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MONUMENT FACTS
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HIGHER CRITICAL FANCIES

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MONUMENT FACTS
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HIGHER CRITICAL FANCIES

A. H. SAYCE, LL.D., D.D.
PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
AUTHOR OF 'FRESH LIGHT FROM THE ANCIENT MONUMENTS'
'THE RACES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT,' ETC.

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FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
NEW YORK, CHICAGO, TORONTO

PREFACE
Recent archaeological discoveries bearing
on the age and authenticity of the Old Testa
ment Scriptures have been so numerous and
so unexpected that a brief comparison of them
with the results of the so-called ' Higher
Criticism ' is desirable, especially in view of
the controversies which Professor Friedrich
Delitzsch's Babel und Bibel has excited in
Germany. It will be seen that they are not
favourable to the ' critical ' position. In deal
ing with them repetitions have sometimes been
necessary for the sake of the argument. The
words ' criticism,' ' critical ' and ' critic ' have
been printed between inverted commas when
ever they refer to the school of sceptical
theorists who have arrogated the title of
' critics ' to themselves. It is needless to add
that I, for one, do not admit their right to
do so.
A. H. SAYCE.

CONTENTS CHAPTER I

Historical Evidence

CHAPTER II
The Antiquity of Literature . . . . 28
CHAPTER III
The Dissection of the Pentateuch . . . 44
CHAPTER IV
The Fourteenth Chapter of Genesis and the
Trustworthiness of Old Testament History 54
CHAPTER V
The Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code . 67
CHAPTER VI
The Geography of the Pentateuch . . . 88
CHAPTER VII
Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology . . . 97
CHAPTER VIII
The Doctrine of Religious Evolution . . 115

MONUMENT FACTS

AND

HIGHER CRITICAL FANCIES

CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
' I ""HE Old Testament is a collection of ancient
literary works, and it was written by Orien
tals. These are two facts which will be admitted
by every one, but they are facts, nevertheless,
which once admitted, seem to be immediately
forgotten. Students and critics, commentators
and readers have united in interpreting or
criticizing the books of the Old Testament
as if they were the production of modern
Europeans. Whether the object of the writer
has been to defend or to undermine their
authenticity and trustworthiness, the same
method has been employed, the same point
of view adopted, the same principles uncon
sciously followed. Critic and commentator

10 HistoricalfEvidence
have agreed in transforming the old Hebrew
authors into men like unto themselves, the
representatives of an age of printing, of libra
ries, and of books of reference, with centuries of
European thought and prejudice behind them,
and imbued with all the intellectual and spiritual
prepossessions of a European race.
We cannot, however, understand the literature
of the Orient aright without becoming Orientals
ourselves, or interpret the history of the past
without divesting ourselves as it were of our
modern dress. It is not what we think ought
to have happened which has really happened in
the ancient East, nor has the history of it been
recorded in the manner that seems to us most
natural and fit.
There is only one way in which our studies
are likely to end in true results, and that
is by excluding from them as far as possible
what the Germans would call * the subjec
tive element.' As in natural science, so, too,
in the study of the Old Testament, what we
want are not theories, however ingenious,
but facts. It is true that a fact necessarily
embodies a theory, but if it is really a fact the
theory embodied in it is merely secondary and

Theory versus Fact 11
rests on a foundation of tangible evidence.
That the bronze age followed the stone age
may indeed involve not only the theory that
the bronze and stone implements which char
acterize them have been made by man, but also
that where two strata lie one below the other
the uppermost indicates a later period of deposi
tion ; but the theories are subordinate to the
evidence, and none but a madman would think
of disputing them.
It is only where the evidence is imperfect,
where more than one conclusion may be drawn
from it, that the theoretical side of the fact
assumes undue proportions, and renders the
fact itself provisional only. With the increase
of evidence, and the accumulation of fresh data,
the provisional nature of the facts tends to dis
appear, and the fact itself to stand upon solid
ground. Let us now apply these truisms — for truisms
they are — to the ancient history which has been
traditionally handed down to us. It is clear
that there is only one test of its truthfulness
which is scientifically acceptable. That test is
contemporaneous evidence. The evidence may
be of various kinds ; the facts of which it con-

