Class Five

 

Promise and Peril

Genesis 13 to Genesis 25 and the birth of two families

 

As Genesis 13 opens Abram goes back to where he started from between Bethel and Hai, to the altar he had built previously and called on the name of the LORD. There was a dispute  over grazing land for their grazing animals and Lot went to the plain of Jordan while Abram stayed in Canaan. God promises him all  the land that he sees in every direction and his offspring forever in an unconditional covenant. Abram finally ends up at Mamre, in the area of Hebron, where he builds another altar. Chapter 14 begins with a rebellion of five kings against their four overlords.

 

The local kings of  Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar were apparently tributaries of a coalition which consisted of Amraphel, king of Shinar, whose identity is discussed in the Catholic “New Advent” Encyclopedia, which I will quote here;

“The identity of Amraphel and Hammurabi is now unanimously accepted by Assyriologists and Biblical critics. Phonetically, the two names are identical. The variants of the second form are Ammi­rabi, Ammurapi, and Hammum­rabi, etc. Hammu, or Ammu, was in all probability the name of a god, as it is found in many compound names such as Sumu­hammu, Jasdi­hammu, and Zimri­hammu. The element rabi is very common in Babylonia, and it means "great"; the full name, consequently, means "The god Ammu is great", on the same analogy as names like Sin­rabi, Samas­rabi, and many others. According to Dr. Lindle, followed by Sayce and others, the name was also pronounced Ammurabi, and, so Dr. Pinches was the first to point out, the form Ammu­rapi is also met with by the side of Hammurabi, and like many of the Babylonian kings of that period, he was deified, being addressed as ilu­Ammurabi or Ammurabi­ilu, i.e. "Ammurabi the god", ilu being the equivalent of the Hebrew El, which means "god". Now Ammurabi­ilu or Ammurapilu is letter for letter the Amraphel, or Amrapel, of Genesis. According to another hypothesis, suggested by Dr. Husing, the l at the end of the form "Amraphel" is superfluous, for he would join it to the next word, and read: "And it came to pass in the days of Amraphel, as Arioch king of Ellasar was over Shinar, that Chodorlahomer . . ." Another, and according to Dr. Pinches perhaps more likely, explanation is that this additional letter l is due to a faulty reading of a variant writing of the name, with a polyphonous character having the value of pil, as well as bi, which form may, in fact, still be found. But whichever hypothesis we adopt, the identity of Amraphel and Hammurabi is phonetically beyond dispute.

The political situation presupposed in Gen., xiv, reflects, furthermore, with a remarkable degreee of probability, the condition of the times of Hammurabi's reign. The leader of the force and the suzerain to whom the Chanaanitish princes were subject, was a king of Elam. Elam, therefore, must have been the predominant power at the time, and the

 

 

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 Babylonian king must have been its vassal. The narrative, nevertheless, is dated in the reign of the Babylonian king, and not in that of the King of Elam, and it is to the reign of the Babylonian king that the events described in it are attached. Babylonia, however, was not a united country; there was another king, Arioch of Ellasar, who divided with the Amraphel of Sennaar the government of it, and like Amraphel, acknowledged the supremacy of Elam. Finally, the "nations" (goyim), whoever they were, were also subject to Elam, as well as the distant province of Chanaan. If we turn our glance to the political condition of Hammurabi's times and period, we shall find that the contemporary monuments of Babylonia are in perfect accord with the situation presupposed by Gen., xiv. “

Historians are not unanimous in this identification but do tell us that Hammurabi reigned for 43 years over Babylonia. After conquering his greatest enemies, building a great canal connecting Kish and the Persian Gulf for irrigation of a large area of land, and providing security and government to many tribes his reign may have gone into a decline. He built temples and coddled the clergy while at the same time doing great public works such as a bridge crossing the Euphrates. But, here, as part of this alliance he attempts to subdue these vassal states.

Ussher’s dating has this event occurring in 1912BC. The events of this chapter bear reading. (Read Genesis 14 aloud).

 

One thing to note is that these petty Canaanite kingdoms are little more than cities and their surrounding support areas ruled by kings which are more like mayors in our way of thinking or warlords. The area of Canaan was not one political entity and they spent a great deal of time fighting each other, engaging in trade, and only banding together in an alliance when faced with an outside threat and then only halfheartedly. Except under the nation of Israel and the European Crusader states, the area of Palestine has never been a cohesive political unit all its own, but rather the fodder of conquerors who passed through the region and recognized it as a strategic point between great centers of trade, such as Tyre, in Phoenicia, and Egypt. Look at the map and understand that for navies that had to travel close to land and be supported by and support an army marching along the coast, the area of Palestine or Canaan was very important.

