
‘O lord, my sins are many, my transgressions are great!
O my goddess, my sins are many, my transgressions are great!
The sin that I sinned I knew not.
The transgression I committed I knew not.
The cursed thing that I ate I knew not.
The cursed thing that I trampled on I knew not.
The lord in the wrath of his heart has regarded me;
God in the fierceness of his heart has revealed himself to me.
I sought for help and none took my hand;
I wept and none stood at my side;
I cried aloud and there was none that heard me.
I am in trouble and hiding; I dare not look up.
To my god, the merciful one, I turn myself, I utter my prayer;
O my god, seven times seven are my transgressions; forgive my
sins!
O my goddess, seven times seven are my transgressions; forgive my
sins!’
Footnote 521:
See above, p. 175.
Footnote 522:
_Cont. Ap._ i. 17, 18.
Footnote 523:
The single reigns are:—(1) Hiram for thirty-four years; (2) Baleazor
for seven years according to the Armenian version of Eusebius and the
Synkellos, seventeen years according to Niese’s text of Josephus; (3)
Abdastartos nine years; (4) Methuastartos twelve years; (5) Astarymos
nine years; (6) Phelles eight months; (7) Eithobalos or Eth-Baal
thirty-two years (forty-eight years according to Theophilus _ad
Autolyc._ III.); (8) Balezor six years (seven years according to
Theoph., eight years according to Euseb. and the Synk.); (9) Matgenos
twenty-nine years (twenty-five years according to the Arm. Vers. of
Euseb.); (10) Pygmalion forty-seven years.
Footnote 524:
_I.e._ seventy-two years after the foundation of Rome; Trogus Pompeius
_ap._ Justin. xviii. 7; Oros. iv. 6. Velleius Paterculus (i. 6) makes
it seven years later.
Footnote 525:
See 1 Kings xii. 18. For the forced labour or _corvée_ see 1 Kings v.
13, 14.
Footnote 526:
The Vatican manuscript of the Septuagint has a wholly different list
from that of the Hebrew text, Baasha the son of Ahithalam taking the
place of Azariah as Vizier, Abi the son of Joab being
commander-in-chief, and Ahira the son of Edrei tax-master, while
Benaiah remains commander of the bodyguard as in David’s reign. The
list is perhaps derived from a document that belonged to the early
part of Solomon’s reign. The Syriac reads Zakkur for Zabud, the royal
chaplain; but Zabud is supported by the Vatican Septuagint, which
makes him the chief councillor. For the reading ‘army’ or ‘bodyguard’
instead of the senseless πατριᾶς in iv. 6, see Field, _Origenis
Hexaplorum quæ supersunt_, i. p. 598.
Footnote 527:
See Hommel, _The Ancient Hebrew Tradition_, pp. 252 _sqq._
Footnote 528:
The papyrus in which the history of the expedition is recorded is
preserved in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, and has not yet been
published. Mr. Golénischeff, its discoverer, however, has given me a
verbal account of it.
Footnote 529:
There is no gold in Southern Arabia, and consequently Ophir must have
been an emporium to which the gold was brought for transhipment from
elsewhere. The mines were probably at Zimbabwe and the neighbourhood,
where Mr. Theodore Bent made important excavations. For the site of
Ophir, which may have been near Gerrha in the Persian Gulf, see Sayce
in the _Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology, June 1896,
p. 174.
Footnote 530:
1 Kings v. 16. These taskmasters must be distinguished from the 550
(or 250 according to 2 Chron. viii. 10) who superintended the work in
Jerusalem itself (ix. 23), on which no Israelites were employed, but
only native Canaanites (ix. 21, 22). The Chronicler makes the
overseers of the preparatory work 3600 in number (2 Chron. ii. 18),
the _corvée_ itself consisting of 150,000 men.
Footnote 531:
See my article in the _Quarterly Statement_ of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, 1883, pp. 215-223, where I have staked the
justification of my views on the discovery of the ‘stairs’ near the
spot where the rock-cut steps have been found by Dr. Bliss (_Ibid._
1896-97). Dr. Guthe first noticed that a shallow valley once existed
between the Temple-hill and the so-called ‘Ophel.’
Footnote 532:
The columns were 18 cubits high (1 Kings vii. 15), though the
Chronicler (2 Chron. iii. 15) makes them 35 cubits or 52-1/2 feet. The
_khammânîm_ or ‘Sun-pillars,’ dedicated to the Sun and associated with
the worship of Asherah and Baal, are often referred to in the Old
Testament (2 Chron. xxxiv. 4; Is. xvii. 8, etc.), and are mentioned in
a Palmyrene inscription.
Footnote 533:
A translation of the hymn is given in my Hibbert Lectures on the
_Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, pp. 495, 496; see also p. 63.
Footnote 534:
Layard, _Monuments of Nineveh_, i. plate 7A.
Footnote 535:
See above, p. 196.
Footnote 536:
Herod. i. 181.
Footnote 537:
See Ball, _The India House Inscription of Nebuchadrezzar_ in the
_Records of the Past_, new ser., iii. pp. 104-123.
Footnote 538:
1 Kings viii. 2. In vi. 38, however, it is said that the work was not
completed until the eighth month of the year, the Phœnician Bul.
Footnote 539:
To these the Chronicler adds ‘Beth-horon the Upper’ (2 Chron. viii.
5). Possibly the two Beth-horons were fortified in connection with the
reservoirs which Solomon is supposed to have constructed in order to
supply Jerusalem with water. Baalath was, strictly speaking, in Dan
(Josh. xix. 44). The Latin form Palmyra comes from Tadmor by
assimilation to _palma_, ‘a palm.’ The change of _d_ to _l_ in Latin
words is familiar to etymologists, and the initial _p_ for _t_ is
paralleled by _pavo_, ‘a peacock,’ from the Greek ταὧς (Persian
_tâwûs_). One of the Septuagint MSS. has Thermath for Tadmor, but in
the ordinary text the whole passage is omitted.
Footnote 540:
Thus ‘Beth-horon the Upper’ is omitted in the verse, and the words ‘in
the land’ (of Judah) have been transposed to the end of it, instead of
coming as they should after ‘Baalath.’
