Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

At Beth-el Jacob built another altar. But he could not rest there, and once more took his way to the south. On the road his wife Rachel died while giving birth to his youngest son, and her tomb beside the path to Beth-lehem was marked by a "pillar" which the writer of the Book of Genesis tells us remained to his own day. It indicated the boundary between the territories of Benjamin and Judah at Zelzah (1 Sam. x. 2).

At Beth-lehem Jacob lingered a long while. His flocks and herds were spread over the country, under the charge of his sons, browsing on the hills and watered at the springs, for which the "hill-country of Judah" was famous. In their search for pasturage they wandered northward, we are told, "beyond the tower of the Flock," which guarded the Jebusite stronghold of Zion (Mic. iv. 8). Beth-lehem itself was more commonly known in that age by the name of Ephrath. Beth-lehem, "the temple of Lehem," must, in fact, have been the sacred name of the city derived from the worship of its chief deity, and Mr. Tomkins is doubtless right in seeing in this deity the Babylonian Lakhmu, who with his consort Lakhama, was regarded as a primaeval god of the nascent world.

At Beth-lehem Jacob was but a few miles distant from Hebron, where Isaac still lived, and where at his death he was buried by his sons Jacob and Esau in the family tomb of Machpelah. It was the last time, seemingly, that the two brothers found themselves together. Esau, partly by marriage, partly by conquest, dispossessed the Horites of Mount Seir, and founded the kingdom of Edom, while the sons and flocks of Jacob scattered themselves from Hebron in the south of Canaan to Shechem in its centre. The two hallowed sanctuaries of the future kingdoms of Judah and Israel, where the first throne was set up in Israel and the monarchy of David was first established, thus became the boundaries of the herdsmen's domain. In both the Hebrew patriarch held ground that was rightfully his own. It was a sign that the house of Israel should hereafter occupy the land which the family of Israel thus roamed over with their flocks. The nomad was already passing into the settler, with fields and burial-places of his own.

But before the transformation could be fully accomplished, a long season of growth and preparation was needful. Egypt, and not Canaan, was to be the land in which the Chosen People should be trained for their future work. Canaan itself was to pass under Egyptian domination, and to replace the influence of Babylonian culture by that of Egypt. It was a new world and a new civilization into which the descendants of Jacob were destined to emerge when finally they escaped from the fiery furnace of Egyptian bondage. The Egypt known to Jacob was an Egypt over which Asiatic princes ruled, and whose vizier was himself a Hebrew. It was the Egypt of the Hyksos conquerors, whose capital was Zoan, on the frontiers of Asia, and whose people were the slaves of an Asiatic stranger. The Egypt quitted by his descendants was one which had subjected Asia to itself, and had carried the spoils of Syria to its splendid capital in the far south. The Asiatic wave had been rolled back from the banks of the Nile, and Egyptian conquest and culture had overflooded Asia as far as the Euphrates.

But it was not Egypt alone which had undergone a change. The Canaan of Abraham and Jacob looked to Babylonia for its civilization, its literature, and its laws. Its princes recognized at times the supremacy of the Babylonian sovereigns, and the deities of Babylonia were worshipped in its midst. The Canaan of Moses had long been a province of the Egyptian Empire; Egyptian rule had been substituted for that of Babylon, and the manners and customs of Egypt had penetrated deeply into the minds of its inhabitants. The Hittite invasion from the north had blocked the high-road to Babylonia, and diverted the trade of Palestine towards the west and the south. While Abraham, the native of Ur, and the emigrant from Harran, had found himself in Canaan, and even at Zoan, still within the sphere of the influences among which he had grown up, the fugitives from Egypt entered on the invasion of a country which had but just been delivered from the yoke of the Pharaohs. It was an Egyptian Canaan that the Israelites were called upon to subdue, and it was fitting therefore that they should have been made ready for the task by their long sojourn in the land of Goshen.

How that sojourn came about, it is not for us to recount. The story of Joseph is too familiar to be repeated, though we are but just beginning to learn how true it is, in all its details, to the facts which Egyptian research is bringing more and more fully to light. We see the Midianite and Ishmaelite caravan passing Dothan—still known by its ancient name—with their bales of spicery from Gilead for the dwellers in the Delta, and carrying away with them the young Hebrew slave. We watch his rise in the house of his Egyptian master, his wrongful imprisonment and sudden exaltation when he sits by the side of Pharaoh and governs Egypt in the name of the king. We read the pathetic story of the old father sending his sons to buy corn from the royal granaries or larits of Egypt, and withholding to the last his youngest and dearest one; of the Beduin shepherds bowing all unconsciously before the brother whom they had sold into slavery, and who now holds in his hands the power of life and death; of Joseph's disclosure of himself to the conscious-stricken suppliants; of Jacob's cry when convinced at last that "the governor over all the land of Egypt" was his long-mourned son. "It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before I die."

Jacob and his family travelled in wagons along the high-road which connected the south of Palestine with the Delta. It led past Beer-sheba and El-Arîsh to the Shur, or line of fortifications which protected the eastern frontier of Egypt. The modern caravan road follows its course most of the way. It was thus distinct from "the way of the Philistines," which led along the coast of the Mediterranean, on the northern edge of the Sirbonian Lake. In Egypt the Israelitish emigrants settled not far from the Hyksos capital in the land of Goshen, which the excavations of Dr. Naville have shown to be the Wâdi Tumilât of to-day. Here they multiplied and grew wealthy, until the evil days came when the Egyptians rose up against Semitic influence and control, and Ramses II. transformed the free-born Beduin into public serfs.

But the age of Ramses II. was still far distant when Jacob died full of years, and his mummy was carried to the burial-place of his fathers "in the land of Canaan." Local tradition connected the name of Abel-mizraim, "the meadow of Egypt," on the eastern side of the Jordan, with the long funeral procession which wended its way from Zoan to Hebron. We cannot believe, however, that the mourners would have so far gone out of their road, even if the etymology assigned by tradition to the name could be supported. The tradition bears witness to the fact of the procession, but to nothing more.

With the funeral of Jacob a veil falls upon the Biblical history of Canaan, until the days when the spies were sent out to search the land. Joseph was buried in Egypt, not at Hebron, though he had made the Israelites swear before his death that his mummy should be eventually taken to Palestine. The road to Hebron, it is clear, was no longer open, and the power of the Hyksos princes must have been fast waning. The war of independence had broken out, and the native kings of Upper Egypt were driving the foreigner back into Asia. The rulers of Zoan had no longer troops to spare for a funeral procession through the eastern desert.

The Chronicler, however, has preserved a notice which seems to show that a connection was still kept up between Southern Canaan and the Hebrew settlers in Goshen, even after Jacob's death, perhaps while he was yet living. We are told that certain of the sons of Ephraim were slain by the men of Gath, whose cattle they had attempted to steal, and that their father, after mourning many days, comforted himself with the birth of other sons (1 Chron. vii. 21-26). The notice, moreover, does not stand alone. Thothmes III., the great conqueror of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, states that two of the places captured by him in Palestine were Jacob-el and Joseph-el. It is tempting to see in the two names reminiscences of the Hebrew patriarch and his son. If so, the name of Joseph would have been impressed upon a locality in Canaan more than two centuries before the Exodus. The geographical lists of Thothmes III. and the fragments of early history preserved by the Chronicler would thus support and complete one another. The Egyptian cavalry who accompanied the mummy of Jacob to its resting-place at Machpelah, would not be the only evidence of the authority claimed by Joseph and his master in the land of Canaan; Joseph himself would have left his name there, and his grand-children would have fought against "the men of Gath."