 

To quote Durant, once again in his “The Story of Civilization, Volume 1, Our Oriental Heritage”; “The climatic history of the land tells us again how precarious a thing civilization is, and how its great enemies – barbarism and desiccation – are always waiting to destroy it. Once Palestine was “a land flowing with milk and honey”, as many a passage in the Pentateuch describes it. Josephus, in the first century after Christ, still speaks of it as “moist enough for agriculture, and very beautiful. They have abundance of

 

 

 

 

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trees and are full of autumn fruits both wild and cultivated….They are not naturally watered by many rivers, but derive their chief moisture from rain, of which they have no want.”  Try to reconcile that picture of Palestine with the one you see on your television screens today.

 

Abram’s ability to defeat this coalition with such a seemingly small number of people, 318, has to do with God’s supernatural favor using the tactical advantage of a night attack. Later, Gideon performs a similar feat against the Midianites.

 

The true identity of the king to whom Abram offers his tithe to is not a subject of this history study but has more to do with doctrinal applications of the Bible. We will attempt to limit our study to history and avoid doctrine except where that is impossible. In chapter 15 God asserts his promise to Abram and his PHYSICAL descendants of all of the land from the Nile, the river of Egypt, to the Euphrates, and dominion over the land that the descendants of Ham now currently occupied.

 

In chapter 16 we have the birth of Ishmael, the offspring of Abram, a descendant of Shem, and Hagar, the Egyptian, a descendant of Ham. We also have a prophecy of the way Ishmael’s descendants will interact with other peoples. This was not, by the way, the child he was promised, as the Bible makes clear. The Arab peoples look upon Ishmael as their common ancestor although many other people point out that Ishmael is only the father of the Ishmaelites. The term, Arab, is first found in Assyrian annals of the ninth to seventh century BC and the word probably means, nomad, according to “The Dictionary of the Ancient Near East”. One important thing to remember is that until the creation of modern Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and the petty states such as Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, etc. the Arabia peninsula had never been a single cultural or political unit, and even today, it is not. The Arabs always fought among themselves in tribal groupings and were only united by their common worship of many gods and ultimately by Islam, but that is a story for later.

 

In chapter 17, God changes Abram’s name to Abraham and commanded circumcision as a token of the covenant between them. This later spread to the Egyptians after the Jews lived in that country. Chapter 18 reinforces God’s promise of a son to Abraham through his wife, Sarah, which name was also changed, from Sarai, in chapter 17. God’s intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah is revealed in this chapter, as well. Although modern students of the Bible dispute as to the location of these two cities Ussher makes the following statement regarding them;

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“The monument of this (their destruction) remains to this day, even the Dead Sea,. The valley of Siddim, where these five cities stood in former times, was full of brimstone and salt pits. This has since grown into a vast lake which, because of the brimstone floating in it, is called Laces Asphaltitis or Lake of Brimstone and because of the salt, Mare Salsum or the Salt Sea.” He then refers to the historian, Solinus, for a description of the area.

 

I think it would be suitable to define “brimstone” here. It means “sulfur”. The American Heritage dictionary defines sulfur as “A pale yellow nonmetallic element occurring widely in nature in several free and combined allotropic (define) forms. It is used in black gunpowder, rubber vulcanization, the manufacture of insecticides and pharmaceuticals, and in the preparation of sulfur compounds such as hydrogen sulfide and sulfuric acid.”

According to a study initiated by the Institute for Petroleum and Organic Geochemistry, Juelich, Federal Republic of Germany, cited on the internet’s Department of Energy ‘Energy Citations Database’, the Dead Sea area is formed by oils, asphalts, and sulfur compounds. An interesting study would be for you to research the efforts by archaeologists to locate the cities that God destroyed at this time.

 

From reading the chronicle of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the perversion that plagued those cities and recalling the sexual content of ancient worship one can imagine the depraved nature of the ancient world. If you add this to the aforementioned manner in which the rebellious sons of God in Genesis 6 dealt with humanity we get a very negative picture of mankind’s moral standing before God.

 

Solinus was a Latin grammarian and historian of the 3^rd century AD, by the way.

 

In chapter 21, we see the first persecution of the Abraham’s child of promise, Isaac, by his older half-brother, Ishmael. Ussher begins the 400 year persecution until the Exodus from this point. See Galatians 4:29; Genesis 15:13; Acts 7:6. Ishmael, the son of an Egyptian, and the father of the Arab nations, according to them, is still persecuting Isaac. It is interesting to note that the late Yasir Arafat was an Egyptian. Isaac’s feast and Ishmael’s mocking occurred in 1891BC, according to Ussher’s chronology. Abraham’s testing with regard to Isaac’s “sacrifice” occurred in 1871BC according to the same chronology. Finally, Sarah’s death and Abraham’s first purchase of property in Canaan for her grave is given as 1859BC. Interestingly, Shem, Noah’s son, and Abraham’s ancestor doesn’t die until 1846BC. Dr. Floyd Nolen Jones in his 1993 “Chronology of the Old Testament” agrees in the main with Ussher, using computer models based on a literal application of the Bible.

