Once more the curtain falls, and Canaan is hidden for a while out of our sight.  Babylonia has become a united kingdom with its capital and centre at Babylon.  Khammurabi (B.C. 2356-2301) has succeeded in shaking off the suzerainty of Elam, in overthrowing his rival Eri-Aku, king of Larsa, with his Elamite allies, and in constituting himself sole monarch of Babylonia.  His family seems to have been in part, if not wholly, of South Arabian extraction.  Their names are Arabian rather than Babylonian, and the Babylonian scribes found a difficulty in transcribing them correctly.  But once in the possession of the Babylonian throne, they became thoroughly national, and under Khammurabi the literary glories of the court of Sargon of Akkad revived once more.

Ammi-satana, the great-grandson of Khammurabi, calls himself king of “the land of the Amorites.”  Babylonia, therefore, still claimed to be paramount in Palestine.  Even the name of the king is an indication of his connection with the West.  Neither of the elements of which it is composed belonged to the Babylonian language.  The first of them, Ammi, was explained by the Babylonian philologists as meaning “a family,” but it is more probable that it represents the name of a god.  We find it in the proper names both of Southern and of Northwestern Arabia.  The early Minsaean inscriptions of Southern Arabia contain names like Ammi-karib, Ammi-zadiqa, and Ammi-zaduq, the last of which is identical with that of Ammi-zaduq, the son and successor of Ammi-satana.  The Egyptian Sinuhit, who in the time of the twelfth dynasty fled, like Moses, for his life from the court of the Pharaoh to the Kadmonites east of the Jordan, found protection among them at the hands of their chieftain Ammu-anshi.  The Ammonites themselves were the “sons of Ammi,” and in numerous Hebrew names we find that of the god.  Ammi-el, Ammi-nadab, and Ammi-shaddai are mentioned in the Old Testament, the Assyrian inscriptions tell us of Ammi-nadab the king of Ammon, and it is possible that even the name of Balaam, the Aramaean seer, may be compounded with that of the god.  At all events, the city of Pethor from which he came was “by the river (Euphrates) of the land of the children of Ammo,” for such is the literal rendering of the Hebrew words.

Ammi-satana was not the first of his line whose authority had been acknowledged in Palestine.  The inscription in which he records the fact is but a confirmation of what had been long known to us from the Book of Genesis.  There we read how Chedor-laomer, the king of Elam, with the three vassal princes, Arioch of Ellasar, Amraphel of Shinar, and Tidal of Goyyim invaded Canaan, and how the kings of the vale of Siddim with its pits of asphalt became their tributaries.  For thirteen years they remained submissive and then rebelled.  Thereupon the Babylonian army again marched to the west.  Bashan and the eastern bank of the Jordan were subjugated, the Horites in Mount Seir were smitten, and the invaders then turned back