It could not have been long after this that the cities of the plain were destroyed "with brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven." The expression is found in the cuneiform tablets of Babylonia. Old Sumerian hymns spoke of a "rain of stones and fire," though the stones may have been hail-stones and thunderbolts, and the fire the flash of the lightning. But whatever may have been the nature of the sheet of flame which enveloped the guilty cities of the plain and set on fire the naphtha-springs that oozed out of it, the remembrance of the catastrophe survived to distant ages. The prophets of Israel and Judah still refer to the overthrow of Sodom and its sister cities, and St. Jude points to them as "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." Some scholars have seen an allusion to their overthrow in the tradition of the Phoenicians which brought their ancestors into the coastlands of Canaan in consequence of an earth-quake on the shores of "the Assyrian Lake." But the lake is more probably to be looked for in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf than in the valley of the Jordan.
The vale of Siddim, and "the cities of the plain," stood at the northern end of the Dead Sea. Here were the "slime-pits" from which the naphtha was extracted, and which caused the defeat of the Canaanitish princes by the Babylonian army. The legend which placed the pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was changed at the southern extremity of the Dead Sea was of late origin, probably not earlier than the days when Herod built his fortress of Machaerus on the impregnable cliffs of Moab, and the name of Gebel Usdum, given by the modern Arabs to one of the mountain-summits to the south of the sea proves nothing as to the site of the city of Sodom. Names in the east are readily transferred from one locality to another, and a mountain is not the same as a city in a plain.
There are two sufficient reasons why it is to the north rather than to the south that we must look for the remains of the doomed cities, among the numerous tumuli which rise above the rich and fertile plain in the neighbourhood of Jericho, where the ancient "slime-pits" can still be traced. Geology has taught us that throughout the historical period the Dead Sea and the country immediately to the south of it have undergone no change. What the lake is to-day, it must have been in the days of Abraham. It has neither grown nor shrunk in size, and the barren salt with which it poisons the ground must have equally poisoned it then. No fertile valley, like the vale of Siddim, could have existed in the south; no prosperous Canaanitish cities could have grown up among the desolate tracts of the southern wilderness. As we are expressly told in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 29), the Canaanites dwelt only "by the coast of Jordan," not in the desert far beyond the reach of the fertilizing stream.
But there is another reason which excludes the southern site. "When Abraham got up early in the morning," we are told, "he looked towards Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace." Such a sight was possible from the hills of Hebron; if the country lay at the northern end of the Dead Sea, it would have been impossible had it been south of it.
Moreover, the northern situation of the cities alone agrees with the geography of Genesis. When the Babylonian invaders had turned northwards after smiting the Amalekites of the desert south of the Dead Sea, they did not fall in with the forces of the king of Sodom and his allies until they had first passed "the Amorites that dwelt in Hazezon-tamar." Hazezon-tamar, as we learn from the Second Book of Chronicles (xx. 2), was the later En-gedi, "the Spring of the Kid," and En-gedi lay on the western shore of the Dead Sea midway between its northern and southern extremities.
In the warm, soft valley of the Jordan, accordingly, where a sub-tropical vegetation springs luxuriantly out of the fertile ground and the river plunges into the Dead Sea as into a tomb, the nations of Ammon and Moab were born. It was a fitting spot, in close proximity as it was to the countries which thereafter bore their names. From the mountain above Zoar, Lot could look across to the blue hills of Moab and the distant plateau of Ammon.
Meanwhile Abraham had quitted Mamre and again turned his steps towards the south. This time it was at Gerar, between the sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea and Shur the "wall" of Egypt that he sojourned. Kadesh has been found again in our own days by the united efforts of Dr. John Rowlands and Dr. Clay Trumbull in the shelter of a block of mountains which rise to the south of the desert of Beer-sheba. The spring of clear and abundant water which gushes forth in their midst was the En-Mishpat—"the spring where judgments were pronounced"—of early times, and is still called 'Ain-Qadîs, "the spring of Kadesh." Gerar is the modern Umm el-Jerâr, now desolate and barren, all that remains of its past being a lofty mound of rubbish and a mass of potsherds. It lies a few hours only to the south of Gaza.
