THE PEOPLE

In the days of Abraham, Chedor-laomer, king of Elam and lord over the kings of Babylonia, marched westward with his Babylonian allies, in order to punish his rebellious subjects in Canaan. The invading army entered Palestine from the eastern side of the Jordan. Instead of marching along the sea-coast, it took the line of the valley of the Jordan. It first attacked the plateau of Bashan, and then smote “the Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnaim, and the Zuzim in Ham, and the Emim in the plain of Kiriathaim.” Then it passed into Mount Seir, and subjugated the Horites as far as El-Paran “by the wilderness.” Thence it turned northward again through the oasis of En-mishpat or Kadesh-barnea, and after smiting the Amalekite Beduin, as well as the Amorites in Hazezon-tamar, made its way into the vale of Siddim. There the battle took place which ended in the defeat of the king of Sodom and his allies, who were carried away captive to the north. But at Hobah, “on the left hand of Damascus,” the invaders were overtaken by “Abram the Hebrew,” who dwelt with his Amorite confederates in the plain of Mamre, and the spoil they had seized was recovered from them.

The narrative gives us a picture of the geography and ethnology of Palestine as it was at the beginning of the Patriarchal Age. Before that age was over it had altered very materially; the old cities for the most part still remained, but new races had taken the place of the older ones, new kingdoms had arisen, and the earlier landmarks had been displaced. The Amalekite alone continued what he had always been, the untamable nomad of the southern desert.

Rephaim or “Giants” was a general epithet applied to the prehistoric population of the country. Og, king of Bashan in the time of the Exodus, was “of the remnant of the Rephaim” (Deut. ii; but so also were the Anakim in Hebron, the Emim in Moab, and the Zamzummim in Ammon (Deut. i, 20). Doubtless they represented a tall race in comparison with the Hebrews and Arabs of the desert; and the Israelitish spies described themselves as grasshoppers by the side of them (Numb. xii. It is possible, however, that the name was really an ethnic one, which had only an accidental similarity in sound to the Hebrew word for “giants.” At all events, in the list of conquered Canaanitish towns which the Pharaoh Thothmes iii. of Egypt caused to be engraved on the walls of Karnak, the name of Astartu or Ashteroth Karnaim is followed by that of Anaurepa, in which Mr. Tomkins proposes to see On-Repha, “On of the Giant(s).” In the close neighbourhood in classical days stood Raphon or Raphana, Arpha of the Dekapolis, now called Er-Rafeh, and in Raphon it is difficult not to discern a reminiscence of the Rephaim of Genesis.

Did these Rephaim belong to the same race as the Emim and the Anakim, or were the latter called Rephaim or “Giants” merely because they represented the tall prehistoric population of Canaan? The question can be more easily asked than answered. We know from the Book of Genesis that Amorites as well as Hittites lived at Hebron, or in its immediate vicinity. Abram dwelt in the plain of Mamre along with three Amorite chieftains, and Hoham, king of Hebron, who fought against Joshua, is accounted among the Amorites (Josh. . The Anakim may therefore have been an Amorite tribe. They held themselves to be the descendants of Anak, an ancient Canaanite god, whose female counterpart was the Phoenician goddess Onka. But, on the other hand, the Amorites at Hebron may have been intruders; we know that Hebron was peculiarly a Hittite city, and it is at Mamre rather than at Hebron that the Amorite confederates of Abram had their home. It is equally possible that the Anakim themselves may have been the stranger element; we hear nothing about them in the days of the patriarchs, and it is only when the Israelites prepare to enter Canaan that they first make their appearance upon the stage.

Og, king of Bashan, however, was an Amorite; of this we are assured in the Book of Deuteronomy (ii, and it is further said of him that he only “remained of the remnant of the Rephaim.” The expression is a noticeable one, as it implies that the older population had been for the most part driven out. And such, in fact, was the case. At Rabbath, the capital of Ammon, the basalt sarcophagus of the last king of Bashan was preserved; but the king and his people had alike perished. Ammonites and Israelites had taken their place.

