Part 2 (1/2)

It is plain from the context that Arphaxad must signify Chaldea; and this conclusion is verified by the fact that the name might also be p.r.o.nounced Arpa-Chesed, or ”border of Chaldaea.” Chesed is the singular of Casdim, the word used in the Old Testament to denote the inhabitants of Babylonia. The origin of it is doubtful, but, as has been suggested above, it most probably represents the a.s.syrian _casidi_, ”conquerors,” a term which might very well be applied to the Semitic conquerors of Sumir and Accad.

The Greek word Chaldeans is derived from the Kalda, a tribe which lived on the sh.o.r.es of the Persian Gulf, and is first heard of in the ninth century before our era. Under Merodach-Baladan, the Kalda made themselves masters of Babylonia, and became so integral a part of the population as to give their name to the whole of it in cla.s.sical times.

Aram, the brother of Arphaxad, represents, of course, the Aramaeans of Aram, or ”the highlands,” which included the greater part of Mesopotamia and Syria. In the later days of the a.s.syrian Empire, Aramaic, the language of Aram, became the common language of trade and diplomacy, which every merchant and politician was supposed to learn, and in still later times succeeded in supplanting a.s.syrian in a.s.syria and Babylonia, as well as Hebrew in Palestine, until in its turn it was supplanted by Arabic.

Lud seems to be a misreading; at all events, Lydia and the Lydians, on the extreme western coast of Asia Minor, had nothing to do with the peoples of Elam, of a.s.syria, and of Aram. What the original reading was, however, it is now impossible to say.

In the midst of all these geographical names we find a notice inserted relating to ”the mighty hunter” Nimrod, the beginning of whose kingdom, we are told, was Babylon, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh in the land of s.h.i.+nar. His name has not yet been discovered in the cuneiform records.

Some a.s.syrian scholars have wished to identify him with Gisdhubar, the hero of the great Chaldean epic, which contains the account of the Deluge; but Gisdhubar was a solar hero who had originally been the Accadian G.o.d of fire. It is true that Gisdhubar was the special deity of the town of Marad, and that Na-Marad would signify in the Accadian language ”the prince of Marad”; such a t.i.tle, however, has not been found in the inscriptions. Erech, called Uruk on the monuments, is now represented by the mounds of Warka, far away to the south of Babylon, and was one of the oldest and most important of the Babylonian cities. Like Calneh, the Kul-unu of the monuments, it was situated in the division of the country known as Sumir or s.h.i.+nar. Accad, from which the northern division of the country took its name, was a suburb of Sippara (now Abu-Habba), and, along with the latter, made up the Sepharvaim or ”Two Sipparas” of Scripture.

The Accadian form of the name was Agade, and here was the seat of a great library formed in remote days by Sargon I, and containing, among other treasures, a work on astronomy and astrology in seventy-two books.

The translation of the verse which follows the list of Nimrod's Babylonian cities is doubtful. It is a question whether we should render with the Authorised Version: ”Out of that land went forth a.s.shur,” or prefer the alternative translation: ”Out of that land he went forth to a.s.syria.” The latter is favoured by Micah v. 6, where ”the land of Nimrod” appears to mean a.s.syria. But the question cannot be finally decided until we discover some positive information about Nimrod on the monuments.

