In Jacob the Israelites saw their peculiar ancestor.  His twelve sons became the fathers and representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel, and his own name was changed to that of Israel.  The inscribed tablets of early Babylonia have taught us that both Israel and Ishmael were the names of individuals in the Patriarchal age, not the names of tribes or peoples, and consequently the Israelites, like the Ishmaelites, of a later day must have been the descendants of an individual Israel and Ishmael as the Old Testament records assert.  Already in the reign of the Babylonian king Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of Amraphel, the contemporary of Abraham, a high-priest in the district of northern Chaldasa assigned to “Amorite” settlers from Canaan, bore the name of Sar-ilu or Israel.[1]

The fuller and older form of Jacob is Jacob-el.  We find it in contracts drawn up in Babylonia in the time of Abraham; we also find it as the name of an Egyptian king in the period when Egypt was ruled by Asiatic conquerors.  The latter fact is curious, taken in connection with the further fact, that the son of the Biblical Jacob—­the progenitor of the Israelites—­was the viceroy of an Egyptian Pharaoh, and that his father died in the Egyptian land of Goshen.  Goshen was the district which extends from Tel el-Maskhuta or Pithom near Ismailiya to Belbeis and Zagazig, and includes the modern Wadi Tumilat; the traveller on the railway passes through it on his way from Ismailiya to Cairo.  It lay outside the Delta proper, and, as the Egyptian inscriptions tell us, had from early times been handed over to the nomad Bedawin and their flocks.  Here they lived, separate from the native agriculturists, herding their flocks and cattle, and in touch with their kinsmen of the desert.  Here, too, the children of Israel were established, and here they multiplied and became a people.

The growth of a family into a tribe or people is in accordance with Arab rule.  There are numerous historical instances of a single individual becoming the forefather of a tribe or a collection of tribes which under favourable conditions may develop into a nation.  The tribe or people is known as the “sons” of their ancestor; his name is handed down from generation to generation, and the names of his leading descendants, the representatives of the tribe, are handed down at the same time.  Where we speak of the population of a country, the Arab speaks of the “children” of a certain man.  Such a mode of expression is in harmony with Semitic habits of thought.  The genealogical method prevails alike in history and geography; a colony is the “daughter” or “son” of its mother-city, and the town of Sidon is the “first-born” of Canaan.