12 Historical Evidence
sists may be literary and epigraphical, or of
a more or less material nature. The more
material they are, indeed, the more certain are
the conclusions to be derived from them.
Literary evidence may be explained away or
misinterpreted, inscriptions may be broken and
imperfect, but the evidence of potsherds and
forms of art is evidence which, once acquired,
is acquired for ever, and constitutes a solid
foundation of fact upon which to build. In
other words, the more archaeological and the
less philological our evidence is, the greater
will be its claim to scientific authority.
The reason of this is obvious. It is archaeo
logy and not philology that has to do with
history. The study of language and the study
of the past history of mankind belong to
different departments of thought. We cannot
extract history out of grammars and diction
aries, and the attempt to do so has always
ended in failure. In the early days of the
science of language comparative philologists
fancied that they could construct the primitive
history of a hypothetical ' Aryan family ' upon
the fossilized relics of Indo-European speech,
but the idyllic picture which they painted of the

'Literary Tact' 13
'undivided' Aryan community has long since
been shattered by anthropology.
For the purposes of history philology can be
only accidentally of service, only in so far as it
throws light on the meaning of a literary record
or assists in the decipherment of an ancient
inscription. It is the linguistic sense of the
record, and not the history it embodies or the
historical facts to be drawn from it, with which
alone philology is properly concerned. We
must not go to it for dates or for the history of
the development of civilization and culture.
Still less can we look for help to what has
been called ' literary tact.' ' Literary tact ' is
but another name for a purely subjective im
pression, and the subjective impressions of
a modern European in regard to ancient
Oriental history are not likely to be of value.
It is quite certain that an ancient Oriental
author would not have written as we should
write, or as we should have expected him to
write ; and consequently the very fact that an
ancient Oriental document does not conform to
our modern canons of criticism is an argument
in favour of its genuineness. A document
written in accordance with the critical require-

14 Historical Evidence
ments of a German professor can never have
come to us from the ancient East.
In the eyes, therefore, of inductive science
there is only one admissible test of the authen
ticity and trustworthiness of an ancient record,
t and that is an archaeological test. So far as
the historical side of the question is concerned
the philologist pure and simple is ruled out of
court. It is the archaeological evidence of
Egyptology or Assyriology, and not the philo
logical evidence, which can alone be applied to
the settlement of historical disputes.
This fact is often forgotten, and it is assumed
that every Egyptologist or Assyriologist is
equally a judge of historical questions. But
there are students of Egyptian and Assyrian
who have devoted themselves only to the
philological side of their subject ; and where
archaeology is involved the opinion of such
students is consequently just as valueless as
that of any other philologist in other fields of
research. Doubtless wherever literature or
inscriptions are involved philology supplies
part of the material of an archaeological fact ;
the question, for example, as to the existence
of the name of a god Yahum or Yahweh in

Value of Archaeology 15
Babylonian contracts of the age of Abraham,
is primarily a philological one ; but the
appreciation and historical application of the
fact — if fact it be — falls within the province of
archaeology. So, too, it is for philology to decide upon the
meaning of a passage in an ancient inscription ;
the historical bearing and date of the passage ;,
must be determined by archaeology.
Of recent years, however, criticism has
endeavoured to bolster up the weakness of the
philological method by an appeal to the
doctrine of evolution. But again, as in the case
of 'literary tact,' the appeal is to subjective
impressions and beliefs rather than to scientifi
cally established facts. That evolution has
been a potent factor in the history of man no
sane thinker will deny ; the precise line along
which it has moved, still more the line along
which it ought to have moved, is a totally
different matter.
In many instances the process of evolution
is clear, the links of the chain are practically
preserved, and we can point out the orderly
sequence in which they have succeeded one to
the other. But in many instances this is

16 Historical Evidence
impossible ; fragments only of the chain have
come down to us, and we have to supply the
missing links as best we may. Sometimes we
can do so with certainty ; at other times our
hypothetical chain is a possibility only.
But in all such cases the existence of some,
at any rate, of the links is presupposed. The
facts are there ; all we have to do is to connect
them together. Where art or archaeology
informs us which is the earlier and which
the later link, it is not difficult to bind them
into a single chain. But as soon as we leave
the sure ground of material facts and pheno
mena we pass into a region of purely subjective
speculation. That there is evolution in the world of
thought and ideas as well as in the world of
material objects is undeniable, but to trace the
evolution generally needs more knowledge than
we possess. Dr. Newman's epoch-making
book on The Development of Christian Doctrine
convinced its readers that there is such a thing
as development in dogma ; when it went on to
assert that the development must have taken
place in a particular direction, those only were
persuaded who were already disposed to be so.

