The Road to Canaan
The deluge was over. Noah, and his three sons, Shem, Ham and Yapheth have settled down, raised families, and became the eponymous ancestors of the human race. It is worth mentioning that the Old Testament did not follow the definitions of modern race theory: it assigned the descendants of the three brothers according to territories and not according to language or racial origin. Judging from the names of the brothers, the compilers of the Old Testament wanted to account for the families of peoples, who were involved in the Middle East.
Today, we would certainly assign the descendants of Shem to the Semites, Arabs, Jews, Akkadeans, Arameans, etc., the descendants of Japheth to the family of Indo-Europeans, and those of Ham to the Hamites, among them the Egyptians, Ethiopians, etc. The Old Testament assigned the Semitic Canaanites and Amorites to be Hamitic, because of their nearness and connection with Hamitic Egypt. It also assigned the Hittites and the Jebusites to the group of Hamites, because they lived in Canaan, and for some unknown reason it did so to the Cypriots and the Cretans.
The book of Genesis is really a continuing story of a single family, starting with the creation of the world, their sojourn in the Garden of Eden, and ending with their descent to Egypt. The last two chapters of the Book of Genesis tell the story of the death of Jacob, his burial in the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, and the death of Joseph. With these two chapters the story of the family ends. From then on, the continuation of the story is not about the family, but about a people that grew out of that family. The only connection between the story of the Book of Genesis and its continuation is the names of the twelve tribes, whose eponymous fathers were Jacob's children and grandchildren.
As the Book of Genesis is really the story of a single family, it duly recorded only the direct link in each generation. Together with the name of the child who was in the line of direct descent, the Bible recorded also the age of the father when the child was born, and the remaining years of the father after the birth. Compiling a record based on those numbers shows a truly amazing picture.
Between Noah and Abraham, there were ten generations. According the Bible, when Abraham was born, all ten of his ancestors were still around and in apparent good health. When Abraham has died at the age of 175, two of his ancestors survived him. The first was Shem, his ancestor nine times removed, and the second was Eber.
Using that chronology to calculate the distance between the deluge and Abraham's birth, then it is found that only 392 years passed between the two. We know, that the near accurate date of the deluge was 5500 BC, therefore Abraham was born at the end of the 52nd century BC. According to a previous estimation, Abraham's approximate lifetime was at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. There are three millennia between the two estimates. Indeed according to traditional figures, Abraham was born in 2166 BC and died in 1991 Bc, at the age of 175.
It is obvious that the biblical chronology cannot be a base to a historical analysis. One wonders why ancient sources stressed those inflated ages in mythological stories. The Old Testament's list of Noah's descendants was not a solitary example. The Sumerian list of kings is even more extreme. It is not only the longevity that is common to the presentation of the Old Testament and the Sumerian king-list. There are two more common elements. The first of them is, that in both lists, the years of the people in ante-diluvian times were much longer, than in the years after it. The second is that in addition to their longevity they seemed to have special, super-human powers,
Sarah was 60 when going with Abraham to Egypt. Abraham was worried that Sarah's beauty will cause him trouble, so he presented her as his sister. The same Abraham was 140 when Sarah died. He married again and had six more sons. The long years and the special powers continued to be in the family. Isaac and Jacob, and even Joseph had very long years and special powers, and that in a period where the average length of life was no more than 50. This is at least the testimony of the excavations. It is obvious that superhuman age and ability were among those elements that distinguished the chosen few from ordinary mortals.1
So, there is a difference of three millennia between the calculated and actual dates. The expression of actual date means, that it is based on some reasonable hypothesis. There can be a number of reasons for that huge variation of dates.
One of the reasons, probably the simplest is that the names and the ages are pure mythology and as such everything is allowed. There is a second possibility, that both the Patriarchs, whose stories are described in the Book of Genesis, and their ancestors too, were not single but composite persons. Thomas Mann hinted on this possibility in his book, The Tales of Jacob. The hero of the book, young Joseph, says that the name of his father is Jacob, his grandfather is Isaac and his great-grandfather was Abraham. They were all real, flesh-and-blood persons. However, beyond them was another mythical triad, also called Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And the two triads are mixed in his imagination.