 

At this time, traditional historians, believe the Middle Kingdom of Egypt was in power, starting with the 12^th dynasty with well trained, professional armies, including Nubian

 

 

 

 

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auxiliary units. According to “The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History”, we are right on the edge of the Hyksos invasion of Egypt, its first foreign invasion by semitic peoples who, according to Harper’s “introduced the horse and horse-drawn chariot in Egypt”. We’ll get to this later when we get to Joseph.

 

With this account we are also just before the Aryan migrations in India and the emergence of historical China. The earliest civilization that historians mention in India is the Mohenjo-Daro culture which they give as existent around 2900BC according to Durant.  India is not so much a nation as Egypt or Sumeria but more like Europe, a polyglot of languages and cultures on a sub-continent called South Asia. The river Indus, a thousand miles long, had its name from the native Punjabi word for river, sindhu, which the Persians, changing it to Hindu, applied to all of Northern India, as Hindustan, the land of the rivers. Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, on the Indus river, were discovered in 1924 and may represent a more advanced civilization than even Ur, with the lowest strata of excavation being a more advanced culture than the upper and possibly representing the pre-flood civilization. Some of the things found include “household utensils, dice, chess-men, coins older than any previously known, over a thousand engraved seals done in an unknown pictographic script, stone carvings superior to that of the Sumerians, copper weapons and tools, a copper model of a two wheeled cart; one of the oldest examples of this vehicle, gold and silver jewelry finished and finely polished in such a manner that they could have come from a modern jewelry store, and, as mentioned earlier, the finds get more detailed and spectacular the deeper the archaeologists look. Many believe that the civilization of Mohenjo-Daro was the oldest in the world. Durant laments that “In India, or elsewhere, the beginnings of civilization are buried in the earth, and not all the spades of archeology will ever quite exhume them”.

 

There are some students of Hindu religious literature such as the Vedas and the Mahabharata that insist that they contain verses that describe airplanes and spaceships, and even descriptions of nuclear warfare. While flying machines are also mentioned in Babylonian literature as being of quite ancient origin and also in Chaldean “writings” it is the claim that it may have been atomic warfare that destroyed Mohenjo-Daro which is most interesting. In 1979, David Davenport, an Englishman born living in India wrote a book that claimed that evidence of an event generating enormous heat is everywhere on the site of the city. However, most scientists regard his interpretation of the evidence as ranking right down there with Erik Von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods” book from the 1970’s.

 

A source devoted to studying ancient Indian religious literature contained the following;

“Only seven years after the first successful atom bomb blast in New Mexico, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) Scientist, philosopher, bohemian, and radical. A theoretical 

 

 

 

 

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physicist and the Supervising Scientist of the Manhattan Project, who was familiar with ancient Sanskrit literature, was giving a lecture at Rochester University. During the question and answer period a student asked a question to which Oppenheimer gave a strangely qualified answer:

Student: Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to be detonated?

Dr. Oppenheimer: "Well -- yes. In modern times, of course.””

 

Whatever is true or mere fantasy, Durant is probably correct and there are simply a great deal of things we will never know in this life.

 

Reliable historians state that no one knows where the Chinese came from, or what was the beginning of their race, or how old their civilization is. There is a great deal of fossil evidence in China and Mongolia to lead the atheistic scientist to conclude that Paleolithic, stone age man existed there for tens of thousands of years. But, since some of the most striking evidence of their early art and industry clearly came from Mesopotamia I would insist that once again we must look to the biblical narrative for answers. Some say that the Chinese descended from Ham, while others say Shem. Those who theorize that the Chinese came from Ham point to the son of Canaan called Heth. The cuneiform of the word Hittite is Khittae also known as Khitai which comes down to us as Cathay, an old word referring to the Chinese people. Quoting directly from Tim Osterholm who uses “Noah’s Three Sons” by Arthur Custance, “Genesis and Early Man” by the same author, Bill Cooper’s “After the Flood”, Henry Morris’ “The Genesis Record”, and Ruth Beechick’s “Genesis, Finding our Roots”, among others, as references;

 

“Sin (or Seni), a brother of Heth, has many occurrences in variant forms in the Far East.  There is one significant feature concerning the likely mode of origin of Chinese civilization.  The place most closely associated by the Chinese themselves with the origin of their civilization is the capital of Shensi, namely, Siang-fu (Father Sin).  Siang-fu appears in Assyrian records as Sianu.  Today, Siang-fu can be loosely

 

 

 

 

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translated, "Peace to the Western Capital of China".  The Chinese have a tradition that their first king, Fu-hi or Fohi (Chinese Noah), made his appearance on the Mountains of Chin, was surrounded by a rainbow after the world had been covered with water, and sacraficed animals to God (corresponding to the Genesis record).  Sin himself was the third generation from Noah, a circumstance which would provide the right time interval for the formation of early Chinese culture.

