The ephod after which Israel went ‘a whoring,’ was not dedicated at Shiloh but at Ophrah, a few miles to the north; and Baal-berith in the Ephraimitish city of Shechem had more worshippers than Yahveh of Shiloh. Just as the spirit of Judaism was kept alive in the age of the Maccabees among a small remnant of the people, amid the obscurity of a country town, so in the time of the Judges the spirit of the law was preserved among the mountains of Ephraim in the midst of an insignificant body of priests. It was not only with the Canaanites and with its own internal disorganisation and dissensions that the infant nation of Israel was called upon to contend. Foreign invasion followed quickly on the settlement in Palestine. We have learnt from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna that already before the days of the Exodus the kings of Mesopotamia had cast longing eyes upon Canaan. To the Semites of the west Mesopotamia was known as Naharaim, or Aram Naharaim, ‘Aram of the Two Rivers,’ the Euphrates and Tigris, and the name was borrowed by the Egyptians under its Aramaic form of Naharain or Nahrina.[288] The leading state of Mesopotamia had for some centuries been Mitanni, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Carchemish, and the rulers of Mitanni had made themselves masters not only of the district between the Euphrates and the Tigris, but also of the country westward to the Orontes. In the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty Mitanni was the most powerful of the Asiatic kingdoms, and the Pharaohs themselves did not disdain to unite their solar blood with that of its royal family. From time to time, the Tel el-Amarna correspondence teaches us, the princes of Mitanni had interfered in the affairs of Palestine. Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia, declares that ‘from of old’ the kings of Mitanni had been hostile to the ancestors of the Pharaoh, and his letters are filled with complaints that the Amorites to the north of Palestine had revolted against Egypt with the help of Mitanni and Babylonia. Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem, who uses the name Nahrina or Naharain like the writers of the Old Testament, refers to the struggles that had taken place on the waters of the Mediterranean when Nahrina and Babylonia held possession of Canaan. ‘When the ships,’ he says, ‘were on the sea, the arm of the Mighty King (the god of Jerusalem) overcame Nahrima and Babylonia; yet now the Khabiri have overcome the cities of the king’ (of Egypt in Southern Palestine).[289]