a day (as the warm hours) · preposition + noun, common masculine plural construct
Amraphel
אַמְרָפֶ֣ל'am.ra.Fel
H569
Amraphel · proper noun, a man's name
king
מֶֽלֶךְMe.lekh-
H4428
a king · noun, common masculine singular construct
Shinar
שִׁנְעָ֔רshin.'Ar
H8152
Shinar · proper noun, a place name
Arioch
אַרְי֖וֹךְ'ar.Yokh
H746
Arjok · proper noun, a man's name
king
מֶ֣לֶךְMe.lekh
H4428
a king · noun, common masculine singular construct
Ellasar
אֶלָּסָ֑ר'e.la.Sar
H495
Ellasar · proper noun, a place name
Chedorlaomer
כְּדָרְלָעֹ֙מֶר֙ke.da.re.la.'O.mer
H3540
Kedorlaomer · proper noun, a man's name
king
מֶ֣לֶךְMe.lekh
H4428
a king · noun, common masculine singular construct
Elam
עֵילָ֔ם'ei.Lam
H5867
Elam · proper noun, a place name
Tidal
וְתִדְעָ֖לve.tid.'Al
H8413
Tidal · conjunction + proper noun, a man's name
king
מֶ֥לֶךְMe.lekh
H4428
a king · noun, common masculine singular construct
nations
גּוֹיִֽםgo.Yim
H1471
a foreign nation · proper noun, a place name
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Genesis 10:10 And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.
Genesis 10:22 The children of Shem; Elam, and Asshur, and Arphaxad, and Lud, and Aram.
Genesis 11:2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
Isaiah 37:12 Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed, as Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of Eden which…
Isaiah 11:11 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which sh…
Isaiah 21:2 A grievous vision is declared unto me; the treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler spoileth. Go up, O Elam: besiege, O Med…
Isaiah 22:6 And Elam bare the quiver with chariots of men and horsemen, and Kir uncovered the shield.
Jeremiah 25:25 And all the kings of Zimri, and all the kings of Elam, and all the kings of the Medes,
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Genesis 14:1-12
We have here an account of the first war that ever we read of in scripture, which (though the wars of the nations make the greatest figure in history) we should not have had the history of if Abram and Lot had not been concerned in it. Now, concerning this war, we may observe,
I. The parties engaged in it. The invaders were four kings, two of them no less than kings of Shinar and Elam (that is, Chaldea and Persia), yet probably not the sovereign princes of those great kingdoms in their own persons, but either officers under them, or rather the heads and leaders of some colonies which came out of those great nations, and settled themselves near Sodom, but retained the names of the countries f…
In the days of Amraphel - Who this king was is not known; and yet, from the manner in which he is spoken of in the text, it would seem that he was a person well known, even when Moses wrote this account. But the Vulgate gives a different turn to the place, by rendering the passage thus: Factum est in illo tempore, ut Amraphel, etc. "It came to pass in that time that Amraphel, etc." The Chaldee Targum of Onkelos makes Amraphel king of Babylon, others make him king of Assyria; some make him the same as Nimrod, and others, one of his descendants.
Arioch king of Ellasar - Some think Syria is meant; but conjecture is endless where facts cannot be ascertained. Chedorlaomer king of Elam - Dr. Shuck…
And it came to pass, in the days of Amraphel king of Shinar,.... Or Babylon, as Onkelos, where Nimrod began his kingdom, Genesis 10:8. This was Nimrod himself, as the Jewish writers generally says; though more likely Ninyas the son of Ninus and Semiramis, and grandson of Nimrod; or rather some petty prince or deputy governor of Shinar, under the king of Babylon; since, though named first, he was not the principal in this war, but fought under the king of Elam, and as an ally and auxiliary of his; and it may be the kingdom of Babylon was not as yet of any great extent and power, and that all those stories told of Ninus, Semiramis, and Ninyas, are mere fables; and indeed we hear nothing in Scr…
The Church Fathers
Now it came to pass in those days that Amraphel, king of Shinar, Ariok, king of Pontus, Chodorlahomor, king of the Elamites, and Thadat, king of the nations, made war against Bera, king of Sodom, and against Birsha, king of Gomorrah, and the rest. It is recounted how Chodorlachomor, king of the Elamites, that is, the Persians, waging war against the Pentapolis with allied kings, won a victory, and how many nations were slain by him on his march to that contest. It is not to be supposed that the sacred author of Scripture recorded these only for the sake of historical study but rather to commend to us the grace of heaven. For it teaches us through the victory of Abraham, who overcame so many kings with a few men, what the power of faith is, with which he himself was armed, and how great the grace of divine blessing was, with which he was endowed. Because in the same way, the saints, later to be born, would, through this faith, overcome kingdoms, perform righteousness, and obtain promises. But there is also another very important and by no means negligible reason why the battle of the kings, the initial flight of the Sodomites, and their subsequent capture is written, for it is established that they, too, were subsequently utterly overthrown by heavenly wrath. Seeing their wickedness, God first chastised them with hostile slaughter and captivity. But then, through his faithful servant, he delivered them from that captivity with all the things that were taken, and this was for the sake of the blessed Lot, who served God faithfully among them, so that aided by such a gift of divine protection and delivered from their miseries, they might learn, leaving their errors, to serve God and follow his example in good works, by whom and through whom they were saved by God's grace. But because they neither wished to be corrected by divine chastisements nor by gifts to abandon their iniquity, but rather daily added new crimes to their old wickedness, it remained that they be damned by heavenly wrath permanently. This kind of correction and punishment continues to this day, indeed until the end of the age, against the impious and sinners, for those who care neither for heavenly benefits nor chastisements are subsequently condemned by heavenly vengeance. In this way, the world itself will finally meet its end, when men throughout the whole earth, ungrateful for heavenly…
