son by his Egyptian handmaid, the ancestor of the Ishmaelite tribes who
spread from the frontier of Egypt to Mecca in Central Arabia. It was
when Ishmael was thirteen years of age that the covenant was made
between God and Abraham which was sealed with the institution of
circumcision. Circumcision had been practised in Egypt from the earliest
days of its history; henceforth it also distinguished all those who
claimed Abraham as their forefather. With circumcision Abraham received
the name by which he was henceforth to be known; he ceased to be Abram,
the Hebrew from Babylonia, and became Abraham the father of Ishmael and
Israel. The new rite and the new name were alike the seal and token of
the covenant established between the patriarch and his God: God promised
that his seed should multiply, and that the land of Canaan should be
given as an everlasting possession, while Abraham and his offspring were
called upon to keep God's covenant for ever.

It could not have been long after this that the cities of the plain were
destroyed "with brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven." The
expression is found in the cuneiform tablets of Babylonia. Old Sumerian
hymns spoke of a "rain of stones and fire," though the stones may have
been hail-stones and thunderbolts, and the fire the flash of the
lightning. But whatever may have been the nature of the sheet of flame
which enveloped the guilty cities of the plain and set on fire the
naphtha-springs that oozed out of it, the remembrance of the catastrophe
survived to distant ages. The prophets of Israel and Judah still refer
to the overthrow of Sodom and its sister cities, and St. Jude points to
them as "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." Some scholars have
seen an allusion to their overthrow in the tradition of the Phoenicians
which brought their ancestors into the coastlands of Canaan in
consequence of an earth-quake on the shores of "the Assyrian Lake." But
the lake is more probably to be looked for in the neighbourhood of the