10.9 Abraham in Egypt

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Abraham first reigned at Damascus .

 Hattusili forbade his merchants to acquire Ugaritic real-estate, or to remain in Ugarit throughout the year.

Abraham Was the commander of his own company of troops, augmented by those of his Amorite allies. Moreover, he is successful in overtaking and defeating a coalition of invading kings.

"Abram reigned at Damascus, being a foreigner, who came with an army out of the land above Babylon, called the land of the Chaldeans: but, after a long time, he got him up, and removed from that country also, with his people, and went into the land then called the land of Canaan, but now the land of Judea, and this when his posterity were become a multitude; 



Abraham in Egypt

the Jews were called Ermiuth, which when interpreted after the Greek language means Judaeans

and that they were called Hebrews from Abraham. And he, they say, came with all his household into Egypt, to Pharethothes the king of the Egyptians, and taught him astrology; and after remaining there twenty years, 
removed back again into the regions of Syria: but that many of those who had come with him remained in Egypt because of the prosperity of the country.

Pharethothes was apparently Pharaoh Thutmosis I, the third king of the 18th Dynasty and the New Kingdom, who ruled for 8 years beginning in 1505, the year before Abraham entered Egypt, and was then replaced by Thutmosis 

It was only after supposedly marrying his wife off to the king of Egypt that Abraham returned to Canaan and proceeded to take on the assembled forces of the Syrians, Hittites, and Assyrians somewhere near Ugarit.

he Egyptians had removed the Asiatic "Hyksos" from the eastern delta and from the very throne of the pharaohs in 1534 and finally defeated them in 1531.

the process of bolstering their defences by sending an armed force into Canaan and driving the Assyrians and their Anatolian allies, as well as the remaining Hyksos forces in the area, back across the Orontes while at the same time placing Abraham's brother on the throne of Ugarit

Thutmosis I is credited with conquering the eastern shore of the Mediterranean as far north as Syria. As for Abraham's position at the court of the Egyptians

Abraham entered Egypt just after the rise of Thutmosis I in 1505 BC only to turn around within the year and use his newly acquired Egyptian reinforcements in the service of his battle with their common enemy, the Assyrians.

The Battle with Chedorlaomer

Manetho embedded what look and read like stories, or tales, or legends, about the more interesting rulers in his lists. There are points in the text of the bible where one notices what look like these same excursions into storytelling and myth making, and the story of Abraham and his exploits is not free from this method of exposition. His battle with Chedorlaomer looks and feels like such a story. Yet it is not impossible to see in it more than a mere bold-faced tall tale.

To set the scene, Chedorlaomer has ruled over the "Cities of the Plain" for six years (in the original, 12). He and three allies,

... Made war with Bera king of Sodom, and with Birsha king of Gomorrah, Shinab king of Admah, and Shemeber king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela―the same is Zoar. All these came as allies unto the vale of Siddim―the same is the Salt Sea.

In the seventh, the local kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, and nearby Amorite towns revolt. And in the second half of that year, Chedorlaomer, reinforced by three other kings, marshals his forces to march on those very same Cities of the Plain. The progression of Chedorlaomer as he makes his way south battling one after the other local king is such that one has to wonder if there were other cities and towns in revolt along the way, or whether he has simply taken the opportunity to increase the sphere of his influence. In any event, the locals are wildly outnumbered, or simply employed soldiers of an inferior temperament, and run at the first sign of the combined army. In the process, Abraham's nephew Lot is taken prisoner and placed in danger of spending the rest of his life in slavery, a theme that resonates with later events in 19th Dynasty Egypt. The ancestors of the Jewish people seem continuously to have found themselves in alternating positions of authority and servitude. Abraham, a prince himself, will have nothing of this. He raises a force (of supposedly only 318) from his own men and follows Chedorlaomer northward as he and his cohorts return to their own cities.

And there went out the king of Sodom, and the king of Gomorrah, and the king of Admah, and the king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela―the same is Zoar; and they set the battle in array against them in the vale of Siddim; against Chedorlaomer king of Elam, and Tidal king of Goiim, and Amraphel king of Shinar, and Arioch king of Ellasar; four kings against the five.

