We have here made some assumptions which may be all wrong. I am often asked with much concern whether Hammurabi really is Amraphel. Now that is a question which cannot possibly be answered until much else has been answered first. Hammurabi we know; his life and reign are as well or better known than those of the Saxon kings of England. But who was Amraphel? All we know of him is contained in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. He is there said to be King of Shinar. If Shinar in that passage means what it clearly means elsewhere, he was a king of Babylonia, or at least of some part of that land for which Shinar is used as a synonym. But even if Shinar does not certainly mean Singara, part of Assyria, it could quite well be a part of the Mesopotamian area with which the early Israelites became acquainted, and so transferred its name to all Babylonia. But Hammurabi is never said to be King of Shinar, nor of any land but Amurru, Akkad, Elam, &c., or Sumer. The latter name means South Babylonia, where Rîm-Sin of Larsa maintained his supremacy in spite of Hammurabi until his thirty-first year. Till then no one could call Hammurabi King of Sumer, and then it is certain he could be no ally with Rîm-Sin. Hammurabi was, however, always King of Babylon. He could hardly have been called King of Shinar by any one who knew anything about his history. How comes Hammurabi’s name to be rendered by Amraphel? We know that his name was variously rendered in cuneiform, being a foreign name to the Babylonian scribes. But they never spell his name as ending in _l_. It has been suggested that one character which denotes _bi_ and can also be read _bil_ may have misled some Hebrew writer who transcribed the cuneiform account which he found among the archives of some ancient city in Palestine. There is nothing whatever improbable in such ancient cuneiform records being kept. The discovery of the Tell-el-Amarna tablets proves that the kings of Palestine before the Israelite invasion wrote to their neighbours far and near in cuneiform and in the Babylonian language, and also that they spoke a language closely related to Hebrew. But there is no evidence that they misread cuneiform. Let us go on with the assumptions supposed to have restored the credibility of the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. The first point has been that, assuming a cuneiform record to be translated by a Hebrew writer (? Moses) who knew some cuneiform Babylonian, that writer blundered into misreading the name of one of the most celebrated kings of Babylon, with whose history he must have been little acquainted and whose name he found written in a way to which there is no known parallel. Further, he called him King of Shinar. No tenable suggestion has yet been made as to what cuneiform signs he rendered by Shinar. There also he must have found something to which there is no parallel in the native titles of Hammurabi. There is not a single reason in anything said of Amraphel to