Chapter III: The Babylonians in Canaan and the Egyptian Conquest (1)

It is in the cuneiform records of Babylonia that we catch the first glimpse of the early history of Canaan. Babylonia was not yet united under a single head. From time to time some prince arose whose conquests allowed him to claim the imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of Southern and Northern Babylonia, but the claim was never of long duration, and often it signified no more than a supremacy over the other rulers of the country.

It was while Babylonia was thus divided into more than one kingdom, that the first Chaldæan empire of which we know was formed by the military skill of Sargon of Akkad. Sargon was of Semitic origin, but his birth seems to have been obscure. His father, Itti-Bel, is not given the title of king, and the later legends which gathered around his name declared that his mother was of low degree, that his father he knew not, and that his father's brother lived in the mountain-land. Born in secrecy in the city of Azu-pirani, "whence the elephants issue forth," he was launched by his mother on the waters of the Euphrates in an ark of bulrushes daubed with pitch. The river carried the child to Akki the irrigator, who had compassion upon it, and brought it up as his own son. So Sargon became an agriculturist and gardener like his adopted father, till the goddess Istar beheld and loved him, and eventually gave him his kingdom and crown.

Whatever may have been the real history of Sargon's rise to power, certain it is that he showed himself worthy of it. He built himself a capital, which perhaps was Akkad near Sippara, and there founded a library stocked with books on clay and well provided with scribes. The standard works on astronomy and terrestrial omens were compiled for it, the first of which was translated into Greek by Berossos in days long subsequent. But it was as a conqueror and the founder of the first Semitic empire in Western Asia that posterity chiefly remembered him. He overthrew his rivals at home, and made himself master of Northern Babylonia. Then he marched into Elam on the east, and devastated its fields. Next he turned his attention to the west. Four times did he make his way to "the land of the Amorites," until at last it was thoroughly subdued. His final campaign occupied three years. The countries "of the sea of the setting sun" acknowledged his dominion, and he united them with his former conquests into "a single" empire. On the shores of the Mediterranean he erected images of himself in token of his victories, and caused the spoil of Cyprus "to pass over into the countries of the sea." Towards the end of his reign a revolt broke out against him in Babylonia, and he was besieged in the city of Akkad, but he "issued forth and smote" his enemies and utterly destroyed them. Then came his last campaign against Northern Mesopotamia, from which he returned with abundant prisoners and spoil.

Sargon's son and successor was Naram-Sin, "the beloved of the Moon-god," who continued the conquests of his father. His second campaign was against the land of Magan, the name under which Midian and the Sinaitic peninsula were known to the Babylonians. The result of it was the addition of Magan to his empire and the captivity of its king.

The copper mines of Magan, which are noticed in an early Babylonian geographical list, made its acquisition coveted alike by Babylonians and Egyptians. We find the Pharaohs of the third dynasty already establishing their garrisons and colonies of miners in the province of Mafkat, as they called it, and slaughtering the Beduin who interfered with them. The history of Naram-Sin shows that its conquest was equally an object of the Babylonian monarchs at the very outset of their history. But whereas the road from Egypt to Sinai was short and easy, that from Babylonia was long and difficult. Before a Babylonian army could march into the peninsula it was needful that Syria should be secure in the rear. The conquest of Palestine, in fact, was necessary before the copper mines of Sinai could fall into Babylonian hands.

The consolidation of Sargon's empire in the west, therefore, was needful before the invasion of the country of Magan could take place, and the invasion accordingly was reserved for Naram-Sin to make. The father had prepared the way; the son obtained the great prize--the source of the copper that was used in the ancient world.

The fact that the whole of Syria is described in the annals of Sargon as "the land of the Amorites," implies, not only that the Amorites were the ruling population in the country, but also that they must have extended far to the south. The "land of the Amorites" formed the basis and starting-point for the expedition of Naram-Sin into Magan; it must, therefore, have reached to the southern border of Palestine, if not even farther. The road trodden by his forces would have been the same as that which was afterwards traversed by Chedor-laomer, and would have led him through Kadesh-barnea. Is it possible that the Amorites were already in possession of the mountain-block within which Kadesh stood, and that this was their extreme limit to the south?

There were other names by which Palestine and Syria were known to the early Babylonians, besides the general title of "the land of the Amorites." One of these was Tidanum or Tidnum; another was Sanir or Shenir. There was yet another, the reading of which is uncertain, though it may be Khidhi or Titi.

Mr. Boscawen has pointed out a coincidence that is at least worthy of attention. The first Babylonian monarch who penetrated into the peninsula of Sinai bore a name compounded with that of the Moon-god, which thus bears witness to a special veneration for that deity. Now the name of Mount Sinai is similarly derived from that of the Babylonian Moon-god Sin. It was the high place where the god must have been adored from early times under his Babylonian name. It thus points to Babylonian influence, if not to the presence of Babylonians on the spot. Can it have been that the mountain whereon the God of Israel afterwards revealed Himself to Moses was dedicated to the Moon-god of Babylon by Naram-Sin the Chaldæn conqueror?

If such indeed were the case, it would have been more than two thousand years before the Israelitish exodus. Nabonidos, the last king of the later Babylonian empire, who had a fancy for antiquarian exploration, tells us that Naram-Sin reigned 3200 years before his own time, and therefore about 3750 B.C. The date, startlingly early as it seems to be, is indirectly confirmed by other evidence, and Assyriologists consequently have come to accept it as approximately correct.

