Chapter I: The Hebrew Patriarchs (2)

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.