city,"
became _yeru_ or _yiru_ in Hebrew pronunciation, and between this and
_yireh_ the difference is not great. Yahveh-yireh, "the Lord sees,"
might also be interpreted "the Lord of Yeru."

The temple-hill was emphatically "the mount of the Lord." In Ezekiel
(xliii. 15) the altar that stood upon it is called Har-el, "the mountain
of God." The term reminds us of Babylonia, where the mercy-seat of the
great temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon was termed Du-azagga, "the holy
hill." It was on this "seat of the oracles," as it was termed, that the
god enthroned himself at the beginning of each year, and announced his
will to mankind. But the mercy-seat was entitled "the holy hill" only
because it was a miniature copy of "the holy hill" upon which the whole
temple was erected. So, too, at Jerusalem, the altar is called "the
mount of God" by Ezekiel only because it represents that greater "mount
of God" upon which it was built. The temple-hill itself was the
primitive Har-el.

The list of conquered localities in Palestine recorded by Thothmes III.
at Karnak gives indirect testimony to the same fact. The name of Rabbah
of Judah is immediately preceded in it by that of Har-el, "the mount of
God." The position of this Har-el leads us to the very mountain tract in
the midst of which Jerusalem stood. We now know that Jerusalem was
already an important city in the age of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty,
and that it formed one of the Egyptian conquests; it would be strange
therefore if no notice had been taken of it by the compiler of the list.
May we not see, then, in the Har-el of the Egyptian scribe the sacred
mountain of Israelitish history?

There is a passage in one of the letters of Ebed-Tob which may throw
further light on the history of the temple-hill. Unfortunately one of
the cuneiform characters in it is badly formed, so that its reading is
not certain, and still more unfortunately this character is one of the
most important in the whole paragraph. If Dr. Winckler and myself are
right in our copies, Ebed-Tob speaks of "the city of the mountain of
Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the god Nin-ip, (whose) name
(there) is Salim, the city of the king." What we read "Salim," however,
is read differently by Dr. Zimmern, so that according to his copy the
passage must be translated: "the city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the
city of the temple of the god Nin-ip is its name, the city of the king."
In the one case Ebed-Tob w