About 2100 B. C. Babylonia had a king known far and wide for the laws he made. His name was Hammurabi, and we still have the laws he made though we no longer obey them; for they were carved into a stone in cuneiform, and we have the stone. Sargon and Hammurabi are strange names like no one’s name you ever heard before, yet they are real names of real kings who ruled over real people. [Illustration] 9 The Wandering Jews “You are” spells “Ur.” It is one of the shortest names I know. It is the name of a little place in that part of Babylonia called Chaldea. In this place--about nineteen hundred years B.C.--there lived a man named Abraham. Abraham had a very large family and though he had no money he was rich. He had large herds of sheep and goats, and these were the chief riches in those days. Now, Abraham believed in one God, as we do, while his neighbors, the Babylonians, worshiped idols and the heavenly bodies, such as the sun, moon, and stars, as I have just said. Abraham did not like his neighbors for this reason; and his neighbors didn’t like him, either, for they thought his ideas were peculiar or even crazy. So, about nineteen hundred years before Christ, Abraham took his large family, his flocks, and his herds and moved to a land called Canaan, far away on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Abraham lived to be a very old man, and he had a large family. One of his grandsons named Jacob, who was also known by the name of Israel, had a son Joseph. You probably remember the Bible story of Jacob’s favorite son Joseph with the coat of many colors. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him, as boys and even dogs are apt to be jealous of any one who is liked better than they are. So they put Joseph into a well and then sold him as a slave to some Egyptians who were passing by. Then they told their father Jacob that Joseph had been killed by wild animals. The Egyptians took Joseph to far-off Egypt--far away from Canaan. [Illustration: Abraham leaving Ur. 1900 B.C.] But although Joseph was a slave in Egypt, and although, as I told you, it was very difficult for any one to work his way up out of his class to a higher class, he was so bright that at last he became one of the rulers in Egypt. Now, at that time when he was ruler there came a famine in Canaan and there was no food. In Egypt, however, there was plenty of food stored up. So Joseph’s wicked brothers went down to Egypt to beg the rulers for bread. They probably thought by that time their brother was dead. They did not know that he had become such a great man and that he was now the ruler of whom they were begging food. You can imagine how surprised they were and how ashamed they must have felt when they found out that the great ruler was their own brother, whom they had planned to kill and then had sold as a slave.