Lagamar or Lagamer, written Laomer in Hebrew, was one of the principal deities of Elam, and the Babylonians made him a son of their own water-god Ea.  The Elamite king Chedor-laomer, or Kudur-Lagamar, as his name was written in his own language, must have been related to the Elamite prince Kudur-Mabug, whose son Arioch was a subject-ally of the Elamite monarch.  Possibly they were brothers, the younger brother receiving as his share of power the title of “father”—­not “king”—­of Yamutbal and the land of the Amorites.  At any rate it is a son of Kudur-Mabug and not of the Elamite sovereign who receives a principality in Babylonia.

In the Book of Genesis Arioch is called “king of Ellasar.”  But Ellasar is clearly the Larsa of the cuneiform inscriptions, perhaps with the word al, “city,” prefixed.  Larsa, the modern Senkereh, was in Southern Babylonia, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, not far from Erech, and to the north of Ur.  Its king was virtually lord of Sumer, but he claimed to be lord also of the north.  In his inscriptions Eri-Aku assumes the imperial title of “king of Sumer and Akkad,” of both divisions of Babylonia, and it may be that at one time the rival king of Babylon acknowledged his supremacy.

Who “Tidal king of Goyyim” may have been we cannot tell.  Sir Henry Rawlinson has proposed to see in Goyyim a transformation of Gutium, the name by which Kurdistan was called in early Babylonia.  Mr. Pinches has recently discovered a cuneiform tablet in which mention is made, not only of Eri-Aku and Kudur-Lagamar, but also of Tudkhul, and Tudkhul would be an exact transcription in Babylonian of the Hebrew Tidal.  But the tablet is mutilated, and its relation to the narrative of Genesis is not yet clear.  For the present, therefore, we must leave Tidal unexplained.

The name even of one of the Canaanite kings who were subdued by the Babylonian army has found its confirmation in a cuneiform inscription.  This is the name of “Shinab, king of Admah.”  We hear from Tiglath-pileser iii. of Sanibu, king of Ammon, and Sanibu and Shinab are one and the same.  The old name of the king of Admah was thus perpetuated on the eastern side of the Jordan.

It may be that the asphalt of Siddim was coveted by the Babylonian kings.  Bitumen, it is true, was found in Babylonia itself near Hit, but if Amiaud is right, one of the objects imported from abroad for Gudea of Lagas was asphalt.  It came from Madga, which is described as being “in the mountains of the river Gur(?)ruda.”  But no reference to the place is to be met with anywhere else in cuneiform literature.

When Abram returned with the captives and spoil of Sodom, the new king came forth to meet him “at the valley of Shaveh, which is the king’s dale.”  This was in the near neighbourhood of Jerusalem, as we gather from the history of Absalom (2 Sam. xviii. 18).  Accordingly we further read that at the same time “Melchizedek, king of Salem,” and “priest of the most High God,” “brought forth bread and wine,” and blessed the Hebrew conqueror, who thereupon gave him tithes of all the spoil.