Patriarchal Palestine

It was under one of the immediate successors of Ramses II. that the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt must have taken place. Egyptian tradition pointed to Meneptah; modern scholars incline rather to his successors Seti II. and Si-Ptah. With this event the patriarchal history of Canaan ought properly to come to an end. But the Egyptian monuments still cast light upon it, and enable us to carry it on almost to the moment when Joshua and his followers entered the Promised Land.

Palestine still formed part of the kingdom of Meneptah, at all events in the earlier years of his reign. A scribe has left us a record of the officials who passed to and from Canaan through the frontier fortress of Zaru during the middle of the month Pakhons in the third year of the king. One of these was Baal- … the son of Zippor of Gaza, who carried a letter for the Egyptian overseer of the Syrian peasantry (or Perizzites), as well as another for Baal-[sa]lil-ga[b]u, the vassal-prince of Tyre. Another messenger was Sutekh-mes, the son of 'Aper-dagar, who also carried a despatch to the overseer of the peasantry, while a third envoy came in the reverse direction, from the city of Meneptah, "in the land of the Amorites."

In the troubles which preceded the accession of the twentieth dynasty the Asiatic possessions of Egypt were naturally lost, and were never again recovered. Ramses III., however, the last of the conquering Pharaohs, made at least one campaign in Palestine and Syria. Like Meneptah, he had to bear the brunt of an attack upon Egypt by the confederated hordes of the north which threatened to extinguish its civilization altogether. The nations of Asia Minor and the Ægean Sea had poured into Syria as the northern barbarians in later days poured into the provinces of the Roman Empire. Partly by land, partly by sea, they made their way through Phoenicia and the land of the Hittites, destroying everything as they went, and carrying in their train the subjugated princes of Naharaim and Kadesh. For a time they encamped in the "land of the Amorites," and then pursued their southward march. Ramses III. met them on the north-eastern frontier of his kingdom, and in a fiercely-contested battle utterly overthrew them. The ships of the invaders were captured or sunk, and their forces on land were decimated. Immense quantities of booty and prisoners were taken, and the shattered forces of the enemy retreated into Syria. There the Philistines and Zakkal possessed themselves of the sea-coast, and garrisoned the cities of the extreme south. Gaza ceased to be an Egyptian fortress, and became instead an effectual barrier to the Egyptian occupation of Canaan.

When Ramses III. followed the retreating invaders of his country into Syria, it is doubtful whether the Philistines had as yet settled themselves in their future home. At all events Gaza fell into his hands, and he found no difficulty in marching along the Mediterranean coast like the conquering Pharaohs who had preceded him. In his temple palace at Medînet Habu he has left a record of the conquests that he made in Syria. The great cities of the coast were untouched. No attempt was made to besiege or capture Tyre and Sidon, Beyrout and Gebal, and the Egyptian army marched past them, encamping on the way only at such places as "the headland of Carmel," "the source of the Magoras," or river of Beyrout, and the Bor or "Cistern." Otherwise its resting-places were at unknown villages like Inzath and Lui-el. North of Beyrout it struck eastward through the gorge of the Nahr el-Kelb, and took the city of Kumidi. Then it made its way by Shenir or Hermon to Hamath, which surrendered, and from thence still northward to "the plain" of Aleppo.

In the south of Palestine, in what was afterwards the territory of Judah, Ramses made yet another campaign. Here he claims to have taken Lebanoth and Beth-Anath, Carmel of Judah and Shebtin, Jacob-el and Hebron, Libnah and Aphek, Migdal-gad and Ir-Shemesh, Hadashah and the district of Salem or Jerusalem. From thence the Egyptian forces proceeded to the Lake of Reshpon or the Dead Sea, and then crossing the Jordan seized Korkha in Moab. But the campaign was little more than a raid; it left no permanent results behind it, and all traces of Egyptian authority disappeared with the departure of the Pharaoh's army. Canaan remained the prey of the first resolute invader who had strength and courage at his back.

