The Book of Genesis.

Recent discoveries, especially in Babylonia and Assyria, have thrown much light on Genesis. — The Accadians. — An Assyrian account of the Creation. — The Babylonian Sabbath. — Traces of an account of the Fall. — Site of Paradise. — “Adam” a Babylonian word. — The Chaldean story of the Deluge. — This compared with the record in Genesis. — The Babylonian account of the building of Babel. — The light thrown by the Assyrian inscriptions on the names in Gen. x. — Gomer; Madai; Javan; Cush and Mizraim; Phut; Canaan; Elam; Asshur; Arphaxad; Aram; Lud; Nimrod. — The site of Ur. — Approximate date of the rescue of Lot by Abraham. — Egypt in the time of Abraham.—Records of famines. — The date of Joseph's appointment as second ruler in Egypt. — The Tale of the Two Brothers. — Goshen.

There is no book in the world about which more has been written than the Bible, and perhaps there is no portion of the Bible which has given rise to a larger literature than the Book of Genesis. Every word in it has been carefully scrutinised, now by scholars who sought to discover its deepest meaning or to defend it against the attacks of adversaries, now again by hostile critics anxious to expose every supposed flaw, and to convict it of error and inconsistency. Assailants and defenders had long to content themselves with such evidence as could be derived from a study of the book itself, or from the doubtful traditions of ancient nations, as reported by the writers of Greece and Rome. Such reports were alike imperfect and untrustworthy; historical criticism was still in its infancy in the age of the classical authors, and they cared but little to describe accurately the traditions of races whom they despised. It was even a question whether any credit could be given to the fragments of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Phœnician mythology or history extracted by Christian apologists from the lost works of native authors who wrote in Greek. The Egyptian dynasties of Manetho, the Babylonian stories of the Creation and Flood narrated by Berossus, the self-contradicting Phœnician legends collected by Philo Byblius, were all more or less suspected of being an invention of a later age. The earlier chapters of Genesis stood almost alone; friends and foes alike felt the danger of resting any argument on the apparent similarity of the accounts recorded in them to the myths and legends contained in the fragments of Manetho, of Berossus, and of Philo Byblius.

All is changed now. The marvellous discoveries of the last half-century have thrown a flood of light on the ancient oriental world, and some of this light has necessarily been reflected on the Book of Genesis. The monuments of Egypt, of Babylonia, and of Assyria have been rescued from their hiding-places, and the writing upon them has been made to speak once more in living words. A dead world has been called again to life by the spade of the excavator and the patient labour of the decipherer. We find ourselves, as it were, face to face with Sennacherib, with Nebuchadnezzar, and with Cyrus, with those whose names have been familiar to us from childhood, but who have hitherto been to us mere names, mere shadowy occupants of an unreal world. Thanks to the research of the last half-century, we can now penetrate into the details of their daily life, can examine their religious ideas, can listen to them as they themselves recount the events of their own time or the traditions of the past which had been handed down to them.

It is more especially in Babylonia and Assyria that we find illustrations of the earlier chapters of Genesis, as, indeed, is only natural. The Semitic language spoken in these two countries was closely allied to that of the Old Testament, as closely, in fact, as two modern English dialects are allied to each other; and it was from Babylonia, from Ur of the Chaldees, now represented by the mounds of Mugheir, that Abraham made his way to the future home of his descendants in the west. It is to Babylonia that the Biblical accounts of the Fall, of the Deluge, and of the Confusion of Tongues particularly look: two of the rivers of Paradise were the Tigris and Euphrates, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, and the city built around the Tower which men designed should reach to heaven was Babel or Babylon. Babylonia was an older kingdom than Assyria, which took its name from the city of Assur, now Kalah Sherghat, on the Tigris, the original capital of the country. It was divided into two halves, Accad (Gen. x. 10) being Northern Babylonia, and Sumir, the Shinar of the Old Testament, Southern Babylonia. The primitive populations of both Sumir and Accad were related, not to the Semitic race, but to the tribes which continued to maintain themselves in the mountains of Elam down to a late day. They spoke two cognate dialects, which were agglutinative in character, like the languages of the modern Turks and Fins; that is to say, the relations of grammar were expressed by coupling words together, each of which retained an independent meaning of its own. Thus in-nin-sun is “he gave it,” literally “he-it-gave,” e-mes-na is “of houses,” literally “house-many-of.” At an early date, which cannot yet, however, be exactly determined, the Sumirians and Accadians were overrun and conquered by the Semitic Babylonians of later history, Accad being apparently the first half of the country to fall under the sway of the new-comers. It is possible that Casdim, the Hebrew word translated “Chaldees” or “Chaldæans” in the Authorised Version, is the Babylonian casidi, or “conquerors,” a title which continued to cling to them in consequence of their conquest.

The Accadians had been the inventors of the pictorial hieroglyphics which afterwards developed into the cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing; they had founded the great cities of Chaldea, and had attained to a high degree of culture and civilisation. Their cities possessed libraries, stocked with books, written partly on papyrus, partly on clay, which was, while still soft, impressed with characters by means of a metal stylus. The books were numerous, and related to a variety of subjects. Among them there were more particularly two to which a special degree of sanctity was attached. One of these contained magical formulæ for warding off the assaults of evil spirits; the other was a collection of hymns to the gods, which was used by the priests as a kind of prayer-book. When the Semitic Babylonians, the kinsmen of the Hebrews, the Aramæans, the Phœnicians and the Arabs, conquered the old population, they received from it, along with other elements of culture, the cuneiform system of writing and the literature written in it. The sacred hymns still continued to serve as a prayer-book, but they were now provided with interlinear translations into the Babylonian (or, as it is usually termed, the Assyrian) language. Part of the literature consisted of legal codes and decisions; and since the inheritance and holding of property frequently depended on a knowledge of these, it became necessary for the conquerors to acquaint themselves with the language of the people they had conquered. In course of time, however, the two dialects of Sumir and Accad ceased to be spoken; but the necessity for learning them still remained, and we find accordingly that down to the latest days of both Assyria and Babylonia the educated classes were taught the old extinct Accadian, just as in modern Europe they are taught Latin. From time to time, indeed, the scribes of Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar attempted to write in the ancient language, and in doing so sometimes made similar mistakes to those that are made now-a-days by a schoolboy in writing Latin.

The Accadians were, like the Chinese, pre-eminently a literary people. Their conception of chaos was that of a period when as yet no books were written. Accordingly, a legend of the Creation, preserved in the library of Cuthah, contains this curious statement: “On a memorial-tablet none wrote, none explained, for bodies and produce were not brought forth in the earth.” To the author of the legend the art of writing seemed to mount back to the very beginning of mankind.

