Two such aboriginal kingdoms are mentioned here. The first is that of the Amalekites. These appear from other indications also to have been such, and indeed originally to have overspread the whole land; so that no name was found more fitting than theirs to become the common designation of all the Aborigines; as will be further explained hereafter. Besides this small kingdom, which then still existed in the far south, there was another, occupying a narrow strip extending westwards from Judah about to Joppa; this was called from its chief city Geshur, with which Gezar seems to be synonymous. This kingdom, though sorely harassed by both Philistines and Israelites, maintained its existence until the reign of Solomon. From the special tribe which occupied this district from primeval times, the land was called the land of the Avites or Ayim; but from what has been said above, it need not surprise us that this name is sometimes exchanged for that of Amorites. But in David's reign there was another small kingdom of the same name Geshur, at the very opposite point, on the north-east on the other side Jordan, and distinguished by the epithet Aramean, as being surrounded by tribes speaking Aramaic. As such identity of name cannot be accidental, we must regard it as a displaced member of the same original people, the main part of which was driven to the extreme south and south-west. The personal name Talmai already noticed, p. 230, recurs again here, although it is quite foreign to ancient Israel, and only appears as an Israelitish name in the New Testament in the form Bartholomew. 2 It is clear from all these signs that there was here a primitive people which once extended over the whole land of the Jordan to the left, and to the Euphrates on the right, and to the Red Sea on the south; and that, as in many districts it was still disputing dominion with the Canaanites, it was completely subjugated only by the fresh incursion of the Hebrews under Moses. Whether they were of Semitic race hardly admits of doubt even on a first glance. The few names preserved' have a Semitic form and complexion; parenthetic clause, and those following describe merely how far David ranged southwards (even to Egypt). We might [Gaza]; that is (the speaker being north of Gaza), that Gaza was the most southerly region to which they ever extended. [The name is properly Avvim, Heb. DY.] .from 1 Sam מעולם for מחוילה conjecture xv. 7; but I consider every change of the Hebrew construction as unnecessary, or rather false. 1 From Josh. xiii. 3, compared with verse 2, it appears that the Geshuri and the Avites are one and the same people; according to Deut. ii. 23 they dwelt even unto Azzah 2 According to 2 Sam. xv. 8; Josh. xii. 5, xiii. 13; 1 Chron. ii. 23. 32 Sam. iii. 3, xiii. 37. These are the five names of chiefs already mentioned, and some names of tribes and places; such as the above 2 and when we consider that the chiefs who would not become subject to the Hebrews, at last retreated to the coast-towns of the Philistines,' and that in later times the Philistines led the descendants of these terrible giants into battle, and that from the earliest period Semites were settled on many of the neighbouring islands and coasts of the Mediterranean Sea (as will soon be shown in the case of the Philistines), we may assume it to be highly probable that this entire stratum of nations was connected with the Semitic peoples, who were driven still further westward beyond the sea.3 2. The land occupied by these Aborigines was, both long before and long after the Hebrew conquest, invaded by various widely differing Semitic nations, who wholly subdued some portions and obtained partial possession of others. 1) Of these the CANAANITES must be regarded as the most important. At first sight it seems doubtful whether they were invaders or not. Fortunately, however, we possess in a passage of the Book of Origins, Gen. x. 15-20, a record by means of which we can measure with great accuracy the extent of the early dominion of this important people, and without which many perplexed points of the history of these ancient tribes would be far more difficult to unravel. Here the separate tribes of the Canaanites are enumerated as sons of Canaan, and the boundaries of the territory of each described. Their number is eleven. Sidon is mentioned as the first-born; which means that Sidon had from time immemorial been the greatest Canaanitish power. Next come three nations living towards the south, Heth, the Jebusites, and the Amorites; then two in the most northerly country conquered by Israel, the Girgashites and the Hivites; then four in Phoenicia, and lastly the most northern of all, the well-known kingdom of Hamath on the Orontes. The description then given of the Canaanite boundaries makes it still more evident that the writer here intends to describe their territories as they were prior to the Israelitish conquest. They embrace the entire land, as far as Gaza on the south-west; so that the Aborigines still existing there (the quoted, Gen. xiv. 5; and ¡y, Deut. dan. But since répyeσa, known from Matt. ii. 23. 1 Josh. xi. 22. 2 2 Sam. xxi. 16-22; 1 Sam. xvii. For the proof that the whole country here was inhabited by Semites, see also the Jahrb. der Bibl. Wiss. vi. p. 88. Their locality is nowhere defined in the Old Testament, except that in Josh. xxiv. 11, they are placed on this side Jor viii. 28, was, according to Euseb. Onom., t Philistines were not then yet in the same force on that coast as later) must have been regarded as a protected and subject population. But this story of the eleven sons of Canaan implies no more than a clear recollection that at some time, it might be even centuries before the Israelitish conquest, a dominant people named Canaan created and preserved some degree of unity among the various tribes. The question of the age of each separate tribe, whether they were all aboriginal or not, did not come under consideration here: we only learn that the influence of the Canaanites had been firmly established in the land long before the time of Moses. But as these Canaanites appear in so many passages as only one among many ancient nations inhabiting this land, there is no intrinsic absurdity in supposing that even if their immigration had preceded that of Moses by more than five centuries, they were distinct from the Aborigines already mentioned. In fact it is nowhere said in the Old Testament that they were aborigines; for the Fourth Narrator of the primeval history, in saying incidentally that the Canaanites were in the land before Abraham,' only means that the land was even then already thickly peopled, and names the Canaanites simply as the best known