There is no book in the world about
which more has been written than the Bible, and perhaps
there is no portion of the Bible which has given rise
to a larger literature than the Book of Genesis.
Every word in it has been carefully scrutinised, now
by scholars who sought to discover its deepest meaning
or to defend it against the attacks of adversaries,
now again by hostile critics anxious to expose every
supposed flaw, and to convict it of error and inconsistency.
Assailants and defenders had long to content themselves
with such evidence as could be derived from a study
of the book itself, or from the doubtful traditions
of ancient nations, as reported by the writers of
Greece and Rome. Such reports were alike imperfect
and untrustworthy; historical criticism was still
in its infancy in the age of the classical authors,
and they cared but little to describe accurately the
traditions of races whom they despised. It was
even a question whether any credit could be given
to the fragments of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Phoenician
mythology or history extracted by Christian apologists
from the lost works of native authors who wrote in
Greek. The Egyptian dynasties of Manetho, the
Babylonian stories of the Creation and Flood narrated
by Berossus, the self-contradicting Phoenician legends
collected by Philo Byblius, were all more or less
suspected of being an invention of a later age.
The earlier chapters of Genesis stood almost alone;
friends and foes alike felt the danger of resting
any argument on the apparent similarity of the accounts
recorded in them to the myths and legends contained
in the fragments of Manetho, of Berossus, and of Philo
Byblius.
All is changed now. The marvellous
discoveries of the last half-century have thrown a
flood of light on the ancient oriental world, and some
of this light has necessarily been reflected on the
Book of Genesis. The monuments of Egypt, of Babylonia,
and of Assyria have been rescued from their hiding-places,
and the writing upon them has been made to speak once
more in living words. A dead world has been called
again to life by the spade of the excavator and the
patient labour of the decipherer. We find ourselves,
as it were, face to face with Sennacherib, with Nebuchadnezzar,
and with Cyrus, with those whose names have been familiar
to us from childhood, but who have hitherto been to
us mere names, mere shadowy occupants of an unreal
world. Thanks to the research of the last half-century,
we can now penetrate into the details of their daily
life, can examine their religious ideas, can listen
to them as they themselves recount the events of their
own time or the traditions of the past which had been
handed down to them.
It is more especially in Babylonia
and Assyria that we find illustrations of the earlier
chapters of Genesis, as, indeed, is only natural.
The Semitic language spoken in these two countries
was closely allied to that of the Old Testament, as
closely, in fact, as two modern English dialects are
allied to each other; and it was from Babylonia, from
Ur of the Chaldees, now represented by the mounds
of Mugheir, that Abraham made his way to the future
home of his descendants in the west. It is to
Babylonia that the Biblical accounts of the Fall,
of the Deluge, and of the Confusion of Tongues particularly
look: two of the rivers of Paradise were the
Tigris and Euphrates, the ark rested on the mountains
of Ararat, and the city built around the Tower which
men designed should reach to heaven was Babel or Babylon.
Babylonia was an older kingdom than Assyria, which
took its name from the city of Assur, now Kalah Sherghat,
on the Tigris, the original capital of the country.
It was divided into two halves, Accad (Gen.
being Northern Babylonia, and Sumir, the Shinar
of the Old Testament, Southern Babylonia. The
primitive populations of both Sumir and Accad
were related, not to the Semitic race, but to the tribes
which continued to maintain themselves in the mountains
of Elam down to a late day. They spoke two cognate
dialects, which were agglutinative in character, like
the languages of the modern Turks and Fins; that is
to say, the relations of grammar were expressed by
coupling words together, each of which retained an
independent meaning of its own. Thus in-nin-sun
is “he gave it,” literally “he-it-gave,”
e-mes-na is “of houses,” literally
“house-many-of.” At an early date,
which cannot yet, however, be exactly determined,
the Sumirians and Accadians were overrun and conquered
by the Semitic Babylonians of later history, Accad
being apparently the first half of the country to
fall under the sway of the new-comers. It is
possible that Casdim, the Hebrew word translated “Chaldees”
or “Chaldaeans” in the Authorised Version,
is the Babylonian casidi, or “conquerors,”
a title which continued to cling to them in consequence
of their conquest.
The Accadians had been the inventors
of the pictorial hieroglyphics which afterwards developed
into the cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing;
they had founded the great cities of Chaldea, and had
attained to a high degree of culture and civilisation.
Their cities possessed libraries, stocked with books,
written partly on papyrus, partly on clay, which was,
while still soft, impressed with characters by means
of a metal stylus. The books were numerous, and
related to a variety of subjects. Among them
there were more particularly two to which a special
degree of sanctity was attached. One of these
contained magical formulae for warding off the assaults
of evil spirits; the other was a collection of hymns
to the gods, which was used by the priests as a kind
of prayer-book. When the Semitic Babylonians,
the kinsmen of the Hebrews, the Aramaeans, the Phoenicians
and the Arabs, conquered the old population, they
received from it, along with other elements of culture,
the cuneiform system of writing and the literature
written in it. The sacred hymns still continued
to serve as a prayer-book, but they were now provided
with interlinear translations into the Babylonian
(or, as it is usually termed, the Assyrian) language.