CHAPTER IV

THE PATRIARCHS

Abraham had been born in "Ur of the Chaldees." Ur lay on the western side of the Euphrates in Southern Babylonia, where the mounds of Muqayyar or Mugheir mark the site of the great temple that had been reared to the worship of the Moon-god long before the days of the Hebrew patriarch. Here Abraham had married, and from hence he had gone forth with his father to seek a new home in the west. Their first resting-place had been Harran in Mesopotamia, on the high-road to Syria and the Mediterranean. The name of Harran, in fact, signified "road" in the old language of Chaldæa, and for many ages the armies and merchants of Babylonia had halted there when making their way towards the Mediterranean. Like Ur, it was dedicated to the worship of Sin, the Moon-god, and its temple rivalled in fame and antiquity that of the Babylonian city, and had probably been founded by a Babylonian king.

At Harran, therefore, Abraham would still have been within the limits of Babylonian influence and culture, if not of Babylonian government as well. He would have found there the same religion as that which he had left behind him in his native city; the same deity was adored there, under the same name and with the same rites. He was indeed on the road to Canaan, and among an Aramaean rather than a Babylonian population, but Babylonia with its beliefs and civilization had not as yet been forsaken. Even the language of Babylonia was known in his new home, as is indicated by the name of the city itself.

Harran and Mesopotamia were not the goal of the future father of the Israelitish people. He was bidden to seek elsewhere another country and another kindred. Canaan was the land which God promised to "show" to him, and it was in Canaan that his descendants were to become "a great nation." He went forth, accordingly, "to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan he came."

But even in Canaan Abraham was not beyond the reach of Babylonian influence. As we have seen in the last chapter, Babylonian armies had already penetrated to the shores of the Mediterranean, Palestine had been included within the bounds of a Babylonian empire, and Babylonian culture and religion had spread widely among the Canaanitish tribes. The cuneiform system of writing had made its way to Syria, and Babylonian literature had followed in its wake. Centuries had already passed since Sargon of Akkad had made himself master of the Mediterranean coast and his son Naram-Sin had led his forces to the Peninsula of Sinai. Istar of Babylonia had become Ashtoreth of the Canaanites, and Babylonian trade had long moved briskly along the very road that Abraham traversed. In the days of the patriarch himself the rulers of Babylonia claimed to be also rulers of Canaan; for thirteen years did the Canaanite princes "serve" Chedor-laomer and his allies, the father of Arioch is also "the father of the land of the Amorites" in his son's inscriptions, and at a little later date the King of Babylon still claimed sovereignty over the West.

It was not, therefore, to a strange and unexplored country that Abraham had migrated. The laws and manners to which he had been accustomed, the writing and literature which he had learned in the schools of Ur, the religious beliefs among which he had lived in Chaldæa and Harran, he found again in Canaan. The land of his adoption was full of Babylonian traders, soldiers, and probably officials as well, and from time to time he must have heard around him the language of his birthplace. The introduction into the West of the Babylonian literature and script brought with it a knowledge of the Babylonian language, and the knowledge is reflected in some of the local names of Palestine. The patriarch had not escaped beyond the control even of the Babylonian government. At times, at all events, the princes of Canaan were compelled to acknowledge the suzerainty of Chaldæa and obey the laws, as the Babylonians would have said, of "Anu and Dagon."

The fact needs dwelling upon, partly because of its importance, partly because it is but recently that we have begun to realize it. It might indeed have been gathered from the narratives of Genesis, more especially from the account of Chedor-laomer's campaign, but it ran counter to the preconceived ideas of the modern historian, and never therefore took definite shape in his mind. It is one of the many gains that the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions has brought to the student of the Old Testament, and it makes us understand the story of Abraham's migration in a way that was never possible before. He was no wild nomad wandering in unknown regions, among a people of alien habits and foreign civilization. We know now why he took the road which we are told he followed; why he was able to make allies among the inhabitants of Canaan; why he understood their language and could take part in their social life. Like the Englishman who migrates to a British colony, Abraham was in contact with the same culture in Canaan and Chaldæa alike.

But when he reached Canaan he was not yet Abraham. He was still "Abram the Hebrew," and it was as "Abram the Hebrew" that he made alliance with the Amorites of Mamre and overthrew the retreating forces of the Babylonian kings. Abram—Abu-ramu, "the exalted father,"—is a Babylonian name, and is found in contracts of the age of Chedor-laomer. When the name was changed to Abraham, it was a sign that the Babylonian emigrant had become a native of the West.