This legend of the Creation, however, is not the only one that has been recovered from the shipwreck of Assyrian and Babylonian literature. Besides the account given in the fragments of Berossus, there is another, which bears a striking resemblance to the account of the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis. It does not appear, however, that this last was of Accadian origin; at all events, there is no indication that it was translated into Assyrian from an older Accadian document, and there are even reasons for thinking that it may not be earlier—in its present form at least—than the seventh century B.C. We possess, unfortunately, only portions of it, since many of the series of clay tablets on which it was inscribed have been lost or injured. The account begins as follows:—

1. At that time the heavens above named not a name,

2. Nor did the earth below record one:

3. Yea, the deep was their first creator,

4. The flood of the sea was she who bore them all.

5. Their waters were embosomed in one place, and

6. The flowering reed was ungathered, the marsh-plant was ungrown.

7. At that time the gods had not issued forth, any one of them,

8. By no name were they recorded, no destiny (had they fixed).

9. Then the (great) gods were made,

10. Lakhmu and Lakhamu issued forth (the first),

11. They grew up . . . .

12. Next were made the host of heaven and earth,

13. The time was long (and then)

14. The gods Anu (Bel and Ea were born of)

15. The host of heaven and earth.

It is not until we come to the fifth tablet of the series, which describes the appointment of the heavenly bodies—the work of the fourth day of creation, according to Genesis—that the narrative is again preserved. Here we read that the Creator “made beautiful the stations of the great gods,” or stars, an expression which reminds us of the oft-recurring phrase of Genesis: “And God saw that it was good.” The stars, moon, and sun were ordered to rule over the night and day, and to determine the year, with its months and days. The latter part of the tablet, however, like the latter part of the first tablet, is destroyed, and of the next tablet—that which described the creation of animals—only the first few lines remain. “At that time,” it begins, “the gods in their assembly created (the living creatures). They made beautiful the mighty (animals). They made the living beings come forth, the cattle of the field, the beast of the field, and the creeping thing.” What follows is too mutilated to yield a connected sense.

There is no need of pointing out how closely this Assyrian account of the Creation resembles that of Genesis. Even the very wording and phrases of Genesis occur in it, and though no fragment is preserved which expressly tells us that the work of the Creation was accomplished in seven days, we may infer that such was the case, from the order of events as recorded on the tablets. But, with all this similarity, there is even greater dissimilarity. The philosophical conceptions with which the Assyrian account opens, the polytheistic colouring which we find in it further on, have no parallel in the Book of Genesis. The spirit of the two narratives is essentially different.

The last tablet probably contained an account of the institution of the Sabbath. At all events, we learn that the seventh day was observed as a day of rest among the Babylonians, as it was among the Jews. It was even called by the same name of Sabbath, a word which is defined in an Assyrian text as “a day of rest for the heart,” while the Accadian equivalent is explained to mean “a day of completion of labour.” A calendar of saints' days for the month of the intercalary Elul makes the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the lunar month Sabbaths, on which certain works were forbidden to be done. On those days, it is stated, “flesh cooked on the fire may not be eaten, the clothing of the body may not be changed, white garments may not be put on, a sacrifice may not be offered, the king may not ride in his chariot, nor speak in public, the augur may not mutter in a secret place, medicine of the body may not be applied, nor may any curse be uttered.” Nothing, in fact, that implied work was allowed to be done. Where the Babylonian Sabbath differed from the Jewish one was in its essentially lunar character. The first Sabbath was the first day of a month, whatever might be the length of the month that preceded it. While Sabbaths and new moons are distinguished from one another in the Old Testament, they are found united in the Babylonian ritual. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Babylonians were acquainted with a week of seven days, each day of which was dedicated to one of the seven planets; it was the space of time naturally marked out by the four quarters of the moon.

No account of the Fall of Man, similar to that in Genesis, has as yet been found among the fragments of the Assyrian libraries. Mr. George Smith, indeed, supposed that he had discovered one, but the text which he referred to the Fall, is really an ancient hymn to the Creator. It is, nevertheless, pretty certain that such an account once existed. An archaic Babylonian gem represents a tree, on either side of which are seated a man and woman, with a serpent behind them, and their hands are stretched out towards the fruit that hangs from the tree. A few stray references in the bilingual (Accadian and Assyrian) dictionaries throw some light upon this representation, and inform us that the Accadians knew of “a wicked serpent,” “the serpent of night” and “darkness,” which had brought about the fall of man. The tree of life, of which so many illustrations occur on Assyrian monuments, is declared to be “the pine-tree” of Eridu, “the shrine of the god Irnin;” and Irnin is a name of the Euphrates, when regarded as the “snake-river,” which encircled the world like a rope, and was the stream of Hea, “the snake-god of the tree of life.” The Euphrates, we must remember, was one of the rivers of Paradise.

The site of Paradise is to be sought for in Babylonia. The garden which God planted was in Eden, and Eden, as we learn from the cuneiform records, was the ancient name of the “field” or plain of Babylonia, where the first living creatures had been created. The city of Eridu, which the people of Sumir called “the good” or “holy,” was, as we have seen, the shrine of Irnin, and in the midst of a forest or garden that once lay near it grew “the holy pine-tree,” “the tree of life.” The rivers of Eden can be found in the rivers and canals of Babylonia. Two of them were the Euphrates and Tigris, called by the Accadians id Idikla, “the river of Idikla,” the Biblical Hiddekhel, while Pishon is a Babylonian word signifying “canal,” and Gihon may be the Accadian Gukhan, the stream on which Babylon stood. Even the word cherub is itself of Babylonian derivation. It is the name given to one of those winged monsters, with the body of a bull and the head of a man, which are sometimes placed in the Assyrian sculptures on either side of the tree of life. They stood at the entrance of a Babylonian palace, and were supposed to prevent the evil spirits from entering within. The word comes from a root which means “to approach” or “be near,” and perhaps originally signified one who was near to God.

Like cherub, Adam also was a Babylonian word. It has the general sense of “man,” and is used in this sense both in Hebrew and in Assyrian. But as in Hebrew it has come to be the proper name of the first man, so, too, in the old Babylonian legends, the “Adamites” were “the white race” of Semitic descent, who stood in marked contrast to “the black heads” or Accadians of primitive Babylonia. Originally, however, it was this dark race itself that claimed to have been “the men” whom the god Merodach created; and it was not until after the Semitic conquest of Chaldea that the children of Adamu or Adam were supposed to denote the white Semitic population. Hence it is that the dark race continued to the last to be called the Adamatu or “red-skins,” which a popular etymology connected with Adamu “man.” Sir H. Rawlinson has suggested a parallel between the dark and white races of Babylonia and the “sons of God” and “daughters of men” of Genesis. Adam, we are told, was “the son of God” (Luke iii. 38). But nothing similar to what we read in the sixth chapter of Genesis has as yet been met with among the cuneiform records, and though these speak of giant heroes, like Ner and Etanna, who lived before the Flood, we know nothing as yet as to their parentage.

The Babylonians, however, were well aware that the Deluge had been caused by the wickedness of the human race. It has often been remarked that though traditions of a universal or a partial deluge are found all over the world, it is only in the Old Testament that the cause assigned for it is a moral one. The Chaldean account of the Deluge, discovered by Mr. George Smith, offers an exception to this rule. Here, as in Genesis, Sisuthros, the Accadian Noah, is saved from destruction on account of his piety, the rest of mankind being drowned as a punishment for their sins.