If, however, little light has been thrown by modern research on the person of Nimrod, this is by no means the case as regards Abraham. Abu-ramu or Abram, ”the exalted father,” Abraham's original name, is a name which also occurs on early Babylonian contract-tablets. Sarah, again, is the a.s.syrian _sarrat_, ”queen,” while Milcah, the daughter of Haran, is the a.s.syrian _milcat_, ”princess.” The site of Ur of the Chaldees, the birthplace of Abram, has been discovered, and excavations have been made among the ruins of its temples. The site is now called Mugheir, and lies on the western side of the Euphrates, on the border of the desert, immediately to the west of Erech. The chief temple of Ur was dedicated to the moon-G.o.d, and the Accadian inscriptions on its bricks, which record its foundation, are among the earliest that we possess. It was, in fact, the capital of one of the oldest of the pre-Semitic dynasties, and its very name, Uru or Ur, is only the Semitic form of the Accadian _eri_, ”city.” It is probable that it had pa.s.sed into the hands of the Semitic ”Casdim” before the age of Abraham; at all events, it had long been the resort of Semitic traders, who had ceased to lead the roving life of their ancestors in the Arabian desert. From Ur, Abraham's father had migrated to Haran, in the northern part of Mesopotamia, on the high road which led from Babylonia and a.s.syria into Syria and Palestine. Why he should have migrated to so distant a city has been a great puzzle, and has tempted scholars to place both Ur and Haran in wrong localities; but here, again, the cuneiform inscriptions have at last furnished us with the key. As far back as the Accadian epoch, the district in which Haran was built belonged to the rulers of Babylonia; Haran was, in fact, the frontier town of the empire, commanding at once the highway into the west and the fords of the Euphrates; the name itself was an Accadian one signifying ”the road”; and the deity to whom it was dedicated was the moon-G.o.d of Ur. The symbol of this deity was a conical stone, with a star above it, and gems with this symbol engraved upon them may be seen in the British Museum.

The road which pa.s.sed through Haran was well known to the Chaldean kings and their subjects. Sargon I of Accad, and his son Naram-Sin, had already made expeditions into the far west. Sargon had carved his image on the rocks of the Mediterranean coast, and had even crossed over into the island of Cyprus. The campaign, therefore, of Chedor-laomer and his allies, recorded in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, was no new thing.

The soil of Canaan had already felt the tramp of Babylonian feet. We can even fix the approximate date at which the campaign took place, and when Abraham and his confederates surprised the invaders and recovered from them the spoils of Southern Palestine. For twelve years, we are told, the tribes in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea had served Chedor-laomer, king of Elam, and then they rebelled; but the rebellion was quickly followed by invasion. Chedor-laomer and ”the kings that were with him,”-Amraphel, king of s.h.i.+nar, Arioch, king of Ellasar, and Tidal, ”king of nations,”-marched against the revolters, overthrew them in battle, and carried them away captive. The name of Arioch is actually found on the cuneiform monuments.

Bricks have been discovered engraved with the legend of Eri-aku, king of Larsa, the son of Kudur-Mabug the Elamite. Eri-aku means in Accadian ”the servant of the moon-G.o.d,” and Larsa, his capital, is now represented by the mounds of Senkereh, a little to the east of Erech. Kudur-Mabug is ent.i.tled ”the father of Palestine,” and it would, therefore, seem that he claimed supremacy over Canaan. His name is an Elamite one, signifying ”the servant of the G.o.d Mabug,” and is closely parallel to the Biblical Chedor-laomer, that is, Kudur-Lagamar, ”the servant of the G.o.d Lagamar.”

Lagamar and Mabug, however, were different deities, and we cannot, therefore, identify Chedor-laomer and Kudur-Mabug together. But it is highly probable that they were brothers, Chedor-laomer being the elder, who held sway in Elam, while his nephew Eri-aku owned allegiance to him in Southern Babylonia. At any rate, it is plain from the history of Genesis that Babylon was at this time subject to Elam, and under the government of more than one ruler. Amraphel would have been king of that portion of Sumir, or Southern Chaldea, which was not comprised in the dominions of the king of Larsa; and the fact that the narrative begins by stating that the campaign in Palestine was made in his days, seems to imply that the whole account has been extracted from the Babylonian archives. As for ”Tidal, king of nations,” it is very possible that we ought to read Turgal (Thorgal), with the Septuagint, while Goyyim or ”nations” has been shown by Sir Henry Rawlinson to be a misreading for Gutium, the name given to the tract of country northward of Babylonia, which stretched from Mesopotamia to the mountains of Kurdistan, and within which the kingdom of a.s.syria afterwards arose.