True Value of Evolution 17
When we are told that the development of
religious ideas in Israel or elsewhere must have
followed certain lines, we need only point to
the recent archaeological discoveries which have
shattered similarly subjective theories of
development in Egypt and the early Greek
world. Unsupported by the archaeological
facts which indicate what is older and what is
later in the process of development, all theories
about the evolution of ideas, whether religious
or otherwise, are absolutely valueless. There
is no single line of growth along which they
must necessarily have moved, and, apart from (
the archaeological evidence, we can no more say
that a particular phase of faith or thought has
been evolved out of another than, apart from
physiology, we can say that a particular form of
life has a special ancestry. So far as the
criticism of ancient history or ancient docu
ments is concerned, whatever scientific value
there may be in the application to them of
the doctrine of evolution is derived from
archaeology. In dealing with the history of the past we
are thus confronted with two utterly opposed
methods, one objective, the other subjective,
B

18 Historical Evidence
one resting on a basis of verifiable facts, the
other on the unsupported and unsupportable
assumptions of the modern scholar. The one
is the method of archaeology, the other of
the so-called 'higher criticism.' Between the
two the scientifically trained mind can have no
hesitation in choosing.
The value, indeed, of the method of the
'higher criticism' can be easily tested. We
may know the tree by its fruits, and nowhere
is this truer than in the domain of science.
There is a very simple test which can be
applied to the pretensions of the ' higher critic'
More than once I have challenged the advo
cates of the 'critical method' to meet it, but
the challenge has never been accepted.
In both England and France books have been
published of late years which we know to have
been the joint work of more than one writer.
The novels of Besant and Rice and of Erck-
mann and Chatrian are familiar instances in
point. They are written in languages which
are both living, which embrace vast literatures,
and with which we believe ourselves to be
thoroughly acquainted. And yet there is no
Englishman who would undertake to say where

Value of * Critical' Analysis 19
Besant ends and Rice begins in the novels
which they wrote together, and no Frenchman
who would venture to do so in the case of the
two French novelists.
How then is it possible for the European
scholar of to-day to analyse an old Hebrew
book into its component parts, to lay down with
mathematical accuracy what section of the same
verse belongs to one writer, what to a second, and
what to a third, and even to fix the relative ¦
dates of these hypothetical authors ? Hebrew is
a language that is very imperfectly known ; it
has long ceased to be spoken ; only a fragment
of its literature has come down to us, and that
often in a corrupt state ; and the meaning of
many of the words which have survived, and
even of the grammatical forms, is uncertain
and disputed. In fact, it is just this fragment
ary and imperfect knowledge of the language
which has made the work and results of the
higher criticism possible. The 'critical'
analysis of the Pentateuch is but a measure
of our ignorance and the limitations of our
knowledge. What is impossible in the case of
modern English or French novels must be still
less possible in the case of the Old Testament
b 2

20 Historical Evidence
Scriptures. With fuller knowledge would come
a recognition of the futility of the task.
But there is yet another test to which we
can subject the results of the ' critical ' school.
There are cases in which recent archaeological
discovery has enabled us to put them to the
proof. The most striking of these is the account
of the Deluge contained in the Book of Genesis.
Here, if anywhere, we should seem to be justified
in inferring the existence of a composite nar
rative, in which at least two stories of the Flood
have been mixed or combined together. But
it so happens that a Babylonian story of the
Flood, which goes back in its present form to
the age of Abraham, has been preserved in the
Chaldean epic of Gilgames. When we compare
( this story with the account in Genesis, we find
that it agrees not only with the so-called
Elohistic version, but with the so-called Yah-
vistic version as well.
It thus presupposes an account of the Deluge
*in which the 'Elohistic' and 'Yahvistic' ele
ments were already combined together. And
since it was written some centuries before the
birth of Moses, there are only two ways of
accounting for the fact, if the narrative in

