Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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