The children of Ammon had taken possession of the land once owned by the Zamzummim (Deut. i. The latter are called Zuzim in the narrative of Genesis, and they are said to have dwelt in Ham. But Zuzim and Ham are merely faulty transcriptions from a cuneiform text of the Hebrew Zamzummim and Ammon, and the same people are meant both in Genesis and in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy also the Emim are mentioned, and their geographical position defined. They were the predecessors of the Moabites, and like the Zamzummim, “a people great and many and tall,” whom the Moabites expelled doubtless at the same time as that at which the Ammonites conquered the Zamzummim. The “plain of Kiriathaim,” or “the two cities,” must have lain south of the Arnon, where Ar and Kir Haraseth were built.

South of the Emim, in the rose-red mountains of Seir, afterwards occupied by the Edomites, came the Horites, whose name is generally supposed to be derived from a Hebrew word signifying “a cave.” They have therefore been regarded as Troglodytes, or cave-dwellers, a savage race of men who possessed neither houses nor settled home. But it is quite possible to connect the name with another word which means “white,” and to see in them the representatives of a white race. The name of Hor is associated with Beth-lehem, and Caleb, of the Edomite tribe of Kenaz, is called “the son of Hur” (1 Chron. i, i. There is no reason for believing that cave-dwellers ever existed in that part of Palestine.

The discovery of the site of Kadesh-barnea is due in the first instance to Dr. Rowlands, secondly to the archaeological skill of Dr. Clay Trumbull. It is still known as ’Ain Qadis, “the spring of Qadis,” and lies hidden within the block of mountains which rise in the southern desert about midway between Mount Seir and the Mediterranean Sea. The water still gushes out of the rock, fresh and clear, and nourishes the oasis that surrounds it. It has been marked out by nature to be a meeting-place and “sanctuary” of the desert tribes. Its central position, its security from sudden attack, and its abundant supply of water all combined to make it the En-Mishpat or “Spring of Judgment,” where cases were tried and laws enacted. It was here that the Israelites lingered year after year during their wanderings in the wilderness, and it was from hence that the spies were sent out to explore the Promised Land. In those days the mountains which encircled it were known as “the mountains of the Amorites” (Deut. , 20). In the age of the Babylonian invasion, however, the Amorites had not advanced so far to the south. They were as yet only at Hazezon-tamar, the “palm-grove” on the western shore of the Dead Sea, which a later generation called En-gedi (2 Chron. x. En-Mishpat was still in the hands of the Amalekites, the lords of “all the country” round about.

The Amalekites had not as yet intermingled with the Ishmaelites, and their Beduin blood was still pure. They were the Shasu or “Plunderers” of the Egyptian inscriptions, sometimes also termed the Sitti, the Sute of the cuneiform texts. Like their modern descendants, they lived by the plunder of their more peaceful neighbours. As was prophesied of Ishmael, so could it have been prophesied of the Amalekites, that their “hand should be against every man, and every man’s hand against” them. They were the wild offspring of the wilderness, and accounted the first-born of mankind (Numb. xxi.

From En-Mishpat the Babylonian forces marched northward along the western edge of the Dead Sea. Leaving Jerusalem on their left, they descended into the vale of Siddim, where they found themselves in the valley of the Jordan, and consequently in the land of the Canaanites. As we are told in the Book of Numbers (xii, while “the Amalekites dwell in the land of the south, and the Hittites and the Jebusites and Amorites dwell in the mountains, the Canaanites dwell by the sea and by the coast of Jordan.”

The word Canaan, as we have seen, meant “the lowlands,” and appears sometimes in a longer, sometimes in a shorter form. The shorter form is written Khna by the Greeks: in the Tel el-Amarna tablets it is Kinakhkhi, while Canaan, the longer form, is Kinakhna. It is this longer form which alone appears in the hieroglyphic texts. Here we read how Seti I. destroyed the Shasu or Amalekites from the eastern frontier of Egypt to “the land of Kana’an,” and captured their fortress of the same name which Major Conder has identified with Khurbet Kan’an near Hebron. It was also the longer form which was preserved among the Israelites as well as among the Phoenicians, the original inhabitants of the sea-coast. Coins of Laodicea, on the Orontes, bear the inscription, “Laodicea a metropolis in Canaan,” and St. Augustine states that in his time the Carthaginian peasantry of Northern Africa, if questioned as to their descent, still answered that they were “Canaanites.” (Exp. Epist. ad Rom. 13.)

