A few miles to the north of Pethor was Carchemish, now Jerablûs, which was destined to become one of the most important strongholds of the Hittite tribes. The Semites explained the name as ‘the fortified wall of Chemosh’;[[53]] and whether this etymology were true or not, at all events it indicates a belief that the worship of Chemosh extended as far northward into Aram as did the worship of Ammi. Chemosh was the national god of Moab. Like Yahveh of Israel and Assur in Assyria, he had neither wife nor children; and on the Moabite Stone even the Babylonian goddess Ashtar, whose cult had been carried to the West, is identified with him. She ceases to have any independent existence or sex of her own, and is absorbed into the one supreme deity of Moabite faith. It is probable that Ammi also was similarly conceived of as standing alone in jealous isolation, supreme over all other gods, and having no consort with whom to share his power.
Moab and Ammon were alike intruders in the lands which subsequently bore their names. The older inhabitants of Moab were known as the Emim, ‘a people great and many and tall, as the Anakim, which also were accounted giants.’ Ammon too had been ‘accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time, and the Ammonites call them Zamzummim.’ The word rendered ‘giants’ in the Authorised Version is Rephaim; and it is very possible that a trace of it survives in the name On-Repha, ‘On of the giant,’ the Raphon or Raphana of classical geography, which is coupled by the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. with Astartu or Ashteroth-Karnaim.[[54]] When Chedor-laomer made his campaign in Canaan the Rephaim were still living at Ashteroth-Karnaim, and the ‘Zuzim’ or Zamzummim in ‘Ham.’ The name of the latter seems to occur in the inscriptions of the kings of Ur, who reigned some centuries before the birth of Abraham; they mention hostile expeditions against the land of Zavzala or the Zuzim; and a Babylonian high-priest who owned allegiance to one of them brought blocks of limestone for his temples and palace from the same district, which he tells us was situated ‘in the mountains of the Amorites.’[[55]]
Whether or not the Emim and Zamzummim were Amorite tribes, we cannot tell. The physical characteristics ascribed to them in the Old Testament would, however, seem to indicate that such was the case. Moreover, the Amorites had at one time been the dominant population, not only in Palestine itself, but also in the country east of the Jordan as well as in the Syrian districts to the north. When the Babylonians first became acquainted with Western Asia in the fifth or fourth millennium before the Christian era, the inhabitants of Syria were mainly of the Amorite race. Syria, accordingly, and more especially that part of it which is known to us as Palestine, was called in the old agglutinative language of Chaldæa ‘the land of Martu’ or ‘the Amorite,’ a word which has survived in the book of Genesis under the form of Moreh.[[56]] When the older language of Chaldæa made way for Semitic Babylonian, Martu became Amurru, and Hadad, the supreme Baal or sun-god of Canaan, became known as ‘Amurru,’ ‘the Amorite.’ By the Egyptians the Amorites were termed Amur; and, as has been already stated,[[57]] the Egyptian artists have shown us that they were a fair-skinned people, with blue eyes and reddish hair; that they were also tall and handsome, and wore short and pointed beards. In fact, they resembled in features the Libyans of Northern Africa, whose modern descendants—the Kabyles of Algeria—offer such a striking likeness to the golden-haired Kelt. The Amorite type may still be seen in its purity among the Arabs of the El-Arîsh desert, who inhabit the district between the frontiers of Palestine and Egypt: many of the latter, as we see them to-day, might well have sat for the portraits of the Amorites depicted on the walls of the old Egyptian temples and tombs. It would seem that the Amorite race, fair and tall and energetic, once extended along the northern coast of Africa into Asia itself, where they occupied the larger part of Southern Syria. There they have left behind them cromlechs and dolmens which remind us of those of our own islands. Indeed, if the Amorite were the eastern branch of the Libyan race, it is probable that he could claim kindred with the so-called red Kelt of Britain. The physiological characteristics of the Libyan and fair-haired Kelt are similar; and many anthropologists assume the existence of a Libyo-Keltic or ‘Eurafrican’ family, which has spread northward through Spain and the western side of France into the British Isles.[[58]]
The Emim and Zamzummim, accordingly, whom the descendants of Lot partly expelled, partly absorbed, may have been of Amorite origin, and connected in race with a portion of the population of our own country. At all events, when the Israelites entered Canaan, the Amorites were already settled on the eastern side of the Jordan. At that time the land was divided between the Amalekites or Bedâwin of the desert to the south, the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites ‘in the mountains,’ and the Canaanites on the coast of the Mediterranean and in the valley of the Jordan (Numb. xiii. 29). As might have been expected in the case of a fair-skinned people, the Amorites needed the bracing air of the mountains in order to hold their own against the other populations of the country; in the hot plains their vigour was in danger of being lost.
