Lagamar or Lagamer, written Laomer in Hebrew, was one of the princ.i.p.al deities of Elam, and the Babylonians made him a son of their own water-G.o.d 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 t.i.tle 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 princ.i.p.ality 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 a.s.sumes the imperial t.i.tle 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 G.o.d," "brought forth bread and wine," and blessed the Hebrew conqueror, who thereupon gave him t.i.thes 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 Amenophis 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 va.s.sal 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 G.o.d worshipped by Ebed-Tob, the "Most High G.o.d" of Melchizedek, and the prototype of "the Mighty G.o.d" of Isaiah. It is this same mighty king, Ebed-Tob a.s.sures 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 G.o.d. 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 a.n.a.logy; 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 doc.u.ments Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim," the G.o.d 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 Chaldaea _eri_ signified a "city,"
and _eri_ in the p.r.o.nunciation 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 sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, and so the word which denoted it was borrowed from the old language of Chaldaea, like the word for "palace," _hekal_, the Sumerian _e-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 pa.s.sed to Canaan from the speakers of the primaeval language of Chaldaea.
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 Medinet 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 t.i.tle of "Prince of Peace." But in any case the fact that Salim, the G.o.d 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 grat.i.tude to the deliverer, while the t.i.thes paid by Abram were equally a token that the land was again at peace. The name of Salim, the G.o.d 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 a.s.syria is written Sulman-asarid, "the G.o.d 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 a.s.syrian cities (Dimmen-Silim, "the foundation-stone of peace") worship was paid to the G.o.d "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 a.s.syrian language.
There is yet another point in the history of the meeting between Abram and Melchizedek which must not be pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 t.i.thes 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 subst.i.tuted 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 p.r.o.nunciation, 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 G.o.d." 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 G.o.d enthroned himself at the beginning of each year, and announced his will to mankind. But the mercy-seat was ent.i.tled "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 G.o.d" by Ezekiel only because it represents that greater "mount of G.o.d" 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 G.o.d." 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 pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage must be translated: "the city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the G.o.d Nin-ip is its name, the city of the king."
In the one case Ebed-Tob will state explicitly that the G.o.d of Jerusalem, whom he identifies with the Babylonian Nin-ip, is Salim or Sulman, the G.o.d 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 a.s.sume 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 Chaldaean 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 Ma.s.soretic 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 a.s.sociated together, and it is plain, therefore, as Dr. W. Max Muller 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 a.s.syria, a large body of scribes was kept constantly at work.
The language employed in the cuneiform doc.u.ments 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 G.o.d of the air, whom the Syrians identified with the Sun-G.o.d, Nebo, the G.o.d of prophecy, the interpreter of the will of Bel-Merodach, Anu, the G.o.d 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 Chaldaean deity Lakhmu. The Canaanitish Moloch is the Babylonian Malik, and Dagon was one of the oldest of Chaldaean divinities and the a.s.sociate of Anu.
We have seen how ready Ebed-Tob was to identify the G.o.d 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 G.o.d.
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 Chaldaeans 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 pa.s.sed 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 _aegean_. 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 cla.s.ses of vessel known to the Egyptians were called "ships of Gebal" and "ships of Kaft," or Phoenicia, and Ebed-Tob a.s.serts 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 a.s.shur 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 Hitt.i.tes, 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.syria were also borrowed--Sin the Moon-G.o.d, whose temple stood in the city of Harran, Ea the G.o.d of the waters, Bel, the Baal of the Canaanites, and Istar, "the lady of Nineveh." Even Amon the G.o.d 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 a.s.syria 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 Chaldaea--a name which may be the origin of the modern "Syria," rather than a.s.syria, as is usually supposed, and the Semitic Babylonians gave it the t.i.tle 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 Ka.s.sites, a name which could have been given to them only after the conquest of Babylonia by the Ka.s.site mountaineers of Elam, and the rise of a Ka.s.site 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 a.s.syrians," 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 a.s.syrians 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 Hitt.i.tes." 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 Chaldaeans made war against the Phoenicians in B.C. 1556, he is doubtless quoting from some old and trustworthy source.
We must not imagine, however, that there was any permanent occupation of Canaan on the part of the Babylonians at this period of its history. It would seem rather that Babylonian authority was directly exercised only from time to time, and had to be enforced by repeated invasions and campaigns. It was the influence of Babylonian civilization and culture that was permanent, not the Babylonian government itself. Sometimes, indeed, Canaan became a Babylonian province, at other times there were only certain portions of the country which submitted to the foreign control, while again at other times the Babylonian rule was merely nominal. But it is clear that it was not until Canaan had been thoroughly reduced by Egyptian arms that the old claim of Babylonia to be its mistress was finally renounced, and even then we see that intrigues were carried on with the Babylonians against the Egyptian authority.
It was during this period of Babylonian influence and tutelage that the traditions and myths of Chaldaea became known to the people of Canaan. It is again the tablets of Tel el-Amarna which have shown us how this came to pa.s.s. Among them are fragments of Babylonian legends, one of which endeavoured to account for the creation of man and the introduction of sin into the world, and these legends were used as exercise-books in the foreign language by the scribes of Canaan and Egypt who were learning the Babylonian language and script. If ever we discover the library of Kirjath-sepher we shall doubtless find among its clay records similar examples of Chaldaean literature. The resemblances between the cosmogonies of Phoenicia and Babylonia have often been pointed out, and since the discovery of the Chaldaean account of the Deluge by George Smith we have learned that between that account and the one which is preserved in Genesis there is the closest possible likeness, extending even to words and phrases. The long-continued literary influence of Babylonia in Palestine in the Patriarchal Age explains all this, and shows us how the traditions of Chaldaea made their way to the West. When Abraham entered Canaan, he entered a country whose educated inhabitants were already familiar with the books, the history, and the traditions of that in which he had been born. There were doubtless many to whom the name and history of "Ur of the Chaldees" were already known. It may even be that copies of the books in its library already existed in the libraries of Canaan.
There was one Babylonian hero at all events whose name had become so well known in the West that it had there pa.s.sed into a proverb. This was the name of Nimrod, "the mighty hunter before the Lord." As yet the cuneiform doc.u.ments are silent about him, but it is probable that he was one of the early Ka.s.site kings who established their dominion over the cities of Babylonia. He is called the son of Cush or Kas, and "the beginning of his kingdom" was Babylon, which had now for six centuries been the capital of the country. His name, however, was as familiar to the Canaanite as it was to the inhabitant of Chaldaea, and the G.o.d before whom his exploits were displayed was Yahveh and not Bel.
It was about 1600 B.C. that the Hyksos were finally expelled from Egypt.