Amraphel identified him with Hammurabi of Babylon, whom they knew well from their records, and confused Shinar with an ancient name for Babylonia rather than Sanhar in Syria near Ugarit, where ’Ammurapi ruled. They saw Arioch and identified him with Eri-Aku of Assyria, with which they identified Ellasar. They saw Tidal and found in his name an echo of one of the Tudhaliyas of the Hittites, a non-Semitic nation, and saw in them the "Goiim," an identification that may turn out to be correct after all. And finally, they read Chedorlaomer and saw in the name an analogue of the names of the kings of Elam in what would later be called Persia when they were under Babylonian vassalage during the so-called Kudur Dynasty. What are we left with, then? What remains of the story in Genesis after the misidentifications of the scholars have been stripped away are what appear to be four kings of cities located somewhere in or near Syria with a political and economic interest in the region near the Dead Sea, or, as we shall see in a moment, four generals in the employ of a major regional power of the time, named, at least in Hebrew transliteration, Chedorlaomer, Amraphel, Arioch, and Tidal

At this time, when the Assyrians had the dominion over Asia, the people of Sodom were in a flourishing condition, both as to riches and the number of their youth. There were five kings that managed the affairs of this county: Ballas, Barsas, Senabar, and Sumobor, with the king of Bela; and each king led on his own troops: and the Assyrians made war upon them; and, dividing their army into four parts, fought against them. Now every part of the army had its own commander; and when the battle was joined, the Assyrians were conquerors, and imposed a tribute on the kings of the Sodomites, who submitted to this slavery twelve years; and so long they continued to pay their tribute: but on the thirteenth year they rebelled, and then the army of the Assyrians came upon them, under their commanders Amraphel, Arioch, Chodorlaomer, and Tidal. These kings had laid waste all Syria, and overthrown the offspring of the giants. And when they were come over against Sodom, they pitched their camp at the vale called the Slime Pits, for at that time there were pits in that place; but now, upon the destruction of the city of Sodom, that vale became the Lake Asphaltites, as it is called. However, concerning this lake we shall speak more presently. Now when the Sodomites joined battle with the Assyrians, and the fight was very obstinate, many of them were killed, and the rest were carried captive; among which captives was Lot, who had come to assist the Sodomites.

Arioch is identified not as king of Ellasar, purportedly Assyria, but of Cappadocia on the Halys River on the south shore of the Black Sea the end of the 16th century BC the power of Assyria extended as far north as the Black Sea and as far south as the Dead Sea.

And who was this mysterious Assyrian king under whom these four subordinate kings, or generals, attacked the land of Sodom? As we shall see in Chapter Thirteen, the king of Assyria in 1504BC was Puzur-Asshur III, and he lived to tell the tale until replaced by Enlil-nasir I in 1489, six years after the birth of Isaac.

After defeating the Assyrians, Abraham appears to have returned to Egypt. At least one source has him teaching astrology there at the City of the Sun, Heliopolis, for 20 years. Only upon the accession of Thutmosis III under the watchful eye of his aunt, Hatshepsut, did Abraham again leave Egypt..

kings of Ugarit,
Ibiranu I.
Ya'dur Addu
Niqmepa II (ca 1600)
Ibiranu II
’Ammurapi I.
Niqmepa III
Ibiranu III
Niqmepa IV (ca 1500)
Ibiranu IV
Niqmaddu I.
Yaqaru

’Ammurapi I (Hammurabi I) isn't Amraphel and Ibiranu III, Abraham; Niqmepa III having ruled after the death of Amraphel and before Abraham. 

King of Ugarit	Biblical Name [Jubilees]	Reign Dates BC	Lived
	Shelah		1672–1605
Ibiranu I	Eber	?–1584	1655–1584
Ya'dur Addu		1584–?
Niqmepa II	Nahor ben Serug	?–1555	1594–1555
Ibiranu II	[Abram, husband of Nahor's sister]	1555–?
’Ammurapi I	Amraphel	?–1504	?–1504
Niqmepa III	Nahor ben Terah	1504–ca 1475	?
Ibiranu III	Abram ben Terah	ca 1475–1458	1545–1458
Niqmepa IV		1458–?	?
Ibiranu IV		?	?
Niqmaddu I		?	?
Yaqaru	Jacob	?–1400	1465–1392

/////////////Abram, the father-in-law of Terah  


Damascus is identified with Abraham by Damascenus, rather than with Ugarit, to which it bears rather more of a similarity than does the Dammasek or Darmesek of ancient times.


Isaac in Egypt

The story of the life of Isaac 

though Nahor was already king of Ugarit Later, Jacob would travel to Paddan-Aram in search of a wife and wind up in Harran, where again in "Mesopotamia," he would visit his mother's brother Laban, the son of "Bethuel the Syrian" 


At the age of thirty Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob, and then, upon the occurrence of another famine, the book of Genesis is adamant that Isaac did not, at that time, return to Egypt. The Lord specifically said to him, "Go not down into Egypt ..."! This is strange, and there follows the tale of his migration to Gerar in the land of the Philistines and an exact duplicate of the story of Abraham's attempt to fob off his wife as his sister, as well as a series of folk etymologies of the names of various places in the region.