In course of time the geographical signification of the name came to be widely extended beyond its original limits. Just as Philistia, the district of the Philistines, became the comprehensive Palestine, so Canaan, the land of the Canaanites of the coast and the valley, came to denote the whole of the country between the Jordan and the sea. It is already used in this sense in the cuneiform correspondence of Tel el-Amarna. Already in the century before the Exodus Kinakhna or Canaan represented pretty nearly all that we now mean by “Palestine.” It was in fact the country to the south of “the land of the Amorites,” and “the land of the Amorites” lay immediately to the north of the Waters of Merom.

In the geographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis Canaan is stated to be the son of Ham and the brother of Mizraim or Egypt. The statement indicates the age to which the account must go back. There was only one period of history in which Canaan could be geographically described as a brother of Egypt, and that was the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when for a while it was a province of the Pharaohs. At no other time was it closely connected with the sons of Ham. At an earlier epoch its relations had been with Babylonia rather than with the valley of the Nile, and with the fall of the nineteenth dynasty the Asiatic empire of Egypt came finally to an end.

The city of Sidon, we are further told, was the first-born of Canaan. It claimed to be the oldest of the Phoenician cities in the “lowlands” of the coast. It had grown out of an assemblage of “fishermen’s” huts, and Said the god of the fishermen continued to preside over it to the last. The fishermen became in time sailors and merchant-princes, and the fish for which they sought was the murex with its precious purple dye. Tyre, the city of the “rock,” which in later days disputed the supremacy over Phoenicia with Sidon, was of younger foundation. Herodotus was told that the great temple of Baal Melkarth, “the city’s king,” which he saw there, had been built twenty-three centuries before his visit. But Sidon was still older, older even than Gebal, the sacred city of the goddess Baaltis.

The wider extension of the name of Canaan brought with it other geographical relationships besides those of the sea-coast. Hittites and Amorites, Jebusites and Girgashites, Hivites and the peoples of the southern Lebanon, were all settled within the limits of the larger Canaan, and were therefore accounted his sons. Even Hamath claimed the right to be included in the brotherhood. It is said with truth that “afterwards were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad.”

Hittites and Amorites were interlocked both in the north and in the south. Kadesh, on the Orontes, the southern stronghold of the Hittite kingdom of the north, was, as the Egyptian records tell us, in the land of the Amorites; while in the south Hittites and Amorites were mingled together at Hebron, and Ezekiel (xv declares that Jerusalem had a double parentage: its birth was in the land of Canaan, but its father was an Amorite and its mother a Hittite. Modern research, however, has shown that Hittites and Amorites were races widely separated in character and origin. About the Hittites we hear a good deal both in the hieroglyphic and in the cuneiform inscriptions. The Khata of the Egyptian texts were the most formidable power of Western Asia with whom the Egyptians of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties had to deal. They were tribes of mountaineers from the ranges of the Taurus who had descended on the plains of Syria and established themselves there in the midst of an Aramaic population. Carchemish on the Euphrates became one of their Syrian capitals, commanding the high-road of commerce and war from east to west. Thothmes iii., the conqueror of Western Asia, boasts of the gifts he received from “the land of Khata the greater,” so called, it would seem, to distinguish it from another and lesser land of Khata that of the Hittites of the south.

The cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna, in the closing days of the eighteenth dynasty, represent the Hittites as advancing steadily southward and menacing the Syrian possessions of the Pharaoh. Disaffected Amorites and Canaanites looked to them for help, and eventually “the land of the Amorites” to the north of Palestine fell into their possession. When the first Pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty attempted to recover the Egyptian empire in Asia, they found themselves confronted by the most formidable of antagonists. Against Kadesh and “the great king of the Hittites” the Egyptian forces were driven in vain, and after twenty years of warfare Ramses ii., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, was fain to consent to peace. A treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, was drawn up between the two rivals, and Egypt was henceforth compelled to treat with the Hittites on equal terms. The Khatta or Khata of the Assyrian inscriptions are already a decaying power. They are broken into a number of separate states or kingdoms, of which Carchemish is the richest and most important. They are in fact in retreat towards those mountains of Asia Minor from which they had originally issued forth. But they still hold their ground in Syria for a long while. There were Hittites at Kadesh in the reign of David. Hittite kings could lend their services to Israel in the age of Elisha (2 Kings vi, and it was not till B.C. 717 that Carchemish was captured by Sargon of Assyria, and the trade which passed through it diverted to Nineveh. But when the Assyrians first became acquainted with the coastland of the Mediterranean, the Hittites were to such an extent the ruling race there that they gave their name to the whole district. Like “Palestine,” or “Canaan,” the term “land of the Hittites” came to denote among the Assyrians, not only Northern Syria and the Lebanon, but Southern Syria as well. Even Ahab of Israel and Baasha the Ammonite are included by Shalmaneser ii. among its kings.

This extended use of the name among the Assyrians is illustrated by the existence of a Hittite tribe at Hebron in the extreme south of Palestine. Various attempts have been made to get rid of the latter by unbelieving critics, but the statements of Genesis are corroborated by Ezekiel’s account of the foundation of Jerusalem. They are, moreover, in full harmony with the monumental records. As we have seen, Thothmes iii. implies that already in his day there was a second and smaller land of the Hittites, and the great Babylonian work on astronomy contains references to the Hittites which appear to go back to early days.

Assyrian and Babylonian texts are not the only cuneiform records which make mention of the “Khata” or Hittites. Their name is found also on the monuments of the kings of Ararat or Armenia who reigned in the ninth and eighth centuries before our era, and who had borrowed from Nineveh the cuneiform system of writing. But the Khata of these Vannic or Armenian texts lived considerably to the north of the Hittites of the Bible and of the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments. The country they inhabited lay in eastern Asia Minor in the neighbourhood of the modern Malatiyeh. Here, in fact, was their original home.

Thanks to the Egyptian artists, we are well acquainted with the Hittite physical type. It was not handsome. The nose was unduly protrusive, while the chin and the forehead retreated. The cheeks were square with prominent bones, and the face was beardless. In colour the Hittites were yellow-skinned with black hair and eyes. They seem to have worn their hair in three long plaits which fell over the back like the pigtail of a Chinaman, and they were distinguished by the use of boots with upturned toes.

We might perhaps imagine that the Egyptian artists have caricatured their adversaries. But this is not the case. Precisely the same profile of face, sometimes even exaggerated in its ugliness, is represented on the Hittite monuments by the native sculptors themselves. It is one of the surest proofs we possess that these monuments, with their still undeciphered inscriptions, are of Hittite origin. They belong to the people whom Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Armenians united in calling Hittites.

In marked contrast to the Hittites stood the Amorites. They too are depicted on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. While the Hittite type of features is Mongoloid, that of the Amorite is European. His nose is straight and somewhat pointed, his lips and nostrils thin, his cheek-bones high, his mouth firm and regular, his forehead expressive of intelligence. He has a fair amount of whisker, ending in a pointed beard. At Abu-Simbel the skin is painted a pale yellow the Egyptian equivalent for white his eyes blue, and his beard and eyebrows red. At Medinet Habu, his skin, as Prof. Petrie expresses it, is “rather pinker than flesh-colour,” while in a tomb of the eighteenth dynasty at Thebes it is painted white, the eyes and hair being a light red-brown.