There is also a third possibility, It is that each of the ten generations that separated the generation of Abraham from that of Noah, was not a human generation but a period which was named after a certain person, probably an eponymous father symbolizing the period. It is possible that the Bible itself provides a clue. The list of Abraham's ancestors and their ages are given in Gen.11.-10-27:
Noah 448 (after the deluge)
Shem 602
Arpaxad 438
Shelach 433
Eber 464
Peleg 239
Reu 239
Serug 230
Nahor 148
Terah 70 (until the birth of Abraham)
If the year of life of each family member is added, a number of 3311 is received. Deducting it from 5,500, the year of the deluge, the result is 2,189 that is very near the traditional year of Abraham's birth. Admittedly, it is not a scientific method of calculation, but then it is a text, full of cryptic references and codes, which might have been perfectly familiar to the listeners, or readers, of their time, but are hidden from us
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It is worth while to concentrate on the third hypothesis, as it can give answers to many questions, which so far remained without answers. Accordingly, Abraham's ancestors were probably not individual people, but eponymous fathers of clans, who might have been preeminent in certain periods. If it is so, then that hypothesis should have proof, either in some ancient archive, or on scratched potsherds found in archaeological excavations.
Exactly such proofs were found in more than one archives of northern Mesopotamia, in an area stretching between Ebla in the west and Nuzi in the east. It is a wide belt of land, whose southern border is the line between Ebla and Asshur, its northern border is the line between Ur and Lake Urmia.
Map 6. shows that territory in detail. In simpler terms, it is the valley of the river Balikh, between the Euphrates in the west and the Habur in the east.
Before describing the hypothesis in detail, there is hidden evidence in the list of the ten ancestors. The first five ancestors on the list, whose lifetime stretched to about two-thirds of the three millennia between the deluge and the birth of Abraham, left no historical traces. Of the rest of the list, apart of Reu, there are clear traces on the ground, exactly in the area that was described above. The fifth member of the list, Eber, might have left a trace in the name of the king of Ebla, Ibrium or Ebrum, but he also could have been part of the composite personage of Abraham. However, neither the Eblaite kingship, nor the period of Abraham, which were approximately coeval, fit the position of Eber in the list.
The names of four members on the list were found in more than one archives of the middle Euphrates Valley. They were found in the royal Assyrian archives, in the archives of Nuzi and also in that of Mari. According to the findings:2
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Peleg appears as a town called Paliga, on the Euphrates, just above the
junction with the Habur.
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Serug is found as Sarugi
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Nahor is known in the Assyrian archives as Til Nahiri
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Terah is known as Til Turakhi
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It should be mentioned here that the Assyrian Til is equivalent to the modern Arabic or Hebrew Tel, which means an artificial mound that covers the ruins of a village or a city. As the Assyrian archives originated in the first millenium BC. it means that the cities of Nahor and Terah were abandoned by then.All the cities or villages whose references were found in the contemporary archives were situated on the rivers Balikh-Euphrates, not below the junction of the Habur river. Putting both these findings and those of the previous chapter within a framework, the following logical scenario can be constructed.
There was a small tribe, who lived since time immemorial in an area, which was east of Lake Urmia. That territory was known in early historical times as Armenia. It is known today as Iranian Azerbeijan. The tribe was especially lucky because that particular plot of land was beautiful and fruitful. They called it then the Garden of Eden. It is called now the Meydan-e Shah, the Garden of the Shah, which is not far from the original name. The racial belonging of that tribe or clan is irrelevant. If they had remained there, they would have been called Armenians in classical times, probably Iranians after that and Azeris today. But they did not remain there.
At the end of the seventh millenium BC, with the deterioration of the climate, the clan has moved to the oasis around the Euxine Lake, which was a large sweet-water lake, known today as the Black Sea. They must have found shelter somewhere on the south shore of the lake, probably around the area of the seamount which is opposite the mouth of the Halys. Judging from the stories told by the Bible about the deluge, the escape by an ark and the stranded people on hills they probably lived around the seamount, as in other places quick decision and strong legs were probably sufficient to be saved from the deluge.
When the Euxine Lake disappeared in the deluge that occurred in the mid-sixth millenium BC, some of the clan succeeded to escape and eventually settled in the valley of the Balikh. Why there? This question can be asked from any people who were wandering around to find a place to settle. The answer is usually the same. People settle where they can. Either they settle in empty places, if they can find any, or where the resistance is weak, or lacking that where they are accepted as immigrant workers. So, our migrant tribe settled in that valley, because it was empty, or they were stronger than the previous owners.
