Chapter I: The Hebrew Patriarchs (3)

A simple form of contract for the sale and purchase of landed property in Babylonia is to be found in one that was drawn up in the reign of Eri-Aku or Arioch. It is written in Sumerian, the old legal language of Chaldæa, as Latin was the legal language of Europe in the Middle Ages, and runs as follows:—‘One and five-sixths _sar_[68] of a terrace with a house upon it, bounded on three sides by the house of Abil-Sin, and on the fourth side by the street, has been purchased by Sin-uzilli the son of Tsili-Istar from Sin-illatsu the son of Nannar-arabit: 2-½ shekels of silver he has weighed as its full price. In days to come Sin-illatsu shall never make any claim in regard to the house or dispute the title. The (contracting parties) have sworn by the names of Sin, Samas, and king Eri-Aku. Witnessed by Abu-ilisu the son of Tsili-Istar, Abil-Sin the son of Uruki-bansum, Nur-Amurri the son of Abi-idinnam, Ibku-Urra, son of Nabi-ilisu, and Sin-semê his brother. The seals of the witnesses (are attached).’[69]

Still more insight into the character and procedure of Babylonian commercial law is given by the record of a case of disputed property which came before the judges in the reign of Khammu-rabi or Amraphel. The following is a translation of it:—‘Concerning the garden of Sin-magir which Naid-Amurri bought for silver, but to which Ilu-bani laid claim on the ground that he had bred horses there. They went before the judges, and the judges took them to the gate of the goddess Nin-Martu (the mistress of the land of the Amorites), and to the judges of the gate of Nin-Martu Ilu-bani thus declared in the gate of Nin-Martu: I am indeed the son of Sin-magir; he adopted me as his son; the sealed documents (recording the fact) he never destroyed. Thus he declared, and under (king) Eri-Aku they adjudged the garden and house to Ilu-bani. Then came Sin-mubalidh and claimed the garden of Ilu-bani; so they went before the judges, and the judges (said): To us and the elders they have been taken, and must stand in the gate of the gods Merodach, Sussa, Sin, Khusa, and Nin-Martu the daughter of Merodach ... and the elders who have already appeared in the case of Naid-Amurri have heard Ilu-bani declare in the gate of Nin-Martu that “I am indeed the son (of Sin-magir)”; accordingly, they adjudged the garden and house to Ilu-bani. Sin-mubalidh cannot come again and make a claim. Oaths have been sworn by the names of Sin, Samas, Merodach, and king Khammu-rabi. Witnessed by Sin-imguranni the noble, Elilka-Sin, Abil-irzitim, Ubarrum, Zanbil-arad-Sin, Akhiya, Bel-dugul (?), Samas-bani the son of Abid-rakhas, Zanik-pisu, Izkur-Ea the major-domo, and Bau-ila. The seals of the witnesses (are attached). The 4th day of the month Tammuz, the year when Khammu-rabi the king offered prayers to Tasmit.’[70]

It is needless to quote other documents of a similar nature, unless it be to add that when a field or garden is sold, the palms and other trees planted in it are carefully specified. So they were also in the case of the field of Machpelah. Here, too, the transaction took place before the ‘elders’ of the city, at ‘the gate’ through which the people entered, and it was duly witnessed by ‘the children of Heth.’[71] The fact that ‘a stranger and a sojourner’ could thus acquire landed property and hand it down to his descendants was in strict accordance with Babylonian law. As the Canaanite in Babylonia could buy land and leave it to his children, so too the Babylonian in Canaan could do the same. Even the technical words used in recording the deed of sale are of Babylonian origin. The shekel is the Babylonian _siqlu_, and the Babylonian was the first who spoke of ‘weighing silver’ in the sense of ‘paying money.’[72] The statement that the shekels were ‘current with the merchant’ takes us back to those Babylonian ‘merchants’ who played so great a part in the early Babylonian world. It was for them that Dungi, king of Ur, long before the birth of Abraham, had fixed the monetary standard which remained in use down to the later days of the Chaldæan monarchy. He had determined by law the weight and value of the maneh, of which the sixtieth part was a shekel, and only those manehs and shekels which conformed to it could be accepted by the Babylonian trader. The words of Genesis are a curious indication of the period of society to which they must belong.[73]

There was evolution in Babylonian law as in the law of all other countries; and though the early contracts remained a model for those of a later epoch, their style and form underwent change. The Assyrian and later Babylonian contracts resemble them, it is true, in their main outlines; but they have become more complicated, and the older phraseology is altered in many respects. The ‘elders’ no longer appear as witnesses; it is no longer needful to try cases of disputed title at the various gates of the city; and it is questionable whether foreigners could claim the same rights in regard to possessions in land that they did in the days of Amraphel and Arioch. The sale of the field of Machpelah belongs essentially to the early Babylonian and not to the Assyrian period.

It is only fragments of the life of Abraham that are brought before us in the pages of Genesis. They are like a series of pictures which have been saved from the shipwreck of the past. And the pictures are not always painted in the same colours. At one time the patriarch appears as ‘a mighty prince,’ as a rich and cultured Chaldæan immigrant, with armed bands of warriors under him with whom he can venture to attack even the army of the king of Elam. He is the confederate of the Amorite chieftains, the prince whom the Hittites of Hebron hear with respect. But at another time the colours on the canvas seem quite different. When the angels warn the patriarch of the approaching overthrow of the cities of the plain, they find him in the tent of a Bedâwi, leading the simple life of an uncultured nomad, and preparing the food of his guests with his own hands. Between this Bedâwi shêkh and the companion of the king of Gerar or the Pharaoh of Egypt the contrast is indeed great.