The story of the Deluge formed the subject of more than one poem among the Accadians. Two of these were amalgamated together by the author of a great epic in twelve books, which described the adventures of a solar hero whose name cannot be read with certainty, but may provisionally be pronounced Gisdhubar. The amalgamated account was introduced as an episode into the eleventh book, the whole epic being arranged upon an astronomical principle, so that each book should correspond to one of the signs of the Zodiac, the eleventh book consequently answering to Aquarius. Sisuthros, who had been translated without dying, like the Biblical Enoch, is made to tell the story himself to Gisdhubar. Gisdhubar had travelled in search of health to the shores of the river of death at the mouth of the Euphrates, and here afar off in the other world he sees and talks with Sisuthros. Fragments of several editions of the poem have been found, not only among the ruins of Nineveh, but also in Babylonia; and by fitting these together it has been possible to recover almost the whole of the original text. The translations of it made by different scholars have necessarily improved with the progress of Assyrian research, and though the first translation given to the world by Mr. George Smith was substantially correct, there were many minor inaccuracies in it which have since had to be corrected. The latest and best version is that which has been published by Professor Haupt. The following translation of the account is based upon it:—

(Col. I) “Sisuthros speaks to him, even to Gisdhubar: Let me reveal unto thee, Gisdhubar, the story of my preservation, and the oracle of the gods let me tell to thee. The city of Surippak, the city which, as thou knowest, is built on the Euphrates, this city was already ancient when the gods within it set their hearts to bring on a deluge, even the great gods as many as there are—their father Anu, their king the warrior Bel, their throne-bearer Adar, their prince En-nugi. Ea, the lord of wisdom, sat along with them, and repeated their decree: ‘For their boat! as a boat, as a boat, a hull, a hull! hearken to their boat, and understand the hull, O man of Surippak, son of Ubara-Tutu; dig up the house, build the ship, save what thou canst of the germ of life. (The gods) will destroy the seed of life, but do thou live, and bid the seed of life of every kind mount into the midst of the ship. The ship which thou shalt build,  . . . cubits shall be its length in measure,  . . . cubits the content of its breadth and its height. (Above) the deep cover it in.’ I understood and spake to Ea, my lord: ‘The building of the ship which thou hast commanded thus, if it be done by me, the children of the people and the old men (alike will laugh at me).’ Ea opened his mouth and said, he speaks to me his servant: ‘(If they laugh at thee) thou shalt say unto them, (Every one) who has turned against me and (dis-believes the oracle that) has been given me,  . . . I will judge above and below. (But as for thee) shut (not) the door (until) the time comes of which I will send thee word. (Then) enter the door of the ship, and bring into the midst of it thy corn, thy property, and thy goods, thy (family), thy household, thy concubines, and the sons of the people. The cattle of the field, the wild beasts of the field, as many as I would preserve, I will send unto thee, and they shall keep thy door.’ Sisuthros opened his mouth and speaks; he says to Ea, his lord: ‘(O my lord) no one yet has built a ship (in this fashion) on land to contain the beasts (of the field). (The plan?) let me see and the ship (I will build). On the land the ship (I will build) as thou hast commanded me.’ . . .

(Col. II) “ . . . On the fifth day (after it was begun) in its circuit(?) fourteen measures its hull (measured); fourteen measures measured (the roof) above it. I made it a dwelling-house(?) . . . . I enclosed it. I compacted it six times, I divided (its passages) seven times, I divided its interior (seven) times. Leaks for the waters in the midst of it I cut off. I saw the rents, and what was wanting I added. Three sari of bitumen I poured over the outside. Three sari of bitumen I poured over the inside. Three sari of men, carrying baskets, who carried on their heads food, I provided, even a saros of food for the people to eat, while two sari of food the boatmen shared. To (the gods) I caused oxen to be sacrificed; I (established offerings) each day. In (the ship) beer, food, and wine (I collected) like the waters of a river, and (I heaped them up) like the dust(?) of the earth, and (in the ship) the food with my hand I placed. (With the help) of Samas [the Sun-God] the compacting of the ship was finished; (all parts of the ship) were made strong, and I caused the tackling to be carried above and below. (Then of my household) went two-thirds: all that I had I heaped together; all that I had of silver I heaped together; all that I had of gold I heaped together; all that I had of the seed of life I heaped together. I brought the whole up into the ship; all my slaves and concubines, the cattle of the field, the beasts of the field, the sons of the people, all of them, did I bring up. The season Samas fixed, and he spake, saying: ‘In the night will I cause the heaven to rain destruction. Enter into the midst of the ship and close thy door.’ The season came round; he spake, saying: ‘In the night will I cause the heaven to rain destruction.’ Of that day I reached the evening, the day which I watched for with fear. I entered into the midst of the ship and shut the door, that I might close the ship. To Buzur-sadi-rabi, the boatman, I gave the palace, with all its goods. Then arose Mu-seri-ina-namari (The Water of Dawn at Daylight) from the horizon of heaven (like) a black cloud. Rimmon in the midst of it thundered, and Nebo and the Wind-God go in front: the throne-bearers go over mountain and plain: Nergal the mighty removes the wicked; Adar goes overthrowing all before him. The spirits of earth carried the flood; in their terribleness they sweep through the land; the deluge of Rimmon reaches unto heaven; all that was light to (darkness) was turned.

(Col. III) “(The surface) of the land like (fire?) they wasted; (they destroyed all) life from the face of the land; to battle against men they brought (the waters). Brother saw not his brother; men knew not one another. In heaven the gods feared the flood, and sought a refuge; they ascended to the heaven of Anu. The gods, like a dog in his kennel, crouched down in a heap. Istar cries like a mother, the great goddess utters her speech: ‘All to clay is turned, and the evil I prophesied in the presence of the gods, according as I prophesied evil in the presence of the gods, for the destruction of my people I prophesied (it) against them; and though I their mother have begotten my people, like the spawn of the fishes they fill the sea.’ Then the gods were weeping with her because of the spirits of earth; the gods on a throne were seated in weeping; covered were their lips because of the coming evil. Six days and nights the wind, the flood, and the storm go on overwhelming. The seventh day when it approached the storm subsided, the flood which had fought against (men) like an armed host was quieted. The sea began to dry, and the wind and the flood ended. I watched the sea making a noise, and the whole of mankind was turned to clay; like reeds the corpses floated. I opened the window, and the light smote upon my face; I stooped and sat down; I weep, over my face flow my tears. I watch the regions at the edge of the sea; a district rose twelve measures high. To the land of Nizir steered the ship; the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship, and it was not able to pass over it. The first day, the second day, the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship. The third day, the fourth day, the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship. The fifth day, the sixth day, the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship. The seventh day when it approached I sent forth a dove, and it left. The dove went and returned, and found no resting-place, and it came back. Then I sent forth a swallow, and it left. The swallow went and returned, and found no resting-place, and it came back. I sent forth a raven, and it left. The raven went and saw the carrion on the water, and it ate, it swam, it wandered away; it did not return. I sent (the animals) forth to the four winds, I sacrificed a sacrifice. I built an altar on the peak of the mountain. I set vessels [each containing the third of an ephah] by sevens; underneath them I spread reeds, pine-wood, and spices. The gods smelt the savour; the gods smelt the good savour; the gods gathered like flies over the sacrifices. Thereupon the great goddess at her approach lighted up the rainbow which Anu had created according to his glory. The crystal brilliance of those gods before me may I not forget;