Furthermore, those who came from the Far East to trade were called Sinæ (Sin) by the Scythians.  Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer, referred to China as the land of Sinim or Sinæ.  Reference to the Sinim in Isaiah 49:12 notes they came "from afar," specifically not from the north and not from the west.  Arabs called China Sin, Chin, Mahachin, Machin.  The Sinæ were spoken of as a people in the remotest parts of Asia.  For the Sinæ, the most important town was Thinæ, a great trading emporium in Western China.  The city Thinæ is now known as Thsin or simply Tin, and it lies in the province of Shensi.  Much of China was ruled by the Sino-Khitan Empire (960-1126 A.D.), which Beijing became the southern capital.  The Sinæ became independent in Western China, their princes reigning there for some 650 years before they finally gained dominion over the whole land.

In the third century B.C., the dynasty of Tsin became supreme.  The word Tsin itself came to have the meaning of purebred.  This word was assumed as a title by the Manchu Emperors and is believed to have been changed into the form Tchina.  From there the term was brought into Europe as China, probably from the Ch'in or Qin dynasty (255-206 B.C.).  The Greek word for China is Kina (Latin is Sina).  As well, Chinese and surrouding languages are part of the Sino-Tibetan language family.  Years ago, American newspapers regularly carried headlines with reference to the conflict between the Chinese and Japanese in which the ancient name reappeared in its original form, the Sino-Japanese war.  Sinology refers to the study of Chinese history.

With respect to the Cathay people of historical reference, it would make sense to suppose that the remnants of the Hittites, after the destruction of their empire, travelled towards the east and settled among the Sinites who were relatives, contributing to their civilization, and thus becoming the ancestors of the Asian people groups.  Still others migrated throughout the region and beyond, making up present-day Mongoloid races in Asia and the Americas.  The evidence strongly suggests that Ham's grandsons, Heth (Hittites/Cathay) and Sin (Sinites/China), are the ancestors of the Mongoloid peoples.”

 

We will have much more to say about China and India as we move forward. These nations are particularly important in today’s world with regard to geopolitics and for conditions at the end time. Sam Cohen, father of the neutron bomb, in his book, “Shame”, has prophesied that in twenty years Asia will be using as much oil in a day as we do now in a year and will be importing more than half of it. This has serious implications when considering the ongoing struggles in the Middle East and Revelation’s “kings of the east” in Revelation sixteen.

 

 

 

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The doctrinal applications of Abraham’s testing by God in chapter 22, dated at around 1871BC by Ussher, are not the subject of this study but different theologians give Isaac’s age as 25 to 35 at the time of this test of Abraham’s faithfulness.

 

Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and Isaac’s mother, dies and is buried in Hebron in a cave in a field Abraham purchased from the “sons of Heth”.

 

Chapter 24 deals with Abraham’s servant fetching a bride for Isaac from among his own people and Genesis 25 reveals Esau selling his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew. Esau aka Edom plays significant roles in future history as an enemy of Israel, although Esau himself eventually loses his own personal enmity against his brother. Edom, also called Seir, is part of the country of Jordan. In Roman times it was known as Idumea, the origin of the Herods, puppet rulers of Judea. It’s worship of the spring festival of Ishtar is believed to be the reasoning for the King James translators controversial translation in Acts 12:4. Edom, meaning red, and taken from the red pottage he bargained his birthright away for, used red in its banners, as Idumea, and was characterized by a particularly bloody reign over Judea.

 

One of the principal wonders of the area of Edom is the rock city of Petra, which figured into the movie, ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’. It wasn’t built until much later in history, presumably around the 6^th century BC by Nabatean Arabs but I thought I would mention it here as nail to hang your memory of Edom upon as this area has a significant role to play in end time prophecy according to many Bible commentators.

 

Now, I want to talk about the Hittite empire mentioned in the Table of Nations reference earlier. Most of traditional or non-Biblical scholars information about the Hittites comes from thousands of clay tablets excavated from their capital, Hattusas. The ‘Dictionary of the Ancient Near East’ claims that their power finally ended around 1200BC. However, Snell, in ‘Life in the Ancient Near East’, states that the texts that the knowledge about the Hittites is based on are hard to date and therefore, one would conclude, that any absolute dating by traditional historians is unsure. Durant claims that the Egyptians of this period mentioned importing iron from the Hittites. He states that they had spread their influence from south of the Black Sea to the area of Babylon. This would be around the time of Abraham’s journeys. Abraham buries Sarah and is buried by Isaac and Ishmael in a plot of land he purchased from a Hittite.