Part of the literature consisted of legal codes and
decisions; and since the inheritance and holding of
property frequently depended on a knowledge of these,
it became necessary for the conquerors to acquaint
themselves with the language of the people they had
conquered. In course of time, however, the two
dialects of Sumir and Accad ceased to be spoken;
but the necessity for learning them still remained,
and we find accordingly that down to the latest days
of both Assyria and Babylonia the educated classes
were taught the old extinct Accadian, just as in modern
Europe they are taught Latin. From time to time,
indeed, the scribes of Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar
attempted to write in the ancient language, and in
doing so sometimes made similar mistakes to those
that are made now-a-days by a schoolboy in writing
Latin.
The Accadians were, like the Chinese,
pre-eminently a literary people. Their conception
of chaos was that of a period when as yet no books
were written. Accordingly, a legend of the Creation,
preserved in the library of Cuthah, contains this
curious statement: “On a memorial-tablet
none wrote, none explained, for bodies and produce
were not brought forth in the earth.” To
the author of the legend the art of writing seemed
to mount back to the very beginning of mankind.
This legend of the Creation, however,
is not the only one that has been recovered from the
shipwreck of Assyrian and Babylonian literature.
Besides the account given in the fragments of Berossus,
there is another, which bears a striking resemblance
to the account of the Creation in the first chapter
of Genesis. It does not appear, however, that
this last was of Accadian origin; at all events, there
is no indication that it was translated into Assyrian
from an older Accadian document, and there are even
reasons for thinking that it may not be earlier in
its present form at least than the seventh century B.C. We possess,
unfortunately, only portions of it, since many of the series of clay tablets on
which it was inscribed have been lost or injured. The account begins as
follows:
1. At that time the heavens
above named not a name,
2. Nor did the earth
below record one:
3. Yea, the deep was
their first creator,
4. The flood of the sea
was she who bore them all.
5. Their waters were
embosomed in one place, and
6. The flowering reed
was ungathered, the marsh-plant was ungrown.
7. At that time the gods
had not issued forth, any one of them,
8. By no name were they
recorded, no destiny (had they fixed).
9. Then the (great) gods
were made,
10. Lakhmu and Lakhamu
issued forth (the first),
11. They grew up....
12. Next were made the
host of heaven and earth,
13. The time was long
(and then)
14. The gods Anu (Bel
and Ea were born of)
15. The host of heaven
and earth.
It is not until we come to the fifth
tablet of the series, which describes the appointment
of the heavenly bodies the work of the fourth
day of creation, according to Genesis that
the narrative is again preserved. Here we read
that the Creator “made beautiful the stations
of the great gods,” or stars, an expression
which reminds us of the oft-recurring phrase of Genesis:
“And God saw that it was good.” The
stars, moon, and sun were ordered to rule over the
night and day, and to determine the year, with its
months and days. The latter part of the tablet,
however, like the latter part of the first tablet,
is destroyed, and of the next tablet that
which described the creation of animals only
the first few lines remain. “At that time,”
it begins, “the gods in their assembly created
(the living creatures). They made beautiful the
mighty (animals). They made the living beings
come forth, the cattle of the field, the beast of the
field, and the creeping thing.” What follows
is too mutilated to yield a connected sense.
There is no need of pointing out how
closely this Assyrian account of the Creation resembles
that of Genesis. Even the very wording and phrases
of Genesis occur in it, and though no fragment is
preserved which expressly tells us that the work of
the Creation was accomplished in seven days, we may
infer that such was the case, from the order of events
as recorded on the tablets. But, with all this
similarity, there is even greater dissimilarity.
The philosophical conceptions with which the Assyrian
account opens, the polytheistic colouring which we
find in it further on, have no parallel in the Book
of Genesis. The spirit of the two narratives
is essentially different.
The last tablet probably contained
an account of the institution of the Sabbath.
At all events, we learn that the seventh day was observed
as a day of rest among the Babylonians, as it was
among the Jews. It was even called by the same
name of Sabbath, a word which is defined in an Assyrian
text as “a day of rest for the heart,”
while the Accadian equivalent is explained to mean
“a day of completion of labour.” A
calendar of saints’ days for the month of the
intercalary Elul makes the seventh, fourteenth,
twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the lunar month
Sabbaths, on which certain works were forbidden to
be done. On those days, it is stated, “flesh
cooked on the fire may not be eaten, the clothing of
the body may not be changed, white garments may not
be put on, a sacrifice may not be offered, the king
may not ride in his chariot, nor speak in public, the
augur may not mutter in a secret place, medicine of
the body may not be applied, nor may any curse be
uttered.” Nothing, in fact, that implied
work was allowed to be done. Where the Babylonian
Sabbath differed from the Jewish one was in its essentially
lunar character. The first Sabbath was the first
day of a month, whatever might be the length of the
month that preceded it. While Sabbaths and new
moons are distinguished from one another in the Old
Testament, they are found united in the Babylonian
ritual. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Babylonians
were acquainted with a week of seven days, each day
of which was dedicated to one of the seven planets;
it was the space of time naturally marked out by the
four quarters of the moon.
No account of the Fall of Man, similar
to that in Genesis, has as yet been found among the
fragments of the Assyrian libraries. Mr. George
Smith, indeed, supposed that he had discovered one,
but the text which he referred to the Fall, is really
an ancient hymn to the Creator. It is, nevertheless,
pretty certain that such an account once existed.