Footnote 541:
_Records of the Past_, new ser., i. p. 115.
Footnote 542:
1 Kings iv. 33. That books are meant, and not lectures such as were
given to his subjects by the Egyptian king Khu-n-Aten, seems evident
from verse 32, compared with Prov. xxv. 1.
Footnote 543:
‘The enemies of Assur,’ says Assur-natsir-pal, he ‘has combated to
their furthest bounds above and below’ (_Records of the Past_, new
ser., ii. p. 136); ‘Countries, mountains, fortresses, and kinglets,
the enemies of Assur, I have conquered,’ says Tiglath-pileser I.
(_Records of the Past_, new ser., i. p. 94).
INDEX.
A
Aaron, 34, 134, 162, 165, 201, 215, 218, 221, 223, 245.
Abarim, 7, 226, 244.
Abdiel, 13, 38.
Abdon, 322.
Abel (city), 436.
Abel-mizraim, 98.
Abesukh (Abishua), 13.
Abi, 459.
Abiah, 355.
Abiathar, 348, 381, 388, 391, 431, 443, 444, 445, 447, 455.
Abibal, 410, 411, 437, 452, 453, 462.
Abiel, 399.
Abi-ezrites, 305, 307, 309, 311.
Abigail, 384, 401, 431.
Abimelech, 242, 306, 310, 316 _sq._
Abimelech of Gerar, 63.
Abinadab, 348, 352, 398.
Abinoam, 299, 303.
Abishag, 445, 455.
Abishai, 384, 408, 417, 426, 432, 436.
Abishar, 459.
Abital, 401.
Abner, 371, 374 _sq._, 436.
Abraham, etymology of, 33, 34.
age of, 143.
Abram (Abi-ramu), 13, 38, 128.
_abrêk_, 87.
Absalom, 146, 401, 429 _sq._, 448.
Abulfarag, 95.
Achan, 251.
Achish, 378, 385, 389.
Achshaph, 259.
Adam (city), 248.
Adino, 406.
Adoni-bezek, 267.
Adonijah, 401, 445, 446, 447, 455.
Adoni-zedek, 254.
Adoram. _See_ Hadoram.
Adriel, 439.
Adullam, 379, 405.
Agag, 367.
Ahiah. _See_ Ahimelech.
Ahijah, 373, 376, 476.
Ahimaaz, 369, 431, 433, 459.
Ahimelech or Ahiah, 348, 363, 365, 378, 381, 443.
the Hittite, 384.
Ahinoam, 369.
wife of David, 384, 401.
Ahira, 459.
Ahitophel, 430, 432.
Ahitub, 348, 349, 353, 443.
Ahmes, 148.
‘Captain,’ 89, 92, 95.
Aholiab, 198.
Ai, 14, 247, 251, 254, 258, 269.
Aijalon, 257, 363.
in Zebulon, 322.
Akiamos, 292, 293.
Aleppo, 421.
Alexander the Great, 185.
Allon-bachuth, 298.
_alûphîm_, 67, 224.
Amalek, city of, 367.
Amalekites, 43, 46, 186, 189, 215, 230, 234, 247, 289, 303, 307, 322,
367, 386, 391, 392, 395, 426.
Amasa, 431 _sq._
amber, 475.
Ameni, 175, 231.
Amenôphis, 173, 174.
Amenôphis, IV. or Khu-n-Aten, 155, 287.
Ammi, 13, 39, 413.
Ammi-satana (dhitana), 12.
Ammiya, 229.
Ammi-zadoq, 7, 13, 14, 39, 40.
Ammo, 40, 228.
Ammon, 13, 39, 44, 227, 289, 358, 401, 417 _sq._, 427, 457.
Ammonites, 322, 323, 398, 432.
Amnon, 401, 429.
Amon, 156, 158, 237.
Amorites, 2, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 24, 38, 42 _sq._, 56, 57, 231,
252, 264, 285, 292, 353, 415.
Amram, 162.
Amraphel (_see_ Khammu-rabi), 12, 24, 117, 126, 128, 147, 149, 295.
Amu, 6.
Amurru (Amorites), 15, 30, 42.
Anab, 266.
Anakim, 41, 53, 294, 370.
Anath, 295.
Anathoth, 237, 455.
angels, Babylonian, 194.
Ansarîyeh, 37.
Anu, 295, 350.
Anuti, 3.
Aperu, 3.
Aphek, 261, 262, 346, 387, 391.
Apophis, 23, 85, 95, 99, 148.
Apuriu, 2, 173.
Ar, 44, 227.
Arad, 182, 217, 257, 263, 329.
Aram, 368, 401, 417, 473, 478.
Aramaic, 34 _sq._
Araunah, 441.
Arba, 53.
Argob, 227, 322.
_ariel_, 416.
Arioch (_see_ Eri-Aku), 11, 24, 26, 58, 128.
ark, 196 _sq._, 346 _sq._, 354, 413, 456, 468.
Arnon, 43, 222, 223, 226.
Aroer, 392, 393.
Arphaxad, 143.
Arrian, 185.
Arumah, 318.
Arvad, 231, 285, 461.
Asahel, 400.
Asenath, 84.
Ashdod, 292, 293, 349, 351.
Asher, 78, 248, 304, 311, 314.
Asherah (Asratu), 15, 241, 274, 307, 468.
Ashkelon, 56, 159, 292, 396.
Ashtaroth-Karnaim, 24, 41, 223, 227.
Ashurites, 401.
Asshurim, 7, 223, 231.
Assur-bil-kala, 231.
Assur-irbi, 231, 437.
Assur-natsir-pal, 359, 478.
Assyrians, 21, etc., 418, 451.
Astruc, 105.
_asyla_, 235, 236.
Aten-Ra, 156.
Atonement, day of, 134.
Aup, 229.
Avaris, 23, 173.
Avim, 294.
Azariah, 459.
Azekah, 369.
Azmaveth, 445.
B
Baal, 308.
Baalath of Judah, 471.
Baal-berith, 283, 310.