To the Western mind, however, the contrast is greater than it would be to the Oriental. The traveller in the East is well acquainted with wealthy Bedâwin shêkhs who live in the desert in barbaric simplicity, but, nevertheless, have their houses at Cairo or Damascus, where they indulge in all the luxury and splendour of Oriental life. Moreover, the narratives which have been combined in the book of Genesis do not all come from the same source. Some of them have been taken from written historical documents which breathe the atmosphere of the cultured city, of the educated scribe, and the luxurious court. Others, derived it may be from oral tradition, are filled with the spirit of the wanderer in the desert, and set before us the simple life and rude fare of the dweller in tents. The history of the patriarchs is, in fact, like Joseph’s coat of many colours. It is a series of pictures rather than a homogeneous whole. The materials of which it is composed differ widely in both character and origin. Some of them can be shown to have been contemporaneous with the events they record; some again to have been like the tales of their old heroes recounted by the nomad Arabs in the days before Islam as they sat at night round their camp-fires. The details and spirit of the story have necessarily caught the colour of the medium through which they have passed. The life of Abraham, doubtless, presented the contrasts still presented by that of a rich Bedâwi shêkh; at one time spent in the wild freedom and privations of the desert; at another amid the luxuries and culture of the town; but the contrasts have been heightened by the difference in the sources through which they have been handed down. Naturally, while the scribe would record only those phases of Abraham’s history which brought him into contact with the great world of kings and princes, of war and trade, the nomad reciter of ancient stories would dwell rather on such parts of it as he and his hearers could understand. For them Abraham would become a desert-wanderer like themselves.

This difference in the sources of the narrative explains why it is that the figure of Abraham so largely overshadows that of his son Isaac. Isaac seems almost swallowed up in that darkness of antiquity through which the figure of his father looms so largely. Apart from his dispute with Abimelech of Gerar, which reads like a repetition of the dispute between Abimelech and Abraham, there is little told of the life of Isaac which is not connected with his more famous father or son. Between Abraham and Jacob, the great ancestors of Israel, Isaac seems to intervene as merely a connecting link.

But the life of Isaac was that of a Bedâwi shêkh. The other side of his father’s life and character was lost. The forefather of Israel had ceased to be a Chaldæan, and had become simply a dweller in the desert, like the fugitive slaves from Egypt in after days. Even Hebron was left, and the life of Isaac was mainly passed on the northern edge of that desert in which his descendants were in later times to receive the Law. If he approached Canaan, it was only to Beer-sheba and Gerar on the southern skirts of Canaanitish territory, where the Bedâwin and their flocks still claimed to be masters. But his chief residence was further south, in the very heart of the wilderness.

Isaac was thus essentially a Bedâwi, a fit type of the phase of life through which the Israelites were destined to pass before their conquest of the Promised Land. With the politics and trade of the civilised world, accordingly, he never came into contact. There was nothing in his existence for the historian to chronicle; nothing which could bring his name into the written history of the time. If his memory were to be preserved at all, it could be only through the unwritten traditions of the desert, through the tales told of him among the desert tribes.

Once indeed, it is said, he had relations with a king. The king was one of those Canaanitish princelets with whose names the Tel el-Amarna tablets are filled. The dominions of Abimelech of Gerar were of small extent, and must have been barren in the extreme. The site of Gerar lies two hours south of Gaza,[74] and the territory of its king extended eastward as far as Beer-sheba. It was essentially a desert territory: during the greater part of the year the whole country is bare and sterile; only after rain does the wilderness break forth suddenly into green herbage.

In the story of Isaac’s dispute with Abimelech the writer of Genesis calls him ‘king of the Philistines,’ and speaks of his subjects as ‘Philistines.’ This, however, is an accommodation to the geography of a later day. In the age of the patriarchs the south-eastern corner of Palestine has not as yet been occupied by the Philistine immigrants. We have learned from the Egyptian monuments that they were pirates from the islands and coasts of the Greek Seas who did not seize upon the frontier cities of Southern Canaan until the time of the Pharaoh Meneptah, the son of Ramses II. Up to then, for more than three centuries, the frontier cities had been garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and included in the Egyptian empire. It was not till the period of the Exodus that the district passed into Philistine hands, and the old road into Egypt by the sea-coast became known as ‘the way of the Philistines.’

In speaking of the ‘Philistines,’ therefore, the writer of the book of Genesis is speaking proleptically. And in reading the narrative of Isaac’s dealings with Abimelech by the side of that of Abraham’s dealings with the same king, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that we have before us two versions of the same event. Doubtless, history repeats itself; disputes about the possession of wells in a desert-land can frequently recur, and it is possible that two kings of the same name may have followed one another on the throne of Gerar. But what does not seem very possible is that each of these kings should have had a ‘chief captain of his host’ called by the strange non-Semitic name of Phichol (Gen. xxi. 22; xxvi. 26); that each of them should have taken the wife of the patriarch, believing her to be his sister; or that Beer-sheba should twice have received the same name from the oaths sworn over it.