It was under the terebinth of Moreh before Shechem that Abraham first pitched his tent and erected his first altar to the Lord. Above him towered Ebal and Gerizim, where the curses and blessings of the Law were afterwards to be pronounced. From thence he moved southward to one of the hills westward of Beth-el, the modern Beitin, and there his second altar was built. While the first had been reared in the plain, the second was raised on the mountain-slope.

But here too he did not remain long. Again he "journeyed, going on still towards the south." Then came a famine which obliged him to cross the frontier of Egypt, and visit the court of the Pharaoh. The Hyksos kinsmen of the race to which he belonged were ruling in the Delta, and a ready welcome was given to the Asiatic stranger. He was "very rich in cattle, in silver and in gold," and like a wealthy Arab sheikh to-day was received with due honour in the Egyptian capital. The court of the Pharaoh was doubtless at Zoan.

Among the possessions of the patriarch we are told were camels. The camel is not included among the Egyptian hieroglyphs, nor has it been found depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. The name is first met with in a papyrus of the time of the nineteenth dynasty, and is one of the many words which the Egyptians of that age borrowed from their Canaanitish neighbours. The animal, in fact, was not used by the Egyptians, and its domestication in the valley of the Nile seems to be as recent as the Arab conquest. But though it was not used by the Egyptians, it had been a beast of burden among the Semites of Arabia from an early period. In the primitive Sumerian language of Chaldæa it was called "the animal from the Persian Gulf," and its Semitic name, from which our own word camel is derived, goes back to the very beginnings of Semitic history. We cannot, therefore, imagine a Semitic nomad arriving in Egypt without the camel; travellers, indeed, from the cities of Canaan might do so, but not those who led a purely nomadic life. And, in fact, though we look in vain for a picture of the camel among the sculptures and paintings of Egypt, the bones of the animal have been discovered deep in the alluvial soil of the valley of the Nile.

Abraham had to quit Egypt, and once more he traversed the desert of the "South" and pitched his tent near Beth-el. Here his nephew Lot left him, and, dissatisfied with the life of a wandering Bedawi, took up his abode in the city of Sodom at the northern end of the Dead Sea. While Abraham kept himself separate from the natives of Canaan, Lot thus became one of them, and narrowly escaped the doom which afterwards fell upon the cities of the plain. In forsaking the tent, he forsook not only the free life of the immigrant from Chaldæa, but the God of Abraham as well. The inhabitant of a Canaanitish city passed under the influence of its faith and worship, its morals and manners, as well as its laws and government. He ceased to be an alien and stranger, of a different race and fatherland, and with a religion and customs of his own. He could intermarry with the natives of his adopted country and participate in their sacred rites. Little by little his family became merged in the population that surrounded him; its gods became their gods, its morality—or, it may be, its immorality—became theirs also. Lot, indeed, had eventually to fly from Sodom, leaving behind him all his wealth; but the mischief had already been done, and his children had become Canaanites in thought and deed. The nations which sprang from him, though separate in race from the older people of Canaan, were yet like them in other respects. They formed no "peculiar people," to whom the Lord might reveal Himself through the law and the prophets.

It was not until Lot had separated himself from Abraham that the land of Canaan was promised to the descendants of the patriarch. "Lift up now thine eyes," God said to him, "and look from the place where thou art, northward and southward, and eastward and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever." Once more, therefore, Abraham departed southward from Shechem; not this time to go into the land of Egypt, but to dwell beside the terebinth-oak of Mamre hard by Hebron, where the founder of the Davidic monarchy was hereafter to be crowned king. It is probable that the sanctuary which in days to come was to make Hebron famous had not as yet been established there; at all events the name of Hebron, "the confederacy," was not as yet known, and the city was called Kirjath-Arba. Whether it was also called Mamre is doubtful; Mamre would rather seem to have been the name of the plateau which stretched beyond the valley of Hebron and was occupied by the Amorite confederates of the Hebrew patriarch.