Baale-Judah, 413.
Baal-hanan, 356, 445.
Baal-Peor, 233, 244.
Baal-perazim, 407.
Baal-zephon, 181.
Baanah, 404.
Baasha, 459.
Baba, 93.
Babylon, 11, 12.
Babylonia, 2, etc.
kings of, 12, 147.
Babylonian law, 57 _sq._
ritual, 204.
Bad-makh-dingirene, 26.
Baethgen, 306.
Balaam, 40, 132, 224, 228 _sq._, 234.
Balak, 228.
Balawât, 197, 202.
Barak, 296 _sq._, 311.
Baring-Gould, 195.
Barzillai, 439, 447.
Bashan, 24, 223, 227, 235, 322, 457.
Bastian, 31.
Bath-sheba, 263, 424, 429, 445, 446.
Baxter, 135.
Beer, 318.
Beeroth, 252, 404.
Beer-Sheba, 64, 353.
Bela, son of Beor (_see_ Balaam), 224.
Belbeis, 96, 154, 171.
Benaiah, 416, 443, 446, 462.
Ben-Hadad, 420, 451.
Beni-Yaakan, 221.
Benjamin, 76, 79, 253, 268, 275 _sq._, 303.
Ben-Oni, 79.
Bent, 463.
Berger, 34.
Berothai, 423.
Beth-Anoth, 285.
Beth-barah, 312, 317, 318, 319.
Beth-car, 352.
Beth-el, 69, 70, 81, 247, 253, 277, 298, 345, 353, 354, 363.
Beth-horon, 255, 471, 472.
Beth-lehem, 81, 264, 268, 275, 279, 338, 369, 371, 377.
Beth-lehem in Zebulon, 322.
Beth-On, 70, 79, 86, 253, 363.
Beth-Rehob, 420.
Beth-Shean, Beth-Shan, 247, 252, 296, 394
Beth-Shemesh, 351, 352.
Bethuel, 65.
Beybars I., Sultan, 249.
Bezek, 247, 267, 359.
Bint-Anat, 161.
Birch, 185.
Bissell, 110.
Bliss, 255, 256, 410, 466, 467, 475.
Boaz, 394.
Boaz, (a column), 467.
Boeckh, 453.
Briggs, 105.
Brinton, 42.
Browne, Sir Th., 201.
Brugsch, 3, 93, 149, 150, 179, 180.
Brünnow, 4.
Bubastis, 154.
Budde, 226, 290, 297.
Bul (month), 469.
Burna-buryas, 21.
C
Caleb, 246, 256, 263 _sq._, 269, 287, 392, 394, 397.
calendar changed, 178.
camels, 169.
Canaan, 2, 8, 11, 21, 34, 131, 159, 160, 217.
Canaanitish. _See_ Hebrew.
Caphtor, 291.
Carchemish, 19, 40, 55, 228, 285, 419, 472.
Carmel of Judah, 285, 383.
Carthage, 288, 453.
Casdim, 8.
census, 210, 440.
Chabas, 3.
Chærêmôn, 174.
Chedor-laomer, 11, 24, 26, 128.
Chemosh, 40, 44, 416, 478.
Chephirah, 252.
Cherethithes, 392.
Cheyne, 304, 305.
Chileab, 401.
Chinnereth, 259.
Chronicles, books of, 140.
chronology, 142 _sq._, 211, 451.
Chun, 423.
Chushan-rishathaim, 286, 287.
circumcision, 31, 165, 250.
Clercq, de, 202.
Clermont-Ganneau, 29, 52, 249, 252, 346.
copper, 474.
Cornill, 343.
Cornwall, 474.
Covenant, book of, 101, 136, 196.
cuneiform characters, use of in Israel, 244, 339.
Cushite wife of Moses, 215.
Cyprus, 230, 285, 474.
D
Dagon, 294, 349, 350.
Damascus, 25, 28, 368, 373, 421, 423, 438, 462, 477.
Dan, 76, 80, 248, 254, 263, 280, 294, 304, 320, 330.
Camp of, 279, 280.
Dangin, Thureau-, 10.
Daressy, 14, 223.
David, 146, 369 _sq._
City of, 465, 466.
Day of Atonement, 208.
Debir (king), 254.
Debir (city), 265.
Deborah, 81, 295 _sq._
Song of, 273 _sq._
Dedan, 45.
Delitzsch, Friedrich, 148, 419.
Deluge—story, 122 _sq._
Derketô, 292.
Deuteronomy, 101, 219, 238 _sq._
Dhi-Zahab, 222.
Dibon, 79.
Diktynna, 294.
Dinhabah (Dunip), 37, 224.
Diodoros, 96, 97, 184.
Dodah, 416.
Doeg, 356, 381.
Dor (_Tantûra_), 247, 252, 259, 261, 294, 313, 387, 457.
Driver, 143.
Dungi, 60.
Dusratta, 287.
Dussaud, 37.
E
Ebal, 242, 243.
Ebed-Tob, 3, 28, 29, 128, 254, 266, 441.
Ebed-Asherah, 229.
Eben-ezer, 346, 352, 354.
Eber, 7, 231, 285.
Ebers, 86.
Ebir-nâri, 7, 8, 231, 423.
Ebronah, 7, 221.
Ecclesiasticus, book of, 137.
Edar, tower of, 82.
Edom, 39, 66 _sq._, 120, 132, 155, 182, 189, 190, 222, 224, 230, 288,
356, 368, 401, 426, 427, 442, 454, 463, 477.
Edom (god), 413.
Edrei, 227.
Egibi, 69.
Eglah, 401.
Eglon (king of Moab), 289 _sq._
Eglon (city), 254, 256.
Egypt, 2, etc., 418.
Egyptians in Israel, 288.
Ehud, 290.
Eisenlohr, 151.
Ekron, 351, 371.
El, 46.
Elah, 226, 369, 371, 374.
Elath, 66, 182, 187, 427, 464.
Elam, 5, 11, 12, 24, 26.
Eleazar, 221, 406, 443.
El-hanan, 356, 369, 372.
El-Hîba (in Egypt), 418.
