Inê-Sin married his daughter to the High-Priest of Zabsali, but his successor Pûr-Sin II. appears to have been one of the last of the dynasty. Babylonia fell under Elamite domination, and a line of kings arose at Babylon whose names show that they came from Southern Arabia. The first of them was Khammu-rabi, whose reign lasted for fifty-five years. He proved himself one of the most able and vigorous of Babylonian monarchs. Before he died he had driven the Elamites out of the country, and united it into a single monarchy, with Babylon for its capital.
When Khammu-rabi first mounted the throne, he was a vassal of the king of Elam. In Southern Babylonia, not far from Ur, though on the opposite side of the river, was a rival kingdom, that of Larsa, whose king, Eri-Aku or Arioch, was the son of an Elamite prince. His father Kudur-Mabug is called ‘the Father of the land of the Amorites,’ implying not only that Canaan was subject at the time to Elamite rule, but also that Kudur-Mabug held some official position there. In one of his inscriptions Eri-Aku entitles himself ‘the shepherd of Ur,’ and tells us that he had captured ‘the ancient city of Erech.’
In Eri-Aku or Arioch, Assyriologists have long since seen the Arioch of the book of Genesis, the contemporary of Abram; and their belief has been raised to certainty by the recent discovery by Mr. Pinches of certain fragmentary cuneiform tablets in which allusion is made not only to Khammu-rabi, but also to the kings who were his contemporaries. These are Arioch, Kudur-Laghghamar or Chedor-laomer, and Tudghula or Tid’al. Khammu-rabi, accordingly, must be identified with Amraphel, who is stated in the Old Testament to have been king of Shinar or Babylonia, and we can approximately fix the period when the family of Terah migrated from Ur of the Chaldees. It was about 2300 B.C. if the chronology of the native Babylonian historians is correct.[[14]]
There was at this time constant intercourse between Babylonia and the West. The father of Eri-Aku, as we have seen, bore the title of ‘Father of the land of the Amorites,’ and Khammu-rabi himself claimed sovereignty over the same part of the world. So, too, did his great-grandson Ammi-satana (or Ammi-dhitana), who in one of his inscriptions adds the title of ‘king of the land of the Amorites’ to that of ‘king of Babylon.’ Indeed, the kings of the dynasty to which Khammu-rabi belonged bear names which are almost as much Canaanitish or Hebrew as they are South Arabic in form. The Babylonians had some difficulty in spelling them, and in the contract-tablets, consequently, the same name is written in different ways. Thus we learn from a philological tablet in which the names are translated into Semitic Babylonian that Khammu and Ammi are but variant attempts to represent the same word—that of a god whose name appears in those of South Arabian princes as well as Israelites of the Old Testament, and from whom the Beni-Ammi or Ammonites derived their name.[[15]]
The founder of the dynasty had been Sumu-abi (or Samu-abi), ‘Shem is my father,’ and his son had been Sumu-la-il, ‘Is not Shem a god?’ The monarchs who ruled at Babylon, therefore, when Abram was born claimed the same ancestor as did Abram’s family, and worshipped him as a god. The father of Ammi-satana was Abesukh, the Abishua’ of the Bible; and his son was Ammi-zaduq, where zaduq, ‘righteous,’ is a word well known to the languages of Southern Arabia and Canaan, but not to that of Babylonia. The kings who succeeded to the inheritance of the old Babylonian monarchs of Ur were thus allied in language and race to the Hebrew patriarch.
