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Of Jacob-el we have already had occasion to speak. It is in the ruined temple of Medinet Habu that Ramses III. has recorded his victories and inscribed the names of the peoples and cities he had overcome.
This is followed by a name which is full of interest, for it reads Joseph-el or "Joseph-god." Pinches tells me that in early Babylonian contracts of the age of Chedor-laomer he has found the name of Yasupu-ilu or Joseph-el, as well as that of Yakub-ilu or Jacob-el.
It is only by one of those plays upon words, of which the Oriental is still so fond, that the name can be brought into connection with the word sar, "a prince." But the name of Jacob was well known among the northern Semites. We gather from the inscriptions of Egypt that its full form was Jacob-el.
Pinches has lately discovered the name of Jacob-el among the persons mentioned in contracts of the time of the Babylonian sovereign Sin-mu-ballidh, who was a contemporary of Chedor-laomer. We thus have monumental evidence that the name of Jacob was well known in the Semitic world in the age of the Hebrew patriarchs.
Already in the reign of the Babylonian king Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of Amraphel, the contemporary of Abraham, a high-priest in the district of northern Chaldasa assigned to "Amorite" settlers from Canaan, bore the name of Sar-ilu or Israel. The fuller and older form of Jacob is Jacob-el.
Thothmes III., the great conqueror of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, states that two of the places captured by him in Palestine were Jacob-el and Joseph-el. It is tempting to see in the two names reminiscences of the Hebrew patriarch and his son. If so, the name of Joseph would have been impressed upon a locality in Canaan more than two centuries before the Exodus.
In the second list we read: Rosh Kadesh, or Mount Carmel; Inzat; Maghar; Rehuza; Saabata; Gaza; the district of Sala'; the district of Zasr; Jacob-el; and the land of Akrith, the Ugarit of the Tel el-Amarna tablets.
Here he claims to have taken Lebanoth and Beth-Anath, Carmel of Judah and Shebtin, Jacob-el and Hebron, Libnah and Aphek, Migdal-gad and Ir-Shemesh, Hadashah and the district of Salem or Jerusalem. From thence the Egyptian forces proceeded to the Lake of Reshpon or the Dead Sea, and then crossing the Jordan seized Korkha in Moab.
One of the places in Palestine conquered by the Pharaoh Thothmes III., the names of which are recorded on the walls of his temple at Karnak, was Jacob-el a reminiscence, doubtless, of the Hebrew patriarch.
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