Eli, 219, 340 _sq._, 381, 443, 455.
Eliab, 459.
Eliadah, 421.
Eliak, 459.
Elijah, 189.
Elim, 182, 187.
Elimelech, 4.
Elishah (Cyprus), 285.
El-Kab, 89, 92, 93.
Elkanah, 339.
Ellasar (Larsa), 25, 138.
Elon, 321.
El-Paran, 187, 226.
embalming, 96, 97.
Emim, 24, 41, 43.
Endor, witch of, 389.
En-gedi, 383.
En-hakkorê, 327, 328.
En-Mishpat (Kadesh-barnea), 191, 215, 220.
Enna (Egyptian writer), 83.
En-rogel (the Fuller’s Well), 446.
ephod, 72, 283, 316.
Ephraim, 76, 79, 253, 303, 313 _sq._, 322 _sq._, 325 _sq._, 334, 335,
338.
Ephrathite, 338.
eponyms, 451.
Erman, 89, 90, 91, 198, 212, 223.
Erech, 11, 12.
Eri-Aku (Arioch), 11, 12, 25, 27, 59.
Esar-haddon, 208, 225.
Esau, 66 _sq._, 74.
Esh-Baal, 368, 393, 398 _sq._, 417, 430, 444.
Eshcol, 216.
Eshtaol, 279, 326.
Eshtemoa, 264.
Etana, 328.
Etham, 180, 187.
Ethanim (month), 469.
eunuchs, 86.
Eurafrican race, 43.
Ewald, 305.
Ezion-geber, 182, 221, 427, 464.
Ezra, 132, 134.
Ezri, 445.
F
Feast of Trumpets, 208.
Fenkhu, 2, 6.
festivals, 194.
firstborn claimed by Baal, 206.
G
Gaal, 318.
Gad (tribe), 76, 80, 227, 232, 235.
Gad (prophet), 345, 380, 388, 440, 442.
Galilee, 467.
gardens, zoological and botanical, 473.
Gath, 266, 351, 378, 386, 408, 413, 414, 432.
Gaza, 180, 258, 292, 293, 294, 328.
Geba, 352.
Gebal, 94, 461.
Gedor, 265.
George Syncellus, 95.
Gerar, 63.
Gerizim, 243, 317.
Geshur, 227, 368, 401, 427, 457.
Gezer, 120, 159, 247, 252, 253, 256, 257, 408, 460, 462.
Gibeah, 275 _sq._, 352, 353, 357, 358, 361, 366, 369, 377, 380, 387,
412, 439.
Gibeon, 252, 254, 352, 353, 436.
Gibeonites, 253, 259, 404, 438, 475.
Gideon (Jerub-baal), 232, 305 _sq._
Gihon, 446, 466.
Gilboa, 387, 393, 396, 399, 404.
Gilead, 227, 235, 304, 312, 322 _sq._, 368, 432, 447, 457.
Gilgal, 250, 261, 290, 353, 357, 360, 361, 366, 367.
Gilgames, Epic of, 123.
Gimil-Sin, 10.
Girshin, 37.
Glaser, 7, 119, 459.
Gob, 408.
Goldziher, 226.
Golénischeff, 175, 291, 294, 313, 461.
Goliath, 353, 356, 369 _sq._, 375, 378, 408.
Gomer (Kimmerians), 131.
Goodwin, 181.
Goshen, 95, 150, 153, 158.
granaries, 92.
Gray, Buchanan, 198.
Greene, Baker, 187.
Gudea, 164, 207.
Gudgodah, 221.
Guthe, 409, 467.
H
Hachilah, 384.
Hadad (god), 15, 241.
Hadad (king), 146, 356, 427, 477.
Hadad, son of Bedad, 232.
Hadad-ezer, 368, 417, 418, 420, 421, 424.
Hadar, 427.
Hadashah, 286.
Hadoram (Adoram), 444, 452, 457, 458, 464.
or Joram, 254, 423.
Hadrach, 419.
Haggith, 401.
Ham (Ammon), 25, 41.
Hamath, 254, 421, 423, 472, 478.
Hamor, 75.
Hannah, 339.
Har-el, 50.
Harosheth, 296, 299, 300.
Harran (Kharran), 8, 9, 15, 65, 71, 350.
Hashmonah, 221.
Hathor, 88.
Haurân, 368, 419.
Havilah, 190, 367.
Havoth-Jair, 227.
Hayman, 243.
Hazeroth, 214.
Hazor, 248, 258, 259 _sq._, 296 _sq._
Heber, 299, 304.
Hebrew language, 35 _sq._
Hebrews, 1, etc., 362.
Hebron, 4, 23, 53, 81, 149, 236, 254, 264, 265, 285, 289, 373, 397,
398, 401, 402, 403, 405, 429.
Helam (Aleppo), 422.
Heliopolis (On), 85, 99, 154, 171.
Hepher, 261, 262.
Herodotos, 14, 31, 96, 468.
Heshbon, 43.
Hesy (_see_ Lachish), 255.
Hexateuch, 100.
Hezekiah, 225.
high-priests, 219, 315.
Hilprecht, 10.
Hinnom, valley of sons of, 409, 466.
Hiram, 410, 452, 453, 462, 463, 464, 465, 480.
Hir-Hor, 461.
Hittites, 14, 21, 22, 29, 40, 54 _sq._, 94, 159, 160, 262, 274, 284,
285, 300, 418, 420, 437, 471, 472, 473, 474.
Hitzig, 300, 378.
Hivites, 262, 274.
Hobab, 213.
Hoffmann, 37.
Hoham, 254.
Hommel, 5, 7, 26, 29, 34, 45, 80, 119, 148, 151, 164, 198, 231, 291,
321, 423, 459.
Hophni, 340.
Hor, 182, 221.
Horam, 256.
Horeb, 164, 189.
Hormah (or Zephath), 215, 217, 258, 392.
hornet, the, 286, 293.
Horites, 2, 24, 66, 74, 159.
horse, the, 90.
Huldah, 297.
Hûleh (Lake Merom), 259, 261.