It was while he "dwelt under the terebinth of Mamre the Amorite" that the campaign of Chedor-laomer and his Babylonian allies took place, and that Lot was carried away among the Canaanitish captives. But the triumph of the conquerors was short-lived. "Abram the Hebrew" pursued them with his armed followers, three hundred and eighteen in number, as well as with his Amorite allies, and suddenly falling upon their rear-guard near Damascus by night, rescued the captives and the spoil. There was rejoicing in the Canaanitish cities when the patriarch returned with his booty. The new king of Sodom met him in the valley of Shaveh, "the king's dale" of later times, just outside the walls of Jerusalem, and the king of Jerusalem himself, Melchizedek, "the priest of the most High God," welcomed the return of the victor with bread and wine. Then it was that Abram gave tithes of the spoil to the God of Salem, while Melchizedek blessed him in the name of "the most High God."

Outside the pages of the Old Testament the special form assumed by the blessing has been found only in the Aramaic inscriptions of Egypt. Here too we find travellers from Palestine writing of themselves "Blessed be Augah of Isis," or "Blessed be Abed-Nebo of Khnum"! It would seem, therefore, to have been a formula peculiar to Canaan; at all events, it has not been traced to other parts of the Semitic world. The temple of the Most High God—El Elyôn—probably stood on Mount Moriah where the temple of the God of Israel was afterwards to be erected. It will be remembered that among the letters sent by Ebed-Tob, the king of Jerusalem, to the Egyptian Pharaoh is one in which he speaks of "the city of the Mountain of Jerusalem, whose name is the city of the temple of the god Nin-ip." In this "Mountain of Jerusalem" it is difficult not to see the "temple-Mount" of later days.

In the cuneiform texts of Ebed-Tob and the later Assyrian kings the name of Jerusalem is written Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim." Salim or "Peace" is almost certainly the native name of the god who was identified with the Babylonian Nin-ip, and perhaps Isaiah—that student of the older history of his country—is alluding to the fact when he declares that one of the titles of the Messiah shall be "the Prince of Peace." At any rate, if the Most High God of Jerusalem were really Salim, the God of Peace, we should have an explanation of the blessing pronounced by Melchizedek upon the patriarch. Abram's victory had restored peace to Canaan; he had brought back the captives, and had himself returned in peace. It was fitting, therefore, that he should be welcomed by the priest of the God of Peace, and that he should offer tithes of the booty he had recovered to the god of "the City of Peace."

This offering of tithes was no new thing. In his Babylonian home Abraham must have been familiar with the practice. The cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia contain frequent references to it. It went back to the pre-Semitic age of Chaldæa, and the great temples of Babylonia were largely supported by the esra or tithe which was levied upon prince and peasant alike. That the god should receive a tenth of the good things which, it was believed, he had bestowed upon mankind, was not considered to be asking too much. There are many tablets in the British Museum which are receipts for the payment of the tithe to the great temple of the Sun-god at Sippara in the time of Nebuchadrezzar and his successors. From one of them we learn that Belshazzar, even at the very moment when the Babylonian empire was falling from his father's hands, nevertheless found an opportunity for paying the tithe due from his sister; while others show us that Cyrus and Cambyses did not regard their foreign origin as affording any pretext for refusing to pay tithe to the gods of the kingdom they had overthrown.

The Babylonian army had been defeated near Damascus, and immediately after this we are told that the steward of Abraham's house was "Eli-ezer of Damascus." Whether there is any connection between the two facts we cannot say; but it may be that Eli-ezer had attached himself to the Hebrew conqueror when he was returning "from the slaughter of Chedor-laomer." The name of Eli-ezer, "God is a help," is characteristic of Damascus. More often in place of El, "God," we have Hadad, the supreme deity of Syria; but just as among the Israelites Eli-akim and Jeho-iakim are equivalent, so among the Aramaeans of Syria were Eli-ezer and Hadad-ezer. Hadad-ezer, it will be remembered, was the king of Zobah who was overthrown by David.

Sarai, the wife of Abraham, was still childless, but the patriarch had a son by his Egyptian handmaid, the ancestor of the Ishmaelite tribes who spread from the frontier of Egypt to Mecca in Central Arabia. It was when Ishmael was thirteen years of age that the covenant was made between God and Abraham which was sealed with the institution of circumcision. Circumcision had been practised in Egypt from the earliest days of its history; henceforth it also distinguished all those who claimed Abraham as their forefather. With circumcision Abraham received the name by which he was henceforth to be known; he ceased to be Abram, the Hebrew from Babylonia, and became Abraham the father of Ishmael and Israel. The new rite and the new name were alike the seal and token of the covenant established between the patriarch and his God: God promised that his seed should multiply, and that the land of Canaan should be given as an everlasting possession, while Abraham and his offspring were called upon to keep God's covenant for ever.