Now, the a.s.syrian king a.s.sur-bani-pal tells us that an image of the G.o.ddess Nana had been carried away from Babylonia by the Elamite king Kudur-Nankhundi when he overran Chaldea 1635 years before his own time, that is to say, in 2280 B.C. It is possible that this invasion of the country by Kudur-Nankhundi was the beginning of Elamite supremacy in Babylonia, and that Kudur-Mabug and Chedor-laomer were descendants of his.

If so, we shall have an approximate date for the rescue of Lot by Abraham, and consequently for the age of Abraham himself.

The fourteenth chapter of Genesis is the last in the Book that relates to Babylonia. The history now turns to Egypt; and it is, therefore, from the monuments of Egypt, and not from those of Babylonia and a.s.syria, that we henceforth have to look for light and information.

No traditions of a deluge had been preserved among the Egyptians. They believed, however, that there was a time when the greater part of mankind had been destroyed by the angry G.o.ds. A myth told how men had once uttered hostile words against their creator Ra, the Sun-G.o.d, who accordingly sent the G.o.ddess Hathor to slay them, so that the earth was covered with their blood as far as the town of Herakleopolis. Then Ra drank 7,000 cups of wine, made from the fruits of Egypt and mingled with the blood of the slain; his heart rejoiced, and he made an oath that he would not destroy mankind again. Rain filled the wells, and Ra went forth to fight against his human foes. Their bows were broken and themselves slaughtered, and the G.o.d returned victorious to heaven, where he created Paradise and the people of the stars. This myth agrees with another, according to which mankind had emanated from the eyes of Ra, though there was a different legend of the creation, which a.s.serted that all men, with the exception of the negroes, had sprung from the tears of the two deities Horus and Sekhet.

When Abraham went down into Egypt the empire was already very old. Its history begins with Menes, who united the independent states of the Nile valley into a single kingdom, and established his capital at Memphis. The first six dynasties of kings, who reigned 1,478 years, represent what is called the Old Empire. It was under the monarchs of the fourth dynasty that the pyramids of Gizeh were built; and at no time during its later history did the art and culture of Egypt reach again so high a level as it did under the Old Empire. With the close of the sixth dynasty came a period of disaster and decline. When Egypt again emerged into the light of history it was under the warrior princes of the twelfth dynasty. The capital had been s.h.i.+fted to the new city of Thebes, in the south, a new G.o.d, Amun, presided over the Egyptian deities, and the ruling cla.s.s itself differed in blood and features from the men of the Old Empire. Henceforth Egyptian art was characterised by a stiff conventionality wholly unlike the freedom and vigour of the art of the early dynasties; the government became more autocratic; and the obelisk took the place of the pyramid in architecture. But the Middle Empire, as it has been termed, did not last long. Semitic invaders from Canaan and Arabia overran the country, and established their seat at Zoan or Tanis. For 511 years they held the Egyptians in bondage, though the native princes, who had taken refuge in the south, gradually acquired more and more power, until at last, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Aahmes or Amosis, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, they succeeded in driving the hated foreigners out. These foreigners are known to history as the Hyksos or Shepherds, Hyksos being the Egyptian _hik shasu_, ”prince of the Shasu,” or ”Beduins.” The name which they bear upon the monuments is Menti.

It must have been while the Hyksos monarchs were holding their court at Zoan that Abraham entered the land. He found there men of Semitic blood, like himself, and speaking a Semitic language. A welcome was a.s.sured him, and he had no need of an interpreter. But the Hyksos kings had already begun to a.s.sume Egyptian state and to adopt Egyptian customs. In place of the Semitic _shalat_, ”ruler,” the t.i.tle by which their first leaders had been known, they had borrowed the Egyptian t.i.tle of Pharaoh. Pharaoh appears on the monuments as _pir-aa_, ”great house,” the palace in which the king lived being used to denote the king himself, just as in our own time the ”porte” or gate of the palace has become synonymous with the Turkish Sultan.