How long Syria remained a part of the empire of Sargon of Akkad we do not know. But it must have been long enough for the elements of Babylonian culture to be introduced into it. The small stone cylinders used by the Babylonians for sealing their clay documents thus became known to the peoples of the West. More than one has been found in Syria and Cyprus which go back to the age of Sargon and Naram-Sin, while there are numerous others which are more or less barbarous attempts on the part of the natives to imitate the Babylonian originals. But the imitations prove that with the fall of Sargon's empire the use of seal-cylinders in Syria, and consequently of documents for sealing, did not disappear. That knowledge of writing, which was a characteristic of Babylonian civilization, must have been carried with it to the shores of the Mediterranean.

The seal-cylinders were engraved, sometimes with figures of men and gods, sometimes with symbols only. Very frequently lines of cuneiform writing were added, and a common formula gave the name of the owner of the seal, along with those of his father and of the deity whom he worshipped. One of the seal-cylinders found in Cyprus describes the owner as an adorer of "the god Naram-Sin." It is true that its workmanship shows it to belong to a much later date than the age of Naram-Sin himself, but the legend equally shows that the name of the conqueror of Magan was still remembered in the West. Another cylinder discovered in the Lebanon mentions "the gods of the Amorite," while a third from the same locality bears the inscription: "Multal-ili, the son of Ili-isme-anni, the worshipper of the god Nin-si-zida." The name of the god signified in the old pre-Semitic language of Chaldæa "the lord of the upright horn," while it is worth notice that the names of the owner and his father are compounded simply with the word _ili_ or _el_, "god," not with the name of any special divinity. Multal-ili means "Provident is God," Ili-isme-anni, "O my God, hear me!"

Many centuries have to elapse before the monuments of Babylonia again throw light on the history of Canaan. Somewhere about B.C. 2700, a high-priest was ruling in a city of Southern Babylonia, under the suzerainty of Dungi, the king of Ur. The high-priest's name was Gudea, and his city (now called Tel-loh by the Arabs) was known as Lagas. The excavations made here by M. de Sarzec have brought to light temples and palaces, collections of clay books and carved stone statues, which go back to the early days of Babylonian history. The larger and better part of the monuments belong to Gudea, who seems to have spent most of his life in building and restoring the sanctuaries of the gods. Diorite statues of the prince are now in the Louvre, and inscriptions upon them state that the stone out of which they were made was brought from the land of Magan. On the lap of one of them is a plan of the royal palace, with the scale of measurement marked on the edge of a sort of drawing-board. Prof. Petrie has shown that the unit of measurement represented in it is the cubit of the pyramid-builders of Egypt.

The diorite of Sinai was not the only material which was imported into Babylonia for the buildings of Gudea. Beams of cedar and box were brought from Mount Amanus at the head of the Gulf of Antioch, blocks of stone were floated down the Euphrates from Barsip near Carchemish, gold-dust came from Melukhkha, the "salt" desert to the east of Egypt which the Old Testament calls Havilah; copper was conveyed from the north of Arabia, limestone from the Lebanon ("the mountains of Tidanum"), and another kind of stone from Subsalla in the mountains of the Amorite land. Before beams of wood and blocks of stone could thus be brought from the distant West, it was necessary that trade between Babylonia and the countries of the Mediterranean should have long been organized, that the roads throughout Western Asia should have been good and numerous, and that Babylonian influence should have been extended far and wide. The conquests of Sargon and Naram-Sin had borne fruit in the commerce that had followed upon them.

Once more the curtain falls, and Canaan is hidden for a while out of our sight. Babylonia has become a united kingdom with its capital and centre at Babylon. Khammurabi (B.C. 2356-2301) has succeeded in shaking off the suzerainty of Elam, in overthrowing his rival Eri-Aku, king of Larsa, with his Elamite allies, and in constituting himself sole monarch of Babylonia. His family seems to have been in part, if not wholly, of South Arabian extraction. Their names are Arabian rather than Babylonian, and the Babylonian scribes found a difficulty in transcribing them correctly. But once in the possession of the Babylonian throne, they became thoroughly national, and under Khammurabi the literary glories of the court of Sargon of Akkad revived once more.

Ammi-satana, the great-grandson of Khammurabi, calls himself king of "the land of the Amorites." Babylonia, therefore, still claimed to be paramount in Palestine. Even the name of the king is an indication of his connection with the West. Neither of the elements of which it is composed belonged to the Babylonian language. The first of them, Ammi, was explained by the Babylonian philologists as meaning "a family," but it is more probable that it represents the name of a god. We find it in the proper names both of Southern and of Northwestern Arabia. The early Minsaean inscriptions of Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-karib, Ammi-zadiqa, and Ammi-zaduq, the last of which is identical with that of Ammi-zaduq, the son and successor of Ammi-satana. The Egyptian Sinuhit, who in the time of the twelfth dynasty fled, like Moses, for his life from the court of the Pharaoh to the Kadmonites east of the Jordan, found protection among them at the hands of their chieftain Ammu-ânshi. The Ammonites themselves were the "sons of Ammi," and in numerous Hebrew names we find that of the god. Ammi-el, Ammi-nadab, and Ammi-shaddai are mentioned in the Old Testament, the Assyrian inscriptions tell us of Ammi-nadab the king of Ammon, and it is possible that even the name of Balaam, the Aramaean seer, may be compounded with that of the god. At all events, the city of Pethor from which he came was "by the river (Euphrates) of the land of the children of Ammo," for such is the literal rendering of the Hebrew words.

