In fact, the Egyptian equivalent of Hebrew is ’Amu. What Joseph calls ‘the land of the Hebrews’ would have been termed ‘the land of the ’Amu’ by an Egyptian scribe. Joseph himself would have been an ’Amu slave. ’Amu signified an Asiatic in a restricted sense. It denoted the Asiatics of Syria and of the desert between Palestine and Egypt. It included also the nomad tribes of Edom and the Sinaitic Peninsula. It was thus larger in its meaning than the Biblical ‘Hebrew’; but, at the same time, it conveyed just the same ideas, and was used in much the same way. The Hyksos conquerors of Egypt were termed ’Amu, and a famous Syrian oculist in the days of the eighteenth dynasty is described as an ’Amu of Gebal. The name is probably derived from the Canaanitish and Hebrew word which signifies ‘a people.’
The name ‘Hebrew’ comes from a root which means ‘to pass’ or ‘cross over.’ It has been variously explained as ‘a pilgrim,’ ‘a dweller on the other side,’ ‘a crosser of the river.’ But the second explanation is that which best harmonises with philological probabilities. We find other derivatives from the same root. Among them is Abarim, the name of that mountain-range of Moab on ‘the other side’ of the Jordan, from whence Moses beheld the Promised Land (Numb. xxvii. 12), as well as Ebronah, near the Gulf of Aqaba, one of the resting-places of the children of Israel (Numb. xxxiii. 34). Hebrew genealogists indeed seem to have connected the name with that of the patriarch Eber. But this is in accordance with that spirit of Semitic idiom which throws geography and ethnology into a genealogical form. It is probable that the name of the patriarch is merely the Babylonian ebar, ‘a priest,’ which is met with in Babylonian contracts of the age of Abraham.
Professor Hommel, however, supplementing a suggestion of Dr. Glaser, has recently drawn attention to certain facts which throw light on the early use of the name ‘Hebrew,’ even if they do not remove all the difficulties connected with it.[[8]] A Minæan inscription from the south of Arabia, in which the name of ’Ammi-zadoq occurs, couples together the countries of Misr or Egypt, of Aashur, the Ashshurim of Gen. xxv. 3, and of ’Ibr Naharân, ‘the land beyond the river.’ In another Minæan inscription of the same age, the name of ’Ibr Naharân is replaced by that of Gaza. It is clear, therefore, that in ’Ibr Naharân we must see the south of Palestine. But the Minæan texts are not alone in their use of the term. A broken Assyrian tablet from the library of Nineveh[[9]] also refers to Ebir-nâri, ‘the land beyond the river,’ in Canaan, and associates it with Beth-el, Tyre, and Jeshimon. Professor Hommel is probably right in assigning the inscription to the reign of Assur-bel-Kala, the son of Tiglath-pileser I. (B.C. 1080). At all events, the name seems to be of Babylonian origin, like most of the geographical expressions adopted by the Assyrians, and it is consequently very possible that Ebir-nâri primarily signified the country on the western bank of the Euphrates, where Ur was situated, and that it was subsequently extended to the country west of the Jordan when Syria became a province of the Babylonian empire.[[10]]
However this may be, the question with which we started remains unanswered. We are still unable to define with exactness who the Hebrews were. The origin and first use of the name are still a matter of doubt. We must be content with the fact that it came to be applied—if not exclusively, at all events predominantly—to the people of Israel in their dealings with their foreign neighbours. It may be that this special application of it was first fixed by the Philistines. In any case it was a name which was accepted by the Israelites themselves, and gradually became synonymous with all that was specifically Israelitish. Even the old ‘language of Canaan,’ as it is still called by Isaiah (xix. 18), became ‘the Hebrew language’ of modern lexicographers. For us of to-day the history of the Hebrew people means the history of the descendants of Israel. It is with ‘Abram the Hebrew’ that the history begins. Future ages looked back upon him as the ancestor of the Hebrew race, ‘the rock’ from whence it was ‘hewn.’ He had come from the far East, from ‘Ur of the Casdim’ or Babylonians. His younger brother Haran had died ‘in the land of his nativity’; with his elder brother Nahor and himself, his father Terah had migrated westward, to Harran in Mesopotamia. There Terah had died, and there Abram had received the call which led him to journey still further onwards into the land of Canaan.
He was already married. Already in Babylonia he had made Sarai his wife, who is also said to have been his step-sister; while the wife, Milcah, whom his brother Nahor had taken to himself, was his niece. A time came when both Abram and Sarai took new names in token of the covenant they had made with God. Abram became Abraham, and Sarai became Sarah.
Upon these beginnings of Hebrew history light has been thrown by the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions. The site of ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ has been found. Geographers are no longer dependent on Arab legends or vague coincidencies with classical names. Ur was one of the most ancient and prosperous of Babylonian cities. The very name meant ‘the city’; it was, in fact, the capital of a district, and its kings at one time had claimed sway over the rest of Chaldæa. Alone among the great cities of Babylonia, it stood on the western bank of the Euphrates in close contact with the nomad tribes of Semitic Arabia. More than any other of the Babylonian towns it was thus able to influence and be influenced by the Semites of the west; it was an outpost of Babylonian culture, and its position made it a centre of trade.
Its mounds of ruin are now known as Muqayyar or Mugheir. Highest among them towers the mound which covers the remains of the great temple of the moon-god. For it was to Sin, the moon-god, that the city had been dedicated from time immemorial, and in whose honour its temple had been built. There was only one other temple of Sin that was equally famous, and this was the temple which stood at Harran in Mesopotamia, and which, like that at Ur, had been erected and endowed by Babylonian kings.
It was not only with the Semites of Northern Arabia that Ur carried on its trade. It lay not very far from the mouth of the Euphrates, which in early days flowed into the Persian Gulf nearly a hundred miles to the north of the present coast. We hear in the cuneiform tablets of ‘the ships of Ur,’ and these ships must have been used in the trade that was carried on by water. The products of Southern Arabia could thus be brought to the Chaldean city; perhaps also there was intercourse even with Egypt.
The kings of Ur grew in power, and a dynasty arose at last which gained ascendency over the other states of Babylonia. We are beginning to learn something about these kings and the society over which they ruled. During the last few years excavations have been carried on by the Americans, by the French, and even by the Turkish Government, which have brought to light thousands of early cuneiform records, some of which are dated in their reigns. A large proportion of these records are contracts which throw an unexpected light on the commerce and law, the manners and customs and social life of the inhabitants of Babylonia at the time.
Among the last kings of the dynasty of Ur were Inê-Sin and Pûr-Sin, whose names, it will be observed, are compounded with that of the patron-god of the state. Inê-Sin not only invaded Elam, but the distant west as well. His daughters married the High-Priests both of Ansan in Elam and of Markhasi, now Mer’ash, in Syria.[[11]] But it was not the first time that Babylonian armies had marched to the west. Centuries before (about B.C. 3800) another Babylonian king, Sargon of Accad, had made campaign after campaign against the land of the Amorites, as Syria and Palestine were called, had set up images of himself on the shores of the Mediterranean, and had united all Western Asia into a single empire, while his son and successor had marched southward into the Sinaitic Peninsula.[[12]] A predecessor of Inê-Sin himself, Gimil-Sin by name, had overrun the land of Zabsali, which Professor Hommel is probably right in identifying with Subsalla, from whence an earlier Babylonian prince obtained stone for his buildings, and which, we are told, was in the mountains of the Amorites. The stone, in fact, was the limestone of the Lebanon.[[13]]