By the time that Joseph was sold into Egypt there was little outward difference between the court at Zoan and the court of the native princes at Thebes. The very names and t.i.tles borne by the Hyksos officials had become Egyptian; and though they still regarded the G.o.d Set as the chief object of their wors.h.i.+p, they had begun to rebuild the Egyptian temples, and pay honour to the Egyptian deities. Potiphar, to whom Joseph was sold, bore a purely Egyptian name, meaning ”the gift of the risen one,” while the name of Potipherah, the high priest of On, whose daughter, Asenath, was married by Joseph, is equally Egyptian, and signifies ”the gift of the Sun-G.o.d.” The Sun-G.o.d was the special deity of On; to him the great temple of the city was dedicated, and the name by which the place was known to the Greeks was Heliopolis, ”the city of the sun.” It was the city whose name is played upon in Isaiah xix. 18, where the prophet declares that in the day when Egypt shall be converted to the Lord, ”the City of the Sun”

(_'ir ha-kheres_) shall become ”the city of the destruction” of idols (_'ir ha-heres_). Jeremiah, too, plays similarly upon the name, when he says that Nebuchadnezzar, ”shall break also the images of Beth-Shemesh (the house of the Sun-G.o.d) that is in the land of Egypt” (Jer. xliii. 13); while Ezekiel changes the Egyptian word On into the Hebrew _aven_, ”nothingness,” and prophesies that ”the young men of Aven shall fall by the sword” (Ezek. x.x.x. 17). The ruins of On are within an afternoon's drive of Cairo: but nothing remains of the city except mounds of earth, and a solitary obelisk that once stood in front of the great temple of the sun, and had been reared by Usertasen I, of the twelfth dynasty, a thousand years before the daughter of its priest became the wife of Joseph. The name of this daughter, Asenath, is the Egyptian 'Snat.

We are told that when the Pharaoh had made Joseph ”ruler over all the land of Egypt” he gave him a new name, Zaphnath-paaneah (Gen. xli. 45).

According to Dr. Brugsch, this name is the Egyptian _Za pa-u nt pa-aa-ankh_, ”governor of the district of the place of life,” that is, of the district in which the Israelites afterwards built the towns of Raamses and Pithom, and in which the land of Goshen seems to have been situated.

In after times Egyptian legend confounded Joseph with Moses, and changing the divine name which formed the first element in his into that of the Egyptian G.o.d Osiris, called him Osar-siph. The Jewish historian, Josephus, has preserved for us the story which made Osar-siph the leader of the Israelites in their flight from Egypt.

The seven years' famine, which Joseph predicted, is a rare occurrence in Egypt. In a country where rain is almost unknown, the fertility of the fields depends upon the annual inundation of the Nile when swollen by the melting snows of Abyssinia. It is only where the waters can penetrate, or can be led by ca.n.a.ls and irrigating machines, that the soil is capable of supporting vegetation; but wherever this takes place the mud they bring with them is so fertilising that the peasantry frequently grow three luxuriant crops on the same piece of ground during the same year. For the inundation to fail in any single year is not common; for it to fail seven years running is a most unusual event. The last recorded time when there was a seven years' failure of the river, and a consequent famine, was in A.D. 1064-1071, under the reign of the Khalif El-Mustansir Billah. A similar failure must have taken place in the age of the twelfth dynasty, since Ameni, an officer of King Usurtasen I, who has engraved the history of his life at the entrance of his tomb among the cliffs of Beni-Ha.s.san, states that ”no one was hungry in my days, not even in the years of famine. For I had tilled all the fields of the district of Mah, up to the southern and northern frontiers. Thus I prolonged the life of its inhabitants, and preserved the food which it produced. No hungry man was in it. I distributed equally to the widow as to the married woman. I did not prefer the great to the humble in all that I gave away.”(2)

Another long famine of the same kind happened at a later date, and may possibly be that against which Joseph provided in Northern Egypt. The sepulchral tablet of a n.o.bleman, called Baba, far away at El-Kab in Southern Egypt, informs us of the fact. In this the dead man is made to say: ”When a famine arose, lasting many years, I distributed corn to the city each year of famine.”