Here Isaac was born and circumcised, and here Ishmael and Hagar were cast forth into the wilderness and went to dwell in the desert of Paran. The territory of Gerar extended to Beer-sheba, "the well of the oath," where Abraham's servants digged a well, and Abimelech, king of Gerar, confirmed his possession of it by an oath. It may be that one of the two wells which still exist at Wadi es-Seba', with the stones that line their mouths deeply indented by the ropes of the water-drawers, is the very one around which the herdsmen of Abraham and Abimelech wrangled with each other. The wells of the desert go back to a great antiquity: where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it. The old wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side.
Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines. But they had been new-comers. All through the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties the country had been in the hands of the Egyptians. Gaza had been their frontier fortress, and as late as the reign of Meneptah, the son of the Pharaoh of the Oppression, it was still garrisoned by Egyptian troops and governed by Egyptian officers. The Pulsata or Philistines did not arrive till the troublous days of Ramses III., of the twentieth dynasty. They formed part of the barbarian hordes from the shores of Asia Minor and the islands of the Ægean, who swarmed over Syria and flung themselves on the valley of the Nile, and the land of Caphtor from which they came was possibly the island of Krete. The Philistine occupation of the coastland of Canaan, therefore, did not long precede the Israelitish invasion of the Promised Land; indeed we may perhaps gather from the words of Exod. xiii. 17 that the Philistines were already winning for themselves their new territory when the Israelites marched out of Egypt. In saying, consequently, that the kingdom of Abimelech was in the land of the Philistines the Book of Genesis speaks proleptically: when the story of Abraham and Abimelech was written in its present form Gerar was a Philistine town: in the days of the patriarchs this was not yet the case.
At Beer-sheba Abraham planted a tamarisk, and "called on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God." Beer-sheba long remained one of the sacred places of Palestine. The tree planted by its well was a sign both of the water that flowed beneath its soil and of its sacred character. It was only where fresh water was found that the nomads of the desert could come together, and the tree was a token of the life and refreshment they would meet with. The well was sacred; so also was the solitary tree which stood beside it, and under whose branches man and beast could find shade and protection from the mid-day heat. Even Mohammedanism, that Puritanism of the East, has not been able to eradicate the belief in the divine nature of such trees from the mind of the nomad; we may still see them decorated with offerings of rags torn from the garments of the passer-by or shading the tomb of some reputed saint. They are still more than waymarks or resting-places for the heated and weary; when standing beneath them the herdsman feels that he is walking upon consecrated ground.
It was at Beer-sheba that the temptation came to Abraham to sacrifice his first-born, his only son Isaac. The temptation was in accordance with the fierce ritual of Syria, and traces of the belief which had called it into existence are to be found in the early literature of Babylonia. Thus in an ancient Babylonian ritual-text we read: "The offspring who raises his head among mankind, the offspring for his life he gave; the head of the offspring for the head of the man he gave; the neck of the offspring for the neck of the man he gave." Phoenician legend told how the god El had robed himself in royal purple and sacrificed his only son Yeud in a time of pestilence, and the writers of Greece and Rome describe with horror the sacrifices of the first-born with which the history of Carthage was stained. The father was called upon in time of trouble to yield up to the god his nearest and dearest; the fruit of his body could alone wipe away the sin of his soul, and Baal required him to sacrifice without a murmur or a tear his first-born and his only one. The more precious the offering, the more acceptable was it to the god; the harder the struggle to resign it, the greater was the merit of doing so. The child died for the sins of his people; and the belief was but the blind and ignorant expression of a true instinct.
But Abraham was to be taught a better way. For three days he journeyed northward with his son, and then lifting up his eyes saw afar off that mountain "in the land of Moriah," on the summit of which the sacrifice was to be consummated. Alone with Isaac he ascended to the high-place, and there building his altar and binding to it his son he prepared to perform the terrible rite. But at the last moment his hand was stayed, a new and better revelation was made to him, and a ram was substituted for his son. It cannot be accidental that, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out, we learn from the temple-tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles that in the later ritual of Phoenicia a ram took the place of the earlier human sacrifice.