Ammi-satana was not the first of his line whose authority had been acknowledged in Palestine. The inscription in which he records the fact is but a confirmation of what had been long known to us from the Book of Genesis. There we read how Chedor-laomer, the king of Elam, with the three vassal princes, Arioch of Ellasar, Amraphel of Shinar, and Tidal of Goyyim invaded Canaan, and how the kings of the vale of Siddim with its pits of asphalt became their tributaries. For thirteen years they remained submissive and then rebelled. Thereupon the Babylonian army again marched to the west. Bashan and the eastern bank of the Jordan were subjugated, the Horites in Mount Seir were smitten, and the invaders then turned back through Kadesh-barnea, overthrowing the Amalekites and the Amorites on their way. Then came the battle in the vale of Siddim, which ended in the defeat of the Canaanites, the death of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrha, and the capture of abundant booty. Among the prisoners was Lot, the nephew of Abram, and it was to effect his rescue that the patriarch armed his followers and started in pursuit of the conquerors. Near Damascus he overtook them, and falling upon them by night, recovered the spoil of Sodom as well as his "brother's son."

Arioch is the Eri-Aku of the cuneiform texts. In the old language of Chaldea the name signified "servant of the Moon-god." The king is well known to us from contemporaneous inscriptions. Besides the inscribed bricks which have come from the temple of the Moon-god which he enlarged in the city of Ur, there are numerous contract tablets that are dated in his reign. He tells us that he was the son of an Elamite, Kudur-Mabug, son of Simti-silkhak, and prince (or "father") of Yamut-bal on the borders of Elam and Babylonia. But this is not all. He further gives Kudur-Mabug the title of "father of the Amorite land." What this title exactly means it is difficult to say; one thing, however, is certain, Kudur-Mabug must have exercised some kind of power and authority in the distant West.

His name, too, is remarkable. Names compounded with Kudur, "a servant," were common in the Elamite language, the second element of the name being that of a deity, to whose worship the owner of it was dedicated. Thus we have Kudur-Lagamar, "the servant of the god Lagamar," Kudur-Nakhkhunte, "the servant of Nakhkhunte." But Mabug was not an Elamite divinity. It was, on the contrary, a Mesopotamian deity from whom the town of Mabug near Carchemish, called Bambykê by the Greeks, and assimilated by the Arabs to their Membij, "a source," derived its name. Can it be from this Syrian deity that the father of Arioch received his name?

The capital of Arioch or Eri-Aku was Larsa, the city of the Sun-god, now called Senkereh. With the help of his Elamite kindred, he extended his power from thence over the greater part of Southern Babylonia. The old city of Ur, once the seat of the dominant dynasty of Chaldæan kings, formed part of his dominions; Nipur, now Niffer, fell into his hands like the seaport Eridu on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and in one of his inscriptions he celebrates his conquest of "the ancient city of Erech." On the day of its capture he erected in gratitude a temple to his god Ingirisa, "for the preservation of his life."

But the god did not protect him for ever. A time came when Khammurabi, king of Babylon, rose in revolt against the Elamite supremacy, and drove the Elamite forces out of the land. Eri-Aku was attacked and defeated, and his cities fell into the hands of the conqueror. Khammurabi became sole king of Babylonia, which from henceforth obeyed but a single sceptre.

Are we to see in the Amraphel of Genesis the Khammurabi of the cuneiform inscriptions? The difference in the names seems to make it impossible. Moreover, Amraphel, we are told, was king of Shinar, and it is not certain that the Shinar of the fourteenth chapter of Genesis was that part of Babylonia of which Babylon was the capital. This, in fact, was the northern division of the country, and if we are to identify the Shinar of scripture with the Sumer of the monuments, as Assyriologists have agreed to do, Shinar would have been its southern half. It is true that in the later days of Hebrew history Shinar denoted the whole plain of Chaldæa, including the city of Babylon, but this may have been an extension of the meaning of the name similar to that of which Canaan is an instance.

Unless Sumer and Shinar are the same words, outside the Old Testament there is only one Shinar known to ancient geography. That was in Mesopotamia. The Greek geographers called it Singara (now Sinjar), an oasis in the midst of deserts, and formed by an isolated mountain tract abounding in springs. It is already mentioned in the annals of the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. In his thirty-third year (B.C. 1470), the king of Sangar sent him tribute consisting of lapis-lazuli "of Babylon," and of various objects carved out of it. From Sangar also horses were exported into Egypt, and in one of the Tel el-Amarna letters, the king of Alasiya in Northern Syria writes to the Pharaoh,--"Do not set me with the king of the Hittites and the king of Sankhar; whatever gifts they have sent to me I will restore to thee twofold." In hieroglyphic and cuneiform spelling, Sangar and Sankhar are the exact equivalents of the Hebrew Shinar.

How the name of Shinar came to be transferred from Mesopotamia to Babylonia is a puzzle. The Mesopotamian Shinar is nowhere near the Babylonian frontier. It lies in a straight line westward of Mosul and the ancient Nineveh, and not far from the banks of the Khabur. Can its application to Babylonia be due to a confusion between Sumer and Sangar?

