Among the prisoners was Lot, the nephew of Abram, and it was to effect
his rescue that the patriarch armed his followers and started in pursuit
of the conquerors. Near Damascus he overtook them, and falling upon them
by night, recovered the spoil of Sodom as well as his "brother's son."

Arioch is the Eri-Aku of the cuneiform texts. In the old language of
Chaldea the name signified "servant of the Moon-god." The king is well
known to us from contemporaneous inscriptions. Besides the inscribed
bricks which have come from the temple of the Moon-god which he enlarged
in the city of Ur, there are numerous contract tablets that are dated in
his reign. He tells us that he was the son of an Elamite, Kudur-Mabug,
son of Simti-silkhak, and prince (or "father") of Yamut-bal on the
borders of Elam and Babylonia. But this is not all. He further gives
Kudur-Mabug the title of "father of the Amorite land." What this title
exactly means it is difficult to say; one thing, however, is certain,
Kudur-Mabug must have exercised some kind of power and authority in the
distant West.

His name, too, is remarkable. Names compounded with Kudur, "a servant,"
were common in the Elamite language, the second element of the name
being that of a deity, to whose worship the owner of it was dedicated.
Thus we have Kudur-Lagamar, "the servant of the god Lagamar,"
Kudur-Nakhkhunte, "the servant of Nakhkhunte." But Mabug was not an
Elamite divinity. It was, on the contrary, a Mesopotamian deity from
whom the town of Mabug near Carchemish, called Bambykê by the Greeks,
and assimilated by the Arabs to their Membij, "a source," derived its
name. Can it be from this Syrian deity that the father of Arioch
received his name?

The capital of Arioch or Eri-Aku was Larsa, the city of the Sun-god, now