inhabitants. And when we further reflect how very widely they must have differed both in mental and in physical culture from the Aborigines already described, and how utterly shattered and dispersed these Aborigines were even before Moses, a later immigration appears on these grounds also the more probable. Many signs conspire to prove that a powerful invasion must at a very early time have everywhere split up the first deep stratum of population, an older and very different invasion from those of the Philistines and the Hebrews, which will afterwards come under consideration; and we can imagine no other such than this of the Canaanites. So far we are guided by the Old Testament accounts of the Canaanites. But other independent traditions of the immigration of the Phoenicians reached Herodotus and other Greek writers. Independent again of these is the genuine Phoenician tradition given by Sanchoniathon2 of the constant enmity between the two Tyrian brothers Hypsuranius and Usôus. The 1 Gen. xii. 6, xiii. 7; and see also such passages as Num. xxii. 4. The later descriptions by the Fathers of the Church, as collected by Moses Choronensis (Hist. i. 5), appear to be derived from the Book of Jubilees and similar works. 2 In Orelli's edition, p. 16 sq.; see also on this legend my Abhandlung über die Phönikischen Ansichten von der Weltschöpfung und Sanchuniathon (Göttingen, 1851), p. 44 sq. first, as his name indicates, is the heavenly progenitor of the Phoenicians; the other a wild hunter, a savage 'hairy' man (as his name expresses), and the true type of the earliest inhabitants. Indeed the name Usô, by the Phoenician phonetic laws, is actually identical with the Hebrew Esau: not that the Tyrian Usô derived his name from that nation which the Hebrews named Esau, but that the contrast expressed in the Phoenician tradition between two related tribes of which the younger formed a later immigration into the land, is repeated in the history of Israel. At the time of Moses, indeed, the immigration of the Canaanites was so completely a bygone event, and had given rise to so many new arrangements and changes, that the very name of the principal nation, the Canaanites, is only to be explained from these. For on reviewing the names of the eleven tribes and of others elsewhere named as connected with them, we find some to be derived from corresponding cities or kingdoms; namely, the Phoenician nations and Hamath; also the Jebusites, so called from Jebus an ancient name of Jerusalem, evidently because they preserved their independence and a considerable territory long after the Israelite invasion;2 also the Girgashites, already mentioned p. 232. These small kingdoms, seven in all, maintained their existence with firmness generally till long after Moses. But the case is very different with the four or five names remaining. None of the nations bearing these can be so called from a city or kingdom; and four of them are besides mentioned with such disproportionate frequency, and as spreading over such an extent of country, as is incompatible with the idea that they constituted compact and localised kingdoms. Many indications show that these names describe the inhabitants by certain differences of locality and occupation in the different parts of the country.3 a.) The AMORITES. These were Highlanders, as their name1 2 indicates, and as the chief passage about them, Num. xiii. 29, (belonging to the Book of Origins) shows. Whenever any indication is given of their locality, they always appear as dwelling upon or ruling from high places. It is, however, expressly stated by the earliest narrator, that they dwelt originally beyond the Scorpion Range (the going up to Akrabbim '), on the southern boundary of the subsequent Judah, and further still to the south-east as far as the Rock-city (Petra) of Idumæa; and even as late as the Israelite conquest they must have held extensive sway throughout the southern regions on this side of the Jordan; besides this they occupied wide regions on the other side, and had made fresh conquests there just before the arrival of Moses.3 Hence the earliest narrator not unnaturally applies the name Amorite to all the ancient settlers in the south, on the western, as well as to the entire population on the eastern side of the Jordan; and other writers in Judah also employ the name in this larger sense. But we have seen already, p. 230, that these very Amorites, described as warlike and savage, were mainly relics of the aboriginal population; and their connection with the Canaanites, strictly so called, must therefore have been very loose. In fact, in careful delineations, they were clearly distinguished from these, and only gradually and in later times thrown into the same category with them. We possess also one proof that the language of the Amorites was by no means identical with that of the Canaanites." b.) The contrast to these Highlanders with their strong castles is furnished by the HITTITES,' as dwellers in the valley, also of that of mountains with their castles. In 1840 I published this remark on Is. xvii. 9. In Syriac i still signifies hero; Knös. Chrest p. 31. 3 from below, 70. 1 Gen. xiv. 7, of the district near Jericho where mountains lie to the west; Deut. i. 7, 29 sq. 44, according to old authorities; Josh. x. 5 sq., where mention is made of their five kings who ruled the country on this side. 2 Judges i, 36; see Josh. xiii. 4; on the Scorpion Range, which stretched from the southern extremity of the Dead Sea in a south-westerly direction, see Num. xxxiv. 4; Josh. xv. 3. As we are told not only by the earliest narrator, but by national songs: Num. xxi. 29, compared with Gen. xiv. 5; according to which the Amorites were here not aboriginal. See above, p. 72. That the Book of Origins, however, already used the name Canaanite in a wider sense, is plain from Num. xiv. 43-45 (Judges i. 17), compared with Deut. i. In like manner the narrator of 2 Sam. xxi. 2, puts Amorites in the place of those whom the Book of Origins (in Josh. ix.) properly calls Hivites. 5 As in the often retouched passage, Judges i.; compare verse 10 with Josh. xv. 13 sq., xi. 21 sq. 6 In the remarkable passage Deut. iii. 9. They are called also Sons of Heth, from which we learn only that their territory was formerly larger. It is an obvious conjecture that the name of the Phoenician Kittion in Cyprus is related to the word n; these Kittites were, indeed, always written in Hebrew, and almost always in Phoenician, with, never with there are found coins with the inscription οἱ ἐν Σιδῶνι Κιττιείς, so that at least in Sidon Heth seems to be employed in the sense of Canaan; see the Jahrbücher der On Biblischen Wissenschaft, iii. p. 209. yet |