Whatever the explanation may be, it is clear that the position of the kingdom of Amraphel is by no means so easily determined as has hitherto been supposed. It may be Sumer or Southern Babylonia; it may be Northern Babylonia with its capital Babylon; or again, it may be the Mesopotamian oasis of Sinjar. Until we find the name of Amraphel in the cuneiform texts it is impossible to attain certainty.

There is one fact, however, which seems to indicate that it really is either Sumer or Northern Babylonia that is meant. The narrative of Chedor-laomer's campaign begins with the words that it took place "in the time of Amraphel, king of Shinar." Chedor-laomer the Elamite was the leader of the expedition; he too was the suzerain lord of his allies; and nevertheless the campaign is dated, not in his reign, but in that of one of the subject kings. That the narrative has been taken from the Babylonian annals there is little room for doubt, and consequently it would follow from the dating that Amraphel was a Babylonian prince, perhaps that he was the ruler of the city which, from the days of Khammurabi onward, became the capital of the country. In that case we should have to find some way of explaining the difference between the Hebrew and the Babylonian forms of the royal name.

Lagamar or Lagamer, written Laomer in Hebrew, was one of the principal deities of Elam, and the Babylonians made him a son of their own water-god Ea. The Elamite king Chedor-laomer, or Kudur-Lagamar, as his name was written in his own language, must have been related to the Elamite prince Kudur-Mabug, whose son Arioch was a subject-ally of the Elamite monarch. Possibly they were brothers, the younger brother receiving as his share of power the title of "father"--not "king"--of Yamutbal and the land of the Amorites. At any rate it is a son of Kudur-Mabug and not of the Elamite sovereign who receives a principality in Babylonia.

In the Book of Genesis Arioch is called "king of Ellasar." But Ellasar is clearly the Larsa of the cuneiform inscriptions, perhaps with the word _al_, "city," prefixed. Larsa, the modern Senkereh, was in Southern Babylonia, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Erech, and to the north of Ur. Its king was virtually lord of Sumer, but he claimed to be lord also of the north. In his inscriptions Eri-Aku assumes the imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of both divisions of Babylonia, and it may be that at one time the rival king of Babylon acknowledged his supremacy.

Who "Tidal king of Goyyim" may have been we cannot tell. Sir Henry Rawlinson has proposed to see in Goyyim a transformation of Gutium, the name by which Kurdistan was called in early Babylonia. Mr. Pinches has recently discovered a cuneiform tablet in which mention is made, not only of Eri-Aku and Kudur-Lagamar, but also of Tudkhul, and Tudkhul would be an exact transcription in Babylonian of the Hebrew Tidal. But the tablet is mutilated, and its relation to the narrative of Genesis is not yet clear. For the present, therefore, we must leave Tidal unexplained.

The name even of one of the Canaanite kings who were subdued by the Babylonian army has found its confirmation in a cuneiform inscription. This is the name of "Shinab, king of Admah." We hear from Tiglath-pileser III. of Sanibu, king of Ammon, and Sanibu and Shinab are one and the same. The old name of the king of Admah was thus perpetuated on the eastern side of the Jordan.

It may be that the asphalt of Siddim was coveted by the Babylonian kings. Bitumen, it is true, was found in Babylonia itself near Hit, but if Amiaud is right, one of the objects imported from abroad for Gudea of Lagas was asphalt. It came from Madga, which is described as being "in the mountains of the river Gur(?)ruda." But no reference to the place is to be met with anywhere else in cuneiform literature.

When Abram returned with the captives and spoil of Sodom, the new king came forth to meet him "at the valley of Shaveh, which is the king's dale." This was in the near neighbourhood of Jerusalem, as we gather from the history of Absalom (2 Sam. xviii. 18). Accordingly we further read that at the same time "Melchizedek, king of Salem," and "priest of the most High God," "brought forth bread and wine," and blessed the Hebrew conqueror, who thereupon gave him tithes of all the spoil.

It is only since the discovery and decipherment of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna that the story of Melchizedek has been illustrated and explained. Hitherto it had seemed to stand alone. The critics, in the superiority of their knowledge, had refused credit to it, and had denied that the name even of Jerusalem or Salem was known before the age of David. But the monuments have come to our help, and have shown that it is the critics and not the Biblical writer who have been in error.

Several of the most interesting of the Tel el-Amarna letters were written to the Pharaoh Amenôphis IV. Khu-n-Aten by Ebed-Tob the king of Jerusalem. Not only is the name of Uru-salim or Jerusalem the only one in use, the city itself is already one of the most important fortresses of Canaan. It was the capital of a large district which extended southwards as far as Keilah and Karmel of Judah. It commanded the approach to the vale of Siddim, and in one of his letters Ebed-Tob speaks of having repaired the royal roads not only in the mountains, but also in the _kikar_ or "plain" of Jordan (Gen. xiii. 10). The possession of Jerusalem was eagerly coveted by the enemies of Ebed-Tob, whom he calls also the enemies of the Egyptian king.

Now Ebed-Tob declares time after time that he is not an Egyptian governor, but a tributary ally and vassal of the Pharaoh, and that he had received his royal power, not by inheritance from his father or mother, but through the arm (or oracle) of "the Mighty King." As "the Mighty King" is distinguished from the "great King" of Egypt, we must see in him the god worshipped by Ebed-Tob, the "Most High God" of Melchizedek, and the prototype of "the Mighty God" of Isaiah. It is this same mighty king, Ebed-Tob assures the Pharaoh in another letter, who will overthrow the navies of Babylonia and Aram-Naharaim.

