The northern boundary between Canaanitish and Aramaic dialects was among the mountains of Gilead. This is made clear by the narrative of the covenant between Laban and Jacob. At Mizpah, the ‘Watch-tower,’ which guarded the approaches to the south, a cairn was raised, called Yegar-sahadutha in the language of Laban, Galeed in that of Jacob (Gen. xxxi. 47, 48). The two names alike signified the ‘heap of witnesses,’ but while the first was Aramaic, the second was Canaanitish. The fact that the names survived into later history shows that the line of demarcation between the two Semitic languages which they represent continued to remain in the same place.[[47]]
Jacob, despite his long residence in Aram and his relationship to an Aramæan family, is nevertheless Canaanite in his language. It is a sign and proof how completely the ancestors of the Israelites had identified themselves with the country which their descendants were afterwards to possess. The Canaanitish history of Israel begins long before the days of Moses or Joshua; it already dates from the day when the Babylonian Abram became the Abraham of Canaan, and when the field of Machpelah was sold to him by the children of Heth.
It is true that Jacob—or it may be, Terah—is once called in the Old Testament (Deut. xxvi. 5) ‘a wandering Aramæan.’ But he was so only in a secondary sense. It was not as an Aramæan, but as a wanderer out of Aramaic lands, that the title is given him. Israel was closely connected with Aram and Harran, but it was a relationship only.
Discoveries recently made in Northern Syria by the German explorer, Dr. von Luschan, have thrown some light on the matter. At Sinjerli, twenty-five miles north-east of the Gulf of Antioch, and nearly midway between Yarpuz and Aintab, he has excavated the ruins of the capital of the ancient kingdom of Samâla, and found monuments which make mention of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser.[[48]] Most of them, in fact, were erected by a prince who acknowledged the supremacy of the Assyrian monarch, and whose father’s name is met with in the annals of the latter sovereign. The inscriptions on them are in an Aramaic dialect; but the dialect is so largely mixed with Hebrew words and idioms as to have made scholars doubt at first whether it was not an Aramaised form of Hebrew rather than an Hebraised form of Aramaic. In any case, it is plain that the dialect was in close contact with a population which spoke ‘the language of Canaan.’ Far away to the north, therefore, in the heart of an Aramaic country, there must have been speakers of Hebrew or Canaanite. Nor is this all. Two or three miles from the ruins of Samâla are the ruins of another ancient town, the modern name of which is Girshin. Here, too, the German excavators have found an inscription of the same age as those of Samâla, and we may gather from it that Girshin stands on the site of a city which was the capital of the land of ‘Ya’di.’ In the Tel el-Amarna tablets, written in the century before the Exodus, Yaudâ are mentioned as living in the same part of the world.[[49]] Now Yaudâ is also the Assyrian mode of spelling the name of the Jews, and it would accordingly seem that a tribe which bore a name similar to that of Judah existed in Northern Syria as far back as the Patriarchal age.[[50]]
All this is in singular harmony with the Scriptural narrative which tells us that a part of Terah’s family lingered at Harran, and that the wives of both Isaac and Jacob came from their Aramæan kindred in the north. There were Hebrews in Northern Syria as well as in Canaan, and Scripture and archæology are alike in agreement in testifying to the fact.
Even in Babylonia it may be that Abraham had been educated in ‘the language of Canaan.’ There were colonies of Amorite (or, as we should say, Canaanitish) merchants in Chaldæa who had special districts and privileges assigned to them by the Babylonian kings. Reference is not unfrequently made to them in the contracts of the Abrahamic age. The proper names, which sometimes make their appearance in deeds of sale or lease, or in legal suits in which the foreign merchants were involved, are Canaanitish and not Babylonian. Thus we find names like Ishmael and Abdiel, Jacob-el (Ya’qub-il), and Joseph-el (Yasup-il), and we even read of ‘the Amorite the son of Abi-ramu’ or Abram, who appears as a witness to a deed dated in the reign of the grandfather of Amraphel.
Israel thus stood in close relation to almost all the chief linguistic divisions of the Semitic world. Its first forefather had been born in the land where Babylonian—or Assyrian, as we usually term it—was spoken, and its contact with Aramaic had been early and intimate. Its desert wanderings had led it into a region into which the Bedâwin tribes of Central Arabia could make their way, and the Hebrew article seems to be a relic of its intercourse with them and the Arabic they spoke. But with all this contact with other Semitic tongues, Israel nevertheless remained true to that of the land of its destiny: the language of the Old Testament is the language which was spoken in Canaan before the days of Moses, the language of the inscriptions of Phœnicia and Carthage, the language of Hannibal as well as of Joshua.
If Israel was connected by language with Canaan, it was connected by blood as well as by language with Moab, and Ammon, and Edom. In fact, Edom and Israel were brothers. While the relationship with Moab and Ammon was comparatively distant, the relationship with Edom was peculiarly close. The fact was never forgotten, and in the later days of Jewish history the unbrotherly conduct of Edom caused a bitterness of feeling towards it on the part of the Jews such as no other Gentiles were able to excite.
Moab and Ammon were the children of Lot, and had possessed themselves of the mountain and fertile plains on the east side of the Dead Sea and southern course of the Jordan long before Israel had entered into its inheritance, or even Edom had carved out a possession for itself with the sword. They were accused of being of incestuous origin, and it was related how the ancestors of each had been born in hiding and in the wild solitude of a cave. Moab was the eldest, Ben-Ammi, ‘the Ammonite,’ being the younger of the two.
The name of Moab (or Muab) is engraved among the conquests of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II., on the base of one of the statues which stand before the northern entrance of the temple of Luxor. Ammi, whose ‘son’ the ancestor of the Ammonites was called, was the supreme God of Ammon, standing to the Ammonites in the same relation that Chemosh stood to Moab, or Yahveh to Israel. Ammon, indeed, is but another form of Ammi. The god was widely worshipped, as we may learn from the proper names into which his own name enters. Thus the Old Testament knows of Ammiel, ‘Ammi is god’; of Ammi-shaddai, ‘Ammi is the Almighty’; and of Ammi-nadab, ‘Ammi is noble.’ Ammi-nadab was king of Ammon in the time of the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal; the early Minæan inscriptions of Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-zadoq and Ammi-zadiqa, ‘Ammi is righteous,’ as well as Ammi-karib and Ammi-anshi; while among the kings of the south Arabian dynasty which ruled over Babylonia in the age of Abraham we find Ammi-zadoq, or Ammu-zadoq and Ammi-dhitana; and the Kadmonite chieftain east of the Jordan, with whom the Egyptian fugitive Sinuhit found a home in the time of the twelfth dynasty, bore the name of Ammi-anshi.[[51]] Balaam the seer, moreover, was summoned by the king of Moab from his city of Pethor, at the junction of the Euphrates and the Sajur, in ‘the land of the children of Ammo,’—for such is the correct translation of the Hebrew text. It may not be an accident that one who thus belonged to the ‘Beni-Ammo,’ or ‘Ammonites’ of the north, should have been called to the country which bordered on that of the Beni-Ammi, or Ammonites of the south.[[52]]