The Amorite, it is clear, must be classed with the fair-skinned, blue-eyed Libyans of the Egyptian monuments, whose modern descendants are the Kabyles and other Berber tribes of Northern Africa. The latter are not only European in type, they claim special affinities to the blond, “golden-haired” Kelt. And their tall stature agrees well with what the Old Testament has to tell us about the Amorites. They too were classed among the Rephaim or “giants,” by the side of whom the Israelite invaders were but as “grasshoppers.”

While the Canaanites inhabited the lowlands, the highlands were the seat of the Amorites (Num. xii. This, again, is in accordance with their European affinities. They flourished best in the colder and more bracing climate of the mountains, as do the Berber tribes of Northern Africa to-day. The blond, blue-eyed race is better adapted to endure the cold than the heat.

Amorite tribes and kingdoms were to be found in all parts of Palestine. Southward, as we have seen, Kadesh-barnea was in “the mountain of the Amorites,” while Chedor-laomer found them on the western shores of the Dead Sea. When Abraham pitched his tent in the plain above Hebron, it was in the possession of three Amorite chieftains, and at the time of the Israelitish conquest, Hebron and Jerusalem, Jarmuth, Lachish and Eglon were all Amorite (Josh. . Jacob assured Joseph the inheritance of his tribe should be in that district of Shechem which the patriarch had taken “out of the hand of the Amorite” (Gen. xlvii, and on the eastern side of the Jordan were the Amorite kingdoms of Og and Sihon. But we learn from the Egyptian inscriptions, and more especially from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, that the chief seat of Amorite power lay immediately to the north of Palestine. Here was “the land of the Amorites,” to which frequent reference is made by the monuments, among the ranges of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, from Hamath southward to Hermon. On the east it was bounded by the desert, on the west by the cities of Phoenicia.

In early days, long before the age of Abraham, the Amorites must already have been the predominant population in this part of Syria. When the Babylonian king, Sargon of Akkad, carried his victorious arms to the shores of the Mediterranean, it was against “the land of the Amorites” that his campaigns were directed. From that time forward this was the name under which Syria, and more particularly Canaan, was known to the Babylonians. The geographical extension of the term was parallel to that of “Hittites” among the Assyrians, of “Canaan” among the Israelites, and of “Palestine” among ourselves. But it bears witness to the important part which was played by the Amorites in what we must still call the prehistoric age of Syria, as well as to the extent of the area which they must have occupied.

Of course it does not follow that the whole of this area was occupied at one and the same time. Indeed we know that the conquest of the northern portion of Moab by the Amorite king Sihon took place only a short time before the Israelitish invasion, and part of the Amorite song of triumph on the occasion has been preserved in the Book of Numbers. “There is a fire gone out of Heshbon,” it said, “a flame from the city of Sihon: it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the lords of the high places of Arnon. Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: he hath given his sons that escaped, and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites.” (Num. xx, 29.) In the south, again, the Amorites do not seem to have made their way beyond Hazezon-Tamar, while the Tel el-Amarna tablets make it probable that neither Bashan nor Jerusalem were as yet Amorite at the time they were written. It may be that the Amorite conquests in the south were one of the results of the fall of the Egyptian empire and the Hittite irruption.

Between the Hittite and the Amorite the geographical table of Genesis interposes the Jebusite, and the Book of Numbers similarly states that “the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites dwell in the mountains.” The Jebusites, however, were merely the local tribe which in the early days of the Israelitish occupation of Canaan were in possession of Jerusalem, and they were probably either Hittite or Amorite in race. At any rate there is no trace of them in the cuneiform letters of Tel el-Amarna. On the contrary, in these Jerusalem is still known only by its old name of Uru-salim; of the name Jebus there is not a hint. But the letters show us that Ebed-Tob, the native king of Jerusalem and humble vassal of the Pharaoh, was being hard pressed by his enemies, and that, in spite of his urgent appeals for help, the Egyptians were unable to send any. His enemy were the Khabiri or “Confederates,” about whose identification there has been much discussion, but who were assisted by the Beduin chief Labai and his sons. One by one the towns belonging to the territory of Jerusalem fell into the hands of his adversaries, and at last, as we learn from another letter, Ebed-Tob himself along with his capital was captured by the foe. It was this event, perhaps, which made Jerusalem a Jebusite city. If so, we must see in the enemies of Ebed-Tob the Jebusites of the Old Testament.

