CHAPTER II
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. iii. 11); but so also were the Anakim in Hebron, the Emim in Moab, and the Zamzummim in Ammon (Deut. ii. 11, 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. xiii. 33). 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 Anaurepâ, in which Mr. Tomkins proposes to see On-Repha, "On of the Giant(s)." In the close neighbourhood in classical days stood Raphôn or Raphana, Arpha of the Dekapolis, now called Er-Râfeh, and in Raphôn 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. x. 1). 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 (iii. 8), 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. ii. 20). 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. ii. 50, iv. 4). 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 Qadîs, "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. i. 19, 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. xx. 2). 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. xxiv. 20).

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 (xiii. 29), 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 (xvi. 3) 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.