This portion of the patriarch’s history is not one which can be very easily dealt with, the incident being told very shortly, and no Egyptian names being given—in fact, it is altogether destitute of “local colouring” necessarily so, from the brevity of the narrative. At Haran, the patriarch and the members of his family probably saw people to a great extent of the type to which they had been accustomed in Babylonia, but in the land of Canaan they would notice some difference, though they all spoke a Semitic language, like themselves. Indeed, it is not at all improbable that wherever the ancestor of the Hebrews went, he found the Semitic Babylonian language at least understood, for as the Babylonian king claimed dominion over all this tract as far as the Mediterranean, the language of his country was fast becoming what it certainly was a few hundred years later, namely, the _lingua franca_ of the whole tract as far as Egypt, where also, to all appearance, Abraham and his wife had no difficulty in making themselves understood. According to Gen. x. 6, Canaan, into whose country Abraham journeyed with the object of settling, was the descendant of Cush, and the inhabitants ought therefore to have spoken a Hamitic language. Historically, however, this cannot be proved, but it is certain that if the Canaanites spoke a Hamitic language, they soon changed it for the speech which they seem to have used as far back as history can go, this speech being closely akin to Hebrew. In fact, there is very little doubt that Abraham and his descendants, forsaking their mother-tongue, the language of Babylonia, adopted the dialect of the Canaanitish language, which they afterwards spoke, and which is so well known at the present day as Hebrew. To all appearance Abraham’s relatives, who remained in Mesopotamia, in “the city of Nahor,” spoke a dialect of Aramaic, a language with which Abraham himself must have been acquainted, and which may have been spoken in Babylonia at that early date, as it certainly was, together with Chaldean, later on.