where he could water his flocks from his own spring. It was the
"Promised Land" to which the serfs of the Pharaoh in Goshen looked
forward when they should again become free men and find a new home for
themselves.

Canaan had ever been the refuge of the Asiatic population of Egypt, the
goal at which they aimed when driven out of the land of the Nile. The
Hyksos conquerors from Asia had retreated to Jerusalem when the native
Egyptians recovered their independence and had expelled them from their
seats in the Delta. Though Moses had assured the Pharaoh that all the
Israelites needed was to go a short journey of three days into the
wilderness, and there sacrifice to their God, it was well understood
that the desert was not to be the end of their pilgrimage. Canaan, and
Canaan only, was the destined country they had in view.

In the early inscriptions of Babylonia, Canaan is included in the rest
of Syria under the general title of "the land of the Amorites." The
Amorites were at the time the dominant population on the Mediterranean
coast of western Asia, and after them accordingly the whole country
received its name. The "land of the Amorites" had been overrun by the
armies of Babylonia at a very remote period, and had thus come under the
influence of Babylonian culture. As far back as the reigns of Sargon of
Akkad and his son Naram-Sin (B.C. 3800), three campaigns had laid it at
the feet of the Chaldæan monarch, and Palestine and Syria became a
province of the Babylonian empire. Sargon erected an image of himself by
the shore of the sea, and seems even to have received tribute from
Cyprus. Colonies of "Amorite" or Canaanitish merchants settled in
Babylonia for the purposes of trade, and there obtained various rights
and privileges; and a cadastral survey of southern Babylonia made at the
time mentions "the governor of the land of the Amorites."