the Week of Proper 28 / Ordinary 33
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Bible Dictionaries
Ethiopia
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
or ETHIOPIA is tr. [Note: translate or translation.] of the Heb. Cush , which is derived from Kosh , the Egyp. name of Nubia (beginning at the First Cataract). The cultivable land in this region is very meagre. The scanty and barbarous population of the valley and the deserts on either side was divided in early times among different tribes, which were completely at the mercy of the Egyptians. Individually, however, the Sudanese were sturdy warriors, and were constantly employed by the Pharaohs as mercenary soldiers and police. In the time of the New Kingdom, Cush southward to Napata was a province of Egypt, dotted with Egyptian temples and governed by a viceroy. With the weakening of the Egyptian power Cush grew into a separate kingdom, with Napata as its capital. Its rulers were probably of Egyptian descent; they are represented as being entirely subservient to Ammon, i.e . to his priests, elected by him, acting only upon his oracles, and ready to abdicate or even to commit suicide at his command. We first hear of a king of Ethiopia about b.c. 730, when a certain Pankhi, reigning at Napata and already in possession of the Egyptian Thebaid, added most of Middle Egypt to his dominions and exacted homage from the princes of the Delta. A little later an Ethiopian dynasty (the XXVth) sat on the throne of the Pharaohs for nearly fifty years (b.c. 715 664). The last of these, Tahraku (Tirhakah [wh. see]), intrigued with the kinglets of Syria and PhÅ“nicia against the Assyrians, but only to the ruin of himself and his dynasty. Tahraku and his successor Tandamane were driven into Ethiopia by the Assyrian invasions, and Egypt became independent under the powerful XXVIth Dynasty. For the Persian period it is known that Ethiopia, or part of it, was included in one satrapy with Egypt under Darius. In the 3rd cent. b.c. king Ergamenes freed himself from the power of the priests of Ammon by a great slaughter of them. From about this time forward Meroë, the southern residence, was the capital of Ethiopia. The worship of Ammon, however, as the national god of ‘Negroland,’ as Ethiopia was then called, still continued. In b.c. 24 the Romans invaded Ethiopia in answer to an attack on Egypt by queen Candace, and destroyed Napata, but the kingdom continued to be independent. The Egyptian culture of Ethiopia had by that time fallen into a very barbarous state. Inscriptions exist written in a peculiar character and in the native language, as yet undeciphered; others are in a debased form of Egyptian hieroglyphic.
The name of Cush was familiar to the Hebrews through the part that its kings played in Egypt and Syria from b.c. 730 664, and recently discovered papyri prove that Jews were settled on the Ethiopian border at Syene in the 6th cent. b.c. See also Cush.
F. Ll. Griffith.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Ethiopia'. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdb/e/ethiopia.html. 1909.
