Page 117 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

growing tribe in the pasturelands of Palestine. His people still
have close contacts with their kinsfolk over a wide area, and his

two eldest sons, Ishmael and Isaac, take wives respectively from
Egypt and Mesopotamia. But he was undoubtedly content, in his
old age, to sit outside his tent beneath the evergreen oaks of

Mamre and must have appeared to himself, as he has appeared
to subsequent generations, as a patriarch and the father of his

As he looked back over the span of his life, there must have
seemed to have been little change in the world as he knew it.

Perhaps Elam had increased in power; perhaps Egypt, with its
now well-established dynasty, could be regarded as dangerous

under its new and warlike pharaoh. But Elam after all had for
many generations been the great power of the east, and Egypt
had never seriously ventured beyond her copper mines in the

Sinai peninsula. Abraham could not have the prescience to know
that the future lay neither with Elam nor, for many hundred

years, with Egypt. He would have no reason to see that the sig­
nificant events of his lifetime were the appearance of the chariot­

eers of the north in the hinterland of Asia Minor, the establish­
ment of the little Amorite confederacy around the new town of

Babylon, and the movement, in which he had been one of the
prime movers, of the Amorite tribes into Palestine.
And yet perhaps he did see, in fact, the possibilities inherent

in that westward settlement of his own people. For had not his
god promised him that his seed should be numberless as the

stars and that he should be the father of a multitude of nations?
There was, of course, nothing remarkable in such a promise;

every tribal god proclaimed at every opportunity the glorious
future in store for his worshippers. The only remarkable thing

was that in this case the promise was to be fulfilled.
But, like most old men, Abraham probably thought less about
the future than about the past. In his long lifetime he had

traveled many hundreds of miles. Now, sitting beneath the oaks
of Mamre and watching his flocks grazing on the home pas­

tures, he must frequently have looked back upon his childhood,