(Col. IV) “those days I have thought of, and never may I forget them. May the gods come to my altar; but may Bel not come to my altar, since he did not consider but caused the flood, and my people he assigned to the abyss. When thereupon Bel at his approach saw the ship, Bel stopped; he was filled with anger against the gods and the spirits of heaven: 'Let none come forth alive! let no man live in the abyss!' Adar opened his mouth and spake, he says to the warrior Bel: ‘Who except Ea can form a design? Yea, Ea knows, and all things he communicates.’ Ea opened his mouth and spake, he says to the warrior Bel: ‘Thou, O warrior prince of the gods, why, why didst thou not consider but causedst a flood? Let the doer of sin bear his sin, let the doer of wickedness bear his wickedness. May the just prince not be cut off, may the faithful not be (destroyed). Instead of causing a flood, let lions increase, that men may be minished; instead of causing a flood, let hyænas increase, that men may be minished; instead of causing a flood, let a famine happen, that men may be (wasted); instead of causing a flood, let plague increase, that men may be (reduced). I did not reveal the determination of the great gods To Sisuthros alone a dream I sent, and he heard the determination of the gods.’ When Bel had again taken counsel with himself, he went up into the midst of the ship. He took my hand and bid me ascend, even me he bid ascend; he united my wife to my side; he turned himself to us and joined himself to us in covenant; he blesses us (thus): ‘Hitherto Sisuthros has been a mortal man, but now Sisuthros and his wife are united together in being raised to be like the gods; yea, Sisuthros shall dwell afar off at the mouth of the rivers.’ They took me, and afar off at the mouth of the rivers they made me dwell.”

It is hardly necessary to indicate the points of agreement and disagreement between this Babylonian account of the Deluge and that of Genesis. The most striking difference between the two, that which first meets the eye, is the polytheism of the Babylonian version, in contrast with the monotheism of the Biblical narrative. Here, in place of the gods of Chaldea, we are confronted by the one supreme Deity; we have no longer to do with a Bel who requires the intercession of Ea before he will consent not to destroy the guiltless with the guilty; it is the Lord Himself who “said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.” In the Babylonian legend, moreover, Noah and Enoch have been confounded together; Sisuthros is not only saved from the waters of the flood, but translated to the abode of the gods. The vessel itself in which the seed of life was preserved is not the same in the two accounts. According to the Hebrew narrative, it was an ark; according to the Babylonian poem, a ship. It is true that in one place it is called “a palace,” the word used being the same as that which in many passages of the Old Testament is applied to God's “palace” of heaven; but it is provided with a pilot, Buzur-sadi-rabi, “the Sun-god of the mighty mountain,” and Sisuthros is made to expostulate on the strangeness of building a ship which should sail over the land. It must, however, be noticed that the shrines in which the images of the gods were carried in Babylonia were called “ships,” and that these “ships” corresponded with the ark of the Hebrew tabernacle.

The land of Nizir, in which the vessel of Sisuthros rested, was among the mountains of Pir Mam, to the north-east of Babylonia. Rowandiz, the highest peak in this part of Asia, rises a little to the north of the Pir Mam, and it seems probable, therefore, that it represents “the mountain of Nizir.” The whole country had been included by the Accadians in the vast territory of Guti, or Gutium, which roughly corresponds with the modern Kurdistan. It is accordingly worth notice that a wide-spread eastern tradition makes Gebel Gudi, or Mount Gudi, the mountain on which the ark rested, and that in early Jewish legend this mountain is called Lubar or Baris, the boundary between Armenia and Kurdistan, in the land of the Minni. Ararat, or Urardhu, as it is written in the cuneiform inscriptions, denoted Armenia, and more particularly the district about Lake Van; so that “the mountains of Ararat,” of which Genesis speaks, might easily have been the Kurdish ranges of Southern Armenia. It was not until a very late period that the name of Ararat was first applied and then confined to the lofty mountains in the north.

Rowandiz seems also to have been regarded in Accadian mythology as the Olympos on which the gods dwelt. In this case it was usually called “the mountain of the east;” but the east was here the north-east, since other legends identified it with Aralu, or Hades, the mountain of gold which was fabled to be in the far north. It is to this Accadian Olympos that reference is made in Isa. xiv. 13, where the King of Babylon is described as boasting that he would “ascend into heaven, and exalt his throne above the stars of the gods,” that he would “sit on the mountain of the assembly of the gods in the extremities of the north.” The mountain was sometimes known as the “mountain of the world,” since the firmament was supposed to revolve on its peak as on a pivot. We must not imagine, however, that the Accadians, any more than the Greeks, actually believed the gods to live above the clouds on the terrestrial Rowandiz, except at a very early period in their history. Just as we do not think of the sky when we use the word heaven in a spiritual sense, so by “the mountain of the assembly of the gods” they meant a spiritual mountain, of which Rowandiz was the earthly type. It is in this way that we must explain the position assigned to Sisuthros after his translation. He does not live along with the gods in the north, but has his station fixed “at the mouth of the rivers” Euphrates and Tigris, which in ancient times flowed into the Persian Gulf through separate channels. At an epoch when the geographical knowledge of the Accadians did not extend very far, the unknown district beyond the mouth of the Euphrates became a representative of the other world; and the Euphrates itself was identified with Datilla, the river of “the God of life and death,” as well as with the stream or “great deep” which was supposed to encircle the earth like a monstrous serpent.

The name of the Chaldean Noah, Sisuthros, or, as it is written in the cuneiform, Khasis-adra, or Adra-khasis, is really a title, given to him on account of his righteousness, and signifying “wise (and) pious.” His proper name is one which means “the Sun of Life,” though the exact pronunciation of it is somewhat uncertain. Neither of these names agrees with that of the Biblical Noah, but the latter has received a full explanation from the Assyrian language, where it signifies “rest.”

After the Flood, we are told in Genesis that men journeyed from the east until they came to the plain of Shinar, where they built the tower of Babel, in the vain hope of ascending into heaven. God, however, confounded their language and scattered them over the face of the earth. The references in this narrative to Shinar and Babel, or Babylon, indicate that here again we may expect to find a Babylonian account of the Confusion of Tongues, just as we have found a Babylonian account of the Deluge. As we have seen, the Accadians regarded themselves as having come from the “mountain of the east” where the ark had rested, while Shinar is the Hebrew form of the native name Sumir—or Sungir, as it was pronounced in the allied dialect of Accad—the southern half of pre-Semitic Babylonia. Now Mr. George Smith discovered some broken fragments of a cuneiform text which evidently related to the building of the Tower of Babel. It tells us how certain men had “turned against the father of all the gods,” and how the thoughts of their leader's heart “were evil.” At Babylon they essayed to build “a mound” or hill-like tower, but the winds blew down their work, and Anu “confounded great and small on the mound,” as well as their “speech,” and “made strange their counsel.” The very word that is used in the sense of “confounding” in the narrative of Genesis is used also in the Assyrian text. The Biblical writer, by a play upon words, not uncommon in the Old Testament, compares it with the name of Babel, though etymologically the latter word has nothing to do with it. Babel is the Assyrian Babili, “Gate of God,” and is merely a Semitic translation of the old Accadian (or rather Sumirian) name of the town, Ca-dimíra, where Ca is “gate” and dimíra “God.” Chaldean tradition assigned the construction of the tower and the consequent confusion of languages to the time of the autumnal equinox; and it is possible that the hero-king Etanna (Titan in Greek writers), who is stated to have built a city in defiance of the will of heaven, was the wicked chief under whom the tower was raised.