When we compare the two versions together, it is not difficult to see which of them is the more original. It is in the second that Abimelech is called ‘king of the Philistines’; in the first he is correctly entitled ‘king of Gerar.’ Abraham was justified in calling Sarah his sister; there was no ground and no reason for Isaac doing the same in the case of his own wife. Moreover, Beer-sheba had already received its name from Abraham, who had planted there an _êshel_ or tamarisk, and ‘called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God.’

The wife of Isaac was brought from Harran, from the members of Abraham’s race who had settled in Northern Syria, and there become an Aramæan family. She was the daughter of Bethuel, ‘the house of God,’ a proper name which is found in the Tel el-Amarna letters, where it also belongs to a native of Northern Syria.[75] Bethuel is the older form of Bethel, that anointed stone which, according to Semitic belief, was the special residence of divinity. There was something peculiarly appropriate in such a name at Harran, where the great temple of the Moon-god, the ‘Baal of Harran,’ was itself a Beth-el on a large scale.

That Isaac should have lived all his life long in the southern desert, and that his name should have been associated with none of the ancient sanctuaries of Canaan, Beer-sheba alone excepted, is perhaps curious when we bear in mind a passage in the prophecies of Amos (vii. 9), where it is with Northern Israel and not with Judah that the name of the patriarch is connected. Isaac, however, was as much the forefather of the Israelites of Samaria as he was of those of Jerusalem; and the use of his name by the prophet shows only that he was no mere Jewish hero, but was regarded as an ancestor of the whole Israelitish nation. For the whole of Israel, Isaac was no less historical than Abraham or Jacob.

That Isaac’s dwelling-place should have been in the desert of the south agrees well with the fact that he was the father of Edom as well as of Israel. He thus lived on the borderland of the two peoples who afterwards boasted of their descent from him.

Esau, from whom the Edomites traced their origin, was the elder of his two twin sons. The name has been connected with that of the Phœnician deity Usous, but Usous is really the eponymous god of the city of Usu, in the neighbourhood of Tyre. Esau took possession of the mountains of Seir. Here he partly absorbed, partly destroyed the older races, the Amalekites or Bedâwin whose descendants still prowl among the wadis of Edom, and the Horites whom a somewhat doubtful etymology would turn into Troglodytes or dwellers in caves. Edom itself, the ‘Red’ land, took its name from the red hue of its cliffs. It was a name which went back to a remote antiquity, for among the Egyptians also the desert-country which stretched away eastward into Edom was known as Desher, ‘the Red.’ The punning etymology in Genesis (xxv. 30) preserves a recollection of the true origin of the name.

The territories of Esau extended southward to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. Here were the towns of Elath and Eziongeber, through which the merchandise of the Indian Ocean was conveyed northward, enriching the merchants and princes of Edom in its passage through their land. To the north Edom was in touch with the peoples of Canaan. The wives of Esau, we are told, were ‘of the daughters of Canaan’ (Gen. xxxvi. 2); one of them at least was Hittite, and another, according to one account (Gen. xxvi. 34), bore the name of the ‘Jewess.’ But other wives were taken from the tribes of Arabia. Bashemath was the daughter of Ishmael and sister of a Nabathean chief, while Aholibamah was the daughter of a Horite who belonged to the primeval race of Seir.

Like the Ishmaelites, like the Israelites themselves, it was long before the Edomites submitted to the rule of a king. At first they were divided into tribes, each of them under a shêkh. In Israel the shêkhs were entitled ‘judges,’ a title borrowed from the Canaanite population; in Edom they bore the name of _alûphim_, which the Authorised Version renders by ‘dukes.’[76] The old name still survived down to the time of the Exodus, as we may gather from its use in the Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 15). But when the wanderings in the wilderness were almost over, and Israel was preparing to invade Palestine, the ‘dukes’ of Edom had already been superseded by kings. It was a ‘king of Edom’ to whom Moses sent messengers from Kadesh praying for a ‘passage through his border,’ and it was a king of Edom who refused the request. But the ancient spirit of independence still lingered; and, as we may gather from the extract from the Edomite chronicles preserved in Gen. xxxvi., the monarchy was elective. The son never succeeded the father on the throne, the royal dignity passed from one division of the kingdom to the other, and each city in turn became the capital.[77]

Though Esau was the elder, the birthright passed to the younger brother. Israelitish tradition knew of more than one occurrence which accounted for this. It was told how Esau had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage; it was also told how it had been stolen from him by the craft of his brother Jacob. Naturally, the first tradition was more favoured in Israel, the second in Edom, and the union of the two in the book of Genesis is a proof of the diligence with which the writer of it has gathered together all that was known of the past of his people as well as the impartiality with which he has used his materials. Perhaps both stories owed their preservation to the play upon words which was connected with them. The ‘red’ pottage served to explain the name of Edom, the craft of the younger son the name of Jacob.[78]

Upon the real origin of the latter name, however, recent discovery has thrown light. It is the third person singular of a verb, and is formed like numerous names of the same class in Arabic and Assyrian. But the third person singular of a verb implies a nominative, and the nominative was originally a divine name or title. In familiar use the nominative came to be dropped, and the shortened form of the name to be alone employed. The older form of the name Jacob has now been recovered from the monuments of Babylonia and Egypt. Among the Canaanites who appear as witnesses to Babylonian contracts of the age of Khammu-rabi, Mr. Pinches has found a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el, ‘God will recompense,’ ‘God will add.’[79] The same names, though written a little differently,[80] are met with in contracts earlier than the time of Moses, which have been discovered near Kaisariyeh, in Cappadocia, and are inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform characters and in a Babylonian dialect. We can thus trace them from the primitive home of Abraham to the neighbourhood of that Aramæan district of Northern Mesopotamia in which his father settled.

