Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

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.

Here Isaac was born and circumcised, and here Ishmael and Hagar were cast forth into the wilderness and went to dwell in the desert of Paran. The territory of Gerar extended to Beer-sheba, "the well of the oath," where Abraham's servants digged a well, and Abimelech, king of Gerar, confirmed his possession of it by an oath. It may be that one of the two wells which still exist at Wadi es-Seba', with the stones that line their mouths deeply indented by the ropes of the water-drawers, is the very one around which the herdsmen of Abraham and Abimelech wrangled with each other. The wells of the desert go back to a great antiquity: where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it. The old wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side.

Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines. But they had been new-comers. All through the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties the country had been in the hands of the Egyptians. Gaza had been their frontier fortress, and as late as the reign of Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was still garrisoned by Egyptian troops and governed by Egyptian officers. The Pulsata or Philistines did not arrive till the troublous days of Ramses III., of the twentieth dynasty. They formed part of the barbarian hordes from the shores of Asia Minor and the islands of the Ægean, who swarmed over Syria and flung themselves on the valley of the Nile, and the land of Caphtor from which they came was possibly the island of Krete. The Philistine occupation of the coastland of Canaan, therefore, did not long precede the Israelitish invasion of the Promised Land; indeed we may perhaps gather from the words of Exod. xiii. 17 that the Philistines were already winning for themselves their new territory when the Israelites marched out of Egypt. In saying, consequently, that the kingdom of Abimelech was in the land of the Philistines the Book of Genesis speaks proleptically: when the story of Abraham and Abimelech was written in its present form Gerar was a Philistine town: in the days of the patriarchs this was not yet the case.

At Beer-sheba Abraham planted a tamarisk, and "called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God." Beer-sheba long remained one of the sacred places of Palestine. The tree planted by its well was a sign both of the water that flowed beneath its soil and of its sacred character. It was only where fresh water was found that the nomads of the desert could come together, and the tree was a token of the life and refreshment they would meet with. The well was sacred; so also was the solitary tree which stood beside it, and under whose branches man and beast could find shade and protection from the mid-day heat. Even Mohammedanism, that Puritanism of the East, has not been able to eradicate the belief in the divine nature of such trees from the mind of the nomad; we may still see them decorated with offerings of rags torn from the garments of the passer-by or shading the tomb of some reputed saint. They are still more than waymarks or resting-places for the heated and weary; when standing beneath them the herdsman feels that he is walking upon consecrated ground.

It was at Beer-sheba that the temptation came to Abraham to sacrifice his first-born, his only son Isaac. The temptation was in accordance with the fierce ritual of Syria, and traces of the belief which had called it into existence are to be found in the early literature of Babylonia. Thus in an ancient Babylonian ritual-text we read: "The offspring who raises his head among mankind, the offspring for his life he gave; the head of the offspring for the head of the man he gave; the neck of the offspring for the neck of the man he gave." Phoenician legend told how the god El had robed himself in royal purple and sacrificed his only son Yeud in a time of pestilence, and the writers of Greece and Rome describe with horror the sacrifices of the first-born with which the history of Carthage was stained. The father was called upon in time of trouble to yield up to the god his nearest and dearest; the fruit of his body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul, and Baal required him to sacrifice without a murmur or a tear his first-born and his only one. The more precious the offering, the more acceptable was it to the god; the harder the struggle to resign it, the greater was the merit of doing so. The child died for the sins of his people; and the belief was but the blind and ignorant expression of a true instinct.

But Abraham was to be taught a better way. For three days he journeyed northward with his son, and then lifting up his eyes saw afar off that mountain "in the land of Moriah," on the summit of which the sacrifice was to be consummated. Alone with Isaac he ascended to the high-place, and there building his altar and binding to it his son he prepared to perform the terrible rite. But at the last moment his hand was stayed, a new and better revelation was made to him, and a ram was substituted for his son. It cannot be accidental that, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out, we learn from the temple-tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles that in the later ritual of Phoenicia a ram took the place of the earlier human sacrifice.

Where was this mountain in the land of Moriah whereon the altar of Abraham was built? It would seem from a passage in the Second Book of Chronicles (iii. 1) that it was the future temple-mount at Jerusalem. The words of Genesis also point in the same direction. Abraham, we read, "called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen." It is hard to believe that "the mount of the Lord" can mean anything else than that har-el or "mountain of God" whereon Ezekiel places the temple, or that the proverb can refer to a less holy spot than that where the Lord appeared enthroned upon the cherubim above the mercy-seat. It is doubtful, however, whether the reading of the Hebrew text in either passage is correct. According to the Septuagint the proverb quoted in Genesis should run: "In the mountain is the Lord seen," and the same authority changes the "Moriah" of the Book of Chronicles into Amôr-eia, "of the Amorites."