Page 115 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

Thus they traveled through the lands of the Middle East,
slowly, stopping for days at a time when grazing was good,
dropping in at towns to transact business with their kinsfolk in

the karum, banding together for a raid, or for a punitive expedi­
tion in reply to a raid, and then splitting up again into groups of
fifty or a hundred to wander hundreds of miles along the trade

routes which they monopolized. They must have been a quite
incalculable factor to the settled peoples on the fringes of then-
immense range. While they played an essential role in the

economy of the time, carrying as they did much of the luxury
articles and staple consumer goods, they were a standing
menace to that economy, liable to combine into raiding and

plundering armies whenever the vigilance of the settled areas
relaxed.
The story recounted in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis

clearly belongs to the last phase of the period dealt with in this
chapter, to the period when Abram is settled as the head of a
tribal confederacy in the interior of Palestine (and now calls

himself Abraham, readopting the fricative of West Semitic which
the East Semitic of Mesopotamia had dropped). The story is clear
enough, and shows us how Abraham, for all his wanderings in

south Turkey and Palestine and Egypt, has not completely es­
caped out of the orbit of the troubled politics of south Meso­
potamia, where he started. It is recounted how the king of Elam,

and three kings confederated with him (including one who
claims to be king of Sumer), had forced the “kings” of the

Syrian desert and the Jordan valley to submit to them. After
thirteen years they rebelled, and the following year the king of
Elam sent a punitive expedition. This expedition defeated the
rebel sheikhs, and carried off many prisoners and much booty.

As this loot included the person, family, and possessions of
Abraham’s nephew Lot, Abraham gathered his tribesmen and, in

a night attack, succeeded in freeing the prisoners and regaining
the booty.
The whole course of events is typical of desert warfare and
tribal skirmishing—were it not that it has troubled historians to

find the kings of Sumer and, in particular, of Elam so far away
rom home. We can be fairly sure, however, that it did not sur-