But this is not all. Among the places in Palestine conquered by Thothmes III. of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and recorded on the walls of his temple at Karnak, we find a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el. In Canaan, therefore, the names were already current; it may even be that in the town of Jacob-el we have a reminiscence of the patriarch, in Joseph-el a connection with the ancestor of the ‘House of Joseph.’ At all events, the name of Joseph-el follows immediately after that of the ‘Har’ or ‘Mountain’ of Ephraim, while that of Jacob-el is placed in the neighbourhood of Hebron.[81]

The name of Jacob-el can be carried still further back than the age of Thothmes III., further back probably than the age of the patriarch himself. There are Egyptian scarabs which bear the name of a Pharaoh called Jacob-el. The first part of the name is written just as it would be in Hebrew, and the Pharaoh is given all the titles of a legitimate Egyptian king. On one he is ‘the good God,’ on another ‘the son of the Sun,’ and ‘the giver of life.’ The scarabs belong to the period of the Hyksos, and in the Pharaoh Jacob-el we must accordingly see one of those Hyksos conquerors from Asia who ruled over Egypt for so many centuries. There was thus a Jacob in Egypt before the patriarch migrated there, and he belonged to that Hyksos race under whom Joseph rose to the highest honours of the state.[82]

The shortened form of the name is also found in the Babylonian texts; and it is probable that Egibi, the founder of the great banking and trading firm which carried on business in Babylonia down to the time of the Persian kings, had a name which is identical with it. At any rate the older forms of both ‘Jacob’ and ‘Joseph’ show that ‘Isaac’ too must be an abbreviation from an earlier ‘Isaac-el’ (_Yitskhaq-êl_). ‘God smileth’ would have been the primitive signification of the word.

The craft of Jacob was the cause of his flight to his mother’s family in Padan-Aram. He thus became that ‘wandering Aramæan’ of whom we read in Deuteronomy (xxvi. 5). On his way he rested at the great Beth-el of Central Palestine, and there in a vision beheld the angels of God ascending and descending the steps of limestone that were piled one upon the other to the gates of heaven.[83] There, too, he poured oil upon the sacred stone and consecrated it to the deity, and future generations revered it as a veritable Beth-el or ‘House of God.’

The name, in fact, we are told, was given to it by Jacob himself. ‘If I come again to my father’s house in peace,’ he said, ‘then shall Yahveh be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that Thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto Thee.’ The vow was in accordance with a Canaanitish custom which had originally come from Babylonia. From time immemorial the Babylonian temples had been supported by the tenth or tithe, which was levied on both king and people: it was not thought that the gods were asking too much when they demanded the tenth of the income which had been given to man by themselves. Among the Babylonian contract-tablets there are several which relate to the payment of the tithe as well as to the gifts that were made to a Bit-ili or Beth-el.[84]

Jacob’s vow was performed, at least in part, when once more he returned to Canaan. Then again ‘God appeared to him’ and changed the patriarch’s name. Then again, too, ‘he set up a pillar of stone; and he poured a drink-offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon. And Jacob called the name of the place where God spake with him Beth-el.’ This second account of the naming of the place doubtless comes from a different source from that which recorded Jacob’s dream, and is the account which was known to Hosea, the prophet of the northern kingdom. Modern critics have alleged that it is inconsistent with the first, and that consequently neither the one nor the other is historical. The compiler of the book of Genesis, however, thought otherwise; he has made no attempt to smooth over what the European scholar declares to be inconsistencies, and which therefore cannot have seemed inconsistencies to him. The Oriental mode of writing history, it must once more be remarked, is not the same as ours; and as it is with the ancient East that we are now concerned, it would be wiser to follow the judgment of the writer of Genesis than that of his European critics.

At Harran Jacob served his cousin Laban ‘for a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep.’ Such contracts of voluntary service are to be found in the Babylonian tablets of the age of Khammu-rabi and his predecessors. It was not at all unusual for a slave to be hired out to another master for a definite period of time; it sometimes happened that the master himself hired out his own services in a similar way.[85] In Babylonia the work was partly pastoral, partly agricultural; the semi-Bedâwi Jacob was a herdsman only. His cousin Laban bore a name which was also that of an Assyrian deity; and it may not be a mere coincidence that when Nabonidos, the last king of Babylonia, restored the great temple of the moon-god at Harran, he tells us that he began the task ‘by the art of the god Laban, the god of foundations and brickwork.’[86]

The two daughters of Laban bore names which had a familiar sound to the ear of a herdsman. Rachel means ‘ewe’; Leah is the Assyrian _li’tu_, ‘a cow.’ It is needless to recount the well-known story of the wooing of the younger daughter, and of the efforts made by Laban to retain Jacob in his service and marry both the sisters to him. Craft was met by craft; but in the end the ancestor of Israel proved more than a match for the wily Syrian. His cattle and riches multiplied like the children who were born to him, and a time came when the sons of Laban began to view with envy the poor relative who was robbing them of their patrimony. So Jacob fled, before harm had come to him, carrying with him his wives and children and all the wealth he had accumulated. Laban pursued and succeeded in overtaking the heavily-weighted caravan at the very spot where the frontiers of Aram and Canaan met together. There the cairn of stones was raised in which later generations saw a memorial of the pact that had been sworn between Jacob and his father-in-law. Henceforth the tie with Aram was broken: the wives of Jacob forgot the home of their father and looked to Canaan instead of Aram as the native land of their race. Over the cairn of Gilead the forefathers of Israel forswore for ever their Aramæan ties.