So, they settled down in that valley and did what everybody else did at that time. They did the best what they could to survive, to beat off marauding parties who were looking for what they themselves were looking in their time; a place to live. The sojourn of the tribe in that valley was very long; it may continue even today. After all, the story of the Bible does not speak about an exodus of a people from the old country to look for a new home. The story is about a single clan, who decided to leave and settle somewhere else. They might not have been the first to do so, and maybe not the last. When Abraham reached Canaan, he was greeted by the Hittites of Hebron as one of them, even as a great prince among them, and was accepted by the king of Jerusalem as an equal.
From the time of their arrival to that valley until the start of the story of the family, there were about three millennia. At the beginning, they must have been a small community. One does not have to accept that only a single family has escaped from the holocaust, but it certainly was a terrible catastrophe, which did not leave many alive. It must have been a long time until the numbers increased, with new villages and towns settled, and named after their founders. Probably, the whole area thought themselves as kin, with common ancestors, language, customs and religion. The sense of belonging went further than the confines of the valley. There must have been similar groupings all around them, otherwise they could not have survived so long, with the same language and customs.
There is one important element in the geographical area, where the Noah clan has settled. It was the boundary between the Semitic south and the non-Semitic north. It is difficult to decide on the evidence of the Bible, whether they belonged to the south or the north. Whatever it was, there must have been mutual influences and cross-fertilization. Some of the names, like Eber, Peleg and Reu were Semitic, but their customs and religion was probably more non-Semitic than Semitic. The use of the expression, non-Semitic, means that in later, historical times, that area was the center of the Kingdom of Mitanni, ruled by Indo-European aristocracy over a mass of Hurrians, who were of Caucasian stock.
According the evidence of the Old Testament3 and some of their religious and political customs, it seems that they were Hittites and not Hurrians. But it is a conjecture and not a certainty.4 Moreover, it has no importance. The kingdom of Mitanni was still in the future, so the later ethnic composition might not have been the same nearly a millennium before it.
So, the Valley of the Balikh was the area from where Abraham was supposed to continue his journey to Canaan, after his father Terah died in Haran. This statement immediately contacts the main question of this chapter. Where exactly did Abraham (and Terah) start their journey to Canaan. Map 6 shows the scene of Abraham's journey. There are three major locations on that map; Ur in the lower right corner, Canaan in the lower left corner, and Haran is up north, east of the Euphrates.
Traveling from Ur in lower Mesopotamia to Canaan through Haran in the upper Balikh valley is making a first trip of about 600 miles along the Euphrates and the Balikh, and then turning south and making another trip of about 400 miles to Canaan, probably through Damascus. There is a more direct way, through the desert between Ur and the valley of the Jordan. It can be done but it is very unsuitable for large herds of animals. The logistic of water supply to the animals, and to the people, would be insurmountable and certainly beyond the capabilities of that period. So, if Abram was indeed a caravaneer, a form of itinerant peddler, then the longer trip would be logical because then he would be able to trade on the road. Similarly, if he had a large herd of animals, the northern road would have been much preferable, because he would have water all along the way. But was there a need to travel from Ur in lower Mesopotamia to Canaan? It is an important question in the matter of the Patriarchs, and it should be resolved. Where was the home of the Patriarchs?
It should be emphasized that the Old Testament is not responsible for the confusion. Gen. 11.31 says about the starting point of the journey:
"And Terah took Abram, his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there. And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and Terah died in Haran."
This chapter of the Bible must have been very clear to its contemporaries; it was much less clear to modern scholars wishing to understand it. By defining Ur of the Chaldees, it signaled that there were more than one city with the name of Ur. This fact alone should have warned the scholars that the answer is not self-evident. The Old Testament did not add qualifiers to names of cities, unless there were more than one place with that name, and that gave a sign to which city it referred.
Gen.11. 11-12 wrote about the cities of Nineveh, Rehoboth, Calah and Resen, without mentioning that they were in Assyria. The listeners, or the readers, knew it and there was no need for qualification. In this particular case, there was more than one city, bearing the name Ur.
In addition, the Old Testament did not refer to Chaldees, it used the word Kassdim. The translation of Kassdim to Chaldeans is a mistake and an anachronism. The Chaldeans played a major role in southern Mesopotamia in the first millennium BC, but the story of Abram happened in the third millennium BC.