The confusion of tongues was followed by the dispersion of mankind. The earth was again peopled by the descendants of the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Shem is the Assyrian Samu, “olive-coloured,” Ham is Khammu, “burned black,” and Japhet Ippat, “the white race.” The tribes and races which drew their origin from them are enumerated in the tenth chapter of Genesis. The arrangement of this chapter, however, is geographical, not ethnological; the peoples named in it being grouped together according to their geographical position, not according to their relationship in blood or language. Here it is that the non-Semitic Elamites are classed along with the Semitic Assyrians, and that the Phœnicians of Canaan, who spoke the same language as the Hebrews, and originally came from the same ancestors, are associated with the Egyptians. When this fact is recognised, there is no difficulty in showing that the statements of the chapter are fully consistent with the conclusions of modern research.

The Assyrian inscriptions have thrown a good deal of light upon the names contained in it. Gomer, the son of Japhet, represents the Gimirrai of the inscriptions, the Kimmerians of classical writers. Pressed by the Scyths of the Russian steppes, they threatened to overrun the Assyrian empire under a leader named Teispes, but were defeated by Esar-haddon, in B.C. 670, in a great battle on the north-eastern frontier of his kingdom, and driven westwards into Asia Minor. There they sacked the Greek town of Sinôpè, and spread like locusts over the fertile plains of Lydia. Among the gifts sent to Nineveh by the Lydian king, Gugu or Gyges—a name in which we may see the Gog of Ezekiel—were two Kimmerian chieftains whom he had captured with his own hand. Gyges was afterwards slain in battle with the barbarians, and it required some years before they could be finally extirpated.

Madai are the Medes, a title given by the Assyrians to the multifarious tribes to the east of Kurdistan. They are first mentioned in the inscriptions about 820 B.C., and were partially subdued by Tiglath-Pileser II and his successors. At this time they lived in independent communities, each governed by its “city-chief.” The Median empire, which rose upon the ruins of Nineveh, was really the creation of the kings of Ekbatana, the modern Hamadan. The population of this district was known among the Babylonians as manda, or “barbarians;” and through a confusion of the latter word with the proper name Madâ, or “Medes,” historians have been led to suppose that the empire of Ekbatana was a Median one.

Javan is the Greek word “Ionian,” but in the Old Testament it is generally applied to the island of Cyprus, which is called the Island of Yavnan, or the Ionians, on the Assyrian monuments. A more specific name for it in Hebrew is Kittim, derived from the name of the Phœnician colony of Kition, now represented by Larnaka. Cyprus was first visited by the Babylonians at a very remote period, since Sargon I of Accad, who, according to Nabonidos (B.C. 550), lived 3,200 years before his time, carried his arms as far as its shores. As for Tubal and Meshech, they are as frequently associated together in the Assyrian inscriptions as they are in the Bible. The Tubal or Tibarêni spread in Old Testament times over the south-eastern part of Kappadokia, while the Meshech or Moschi adjoined them on the north and west. Ashkenaz is the Assyrian Asguza, the name of a district which lay between the kingdoms of Ekbatana and the Minni.

Cush and Mizraim denote Ethiopia and Egypt, Ethiopia roughly corresponding to the Nubia of today. As Ethiopia was largely peopled by tribes who had come across the Red Sea from Southern Arabia, the name of Cush was given in the Old Testament (as in verse 7 of this chapter) to Southern Arabia also. Properly speaking, however, it denoted the country which commenced on the southern side of the First Cataract. Mizraim means “the two Matsors,” that is Upper and Lower Egypt. Lower Egypt was the original Matsor, a word which signifies “wall,” and referred to the line of fortification which defended the kingdom on the eastern side from the attacks of Asiatic tribes. The word occurs more than once in the Biblical writers, though its sense has been obscured in the Authorised Version. Thus in Isaiah xxxvii. 25, Sennacherib boasts that he has “dried up all the rivers of Matsor,” that is to say, the mouths of the Nile; and in Isaiah xix. 6, we ought to translate “the Nile-arms of Matsor,” instead of “brooks of defence.” While Matsor was the name of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt was termed Pathros (Isa. xi. 11), which is the Egyptian Pe-to-res or “southern land.” The Pathrusim or inhabitants of Pathros are mentioned among the sons of Mizraim in the chapter of Genesis upon which we are engaged.

Phut seems to be the Egyptian Punt, on the Somali coast. Spices and other precious objects of merchandise were brought from it, and the Egyptians sometimes called it “the divine land.” The Lehabim of verse 13 are the Libyans, while the Naphtuhim may be the people of Napata in Ethiopia. The Caphtorim or inhabitants of Caphtor are the Phœnician population settled on the coast of the Delta. From an early period the whole of this district had been colonised by the Phœnicians, and, as Phœnicia itself was called Keft by the Egyptians, the part of Egypt in which they had settled went by the name of Keft-ur or “greater Phœnicia.” From various passages of the Old Testament¹ we learn that the Philistines, whom the kings of Egypt had once employed to garrison the five cities in the extreme south of Palestine, had originally been Phœnicians of Caphtor, so that the words of the verse before us must have been moved from their proper place, “Caphtorim, out of whom came Philistim,” being the correct reading.

Canaan signifies “the lowlands,” and was primarily the name of the coast on which the great cities of Phœnicia were built. As, however, the inland parts of the country were inhabited by a kindred population, the name came to be extended to designate the whole of Palestine, just as Palestine itself meant originally only the small territory of the Philistines. In Isaiah's prophecy upon Tyre (xxiii. 11) the word is used in its primitive sense, though here again the Authorised Version has misled the English reader by mistranslating “the merchant-city” instead of “Canaan.” Sidon, “the fishers' town,” was the oldest of the Canaanite or Phœnician cities; like Tyre, it was divided into two quarters, known respectively as Greater and Lesser Sidon. Heth or the Hithites adjoined the Phœnicians on the north; we shall have a good deal to say about them in a future chapter, and therefore pass them by now. The Amorite was the inhabitant of the mountains of Palestine, in contrast to the Canaanite or lowlander, and the name is met with on the Egyptian monuments. The towns of Arka and Simirra (or Zemar) are both mentioned by Tiglath-Pileser II, while the city of Arvad or Arados (now Ruâd) is repeatedly named in the Assyrian inscriptions. So also is Hamath (now Hamah), which was conquered by Sargon, and made by him the seat of an Assyrian governor.

The name of Elam has first received its explanation from the decipherment of the Assyrian texts. It was the name of the mountainous region to the east of Babylonia, of which Shushan or Susa was at one time the capital, and is nothing more than the Assyrian word elam, “high.” Elam was itself a translation of the Accadian Numma, under which the Accadians included the whole of the highlands which bounded the plain of Babylonia on its eastern side. It was the seat of an ancient monarchy which rivalled in antiquity that of Chaldea itself, and was long a dangerous neighbour to the latter. It was finally overthrown, however, by Assur-bani-pal, the Assyrian king, about B.C. 645. The native title of the country was Anzan or Ansan, and the name of its capital, Susan or Shushan, seems to have signified “the old town” in the language of its inhabitants.