Hushai, 430, 432, 458.
Hyksos, 6, 22, 69, 83, 84, 85, 90, 95, 99, 148, 154, 174, 212.
I
Ibleam, 252.
Ibzan, 322.
I-chabod, 348.
Iddo, 345.
Inê-Sin, 10, 11.
Ira, 444.
Ir-Shemesh, 285.
Isaac, 46, 62 _sq._
age of, 143.
Ishbi-benob, 408.
Ishmael, 34, 38, 66, 76.
Ishmaelites, 46.
Ishui, 398, 399.
Israel, etymology of, 73.
‘Israelites’ in Egyptian, 159, 172.
Issachar, 80, 252, 296, 297, 303, 313, 314, 321.
Istar (Ashtoreth), 161, 188.
Ithamar, 340, 443.
Ithream, 401.
Ittai, 432.
Iye-ha-Abarim, 225.
J
Jaazer, 227.
Jabesh-gilead, 277, 278, 358, 394.
Jabez, 263.
Jabin, 259 _sq._, 296, 300.
Jachin (column), 467.
Jacob, 67 _sq._
Jacob-el, 13, 38, 68 _sq._, 128.
Jacob’s Well, 75.
Jael, 301, 302, 304.
Jaffa. _See_ Joppa.
Jair, 227, 322.
Jarmuth, 254, 255.
Jasher (Jashar), book of, 136, 257, 396.
Jashobeam, 406.
Jaziz, 445.
Jebus, 268.
Jebusites, 247, 264, 267, 409, 414, 441, 465.
Jedidiah (Solomon), 306, 425.
Jehdeiah, 445.
Jehoshaphat, 443, 458.
Jephthah, 322 _sq._, 335.
Jephthah-el, 326.
Jerahmeel, 263, 320, 386, 392, 393.
Jericho, 177, 248, 250, 258, 263, 289.
Jeroboam, 456, 476.
Jerub-baal (Gideon), 305 _sq._
Jerusalem, 3, 25, 28, 174, 246, 254, 257, 264, 268, 269, 275, 284, 286,
407, 408 _sq._, 441, 464, 470, 471, 480.
Jeshurun, 73, 191, 242, 244.
Jesse, 369, 371.
Jethro, 163, 186, 190.
Jezreel, 262, 384.
Joab, 399 _sq._
Joash, 305 _sq._, 445.
Jobaal, 318.
Jobab, 259.
Joel, 355.
Johanan, 261, 431, 447, 459.
Jonathan, son of Saul, 358, 360 _sq._
Jonathan, son of Moses, 281.
Jonathan, brother of Joab, 408.
Jonathan, son of Uzziah, 445.
Joppa (Jaffa), 294, 311, 410, 412.
Joram, 254.
Jordan, dried up, 249.
Joseph, 79, 82 _sq._
Joseph-el, 13, 38, 68, 128.
Josephus, 410, 421, 422, 452.
Joshebbashebeth, 406.
Joshua, 246 _sq._, 265, 270, 271, 287.
Jotham, 317.
Judah, 37, 76, 80, 258, 263, 264, 267 _sq._, 320 _sq._, 328.
judge (_shophêt_), 190, 288.
Justin, 30.
K
Kabzeel, 416.
Kadesh on the Orontes, 55, 80, 300, 419, 437, 442, 473.
Kadesh in Galilee, 236, 259, 261, 296, 298, 299.
Kadesh-barnea, 187, 189, 191, 215, 220, 221, 258, 267.
Kadmonites (_see_ Kedem), 162, 307.
Kainan, 143.
_kalbu_, 265.
Kallisthenes, 184.
Karians, 415.
Kastor, 293.
Kedem or Qedem (Kadmonites), 163, 306.
Keft, 378.
Keilah, 264, 382.
Kelt, 43.
Kenaz, 80, 263.
Kenites, or ‘Smiths,’ 214, 230, 263, 267, 288, 299, 320, 336, 386, 392.
Kenizzites, 264, 267, 286, 287, 289, 320.
Kennicott, 281.
Keturah, 45.
Kibroth-hattaavah, 214.
Kidron, 409.
king, law about the, 241.
Kirjath-jearim, 252, 279, 348, 352, 354, 412.
Kirjath-Sannah, 265.
Kirjath-Sepher, 265, 287, 330.
Kish, 356.
Kishon, 261, 297, 300, 303, 304, 310, 356.
Kittel, 306.
Kohath, 338.
Korkha, 286.
Kretans, 415, 428, 443.
Krete, 293, 294, 320.
Kudur-Laghghamar. _See_ Chedor-laomer.
Kudur-Nankhundi, 12.
Kush, 161.
Khabirâ, 5.
Khabiri, 3, 4, 254, 266, 284, 286.
Khalaman, 422.
Khammu-rabi (Amraphel), 11, 12, 13, 25, 27, 45, 59, 68, 71.
Khanun, 417, 432.
Khar (Horites), 2, 159, 160, 192.
Kharran. _See_ Harran.
Khetem (Etham), 180, 181, 187.
Khubur, 5.
Khu-n-Aten (Amenôphis IV.), 156, 157.
L
Laban, 36, 71 _sq._
Laban (god), 18.
Lachish, 20, 120, 248, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 267, 475.
Laish, 248, 259, 280 _sq._
Lakhmu, 81.
Lapidoth, 297.
Larsa (Ellasar), 11, 12, 25, 27, 28, 117, 138.
lawgiver, the, 121.
Leah, 71.
Lebanon, 11.
Lehmann, 60.
Lemuel, 13.
Lenormant, Fr., 473.
Lepsius, 454.
Levi, 76, 80, 134, 201.
Levite, story of the, 275 _sq._
Levite of Ephraim, 279 _sq._
Levites, 218 _sq._, 234, 239, 243, 378, 413.
cities of, 235 _sq._, 282.
Libnah, 255.
Libyans, 20, 42, 159, 171, 172, 175, 212.
Lihyanian, 35.
Lindl, 25.
Lot, 39, 44.
Lotan, 2.
Luz, 81.
Lycians, 415.