There is a problem about the exact meaning of the word 'Kassdim'. Some think that the word refers to the name 'Khaldu', one of the names of the Hurrians who later became the Kurds, or to 'Khaldis' the name of the congregation of gods in the Hurrian Pantheon. It is also possible that the word is a distortion of the name of the Kassites, an Indo-European tribe, also active in that area. So, there were many possible avenues to investigate, especially as the Bible clearly indicated that there was more than one city with that name. Why was it then identified as the Ur of the Sumerians on the lower Euphrates?
It seems that the reason is simple. There is one city, named Urfa, which is in the area of Haran. In classical times the city was called Edessah and Haran was called Carrhae, the site of Crassus' defeat by the Parthians. Muslim traditions connect Abraham with Urfa5 , Urhai in Aramaic, but the southern Ur was much better know. Leonard Woolley excavated it in the 20s. The place is called today the 'Tel al-Muqayyar' – 'the mound of bitumen' because its imposing Ziggurat was covered by bitumen. The town was discovered in the desert of Mesopotamia in 1854.
When modern scholars started to study the Bible, there was only one Ur on the map, Ur of southern Mesopotamia. Although, the second Ur was also known, at least in Turkey, but not in the circles of scholars. So it was neglected, or not even known about. Only the results of the excavations of Ebla put the northern Ur back to the scientific world. However, it seems that so many scientific reputations were in stake, that the southern Ur remained the preference of the scientific community, It is not the first time that scholarly reputations prove stronger than scientific truths.6
However, even the upholders of the scholarly reputations were aware that Ur on the lower Euphrates was not really suitable for a starting point of Abraham's journey, so they added explanations and embellishments. In that, ancient Jewish sources assisted them, adding their own embellishment, probably because of the same reason. They did not know about the existence of the second Ur, so they fitted the story to the known city. Thus, in an ancient Jewish legend, Terah was a merchant who sold clay idols, and Abraham who was supposed to mind the store, broke the idols to show his contempt. Modern scholars twisted that story and there were some that made of Abraham a man-about-town, who enjoyed the fleshpots of the city. Others, wishing to account for Abraham's journey first north, then back south and finally to Egypt and back again, decided that he was a donkey caravaneer7 plying the route between Mesopotamia and Egypt, trading all the way. This occupation would certainly account for the trip, and for the 318 armed retainers, who recovered Lot from the captivity of the king of Elam. However, it would not account for the company of his father, his wife and his nephew on the trip, nor for his herd of cattle, and that of Lot, which were so big that they were compelled to separate.
Apart of the testimony of the Old Testament itself, there were many reasons why Ur in lower Mesopotamia was not suitable to be Ur Kassdim of the Bible. Abraham was a man of means, owner of a large herd of cattle, and so was his nephew, Lot. The size of their herds compelled them to part ways in Canaan, because they wanted to avoid frictions between their herdsmen. The city of Ur on the lower Euphrates was a busy trading emporium; it had two harbors on the river and flourishing agriculture around it. Agriculture in desert condition means irrigation, so irrigation canals must have crisscrossed the area around the city. It was not a suitable environment for large-scale husbandry.
There is also another, much simpler question. Terah was from the valley of the Balikh, he had a village named after him there. His grandson, Lot had his father there, who was Terah's son. All their kin were in northern Mesopotamia. They certainly were not Sumerians and probably not Semitic. What were they doing in Ur and how they got there? In modern life it is common to move from one place to another. It certainly was not so in ancient times. If they were not born there from parents who themselves were citizens of the town, then they could not be citizens, so they could be neither merchants nor caravaneers. If they really were in Ur on the lower Euphrates, it would have been such an extraordinary event, that we would expect to receive some explanations, about the how and why.
So, Ur of the lower Euphrates was certainly not the starting point of Abraham's journey. But then, the Old Testament clearly says so in many places. Gen. 12.1 informs us that:
"Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house."
That was after Terah's death, The country, the kindred and his father's house were in Haran. In Gen. 24.2, Abraham repeats the instruction when instructing his servant to go back to the old country to find a suitable wife for Isaac:
"…but thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac."
And the servant went to the valley of the Balikh, unto the city of Nahor, but not before asking his master what to do, if he finds a girl and she will not want to return with him.
