[240]. If the two Balaams, ‘son of Beor,’ are really the same person, Edomite and Israelitish history will have handed down two different conceptions of him. The Israelitish chronology, moreover, would make it impossible for him to have been the first Edomite king (see Numb. xx. 14).
[241]. Sheth are the Sutu of the Assyrian inscriptions, the Sittiu or ‘Archers’ of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Bedâwin of modern geography. The Beni-Sheth will be the Midianite Bedâwin who are associated with the Moabites in the Pentateuch (Numb. xxii. 4, 7; xxv. 1-18; xxxi. 8).
[242]. Records of the Past, new ser., iii. pp. 61-65.
[243]. Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) boasts of having sailed upon the Mediterranean in a ship of Arvad, and of there killing a dolphin, while his son, Assur-bil-kala, erected statues in the cities of ‘the land of the Amorites’ (W. A. I. i. 6, No. vi.). A little later Assur-irbi carved an image of himself on Mount Amanus, near the Gulf of Antioch, but the capture by the king of Aram of Mutkina, which guarded the ford over the Euphrates, subsequently cut him off from the west. Palestine is already called Ebir-nâri, ‘the land beyond the river,’ in an Assyrian inscription which Professor Hommel would refer to the age of Assur-bil-kala, the son of Tiglath-pileser I. (The Ancient Hebrew Tradition, p. 196). Professor D. H. Müller (Die Propheten, p. 215) conjecturally emends the Hebrew text of Numb. xxiii. 23, 24, and sees in it a reference to the kingdom of Samalla, to the north-east of the Gulf of Antioch. The two verses become in his translation, ‘[And he saw Samalla], and began his speech, and said, Alas, who will survive of Samalla? And ships [shall come] from the coast of Chittim, and Asshur shall oppress him, and Eber shall oppress him, and he himself is destined to destruction.’ Samalla, however, was only the Assyrian name of a district called by natives of Northern Syria Ya’di and Gurgum; nor is it easy to understand how Balaam could have ‘seen’ the north of Syria from Moab. Professor Hommel is more probably right in his view that Asshur here does not signify the Assyrians, but the Asshurim to the south of Palestine (Gen. xxv. 3, 18).
[244]. For the Messianic prophecy of Ameni, see above, p. [175].
[245]. Similar cities of refuge, called puhonua, existed in Hawaii. ‘A thief or a murderer might be pursued to the very gateway of one of those cities; but as soon as he crossed the threshold of that gate, even though the gate were open and no barrier hindered pursuit, he was safe as at the city altar. When once within the sacred city, the fugitive’s first duty was to present himself before the idol and return thanks for his protection’ (Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, p. 151, quoting Ellis, Through Hawaii, pp. 155 sq., and Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, pp. 135 sq.). For the asyla of Asia Minor see Barth, De Asylis Græcis (1888); Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités, Grecques et Romaines, i. pp. 505 sqq.; Pauly’s Real-Encyclopädie (ed. Wissowa), iv. pp. 1884-5.
[246]. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt (Eng. tr.), p. 299.
[247]. Cornelius Nepos, Them. ii. 10.
[248]. Mahaffy, The Empire of the Ptolemies, pp. 144, 156-158. For the hiera or priestly cities of Asia Minor, see Ramsay, The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, pp. 101 sqq.; their constitution resembled very closely that of the Levitical cities in Israel. Examples of such cities in the history of Israel are Nob in the time of Saul and Anathoth in the age of Jeremiah.
[249]. The order of events is in many places confused, which probably points to later insertions in the text. See, for example, Deut. x. 6-9, which interrupts the context, and has nothing to do either with what precedes or with what follows.