Baba is supposed to have lived shortly before the establishment of the eighteenth dynasty; and this would agree very well with the date which we must a.s.sign to Joseph. As we shall see in the next chapter, we now know the exact period of Egyptian history at which the Exodus must have taken place; and if we count 430 years, ”the sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt” (Exod. xii. 40), back from this, we shall be brought to the reign of the Hyksos king Apophis or Apepi, the very king, in fact, under whom, according to ancient authors, Joseph was raised to be the _adon_, or second ruler of the state. It was not until the Hyksos were driven out of the country, and Aahmes, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, was pursuing with bitter hatred both them and their friends that ”there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.”

The earlier history of Joseph in the house of Potiphar finds a curious parallel in an old Egyptian romance, known as the Tale of the Two Brothers, which was composed by a scribe named Enna in the thirteenth century B.C. Anepu, it is there said, sent his younger brother, Bata, from the field where they were working, to fetch corn from the village. ”And the young brother found the wife of his elder brother occupied in braiding her hair. And he said to her, 'Rise up, give me seed-corn, that I may return to the field, for thus has my elder brother enjoined me, to return without delay.' The woman said to him, 'Go in, open the chest, that thou mayest take what thine heart desires, otherwise my locks will fall by the way.' And the youth entered into the stable, and took thereout a large vessel, for it was his wish to carry away much seed-corn. And he loaded himself with wheat and grains of durra, and went out with it. Then she said unto him, 'How great is the burden on thine arm?' He said to her, 'Two measures of durra and three measures of wheat, making together five measures, which rest on my arms.' Thus he spake to her. But she spake to the youth and said, 'How great is thy strength! Well have I remarked thy vigour every time.' And her heart knew him!... And she stood up and laid hold of him, and she said to him, 'Come, let us enjoy an hour's rest. The most beautiful things shall be thy portion, for I will prepare for thee festal garments.' Then the youth became like the panther of the south for rage, on account of the evil word which she had spoken to him; but she was afraid beyond all measure. And he spoke to her and said, 'Thou, O woman, hast been to me like a mother, and thy husband like a father, for he is older than I, so that he might have been my parent. Why this so great sin, that thou hast spoken to me? Say it not to me another time, then will I not tell it this time, and no word of it shall come out of my mouth about it to any man whatsoever.' And he loaded himself with his burden, and went out into the field. And he went to his elder brother, and they completed their day's work. When it was now evening, the elder brother returned home to his dwelling. And his young brother followed behind his oxen, which he had laden with all the good things of the field, driving them before him, to prepare for their resting-place in the stable in the village. And, behold, the wife of his elder brother was afraid because of the word which she had spoken, and she took a jar of fat, and she made herself like one to whom an evil-doer had offered violence. She wished thereby to say to her husband, 'Thy young brother has offered me violence.' And her husband returned home at evening, according to his daily custom, and entered into his house, and found his wife stretched out and suffering from injury. She gave him no water for his hands, according to her custom. And the lamp was not lighted, so that the house was in darkness. But she lay there and vomited. And her husband spoke to her thus, 'Who has had to do with thee?

Lift thyself up!' She said to him, 'No one has had to do with me except thy young brother; for when he came to take seed-corn for thee, he found me sitting alone, and he said to me, ”Come, let us make merry an hour and rest! Let down thy hair!” Thus he spake to me; but I did not listen to him (but said), ”See, am I not thy mother, and is not thy elder brother like a father to thee?” Thus I spoke to him; but he did not hearken to my speech, and used force with me, that I might not make a report to thee. Now, if thou allowest him to live, I will kill myself.' ”(3) Anepu then took a knife, and went out to kill his brother. The cows, however, warned Bata of his danger, and the Sun-G.o.d came to his aid, and set a river full of crocodiles between himself and Anepu. When Anepu eventually learned the real truth, he hurried back to his house, and put his wife to death.