Asshur or Assur was originally the name of a city on the banks of the Tigris, the ruins of which are now known as Kalah Sherghat. The name was of Accadian derivation, and signified “water-bank.” The city long continued to be the capital of the district which was called after it Assyria, but was eventually supplanted by Ninua or Nineveh. Nineveh lay opposite the present town of Mosul, and it is from the remains of its chief palace, now buried under the mounds of Kouyunjik, that most of the Assyrian inscriptions in the British Museum have been brought. A few miles to the south of Nineveh, on the site now known as Nimrûd, was Calah, a town built by Shalmaneser I, who lived B.C. 1300. Calah subsequently fell into ruins, but was rebuilt in the ninth century before our era. “Between Nineveh and Calah” stood Resen, according to Genesis. Resen is the Assyrian Ris-eni, “head of the stream,” which is once mentioned in an inscription of Sennacherib. Rehoboth ´Ir, or “the open spaces of the city,” must have denoted the suburbs of Nineveh, and cannot be identified with Dur-Sarrukin, founded by Sargon at Khorsabad, several miles to the north.

It is plain from the context that Arphaxad must signify Chaldea; and this conclusion is verified by the fact that the name might also be pronounced Arpa-Chesed, or “border of Chaldæa.” Chesed is the singular of Casdim, the word used in the Old Testament to denote the inhabitants of Babylonia. The origin of it is doubtful, but, as has been suggested above, it most probably represents the Assyrian casidi, “conquerors,” a term which might very well be applied to the Semitic conquerors of Sumir and Accad. The Greek word Chaldeans is derived from the Kaldâ, a tribe which lived on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and is first heard of in the ninth century before our era. Under Merodach-Baladan, the Kaldâ made themselves masters of Babylonia, and became so integral a part of the population as to give their name to the whole of it in classical times.

Aram, the brother of Arphaxad, represents, of course, the Aramæans of Aram, or “the highlands,” which included the greater part of Mesopotamia and Syria. In the later days of the Assyrian Empire, Aramaic, the language of Aram, became the common language of trade and diplomacy, which every merchant and politician was supposed to learn, and in still later times succeeded in supplanting Assyrian in Assyria and Babylonia, as well as Hebrew in Palestine, until in its turn it was supplanted by Arabic.

Lud seems to be a misreading; at all events, Lydia and the Lydians, on the extreme western coast of Asia Minor, had nothing to do with the peoples of Elam, of Assyria, and of Aram. What the original reading was, however, it is now impossible to say.

In the midst of all these geographical names we find a notice inserted relating to “the mighty hunter” Nimrod, the beginning of whose kingdom, we are told, was Babylon, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar. His name has not yet been discovered in the cuneiform records. Some Assyrian scholars have wished to identify him with Gisdhubar, the hero of the great Chaldean epic, which contains the account of the Deluge; but Gisdhubar was a solar hero who had originally been the Accadian god of fire. It is true that Gisdhubar was the special deity of the town of Marad, and that Na-Marad would signify in the Accadian language “the prince of Marad”; such a title, however, has not been found in the inscriptions. Erech, called Uruk on the monuments, is now represented by the mounds of Warka, far away to the south of Babylon, and was one of the oldest and most important of the Babylonian cities. Like Calneh, the Kul-unu of the monuments, it was situated in the division of the country known as Sumir or Shinar. Accad, from which the northern division of the country took its name, was a suburb of Sippara (now Abu-Habba), and, along with the latter, made up the Sepharvaim or “Two Sipparas” of Scripture. The Accadian form of the name was Agadê, and here was the seat of a great library formed in remote days by Sargon I, and containing, among other treasures, a work on astronomy and astrology in seventy-two books.

The translation of the verse which follows the list of Nimrod's Babylonian cities is doubtful. It is a question whether we should render with the Authorised Version: “Out of that land went forth Asshur,” or prefer the alternative translation: “Out of that land he went forth to Assyria.” The latter is favoured by Micah v. 6, where “the land of Nimrod” appears to mean Assyria. But the question cannot be finally decided until we discover some positive information about Nimrod on the monuments.

If, however, little light has been thrown by modern research on the person of Nimrod, this is by no means the case as regards Abraham. Abu-ramu or Abram, “the exalted father,” Abraham's original name, is a name which also occurs on early Babylonian contract-tablets. Sarah, again, is the Assyrian sarrat, “queen,” while Milcah, the daughter of Haran, is the Assyrian milcat, “princess.” The site of Ur of the Chaldees, the birthplace of Abram, has been discovered, and excavations have been made among the ruins of its temples. The site is now called Mugheir, and lies on the western side of the Euphrates, on the border of the desert, immediately to the west of Erech. The chief temple of Ur was dedicated to the moon-god, and the Accadian inscriptions on its bricks, which record its foundation, are among the earliest that we possess. It was, in fact, the capital of one of the oldest of the pre-Semitic dynasties, and its very name, Uru or Ur, is only the Semitic form of the Accadian eri, “city.” It is probable that it had passed into the hands of the Semitic “Casdim” before the age of Abraham; at all events, it had long been the resort of Semitic traders, who had ceased to lead the roving life of their ancestors in the Arabian desert. From Ur, Abraham's father had migrated to Haran, in the northern part of Mesopotamia, on the high road which led from Babylonia and Assyria into Syria and Palestine. Why he should have migrated to so distant a city has been a great puzzle, and has tempted scholars to place both Ur and Haran in wrong localities; but here, again, the cuneiform inscriptions have at last furnished us with the key. As far back as the Accadian epoch, the district in which Haran was built belonged to the rulers of Babylonia; Haran was, in fact, the frontier town of the empire, commanding at once the highway into the west and the fords of the Euphrates; the name itself was an Accadian one signifying “the road”; and the deity to whom it was dedicated was the moon-god of Ur. The symbol of this deity was a conical stone, with a star above it, and gems with this symbol engraved upon them may be seen in the British Museum.