Here, then, as late as the fifteenth century before our era we have a king of Jerusalem who owes his royal dignity to his god. He is, in fact, a priest as well as a king. His throne has not descended to him by inheritance; so far as his kingly office is concerned, he is like Melchizedek, without father and without mother. Between Ebed-Tob and Melchizedek there is more than analogy; there is a striking and unexpected resemblance. The description given of him by Ebed-Tob explains what has puzzled us so long in the person of Melchizedek.

The origin of the name of Jerusalem also is now cleared up. It was no invention of the age of David; on the contrary, it goes back to the period of Babylonian intercourse with Canaan. It is written in the cuneiform documents Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim," the god of peace. One of the lexical tablets from the library of Nineveh has long ago informed us that in one of the languages known to the Babylonians _uru_ was the equivalent of the Babylonian _alu_, "a city," and we now know that this language was that of Canaan. It would even seem that the word had originally been brought from Babylonia itself in the days when Babylonian writing and culture first penetrated to the West. In the Sumerian or pre-Semitic language of Chaldæa _eri_ signified a "city," and _eri_ in the pronunciation of the Semites became _uru_. Hence it was that Uru or Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, received its name at a time when it was the ruling city of Babylonia, and though the Semitic Babylonians themselves never adopted the word in common life it made its way to Canaan. The rise of the "city" in the west was part of that Babylonian civilization which was carried to the shores of the Mediterranean, and so the word which denoted it was borrowed from the old language of Chaldæa, like the word for "palace," _hêkâl_, the Sumerian _ê-gal_, or "Great House." It is noteworthy that Harran, the resting-place of Abraham on his way from Ur to Palestine, the half-way house, as it were, between East and West, also derived its name from a Sumerian word which signified "the high-road." _Harran_ and _Ur_ were two of the gifts which passed to Canaan from the speakers of the primaeval language of Chaldæa.

We can now understand why Melchizedek should have been called the "king of Salem." His capital could be described either as Jeru-salem or as the city of Salem. And that it was often referred to as Salem simply is shown by the Egyptian monuments. One of the cities of Southern Palestine, the capture of which is represented by Ramses II. on the walls of the Ramesseum at Thebes, is Shalam or Salem, and "the district of Salem" is mentioned between "the country of Hadashah" (Josh. xv. 37) and "the district of the Dead Sea" and "the Jordan," in the list of the places which Ramses III. at Medînet Habu describes himself as having conquered in the same part of the world.

It may be that Isaiah is playing upon the old name of Jerusalem when he gives the Messiah the title of "Prince of Peace." But in any case the fact that Salim, the god of peace, was the patron deity of Jerusalem, lends a special significance to Melchizedek's treatment of Abram. The patriarch had returned in peace from an expedition in which he had overthrown the invaders of Canaan; he had restored peace to the country of the priest-king, and had driven away its enemies. The offering of bread and wine on the part of Melchizedek was a sign of freedom from the enemy and of gratitude to the deliverer, while the tithes paid by Abram were equally a token that the land was again at peace. The name of Salim, the god of peace, was under one form or another widely spread in the Semitic world. Salamanu, or Solomon, was the king of Moab in the time of Tiglath-pileser III.; the name of Shalmaneser of Assyria is written Sulman-asarid, "the god Sulman is chief," in the cuneiform inscriptions; and one of the Tel el-Amarna letters was sent by Ebed-Sullim, "the servant of Sullim," who was governor of Hazor. In one of the Assyrian cities (Dimmen-Silim, "the foundation-stone of peace") worship was paid to the god "Sulman the fish." Nor must we forget that "Salma was the father of Beth-lehem" (1 Chron. ii. 51).

In the time of the Israelitish conquest the king of Jerusalem was Adoni-zedek (Josh. x. 1). The name is similar to that of Melchi-zedek, though the exact interpretation of it is a matter of doubt. It points, however, to a special use of the word _zedek_, "righteousness," and it is therefore interesting to find the word actually employed in one of the letters of Ebed-Tob. He there says of the Pharaoh: "Behold, the king is righteous (_zaduq_) towards me." What makes the occurrence of the word the more striking is that it was utterly unknown to the Babylonians. The root _zadaq_, "to be righteous," did not exist in the Assyrian language.

There is yet another point in the history of the meeting between Abram and Melchizedek which must not be passed over. When the patriarch returned after smiting the invading army he was met outside Jerusalem not only by Melchizedek, but also by the new king of Sodom. It was, therefore, in the mountains and in the shadow of the sanctuary of the Most High God that the newly-appointed prince was to be found, rather than in the vale of Siddim. Does not this show that the king of Jerusalem already exercised that sovereignty over the surrounding district that Ebed-Tob did in the century before the Exodus? As we have seen, Ebed-Tob describes himself as repairing the roads in that very "Kikar," or "plain," in which Sodom and Gomorrha stood. It would seem then that the priest-king of the great fortress in the mountains was already acknowledged as the dominant Canaanitish ruler, and that the neighbouring princes had to pay him homage when they first received the crown. This would be an additional reason for the tithes given to him by Abram.

Long after the defeat of Chedor-laomer and his allies, if we are to accept the traditional belief, Abraham was again destined to visit Jerusalem. But he had ceased to be "Abram the Hebrew," the confederate of the Amorite chieftains in the plain of Mamre, and had become Abraham the father of the promised seed. Isaac had been born to him, and he was called upon to sacrifice his first-born son.

