was in force.  From time to time Syria and Canaan had obeyed the rule of the Babylonian kings, and been formed into a Babylonian province.  In fact, Babylonian rule did not come to an end in the west till after the death of Abraham; Khammurabi, the Amraphel of Genesis, entitles himself king of “the land of the Amorites,” as Palestine was called by the Babylonians, and his fourth successor still gives himself the same title.  The loss of Canaan and the fall of the Babylonian empire seem to have been due to the conquest of Babylon by a tribe of Elamite mountaineers.

The Babylonians of Abraham’s age were Semites, and the language they spoke was not more dissimilar from Canaanitish or Hebrew than Italian is from Spanish.  But the population of the country had not always been of the Semitic stock.  Its first settlers—­those who had founded its cities, who had invented the cuneiform system of writing and originated its culture—­were of a wholly different race, and spoke an agglutinative language which had no resemblance to that of the Semites.  They had, however, been conquered and their culture absorbed by the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians of later history, and the civilisation and culture which had spread throughout western Asia was a Semitic modification and development of the older culture of Chaldaea.  Its elements, indeed, were foreign, but long before it had been communicated to the nations of the west it had become almost completely Semitic in character.  The Babylonian conquerors of Canaan were Semites, and the art and trade, the law and literature they brought with them were Semitic also.

In passing, therefore, from Babylonia to Canaan, Abraham was but passing from one part of the Babylonian empire to another.  He was not migrating into a strange country, where the government and civilisation were alike unknown, and the manners and customs those of another world.  The road he traversed had been trodden for centuries by soldiers and traders and civil officials, by Babylonians making their way to Canaan, and by Canaanites intending to settle in Babylonia for the sake of trade.  Harran, the first stage on his journey, bore a Babylonian name, and its great temple of the Moon-god had been founded by Babylonian princes after the model of the temple of the Moon-god at Ur, the birthplace of the patriarch.  Even in Canaan itself the deities of Babylonia were worshipped or identified with the native gods.  Anu the god of the sky, Rimmon the god of the air, Nebo the interpreter and prophet of Bel-Merodach, were all adored in Palestine, and their names were preserved to later times in the geography of the country.  Even Ashtoreth, in whom all the other goddesses of the popular cult came to be merged, was of Babylonian origin.