But this is not all. We find in the contracts which were drawn up in the reigns of the kings of Ur and the successors of Sumu-abi not only names like Sabâ, ‘the Sabæan,’ which carry us to the spice-bearing lands of Southern Arabia,[[16]] but names also which are specifically Canaanitish, or as we should usually term it, Hebrew, in form. Thus Mr. Pinches has discovered in them Ya’qub-il and Yasup-il, of which the Biblical Jacob and Joseph are abbreviations, and elsewhere we meet with Abdiel and Lama-il, the Lemuel of the Old Testament. Even the name of Abram (Abi-ramu) himself occurs among the witnesses to a deed which is dated in the reign of Khammu-rabi’s grandfather, and its Canaanitish character is put beyond question by the fact that he is called the father of ‘the Amorite.’[[17]]
From other documents we learn that there were Amoritish or Canaanite settlements in Babylonia where the foreigner was allowed to acquire land and carry on trade with the natives. One of these was just outside the walls of Sippara in Northern Babylonia, and a good many references to it have already been detected. Thus in the reign of Ammi-zaduq a case of disputed title was brought before four of the royal judges which related to certain feddans or ‘acres’ of land ‘in the district of the Amorites,’ ‘at the entrance to the city of Sippara’;[[18]] and a contract dated in the reign of Khammu-rabi’s father further describes the district as just outside the principal gate of the city. It included arable and garden land, pasturage and woods, as well as houses, and was thus like the land of Goshen, which was similarly handed over to the Israelites to settle in. An Egyptian inscription of the time of the eighteenth dynasty also speaks of a similar district close to Memphis, which had been given to the Hittites by the Pharaohs.[[19]] The strangers had their own judges. We learn, for instance, from a lawsuit which was decided in the time of Khammu-rabi that a Canaanite, Nahid-Amurri (‘the exalted of the Amorite god’), who was defendant in a case of disputed property, was first taken, along with the plaintiff, before the judges of Nin-Marki, ‘the lady of the Amorite land,’ and then before another set of judges and the assembled people of the city. It is clear from this that the judges who were deputed to look after the interests of the settlers from the West also acted when one of the parties was a native of Babylonia.[[20]]
The migration of Terah and his family thus ceases to be an isolated and unexplained fact. In the age to which it belonged Canaan and Babylonia were in close connection one with the other. Babylonian kings claimed rule over Canaan, and Canaanitish merchants were established in Babylonia. The language of Canaan was heard in the Babylonian cities, and even the rulers of the land were of foreign blood. Between Babylonia and Canaan there was a highway which had been trodden for generations, and along which soldiers and civil officials, merchants and messengers, passed frequently to and fro.
Midway, on a tributary of the river Belikh, was the city of Harran, so called from a Sumerian word which signified ‘a high-road.’ Its name pointed to a Babylonian foundation, as did also its temple dedicated to the Babylonian moon-god. The temple, in fact, counted among its founders and restorers a long line of Babylonian and Assyrian kings, and almost the last act of the Babylonian Empire was the restoration of the ancient shrine. Merodach, the god of Babylon, came in a dream to the last of the Babylonian monarchs, and bade him raise once more from its ruins the sanctuary of his brother-god. And Nabonidos tells us how he performed the task laid upon him, how he disinterred the memorial-stones of the older Assyrian kings, and how ‘by the art of the god Laban, the lord of foundations and brickwork, with silver and gold and precious stones, with spices and cedarwood,’ he built again Ê-Khulkhul, ‘the temple of rejoicing.’ The moon-god, Sin, who was adored within it, was known throughout the Aramaic lands of Northern Syria as Baal-Kharran, ‘the Lord of Harran.’
But there was another city of the moon-god besides Harran. This was Ur in Babylonia. In Babylonian literature it is commonly known as the city of Sin. Between Ur and Harran there must have been some close connection, and it may be that Harran owed its foundation to the kings of Ur. At all events, there was good reason why an emigrant from Ur should establish his abode in Harran. Both cities were under the same divine patron, and that meant, in the ancient world, that both lived the same religious and civil life. Harran obeyed the rule of the Babylonian kings; its very name showed that it was of Babylonian origin, and its culture was that of Babylonia. Law and religion, manners and customs, all were alike in Harran and Ur. The migration from the one city to the other did not differ from a change of dwelling from London to Edinburgh.