The place of sacrifice was upon one of the mountains in the land of Moriah. There at the last moment the hand of the father was stayed, and a ram was substituted for the human victim. "And Abraham called the name of that place Yahveh-yireh; as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen." According to the Hebrew text of the Chronicles (2 Chron. iii. 1), this mount of the Lord where Abraham's sacrifice was offered was the temple-mount at Jerusalem. The proverb quoted in Genesis seems to indicate the same fact. Moreover, the distance of the mountain from Beer-sheba--three days' journey--would be also the distance of Jerusalem from Abraham's starting-place.

It is even possible that in the name of Yahveh-yireh we have a play upon the first element in the name of Jeru-salem. The word _uru_, "city," became _yeru_ or _yiru_ in Hebrew pronunciation, and between this and _yireh_ the difference is not great. Yahveh-yireh, "the Lord sees," might also be interpreted "the Lord of Yeru."

The temple-hill was emphatically "the mount of the Lord." In Ezekiel (xliii. 15) the altar that stood upon it is called Har-el, "the mountain of God." The term reminds us of Babylonia, where the mercy-seat of the great temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon was termed Du-azagga, "the holy hill." It was on this "seat of the oracles," as it was termed, that the god enthroned himself at the beginning of each year, and announced his will to mankind. But the mercy-seat was entitled "the holy hill" only because it was a miniature copy of "the holy hill" upon which the whole temple was erected. So, too, at Jerusalem, the altar is called "the mount of God" by Ezekiel only because it represents that greater "mount of God" upon which it was built. The temple-hill itself was the primitive Har-el.

The list of conquered localities in Palestine recorded by Thothmes III. at Karnak gives indirect testimony to the same fact. The name of Rabbah of Judah is immediately preceded in it by that of Har-el, "the mount of God." The position of this Har-el leads us to the very mountain tract in the midst of which Jerusalem stood. We now know that Jerusalem was already an important city in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and that it formed one of the Egyptian conquests; it would be strange therefore if no notice had been taken of it by the compiler of the list. May we not see, then, in the Har-el of the Egyptian scribe the sacred mountain of Israelitish history?

There is a passage in one of the letters of Ebed-Tob which may throw further light on the history of the temple-hill. Unfortunately one of the cuneiform characters in it is badly formed, so that its reading is not certain, and still more unfortunately this character is one of the most important in the whole paragraph. If Dr. Winckler and myself are right in our copies, Ebed-Tob speaks of "the city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the god Nin-ip, (whose) name (there) is Salim, the city of the king." What we read "Salim," however, is read differently by Dr. Zimmern, so that according to his copy the passage must be translated: "the city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the god Nin-ip is its name, the city of the king." In the one case Ebed-Tob will state explicitly that the god of Jerusalem, whom he identifies with the Babylonian Nin-ip, is Salim or Sulman, the god of peace, and that his temple stood on "the mountain of Jerusalem"; in the other case there will be no mention of Salim, and it will be left doubtful whether or not the city of Beth-Nin-ip was included within the walls of the capital. It would seem rather that it was separate from Jerusalem, though standing on the same "mountain" as the great fortress. If so, we might identify Jerusalem with the city on Mount Zion, the Jebusite stronghold of a later date, while "the city of Beth-Nin-ip" would be that which centred round the temple on Moriah.

However this may be, the fortress and the temple-hill were distinct from one another in the days of the Jebusites, and we may therefore assume that they were also distinct in the age of Abraham. This might explain why it was that the mountain of Moriah on the summit of which the patriarch offered his sacrifice was not enclosed within the walls of Jerusalem, and was not covered with buildings. It was a spot, on the contrary, where sheep could feed, and a ram be caught by its horns in the thick brushwood.

In entering Canaan, Abraham would have found himself still surrounded by all the signs of a familiar civilization. The long-continued influence and government of Babylonia had carried to "the land of the Amorites" all the elements of Chaldæan culture. Migration from Ur of the Chaldees to the distant West meant a change only in climate and population, not in the civilization to which the patriarch had been accustomed.

Even the Babylonian language was known and used in the cities of Canaan, and the literature of Babylonia was studied by the Canaanitish people. This is one of the facts which we have learnt from the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. The cuneiform system of writing and the Babylonian language had spread all over Western Asia, and nowhere had they taken deeper root than in Canaan. Here there were schools and teachers for instruction in the foreign language and script, and record-chambers and libraries in which the letters and books of clay could be copied and preserved.

Long before the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets we might have gathered from the Old Testament itself that such libraries once existed in Canaan. One of the Canaanitish cities taken and destroyed by the Israelites was Debir in the mountainous part of Judah. But Debir, "the sanctuary," was also known by two other names. It was called Kirjath-Sannah, "the city of Instruction," as well as Kirjath-Sepher, "the city of Books."