But Rachel had carried with her her father’s teraphim, those household gods on whose cult the welfare of the family seemed to depend. What they were like we may gather from the teraphim of David, which Michal placed on the couch of her husband, and so deceived the messengers of Saul (1 Sam. xix. 13-16). They must have had the shape of a man, and, at all events in the case of those of David, must have also been about a man’s size. Like the ephod and the Urim and Thummim, they were consulted as oracles (Zech. x. 2), and their use lingered among the Jews as late as the period of the Captivity. When Hosea depicts the coming desolation of Israel, he describes it as a time when ‘the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without a sacred pillar, and without an ephod and teraphim’ (Hos. iii. 4).

The final break between Jacob and the Aramæan portion of Terah’s family was marked by a change of name. From henceforth Jacob was to be distinctively the father of the children of Israel. He and his descendants were severed from the rest of their kinsmen whether in Padan-Aram, in Edom, or in the lands beyond the Jordan. Abraham had been the ‘father of many nations’; Jacob was to be the father of but one—of that chosen people to whom the character and worship of Yahveh were revealed.

We read of him in Hosea (xii. 3, 4), ‘By his strength he had power with God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed.’ What the Authorised Version translates ‘had power’ is _sârâh_ and _yâsar_ in Hebrew. The story of the mysterious struggle is told in full in the book of Genesis. The long caravan of Jacob had arrived at length at Mahanaim, ‘the two camps’ by the stream of the Jabbok, and from thence he sent messengers to his brother, who had already established his power in the mountains of Seir. In after days the name of the place was connected with the strange occurrence that there befel the patriarch. He was visited by the angels of God, nay, by God Himself. In the visions of the night he wrestled with one whom, when morning dawned, he believed to have been his God. He had seen God, as it were, face to face, and a popular etymology saw in the fact an explanation of the name of Peniel. When Hosea wrote his prophecies, the belief was too well established that man cannot ‘see God’s face and live,’ and the angel of God accordingly takes the place of God Himself. But when the narrative in Genesis was composed, a more primitive conception of the Divine nature still prevailed, and no reluctance was felt in stating exactly what the patriarch himself had believed. It was God with whom he had struggled, and from whom he had extorted a blessing, and a memory of the conflict and victory was preserved in the name of Israel, which Jacob henceforth bore.

The etymology, however, is really only one of those plays upon words of which the Biblical writers, like Oriental writers generally, are so fond. It has no scientific value, and never was intended to have any. Israel is, like Edom, not the name of an individual, but of the people of whom the individual was the ancestor. The name is formed like that of Jacob-el, and the abbreviated Jeshurun is used instead of it in the Song of Moses.[87] If the latter is correct, the root will not be _sârâh_, ‘he fought,’ or _yâsar_, ‘he is king,’ but _yâshar_, ‘to be upright,’ ‘to direct’; and Israel will signify ‘God has directed.’ Israel, in fact, will be the ‘righteous’ people who have been called to walk in the ways of the Lord.

While Jacob was keeping the sheep of his Aramæan father-in-law, Esau was making a name for himself among the mountains of the Horites. Half robber, half huntsman, he had gathered about him a band of followers, and with their help had founded—if not a kingdom—at all events a nation to the south of Moab. It is true that the ‘red’ land he had occupied was rocky and barren, but the high-road of commerce from the spice-bearing regions of Southern Arabia passed through it, and the plunder or tribute of the merchants who travelled along it brought wealth to him and his well-armed Bedâwin. What David did in later days, when he made himself the head of a band of outlaws, and with their assistance eventually raised himself to the throne of Judah, had already been accomplished by Esau among the barbarians of Seir.

The message of Jacob led him northward by the desert road which ran to the east of Moab and Ammon. It is clear from the story that Jacob knew little about his brother’s power. When news was brought that he was coming with a troop of four hundred men, Jacob’s heart sank within him, and his only thought was how to save himself and at least a portion of his wealth from the powerful robber-chief. The event proved that his precautions were needless. Esau behaved with a magnanimity which it must have been hard for a Hebrew writer to describe, and pressed his brother to accompany him to Seir. Jacob feared to accept the invitation, and equally feared to refuse it. With characteristic caution and craft, he promised to come, but urged that the cattle and children that were with him made it necessary to follow slowly in Esau’s track. So the Edomite chieftain departed, and Jacob took good care to turn westward across the Jordan into the land of Canaan. There, among the cities and fields of the civilised ‘Amorite,’ he felt himself secure from the pursuit of the desert tribes.