Lydians, 292, 293.
M
Maachah, 227, 417, 436.
Maachah wife of David, 429.
Maachah or Maoch of Gath, 378, 379.
Machir, 76, 121, 144, 227, 303, 313.
Machpelah, 53, 97.
Madai, 131.
Madon, 259.
Mafkat (Sinaitic Peninsula), 163, 182, 186.
Mahanaim, 73, 398, 400, 432, 457.
Mahler, 151.
Makkedah, 255, 257, 304.
Malcham or Milcom, 426.
Malik (Moloch), 11.
Mamre, 23, 216.
Mâ’n. _See_ Minæans.
Manasseh, 76, 77, 281, 311, 391, 406.
kingdom of, 306.
maneh or mina, 60, 252.
Manetho, 149, 151, 173, 212, 330.
Maoch. _See_ Maachah.
Maon, 383.
Maonites (Minæans), 321.
Maqrîzî, 93, 129.
Marah, 187.
Mariette, 148.
_marna_, 294.
marriage by capture, 277.
Martu (Moreh), 20, 21, 42, 44.
Maspero, 23, 85, 93, 95, 129, 151, 160, 163.
Massah, 214.
Max Müller, W., 22, 266, 378.
Maxyes, 362.
Megiddo, 247, 252, 259, 296, 304, 310, 387.
Meholah, 439.
Meissner, 8, 60.
Melchi-shua, 399.
Melchizedek, 25, 28, 128.
Melkarth, 315, 463, 467.
Melukhkha, 163, 190, 367, 427.
Memphis, 14.
Menander, 185, 410, 452, 480.
Meneptah, son of Ramses II., 22, 64, 94, 96, 149, 150, 154, 155, 159,
160, 170 _sq._, 175, 178, 185, 212, 291, 361, 374.
Men-kheper-Ra, 418.
Mephibosheth (Merib-Baal), 404, 438.
Merab, 374.
Mer’ash, 10.
Meribah, 214, 220.
Merib-Baal (Mephibosheth), 307, 404, 438.
Merom, 259, 262.
Meroz, 274, 304.
Mesopotamia, 284.
Messianic psalms, 450.
_messu_, 161.
Messui or Messu, 161, 215.
_metheg-ammah_, 414.
mice, 351.
Micah, 278.
Michal, 374, 384, 413, 439.
Michmash, 349, 353, 361, 362, 366.
Midian, 32, 45, 163, 190, 213, 232 _sq._, 263, 306 _sq._
Migdol, 180, 181, 184.
Millo, 319, 466, 476.
Minæans (Mâ’n), 7, 34, 45, 119, 198, 459, 460.
Minos, 293.
Miriam, 162, 214, 223.
Mitanni, 17, 18, 284 _sq._, 300, 419, 462.
Mizpah, 36, 245, 262, 324, 345, 352, 353, 358.
Moab, 223, 226, 232, 289, 368, 381, 415, 457.
Moabite Stone, 146, 416.
Mopsos, 292.
Moreh, 21, 44.
Moriah, 49, 51, 465.
Moseley, H. N., 31.
Moseroth or Mosera, 220.
Moses, 161 _sq._, 281.
songs of, 243.
death of, 244.
Mount of the Lord, 50.
Müller, D. H., 35, 231.
Muzri, 183.
N
Nabal, 383.
Nabatheans, 40, 419.
Nabonassar, 12.
Nabonidos, 16.
Nadab and Abihu, 207.
Naharaim (Mesopotamia), 17, 40, 284 _sq._
Nahash (of Ammon), 358, 417, 432.
Nahash (aunt of Joab), 431.
Nahor, 18, 19.
Nahshon, 145.
Naioth (‘the monastery’), 342, 344, 376.
name changed, 32.
Naphtali, 80, 311, 457.
Naram-Sin, 24, 188.
Nathan, 345, 412, 425, 442, 445, 446, 456, 458.
‘Nations’ (Goyyim), 26.
Naville, 95, 129, 149, 153, 154, 183.
Nebat, 476.
Nebo, 245, 343, 416.
Nebuchadrezzar, 196, 197, 288, 418, 468, 469.
Negeb, the, 246, 254, 257, 269, 329, 392.
Ner, 398, 399.
Nethinim, the, 354, 475.
Neubauer, 37, 162, 224, 302, 476.
Nile, 88, 93, 94.
Nin-ip, 29, 441.
Nin-Marki, 15.
Nin-Martu, 59.
Noah, 123, 124, 126.
Noam, 299.
Nob, 237, 349, 353, 369, 372, 378, 380, 408, 438, 444.
Nobah, 227.
O
Obed-Edom, 413.
Obil, 445.
Oboth, 225.
Og, 43, 224, 227.
On (Heliopolis), 85, 86, 154, 174.
Ophel, 466, 467.
Ophir, 463.
Ophrah, 283, 305, 307 _sq._, 338.
Oppert, 148.
Oreb, 312.
Oros, 173.
Osarsiph, 174.
Osiris, 223.
Othniel, 256, 263, 266, 287 _sq._
P
Padan (-Aram), 16, 17, 69.
Pa-ebpasa, 179.
palace of David, 452.
palace of Solomon, 465.
Palestine, name of, 398.
Palmyra (Tadmor), 471, 472, 473.
Paran, 186, 213, 383.
mount of, 189.
Passover, the, 176 _sq._
peacocks, 474.
Peiser, 8, 59, 60, 71, 148.
Pella, 259.
Peniel, or Penuel, 73, 312.
Perizzites, or ‘fellahin,’ 228.
Pethor, 40, 228.
Petra, 188, 214, 233.
Petrie, Flinders, 20, 21, 56, 60, 151, 159, 170, 255.
Phaltiel, 384, 439.
Pharaoh, etymology of, 97.
Phichol, 64.
Philistines, 64, 180, 257, 291 _sq._, 320, 326 _sq._, 335, 437.
Philo Byblius, 46.
Phinehas, 145, 215, 233, 275, 443.
Phineas son of Eli, 340, 348.
Phœnician alphabet, 119.
Phœnicians, 2, 30, 35, 94, 454, 467.