We now know, however, that the latter name is not quite correct. The Massoretic punctuation has to be emended, and we must read Kirjath-Sopher, "the city of the Scribe(s)," instead of Kirjath-Sepher, "the city of Book(s)." It is an Egyptian papyrus which has given us the exact name. In the time of Ramses II. an Egyptian scribe composed a sarcastic account of the misadventures met with by a tourist in Palestine--commonly known as _The Travels of a Mohar_--and in this mention is made of two adjoining towns in Southern Palestine called Kirjath-Anab and Beth-Sopher. In the Book of Joshua the towns of Anab and Kirjath-Sepher are similarly associated together, and it is plain, therefore, as Dr. W. Max Müller has remarked, that the Egyptian writer has interchanged the equivalent terms Kirjath, "city," and Beth, "house." He ought to have written Beth-Anab and Kirjath-Sopher. But he has given us the true form of the latter name, and as he has added to the word _Sopher_ the determinative of "writing," he has further put beyond question the real meaning of the name. The city must have been one of those centres of Canaanitish learning, where, as in the libraries of Babylonia and Assyria, a large body of scribes was kept constantly at work.

The language employed in the cuneiform documents was almost always that of Babylonia, which had become the common speech of diplomacy and educated society. But at times the native language of the country was also employed, and one or two examples of it have been preserved. The legends and traditions of Babylonia served as text-books for the student, and doubtless Babylonian history was carried to the West as well. The account of Chedor-laomer's campaign might have been derived in this way from the clay-books of ancient Babylonia.

Babylonian theology, too, made its way to the West, and has left records of itself in the map of Canaan. In the names of Canaanitish towns and villages the names of Babylonian deities frequently recur. Rimmon or Hadad, the god of the air, whom the Syrians identified with the Sun-god, Nebo, the god of prophecy, the interpreter of the will of Bel-Merodach, Anu, the god of the sky, and Anat, his consort, all alike meet us in the names sometimes of places, sometimes of persons. Mr. Tomkins is probably right in seeing even in Beth-lehem the name of the primeval Chaldæan deity Lakhmu. The Canaanitish Moloch is the Babylonian Malik, and Dagon was one of the oldest of Chaldæan divinities and the associate of Anu. We have seen how ready Ebed-Tob was to identify the god he worshipped with the Babylonian Nin-ip, and among the Canaanites mentioned in the letters of Tel el-Amarna there is more than one whose name is compounded with that of a Babylonian god.

Writing and literature, religion and mythology, history and science, all these were brought to the peoples of Canaan in the train of Babylonian conquest and trade. Art naturally went hand in hand with this imported culture. The seal-cylinders of the Chaldæans were imitated, and Babylonian figures and ornamental designs were borrowed and modified by the Canaanitish artists. It was in this way that the rosette, the cherub, the sacred tree, and the palmette passed to the West, and there served to adorn the metal-work and pottery. New designs, unknown in Babylonia, began to develop; among others, the heads of animals in gold and silver as covers for metal vases. Some of these "vases of Kaft," as they were called, are pictured on the Egyptian monuments, and Thothmes III. in his annals describes "the paterae with goats' heads upon them and one with a lion's head, the productions of Zahi," or Palestine, which were brought to him as tribute.

The spoil which the same Pharaoh carried away from the Canaanitish princes gives us some idea of the art which they patronized. We hear of chariots and tent-poles covered with plates of gold, of iron armour and helmets, of gold and silver rings which were used in the place of money, of staves of ivory, ebony, and cedar inlaid with gold, of golden sceptres, of tables, chairs, and footstools of cedar wood, inlaid some of them with ivory, others with gold and precious stones, of vases and bowls of all kinds in gold, silver, and bronze, and of the two-handled cups which were a special manufacture of Phoenicia. Iron seems to have been worked in Canaan from an early date. The Israelites were unable to drive out the inhabitants of "the valley" because of their chariots of iron, and when the chariot of the Egyptian Mohar is disabled by the rough roads of the Canaanite mountains the writer of the papyrus already referred to makes him turn aside at once to a worker in iron. There was no difficulty in finding an ironsmith in Canaan.

The purple dye of Phoenicia had been famous from a remote antiquity. It was one of the chief objects of the trade which was carried on by the Canaanites with Egypt on the one side and Babylonia on the other. It was doubtless in exchange for the purple that the "goodly Babylonish garment" of which we are told in the Book of Joshua (vii. 21) made its way to the city of Jericho, for Babylonia was as celebrated for its embroidered robes as Canaan was for its purple dye.

We hear something about the trade of Canaan in one of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna. This is a letter from Kallimma-Sin, king of Babylonia, to the Egyptian Pharaoh urging him to conclude a treaty in accordance with which the merchants of Babylonia might trade with Egypt on condition of their paying the customs at the frontier. Gold, silver, oil, and clothing are among the objects upon which the duty was to be levied. The frontier was probably fixed at the borders of the Egyptian province of Canaan rather than at those of Egypt itself.

Babylonia and the civilized lands of the East were not the only countries with which Canaanitish trade was carried on. Negro slaves were imported from the Soudan, copper and lead from Cyprus, and horses from Asia Minor, while the excavations of Mr. Bliss at Lachish have brought to light beads of Baltic amber mixed with the scarabs of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty.

A large part of the trade of Phoenicia was carried on in ships. It was in this way that the logs of cedar were brought from the forests at the head of the Gulf of Antioch, and the purple murex from the coasts of the _Ægean_. Tyre, whose wealth is already celebrated in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, was built upon an island, and, as an Egyptian papyrus tells us, water had to be conveyed to it in boats. So, too, was Arvad, whose navy occupies an important place in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. The ships of Canaan were, in fact, famous from an early date. Two classes of vessel known to the Egyptians were called "ships of Gebal" and "ships of Kaft," or Phoenicia, and Ebed-Tob asserts that "as long as a ship sails upon the sea, the arm (or oracle) of the Mighty King shall conquer the forces of Aram-Naharaim (Nahrima) and Babylonia." Balaam's prophecy--"Ships shall come from Chittim and shall afflict Asshur and shall afflict Eber," takes us back to the same age.

