We next find the Hebrew patriarch in Egypt. There was famine in Canaan, and Egypt was already the granary of the eastern world. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we hear of Egyptian corn being sent to the starving population of Syria; and Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Exodus, tells us that he had loaded ships with wheat for the Hittites when they were suffering from a famine. The want of rain which destroyed the crops of Canaan did not affect Egypt, where the fertility of the soil depends upon the irrigating waters of the Nile.
Egypt at the time must have been under the sway of the Hyksos kings. They were Asiatic invaders who had overrun the country from north to south, and established themselves on the throne of the Pharaohs. In three successive dynasties did they govern the land, and the descendants of the native monarchs sank into hiqu or vassal ‘princes’ of Thebes. At first, it is said, they laid Egypt waste, destroying the temples and massacring the people. But the influence of Egyptian culture soon led them captive. The Hyksos court became Egyptianised; the Hyksos king assumed the titles and state of the ancient sovereigns; Sutekh, the Hyksos god, was identified with Ra, the Sun-god of On, and the official language itself remained Egyptian. A treatise on mathematics, one of the few scientific works that have survived the shipwreck of Egyptian literature, was written under the patronage of the Hyksos king, Apophis I.[[30]]
Nevertheless, with all this outward varnish of Egyptian culture, the Hyksos rule continued to be foreign. Even the names of the kings were not Egyptian, and up to the last the supreme object of their worship was a foreign deity. According to the Sallier Papyrus, the war of independence was occasioned by the demand of Apophis II. that Sutekh, and not Amon, should be acknowledged as the god of Thebes, and a scarab found at Kom Ombos in 1896 bears upon it, in confirmation of the story, the name of Sutekh-Apopi.[[31]] Moreover, the Hyksos capital was not in any of the old centres of Egyptian government. Zoan, it is true, now Sân, in the north-eastern part of the Delta, was nominally their official residence; but they preferred to dwell in the fortress of Avaris, on the extreme eastern edge of Egypt, and within hail of their Asiatic kinsmen. It was from Avaris that Apophis had sent his insolent message to the terrified Prince of Thebes.
The Hebrew visitor to Egypt, therefore, was among friends and not strangers. Moreover, he had only to cross the frontier to find himself in the presence of the Pharaoh’s court. Whether at Zoan or at Avaris, it was alike close at hand to the traveller from Asia.
After leaving Egypt, Abram established himself at Hebron. It would seem that the name of Hebron, ‘the Confederacy,’ was not yet in existence, as it was to the ‘terebinth’ of Mamre, and not of Hebron, that Abram ‘removed his tent.’ Indeed, it is more than doubtful whether Mamre and Hebron occupied precisely the same site. It may be that Mamre was the older fortress of the Amorites, whose place was taken in after times by the town which gathered round the adjoining sanctuary of Hebron.
In any case, its population was Amorite, though probably we should understand ‘Amorite’ here in its Babylonian sense. ‘Abram the Hebrew,’ it is declared, ‘dwelt under the terebinth of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol and brother of Aner; and these were confederate with Abram.’ In other words, the Hebrew settler in Canaan had formed an alliance with the native chiefs.
Then came an event upon which the cuneiform records of Babylonia are beginning to cast light. Chedor-laomer, king of Elam, and the vassal kings Amraphel of Shinar, Arioch of Ellasar, and Tid’al of ‘nations,’ marched against the five Canaanitish princes of the Vale of Siddim at the northern end of the Dead Sea, bent upon obtaining possession of the naphtha springs that abounded there, and the produce of which had already made its way to Babylonia. No resistance was made to the invader; it is clear, in fact, that the invasion was no new thing, and that the rest of Canaan was already subject to the lords of the East. For ‘twelve years’ the five Canaanitish kings ‘served Chedor-laomer, and in the thirteenth year they rebelled.’ Once more, therefore, the forces of Elam and Babylonia moved westward. The revolt, it would appear, had spread to other parts of the ‘land of the Amorites,’ and the invading army marched southward along the eastern side of the Jordan. First, the Rephaim were overthrown at Ashteroth-Karnaim, in ‘the field of Bashan,’ as it was termed in the days of the Tel el-Amarna tablets; then followed the turn of the Zuzim in the future land of Ammon, and of the Emim in what was to be the land of Moab; and after smiting the Horites of Mount Seir, the invaders penetrated into the wilderness of Paran, fell upon the desert sanctuary of Kadesh, now called ’Ain el-Qadîs, and returned northward along the western shore of the Dead Sea. They had thus partially followed in the footsteps of an earlier Chaldæan king, Naram-Sin, who centuries before had made his way to the Sinaitic Peninsula, and there gained possession of the coveted copper-mines.
The native princes in the Vale of Siddim were no match for the foe. A battle was fought which ended disastrously for the Canaanitish troops. The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah were slain, their men were driven into the naphtha-pits of which the plain was full, or else fled to the mountains. Their cities fell into the hands of the conquerors, who carried away both captives and spoil.
But Abram heard that among the captives was his ‘brother’ Lot. Thereupon he started in pursuit of the Chaldæan army, with his three hundred and eighteen armed followers and the forces of his Amorite allies. The victorious army was overtaken near Damascus, and its rear surprised in a night attack. The captives and spoil were recovered, and brought back in triumph to the south of Canaan. Here at the ‘King’s Dale,’ just outside the walls of Jerusalem, the new king of Sodom went to welcome him; and Melchizedek, the priest-king of Jerusalem, blessed the conqueror in the name of ‘the Most High God.’
The history of the campaign of Chedor-laomer reads like an extract from the Babylonian chronicles. It is dated in the reign of the king of Shinar or Babylon, as it would have been had it been written by a Babylonian scribe, although the Babylonian king was but the vassal and tributary of the sovereign of Elam. Even the spelling of the names indicates that they are taken from a cuneiform document. ‘Ham’ for Ammon, and ‘Zuzim’ for Zamzummim, can be explained only by the peculiarities of the cuneiform system of writing.[[32]]