An archaic Babylonian gem represents a tree, on either
side of which are seated a man and woman, with a serpent
behind them, and their hands are stretched out towards
the fruit that hangs from the tree. A few stray
references in the bilingual (Accadian and Assyrian)
dictionaries throw some light upon this representation,
and inform us that the Accadians knew of “a wicked
serpent,” “the serpent of night”
and “darkness,” which had brought about
the fall of man. The tree of life, of which so
many illustrations occur on Assyrian monuments, is
declared to be “the pine-tree” of Eridu,
“the shrine of the god Irnin;” and Irnin
is a name of the Euphrates, when regarded as the “snake-river,”
which encircled the world like a rope, and was the
stream of Hea, “the snake-god of the tree of
life.” The Euphrates, we must remember,
was one of the rivers of Paradise.
The site of Paradise is to be sought
for in Babylonia. The garden which God planted
was in Eden, and Eden, as we learn from the cuneiform
records, was the ancient name of the “field”
or plain of Babylonia, where the first living creatures
had been created. The city of Eridu, which the
people of Sumir called “the good”
or “holy,” was, as we have seen, the shrine
of Irnin, and in the midst of a forest or garden that
once lay near it grew “the holy pine-tree,”
“the tree of life.” The rivers of
Eden can be found in the rivers and canals of Babylonia.
Two of them were the Euphrates and Tigris, called
by the Accadians id Idikla, “the river
of Idikla,” the Biblical Hiddekhel, while Pishon
is a Babylonian word signifying “canal,”
and Gihon may be the Accadian Gukhan, the stream on
which Babylon stood. Even the word cherub
is itself of Babylonian derivation. It is the
name given to one of those winged monsters, with the
body of a bull and the head of a man, which are sometimes
placed in the Assyrian sculptures on either side of
the tree of life. They stood at the entrance of
a Babylonian palace, and were supposed to prevent
the evil spirits from entering within. The word
comes from a root which means “to approach”
or “be near,” and perhaps originally signified
one who was near to God.
Like cherub, Adam also
was a Babylonian word. It has the general sense
of “man,” and is used in this sense both
in Hebrew and in Assyrian. But as in Hebrew it
has come to be the proper name of the first man, so,
too, in the old Babylonian legends, the “Adamites”
were “the white race” of Semitic descent,
who stood in marked contrast to “the black heads”
or Accadians of primitive Babylonia. Originally,
however, it was this dark race itself that claimed
to have been “the men” whom the god Merodach
created; and it was not until after the Semitic conquest
of Chaldea that the children of Adamu or Adam were
supposed to denote the white Semitic population.
Hence it is that the dark race continued to the last
to be called the Adamatu or “red-skins,”
which a popular etymology connected with Adamu
“man.” Sir H. Rawlinson has suggested
a parallel between the dark and white races of Babylonia
and the “sons of God” and “daughters
of men” of Genesis. Adam, we are told,
was “the son of God” (Luke ii.
But nothing similar to what we read in the sixth chapter
of Genesis has as yet been met with among the cuneiform
records, and though these speak of giant heroes, like
Ner and Etanna, who lived before the Flood, we know
nothing as yet as to their parentage.
The Babylonians, however, were well
aware that the Deluge had been caused by the wickedness
of the human race. It has often been remarked
that though traditions of a universal or a partial
deluge are found all over the world, it is only in
the Old Testament that the cause assigned for it is
a moral one. The Chaldean account of the Deluge,
discovered by Mr. George Smith, offers an exception
to this rule. Here, as in Genesis, Sisuthros,
the Accadian Noah, is saved from destruction on account
of his piety, the rest of mankind being drowned as
a punishment for their sins.
The story of the Deluge formed the subject of more than one poem among the
Accadians. Two of these were amalgamated together by the author of a great
epic in twelve books, which described the adventures of a solar hero whose name
cannot be read with certainty, but may provisionally be pronounced Gisdhubar.
The amalgamated account was introduced as an episode into the eleventh book, the
whole epic being arranged upon an astronomical principle, so that each book
should correspond to one of the signs of the Zodiac, the eleventh book
consequently answering to Aquarius. Sisuthros, who had been translated
without dying, like the Biblical Enoch, is made to tell the story himself to
Gisdhubar. Gisdhubar had travelled in search of health to the shores of
the river of death at the mouth of the Euphrates, and here afar off in the other
world he sees and talks with Sisuthros. Fragments of several editions of
the poem have been found, not only among the ruins of Nineveh, but also in
Babylonia; and by fitting these together it has been possible to recover almost
the whole of the original text. The translations of it made by different
scholars have necessarily improved with the progress of Assyrian research, and
though the first translation given to the world by Mr. George Smith was
substantially correct, there were many minor inaccuracies in it which have since
had to be corrected. The latest and best version is that which has been
published by Professor Haupt. The following translation of the account is
based upon it:
(Col. I) “Sisuthros speaks
to him, even to Gisdhubar: Let me reveal unto
thee, Gisdhubar, the story of my preservation, and
the oracle of the gods let me tell to thee. The
city of Surippak, the city which, as thou knowest,
is built on the Euphrates, this city was already ancient
when the gods within it set their hearts to bring
on a deluge, even the great gods as many as there
are their father Anu, their king the warrior
Bel, their throne-bearer Adar, their prince En-nugi.