The Aram-Naharaim of Scripture is the Nahrina of the hieroglyphic texts, the Mitanni of the native inscriptions. The capital city Mitanni stood on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, at no great distance from Carchemish, but the Naharaim, or "Two Rivers," more probably mean the Euphrates and Orontes, than the Euphrates and Tigris. In one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets the country is called Nahrima, but its usual name is Mitanni or Mitanna. It was the first independent kingdom of any size or power on the frontiers of the Egyptian empire in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, and the Pharaohs Thothmes IV., Amenophis III., and Amenophis IV. successively married into its royal family.

The language of Mitanni has been revealed to us by the cuneiform correspondence from Tel el-Amarna. It was highly agglutinative, and unlike any other form of speech, ancient or modern, with which we are acquainted. Perhaps the speakers of it, like the Hittites, had descended from the north, and occupied territory which had originally belonged to Aramaic tribes. Perhaps, on the other hand, they represented the older population of the country which was overpowered and displaced by Semitic invaders. Which of these views is the more correct we shall probably never know.

Along with their own language the people of Mitanni had also their own theology. Tessupas was god of the atmosphere, the Hadad of the Semites, Sausbe was identified with the Phoenician Ashteroth, and Sekhrus, Zizanu, and Zannukhu are mentioned among the other deities. But many of the divinities of Assyria were also borrowed--Sin the Moon-god, whose temple stood in the city of Harran, Ea the god of the waters, Bel, the Baal of the Canaanites, and Istar, "the lady of Nineveh." Even Amon the god of Thebes was adopted into the pantheon in the days of Egyptian influence.

How far back the interference of Aram-Naharaim in the affairs of Canaan may have reached it is impossible to say. But the kingdom lay on the high-road from Babylonia and Assyria to the West, and its rise may possibly have had something to do with the decline of Babylonian supremacy in Palestine. The district in which it grew up was called Suru or Suri by the Sumerian inhabitants of Chaldæa--a name which may be the origin of the modern "Syria," rather than Assyria, as is usually supposed, and the Semitic Babylonians gave it the title of Subari or Subartu. The conquest of Suri was the work of the last campaign of Sargon of Accad, and laid all northern Mesopotamia at his feet.

We gather from the letters of Tel el-Amarna that the Babylonians were still intriguing in Canaan in the century before the Exodus, though they acknowledged that it was an Egyptian province and subject to Egyptian laws. But the memory of the power they had once exercised there still survived, and the influence of their culture continued undiminished. When their rule actually ceased we do not yet know. It cannot have been very long, however, before the era of Egyptian conquest. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets they are always called Kassites, a name which could have been given to them only after the conquest of Babylonia by the Kassite mountaineers of Elam, and the rise of a Kassite dynasty of kings. This was about 1730 B.C. For some time subsequently, therefore, the government of Babylonia must still have been acknowledged in Canaan. With this agrees a statement of the Egyptian historian Manetho, upon which the critics, in their wisdom or their ignorance, have poured unmeasured contempt. He tells us that when the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt by Ahmes I., the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, they occupied Jerusalem and fortified it--not, as would naturally be imagined, against the Egyptian Pharaoh, but against "the Assyrians," as the Babylonians were called by Manetho's contemporaries. As long as there were no monuments to confront them the critics had little difficulty in proving that the statement was preposterous and unhistorical, that Jerusalem did not as yet exist, and that no Assyrians or Babylonians entered Palestine until centuries later. But we now know that Manetho was right and his critics wrong. Jerusalem did exist, and Babylonian armies threatened the independence of the Canaanite states. In one of his letters, Ebed-Tob, king of Jerusalem, tells the Pharaoh that he need not be alarmed about the Babylonians, for the temple at Jerusalem is strong enough to resist their attack. Rib-Hadad the governor of Gebal bears the same testimony. "When thou didst sit on the throne of thy father," he says, "the sons of Ebed-Asherah (the Amorite) attached themselves to the country of the Babylonians, and took the country of the Pharaoh for themselves; they (intrigued with) the king of Mitanna, and the king of the Babylonians, and the king of the Hittites." In another despatch he speaks in a similar strain: "The king of the Babylonians and the king of Mitanna are strong, and have taken the country of the Pharaoh for themselves already, and have seized the cities of thy governor." When George the Synkellos notes that the Chaldæans made war against the Phoenicians in B.C. 1556, he is doubtless quoting from some old and trustworthy source.

We must not imagine, however, that there was any permanent occupation of Canaan on the part of the Babylonians at this period of its history. It would seem rather that Babylonian authority was directly exercised only from time to time, and had to be enforced by repeated invasions and campaigns. It was the influence of Babylonian civilization and culture that was permanent, not the Babylonian government itself. Sometimes, indeed, Canaan became a Babylonian province, at other times there were only certain portions of the country which submitted to the foreign control, while again at other times the Babylonian rule was merely nominal. But it is clear that it was not until Canaan had been thoroughly reduced by Egyptian arms that the old claim of Babylonia to be its mistress was finally renounced, and even then we see that intrigues were carried on with the Babylonians against the Egyptian authority.