Upon the real origin of the latter name, however, recent discovery has thrown light. It is the third person singular of a verb, and is formed like numerous names of the same class in Arabic and Assyrian. But the third person singular of a verb implies a nominative, and the nominative was originally a divine name or title. In familiar use the nominative came to be dropped, and the shortened form of the name to be alone employed. The older form of the name Jacob has now been recovered from the monuments of Babylonia and Egypt. Among the Canaanites who appear as witnesses to Babylonian contracts of the age of Khammu-rabi, Mr. Pinches has found a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el, ‘God will recompense,’ ‘God will add.’[79] The same names, though written a little differently,[80] are met with in contracts earlier than the time of Moses, which have been discovered near Kaisariyeh, in Cappadocia, and are inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform characters and in a Babylonian dialect. We can thus trace them from the primitive home of Abraham to the neighbourhood of that Aramæan district of Northern Mesopotamia in which his father settled. But this is not all. Among the places in Palestine conquered by Thothmes III. of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, and recorded on the walls of his temple at Karnak, we find a Jacob-el and a Joseph-el. In Canaan, therefore, the names were already current; it may even be that in the town of Jacob-el we have a reminiscence of the patriarch, in Joseph-el a connection with the ancestor of the ‘House of Joseph.’ At all events, the name of Joseph-el follows immediately after that of the ‘Har’ or ‘Mountain’ of Ephraim, while that of Jacob-el is placed in the neighbourhood of Hebron.[81] The name of Jacob-el can be carried still further back than the age of Thothmes III., further back probably than the age of the patriarch himself. There are Egyptian scarabs which bear the name of a Pharaoh called Jacob-el. The first part of the name is written just as it would be in Hebrew, and the Pharaoh is given all the titles of a legitimate Egyptian king. On one he is ‘the good God,’ on another ‘the son of the Sun,’ and ‘the giver of life.’ The scarabs belong to the period of the Hyksos, and in the Pharaoh Jacob-el we must accordingly see one of those Hyksos conquerors from Asia who ruled over Egypt for so many centuries. There was thus a Jacob in Egypt before the patriarch migrated there, and he belonged to that Hyksos race under whom Joseph rose to the highest honours of the state.[82]