Ea, the lord of wisdom, sat along with them,
and repeated their decree: ’For their boat!
as a boat, as a boat, a hull, a hull! hearken to their
boat, and understand the hull, O man of Surippak,
son of Ubara-Tutu; dig up the house, build the ship,
save what thou canst of the germ of life. (The gods)
will destroy the seed of life, but do thou live, and
bid the seed of life of every kind mount into the
midst of the ship. The ship which thou shalt build,
... cubits shall be its length in measure, ... cubits
the content of its breadth and its height. (Above)
the deep cover it in.’ I understood and
spake to Ea, my lord: ’The building
of the ship which thou hast commanded thus, if it be
done by me, the children of the people and the old
men (alike will laugh at me).’ Ea
opened his mouth and said, he speaks to me his servant:
’(If they laugh at thee) thou shalt say unto
them, (Every one) who has turned against me and (dis-believes
the oracle that) has been given me, ... I will
judge above and below. (But as for thee) shut (not)
the door (until) the time comes of which I will send
thee word. (Then) enter the door of the ship, and
bring into the midst of it thy corn, thy property,
and thy goods, thy (family), thy household, thy concubines,
and the sons of the people. The cattle of the
field, the wild beasts of the field, as many as I
would preserve, I will send unto thee, and they shall
keep thy door.’ Sisuthros opened his mouth
and speaks; he says to Ea, his lord: ’(O
my lord) no one yet has built a ship (in this fashion)
on land to contain the beasts (of the field). (The
plan?) let me see and the ship (I will build).
On the land the ship (I will build) as thou hast commanded
me.’...
(Col. II) “... On
the fifth day (after it was begun) in its circuit(?)
fourteen measures its hull (measured); fourteen measures
measured (the roof) above it. I made it a dwelling-house(?)....
I enclosed it. I compacted it six times, I divided
(its passages) seven times, I divided its interior
(seven) times. Leaks for the waters in the midst
of it I cut off. I saw the rents, and what was
wanting I added. Three sari of bitumen
I poured over the outside. Three sari of
bitumen I poured over the inside. Three sari
of men, carrying baskets, who carried on their heads
food, I provided, even a saros of food for the
people to eat, while two sari of food the boatmen
shared. To (the gods) I caused oxen to be sacrificed;
I (established offerings) each day. In (the ship)
beer, food, and wine (I collected) like the waters
of a river, and (I heaped them up) like the dust(?)
of the earth, and (in the ship) the food with my hand
I placed. (With the help) of Samas [the Sun-God] the
compacting of the ship was finished; (all parts of
the ship) were made strong, and I caused the tackling
to be carried above and below. (Then of my household)
went two-thirds: all that I had I heaped together;
all that I had of silver I heaped together; all that
I had of gold I heaped together; all that I had of
the seed of life I heaped together. I brought
the whole up into the ship; all my slaves and concubines,
the cattle of the field, the beasts of the field,
the sons of the people, all of them, did I bring up.
The season Samas fixed, and he spake, saying:
’In the night will I cause the heaven to rain
destruction. Enter into the midst of the ship
and close thy door.’ The season came round;
he spake, saying: ’In the night will I
cause the heaven to rain destruction.’ Of
that day I reached the evening, the day which I watched
for with fear. I entered into the midst of the
ship and shut the door, that I might close the ship.
To Buzur-sadi-rabí, the boatman, I gave the palace,
with all its goods. Then arose Mu-seri-ina-namari
(The Water of Dawn at Daylight) from the horizon of
heaven (like) a black cloud. Rimmon in the midst
of it thundered, and Nebo and the Wind-God go in front:
the throne-bearers go over mountain and plain:
Nergal the mighty removes the wicked; Adar goes overthrowing
all before him. The spirits of earth carried
the flood; in their terribleness they sweep through
the land; the deluge of Rimmon reaches unto heaven;
all that was light to (darkness) was turned.
(Col. III) “(The surface)
of the land like (fire?) they wasted; (they destroyed
all) life from the face of the land; to battle against
men they brought (the waters). Brother saw not
his brother; men knew not one another. In heaven
the gods feared the flood, and sought a refuge; they
ascended to the heaven of Anu. The gods, like
a dog in his kennel, crouched down in a heap.
Istar cries like a mother, the great goddess utters
her speech: ’All to clay is turned, and
the evil I prophesied in the presence of the gods,
according as I prophesied evil in the presence of
the gods, for the destruction of my people I prophesied
(it) against them; and though I their mother have
begotten my people, like the spawn of the fishes they
fill the sea.’ Then the gods were weeping
with her because of the spirits of earth; the gods
on a throne were seated in weeping; covered were their
lips because of the coming evil. Six days and
nights the wind, the flood, and the storm go on overwhelming.
The seventh day when it approached the storm subsided,
the flood which had fought against (men) like an armed
host was quieted. The sea began to dry, and the
wind and the flood ended. I watched the sea making
a noise, and the whole of mankind was turned to clay;
like reeds the corpses floated. I opened the
window, and the light smote upon my face; I stooped
and sat down; I weep, over my face flow my tears.