Was it fear of Esau which kept him in Central Palestine and prevented him so long from venturing near that southern part of the country where his father and grandfather had mainly dwelt? At all events, while Abraham had bought land at Hebron, the land purchased by Jacob was near Shechem. Moreover, it was the ‘parcel of a field where he had spread his tent,’ not a burying-place for his family. It would seem, therefore, that it was intended for a permanent residence; here the patriarch determined to settle and to exchange the free life of the pastoral nomad for that of a villager of Canaan.[88]

The field was bought from Hamor the father of Shechem, the founder of the city which was destined to become the seat of the first monarchy in Israel, and on it was raised the first altar consecrated to the God of Israel. El-elohê-Israel, ‘El is the God of Israel,’ the altar was termed, a declaration that the El whom the Canaanites worshipped was the God of Israel as well. But though the field was bought for one hundred ‘pieces of money’—an expression, be it noted, which is not Babylonian—we are assured also that Jacob had gained land at Shechem by the right of conquest. In blessing Joseph he declared to him that to the tribe of his favourite son there was given ‘a Shechem above’ his ‘brethren which’ he had taken ‘out of the hand of the Amorite with’ his ‘sword and bow’ (Gen. xlviii. 22); and the story of the ravishment of Dinah recounts how the sons of the patriarch massacred the men of the city, how they enslaved their women and carried away their goods. The terrible tale of vengeance was never forgotten; it is alluded to in the Blessing of Jacob (Gen. xlix. 5-7), and the disappearance of Simeon and Levi as separate tribes was looked upon as a punishment for the deed. It would seem that after the Israelitish conquest of Canaan the population of Shechem remained half Canaanite, half Israelite,[89] and the Canaanitish population would naturally remember with horror and indignation the crime of the sons of Jacob. That the deed should have been attributed to the ancestors of two of the southern tribes instead of to those of Issachar or some other tribe of the north is evidence in favour of its truthfulness.

The sons of Jacob were twelve in number, like the twelve sons of Ishmael, and corresponded with the twelve tribes of Israel which were called after their names. And yet the correspondence required a little forcing. It is questionable whether, at any one time, there ever were exactly twelve Israelitish tribes. In the Song of Deborah Judah does not appear at all, Ephraim taking its place and, along with Benjamin, extending as far south as the desert of the Amalekites, while Machir is substituted for Manasseh and Gad. Levi never possessed a territory of its own; had it done so, the tribes would have been thirteen in number and not twelve. At the same time, it had just as much right to be considered a separate tribe as Dan, whose cities were in the north as well as in the south, where, however, they were absorbed by Judah; more right perhaps than Simeon, which hardly existed except in name. The territory of Reuben lay outside the boundaries of Palestine, and was merely the desert-wadis and grazing-grounds of the kingdom of Moab; the country can be said to have belonged to the tribe only in the sense that the wadis east of the Delta belong to the Bedâwin, whom the Egyptian government at present allows to live in them. Manasseh, lastly, was divided into two halves, in order to bring the number of tribes up to the requisite figure.

It is clear that the scheme is an artificial one. Israel, after its conquest of Canaan, could indeed be divided into twelve separate parts, but such a division was theoretical only. There were no twelve territories corresponding to the parts, while the parts themselves could be reckoned as thirteen, eleven, or ten, just as easily as twelve.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious. History credited Jacob with twelve sons, and it was consequently necessary to bring the number of Israelitish tribes into harmony with the fact. Modern criticism has amused itself with reversing the history, and assuming that the twelve sons of the patriarch owed their origin to the twelve tribes. It has accordingly drawn inferences from the fact that some of the sons of Jacob are said to have been the offspring of concubines, and not of his two legitimate wives, and that Joseph and Benjamin were the youngest of all. But such inferences fall with the assumption that in the twelve sons we have merely the eponymous heroes of the twelve tribes. It is a cheap way of making history, and, after all, what we know of the tribes does not fit in with the theory. There is nothing in the history of Dan and Naphtali, or Gad and Asher, which would have caused them to be regarded of bastard descent, if that bastard descent had not been a fact; indeed, in the Song of Deborah, which is almost universally allowed to go back to the early age of the Judges, Naphtali and Zebulun are placed on exactly the same footing. The distinction between the sons of Leah and those of Rachel does not answer to the real cleavage between the tribes of the south and those of the north of Palestine: Benjamin, after the age of Saul, followed Judah and Simeon, while the sons of Joseph were joined with Zebulun and Issachar. Moreover, had the sons of Jacob been mere reflections of the tribes, it would be difficult to account for the existence of Joseph, or to understand why Machir takes the place of Manasseh and Gad in the Song of Deborah.

The critical theory is the result of introducing Greek modes of thought into Semitic history. The Greek tribe, it is true, traced its origin to an eponymous ancestor, but that ancestor was a god or a hero, and not a man. Among the Semites, however, as the history of Arabia may still teach us, the conception of the tribe was something wholly different. The tribe was an enlarged family which called itself by the name of its first head. It began with the individual, and to the last styled itself his children. The Greek tribe, on the contrary, began with the clan, and its theoretical ancestor, accordingly, was merely the divine personage whose common cult kept it together. In the Semitic tribe there could be no cult of its ancestor, for the ancestor was but an ordinary man, who worshipped the same form of Baal and used the same rites as his descendants after him.

