To the Hebrews, the wanderings and fortunes of their forefathers appeared compressed into the lives of the patriarchs, whose mighty forms are also to them the patterns of morality, piety, and a life pleasing to God, the expression of the genuine national character. The name Abraham means, in the form ab-ram, "high father;" in the form ab-raham, "father of the multitude." Sarah means "princess." Their right to the possessions, which they won in Canaan by the sword, they saw in the command given to their ancestors to go thither, and in the promise that the land should belong to his seed, which is given to Abraham, even in the first text. Moreover, the purchase which Abraham concluded with the Hittites of Hebron of a burying-place for his wife and himself in the cave of Machpelah--this narrative is a part of the Judæan text--and the services rendered by Abraham to Canaan gave to his descendants a claim to the possession of Canaan. Abraham planted the trees at Beersheba, and dug wells; he defended Canaan against Kedor-Laomer, and recovered from the kings of the east the booty taken, without keeping back any for himself. These services of the progenitor also constituted a claim for his descendants. The accounts in Genesis[590] of campaigns of Elamite rulers towards the west, and the supremacy of a king of Elam, one of the Kudurids, over Syria, are founded on events and circumstances which occurred about the year 2000 B.C., as has been already pointed out in detail (p. 251). The connection into which Abraham is brought with them is the work of the Hebrews, and belongs to the Ephraimitic text.[591] The account which puts the Horites, who occupied Mount Seir before the Edomites, among the nations conquered by the Elamites, and beside these certain extinct and mythical tribes--the Rephaites, Susites, and Emites--shows plainly that the events must belong to a very distant past.