But the identification of Amraphel with Khammurabi of Babylon or any of the other Khammurabis³⁶ who were more or less contemporary has been generally abandoned. The West Semitic (Amorite) form of the name was not Amraphel but Khammurapikh.³⁷ Amraphel probably contains the name Amurru, the divine eponym of the Amorites; it may be Amurru-apili (“Amurru is my champion”).³⁸ And the Shinar of which he was king is nowadays thought to be Sinğar in Upper Mesopotamia,³⁹ stretching from the vicinity of Nineveh to the confluence of the Euphrates and Khabur, rather than the land of Sumer and Akkad.⁴⁰

But what has all this to do with the Hittites?

One of the three kings who accompanied Chedorlaomer on his march was “Tidal king of nations” (Tidha|l melekh go|yþm). Now this name is the most easily identifiable of the four. It corresponds (with the dropping of the Hittite inflection) to Tudkhalias, the name of five Hittite kings. Was Tidal one of these? Of course there may have been other kings called Tudkhalias, though we do not happen to know of any; the name is also found in the Cappadocian tablets as that of a private citizen of Anatolia. That any of the Hittite kings might appropriately have received the title “king of nations” is plain.

The last three Hittite kings called Tudkhalias are out of the question here. Tudkhalias III played no significant part in history and his date (1400 B.C.) is too late; no such military enterprise as that described in Gen. xiv took place in the reign of Amenhotep III. We might similarly say that the date of Tudkhalias II (c. 1450 B.C.) is also too late, and that no such enterprise as that of Gen. xiv took place after the Egyptian kings of Dynasty XVIII began their career of conquest in Palestine and Syria. But Franz Böhl ably maintained that Tudkhalias II was in fact the Tidal of Gen. xiv and that Abraham must be dated in the time of the Kassites and of the Egyptian Dynasty XVIII (Das Zeitalter Abrahams [Leipzig, 1930]). In order to do so, however, he had to place the date of Tudkhalias II much earlier in Dynasty XVIII than is warranted.

This Tudkhalias begins a new Hittite dynasty, and he ranks as founder of the “new” Hittite Empire, which lasted from his time till its downfall about 1200. At the beginning of this new period of Hittite history the Hittite kings again crossed the Taurus range and collided with the recently founded kingdom of Mitanni. If Böhl’s theory were right, we should expect to find Mitanni playing a leading part in the narrative of Gen. xiv; but there is no word of it. Elam we know; Shinar we have had identified with Sinğar; Ellasar, once popularly identified with Larsa, may (as Böhl suggested) be Til-ashurri on the Upper Euphrates (cf. 2 Kings xix. 12; Isa. xxxvii. 12). But of the Mitanni kingdom, founded a short time before the reign of Tudkhalias II, there is no word.

What about the chronology? Böhl would date Abraham early in Dynasty XVIII (say between 1550 and 1500), and he regarded the entry into Canaan of Jacob and his family on their return from Paddan-Aram as the Biblical counterpart of the Khabiru invasions which were going on when the Tell el-Amarna correspondence was being written. This, of course, involves dating the Exodus under Merenptah (1234-1224). Böhl’s general chronological position is not unlike that maintained by Professor Rowley in Israel’s Sojourn in Egypt (Manchester, 1938).⁴¹ They both rightly remind us that we must not neglect the genealogical statements of the Old Testament in calculating its chronology.

The Merenptah dating of the Exodus, however, is too late, as the famous stele of that Pharaoh, belonging to his fifth year, represents the Israelites as having by that time penetrated to Western Canaan. Professor Albright’s suggestion of a date about 1290 is not only attractive in itself, but is powerfully supported by his brilliant interpretation of the 430 years of Exod. xii. 40 as a calculation from the Era of Tanis (i.e. from the Hyksos foundation of that city about 1720).⁴² Let us remember, too, that the LXX and Samaritan texts take the 430 years as covering the sojourning of the Israelites (or rather their ancestors) in Canaan as well as their stay in Egypt; that is, as Paul in Gal. iii. 17 infers from this verse, 430 years separated Abraham from the Exodus. So we are brought again to a date about 1720 for the events of Gen. xiv.