I watch the regions at the edge of the sea; a district
rose twelve measures high. To the land of Nizir
steered the ship; the mountain of Nizir stopped the
ship, and it was not able to pass over it. The
first day, the second day, the mountain of Nizir stopped
the ship. The third day, the fourth day, the
mountain of Nizir stopped the ship. The fifth
day, the sixth day, the mountain of Nizir stopped the
ship. The seventh day when it approached I sent
forth a dove, and it left. The dove went and
returned, and found no resting-place, and it came back.
Then I sent forth a swallow, and it left. The
swallow went and returned, and found no resting-place,
and it came back. I sent forth a raven, and it
left. The raven went and saw the carrion on the
water, and it ate, it swam, it wandered away; it did
not return. I sent (the animals) forth to the
four winds, I sacrificed a sacrifice. I built
an altar on the peak of the mountain. I set vessels
[each containing the third of an ephah] by sevens;
underneath them I spread reeds, pine-wood, and spices.
The gods smelt the savour; the gods smelt the good
savour; the gods gathered like flies over the sacrifices.
Thereupon the great goddess at her approach lighted
up the rainbow which Anu had created according to his
glory. The crystal brilliance of those gods before
me may I not forget;
(Col. IV) “those days I
have thought of, and never may I forget them.
May the gods come to my altar; but may Bel not come
to my altar, since he did not consider but caused
the flood, and my people he assigned to the abyss.
When thereupon Bel at his approach saw the ship, Bel
stopped; he was filled with anger against the gods
and the spirits of heaven: ’Let none come
forth alive! let no man live in the abyss!’ Adar
opened his mouth and spake, he says to the warrior
Bel: ’Who except Ea can form a
design? Yea, Ea knows, and all things he
communicates.’ Ea opened his mouth
and spake, he says to the warrior Bel: ’Thou,
O warrior prince of the gods, why, why didst thou
not consider but causedst a flood? Let the doer
of sin bear his sin, let the doer of wickedness bear
his wickedness. May the just prince not be cut
off, may the faithful not be (destroyed). Instead
of causing a flood, let lions increase, that men may
be minished; instead of causing a flood, let hyaenas
increase, that men may be minished; instead of causing
a flood, let a famine happen, that men may be (wasted);
instead of causing a flood, let plague increase, that
men may be (reduced). I did not reveal the determination
of the great gods To Sisuthros alone a dream I sent,
and he heard the determination of the gods.’
When Bel had again taken counsel with himself, he
went up into the midst of the ship. He took my
hand and bid me ascend, even me he bid ascend; he
united my wife to my side; he turned himself to us
and joined himself to us in covenant; he blesses us
(thus): ’Hitherto Sisuthros has been a mortal
man, but now Sisuthros and his wife are united together
in being raised to be like the gods; yea, Sisuthros
shall dwell afar off at the mouth of the rivers.’
They took me, and afar off at the mouth of the rivers
they made me dwell.”
It is hardly necessary to indicate
the points of agreement and disagreement between this
Babylonian account of the Deluge and that of Genesis.
The most striking difference between the two, that
which first meets the eye, is the polytheism of the
Babylonian version, in contrast with the monotheism
of the Biblical narrative. Here, in place of the
gods of Chaldea, we are confronted by the one supreme
Deity; we have no longer to do with a Bel who requires
the intercession of Ea before he will consent
not to destroy the guiltless with the guilty; it is
the Lord Himself who “said in His heart, I will
not again curse the ground any more for man’s
sake.” In the Babylonian legend, moreover,
Noah and Enoch have been confounded together; Sisuthros
is not only saved from the waters of the flood, but
translated to the abode of the gods. The vessel
itself in which the seed of life was preserved is
not the same in the two accounts. According to
the Hebrew narrative, it was an ark; according to the
Babylonian poem, a ship. It is true that in one
place it is called “a palace,” the word
used being the same as that which in many passages
of the Old Testament is applied to God’s “palace”
of heaven; but it is provided with a pilot, Buzur-sadi-rabí,
“the Sun-god of the mighty mountain,”
and Sisuthros is made to expostulate on the strangeness
of building a ship which should sail over the land.
It must, however, be noticed that the shrines in which
the images of the gods were carried in Babylonia were
called “ships,” and that these “ships”
corresponded with the ark of the Hebrew tabernacle.
The land of Nizir, in which the vessel
of Sisuthros rested, was among the mountains of Pir
Mam, to the north-east of Babylonia. Rowandiz,
the highest peak in this part of Asia, rises a little
to the north of the Pir Mam, and it seems probable,
therefore, that it represents “the mountain of
Nizir.” The whole country had been included
by the Accadians in the vast territory of Guti, or
Gutium, which roughly corresponds with the modern
Kurdistan. It is accordingly worth notice that
a wide-spread eastern tradition makes Gebel Gudi,
or Mount Gudi, the mountain on which the ark rested,
and that in early Jewish legend this mountain is called
Lubar or Baris, the boundary between Armenia and Kurdistan,
in the land of the Minni. Ararat, or Urardhu,
as it is written in the cuneiform inscriptions, denoted
Armenia, and more particularly the district about Lake
Van; so that “the mountains of Ararat,”
of which Genesis speaks, might easily have been the
Kurdish ranges of Southern Armenia. It was not
until a very late period that the name of Ararat was
first applied and then confined to the lofty mountains
in the north.
