The Hittites : $b The story of a forgotten empireSayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
History
The Hittites : $b The story of a forgotten empire
Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Hittites
Now it will be noticed that the prophet ascribes the foundation of
Jerusalem to the Amorite as well as the Hittite. The Jebusites,
accordingly, from whose hands the city was wrested by David, must have
belonged to one or other of these two great races; perhaps, indeed, to
both. At all events, we find elsewhere that the Hittites and Amorites
are closely interlocked together. It was so at Hebron, where in the time
of Abraham not only Ephron the Hittite dwelt, but also the three sons of
the Amorite Mamre (Gen. xiv. 13). The Egyptian monuments show that the
two nations were similarly confederated together at Kadesh on the
Orontes. Kadesh was a Hittite stronghold; nevertheless it is described
as being 'in the land of the Amaur' or Amorites, and its king is
depicted with the physical characteristics of the Amorite, and not of
the Hittite. Further north, in the country which the Hittites had made
peculiarly their own, cities existed which bore names, it would seem,
compounded with that of the Amorite, and the common Assyrian title of
the district in which Damascus stood, Gar-emeris, is best explained as
'the _Gar_ of the Amorites.' Shechem was taken by Jacob 'out of the hand
of the Amorite' (Gen. xlviii. 22), and the Amorite kingdom of Og and
Sihon included large tracts on the eastern side of the Jordan. South of
Palestine the block of mountains in which the sanctuary of Kadesh-barnea
stood was an Amorite possession (Gen. xiv. 7, Deut. i. 19, 20); and we
learn from Numb. xiii. 29, that while the Amalekites dwelt 'in the land
of the south' and the Canaanites by the sea and in the valley of the
Jordan, the Hittites and Jebusites and Amorites lived together in the
mountains of the interior. Among the five kings of the Amorites against
whom Joshua fought (Josh. x. 5) were the king of Jerusalem and the king
of Hebron.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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