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Updated: August 26, 2024
The forces sent from Gebal to Zemar were made prisoners by the Amorite chief at Abiliya, and the position of Rib-Hadad daily became more desperate. Pa-Hor, the Egyptian governor of Kumidi, joined his opponents, and induced the Sute or Beduin to attack his Sardinian guards.
There were the tsabi yidati or "auxiliaries," the tsabi saruti or "militia," the Khabbati or "Beduin plunderers," and the tsabi matsarti or "Egyptian soldiers of the garrison," as well as the tsabi bitati or "house-guards," who were summoned in cases of emergency. Fragments of the annals of Thothmes III. have been preserved on the shattered walls of his temple at Karnak.
The wells of the desert go back to a great antiquity: where water is scarce its discovery is not easily forgotten, and the Beduin come with their flocks year after year to drink of it. The old wells are constantly renewed, or new ones dug by their side. Gerar was in that south-western corner of Palestine which in the age of the Exodus was inhabited by the Philistines. But they had been new-comers.
Labai, though of Beduin origin, was himself professedly an Egyptian official, the Egyptian policy having been to give the title of governor to the powerful Beduin sheikhs, and to attach them to the Egyptian government by the combined influence of bribery and fear.
If Rib-Hadad spoke the truth, Ebed-Asherah had "sent to the soldiers in Bit-Ninip, saying, 'Gather yourselves together, and let us march up against Gebal, if therein are any who have saved themselves from our hands, and we will appoint governors throughout all the provinces; so all the provinces went over to the Beduin."
The whole country was in a state of unrest. The Khedive had carried on an unsuccessful war against the Christian King of Abyssinia, and the Mohammedan states of Kordofan and Darfur were in revolt against Egypt. There half-savage Beduin tribes were scattered about over the deserts, and there some of the worst slave-dealers had their haunts.
The Beduin, immediately supposing that they lived together in a criminal manner, fell upon my brother in a rage, and after he had mangled him in a barbarous manner, he carried him on a camel to the top of a desert mountain, where he left him. The mountain was on the way to Bagdad, so that the passengers who passed that road gave me an account of the place where he was.
Thence it turned northward again through the oasis of En-mishpat or Kadesh-barnea, and after smiting the Amalekite Beduin, as well as the Amorites in Hazezon-tamar, made its way into the vale of Siddim. There the battle took place which ended in the defeat of the king of Sodom and his allies, who were carried away captive to the north.
We read the pathetic story of the old father sending his sons to buy corn from the royal granaries or larits of Egypt, and withholding to the last his youngest and dearest one; of the Beduin shepherds bowing all unconsciously before the brother whom they had sold into slavery, and who now holds in his hands the power of life and death; of Joseph's disclosure of himself to the conscious-stricken suppliants; of Jacob's cry when convinced at last that "the governor over all the land of Egypt" was his long-mourned son.
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