The Egyptian rule, which the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties had maintained eastward of the Jordan, passed away with the fall of the Egyptian empire, and its place was taken by the Amorite kingdoms of Sihon and Og. Sihon had overthrown the Moabites in battle, and had wrested their territory from them as far south as the Arnon (Numb. xxi. 26). They had been driven out of their cities into the barren mountains which overlooked the Dead Sea. A fragment of the Amorite Song of Triumph which recorded the conquest has been preserved to us. ‘Come unto Heshbon,’ it said, ‘let the city of Sihon be built and fortified. For a fire has gone forth from Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon; it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the Baalim of the high places of Arnon. Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: [Chemosh] hath given his sons that escaped [the battle], and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites’ (Numb. xxi. 27-29).
The southern half of Ammon also, as far north as the Jabbok, was in Amorite hands. Here, however, the Ammonites had strongly fortified their ‘border’ (Numb. xxi. 24), so that neither Sihon himself, nor his Israelitish conquerors, succeeded in passing it. But Rabbah, ‘the city of waters,’ the future capital of Ammon, must have been held by the Amorites, and the two intrusive populations of Ammon and Moab were separated from one another by the Amorite conquest.
If the older inhabitants of the country were Amorite by race, the kingdom of Sihon will have represented an Amorite reaction against the descendants of Lot. But we must remember that the Babylonians had given the name of ‘Amorite’ to all the populations of Palestine and the adjoining districts, whether they were Amorites in blood or not. The old Babylonian usage is followed in several passages of the Pentateuch, and points to their origin in those pre-Mosaic days when Babylonian influence was still dominant in Western Asia. Thus in Gen. xv. 16, God declares to Abraham that ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full,’ and Jacob reminded his sons (Gen. xlviii. 22) that he had wrested Shechem ‘out of the hand of the Amorite’ with his sword and bow. Perhaps the emphatic statement that ‘the Canaanite was then in the land,’ which we read in Gen. xii. 6, is due to the previous mention of the terebinth of Moreh’ or Martu, Martu being the primitive Babylonian equivalent of the later ‘Amorite.’ The terebinth, indeed, was in the country of the Amorites, but the country was already inhabited by Canaanitish tribes.[[59]]
We cannot, then, be certain that the aboriginal peoples of Moab and Ammon were actually of the Amorite race. They were, it is true, included by the Babylonians under the common name of ‘Amorites,’ but this was because all the rest of the population of Southern Syria was known under the same title. The fact, however, that the Hebrew writers have described them as tall, like the Anakim, and that popular tradition should have spoken of them as Rephaim or giants, is in favour of their having been really of Amorite descent. In this case we may see in them the easternmost representatives of the blond race, and the builders of the cromlechs with which the hillsides of Moab are covered.
Southward of Moab came other tribes which, like the Ishmaelites, were said to have sprung directly from Abraham himself. These were the Midianites and the merchant tribes of Sheba and Dedan, who possessed stations on the great desert road that led from the spice-bearing regions of Southern Arabia to the borders of Canaan. They claimed to be the descendants of Keturah, or ‘Incence,’ the second wife of the Hebrew patriarch, after Sarah’s death. Another genealogy (Gen. x. 7) placed Sheba and Dedan in the extreme south of the Arabian peninsula, among the children of Cush. Both genealogies, however, are correct. Sheba was the kingdom of the Sabæans, whose centre was in Southern Arabia, but whose power and commerce extended far to the north. Their trading settlements and garrisons were to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of Midian, at Tema, the modern Teimah, and elsewhere.[[60]] If Professor Hommel is right in identifying Dedan with Tidanum, one of the names by which Palestine was known in early days to the natives of Babylonia, it would seem that the Dedanites also had become a leading people on the frontiers of Canaan. At all events, it is clear that Abraham was claimed as an ancestor by the tribes of Western Arabia from its northern to its southern extremity, by the descendants of Keturah on the western coast and caravan-road, as well as by the Ishmaelites further to the east. They represented the trading and more cultured population of the peninsula as opposed to the wild Amalekites or Bedâwin hordes, who had their home among the mountains of Seir and the desert south of Palestine. The connection between Midian and Israel, which found expression in a common ancestry, was reasserted in later days when the great legislator of Israel fled to Midian and married the daughter of its high-priest.
How nearly that connection had been lost through the death of the forefather of the Israelitish people was recorded in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. A voice came to Abraham, which he believed to be divine, bidding him offer ‘for a burnt-offering’ the son of his old age, the heir of the covenant which had been made with him. It was a form of sacrifice only too well known in Canaan. In time of pestilence or trouble the parent was called upon to sacrifice to Baal that which was dearest and nearest to him, his firstborn or his only son. The gods themselves had set the example. Once when a plague had fallen upon the land, El had clothed Yeud, his only son, in royal purple, and on one of the high-places of Palestine had offered him up to the offended deities.[[61]] The doctrine of vicarious sacrifice was deeply enrooted in the minds of the Canaanitish people. But it needed to be a sacrifice which cost the offerer almost as much as his own life. The fruit of his own body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul. And the sacrifice had to be by fire. Only through that purifying element could the stains of sin and impurity be obliterated, and the offering made acceptable to heaven.