Where was this mountain in the land of Moriah whereon the altar of Abraham was built? It would seem from a passage in the Second Book of Chronicles (iii. 1) that it was the future temple-mount at Jerusalem. The words of Genesis also point in the same direction. Abraham, we read, "called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen." It is hard to believe that "the mount of the Lord" can mean anything else than that har-el or "mountain of God" whereon Ezekiel places the temple, or that the proverb can refer to a less holy spot than that where the Lord appeared enthroned upon the cherubim above the mercy-seat. It is doubtful, however, whether the reading of the Hebrew text in either passage is correct. According to the Septuagint the proverb quoted in Genesis should run: "In the mountain is the Lord seen," and the same authority changes the "Moriah" of the Book of Chronicles into Amôr-eia, "of the Amorites."
It is true that the distance of Jerusalem from Beer-sheba would agree well with the three days' journey of Abraham. But it is difficult to reconcile the description of the scene of Abraham's sacrifice with the future temple-mount. Where Isaac was bound to the altar was a solitary spot, the patriarch and his son were alone there, and it was overgrown with brushwood so thickly that a ram had been caught in it by his horns. The temple-mount, on the contrary, was either within the walls of a city or just outside them, and the city was already a capital famous for its worship of "the most High God." Had the Moriah of Jerusalem really been the site of Abraham's altar it is strange that no allusion is made to the fact by the writers of the Old Testament, or that tradition should have been silent on the matter. We must be content with the knowledge that it was to one of the mountains "in the land of Moriah" that Abraham was led, and that "Moriah" was a "land," not a single mountain-peak. (We should not forget that the Septuagint reads "the highlands," that is, Moreh instead of Moriah, while the Syriac version boldly changes the word into the name of the "Amorites." For arguments on the other side, see p. 79.)
Abraham returned to Beer-sheba, and from thence went to Hebron, where Sarah died. Hebron—or Kirjath-Arba as it was then called—was occupied by a Hittite tribe, in contradistinction to the country round about it, which was in the possession of the Amorites. As at Jerusalem, or at Kadesh on the Orontes, the Hittites had intruded into Amoritish territory and established themselves in the fortress-town. But while the Hittite city was known as Kirjath-Arba, "the city of Arba," the Amoritish district was named Mamre: the union of Kirjath-Arba and Mamre created the Hebron of a later day.
Kirjath-Arba seems to have been built in the valley, close to the pools which still provide water for its modern inhabitants. On the eastern side the slope of the hill is honeycombed with tombs cut in the rock, and, if ancient tradition is to be believed, it was in one of these that Abraham desired to lay the body of his wife. The "double cave" of Machpelah—for so the Septuagint renders the phrase—was in the field of Ephron the Hittite, and from Ephron, accordingly, the Hebrew patriarch purchased the land for 400 shekels of silver, or about £47. The cave, we are told, lay opposite Mamre, which goes to show that the oak under which Abraham once pitched his tent may not have been very far distant from that still pointed out as the oak of Mamre in the grounds of the Russian hospice. The traditional tomb of Machpelah has been venerated alike by Jew, Christian, and Mohammedan. The church built over it in Byzantine days and restored by the Crusaders to Christian worship has been transformed into a mosque, but its sanctity has remained unchanged. It stands in the middle of a court, enclosed by a solid wall of massive stones, the lower courses of which were cut and laid in their places in the age of Herod. The fanatical Moslem is unwilling that any but himself should enter the sacred precincts, but by climbing the cliff behind the town it is possible to look down upon the mosque and its sacred enclosure, and see the whole building spread out like a map below the feet.
More than one English traveller has been permitted to enter the mosque, and we are now well acquainted with the details of its architecture. But the rock-cut tomb in which the bodies of the patriarchs are supposed to have lain has never been examined by the explorer. It is probable, however, that were he to penetrate into it he would find nothing to reward his pains. During the long period that Hebron was in Christian hands the cave was more than once visited by the pilgrim. But we look in vain in the records which have come down to us for an account of the relics it has been supposed to contain. Had the mummified corpses of the patriarchs been preserved in it, the fact would have been known to the travellers of the Crusading age. (See the Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, 1895.)