"And the servant said unto him. Peradventure the woman will not be willing to follow me unto this land, must I needs to bring thy son again unto the land whence thou camest?"
Abraham answers that he does not wish his son to return there, as it would be against the wishes of the Lord, "which took me from my father's house."
It cannot be clearer. Abraham came from the valley of the Balikh, there was his father's house, his kindred and his country. But the same notion returns again and again. Isaac received his wife from his old country, from his family, so did his son Jacob, who personally went to Haran to his uncle, Laban. These quotations are convincing enough, but there is another one, which points to the map, to show where Ur really was. In the Book of Joshua Chap.24.2 Joshua says farewell to the people:
"Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor; and they served other gods."
The flood in the Bible is always the river Euphrates. Map 6 clearly shows that Ur on the lower Euphrates was on the west side of the river, 'this side' from Canaan. The second Ur, in the valley of the Balikh, was on the east side of the Euphrates, the 'other side'.
The final and probably the most decisive non-biblical testimony came from the excavations of Ebla, were a tablet was found, writing about 'Ur in the district of Haran".8
So, Abraham has started his journey in Ur on the Balikh, continued to Haran, where his father Terah had died, and from then on to Canaan, the land that was promised by God. What did he find in Canaan? Judging from the testimony of the Bible, he found very little.
There is a chance remark in the Book of Genesis about the state of Canaan, (12.6) :"The Canaanites were then in the land" and another remark when he returned from Egypt and decided to part company with Lot to avoid future strife between their herdsmen,(Gen.13.7) "and the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelt then in the land." Apart of these two remarks, there is nothing. If Abraham had any human contact, apart of his family and retainers, it was with kings, in connection with his alliance against the Elamites, and with the Hittites in Hebron.
In his first itinerary in Canaan, he did not leave the central highland. After passing the Jordan, he reached Schechem, probably through the gap in the hills somewhere near Meggido, from there to Bethel and finally to Hebron. In fact he was moving through territory which was probably settled by Hittites, who might have had similar origin and background.9 It is not surprising that he did not meet many people, at least there is no report about meeting them, and also that he had to cut short his first visit because there was a famine in the land.
The sentence about the famine is one of those historical data that help to date the events. From the beginning of the 3rd millennium, or even before that, until about 2400 BC, there was a period of rainy climate in the Middle East. That was the period when Egypt was unified and when the first dynasties built the pyramids and other huge monuments. It is possible that the builders were coerced slaves, but even coerced people need food, which can be taken only from surplus. The very existence of surplus in an agriculture society means good climate. In Palestine and in the Levant in general, there was a demographic explosion and the creation of an economy whose main customer was Egypt.
They planted vineyards and orchards on the terraces of the valleys, and had flocks of sheep and goat, whose husbandry was local transhumance; winter pasture on the highlands and summer pasture on the stubble of the grainfields after the harvest. In addition, the forested hills provided timber to the Egyptian building industry. There was no unified political system. There were independent city-states. It was a decentralized country, with each city managing its affairs. For more than 500 years they had prosperity.
That prosperity had collapsed at about 2400 BC with the advent of an extended drought. The change of the climate affected Egypt as well, as the First Immediate Period was exactly at that time, and probably was caused by it, but it affected the economy of Egypt much less than that of the Levant. Egyptian agriculture, and economy, did not depend on rainfall, of which they had nothing at all, but on the water of the Nile, whose yearly flood reflected the climate of East and Central Africa, and not the local climate. The agriculture of Palestine and the Levant depended upon rainfall. An extended period of drought brought on the familiar sequence: land normally used to grow grain became steppe, and steppe turned into desert. The population which had grown out of all proportion in the good times of prosperity, had to find alternative places to survive. Some infiltrated Egypt, some went to Arabia and some to the rivers of northern Mesopotamia.10
Egypt was in a comparatively advantageous situation, and it was a prime target for would-be infiltrators and immigrants. It was probably not the first, and certainly not the last massive attempt of hungry people to enter Egypt by force. There is a scant information about this aspect in the First Intermediate Period. However, there is much more information about a similar situation at the end of the Bronze Age. That was at the time of the collapse of the Mycaenean civilization, about a millennium after Abraham, when Libyan invaders came with women and children, as their last chance for life was to enjoy Egypt's bounty, which was less dependent on climate than Libya was.11
Abraham's entry to Canaan and his trip to Egypt were probably at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. While Canaan might not have been exactly empty, still in the highlands where he spent his short visit, there probably were not many people. That area was probably suitable for grazing, but not for agriculture dependent on rain. So, the Old Testament recorded the fact that the Canaanites and the Perizzites were in the land, probably in the west along the seashore, and in the east in the valley of the Jordan.
