Ebed-Tob reiterates that he was not, like the other governors of Canaan, under Egyptian rule. They had been appointed to their offices by the Pharaoh, or had inherited them by descent from the older royal lines of the country whom the Egyptian Government had allowed to remain. He, on the contrary, was the friend and ally of the Egyptian king. His kingly dignity had not been derived from either father or mother, but from the ‘Mighty King,’ from the god, that is to say, whose temple stood on ‘the mountain of Jerusalem.’ He was, therefore, a priest-king, without father or mother, so far as his royal office was concerned.[39] That the king of Salem, the priest of the God of Peace, should have come forth from his city and its temple to welcome the conqueror when he returned in peace, was both natural and fitting. It was equally natural and fitting that he should bless the Hebrew in the name of the ‘Most High God’—the patron deity of Jerusalem, whom Ebed-Tob identifies with the Babylonian Ninip—and that Abram should in return have given him tithes of the spoil. From time immemorial, the _esrâ_ or tithe had been exacted in Babylonia for the temples and their priests, and had been paid alike by prince and peasant. It passed to the West along with the other elements and institutions of Babylonian culture.[40] The destruction of the cities of the Vale of Siddim, which is represented as occurring not long after the retreat of the king of Elam, made a profound impression on the Western world. References are made to the catastrophe up to the latest days of Hebrew literature; and the mist caused by the evaporation of the salt on the surface of the Dead Sea was popularly supposed to be the smoke which hung eternally over the ruins of the doomed cities of the plain. The storm which burst from the heavens set fire to the naphtha springs that oozed through the soil, and houses and men alike were enveloped in a sheet of fire. Similar catastrophes have happened in our own time at Baku on the Caspian, where the petroleum, accidentally ignited, has blazed for days in columns of fire.