The History of the Ancient Civilizations. Duncker Max

and bade him sacrifice his only son Isaac, in the land of Moriah, as a burnt offering. But when Abraham had built the altar on the top of the mountain, and laid the wood upon it, and bound Isaac and laid him on the altar, and taken the knife and stretched forth his hand to slay his son, the angel of Jehovah called from heaven, saying: Lay not thine hand on the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God; thou hast not refused Him thine only son. And Abraham saw a ram caught in the thicket, and he sacrificed him.

      When Sarah died at Hebron, Abraham spoke to the Hittites among whom he dwelt: I am a stranger and a sojourner among you; give me a burying-place for my people among you, that I may put away my dead from me. Speak for me with Ephron, the son of Zohar, that he give me the cave of Machpelah which is his, at the corner of his field; let him give it to me for a burying-place at its full worth in money. Ephron agreed, and Abraham weighed the money to Ephron, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant. And thus the field of Ephron at Machpelah, to the east of Mamre, that is Hebron, the field and the cave, and all the trees on the field and round it, were given to Abraham before the eyes of the Hittites, and the eyes of all who went into the gates of the city. And Abraham buried Sarah in the cave of the field of Machpelah.

      Then Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah, and she bore him Zimram, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and Ishbak, and Shuah. But Isaac had grown a man, and Abraham said to his servant, the oldest in his house, Eliezer of Damascus: Lay thy hand under my thigh; I charge thee that thou take not to my son a wife from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom we dwell; to my fatherland and my home thou shalt go, and there seek a wife for Isaac. Then the servant took ten camels from the camels of his master, and goods of every kind, and passed over the Euphrates towards Mesopotamia, to the city of Nahor, the brother of Abraham. To Nahor his wife Milcah, the daughter of Haran, had borne eight sons. The youngest was Bethuel, and Bethuel's son was Laban, and his daughter Rebekah. Eliezer came to the city of Nahor at evening, and halted his camels at the well outside the city. Then came a maiden, fair to behold, with her pitcher on her shoulder, to the well. When she had filled her pitcher and come up from the well, the servant went to her and said: Bend down thy pitcher and let me drink a little water. Drink, my lord, she answered, and quickly took the pitcher in her hand, and gave him to drink. Then she said: I will draw also for thy camels, and stepped down again to the well. Eliezer marvelled at her; and when all the camels had drunk, he took a golden ring, half a shekel in weight, and two golden bracelets, ten shekels in weight, and put the ring in her nose, and the bracelets on her arm, and then inquired whose daughter she was, and whether there was room in her father's house to shelter him and the camels. And she answered: I am Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel, the son of Nahor; straw and fodder is in abundance with us, and room for the camels. And her brother Laban came to the well, and led Eliezer to the house, and Laban took the saddles from the camels, spread straw for them, and gave them fodder and brought water for his guest to wash his feet, and food. But Eliezer said: I will not eat till I have given my message. I am the servant of Abraham, and Jehovah has blessed my master, so that he has become great, and he has given him sheep and oxen, and silver and gold, and men-servants, and maid-servants, and camels and asses. And Sarah has borne a son to my master in his old age, and I have sworn to seek a wife for his son from his home and his own people; and Jehovah led me in the right path in order to take the granddaughter of the brother of my master for his son. If ye are willing to plight troth and love with Abraham, say it. Then said Bethuel, Rebekah's father, and Laban her brother: Behold, the maiden stands before thee, take her and go. Then Eliezer brought forth gold and silver ornaments, and garments, and gave them to Rebekah; to her brother also and her mother he gave gifts. And when Laban and his mother sent away Rebekah with her nurse Deborah, and Abraham's servant Eliezer, they blessed Rebekah, and said: Become a thousand times a thousand, and may thy seed possess the gate of thy enemies. When Eliezer returned home, he told all that he had done, and Isaac received Rebekah into the tent of his mother, and she became his wife, and he loved her. And Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac; but to Ishmael and the sons of Keturah he gave gifts, and sent them away from his son Isaac into the land to the East. Then Abraham, after he had lived 175 years, died at a good old age, and his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah.

