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world, men have thought it their duty to offer a portion of their substance to the divine
Being.

Abram and Jacob

We now pass to the example of Abram, of whom we read that the proportion of
his spoils that he devoted, was a TENTH. Returning from the slaughter of the kings with
spoils of war, he was met near Jerusalem by a kingly priest, Melchizedek, who brought to
Abram bread and wine, who blessed Abram, who praised God for the victory gained, and
to whom Abram offered a tenth of all.

Here, then, we have an instance of tithe-paying which occurred (according to
Ussher's chronology, which is here followed throughout) about 1900 B.C., and this has
ordinarily been regarded as the earliest recorded instance of the payment of the tithe.

But recent discoveries, transmitted to us by students of cuneiform literature, have
thrown a flood of new light upon the land of Canaan before it was peopled by the
Israelites. Professor Sayce, tracing the migration of Abram from Ur of the Chaldees, says
in his Patriarchal Palestine (p. 66):

"Ur lay on the western side of the Euphrates in Southern Babylonia, where the
mounds of Mugheir mark the site of the great temple that had been reared to the
worship of the Moon-god long before the days of the Hebrew patriarch.

"Here Abram had married, and from hence he had gone forth with his father to
seek a new home. Their first resting-place had been Harran in Mesopotamia . . . .
Harran signified 'road' in the old language of Chaldaea, and for many ages the
armies and merchants of Babylonia had halted there when making their way
towards the Mediterranean. Like Ur, it was dedicated to the worship of Sin, the
Moon-god; and its temple rivalled in fame and antiquity that of the Babylonian
city, and had probably been founded by a Babylonian king.

"At Harran, therefore, Abram would still have been within the limits of
Babylonian influence and culture, if not of Babylonian government as well. He
would have found there the same religion as that which he had left behind him in
his native city . . . .

"Even in Canaan Abram was not beyond the reach of Babylonian influence . . . .
Babylonian armies had already penetrated to the shores of the Mediterranean,
Palestine had been included within the bounds of a Babylonian empire, and
Babylonian culture and religion had spread widely among the Canaanitish tribes.
The cuneiform system of writing had made its way to Syria, and Babylonian
literature had followed in its wake. Centuries had already passed since Sargon of
Akkad had made himself master of the Mediterranean coast, and his son Naram
Sin had led his forces to the peninsula of Sinai."