The road which passed through Haran was well known to the Chaldean kings and their subjects. Sargon I of Accad, and his son Naram-Sin, had already made expeditions into the far west. Sargon had carved his image on the rocks of the Mediterranean coast, and had even crossed over into the island of Cyprus. The campaign, therefore, of Chedor-laomer and his allies, recorded in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, was no new thing. The soil of Canaan had already felt the tramp of Babylonian feet. We can even fix the approximate date at which the campaign took place, and when Abraham and his confederates surprised the invaders and recovered from them the spoils of Southern Palestine. For twelve years, we are told, the tribes in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea had served Chedor-laomer, king of Elam, and then they rebelled; but the rebellion was quickly followed by invasion. Chedor-laomer and “the kings that were with him,”—Amraphel, king of Shinar, Arioch, king of Ellasar, and Tidal, “king of nations,”—marched against the revolters, overthrew them in battle, and carried them away captive. The name of Arioch is actually found on the cuneiform monuments. Bricks have been discovered engraved with the legend of Eri-aku, king of Larsa, the son of Kudur-Mabug the Elamite. Eri-aku means in Accadian “the servant of the moon-god,” and Larsa, his capital, is now represented by the mounds of Senkereh, a little to the east of Erech. Kudur-Mabug is entitled “the father of Palestine,” and it would, therefore, seem that he claimed supremacy over Canaan. His name is an Elamite one, signifying “the servant of the god Mabug,” and is closely parallel to the Biblical Chedor-laomer, that is, Kudur-Lagamar, “the servant of the god Lagamar.” Lagamar and Mabug, however, were different deities, and we cannot, therefore, identify Chedor-laomer and Kudur-Mabug together. But it is highly probable that they were brothers, Chedor-laomer being the elder, who held sway in Elam, while his nephew Eri-aku owned allegiance to him in Southern Babylonia. At any rate, it is plain from the history of Genesis that Babylon was at this time subject to Elam, and under the government of more than one ruler. Amraphel would have been king of that portion of Sumir, or Southern Chaldea, which was not comprised in the dominions of the king of Larsa; and the fact that the narrative begins by stating that the campaign in Palestine was made in his days, seems to imply that the whole account has been extracted from the Babylonian archives. As for “Tidal, king of nations,” it is very possible that we ought to read Turgal (Thorgal), with the Septuagint, while Goyyim or “nations” has been shown by Sir Henry Rawlinson to be a misreading for Gutium, the name given to the tract of country northward of Babylonia, which stretched from Mesopotamia to the mountains of Kurdistan, and within which the kingdom of Assyria afterwards arose.

Now, the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal tells us that an image of the goddess Nana had been carried away from Babylonia by the Elamite king Kudur-Nankhundi when he overran Chaldea 1635 years before his own ime, that is to say, in 2280 B.C. It is possible that this invasion of the country by Kudur-Nankhundi was the beginning of Elamite supremacy in Babylonia, and that Kudur-Mabug and Chedor-laomer were descendants of his. If so, we shall have an approximate date for the rescue of Lot by Abraham, and consequently for the age of Abraham himself.

The fourteenth chapter of Genesis is the last in the Book that relates to Babylonia. The history now turns to Egypt; and it is, therefore, from the monuments of Egypt, and not from those of Babylonia and Assyria, that we henceforth have to look for light and information.

No traditions of a deluge had been preserved among the Egyptians. They believed, however, that there was a time when the greater part of mankind had been destroyed by the angry gods. A myth told how men had once uttered hostile words against their creator Ra, the Sun-God, who accordingly sent the goddess Hathor to slay them, so that the earth was covered with their blood as far as the town of Herakleopolis. Then Ra drank 7,000 cups of wine, made from the fruits of Egypt and mingled with the blood of the slain; his heart rejoiced, and he made an oath that he would not destroy mankind again. Rain filled the wells, and Ra went forth to fight against his human foes. Their bows were broken and themselves slaughtered, and the god returned victorious to heaven, where he created Paradise and the people of the stars. This myth agrees with another, according to which mankind had emanated from the eyes of Ra, though there was a different legend of the creation, which asserted that all men, with the exception of the negroes, had sprung from the tears of the two deities Horus and Sekhet.

When Abraham went down into Egypt the empire was already very old. Its history begins with Menes, who united the independent states of the Nile valley into a single kingdom, and established his capital at Memphis. The first six dynasties of kings, who reigned 1,478 years, represent what is called the Old Empire. It was under the monarchs of the fourth dynasty that the pyramids of Gizeh were built; and at no time during its later history did the art and culture of Egypt reach again so high a level as it did under the Old Empire. With the close of the sixth dynasty came a period of disaster and decline. When Egypt again emerged into the light of history it was under the warrior princes of the twelfth dynasty. The capital had been shifted to the new city of Thebes, in the south, a new god, Amun, presided over the Egyptian deities, and the ruling class itself differed in blood and features from the men of the Old Empire. Henceforth Egyptian art was characterised by a stiff conventionality wholly unlike the freedom and vigour of the art of the early dynasties; the government became more autocratic; and the obelisk took the place of the pyramid in architecture. But the Middle Empire, as it has been termed, did not last long. Semitic invaders from Canaan and Arabia overran the country, and established their seat at Zoan or Tanis. For 511 years they held the Egyptians in bondage, though the native princes, who had taken refuge in the south, gradually acquired more and more power, until at last, under the leadership of Aahmes or Amosis, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, they succeeded in driving the hated foreigners out. These foreigners are known to history as the Hyksos or Shepherds, Hyksos being the Egyptian hik shasu, “prince of the Shasu,” or “Beduins.” The name which they bear upon the monuments is Menti.

It must have been while the Hyksos monarchs were holding their court at Zoan that Abraham entered the land. He found there men of Semitic blood, like himself, and speaking a Semitic language. A welcome was assured him, and he had no need of an interpreter. But the Hyksos kings had already begun to assume Egyptian state and to adopt Egyptian customs. In place of the Semitic shalat, “ruler,” the title by which their first leaders had been known, they had borrowed the Egyptian title of Pharaoh. Pharaoh appears on the monuments as pir-aa, “great house,” the palace in which the king lived being used to denote the king himself, just as in our own time the “porte” or gate of the palace has become synonymous with the Turkish Sultan.

By the time that Joseph was sold into Egypt there was little outward difference between the court at Zoan and the court of the native princes at Thebes. The very names and titles borne by the Hyksos officials had become Egyptian; and though they still regarded the god Set as the chief object of their worship, they had begun to rebuild the Egyptian temples, and pay honour to the Egyptian deities. Potiphar, to whom Joseph was sold, bore a purely Egyptian name, meaning “the gift of the risen one,” while the name of Potipherah, the high priest of On, whose daughter, Asenath, was married by Joseph, is equally Egyptian, and signifies “the gift of the Sun-God.” The Sun-God was the special deity of On; to him the great temple of the city was dedicated, and the name by which the place was known to the Greeks was Heliopolis, “the city of the sun.” It was the city whose name is played upon in Isaiah xix. 18, where the prophet declares that in the day when Egypt shall be converted to the Lord, “the City of the Sun” ('ir ha-kheres) shall become “the city of the destruction” of idols ('ir ha-heres). Jeremiah, too, plays similarly upon the name, when he says that Nebuchadnezzar, “shall break also the images of Beth-Shemesh (the house of the Sun-God) that is in the land of Egypt” (Jer. xliii. 13); while Ezekiel changes the Egyptian word On into the Hebrew aven, “nothingness,” and prophesies that “the young men of Aven shall fall by the sword” (Ezek. xxx. 17). The ruins of On are within an afternoon's drive of Cairo: but nothing remains of the city except mounds of earth, and a solitary obelisk that once stood in front of the great temple of the sun, and had been reared by Usertasen I, of the twelfth dynasty, a thousand years before the daughter of its priest became the wife of Joseph. The name of this daughter, Asenath, is the Egyptian 'Snat.

