It is true that in the books of Samuel, where we are told how the threshing-floor of the Jebusite came to be chosen as the site of the temple, no allusion is made to Abraham’s sacrifice. Another reason is assigned for the choice of the spot. But Oriental modes of writing history are not the same as ours, and the so-called argument from silence is worthless when applied to them. Archæological discovery has shown, time after time, that facts and references are passed over in silence by the writers of ancient Oriental history, not because the writers did not know them, but because their conception of history was different from ours.
Mount Moriah, then, may well have been the scene of that temptation of Abraham when, in accordance with the fierce ritual of Syria, he believed himself called upon to offer up in sacrifice his only son. At all events, the belief that it was so can be traced back to an early date among the Jews. The very fact that the Samaritans transported the place of sacrifice to Mount Gerizim proves that it had already been associated with the site of the temple, and the transference of the site was necessary in support of the claim that the true centre of Hebrew worship was at Samaria and not in Jerusalem.
Light has been cast on the substitution of a ram for the human victim by an acute observation of M. Clermont-Ganneau.[[63]] We know that human sacrifice occupied a prominent place in the ritual of Phœnicia and Carthage; and yet in the so-called sacrificial tariffs which have been discovered at Carthage and Marseilles, and in which the price is stated of each of the offerings demanded by the gods, there is absolute silence in regard to it. The place of the human victim is taken by the ayîl, the ‘ram’ of the book of Genesis.[[64]] The tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to that later period of Phœnician religion, when contact with the Greeks had introduced Western ideas of the value of human life, and a truer conception of what the gods required. The merchants of Carthage had learned that Baal would be satisfied with a victim less costly than man, and would accept instead of him the blood of rams.
The lesson which the Carthaginians learned from contact with the Greeks had been taught the ancestors of the Hebrews by the Lord. The Law and the Prophets alike protested against the old belief, hard as it was to eradicate it from the Semitic mind. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter stands alone, even in the troublous period of the Judges; the sacrifice of his eldest son by the king of Moab (2 Kings iii. 27), though it stayed the Israelitish attack, was the act of one who did not acknowledge Yahveh of Israel as his God; and the Jewish children who were burnt in the fire to Moloch were offered by renegades from the national faith. Israelitish law and history bear upon them the traces of the old Semitic custom, but they are traces only. The story of Abraham’s sacrifice is an antitype of the future history of the religion of Israel. The firstborn, indeed, belonged to Yahveh, if He chose to claim them; but, unlike the gods of the heathen, He did not claim them when they were the firstborn of man.
Once again we have a picture of Abraham; but this time it is not as the shêkh who conforms to the beliefs and practices of Canaan, but as a foreign prince who acquires land in the country of his adoption. Sarah is dead, and Abraham accordingly buys a field at Machpelah in the close neighbourhood of Hebron. The field included a portion of the limestone cliff which overlooked the city, and was pierced then, as now, by numerous cavities, partly natural, partly excavated by the hand of man. They were the burying-places of the inhabitants of the town, the chambered tombs in which the dead were laid to rest. That Abraham should choose Hebron as the future home and resting-place of his family was perhaps natural. It was here that he had lived when he first came, as an immigrant, into ‘the land of the Amorites’; it was here that he had been confederate with its Amorite chieftains, and had led his forces against the invading host of the king of Elam. Moreover, Hebron was one of the old centres of Canaan. It had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt (Numb. xiii. 22), perhaps in the age when the Hyksos kings first conquered Egypt and rebuilt Zoan, making it the capital of their new kingdom. The sanctuary of Hebron rivalled that of Jerusalem in sanctity and fame, at all events in the years immediately succeeding the Israelitish conquest, and it was at Hebron that David first established his power and his son Absalom matured his rebellion.
In the age of Abraham the city had not yet received its later name of Hebron, the ‘Confederacy.’ It was still known as Kirjath-Arba, and the district in which it stood was that of Mamre. Amorites and Hittites dwelt there side by side. Arba, we are told, was ‘a great man among the Amorite Anakim’ (Josh. xiv. 15), but it was from ‘the sons of Heth’ that the field of Machpelah was bought.
Critics have raised the question who these Hittites of Southern Palestine may have been. It has been asserted that they are the invention of a later Hebrew writer, and that the Hittites of Northern Syria were never settled in the south of Canaan. On the other hand, the veracity of the Hebrew record has been admitted, but the identity of ‘the sons of Heth’ with the great Hittite tribes of the north has been denied.
The critics, however, have no grounds for their scepticism. The book of Genesis does not stand alone in testifying to the existence of Hittites in Southern Palestine. The prophet Ezekiel does the same. He too tells us that the origin of Jerusalem was partly Amorite, partly Hittite. Indeed, throughout the Pentateuch it is assumed that Hittites and Amorites were mingled together in the mountainous parts of the country. ‘The Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites,’ it is said in the book of Numbers (xiii. 29), ‘dwell in the mountains,’ and the same combination of names in the same order is found in the geographical table of Genesis (x. 15, 16). Between these Hittites and the Hittites of the north no distinction is made in the Old Testament. ‘The land of the Hittites,’ mentioned in Judg. i. 26, into which the Canaanite betrayer of Beth-el made his way, was in the north, like the Hittite kingdoms whose princes are referred to in 2 Kings vii. 6.
Thanks to archæological discovery, we now know a good deal about these Hittites of Northern Syria. Their name is found on the monuments of Egypt, of Assyria, and of Armenia, and they are mentioned in Babylonian tablets which go back to the age of Abraham. Cappadocia was their earliest home; from hence they descended on the possessions of the Aramæans and established their power as far south as the Lake of Homs. The cuneiform inscriptions of Armenia in the ninth century B.C. describe them as on the Upper Euphrates in the neighbourhood of Malatiyeh, and the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1100) tells us that Carchemish was one of their capitals. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we hear of their growing power on the northern frontier of the Egyptian empire, of their intrigues with the Amorites and the people of Canaan, and of their steady advance to the south. Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, after twenty years of warfare, was glad to conclude peace on equal terms with ‘the great king of the Hittites.’ The Hittite capital was already so near the northern border of Palestine as Kadesh on the Orontes ‘in the land of the Amorites.’ Here the Hittite monarch gathered together his vassals and allies from Syria and Asia Minor; even the distant Lycians and Dardanians came at his call.
The Egyptian artists have left us portraits of the Hittite race. Their features and dress were alike peculiar, and both reappear without change on certain monuments which have been found in Asia Minor and Syria, thus fixing the character of the latter beyond dispute. The monuments are covered with a still undeciphered system of hieroglyphic writing, and among the hieroglyphs are numerous human heads with the strange profile of the Hittite face. The nose and upper jaw protrude, the forehead is high and receding, the cheeks smooth, while we learn from the paintings of Egypt that the skin was yellow and the hair and the eyes were black. The hair was gathered together in a kind of ‘pig-tail,’ and the feet were shod with the shoes of mountaineers, the toes of which rose upwards into a point.[[65]]