It could not have been long after this that the cities of the plain were destroyed "with brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven." The expression is found in the cuneiform tablets of Babylonia. Old Sumerian hymns spoke of a "rain of stones and fire," though the stones may have been hail-stones and thunderbolts, and the fire the flash of the lightning. But whatever may have been the nature of the sheet of flame which enveloped the guilty cities of the plain and set on fire the naphtha-springs that oozed out of it, the remembrance of the catastrophe survived to distant ages. The prophets of Israel and Judah still refer to the overthrow of Sodom and its sister cities, and St. Jude points to them as "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." Some scholars have seen an allusion to their overthrow in the tradition of the Phoenicians which brought their ancestors into the coastlands of Canaan in consequence of an earth-quake on the shores of "the Assyrian Lake." But the lake is more probably to be looked for in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf than in the valley of the Jordan.

The vale of Siddim, and "the cities of the plain," stood at the northern end of the Dead Sea. Here were the "slime-pits" from which the naphtha was extracted, and which caused the defeat of the Canaanitish princes by the Babylonian army. The legend which placed the pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was changed at the southern extremity of the Dead Sea was of late origin, probably not earlier than the days when Herod built his fortress of Machaerus on the impregnable cliffs of Moab, and the name of Gebel Usdum, given by the modern Arabs to one of the mountain-summits to the south of the sea proves nothing as to the site of the city of Sodom. Names in the east are readily transferred from one locality to another, and a mountain is not the same as a city in a plain.

There are two sufficient reasons why it is to the north rather than to the south that we must look for the remains of the doomed cities, among the numerous tumuli which rise above the rich and fertile plain in the neighbourhood of Jericho, where the ancient "slime-pits" can still be traced. Geology has taught us that throughout the historical period the Dead Sea and the country immediately to the south of it have undergone no change. What the lake is to-day, it must have been in the days of Abraham. It has neither grown nor shrunk in size, and the barren salt with which it poisons the ground must have equally poisoned it then. No fertile valley, like the vale of Siddim, could have existed in the south; no prosperous Canaanitish cities could have grown up among the desolate tracts of the southern wilderness. As we are expressly told in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), the Canaanites dwelt only "by the coast of Jordan," not in the desert far beyond the reach of the fertilizing stream.

But there is another reason which excludes the southern site. "When Abraham got up early in the morning," we are told, "he looked towards Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace." Such a sight was possible from the hills of Hebron; if the country lay at the northern end of the Dead Sea, it would have been impossible had it been south of it.

Moreover, the northern situation of the cities alone agrees with the geography of Genesis. When the Babylonian invaders had turned northwards after smiting the Amalekites of the desert south of the Dead Sea, they did not fall in with the forces of the king of Sodom and his allies until they had first passed "the Amorites that dwelt in Hazezon-tamar." Hazezon-tamar, as we learn from the Second Book of Chronicles (xx. 2), was the later En-gedi, "the Spring of the Kid," and En-gedi lay on the western shore of the Dead Sea midway between its northern and southern extremities.

In the warm, soft valley of the Jordan, accordingly, where a sub-tropical vegetation springs luxuriantly out of the fertile ground and the river plunges into the Dead Sea as into a tomb, the nations of Ammon and Moab were born. It was a fitting spot, in close proximity as it was to the countries which thereafter bore their names. From the mountain above Zoar, Lot could look across to the blue hills of Moab and the distant plateau of Ammon.

Meanwhile Abraham had quitted Mamre and again turned his steps towards the south. This time it was at Gerar, between the sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea and Shur the "wall" of Egypt that he sojourned. Kadesh has been found again in our own days by the united efforts of Dr. John Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull in the shelter of a block of mountains which rise to the south of the desert of Beer-sheba. The spring of clear and abundant water which gushes forth in their midst was the En-Mishpat—"the spring where judgments were pronounced"—of early times, and is still called 'Ain-Qadîs, "the spring of Kadesh." Gerar is the modern Umm el-Jerâr, now desolate and barren, all that remains of its past being a lofty mound of rubbish and a mass of potsherds. It lies a few hours only to the south of Gaza.