There is an interesting sentence in Gen. 13.10, writing about the plain of the Jordan:
"…and Lot lifted his eyes and beheld all the plain of the Jordan, that it was well watered every where, before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt."
There was one common element between the valley of the Jordan, the Garden of Eden and the land of Egypt. Rivers, not depending on local conditions, watered all three. Admittedly, the Jordan was not exactly in the league of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates, but it was still better than the drought-stricken highlands.
About Abraham's visit to Egypt, there are two subjects. One of them concerns the story Sarah, her beauty and Abraham's concern about it, and his deceit in dealing with it. The second concerns the circumcision, which at that time was a specific Egyptian custom, and of Egypt alone, which became the visible sign of the Covenant.
The episode with Sarah, was probably one of the 'topos' which was common in stories at that time. It returned again with Abraham and the King of Gerar, and also with Isaac and Rebeccah. As a 'topos' it has no historical value, without place in a historical analysis. There are two comments about the Egyptian visit.
The first is that Sarah was beautiful and that beauty was visible to all. It was common for Egyptians, where women did not cover their faces, but it was not common for Semites. It is probably one of the signs for the ethnic origin of Abraham and Sarah. The second comment is about Abraham's meeting with Pharaoh. In normal circumstances, such a meeting would have been impossible, unless Abraham was a visiting royalty, or some very important person. However, the visit was in the First Intermediate period, with many Pharaohs at the same time, and it was probably easier for a visiting chieftain to meet one of them.
As for a possible influence of the Egyptian visit on later religious developments, the subject is treated in depth in the chapter titled, Religious Interlude.
Notes
| 1. |
J. Gordon Wenham, Word Biblical Commentary, Vol.I. WORD Books, Waco,1987, p.146
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| 2. |
Idem, p. 252; Unger, op.cit.,pp.112-113 ;Werner Keller, op.cit. pp.66 – 67; Furey,op.cit.,p4/9
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| 3. |
Gen.23.5-6; When Abraham wants to buy a burial plot in Hebron, the children of Heth (Hittites) said to him: "Hear us, my lord: thou are a mighty prince among us".
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| 4. |
The custom of naming settlement after the leaders was common to Indo-Europeans and Hurrians too. The religious customs were nearer to Indo-Europeans than to the Hurrians. "Yahweh" was certainly of Indo-European origin – it means 'overflowing' in Sanskrit. The cult of the 'teraphim' was definitely Indo-European and the name Abraham might have had some affinity to the Indo-European 'brahmins'. See Riane Eisler, op.cit. p.19/24; also Robert Graves, The White Goddess, op.cit. p.164
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| 5. |
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1987, Vol. 12, p.204. (Urfa): "it lies in the fertile plain of Haran, ringed by limestone hills on three sides. It is very old and controls the strategic pass to the south, through which runs a road used since antiquity to travel between Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. In the 2nd millennium BC it was probably the chief city of the Hurrians destroyed by the Hittites in the 14th century AD. Traditions of its earliest foundations refer to the legendary king Nimrod. Muslim legend associates the place with Abraham, whose birthplace is still shown there in a cave under the citadel."
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| 6. |
Charles F. Pfeiffer, Combined Bible Dictionary and Concordance, Baker Book House, Grand Rapid, 1999, p. 432, Gordon Wenham, op.cit. p. 272, Merrill T. Unger, op.cit.
pp. 107, 110, Howard F. Vos, op.cit. p. 58, Joseph P. Free, op.cit. p.46
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| 7. |
Ignatius Hunt, op.cit., pp. 48, 128
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| 8. |
Tablet No. 250, BAR, June 1977
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| 9. |
Numbers XIII.29, O.R. Gurney, op.cit.,p.50; Joseph P. Free, op.cit.,p.49, Keller, op.cit. p.111
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| 10. |
Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythical Past, op.cit., p.132
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| 11. |
Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age, Princeton Press, Princeton, 1993,pp.18-21
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