_King_--Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? _Prophet_--Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? _King_--Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? _Prophet_--He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?[2] In the Book of Numbers we find that Balaam had been sent for from another country, and came from the city of Pethor. Now, in the temple of Karnak, Thothmes III. gives a list of two hundred and eighteen towns in Syria and Aram, which he claims to have conquered, and among them we find Pethor. It was a city on the Upper Euphrates, not far from Carchemish, and so was well within the circle of the Hittite dominion. Balaam, then, may be regarded as a Hittite, or as belonging to the Hittite confederacy,[3] and since the text quoted shows his idea of the Divine requirements, it indicates the standard of duty which had been arrived at by some among that people. The rock inscriptions prove that the Hittites possessed a written language, and this is further shown by their engraved treaty sent to Rameses II. They appear even to have possessed a literature, for the Egyptian records mention a certain Khilp-sira as a writer of books among the Hittites. One of their cities in the south of Palestine was called Kirjath-Sepher, or Book-Town, so that the place must have been noted for writings of some kind. The fact that the copy of the treaty sent to Rameses was engraved upon a silver plate, with a figure of the god Sutekh in the middle, shows that the Hittites were an artistic people also. In fact their civilisation was far advanced. “They had walled towns, chased metal work, chariots and horses, skilled artificers. They could carve in stone, and could write in hieroglyphic character. All this wonderful cultivation they possessed while Israel as yet was hardly a nation. Thus the Bible account of the Canaan overrun by Joshua is fully confirmed by monumental evidence.”[4] [_Authorities and Sources_:--“A History of Egypt under the Pharaohs.” By Henry Brugsch-Bey. “The Empire of the Hittites.” By William Wright, D.D. “The Hittites: the Story of a forgotten Empire.” By A. H. Sayce, LL.D. “Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology.”] 5. _Semites in Egypt before the Oppression._