Phœnician sacrificial tariffs, 204, 205, 206.
Pi-hahiroth, 181.
Pinches, 12, 13, 26, 60, 68, 70, 295.
Pinon. _See_ Punon.
Piram, 255, 256.
Pirathon, 322.
Pithom (Pi-Tum), 149, 150, 153, 154, 155, 166.
plagues, the ten, 167 _sq._
Pliny, 97.
Plutarch, 184.
polygamy, 316, 428.
Porphyry, 306.
Potiphar’s wife, 83.
Potipherah (Potiphar), 84, 86.
Priestly Code, the, 101, 103, 106.
prophet, the, 341 _sq._
Ptah-hotep, 98, 118.
Puah, 321.
Punon or Pinon, 225, 226.
Pur-Sin, 20.
Q
Qarantel, mount, 250.
Qedem. _See_ Kedem.
Qos, 356.
Qosem (Goshen), 95, 153, 154.
Quê, 419, 473.
R
Raamses (Rameses or Ramses), 150.
Rabbah, 44, 227, 228.
Rabbath-Ammon (Rabbah), 417, 424, 426, 432.
Rab-saris, the, 86.
Rab-shakeh, the, 459.
Rachel, 71, 81, 82.
ram in sacrifice, 52.
Ramah, 298, 344, 346, 349, 352, 357, 367, 376.
Ramathaim-zophim, 338, 352.
Ramath-lehi, 327, 328.
Rameses or Raamses, city of, 179.
Ramoth of the South, 392.
Ramoth-Gilead, 457.
Ramsay, W. M., 237.
Ramses or Rameses I., 150, 153, 158.
Ramses II., 4, 55, 64, 78, 148, 149, 150, 154, 180, 223, 266, 379, 415,
464.
Ramses III., 3, 4, 67, 150, 171, 222, 224, 285, 291, 292.
Ramses IV., 3, 212.
Ramses VI., 186.
Rassam, Hormuzd, 197.
Rechab, 404.
‘Red Sea,’ the, 182.
refuge, cities of, 235.
Rehob, 420.
Rehoboam, 452.
Rei, 446.
Reisner, 15.
Rekem, 233.
Rephaim, 24, 41, 227.
plain of, 407.
Rephidim, 189.
Reshpu, 413.
resurrection, 210.
Reuben, 77, 80, 227, 232, 235, 289, 303, 392.
Reuel, 63.
Rezon, 147, 421, 437, 452, 462, 477.
Rib-Hadad, 94, 284, 306.
Rimmon (god), 15, 30, 299.
Rimmon (Benjamite), 404.
rock of, 277.
Rizpah, 402, 439.
Rowlands, J., 215.
Ruth, 263, 394.
S
Saba or Sheba, 119, 163, 219.
Sabæans, in Babylonia, 13.
Sabbath, Babylonian etymology of, 193, 208.
Sachau, 19.
sacrifices, 197 _sq._
Babylonian, 197.
human, 46 _sq._, 324.
Saft-el-Henna (Goshen), 96, 153, 154.
Sakea, Babylonian feast of, 209.
Salem or Jerusalem, 28, 268.
Salimmu, god of peace, 28.
Salma or Salmon, 394.
Samâla or Samalla, 36, 231.
Samaritans, 100, 103.
Samson, 327 _sq._
Samsu-iluna, 45.
Samuel, 242, 245, 335 _sq._, 365 _sq._, 389.
sanctuary, central, 240.
Saph, 459.
Sardinians, 293.
Sargon of Akkad, 10, 20, 161.
Sarid, 303.
Saul, 146, 190, 356 _sq._
Saxon conquest of Britain, 252, 269, 271.
scapegoat, the, 48.
Scheil, 12, 27.
Schliemann, 475.
Schumacher, 223.
scribes, 121.
‘sea’ in the temple, 468.
Sebaita (Zephath), 215.
seer. _See_ prophet.
Seir, 24, 66, 67, 74, 162, 171, 188, 222.
Seirath, 290.
Selamanês, 425.
Sennacherib, 137, 152, 257, 260, 359, 383.
Septuagint, 136, 154.
Seraiah, 443, 444.
seraph, 225.
serpents, bronze, in Babylonia, 225, 353.
Set, 165.
Sethos (Ramses), 174.
Seti I., 2, 158, 216.
Seti II., 83, 98, 151, 178, 180, 185.
Set-Nubti, 148.
Shalman, 425.
Shamgar, 295, 301, 320.
Shamir, 321.
Shammah, 406.
Shapher, 221.
Shasu, 67, 171, 217, 222.
Sharon, 261.
Shavsha, 443.
Sheba (Benjamite), 435, 436, 440.
Sheba or Saba, 45, 119, 163, 321, 459, 460.
Shechem, 22, 75, 76, 262, 269, 270, 283, 309, 316 _sq._
shekel, 60.
Shelomith, 207.
Shem (Babylonian Sumu), 13.
Shemesh-Edom, 413.
Shephatiah, 401.
shepherd, 90.
Sheth, 230.
Sheva, 443, 444.
shewbread, 197, 468.
_shibboleth_, 325.
Shiloh, 269, 270, 275, 277, 281, 283, 320, 333, 334, 337, 339, 344
_sq._, 352, 353, 378, 444, 476.
Shimei (Benjamite), 430, 438, 439, 447, 455.
Shimei (official of David), 445, 446.
Shimron, 259.
Shimron-meron, 260.
Shinar, 11, 25.
Shisha, 443, 444, 458.
Shishak, 84, 252, 263, 453, 476, 477.
Shobach or Shophach, 418, 421.
Shobi, 432.
Shunem, 387, 445.
Shur, 181, 183, 187, 190.
Siddim, 24, 30.
Sidon, 259, 262, 274, 280, 321.
Sihon, 43, 224, 226.
Siloam, pool of, 466.
Simeon, 76, 80, 263, 320, 329, 392.
Sin (moon-god), 9, 16, 188.
desert of, 188, 189.
Sinai, 164, 188, 302.
mount, 188, 191 _sq._
Sinaitic Peninsula, 163, 182, 186, 187.
