It was not so long ago that the account of the campaign of Chedor-laomer and his allies in Canaan was unhesitatingly rejected as a mere reflection into the past of the campaigns of later Assyrian kings.

Even the names of the Canaanite princes who opposed him were resolved into etymological puns.

But the tablets of Babylonia have come to their rescue.

We now know that long before the days of Abraham not only did Babylonian armies march to the shores of the Mediterranean, but that Canaan was a Babylonian province, and that Amraphel, the ally of Chedor-laomer, actually entitles himself king of it in one of his inscriptions.

We now know also that the political condition of Babylonia described in the narrative is scrupulously exact.