Rowandiz seems also to have been regarded
in Accadian mythology as the Olympos on which the
gods dwelt. In this case it was usually called
“the mountain of the east;” but the east
was here the north-east, since other legends identified
it with Aralu, or Hades, the mountain of gold which
was fabled to be in the far north. It is to this
Accadian Olympos that reference is made in Isa. xi, where the King of Babylon is described as boasting
that he would “ascend into heaven, and exalt
his throne above the stars of the gods,” that
he would “sit on the mountain of the assembly
of the gods in the extremities of the north.”
The mountain was sometimes known as the “mountain
of the world,” since the firmament was supposed
to revolve on its peak as on a pivot. We must
not imagine, however, that the Accadians, any more
than the Greeks, actually believed the gods to live
above the clouds on the terrestrial Rowandiz, except
at a very early period in their history. Just
as we do not think of the sky when we use the word
heaven in a spiritual sense, so by “the mountain
of the assembly of the gods” they meant a spiritual
mountain, of which Rowandiz was the earthly type.
It is in this way that we must explain the position
assigned to Sisuthros after his translation.
He does not live along with the gods in the north,
but has his station fixed “at the mouth of the
rivers” Euphrates and Tigris, which in ancient
times flowed into the Persian Gulf through separate
channels. At an epoch when the geographical knowledge
of the Accadians did not extend very far, the unknown
district beyond the mouth of the Euphrates became
a representative of the other world; and the Euphrates
itself was identified with Datilla, the river of “the
God of life and death,” as well as with the
stream or “great deep” which was supposed
to encircle the earth like a monstrous serpent.
The name of the Chaldean Noah, Sisuthros,
or, as it is written in the cuneiform, Khasis-adra,
or Adra-khasis, is really a title, given to him on
account of his righteousness, and signifying “wise
(and) pious.” His proper name is one which
means “the Sun of Life,” though the exact
pronunciation of it is somewhat uncertain. Neither
of these names agrees with that of the Biblical Noah,
but the latter has received a full explanation from
the Assyrian language, where it signifies “rest.”
After the Flood, we are told in Genesis
that men journeyed from the east until they came to
the plain of Shinar, where they built the tower of
Babel, in the vain hope of ascending into heaven.
God, however, confounded their language and scattered
them over the face of the earth. The references
in this narrative to Shinar and Babel, or Babylon,
indicate that here again we may expect to find a Babylonian
account of the Confusion of Tongues, just as we have
found a Babylonian account of the Deluge. As
we have seen, the Accadians regarded themselves as
having come from the “mountain of the east”
where the ark had rested, while Shinar is the Hebrew
form of the native name Sumir or Sungir,
as it was pronounced in the allied dialect of Accad the
southern half of pre-Semitic Babylonia. Now Mr.
George Smith discovered some broken fragments of a
cuneiform text which evidently related to the building
of the Tower of Babel. It tells us how certain
men had “turned against the father of all the
gods,” and how the thoughts of their leader’s
heart “were evil.” At Babylon they
essayed to build “a mound” or hill-like
tower, but the winds blew down their work, and Anu
“confounded great and small on the mound,”
as well as their “speech,” and “made
strange their counsel.” The very word that
is used in the sense of “confounding”
in the narrative of Genesis is used also in the Assyrian
text. The Biblical writer, by a play upon words,
not uncommon in the Old Testament, compares it with
the name of Babel, though etymologically the latter
word has nothing to do with it. Babel is the
Assyrian Babili, “Gate of God,” and is
merely a Semitic translation of the old Accadian (or
rather Sumirian) name of the town, Ca-dimira,
where Ca is “gate” and dimira “God.”
Chaldean tradition assigned the construction of the
tower and the consequent confusion of languages to
the time of the autumnal equinox; and it is possible
that the hero-king Etanna (Titan in Greek writers),
who is stated to have built a city in defiance of the
will of heaven, was the wicked chief under whom the
tower was raised.
The confusion of tongues was followed
by the dispersion of mankind. The earth was again
peopled by the descendants of the three sons of Noah Shem,
Ham, and Japhet. Shem is the Assyrian Samu, “olive-coloured,”
Ham is Khammu, “burned black,” and Japhet
Ippat, “the white race.” The tribes
and races which drew their origin from them are enumerated
in the tenth chapter of Genesis. The arrangement
of this chapter, however, is geographical, not ethnological;
the peoples named in it being grouped together according
to their geographical position, not according to their
relationship in blood or language. Here it is
that the non-Semitic Elamites are classed along with
the Semitic Assyrians, and that the Phoenicians of
Canaan, who spoke the same language as the Hebrews,
and originally came from the same ancestors, are associated
with the Egyptians. When this fact is recognised,
there is no difficulty in showing that the statements
of the chapter are fully consistent with the conclusions
of modern research.
The Assyrian inscriptions have thrown
a good deal of light upon the names contained in it.
Gomer, the son of Japhet, represents the Gimirrai of
the inscriptions, the Kimmerians of classical writers.