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Abraham — Father of a multitude, son of Terah, named (Gen. 11:27) before his older brothers Nahor and Haran, because he was the heir of the promises. Till the age of seventy, Abram sojourned among his kindred…
Amraphel — King of Shinar, southern Chaldea, one of the confederates of Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, in a war against Sodom and cities of the plain (Gen. 14:1, 4). It is now found that Amraphel (or Ammirapaltu)…
Arioch — Lion-like, venerable. (1.) A king of Ellasar who was confederate with Chedorlamer (Gen. 14:1, 9). The tablets recently discovered by Mr. Pinches (see CHALDEA) show the true reading is Eri-Aku of…
Babylon, kingdom of — Called “the land of the Chaldeans” (Jer. 24:5; Ezek, 12:13), was an extensive province in Central Asia along the valley of the Tigris from the Persian Gulf northward for some 300 miles. It was famed…
Chaldea — The southern portion of Babylonia, Lower Mesopotamia, lying chiefly on the right bank of the Euphrates, but commonly used of the whole of the Mesopotamian plain. The Hebrew name is Kasdim, which is…
Elam — Highland, the son of Shem (Gen. 10:22), and the name of the country inhabited by his descendants (14:1, 9; Isa. 11:11; 21:2, etc.) lying to the east of Babylonia, and extending to the shore of the…
Ellasar — The oak or heap of Assyria, a territory in Asia of which Arioch was king (Gen. 14:1, 9). It is supposed that the old Chaldean town of Larsa was the metropolis of this kingdom, situated nearly…
Lot — (Heb. goral, a “pebble”), a small stone used in casting lots (Num. 33:54; Jonah 1:7). The lot was always resorted to by the Hebrews with strictest reference to the interposition of God, and as a…
Shinar, The Land of — LXX. and Vulgate “Senaar;” in the inscriptions, “Shumir;” probably identical with Babylonia or Southern Mesopotamia, extending almost to the Persian Gulf. Here the tower of Babel was built (Gen.…
Sodom — Burning; the walled, a city in the vale of Siddim (Gen. 13:10; 14:1-16). The wickedness of its inhabitants brought down upon it fire from heaven, by which it was destroyed (18:16-33; 19:1-29; Deut.…
And it came to pass in the days of Amraphel. The history related in this chapter is chiefly worthy of remembrance, for three reasons: first, because Lot, with a gentle reproof, exhorted the men of Sodom to repentance; they had, however, become altogether unteachable, and desperately perverse in their wickedness. But Lot was beaten with these scourges, because, having been allured and deceived by the richness of the soil, he had mixed himself with unholy and wicked men. Secondly, because God, out of compassion to him, raised up Abram as his avenger and liberator, to rescue him, when a captive, from the hand of the enemy; in which act the incredible goodness and benevolence of God towards his…
The war, which furnished Abram with an opportunity, while in the promised land of which as yet he could not really call a single rood his own, to prove himself a valiant warrior, and not only to smite the existing chiefs of the imperial power of Asia, but to bring back to the kings of Canaan the booty that had been carried off, is circumstantially described, not so much in the interests of secular history as on account of its significance in relation to the kingdom of God. It is of importance, however, as a simple historical fact, to see that in the statement in Gen 14:1, the king of Shinar occupies the first place, although the king of Edom, Chedorlaomer, not only took the lead in the exped…
In this skirmish typical of ancient politics, powerful kings formed a coalition to subjugate smaller vassal states.
14:1-2 Archaeology has not identified these kings, but similar names from antiquity corroborate the report’s accuracy. The Mesopotamian kings were confederates under a suzerain, apparently Amraphel, who is mentioned first.
14:1 Tidal apparently ruled a number of city-states (Goiim, literally nations).
Rashi on Genesis 14:1
אמרפל AMRAPHEL — He is identical with Nimrod who said (אמר) to Abraham, “Plunge (פול) into the fiery furnace” (Eruvin 53a).
מלך גוים KING OF GOIIM (nations) — There was a place that was called Goiim because people from many nations and localities gathered there and proclaimed as their king a man named Tidal (Genesis Rabbah 42:4).
Tidal — (in the LXX. called “Thorgal”), styled the “king of nations” (Gen. 14:1-9). Mentioned as Tudkhula on Arioch’s brick (see facing page 139). Goyyim, translated “nations,” is the country called Gutium,…
Amraphel · King of Shinar — King of Shinar
Arioch · 1. King of Ellasar — 1. King of Ellasar
Armies · Antiquity of — Antiquity of
Assyria · Called: Shinar — Called: Shinar
Babylon · . — .
Chedorlaomer · King of Elam — King of Elam
Confederacies · .Of kings — .Of kings
Elam · 1. A district — 1. A district
Ellasar · Its king inva — Its king inva
Lot · .Taken — .Taken
Sodom · of Chedorlaomer — of Chedorlaomer
Tidal · King of nations (R. V., Goiim) — King of nations (R. V., Goiim)
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