These narratives show that the Hebrews derived the origin of their nation from the land of the Euphrates and Tigris. We remarked above that the legend of the Deluge could only have arisen in river valleys, exposed to severe inundations (p. 245). If we set aside the additions made in the prophetic revision, the narrative of the flood belongs to the first text; in this text therefore the nations of the earth were derived from the sons of Noah. The revision adds that the descendants of Noah, in their journey from the East, found a plain in the land of Shinar, i.e. Babylonia, and dwelt there, and erected a city and a tower, intended to reach to heaven. Then Jehovah confounded their language and scattered them over the earth.[580] But it is the first text which gives the genealogy of Abraham, according to which the descendant of Noah, Terah, the father of Abraham, dwells in the land of his nativity, at Ur in Chaldæa. We found that Ur lay on the lower Euphrates, where the ruins of Mugheir mark its site, that the oldest buildings in Babylonia belong to this place, and the oldest sovereigns on the Euphrates called themselves kings of Ur (p. 259). From Ur Terah, according to the first text, journeyed with his family to Haran.[581] Haran lies in a wide plain surrounded by hills on the Skirtos, a tributary of the Belik, at no great distance from the Euphrates; it is the Carrhae of western writers. From Haran Abraham turns towards Canaan; but his brother's tribe remains in Haran. Hence, as the oldest writings of the Hebrews without any doubt derive the progenitors of the nation from Ur and Carrhae in the land of the Euphrates, so later authorities maintain, as an absolute certainty, that "the fathers dwelt beyond the river," i.e. the Euphrates. In the "second law" Abraham is called a "wandering Aramæan," and Ezekiel calls Chaldæa "the birthplace of the Hebrews."[582] The name "Hebrews" confirms this statement and view. Heber means "that which is beyond," "those who dwell beyond." The Hebrews call themselves the sons of Israel; the name of Hebrews they received from the Canaanites, into whose land they forced a way, though the Canaanites, no doubt, meant no more by the name than that the sons of Israel dwelt on the other side of the Jordan, before they set foot in Canaan.

But the genealogy of the Hebrews goes far beyond Carrhæ and Ur. After enumerating the ten patriarchs from Adam, i.e. from the man "formed of earth" (adama) to Noah, and giving the age of these patriarchs in hundreds of years (the highest age is 969, and the lowest is the seventh, 365), the first text enumerates another set of ten patriarchs from the sons of Noah down to Abraham, and of these the age gradually dwindles from 600 to 175 years.[583] The head of this series, Shem, the eldest son of Noah, the friend of God, is the immediate progenitor of the Hebrews. That the recollection and feeling of the relationship with the inhabitants of the land of the two streams, and with the population of Aram, i.e. of the upper land between the Tigris and Euphrates, the Euphrates and the Jordan, and with portions of the inhabitants of Arabia and Asia Minor, was alive and present in the minds of the Hebrews, is clear from the fact that these nations, akin in tribe and blood and language, were carried back to Shem. From Arphaxad, the third son of Shem, sprang the fathers of the Hebrews; the two first sons Elam and Asshur, we already know as the progenitors of the Elamites and Assyrians. From Lud and Aram, the fourth and fifth sons of Shem, the Lydians and Aramæeans were derived, a genealogy which certainly belongs to the Ephraimitic, if not to the Judæan text. In Arphaxad, the name of the third son, we cannot mistake the name of a district any more than in the names of the other sons. Arphaxad is a mountain canton of South Armenia, between the lakes of Van and Urumiah—the Arrapachitis[584] of the Greeks, the Alpak of the Armenians, the modern Albak—and lies more than 6,000 feet high, at the source of the Great Zab, which also flows through it.[585] The son of Arphaxad is Salah, i.e. "leaving," "departure," and the