Like the other tombs in its neighbourhood, the cave of Machpelah has doubtless been opened and despoiled at an early epoch. We know that tombs were violated in Egypt long before the days of Abraham, in spite of the penalties with which such acts of sacrilege were visited, and the cupidity of the Canaanite was no less great than that of the Egyptian. The treasures buried with the dead were too potent an attraction, and the robber of the tomb braved for their sake the terrors of both this world and the next.
Abraham now sent his servant to Mesopotamia, to seek there for a wife for his son Isaac from among his kinsfolk at Harran. Rebekah, the sister of Laban, accordingly, was brought to Canaan and wedded to her cousin. Isaac was at the time in the southern desert, encamped at the well of Lahai-roi, near Kadesh. So "Isaac was comforted after his mother's death."
"Then again," we are told, "Abraham took a wife," whose name was Keturah, and by whom he was the forefather of a number of Arabian tribes. They occupied the northern and central parts of the Arabian peninsula, by the side of the Ishmaelites, and colonized the land of Midian. It is the last we hear of the great patriarch. He died soon afterwards "in a good old age," and was buried at Machpelah along with his wife.
Isaac still dwell at Lahai-roi, and there the twins, Esau and Jacob, were born to him. There, too, he still was when a famine fell upon the land, like "the first famine that was in the days of Abraham." The story of Abraham's dealings with Abimelech of Gerar is repeated in the case of Isaac. Again we hear of Phichol, the captain of Abimelech's army; again the wife of the patriarch is described as his sister; and again his herdsmen strive with those of the king of Gerar over the wells they have dug, and the well of Beer-sheba is made to derive its name from the oaths sworn mutually by Isaac and the king. It is hardly conceivable that history could have so closely repeated itself, that the lives of the king and commander-in-chief of Gerar could have extended over so many years, or that the origin of the name of Beer-sheba would have been so quickly forgotten. Rather we must believe that two narratives have been mingled together, and that the earlier visit of Abraham to Gerar has coloured the story of Isaac's sojourn in the territory of Abimelech. We need not refuse to believe that the servants of Isaac dug wells and wrangled over them with the native herdsmen; that Beer-sheba should twice have received its name from a repetition of the same event is a different matter. One of the wells—that of Rehoboth—made by Isaac's servants is probably referred to in the Egyptian Travels of a Mohar, where it is called Rehoburta.
Isaac was not a wanderer like his father. Lahai-roi in the desert, "the valley of Gerar," Beer-sheba and Hebron, were the places round which his life revolved, and they were all close to one another. There is no trace of his presence in the north of Palestine, and when the prophet Amos (vii. 16) makes Isaac synonymous with the northern kingdom of Israel, there can be no geographical reference in his words. Isaac died eventually at Hebron, and was buried in the family tomb of Machpelah.
But long before this happened Jacob had fled from the well-deserved wrath of his brother to his uncle Laban at Harran. On his way he had slept on the rocky ridge of Bethel, and had beheld in vision the angels of God ascending and descending the steps of a staircase that led to heaven. The nature of the ground itself must have suggested the dream. The limestone rock is fissured into steplike terraces, which seem formed of blocks of stone piled one upon the other, and rising upwards like a gigantic staircase towards the sky. On the hill that towers above the ruins of Beth-el, we may still fancy that we see before us the "ladder" of Jacob.
But the vision was more than a mere dream. God appeared in it to the patriarch, and repeated to him the promise that had been made to his fathers. Through Jacob, the younger of the twins, the true line of Abraham was to be carried on. When he awoke in the morning the fugitive recognized the real character of his dream. He took, accordingly, the stone that had served him for a pillow, and setting it up as an altar, poured oil upon it, and so made it a Beth-el, or "House of God," Henceforward it was a consecrated altar, a holy memorial of the God whose divinity had been mysteriously imparted to it.
