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Updated: June 27, 2025
Aram and his brethren and all that belonged to him therefore departed from Haran, and they settled in a vale, and they built themselves a city there which they called Aram-Zoba, to perpetuate the name of the father and his first-born son. Another Aram, Aram-naharaim, on the Euphrates, was built by Aram son of Kemuel, a nephew of Abraham.
Chalonitis seems to have taken its name from a capital city called Chala, which lay on the great route connecting Babylon with the southern Ecbatana, and in later times was known as Holwan. West of the Tigris, the name Mesopotamia is commonly used, like the Aram-Naharaim of the Hebrews, for the whole country between the two great rivers.
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.
For two generations in succession the queen-mother was a Mitannian princess, and a king finally sat upon the Pharaohs' throne who attempted to supplant the religion of which he was the official head by a foreign cult, and thereby brought about the fall of his house and empire. The power of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim Aram of the Two Rivers does not seem to have long survived this event.
Even Amon the god of Thebes was adopted into the pantheon in the days of Egyptian influence. How far back the interference of Aram-Naharaim in the affairs of Canaan may have reached it is impossible to say. But the kingdom lay on the high-road from Babylonia and Assyria to the West, and its rise may possibly have had something to do with the decline of Babylonian supremacy in Palestine.
After this we hear no more of a king of Aram-Naharaim in Canaan or on the frontier of Egypt, and when the name of Mitanni is met with a little later in the Assyrian inscriptions it is that of a small and insignificant state. The Hittites had grown at the expense of Mitanni, but their glory too was of no long duration.
His new home lay far away from the boundaries of Palestine, and though the kings of Aram-Naharaim made raids at times into the land of Canaan and caused their arms to be feared within the walls of Jerusalem, they never made any permanent conquests on the coasts of the Mediterranean. In the land of the Aramaeans Jacob is lost for awhile from the history of patriarchal Palestine.
It was not, indeed, until after the Israelitish conquest that the last invasion of Canaan by a king of Aram-Naharaim took place. Gaza and Joppa were at one time under the same governor, Yabitiri, who in a letter which has come down to us asks to be relieved of the burden of his office.
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