The cuneiform inscriptions and the Old Testament - The Search For ...

THE BOOK OF EZEKIEL 7. 119
cannot as yet be precisely determined. On this subject
comp. Vol. I, p. 141 ; also the "Sargon-stele of the British
Museum" p. 30 line 6 foil, on the one side, and F. De-
litzsch Parad. p. 142 on the other. The word is of
Akkadian origin and is compounded of d u p meaning
'tablet' and s a r 'write'. Hence as a name for a person
it signifies 'tablet- writer'.
THE BOOK OF EZEKIEL.
I, 1. On the river Kebar (13?). This stream, accord-
ing to verse 3, lay in the "land of the Chaldaeans" i. e.
Babylonia; moreover we only receive information of a
deportation of Israelites to Babylonia by Nebukadnezzar *
lastly, the name of this river is very clearly distinguished from
that of the Mesopotamian "liDPI by the sounds which make
up the word. We must therefore definitely abandon the 425
identifications of these two streams which have until re-
cently been the favourite ones. Instead of placing the
Kebar in Mesopotamia, with Noldeke (Bibellexicon I,
508) **, we should assign it to Babylonia, though we are
with "IQO^
was originally suggested by Fr. Lenormant; see his 'La
langue primitive de la Chaldee, Paris 1875, p. 365'.
* Babel is expressly referred -to three times (2 Kings XXIV.
15 a. b. 16) as the land of the exile.
[** "The name has in fact", says Noldeke, "entirely disappeared,
for the system of rivers and canals in Babylonia has in the course of
millenniums suffered so many changes, and so many rivers and canals
have even vanished, that we can hardly expect all the names to be
preserved. I purposely speak of canals in this connection, because
from olden times up to the present the same name {nahar) has been
employed in that country to express both river and canal—even the
smallest—of which there were thousands. We may imagine that Chebar
was a canal."— Transl,]
;