The Semitic world was full of such Beth-els, or consecrated stones. They are referred to in the literature of ancient Babylonia, and an English traveller, Mr. Doughty, has found them still existing near the Tema of the Old Testament in Northern Arabia. In Phoenicia we are told that they abounded. The solitary rock in the desert or on the mountain-side seemed to the primitive Semite the dwelling-place of Deity; it rose up awe-striking and impressive in its solitary grandeur and venerable antiquity; it was a shelter to him from the heat of the sun, and a protection from the perils of the night. When his worship and adoration came in time to be transferred from the stone itself to the divinity it had begun to symbolize, it became an altar on which the libation of oil or wine might be poured out to the gods, and on the seals of Syria and the sculptured slabs of Assyria we accordingly find it transformed into a portable altar, and merged in the cone-like symbol of the goddess Ashêrah. The stone which had itself been a Beth-el wherein the Deity had his home, passed by degrees into the altar of the god whose actual dwelling-place was in heaven.
The Canaanitish city near which Jacob had raised the monument of his dream bore the name of Luz. In Israelitish days, however, the name of the monument was transferred to that of the city, and Luz itself was called the Beth-el, or "House of God." The god worshipped there when the Israelites first entered Canaan appears to have been entitled On,—a name derived, perhaps, from that of the city of the Sun-god in Egypt. Bethel was also Beth-On, "the temple of On," from whence the tribe of Benjamin afterwards took the name of Ben-Oni, "the Onite." Beth-On has survived into our own times, and the site of the old city is still known as Beitîn.
It is not needful to follow the adventures of Jacob in Mesopotamia. His new home lay far away from the boundaries of Palestine, and though the kings of Aram-Naharaim made raids at times into the land of Canaan and caused their arms to be feared within the walls of Jerusalem, they never made any permanent conquests on the coasts of the Mediterranean. In the land of the Aramaeans Jacob is lost for awhile from the history of patriarchal Palestine.
When he again emerges, it is as a middle-aged man, rich in flocks and herds, who has won two wives as the reward of his labours, and is already the father of a family. He is on his way back to the country which had been promised to his seed and wherein he himself had been born. Laban, his father-in-law, robbed at once of his daughters and his household gods, is pursuing him, and has overtaken him on the spurs of Mount Gilead, almost within sight of his goal. There a covenant is made between the Aramaean and the Hebrew, and a cairn of stones is piled up to commemorate the fact. The cairn continued to bear a double name, the Aramaean name given to it by Laban, and the Canaanitish name of Galeed, "the heap of witnesses," by which it was called by Jacob. The double name was a sign of the two populations and languages which the cairn separated from one another. Northward were the Aramaeans and an Aramaic speech; southward the land of Canaan and the language which we term Hebrew.
The spot where the cairn was erected bore yet another title. It was also called Mizpah, the "watch-tower," the outpost from which the dweller in Canaan could discern the approaching bands of an enemy from the north or east. It protected the road to the Jordan, and kept watch over the eastern plateau. Here in after times Jephthah gathered around him the patriots of Israel, and delivered his people from the yoke of the Ammonites.
Once more "Jacob went on his way," and from the "two-fold camp" of Mahanaim sent messengers to his brother Esau, who had already established himself among the mountains of Seir. Then came the mysterious struggle in the silent darkness of night with one whom the patriarch believed to have been his God Himself. When day dawned, the vision departed from him, but not until his name had been changed. "Thy name," it was declared to him, "shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed." And his thigh was shrunken, so that the children of Israel in days to come abstained from eating "of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh." The spot where the struggle took place, beside the waters of the Jabbok, was named Penu-el, "the face of God." There was more than one other Penu-el in the Semitic world, and at Carthage the goddess Tanith was entitled Peni-Baal, "the face of Baal."
