Chapter IX. The Nations With Whom The Israelites Came Into Contact.
The Amorites—The Hittites—The Jebusites—The Girgashites—Moab.
Amorites.
The earliest mention of the Amorites in the Old Testament is the passage in Gen. x. 16, where the name occurs along with that of the Jebusites and the Girgashites, from which may be gathered that they were all three very powerful tribes, though their power is in all probability not to be measured by the order of their names, the most important of the three being the Amorites, whose name comes second. They were regarded by the ancient Jews as an iniquitous and wicked people (Gen. xv. 6; 2 Kings xxi. 11), though they may not, in reality, have been worse than other nations which were their contemporaries. That they were a powerful nation is implied by the statement in Gen. xlviii. 22, where Jacob speaks of the tract which he had taken out of the hand of the Amorite with his sword and his bow, as a feat of which a warrior might be proud.
The Amorites in Babylonia have already been referred to in Chap. [V.], and from that part of the present work it will easily be understood that they were an extensive and powerful nationality, capable, with organization, of extending their power, as they [pg 311] evidently did from time to time, far and wide. Indeed, as has been pointed out, there is great probability that the Babylonian dynasty called by Berosus Arabic, was in reality Amorite. In any case, the kings of this dynasty held sway over Amoria, as the inscription of Ammi-ṭitana, translated on p. [155], clearly shows. The importance of this nationality in the eyes of the Babylonians is proved by the fact that their designation for “west” was “the land of Amurrū,” and the west wind was, even with the Assyrians, “the wind of the land of Amurrū” (though the Hittites, in Assyrian times, seem to have been the more powerful nation), and this designation of the western point of the compass probably long outlived the renown of the nationality from which the expression was derived. Among other Biblical passages, testifying to the power of the Amorites, may be quoted as typical Amos ii. 9, 10, and in this the Babylonian and the Hebrew records are quite in agreement.
As has been pointed out by Prof. Sayce, in process of time a great many tribes—Gibeonites, Hivites, Jebusites, and even Hittites—were classed as Amorites by the ancient Jewish writers, a circumstance which likewise testifies to the power of the nationality. These identifications must be to a large extent due to the fact that all the tribes or nationalities referred to were mountaineers, and, as we have seen (p. [122]), the Akkadian character for a mountainous region or nationality, stood not only for Armenia, and the land of the Amorites, but also for the land of Akkad, because the Akkadians came from a mountainous country, perhaps somewhere in the neighbourhood of the mountains of Elam. This character was pronounced Ari when it stood for Amoria, but ceased to be used for that on account of its signifying also the mountainous region of Armenia, and Akkad, for which it still continued to be employed, and it is only the context, [pg 312] in many cases, which enables the reader to gather which is meant. Other groups used for Amoria were the sign for foot, twice over (sometimes with one of them reversed), [Cuneiform], and [Cuneiform], the ordinary pronunciation of which is Saršar, though it is probable that the latter was pronounced, in Akkadian, like the former, i.e. Tidnu. In the inscriptions of Gudea, viceroy of Lagaš about 2700 b.c., there occurs the name of a country called Tidalum, “a mountain of Martu,” from which a kind of limestone was brought. This Hommel and Sayce regard as another form of Tidnu, by the interchange of l and n, which is not uncommon in Akkadian. The fact that Martu is also used in the inscriptions for Amurrū, (the land of) the Amorites, and also, with the prefix for divinity, for the Amorite god (îlu Amurrū), which was introduced into Babylonia at an exceedingly early date, confirms this explanation. In all probability there is not at present sufficient data for ascertaining the dates when these names first appear, but Tidnu or Tidalu was probably the earlier of the two.