Nevertheless, there may be an element of truth in the ‘critical’ assumption. The names of the ancestors of some of the Israelitish tribes may have been the reflex of the later names of the tribes themselves. It does not follow that the name by which one of the sons of Jacob became known to later generations was actually the name which he bore himself. Had Jacob been uniformly called Israel by the Hebrew writers, we should never have known his original name. And it is possible that the name of Asher is really a reflex of this kind. The _Travels of the Mohar_, written in Egypt in the reign of Ramses II. before the Israelitish conquest of Canaan, speak of ‘the mountain of User’ as being in the very locality in which the tribe of Asher was afterwards settled. And in the case of one tribe at least there is evidence that its name must have been reflected back upon that of its progenitor.

This is the tribe of Benjamin. In the book of Genesis (xxxv. 18) Benjamin is represented as having received two different names at his birth. The statement excites our suspicion, for such a double naming is inconsistent with Hebrew practice, and our suspicion is confirmed when we find that both names have a geographical meaning. Benjamin is ‘the son of the South’ or ‘Southerner’; Ben-Oni, as he is also said to have been called, is ‘the son of On,’ or ‘the Onite.’ On, or Beth-On, it will be remembered, was an ancient name of Beth-el, the great sanctuary and centre of the tribe of Benjamin, while ‘the Southerner’ was an appropriate title for the lesser brother tribe which lay to the south of the dominant Ephraim. It is of Ephraim that Deborah says, in her Song of Triumph, ‘Behind thee is Benjamin among thy peoples’ (Judg. v. 14).

The etymology suggested in Genesis for the name of Ben-Oni is a sample of those plays upon words in which Oriental writers have always delighted, and of which the Hebrew Scriptures contain so many illustrations. They all spring from the old confusion between the name and the thing, which substituted the name for the thing, and believed that if the name could be explained, the thing would be explained also. Hence the slight transformations in the form of names which allowed them to be assimilated to familiar words, or their identification with words which obviously gave an incorrect sense. Hence, too, the choice of etymologies which was offered to the reader: where the real origin of the name was unknown or uncertain, it was possible to explain it in more than one way. Isaiah (xv. 9) changes the name of the Moabite city of Dibon into Dimon in order to connect it with the Hebrew _dâm_, ‘blood,’ and the writer of Genesis gives two contradictory derivations of the name of Joseph (Gen. xxx. 23, 24). The latter fact is of itself a sufficient proof of the true value of these etymologies, or rather, popular plays upon words, and the sayings in which they are embodied can still be matched by the traveller in the East. Similar embodiments of popular etymologising are still repeated to explain the place-names of Egypt.[90]

The origin of some of the names of the sons of Jacob is as obscure to us as it was to the writer of Genesis. We do not know, for instance, the meaning and derivation of the name of Reuben. Equally doubtful is the real etymology of the name of Issachar.[91] The name of Simeon is already found among the places in Canaan conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh Thothmes III. before the age of Moses, and in Judah we have a name which seems to be the same as that of a tribe in Northern Syria.[92] Levi, like Naphtali, is a gentilic noun, and must be connected with the _lau’â(n)_, or ‘priest’ of Southern Arabia.[93] Gad was the god of good fortune, Dan ‘the judge,’ the title of certain Babylonian deities, and Dinah is the feminine corresponding to Dan.

Jacob, ever timorous, fled from Hivite vengeance after the destruction of Shechem, forsaking the property he had acquired there by purchase and the sword. He made his way southward to Beth-el, and there rested on the edge of the great mountain block of Central Palestine. Hard by was the city of Luz, soon to be eclipsed by the growing fame of the high-place on the height above it. Here, at Beth-el, an altar was erected by the patriarch to the God of the locality who had once appeared to him in a dream. It was the prototype of the altar that was hereafter to arise there when Beth-el had become a chief sanctuary of the house of Israel. Whether the altar stood on the high-place on the summit of the mountain, where the Beth-el or column of stone had been consecrated by Jacob, we do not know; there are indications in the prophets, however, that the high-place and the temple were separate from one another. Indeed, from the words of Genesis, it would seem that the altar and future temple were on the lower slope of the hill, close to the old Canaanitish town. Here, at any rate, on the road to the city, was that Allon-bachuth, that ‘Terebinth of Tears,’ which is referred to by Hosea (xii. 4), and is connected in the book of Genesis with the death of Deborah, the nurse of Rachel. In later days another Deborah dwelt under the shadow of a palm-tree on the same road (Judg. iv. 6), and modern critical ingenuity has accordingly discovered that the terebinth and the palm were one and the same tree.

Beth-el, however, was still too near the Hivites of Shechem, and Jacob continued his journey to the south. The death of Isaac called him to Hebron, where, for the last time, he met his brother Esau, who came to take part in his father’s burial. But his own residence was at Beth-lehem, ‘the Temple of the god Lakhmu,’ called Ephrath in those early days.[94] Here Rachel died, and here accordingly was raised the tombstone which marked her grave down to the day when the book of Genesis assumed its present form.[95]

It was ‘beyond the tower of Edar,’ the tower of ‘the Flock,’ that Jacob, we are told, ‘spread his tent.’ The tower of the Flock guarded the city-fortress of Jerusalem (Mic. iv. 8), and it was therefore between Jerusalem and Beth-lehem that the patriarch made his home. But his flocks were scattered northwards as far as Shechem, grazing on the mountain slopes under the charge of his sons. Jacob remained like a Bedâwi of to-day living among the settled inhabitants of the country, and yet keeping apart from them and sending his flocks far and wide wherever there was fresh grass and free pasturage.