The name of Israel, as we may learn from its equivalent, Jeshurun, was really derived from a root which signified "to be straight," or "upright." The Israelites were in truth "the people of uprightness." It is only by one of those plays upon words, of which the Oriental is still so fond, that the name can be brought into connection with the word sar, "a prince." But the name of Jacob was well known among the northern Semites. We gather from the inscriptions of Egypt that its full form was Jacob-el. Like Jeshurun by the side of Israel, or Jephthah by the side of Jiphthah-el (Josh. xix. 27), Jacob is but an abbreviated Jacob-el. One of the places in Palestine conquered by the Pharaoh Thothmes III., the names of which are recorded on the walls of his temple at Karnak, was Jacob-el—a reminiscence, doubtless, of the Hebrew patriarch. Professor Flinders Petrie has made us acquainted with Egyptian scarabs on which is inscribed in hieroglyphic characters the name of a king, Jacob-bar or Jacob-hal, who reigned in the valley of the Nile before Abraham entered it, and Mr. Pinches has lately discovered the name of Jacob-el among the persons mentioned in contracts of the time of the Babylonian sovereign Sin-mu-ballidh, who was a contemporary of Chedor-laomer. We thus have monumental evidence that the name of Jacob was well known in the Semitic world in the age of the Hebrew patriarchs.
Jacob and Esau met and were reconciled, and Jacob then journeyed onwards to Succoth, "the booths." The site of this village of "booths" is unknown, but it could not have been far from the banks of the Jordan and the road to Nablûs. The neighbourhood of Shechem, called in Greek times Neapolis, the Nablûs of to-day, was the next resting-place of the patriarch. If we are to follow the translation of the Authorised Version, it would have been at "Shalem, a city of Shechem," that his tents were pitched. But many eminent scholars believe that the Hebrew words should rather be rendered: "And Jacob came in peace to the city of Shechem," the reference being to his peaceable parting from his brother. There is, however, a hamlet still called Salîm, nearly three miles to the east of Nablûs, and it may be therefore that it was really at a place termed Shalem that Jacob rested on his way. In this case the field bought from Hamor, "before the city of Shechem," cannot have been where, since the days of our Lord, "Jacob's well" has been pointed out (S. John iv. 5, 6). The well is situated considerably westward of Salîm, midway, in fact, between that village and Nablûs, and close to the village of 'Askâr, with which the "Sychar" of S. John's Gospel has sometimes been identified. It has been cut through the solid rock to a depth of more than a hundred feet, and the groovings made by the ropes of the waterpots in far-off centuries are still visible at its mouth. But no water can be drawn from it now. The well is choked with the rubbish of a ruined church, built above it in the early days of Christianity, and of which all that remains is a broken arch. It has been dug at a spot where the road from Shechem to the Jordan branches off from that which runs towards the north, though Shechem itself is more than a mile distant. We should notice that S. John does not say that the well was actually in "the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph," only that it was "near to" the patriarch's field.
If Jacob came to Shechem in peace, the peace was of no long continuance. Simeon and Levi, the sons of the patriarch, avenged the insult offered by the Shechemite prince to their sister Dinah, by treacherously falling upon the city and slaying "all the males." Jacob was forced to fly, leaving behind him the altar he had erected. He made for the Canaanitish city of Luz, the Beth-el of later days, where he had seen the great altar-stairs sloping upward to heaven. The idols that had been carried from Mesopotamia were buried "under the oak which was by Shechem," along with the ear-rings of the women. The oak was one of those sacred trees which abounded in the Semitic world, like another oak at Beth-el, beneath which the nurse of Rebekah was soon afterwards to be buried.
At Beth-el Jacob built another altar. But he could not rest there, and once more took his way to the south. On the road his wife Rachel died while giving birth to his youngest son, and her tomb beside the path to Beth-lehem was marked by a "pillar" which the writer of the Book of Genesis tells us remained to his own day. It indicated the boundary between the territories of Benjamin and Judah at Zelzah (1 Sam. x. 2).
At Beth-lehem Jacob lingered a long while. His flocks and herds were spread over the country, under the charge of his sons, browsing on the hills and watered at the springs, for which the "hill-country of Judah" was famous. In their search for pasturage they wandered northward, we are told, "beyond the tower of the Flock," which guarded the Jebusite stronghold of Zion (Mic. iv. 8). Beth-lehem itself was more commonly known in that age by the name of Ephrath. Beth-lehem, "the temple of Lehem," must, in fact, have been the sacred name of the city derived from the worship of its chief deity, and Mr. Tomkins is doubtless right in seeing in this deity the Babylonian Lakhmu, who with his consort Lakhama, was regarded as a primaeval god of the nascent world.