Pressed by the Scyths of the Russian steppes, they
threatened to overrun the Assyrian empire under a
leader named Teispes, but were defeated by Esar-haddon,
in B.C. 670, in a great battle on the north-eastern
frontier of his kingdom, and driven westwards into
Asia Minor. There they sacked the Greek town of
Sinope, and spread like locusts over the fertile
plains of Lydia. Among the gifts sent to Nineveh
by the Lydian king, Gugu or Gyges a name
in which we may see the Gog of Ezekiel were
two Kimmerian chieftains whom he had captured with
his own hand. Gyges was afterwards slain in battle
with the barbarians, and it required some years before
they could be finally extirpated.
Madai are the Mèdes, a title
given by the Assyrians to the multifarious tribes
to the east of Kurdistan. They are first mentioned
in the inscriptions about 820 B.C., and were partially
subdued by Tiglath-Pileser II and his successors.
At this time they lived in independent communities,
each governed by its “city-chief.”
The Median empire, which rose upon the ruins of Nineveh,
was really the creation of the kings of Ekbatana, the
modern Hamadan. The population of this district
was known among the Babylonians as manda, or
“barbarians;” and through a confusion of
the latter word with the proper name Mada, or “Mèdes,”
historians have been led to suppose that the empire
of Ekbatana was a Median one.
Javan is the Greek word “Ionian,”
but in the Old Testament it is generally applied to
the island of Cyprus, which is called the Island of
Yavnan, or the Ionians, on the Assyrian monuments.
A more specific name for it in Hebrew is Kittim, derived
from the name of the Phoenician colony of Kition,
now represented by Larnaka. Cyprus was first visited
by the Babylonians at a very remote period, since
Sargon I of Accad, who, according to Nabonidos (B.C.
550), lived 3,200 years before his time, carried his
arms as far as its shores. As for Tubal and Meshech,
they are as frequently associated together in the
Assyrian inscriptions as they are in the Bible.
The Tubal or Tibareni spread in Old Testament times
over the south-eastern part of Kappadokia, while the
Meshech or Moschi adjoined them on the north and west.
Ashkenaz is the Assyrian Asguza, the name of a district
which lay between the kingdoms of Ekbatana and the
Minni.
Cush and Mizraim denote Ethiopia and
Egypt, Ethiopia roughly corresponding to the Nubia
of today. As Ethiopia was largely peopled by tribes
who had come across the Red Sea from Southern Arabia,
the name of Cush was given in the Old Testament (as
in verse 7 of this chapter) to Southern Arabia also.
Properly speaking, however, it denoted the country
which commenced on the southern side of the First
Cataract. Mizraim means “the two Matsors,”
that is Upper and Lower Egypt. Lower Egypt was
the original Matsor, a word which signifies “wall,”
and referred to the line of fortification which defended
the kingdom on the eastern side from the attacks of
Asiatic tribes. The word occurs more than once
in the Biblical writers, though its sense has been
obscured in the Authorised Version. Thus in Isaiah
xxxvi, Sennacherib boasts that he has “dried
up all the rivers of Matsor,” that is to say,
the mouths of the Nile; and in Isaiah xi, we ought
to translate “the Nile-arms of Matsor,”
instead of “brooks of defence.” While
Matsor was the name of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt was
termed Pathros (Isa. x, which is the Egyptian
Pe-to-res or “southern land.”
The Pathrusim or inhabitants of Pathros are mentioned
among the sons of Mizraim in the chapter of Genesis
upon which we are engaged.
Phut seems to be the Egyptian Punt,
on the Somali coast. Spices and other precious
objects of merchandise were brought from it, and the
Egyptians sometimes called it “the divine land.”
The Lehabim of verse 13 are the Libyans, while the
Naphtuhim may be the people of Napata in Ethiopia.
The Caphtorim or inhabitants of Caphtor are the Phoenician
population settled on the coast of the Delta.
From an early period the whole of this district had
been colonised by the Phoenicians, and, as Phoenicia
itself was called Keft by the Egyptians, the part
of Egypt in which they had settled went by the name
of Keft-ur or “greater Phoenicia.”
From various passages of the Old Testament(1) we learn
that the Philistines, whom the kings of Egypt had
once employed to garrison the five cities in the extreme
south of Palestine, had originally been Phoenicians
of Caphtor, so that the words of the verse before
us must have been moved from their proper place, “Caphtorim,
out of whom came Philistim,” being the correct
reading.
Canaan signifies “the lowlands,”
and was primarily the name of the coast on which the
great cities of Phoenicia were built. As, however,
the inland parts of the country were inhabited by
a kindred population, the name came to be extended
to designate the whole of Palestine, just as Palestine
itself meant originally only the small territory of
the Philistines. In Isaiah’s prophecy upon
Tyre (xxii the word is used in its primitive
sense, though here again the Authorised Version has
misled the English reader by mistranslating “the
merchant-city” instead of “Canaan.”
Sidon, “the fishers’ town,” was
the oldest of the Canaanite or Phoenician cities;
like Tyre, it was divided into two quarters, known
respectively as Greater and Lesser Sidon. Heth
or the Hithites adjoined the Phoenicians on the north;
we shall have a good deal to say about them in a future
chapter, and therefore pass them by now. The
Amorite was the inhabitant of the mountains of Palestine,
in contrast to the Canaanite or lowlander, and the
name is met with on the Egyptian monuments. The
towns of Arka and Simirra (or Zemar) are both mentioned
by Tiglath-Pileser II, while the city of Arvad or
Arados (now Ruad) is repeatedly named in the Assyrian
inscriptions. So also is Hamath (now Hamah), which
was conquered by Sargon, and made by him the seat
of an Assyrian governor.