It was while he thus lived that the disgraceful events occurred connected with the marriage of Judah and the Canaanitish Tamar, which throw an evil light on the manners and morals of the patriarch’s family. The whole episode stands in marked contrast to the ordinary character of the history, and its insertion is evidence of the impartiality of the writer. It is clear that he has put together all that reached him from the past history of his people, omitting nothing, modifying nothing. All sides of the past are brought before us, the darker as well as the lighter, and no attempt is made to spare or condone the forefathers of Israel. It has indeed been asked by an over-sensitive criticism how the recital of such abominations can be consistent with the sanctity claimed for the Mosaic writings. But the question has troubled the minds only of the critics themselves; and not more than three centuries ago the compilers of the Anglican lectionary saw no harm in ordering the chapter to be read publicly to men and maidens in church.

The episode was inserted in the midst of the story of Joseph, one of the most pathetic and touching ever told. We need not repeat its details, or describe how Joseph, the spoilt darling of his father, dreamed dreams which aroused the alarm and jealousy of his brothers, how he was sold by them into Egypt, how there he became the vizier of the Pharaoh, and how eventually Jacob and his family were brought into the land of Goshen, there to enjoy the good things of the valley of the Nile. But the story brings us back again to the great stream of ancient Oriental history; once more the history of Israel touches the history of the world, and ceases to be a series of idyllic pictures, such as the memory of shepherds and Bedâwin might alone preserve.

The story of Joseph forms a complete whole, distinguished by certain features that mark it off from the rest of the book of Genesis. It contains peculiar words, some of them of Egyptian origin,[96] and it shows a very minute acquaintance with Egyptian life in the Hyksos age. There are even words and phrases which seem to have been translated into Hebrew from some other language, and the meaning of which has not been fully understood: thus it is said that the cupbearer of Pharaoh ‘pressed the grapes’ into his master’s goblet instead of pouring the wine; and the word employed to denote an Egyptian official, and translated ‘officer’ in the Authorised Version, properly signifies ‘eunuch.’ Can the story have been translated from an Egyptian papyrus? The question is suggested by the fact that one of the most characteristic portions of it has actually been embodied in an ancient Egyptian tale. This is the so-called _Tale of the Two Brothers_, written by the scribe Enna for Seti II. of the nineteenth dynasty while he was crown-prince, and therefore in the age of the Exodus. Here we have the episode of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife told in Egyptian form. The fellah Bata takes the place of Joseph; his sister-in-law plays the part of Potiphar’s wife.[97]

This part of the story was therefore known among the literary classes of Egypt in the days when Moses was learned in all their wisdom. And if it has been preserved among the few fragments that have been saved from the wreck of ancient Egyptian literature, may we not conclude that had the whole of that literature come down to us, other portions of the story of Joseph would have been preserved in it as well? There is a gentleness in the character of Joseph which reminds us forcibly of Egyptian manners, and offers a sharp contrast to the rough ways and readiness to shed blood which distinguished the Hebrew Semite.

At all events, the story must have been written by one who was well acquainted with the age of the Hyksos. It is true that an attempt has recently been made, on the strength of certain proper names, to show that it is not the Egypt of the Hyksos that is described, but the Egypt of Shishak and his successors. The names of Potipherah or Potiphar and Asenath are said to have been unknown before that date. A couple of proper names, however, is an insecure foundation on which to build a theory, more especially when the argument rests upon the imperfections of our own knowledge. That no names corresponding in formation to Potipherah and Asenath should as yet have been met with earlier than the time of Shishak is no proof that they did not exist. A single example of each is sufficient to prove the contrary. And, as a matter of fact, such examples actually occur. A stela of the reign of Thothmes III. records the name of Pe-tu-Baal, ‘the Gift of Baal,’ as that of the sixth ancestor of the Egyptian whose name it records;[98] while the Tel el-Amarna tablets contain the name of Subanda, the Smendes of Greek writers, which is an exact parallel in form to Asenath.[99] Pe-tu-Baal must have lived at the close of the Hyksos period, and the Semitic deity with whose name his own is compounded indicates that it has been formed under Semitic influence. It was, in fact, as we learn from the Phœnician inscriptions, an imitation of a Canaanitish name.[100] The Hyksos had come from Asia, and had imposed their yoke upon Egypt, where they ruled for more than five hundred years. Though they held all Egypt under their sway, they had established their capital at Zoan, now called Sân, far to the north on the eastern frontier of the Delta. Here they were near their kinsfolk in Canaan, and could readily summon fresh troops from Asia in case of Egyptian revolt.

The court of the Hyksos Pharaohs, however, soon became Egyptianised. They adopted the arts and science, the manners and customs, of their more cultured subjects, and one of the few scientific works of ancient Egypt that have come down to us—the famous _Mathematical Papyrus_—was written for a Hyksos king. It was only in physiognomy and religion that the Hyksos conqueror continued to be distinguished from the native Egyptian.