Chamor

חמור


Genesis 33:20 ff names him as the father of Shechem, who sold land to Ya'akov on his return from Padan Aram for a hundred shekels. Ya'akov erected an altar there to El Elohey Yisra-El (the god of gods of Yisra-El), which may be the reason why Shechem was chosen as the location for the covenant renewal ceremony at the very end of Yehoshu'a's life (Joshua 24).

Genesis 34:1 states that Chamor was a Chivite, which means that Shechem must have been a distant colony, because the Chivites inhabited the foothills of Mount Chermon in southern Levanon, and east of there; on the other hand, that "east of there" happens to be precisely the region where Lavan had his home; Lavan being Ya'akov's uncle, and that home the tribal base before Av-Ram left it to wander into Kena'an, so the connection appears to run somewhat deeper than the telling of the story might suggest.

Indeed, the name Levanon and the name Lavan stem from the same root, לָבָן in Yehudit; and in Arabic, pronounced exactly the same, لبن. Ya'akov's return from his years in service to the moon-god of Padan Aram ends with a pilgrimage of holy sites; first to Penu-El, where he is crowned king in one of the most extraordinary cultic rituals described anywhere in the Tanach, a rite that included ritual maiming; then to Sukot, the shrine of the willow-goddess; then to Shalem, which is described as being a city of Shechem.

In fact Shechem and Shalem were both cities in their own rights, and both had shrines; Shalem - which was one of the seven towns that would eventually become the conurbation of Yeru-Shala'im - being the city of Moloch, and Shechem the city of Chamor, who in his mythological form is the red-haired wild ass called "burrico" in the Spanish (from Chamar, which means "to boil", and gives the Pi'el form "to be red", from the idea of "boiling with rage"), whom the Egyptians knew as Set and the Hebrews as Shet (Seth), the third child of Adam and Chava.

There follows - we are still in Genesis 33 - an account of the rape of Dinah by Chamor's son - who is also named Shechem, like the town - and of the post-circumcision massacre of the town by Shim'on and Levi, much to Ya'akov's shock, horror and disapproval. This attempt to wipe out Shet worship clearly failed, as the pre-coronation pilgrimage of King Sha'ul makes manifest (1 Samuel 9). Nevertheless the city of Shechem became a central Jacobite shrine from this time on.

Joshua 24:32 tells us that Yoseph's bones were buried in the piece of land bought from Chamor and Shechem.

Judges 15:16 has a particularly interesting reference, not to the man or the place, but to the donkey itself:

"בלחי החמור המור המורתים בלחי החמור הכיתי בה אלף איש – Be-lechi ha-chamor chamor chamoratayim bi-lechi ha-chamor hikeyti eleph ish – with the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of an ass have I slain a thousand men".

The words belong to the Danite (Philistine) sun-hero Shimshon (Samson). A "heap" in this context is a burial mound. See notes to Be'er Lechi Ro'i.

The word is also used for a measurement, slightly differently in Exodus 8:10 and Numbers 11:32 from its usage in Leviticus 27:16 and Ezekiel 45:11ff.

See also Judges 9:28.

For more information about the cult of the donkey in the ancient Middle East, see my notes in the essay "Cults and Myth-Making"; for its especial importance in Egypt, where donkeys were buried in graves and had formal funerals, and Set was worshipped in the form of a donkey, click here. From Jeremiah 22:19 we know that the same was not true in later Yisra-El!

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