However this may be, the fortress and the temple-hill were distinct from one another in the days of the Jebusites, and we may therefore assume that they were also distinct in the age of Abraham.  This might explain why it was that the mountain of Moriah on the summit of which the patriarch offered his sacrifice was not enclosed within the walls of Jerusalem, and was not covered with buildings.  It was a spot, on the contrary, where sheep could feed, and a ram be caught by its horns in the thick brushwood.

In entering Canaan, Abraham would have found himself still surrounded by all the signs of a familiar civilization.  The long-continued influence and government of Babylonia had carried to “the land of the Amorites” all the elements of Chaldaean culture.  Migration from Ur of the Chaldees to the distant West meant a change only in climate and population, not in the civilization to which the patriarch had been accustomed.

Even the Babylonian language was known and used in the cities of Canaan, and the literature of Babylonia was studied by the Canaanitish people.  This is one of the facts which we have learnt from the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets.  The cuneiform system of writing and the Babylonian language had spread all over Western Asia, and nowhere had they taken deeper root than in Canaan.  Here there were schools and teachers for instruction in the foreign language and script, and record-chambers and libraries in which the letters and books of clay could be copied and preserved.

Long before the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets we might have gathered from the Old Testament itself that such libraries once existed in Canaan.  One of the Canaanitish cities taken and destroyed by the Israelites was Debir in the mountainous part of Judah.  But Debir, “the sanctuary,” was also known by two other names.  It was called Kirjath-Sannah, “the city of Instruction,” as well as Kirjath-Sepher, “the city of Books.”

We now know, however, that the latter name is not quite correct.  The Massoretic punctuation has to be emended, and we must read Kirjath-Sopher, “the city of the Scribe(s),” instead of Kirjath-Sepher, “the city of Book(s).”  It is an Egyptian papyrus which has given us the exact name.  In the time of Ramses II. an Egyptian scribe composed a sarcastic account of the misadventures met with by a tourist in Palestine—­commonly known as The Travels of a Mohar—­and in this mention is made of two adjoining towns in Southern Palestine called Kirjath-Anab and Beth-Sopher.  In the Book of Joshua the towns of Anab and Kirjath-Sepher are similarly associated together, and it is plain, therefore, as Dr. W. Max Mueller has remarked, that the Egyptian writer has interchanged the equivalent terms Kirjath, “city,” and Beth, “house.”  He ought to have written Beth-Anab and Kirjath-Sopher.  But he has given us the true form of the latter name, and as he has added to the word Sopher the determinative of “writing,” he has further put beyond question the real meaning of the name.  The city must have been one of those centres of Canaanitish learning, where, as in the libraries of Babylonia and Assyria, a large body of scribes was kept constantly at work.