o8 IIEV. JOHN UKQUHART^ ON THE BEARING OF RECENT 



probn])ility, as Kiieiien observes, not recoverable."* The writer 

 nil Judfjcs ill Hadinrjs Bible DidioRCiry says: "Many details 

 Lave been referied, with more or less prol)ability, to myth or 

 misunderstanding, and not to histoiy\ Cusliaii Eishathaim of 

 Mesopotamia is a shadowy and uncertain figure." The latter 

 reference is unfortunate. " Mesopotamia " is in the original 

 Hebrew, " Aram-Naharaim," or " Syria of the two rivers." This 

 king is said to have pushed his coiKpiest westward into Palestine, 

 and to have held the Israelites in subjection for eight years 

 {Judges iii, S). The aiicient history of those lands is being 

 slowly discovered, through the references to them in the 

 inscriptions of Assyria and of Egypt ; but enough is now known 

 to show how dangerous it is to trust to a merely literary 

 ^nalysi§ in historical matters. Aram-Naharaim appears on the 

 Egyptian monuments as Naharina. The distiict was situated 

 in the north of Syria, between the river Orontes and the river 

 Balikh. The Euphrates flowed through the midst of the 

 country. On the north-east of Naharina lay the kingdom of 

 Mitanni. Just at this time Mitanni had been combined in 

 -some way with Naharina. " The Mitanni," says Maspero, 

 *^ exercised a sort of hegemony over the whole of Naharaim." 



Naharina was a populous country. It was conquered by 

 Thotmes III. His monument at Thebes records the names of 

 "230 towns, and about another hundred names have been effaced. 

 Some reigns later, the references on the monuments show that 

 Tushratta, the King of the Mitanni, who is named by the 

 Egyptians King of Xaharina, is a valued ally of Egypt. The 

 letters sent from Palestine to Kings Amenophis III. and IV., 

 which were discovered at Tel-el-Amarna, show that a quarrel 

 arose between the two kingdoms. The last contains wdiat seems 

 to be Tushratta's ultimatum. This rupture apparently led to 

 an invasion of Palestine, whose coast-tiibes acknowledged the 

 Egyptian supremacy, and in this campaign the Israelites were 

 -evidently conquered. In any case, the kingdom of Naharina 

 -was then in existence. It had, as Carl Niebuhr says, a wide 

 dominion, "extending from south-eastern Cappadocia to beyond 

 the later Assyrian capital, Nineveh."t And Naharina was, at 

 this very time, on the eve of an invasion of the west Between 

 these facts and the statements in Judges the agreement is so 

 sti iking that comment is needless. 



The letters discovered at Tel-el-Amarna have a further, and 



* Jntroductiov^ ]). 100. 



t Tke Td-d-Aitiarna Per tody p. 27. 



