and pleasant gardens, affording to the idler or traveller their grateful and
highly-valued shade. Crowds of passengers hurried along the dusty roads
to and from the busy city. The land was rich in corn and wine.”
Recent discoveries, more especially in Babylonia, have thrown much light
on the history of the Hebrew patriarchs, and have illustrated or confirmed
the Biblical narrative in many points. The ancestor of the Hebrew people,
Abram, was, we are told, born at “Ur of the Chaldees.” “Chaldees” is a
mistranslation of the Hebrew Kasdim, Kasdim being the Old Testament
name of the Babylonians, while the Chaldees were a tribe who lived on the
shores of the Persian Gulf, and did not become a part of the Babylonian
population till the time of Hezekiah. Ur was one of the oldest and most
famous of the Babylonian cities. Its site is now called Mugheir, or
Mugayyar, on the western bank of the Euphrates, in Southern Babylonia.
About a century before the birth of Abram it was ruled by a powerful
dynasty of kings. Their conquests extended to Elam on the one side, and to
the Lebanon on the other. They were followed by a dynasty of princes
whose capital was Babylon, and who seem to have been of South Arabian
origin. The founder of the dynasty was Sumu-abi (“Shem is my father”).
But soon afterwards Babylonia fell under Elamite dominion. The kings of
Babylon were compelled to acknowledge the supremacy of Elam, and a
rival kingdom to that of Babylon, and governed by Elamites, sprang up at
Larsa, not far from Ur, but on the opposite bank of the river. In the time of
Abram the king of Larsa was Eri-Aku, the son of an Elamite prince, and
Eri-Aku, as has long been recognized, is the Biblical “Arioch king of
Ellasar” (Genesis 14:1). The contemporaneous king of Babylon in the
north, in the country termed Shinar in Scripture, was Khammu-rabi. (See
BABYLON; ABRAHAM; AMRAPHEL.)
- CHALDEE LANGUAGE employed by the sacred writers in certain
portions of the Old Testament, viz., Daniel 2:4-7, 28; Ezra 4:8-6:18;
7:12-26; Genesis 31:46; Jeremiah 10:11. It is the Aramaic dialect, as it is
sometimes called, as distinguished from the Hebrew dialect. It was the
language of commerce and of social intercourse in Western Asia, and after
the Exile gradually came to be the popular language of Palestine. It is called
“Syrian” in 2 Kings 18:26. Some isolated words in this language are
preserved in the New Testament (Matthew 5:22; 6:24; 16:17; 27:46; Mark
3:17; 5:41; 7:34; 14:36; Acts 1:19; 1 Corinthians 16:22). These are
specimens of the vernacular language of Palestine at that period. The term