Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

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.