In looking for a period in which such a military operation as that of Chedorlaomer and his allies could have been carried out, Böhl decides for the period of confusion immediately following the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt. The breakdown of the Hyksos Empire would certainly offer an invitation to surrounding nations to come and take their share of the spoils. But in point of fact the Pharaohs of Dynasty XVIII lost no time in following the fleeing Hyksos into Asia. Amenhotep I, second king of the Dynasty (1546-1525), conquered Canaan, and Thothmes I, his successor, set up a stele by the Euphrates. There does not really seem to be room or time here for Chedorlaomer’s enterprise.

But if we give up the idea of the aftermath of the Hyksos downfall as a setting for Gen. xiv, we may consider the period preceding the establishment of their domination. And Tudkhalias I is naturally thought of at this time. Böhl, rather contemptuously, says that anyone who really wants to bring him in can do so, as in that case fancy has free play. But there are reasonable grounds for considering him. Tudkhalias I was the great-great-grandfather of Mursilis I, who sacked Babylon at the end of the First Babylonian Dynasty, in the former half of the sixteenth century B.C. Tudkhalias may therefore be dated somewhere in the second half of the eighteenth century B.C. Among those who identify this Tudkhalias with Tidal is F. W. König (Geschichte Elams [Leipzig, 1931], pp. 27 f.), who remarks: “The rise of Elamite power stands in the closest relation to the Semitic wave which established the ‘First’ Dynasty of Babylon. … To this movement also belongs the rise of the Hittites from Tudkhalias I onward, who will in that case be identical with the Tidal of Genesis xiv.” ⁴³

At present, however, all that we can safely say is that the name and date of Tudkhalias I of the Hittites coincide closely with those of Tidal king of nations; but we do not know enough about this Tudkhalias to identify them outright. But if further discoveries should enable us to do so, and should confirm that the raid of the Elamite king and his allies was an incident in the confused times preceding the rise of the Hyksos Empire, we should have further light on the presence of Hittites in Canaan in Abraham’s time.

And here we have to leave the matter. Further discovery may confirm our suggestion, or it may confute it. But as we remember how the history of the Hittites was rediscovered, and how the place which for long ages was given to them by the Bible alone was thus so largely vindicated, we may feel that a hypothesis which maintains agreement with further Biblical statements about this interesting people is at least more likely to be right than one which involves the rejection of these statements.

³⁴ F. M. Th. Böhl (Das Zeitalter Abrahams [1930], p. 23) thinks that Arioch may be an Indo-European name Āryaka (“worthy of an Aryan” or “honourable”); but Speiser, with greater probability, connects it with the Hurrian name Ariukki (Ethnic Movements, p. 45). (More recently Böhl has suggested an identification of Arioch with Ar-ri-wu-uk in the Mari letters; see Bibliotheca Orientalis ii, p. 66.)

³⁵ Böhl (op. cit., p. 13) draws attention to the tendentious Massoretic vocalization of some of these names: Laomer being vocalized as lab-bo|sheth (“for shame”); Amraphel as ‘aŒra|phel (“darkness”), whereas LXX gives his name as Amarphal.

³⁶ Khammurabi of Yamkhad and Khammurabi of Kurda. Cf. Sidney Smith, Alalakh and Chronology (1940), p. 10.

³⁷ Sidney Smith, op. cit., p. 23.

³⁸ So Böhl, op. cit., p. 13. Cf. Speiser, Ethnic Movements, p. 45. It appears that Albright was the first to express the view that the name contains the element Amurru, a view which, says Speiser, “is unquestionably sound.”

³⁹ Albright in JSOR. x. (1926), p. 256; Böhl, op. cit., p. 13.

⁴⁰ Elsewhere (e.g. Gen. x. 10; xi. 2) Shinar (שנער) may well represent Sumer, which goes back to an earlier Sumerian form Kiengi(r).

⁴¹ Professor Rowley places the Descent into Egypt around 1365 B.C., which would agree well enough with Böhl’s date for Abraham.

⁴² BASOR. 58 (1935), p. 16; From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940), p. 184.

⁴³The identification of Tidal with Tudkhalias I is favoured by Sayce (The Hittites, 4th ed., p. 228) and by Professor Hooke (In the Beginning, pp. 73 f.).