the god worshipped by Ebed-Tob, the "Most High God" of
Melchizedek, and the prototype of "the Mighty God" of Isaiah. It is this
same mighty king, Ebed-Tob assures the Pharaoh in another letter, who
will overthrow the navies of Babylonia and Aram-Naharaim.

Here, then, as late as the fifteenth century before our era we have a
king of Jerusalem who owes his royal dignity to his god. He is, in fact,
a priest as well as a king. His throne has not descended to him by
inheritance; so far as his kingly office is concerned, he is like
Melchizedek, without father and without mother. Between Ebed-Tob and
Melchizedek there is more than analogy; there is a striking and
unexpected resemblance. The description given of him by Ebed-Tob
explains what has puzzled us so long in the person of Melchizedek.

The origin of the name of Jerusalem also is now cleared up. It was no
invention of the age of David; on the contrary, it goes back to the
period of Babylonian intercourse with Canaan. It is written in the
cuneiform documents Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim," the god of peace.
One of the lexical tablets from the library of Nineveh has long ago
informed us that in one of the languages known to the Babylonians _uru_
was the equivalent of the Babylonian _alu_, "a city," and we now know
that this language was that of Canaan. It would even seem that the word
had originally been brought from Babylonia itself in the days when
Babylonian writing and culture first penetrated to the West. In the
Sumerian or pre-Semitic language of Chaldaea _eri_ signified a "city,"
and _eri_ in the pronunciation of the Semites became _uru_. Hence it was
that Uru or Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, received its name at a time
when it was the ruling city of Babylonia, and though the Semitic
Babylonians themselves never adopted the word in common life it made its
way to Canaan. The rise of the "city" in the west was part of that
Babylonian civilization which was carried to the shores of the
Mediterranean, and so the word which denoted it was borrowed from the
old language of Chaldaea, like the word for "palace," _hekal_, the
Sumerian _e-gal_, or "Great House." It is noteworthy that Harran, the
resting-place of Abraham on his way from Ur to Palestine, the half-way
house, as it were, between East and West, also derived its name from a
Sumerian word which signified "the high-road." _Harran_ and _Ur_ were
two of the gifts which passed to Canaan from the speakers of the
pri