The whole story, however, has been thrown into a Canaanitish form. The king of Northern Babylonia, whose capital was Babylon, has become a king of Shinar, that being the name given in the West to the northern half of Chaldæa.[[33]] Larsa, the capital of Eri-Aku or Arioch, has been transformed into Ellasar, perhaps through the influence of the Babylonian al, city.’ Lastly, Tid’al, the Tudghula of the cuneiform texts, is entitled the ‘king of nations.’

The fragmentary tablets discovered by Mr. Pinches, in which we hear of Khammu-rabi, king of Babylon, of Eri-Aku or Arioch, and his son Bad-makh-dingirene, and of Kudur-Laghghamar, the Chedor-laomer of Genesis, refer to Tudghula or Tid’al as ‘the son of Gazza[ni].’ Unfortunately, the words which follow, and which gave a description of the prince, have been lost through a fracture of the clay tablet. But there is another tablet from which we may supply the deficiency. On the one hand we are told that Tudghula burned the sanctuaries of Babylonia and allowed the waters of the Euphrates to roll over the ruins of the great temples of Babylon; on the other hand we read: ‘Who is this Kudur-Laghghamar who has wrought evil? He has assembled the Umman Manda, has devastated the land of Bel, and [has marched] at their side.’ Elsewhere Kudur-Laghghamar is called the king of Elam.[[34]]

The Umman Manda were the barbarous tribes in the mountains which adjoined the northern part of Elam and formed the eastern boundary of Babylonia. The term means the ‘Nomad,’ or ‘Barbarous Peoples,’ and is thus the Babylonian equivalent of the Hebrew Goyyim, ‘Nations.’[[35]] What the ‘Gentiles,’ or Goyyim, were to the Hebrews, or the ‘Barbarians’ to the Greeks, the Umman Manda were to the civilised population of Chaldæa. The fact that the king of Elam summons them to his help when he invades Babylonia implies that they acknowledged his suzerainty. It would seem, therefore, that the ‘Nations’ over which Tid’al is said to have ruled were the Kurdish tribes to the east of the Babylonian frontier.

Khammu-rabi eventually succeeded in overthrowing the king of Elam, in crushing his rival Eri-Aku and his Elamite allies, and in making himself master of an independent Babylonia, which was henceforth a united kingdom, with its centre and sovereign city at Babylon. Recent excavations have brought letters of his to light which were written to his faithful vassal Sin-idinnam, Sin-idinnam had been the king of Larsa whom Eri-Aku and his Elamite troops had driven from the city of his fathers, and he had found refuge and protection in the court of Khammu-rabi at Babylon. When the great war finally broke out, which ended in leaving Khammu-rabi sole monarch of Babylonia, Sin-idinnam rendered him active service, and after the conclusion of the struggle he was reinstated in his ancestral princedom. Khammu-rabi loaded him with other honours as well; and one of the letters which have been recovered refers to certain statues which were presented to him as a reward for his ‘valour on the day of Kudur-Laghghamar’s defeat.’ This was an Oriental anticipation of the statues which the Greek cities of a later age bestowed upon those they would honour.[[36]]

It has been suggested that the reverse sustained by Kudur-Laghghamar in Palestine at the hands of the ‘Amorites,’ under the leadership of ‘Abram the Hebrew,’ may have given the king of Babylon his opportunity for successfully revolting from his liege lord. If so, the Hebrew patriarch would have influenced the destinies of the country he had forsaken. What is more certain is that his victory gave him a commanding position in the country of his adoption. Syrian legend in after days made him a king in Damascus;[[37]] and when he buys the rock-tomb of Machpelah, the owners of the land tell him that he is no ‘stranger and sojourner’ among them, but ‘a mighty prince,’ ‘a prince of Elohim.’ From henceforth the ‘Hebrew’ occupies a recognised place in ‘the land of the Amorites.’

The figure of Melchizedek, king of Salem, loomed large upon the imagination of later ages out of the mists that enveloped the history of Canaanitish Jerusalem. But the romance is now making way for sober history. The letters on clay tablets in the Babylonian language and writing, found at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt, have come to our help. Several of them were sent to the Pharaoh from Ebed-Tob, king of Jerusalem, and they show that Jerusalem was already the dominant state of Southern Palestine. Its strong position made it a fortress of importance, and it was the capital of a territory which stretched away towards the desert of the South. Its name was already Jerusalem or Uru-Salim, ‘the city of Salim,’ the God of Peace, and the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt accordingly speak of it simply as Shalama or Salem, omitting the needless Uru, ‘city.’[[38]]

Ebed-Tob reiterates that he was not, like the other governors of Canaan, under Egyptian rule. They had been appointed to their offices by the Pharaoh, or had inherited them by descent from the older royal lines of the country whom the Egyptian Government had allowed to remain. He, on the contrary, was the friend and ally of the Egyptian king. His kingly dignity had not been derived from either father or mother, but from the ‘Mighty King,’ from the god, that is to say, whose temple stood on ‘the mountain of Jerusalem.’ He was, therefore, a priest-king, without father or mother, so far as his royal office was concerned.[[39]]

That the king of Salem, the priest of the God of Peace, should have come forth from his city and its temple to welcome the conqueror when he returned in peace, was both natural and fitting. It was equally natural and fitting that he should bless the Hebrew in the name of the ‘Most High God’—the patron deity of Jerusalem, whom Ebed-Tob identifies with the Babylonian Ninip—and that Abram should in return have given him tithes of the spoil. From time immemorial, the esrâ or tithe had been exacted in Babylonia for the temples and their priests, and had been paid alike by prince and peasant. It passed to the West along with the other elements and institutions of Babylonian culture.[[40]]

The destruction of the cities of the Vale of Siddim, which is represented as occurring not long after the retreat of the king of Elam, made a profound impression on the Western world. References are made to the catastrophe up to the latest days of Hebrew literature; and the mist caused by the evaporation of the salt on the surface of the Dead Sea was popularly supposed to be the smoke which hung eternally over the ruins of the doomed cities of the plain. The storm which burst from the heavens set fire to the naphtha springs that oozed through the soil, and houses and men alike were enveloped in a sheet of fire. Similar catastrophes have happened in our own time at Baku on the Caspian, where the petroleum, accidentally ignited, has blazed for days in columns of fire.

Ingenious Germans have connected with the destruction of Sodom and its sister cities a passage in the Latin writer Justin (xviii. 3. 2, 3), in which it is said that the Phœnicians were driven to the Canaanitish coast by an earthquake which took place in their original home near ‘the Assyrian lake.’ Instead of ‘Assyrian,’ some manuscripts read ‘Syrian,’ and the lake has accordingly been imagined to be the Dead Sea, and the earthquake to be the rain of fire which destroyed the cities of the plain.[[41]] But there is no other instance in which the Dead Sea is called ‘the Syrian lake,’ supposing this to be the true reading, nor is there any trace of an earthquake in the catastrophe described in Genesis. Moreover, the unanimous voice of classical antiquity declared that the Phœnicians had come from the Persian Gulf, not from the valley of the Jordan, and their seafaring propensities were explained by the fact that they once lived in the islands of the Erythræan Sea. Whatever the ‘Assyrian lake’ may have been, it was not the ‘Salt Sea’ of the Old Testament.