Sin-idinnam, 12, 27.
Sinjerli, 19, 36, 138.
Sinuhit, 162.
Sippara (Sepharvaim), 14, 57.
Sisera, 261, 296 _sq._
slave, penalty for murder of, 194.
Smith, G. A., 36.
Socho or Socoh, 265, 369.
Sodom, 25, 30.
Solomon, 146, 306, 425, 445, 447, 452 _sq._
proverbs of, 138.
sphinx, 88.
Spinoza, 105.
Stade, 103, 278, 409.
Stone of Job, 223.
Strabo, 185.
Strassmaier, 59, 197.
strikes, 166.
Subarti, 5, 16.
Succoth, 150, 155, 179, 180, 181, 312.
Suez Canal, 212.
Sumu-abi, 13.
Suphah, 222.
Suru (Syria), 16.
Sutekh, 22, 23, 85, 148.
Sutu or Sutê, 230, 289.
Suweinît, Wâdi, 362.
T
Taanach, 247, 252, 261, 296, 304.
Taberah, 214.
tabernacle, the, 196 _sq._, 353, 414.
tables of the law, 202.
Tabor, 299, 309, 310.
Tadmor, 471, 472.
Tahtim-hodshi, 300.
Takmonite, 406.
tale of the two brothers, 83.
Talmai, 401, 429.
Tamar (wife of Judah), 82.
Tamar (daughter of David), 429.
Tamar (city of), 471.
Tappuah, 261, 262.
Tarkhu, 19.
tartan, the, 374, 443.
Tatian, 105.
Tatnai, 8.
tattooing, 200, 241.
Teie, 155, 158.
Tel el-Amarna, 2, etc.
tablets of, 113 _sq._
Tel el-Maskhûta, 149, 154, 166.
Tema, 45, 459.
Teman, 189.
temple, when built, 145, 412.
of Solomon, 464, 467 _sq._
Terah, 18, 19.
teraphim, 72, 80, 279.
Thapsacus (Tiphsakh), 472.
Thebes in Egypt, 461.
Thebez, 319.
Themistokles, 237.
Thothmes III., 20, 41, 50, 55, 68, 80, 84, 98, 175, 217, 237, 259
_sq._, 280, 300, 311, 323, 413, 423, 473.
Thothmes IV., 88.
Thukut (Succoth), 149, 155, 179, 180, 181.
Tiamat, 125.
Tibhath, 423.
Tid’al, 12, 24, 26, 128.
Tiglath-pileser I., 231, 419, 461, 474, 478.
Tiglath-pileser III., 138, 230, 281, 424, 425, 451, 459, 460.
Tiglath-Ninip, 418.
Timnath-heres, 271.
tin, 474.
Tirzah, 261.
tithe, 29.
Tob, 323, 417.
Toi or Tou, 423.
Tola, 321.
Tomkins, H. G., 20, 80, 81, 84, 259, 300.
Travels of the Mohar, 266, 416.
tribes, the twelve, 77.
Trumbull, Clay, 176, 215, 350.
Tubikhi (Tibhath), 423.
Tudghula. _See_ Tid’al.
Tumilât, Wâdi (Goshen), 95, 153, 154, 155.
Tunip (_see_ Dinhabah), 65.
Tyre, 274, 288, 315, 410, 457, 462, 463, 465, 467, 480.
Tyropœon valley, 466.
U
Ubi (Aup), 229.
Umman-Manda, 26.
Unger, 454.
Ur of the Chaldees, 8, 9, 11, 16, 60, 127, 209.
Uriah, 424, 425.
Urim and Thummim, 72, 198, 388.
Usous, 66.
Uzzah, 413.
V
Virey, 92, 99.
von Luschan, 36.
W
Warburton, Bishop, 210.
Ward, J., 23.
wedges of gold, 252.
Wellhausen, 103, 145, 297, 300.
Welsh laws, 288.
Wessely, 175.
Wiedemann, 194, 239.
Wilbour, 93.
Wilcken, 175.
Winckler, 148, 183, 266.
Wolf, 104, 121.
Wright, Bateson, 104.
X
Xanthos, 293.
Y
Yabniel, 256.
Ya’di, 37, 80, 231.
Yahveh, 34, 47, 164.
Yahveh-Shalom, 308, 310.
Yahveh-yireh, 49.
Yaphia, 255.
Yâm Sûph (_see_ Suphah), 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 188, 427.
Yaudâ or Yaudû, 37, 80.
Year of Jubilee, 208.
Yeud, 46.
Z
Zabdi, 445.
Zabsali (Zamzummim), 11, 41.
Zadok, 145, 431, 443, 444, 446, 455, 459.
Zahi, 2.
Zakkal. _See_ Zaqqal.
Zalmon, 319.
Zalmonah, 225.
Zalmunna, 312.
Zambesi, 474.
Zamzummim, 11, 25, 41, 43, 138.
Zanoah, 264.
Zaphnath-paaneah, 89, 174.
Zaqqal or Zakkal, 5, 291, 293, 294, 313, 387, 388, 412, 457.
Zared, 226.
Zaretan, 248.
Zaru, 179, 181.
Zebah, 312, 368, 401.
Zebud, 459.
Zebul, 318, 319.
Zebulon, 121, 303, 311, 321.
Zeeb, 312.
Zelah, 358, 439.
Zelophehad, 144, 207.
Zephath (Hormah), 217, 246, 257, 258, 329, 392.
Zeruiah, 400, 431.
Ziba, 438.
Ziklag, 386, 389, 391, 392.
Zimrida, 256.
Zin, 220.
Zion, 410, 466.
Ziph, 382, 384.
Zippor, 228.
Zipporah, 163, 165, 215.
Zoan (Tanis), 23, 53, 90, 148, 149, 150, 460.
Zobah, 417, 419, 422, 427, 442, 454, 472, 477.
Zoheleth, 446.
Zorah, 279, 320, 326.
Zuph or Ziph, 338.
Zuzim, 11, 24, 25, 41, 138.
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the sections in which they are
referenced.
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