We are told that when the Pharaoh had made Joseph “ruler over all the land of Egypt” he gave him a new name, Zaphnath-paaneah (Gen. xli. 45). According to Dr. Brugsch, this name is the Egyptian Za pa-u nt pa-aa-ankh, “governor of the district of the place of life,” that is, of the district in which the Israelites afterwards built the towns of Raamses and Pithom, and in which the land of Goshen seems to have been situated. In after times Egyptian legend confounded Joseph with Moses, and changing the divine name which formed the first element in his into that of the Egyptian god Osiris, called him Osar-siph. The Jewish historian, Josephus, has preserved for us the story which made Osar-siph the leader of the Israelites in their flight from Egypt.

The seven years' famine, which Joseph predicted, is a rare occurrence in Egypt. In a country where rain is almost unknown, the fertility of the fields depends upon the annual inundation of the Nile when swollen by the melting snows of Abyssinia. It is only where the waters can penetrate, or can be led by canals and irrigating machines, that the soil is capable of supporting vegetation; but wherever this takes place the mud they bring with them is so fertilising that the peasantry frequently grow three luxuriant crops on the same piece of ground during the same year. For the inundation to fail in any single year is not common; for it to fail seven years running is a most unusual event. The last recorded time when there was a seven years' failure of the river, and a consequent famine, was in A.D. 1064-1071, under the reign of the Khalif El-Mustansir Billah. A similar failure must have taken place in the age of the twelfth dynasty, since Ameni, an officer of King Usurtasen I, who has engraved the history of his life at the entrance of his tomb among the cliffs of Beni-Hassan, states that “no one was hungry in my days, not even in the years of famine. For I had tilled all the fields of the district of Mah, up to the southern and northern frontiers. Thus I prolonged the life of its inhabitants, and preserved the food which it produced. No hungry man was in it. I distributed equally to the widow as to the married woman. I did not prefer the great to the humble in all that I gave away.”²

Another long famine of the same kind happened at a later date, and may possibly be that against which Joseph provided in Northern Egypt. The sepulchral tablet of a nobleman, called Baba, far away at El-Kab in Southern Egypt, informs us of the fact. In this the dead man is made to say: “When a famine arose, lasting many years, I distributed corn to the city each year of famine.”

Baba is supposed to have lived shortly before the establishment of the eighteenth dynasty; and this would agree very well with the date which we must assign to Joseph. As we shall see in the next chapter, we now know the exact period of Egyptian history at which the Exodus must have taken place; and if we count 430 years, “the sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt” (Exod. xii. 40), back from this, we shall be brought to the reign of the Hyksos king Apophis or Apepi, the very king, in fact, under whom, according to ancient authors, Joseph was raised to be the adon, or second ruler of the state. It was not until the Hyksos were driven out of the country, and Aahmes, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, was pursuing with bitter hatred both them and their friends that “there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.”

The earlier history of Joseph in the house of Potiphar finds a curious parallel in an old Egyptian romance, known as the Tale of the Two Brothers, which was composed by a scribe named Enna in the thirteenth century B.C. Anepu, it is there said, sent his younger brother, Bata, from the field where they were working, to fetch corn from the village. “And the young brother found the wife of his elder brother occupied in braiding her hair. And he said to her, ‘Rise up, give me seed-corn, that I may return to the field, for thus has my elder brother enjoined me, to return without delay.’ The woman said to him, ‘Go in, open the chest, that thou mayest take what thine heart desires, otherwise my locks will fall by the way.’ And the youth entered into the stable, and took thereout a large vessel, for it was his wish to carry away much seed-corn. And he loaded himself with wheat and grains of durra, and went out with it. Then she said unto him, ‘How great is the burden on thine arm?’ He said to her, ‘Two measures of durra and three measures of wheat, making together five measures, which rest on my arms.’ Thus he spake to her. But she spake to the youth and said, ‘How great is thy strength! Well have I remarked thy vigour every time.’ And her heart knew him! . . . And she stood up and laid hold of him, and she said to him, ‘Come, let us enjoy an hour's rest. The most beautiful things shall be thy portion, for I will prepare for thee festal garments.’ Then the youth became like the panther of the south for rage, on account of the evil word which she had spoken to him; but she was afraid beyond all measure. And he spoke to her and said, ‘Thou, O woman, hast been to me like a mother, and thy husband like a father, for he is older than I, so that he might have been my parent. Why this so great sin, that thou hast spoken to me? Say it not to me another time, then will I not tell it this time, and no word of it shall come out of my mouth about it to any man whatsoever.’ And he loaded himself with his burden, and went out into the field. And he went to his elder brother, and they completed their day's work. When it was now evening, the elder brother returned home to his dwelling. And his young brother followed behind his oxen, which he had laden with all the good things of the field, driving them before him, to prepare for their resting-place in the stable in the village. And, behold, the wife of his elder brother was afraid because of the word which she had spoken, and she took a jar of fat, and she made herself like one to whom an evil-doer had offered violence. She wished thereby to say to her husband, ‘Thy young brother has offered me violence.’ And her husband returned home at evening, according to his daily custom, and entered into his house, and found his wife stretched out and suffering from injury. She gave him no water for his hands, according to her custom. And the lamp was not lighted, so that the house was in darkness. But she lay there and vomited. And her husband spoke to her thus, ‘Who has had to do with thee? Lift thyself up!’ She said to him, ‘No one has had to do with me except thy young brother; for when he came to take seed-corn for thee, he found me sitting alone, and he said to me, “Come, let us make merry an hour and rest! Let down thy hair!” Thus he spake to me; but I did not listen to him (but said), “See, am I not thy mother, and is not thy elder brother like a father to thee?” Thus I spoke to him; but he did not hearken to my speech, and used force with me, that I might not make a report to thee. Now, if thou allowest him to live, I will kill myself.’ ”³ Anepu then took a knife, and went out to kill his brother. The cows, however, warned Bata of his danger, and the Sun-God came to his aid, and set a river full of crocodiles between himself and Anepu. When Anepu eventually learned the real truth, he hurried back to his house, and put his wife to death.

No name like that of Goshen, where the Israelites were settled by order of the Pharaoh, has as yet been discovered upon the monuments. Goshen, however, could not have been far from the north-eastern frontier of Egypt, and from Genesis xlvii. 11, we learn that it was in the land of Rameses. Now, Dr. Brugsch has shown that Ramses, or Rameses, was the title given to Zoan by Ramses II, when he raised it anew from the ruins in which it had lain since the expulsion of the Hyksos, and filled it again with stately edifices. Goshen consequently must have been in the neighbourhood of Zoan, as, indeed, we might expect, since Joseph's family would naturally be settled not far from the capital and the residence of the powerful minister. It was from hence that Jacob's body, after being embalmed, as was customary in Egypt, was carried to the old family tomb at Hebron; and we can therefore understand why Zoan and Hebron were brought into such close relation in the well-known passage of Numbers (xiii. 22) where it is said that “Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.” Hebron and Zoan were the two points around which centred the patriarchal history which is set before us in the Book of Genesis.

1) Deut. ii. 23, Jer. xlvii. 4, Amos ix. 7.

2) Brugsch, “History of Egypt” (Eng. Tr.) I, p. 158.

3) Brugsch, “History of Egypt” (Eng. Tr.), I, pp. 309-311.