The Girgashite is named after the Amorite, but who he may have been it is hard to say. In the Egyptian epic composed by the court-poet Pentaur, to commemorate the heroic deeds of Ramses ii. in his struggle with the Hittites, mention is twice made of “the country of Qarqish.” It was one of those which had sent contingents to the Hittite army. But it seems to have been situated in Northern Syria, if not in Asia Minor, so that unless we can suppose that some of its inhabitants had followed in the wake of the Hittites and settled in Palestine, it is not easy to see how they could be included among the sons of Canaan. The Hivites, whose name follows that of the Girgashites, are simply the “villagers” or fellahin as opposed to the townsfolk. They are thus synonymous with the Perizzites, who take their place in Gen. x, and whose name has the same signification. But whereas the Perizzites were especially the country population of Southern Palestine, the Hivites were those of the north. In two passages, indeed, the name appears to be used in an ethnic sense, once in Gen. xxxv, where we read that Esau married the granddaughter of “Zibeon the Hivite,” and once in Josh. x, where reference is made to “the Hivite under Hermon in the land of Mizpeh.” But a comparison of the first passage with a later part of the chapter (v, 24, 25) proves that “Hivite” is a corrupt reading for “Horite,” while it is probable that in the second passage “Hittite” ought to be read for “Hivite.”

The four last sons of Canaan represent cities, and not tribes. Arka, called Irqat in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, and now known as Tel ’Arqa, was one of the inland cities of Phoenicia, in the mountains between the Orontes and the sea. Sin, which is mentioned by Tiglath-pileser iii., was in the same neighbourhood, as well as Zemar (now Sumra), which, like Arvad (the modern Ruad), is named repeatedly in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. It was at the time an important Phoenician fortress, “perched like a bird upon the rock,” and was under the control of the governor of Gebal. Arvad was equally important as a sea-port, and its ships were used for war as well as for commerce. As for Hamath (now Hamah), the Khamat and Amat of the Assyrian texts, it was already a leading city in the days of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. Thothmes iii. includes it among his Syrian conquests under the name of Amatu, as also does Ramses iii. The Hittite inscriptions discovered there go to show that, like Kadesh on the Orontes, it fell at one time into Hittite hands.

Such then was the ethnographical map of Palestine in the Patriarchal Age. Canaanites in the lowlands, Amorites and Hittites in the highlands contended for the mastery. In the desert of the south were the Amalekite Beduin, ever ready to raid and murder their settled neighbours. The mountains of Seir were occupied by the Horites, while prehistoric tribes, who probably belonged to the Amorite race, inhabited the plateau east of the Jordan.

This was the Palestine to which Abraham migrated, but it was a Palestine which his migration was destined eventually to change. Before many generations had passed Moab and Ammon, the children of his nephew, took the place of the older population of the eastern table-land, while Edom settled in Mount Seir. A few generations more, and Israel too entered into its inheritance in Canaan itself. The Amorites were extirpated or became tributary, and the valleys of the Jordan and Kishon were seized by the invading tribes. The cities of the extreme south had already become Philistine, and the strangers from Caphtor had supplanted in them the Avim of an earlier epoch.

Meanwhile the waves of foreign conquest had spread more than once across the country. Canaan had been made subject to Babylonia, and had received in exchange for its independence the gift of Babylonian culture. Next it was Egypt which entered upon its career of Asiatic conquest, and Canaan for a while was an Egyptian province. But the Egyptian dominion in its turn passed away, and Palestine was left the prey of other assailants, of the Hittites and the Beduin, of the people of Aram Naharaim and the northern hordes. Egyptians and Babylonians, Hittites and Mesopotamians mingled with the earlier races of the country and obliterated the older landmarks. Before the Patriarchal Age came to an end, the ethnographical map of Canaan had undergone a profound change.