The early history of the HebrewsSayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
History
The early history of the Hebrews
Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Bible. Old Testament -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Jews -- History -- To 953 B.C.
The name of Moab (or Muab) is engraved among the conquests of the
Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II., on the base of one of the statues which
stand before the northern entrance of the temple of Luxor. Ammi, whose
‘son’ the ancestor of the Ammonites was called, was the supreme God of
Ammon, standing to the Ammonites in the same relation that Chemosh stood
to Moab, or Yahveh to Israel. Ammon, indeed, is but another form of
Ammi. The god was widely worshipped, as we may learn from the proper
names into which his own name enters. Thus the Old Testament knows of
Ammiel, ‘Ammi is god’; of Ammi-shaddai, ‘Ammi is the Almighty’; and of
Ammi-nadab, ‘Ammi is noble.’ Ammi-nadab was king of Ammon in the time of
the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal; the early Minæan inscriptions of
Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-zadoq and Ammi-zadiqa, ‘Ammi is
righteous,’ as well as Ammi-karib and Ammi-anshi; while among the kings
of the south Arabian dynasty which ruled over Babylonia in the age of
Abraham we find Ammi-zadoq, or Ammu-zadoq and Ammi-dhitana; and the
Kadmonite chieftain east of the Jordan, with whom the Egyptian fugitive
Sinuhit found a home in the time of the twelfth dynasty, bore the name
of Ammi-anshi.[51] Balaam the seer, moreover, was summoned by the king
of Moab from his city of Pethor, at the junction of the Euphrates and
the Sajur, in ‘the land of the children of Ammo,’—for such is the
correct translation of the Hebrew text. It may not be an accident that
one who thus belonged to the ‘Beni-Ammo,’ or ‘Ammonites’ of the north,
should have been called to the country which bordered on that of the
Beni-Ammi, or Ammonites of the south.[52]
A few miles to the north of Pethor was Carchemish, now Jerablûs, which
was destined to become one of the most important strongholds of the
Hittite tribes. The Semites explained the name as ‘the fortified wall of
Chemosh’;[53] and whether this etymology were true or not, at all events
it indicates a belief that the worship of Chemosh extended as far
northward into Aram as did the worship of Ammi. Chemosh was the national
god of Moab. Like Yahveh of Israel and Assur in Assyria, he had neither
wife nor children; and on the Moabite Stone even the Babylonian goddess
Ashtar, whose cult had been carried to the West, is identified with him.
She ceases to have any independent existence or sex of her own, and is
absorbed into the one supreme deity of Moabite faith. It is probable
that Ammi also was similarly conceived of as standing alone in jealous
isolation, supreme over all other gods, and having no consort with whom
to share his power.
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