Page:Keil and Delitzsch,Biblical commentary the old testament the pentateuch, trad James Martin, volume 1, 1885.djvu/205

and now more fully expanded promise, Jehovah directed him to walk through the land in the length of it and the breadth of it. In doing this he came in his “ tenting,” i.e., his wandering through the land, to Hebron, where he settled by the terebinth of the Amorite Mamre (Gen 14:13), and built an altar to Jehovah. The term ישׁב (set himself, settled down, sat, dwelt) denotes that Abram made this place the central point of his subsequent stay in Canaan (cf. Gen 14:13; Gen 18:1, and Gen 23). On Hebron, see Gen 23:2. The war, which furnished Abram with an opportunity, while in the promised land of which as yet he could not really call a single rood his own, to prove himself a valiant warrior, and not only to smite the existing chiefs of the imperial power of Asia, but to bring back to the kings of Canaan the booty that had been carried off, is circumstantially described, not so much in the interests of secular history as on account of its significance in relation to the kingdom of God. It is of importance, however, as a simple historical fact, to see that in the statement in Gen 14:1, the king of Shinar occupies the first place, although the king of Edom, Chedorlaomer, not only took the lead in the expedition, and had allied himself for that purpose with the other kings, but had previously subjugated the cities of the valley of Siddim, and therefore had extended his dominion very widely over hither Asia. If, notwithstanding this, the time of the war related here is connected with “ the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar,” this is done, no doubt, with reference to the fact that the first worldly kingdom was founded in Shinar by Nimrod (Gen 10:10), a kingdom which still existed under Amraphel, though it was now confined to Shinar itself, whilst Elam possessed the supremacy in inner Asia. There is no ground whatever for regarding the four kings mentioned in Gen 14:1 as four Assyrian generally or viceroys, as Josephus has done in direct contradiction to the biblical text; for, according to the more careful historical researches, the commencement of the Assyrian kingdom belongs to a later period; and Berosus speaks of an earlier Median rule in Babylon, which reaches as far back as the