way to the bitter lamentation: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son
Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”
(2 Samuel 18:33. Comp. Exodus 32:32; Romans 9:3).
Absalom’s three sons (2 Samuel 14:27; comp. 18:18) had all died before
him, so that he left only a daughter, Tamar, who became the grandmother
of Abijah.
- ACACIA (Hebrews shittim) Exodus 25:5, R.V. probably the Acacia
seyal (the gum-arabic tree); called the “shittah” tree (Isaiah 41:19). Its
wood is called shittim wood (Exodus 26:15,26; 25:10,13,23,28, etc.). This
species (A. seyal) is like the hawthorn, a gnarled and thorny tree. It yields
the gum-arabic of commerce. It is found in abundance in the Sinaitic
peninsula. - ACCAD the high land or mountains, a city in the land of Shinar. It has
been identified with the mounds of Akker Kuf, some 50 miles to the north
of Babylon; but this is doubtful. It was one of the cities of Nimrod’s
kingdom (Ge 10:10). It stood close to the Euphrates, opposite Sippara.
(See SEPHARVAIM.)
It is also the name of the country of which this city was the capital,
namely, northern or upper Babylonia. The Accadians who came from the
“mountains of the east,” where the ark rested, attained to a high degree of
civilization. In the Babylonian inscriptions they are called “the black
heads” and “the black faces,” in contrast to “the white race” of Semitic
descent. They invented the form of writing in pictorial hieroglyphics, and
also the cuneiform system, in which they wrote many books partly on
papyrus and partly on clay. The Semitic Babylonians (“the white race”),
or, as some scholars think, first the Cushites, and afterwards, as a second
immigration, the Semites, invaded and conquered this country; and then the
Accadian language ceased to be a spoken language, although for the sake of
its literary treasures it continued to be studied by the educated classes of
Babylonia. A large portion of the Ninevite tablets brought to light by
Oriental research consists of interlinear or parallel translations from
Accadian into Assyrian; and thus that long-forgotten language has been
recovered by scholars. It belongs to the class of languages called
agglutinative, common to the Tauranian race; i.e., it consists of words
“glued together,” without declension of conjugation. These tablets in a
remarkable manner illustrate ancient history. Among other notable records,