The name of Elam has first received
its explanation from the decipherment of the Assyrian
texts. It was the name of the mountainous region
to the east of Babylonia, of which Shushan or Susa
was at one time the capital, and is nothing more than
the Assyrian word elam, “high.”
Elam was itself a translation of the Accadian
Numma, under which the Accadians included the
whole of the highlands which bounded the plain of Babylonia
on its eastern side. It was the seat of an ancient
monarchy which rivalled in antiquity that of Chaldea
itself, and was long a dangerous neighbour to the
latter. It was finally overthrown, however, by
Assur-bani-pal, the Assyrian king, about B.C. 645.
The native title of the country was Anzan or Ansan,
and the name of its capital, Susan or Shushan, seems
to have signified “the old town” in the
language of its inhabitants.
Asshur or Assur was originally the
name of a city on the banks of the Tigris, the ruins
of which are now known as Kalah Sherghat. The
name was of Accadian derivation, and signified “water-bank.”
The city long continued to be the capital of the district
which was called after it Assyria, but was eventually
supplanted by Ninua or Nineveh. Nineveh lay opposite
the present town of Mosul, and it is from the remains
of its chief palace, now buried under the mounds of
Kouyunjik, that most of the Assyrian inscriptions
in the British Museum have been brought. A few
miles to the south of Nineveh, on the site now known
as Nimrud, was Calah, a town built by Shalmaneser
I, who lived B.C. 1300. Calah subsequently fell
into ruins, but was rebuilt in the ninth century before
our era. “Between Nineveh and Calah”
stood Resen, according to Genesis. Resen is the
Assyrian Ris-eni, “head of the stream,”
which is once mentioned in an inscription of Sennacherib.
Rehoboth ´Ir, or “the open spaces of the
city,” must have denoted the suburbs of Nineveh,
and cannot be identified with Dur-Sarrukin, founded
by Sargon at Khorsabad, several miles to the north.
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
pronounced 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 Assyrian 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 shores
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 classical 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 Assyrian 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 Assyrian in Assyria 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 Assyria, 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 Shinar. His
name has not yet been discovered in the cuneiform records.
Some Assyrian 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
god 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 title, 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 Shinar. 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 Asshur,” or prefer the
alternative translation: “Out of that land
he went forth to Assyria.” The latter is
favoured by Micah , where “the land of Nimrod”
appears to mean Assyria. 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 Assyrian sarrat, “queen,”
while Milcah, the daughter of Haran, is the Assyrian
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-god, 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 passed 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 Assyria 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-god 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 passed 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 Shinar, 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-god,” and Larsa, his capital, is
now represented by the mounds of Senkereh, a little
to the east of Erech. Kudur-Mabug is entitled
“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 god Mabug,” and is closely parallel
to the Biblical Chedor-laomer, that is, Kudur-Lagamar,
“the servant of the god 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 Assyria afterwards arose.
Now, the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal
tells us that an image of the goddess 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 Assyria, 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 gods.
A myth told how men had once uttered hostile words
against their creator Ra, the Sun-God, who accordingly
sent the goddess 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 god 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 asserted
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
shifted to the new city of Thebes, in the south, a
new god, Amun, presided over the Egyptian deities,
and the ruling class 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 leadership 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 assured him, and he had no need of an
interpreter. But the Hyksos kings had already
begun to assume Egyptian state and to adopt Egyptian
customs. In place of the Semitic shalat,
“ruler,” the title by which their first
leaders had been known, they had borrowed the Egyptian
title 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 titles borne by
the Hyksos officials had become Egyptian; and though
they still regarded the god Set as the chief object
of their worship, 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-God.” The Sun-God 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 xi, 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-God)
that is in the land of Egypt” (Jer. xlii;
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. xx. 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. xl. 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 god
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 canals 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-Hassan, 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 nobleman, 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 assign 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. xi, 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-God 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.
No name like that of Goshen, where
the Israelites were settled by order of the Pharaoh,
has as yet been discovered upon the monuments.
Goshen, however, could not have been far from the
north-eastern frontier of Egypt, and from Genesis
xlvi, we learn that it was in the land of Rameses.
Now, Dr. Brugsch has shown that Ramses, or Rameses,
was the title given to Zoan by Ramses II, when he
raised it anew from the ruins in which it had lain
since the expulsion of the Hyksos, and filled it again
with stately edifices. Goshen consequently must
have been in the neighbourhood of Zoan, as, indeed,
we might expect, since Joseph’s family would
naturally be settled not far from the capital and
the residence of the powerful minister. It was
from hence that Jacob’s body, after being embalmed,
as was customary in Egypt, was carried to the old
family tomb at Hebron; and we can therefore understand
why Zoan and Hebron were brought into such close relation
in the well-known passage of Numbers (xii where
it is said that “Hebron was built seven years
before Zoan in Egypt.” Hebron and Zoan
were the two points around which centred the patriarchal
history which is set before us in the Book of Genesis.