Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

At that period, however, Canaan already had behind it a long civilized past. The country was filled with schools and libraries, with richly-furnished palaces, and the workshops of the artisans. The cities on the coast had their fleets partly of merchantmen, partly of warships, and an active trade was carried on with all parts of the known world. The result was that the wealth of Palestine was enormous; the amount carried away by Thothmes is alone sufficient to prove it. Apart from the natural productions of the country—corn, wine, and oil, or the slaves which it had to furnish—immense quantities of gold, silver, and precious stones, sometimes in their native state, sometimes manufactured into artistic forms, were transported into Egypt. And in spite of this drain upon its resources, the supply seems never to have failed.

The reciprocal influence of the civilizations of Canaan and Egypt one upon the other, in the days when Canaan was an Egyptian province, is reflected in the languages of the two countries. On the one hand the Canaanite borrowed from Egypt words like tebah "ark," hin "a measure," and ebyôn "poor," while Canaan in return copiously enriched the vocabulary of its conquerors. As the Travels of a Mohar have shown us, under the nineteenth dynasty there was a mania for using Canaanitish words and phrases, similar to that which has more than once visited English society in respect to French. But before the rise of the nineteenth dynasty the Egyptian lexicon was already full of Semitic words. Frequently they denoted objects which had been imported from Syria. Thus a "chariot" was called a merkabut, a "waggon" being agolta; hurpu, "a sword," was the Canaanitish khereb, just as aspata, "a quiver," was ashpâh. The Canaanitish kinnor, "a lyre," was similarly naturalized in Egypt, like the names of certain varieties of "Syrian bread." The Egyptian words for "incense" (qadaruta), "oxen" (abiri), and "sea" (yum) were taken from the same source, though it is possible that the last-mentioned word, like qamhu, "wheat," had been introduced from Syria in the earliest days of Egyptian history. As might have been expected, several kinds of sea-going vessels brought with them their native names from the Phoenician coast. Already in the time of the thirteenth dynasty the larger ships were termed Kabanitu, or "Gebalite"; we read also of "boats" called Za, the Canaanite Zi, while a transport was entitled qauil, the Phoenician gol. The same name was imported into Greek under the form of gaulos, and we are told that it signified "a Phoenician vessel of rounded shape."

The language of Canaan was practically that which we call Hebrew. Indeed Isaiah (xix. 18) speaks of the two dialects as identical, and the so-called Phoenician inscriptions that have been preserved to us show that the differences between them were hardly appreciable. There were differences, however; the Hebrew definite article, for instance, is not found in the Phoenician texts. But the differences are dialectal only, like the differences which the discovery of the Moabite Stone has shown to have existed between the languages of Moab and Israel.

How the Israelites came to adopt "the language of Canaan" is a question into which we cannot here enter. There have been other examples of conquerors who have abandoned the language of their forefathers and adopted that of the conquered people. And it must be remembered, on the one hand, that the ancestors of Israel had lived in Canaan, where they would have learnt the language of the country, and, on the other hand, that their original tongue was itself a Semitic form of speech, as closely related to Hebrew as French or Spanish is to Italian.

The Tel el-Amarna tablets have told us something about the language of Canaan as it was spoken before the days when the Israelites entered the land. Some of the letters that were sent from Palestine contain the Canaanite equivalents of certain Babylonian words that occur in them. Like the Babylonian words, they are written in cuneiform characters, and since these denote syllables and not mere letters we know exactly how the words were pronounced. It is an advantage which is denied us by the Phoenician alphabet, whether in the inscriptions of Phoenicia or in the pages of the Old Testament, and we can thus obtain a better idea of the pronunciation of the Canaanitish language in the century before the Exodus than we can of the Hebrew language in the age of Hezekiah.

Among the words which have been handed down to us by the correspondents of the Pharaoh are maqani "cattle," anay "a ship," súsi "a horse," of which the Hebrew equivalents, according to the Masoretic punctuation, are miqneh, oni, and sûs. The king of Jerusalem says anuki, "I," the Hebrew anochi, while badiu, the Hebrew b'yado, and akharunu, the Hebrew akharono, are stated to signify "in his hand," and "after him." "Dust" is ghaparu, where the guttural gh represents the Canaanitish ayyin ('); "stomach" is batnu, the Hebrew beten; while kilubi, "a cage," corresponds with the Hebrew chelûb, which is used in the same sense by the prophet Jeremiah. Elsewhere we find risu, the Hebrew rosh, "a head," har "a mountain," samama "heaven," and mima "water," in Hebrew shâmayim and mayim, which we gather from the cuneiform spelling have been wrongly punctuated by the Masoretes, as well as khaya "living," the Hebrew khai, and makhsû, "they have smitten him," the Hebrew makhatsu.

It was the use of the definite article ha(n) which mainly distinguished Hebrew and Phoenician or Canaanite one from the other. And we have a curious indication in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, that the same distinction prevailed between the language of the Canaanites and that of the Edomites, who, as we learn from the Old Testament, were so closely related to the Israelites. In the letter to the Pharaoh, in which mention is made of the hostilities carried on by Edom against the Egyptian territory, one of the Edomite towns referred to is called Khinianabi. Transcribed into Hebrew characters this would be 'En-han-nabi, "the Spring of the Prophet." Here, therefore, the Hebrew article makes its appearance, and that too in the very form which it has in the language of Israel. The fact is an interesting commentary on the brotherhood of Jacob and Esau.

If the language of Canaan was influenced by that of Egypt, still more was it influenced by that of Babylonia. Long before Palestine became an Egyptian province it had been a province of Babylonia. And even when it was not actually subject to Babylonian government it was under the dominion of Babylonian culture. War and trade alike forced the Chaldæan civilization upon "the land of the Amorites," and the Canaanites were not slow to take advantage of it. The cuneiform writing of Babylonia was adopted, and therewith the language of Babylonia was taught and learned in the schools and libraries which were established in imitation of those of the Babylonians. Babylonian literature was introduced into the West, and the Canaanite youth became acquainted with the history and legends, the theology and mythology of the dwellers on the Euphrates and Tigris.

Such literary contact naturally left its impress on the language of Canaan. Words which the Semites of Babylonia had borrowed from the older Sumerian population of the country were handed on to the peoples of Palestine. The "city" had been a Sumerian creation; until brought under the influence of Sumerian culture, the Semite had been contented to live in tents. Indeed in Babylonian or Assyrian—the language of the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia and Assyria—the word which signified "tent" was adopted to express the idea of "city" when the tent had been exchanged for city-life. In Canaan, on the other hand, the Sumerian word itself was adopted in a Semitic form, 'Ir, 'ar, or uru, "city," was originally the Sumerian eri.

The Canaanitish hêkâl, "a palace," again, came from a Sumerian source. This was ê-gal, or "great house." But it had passed to the West through the Semitic Babylonians, who had first borrowed the compound word under the form of êkallu. Like the city, the palace also was unknown to the primitive Semitic nomads. It belonged to the civilization of which the Sumerians of Chaldæa, with their agglutinative language, were the pioneers.