'Critical' Methods Unsound 21
Genesis is really a composite one. Either the
Babylonian poet had before him the present
text of Genesis, or else the ' Elohist ' and
'Yahvist' must have copied the Babylonian
story on the mutual understanding that the one
should insert what the other omitted. There
is no third alternative.
It follows from all this that the ' critical '
method is scientifically unsound, and its results
accordingly will not stand the application of
a scientific test. It is quite as much an
artificial creation as was the Ptolemaic system
of the universe, and like the latter requires
for its support an ever-increasing number of
fresh hypotheses and complicated qualifications. 1
With its disappearance will disappear also the
historical conclusions that have been derived
from it.
The varying dates assigned to the hypo
thetical authors of the Pentateuch, the successive
strata of religious belief and custom supposed
to be discoverable in it, the denial of the
historical character of the narratives it contains,
must all alike go with the foundation of sand
upon which they have been built. An edifice
reared on the subjective fancies and assumptions

22 Historical Evidence
of the modern European scholar is necessarily
a house of cards.
If we are to refuse credit to the narratives
of the Old Testament, it must be for some other
reason than a belief that we can analyze its
documents into their component elements, can
fix the age and object of each, and can be sure
that ancient Oriental thought must have de
veloped in one particular fashion and in no
other. There is only one kind of evidence
which can be admitted for or against the history
that has been handed down to us, and that is
the evidence of archaeological facts. If they
support it, we can safely disregard the specula
tions of the ' higher critic ' ; if their testimony
is adverse, we have something more substantial
to go upon than ' literary tact ' or a Massoretic
counting of words.
In default of facts ' criticism ' has been fond
of appealing, in support of its negative con
clusions, to the absence of documentary evidence.
The story of the campaign of the King of Elam
and his allies against the Canaanitish princes,
we have been told, must be pure myth or fiction,
since there was no record of Babylonian ex
peditions into Palestine in the patriarchal age.

'The Argument from Silence' 23
But 'the argument from silence' is essentially
unscientific. To make our own ignorance the
measure of historical credibility is to adopt the
subjective method in an extreme form. If
there is one fact which above all others physical
science is constantly impressing upon us, it is
how little we know of the material universe
wherein we live ; and the same lesson is taught
by archaeology in regard to the history of the
past. Time after time the most positive
assertions of a sceptical criticism have been
disproved by archaeological discovery, events
and personages that were confidently pro
nounced to be mythical have been shown to
be historical, and the older writers have turned
out to have been better acquainted with what
they were describing than the modern critic
who has flouted them.
As we shall see, the campaign of Chedor-
laomer and his allies has proved to be no myth or
fiction, but sober fact; the very names of the kings
who took part in it have been recovered, and we
now know that the political situation presupposed
by the narrative corresponds exactly with the
actual requirements of history. It was the critic
who was mistaken, and not the writer in Genesis.

24 Historical Evidence
Hardly half a dozen years ago the 'critic'
assured us that Menes, the founder of the united
kingdom of Egypt, and his immediate successors
of the First Dynasty were the creations of
etymological invention, 'semi-fabulous' person
ages, belonging to a ' prehistoric ' period, of
which no record could ever have existed. The
spade of the excavator has rudely dissipated
all such dreams. So far from being ' semi-
fabulous ' and ' mythical ' the kings of the First
Dynasty of Egypt turn out to have lived in the
full blaze of culture and history, at a time when
the civilization of Egypt was already old, when
its art was highly advanced and its political
organization complete. The hieroglyphic system
of writing was already perfected ; an alphabet
had been formed out of it, and even a cursive
hand developed. A careful chronological
register was kept, and, as in Babylonia, the
events of each year were officially recorded.
Even the tombs of the ' semi-fabulous ' beings
of the critic's imagination have been discovered,
and the bones of Menes himself are now in the
Museum of Cairo.
If we turn to Babylonia, the same story
awaits us there. There, too, we were told that

The Excavator at Work 25
Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin were
creatures of myth, and that the description of
their campaigns in Syria and Canaan, and of the
empire they established in Western Asia was
altogether ' unhistorical.' But once more the
excavator has been at work; the monuments
of Sargon and Naram-Sin have been found,
and written tablets have been disinterred dated
in the years when Syria, ' the land of the
Amorites,' was conquered. Wherever archae
ology has been able to test the negative con
clusions of criticism, they have dissolved like
a bubble into the air.
The criticism of the Old Testament, which
has ended in negation and preferred the results
of its own subjective theorizing to the external
testimony of tradition, had a twofold basis. It
started on the one hand from Wolf's assumption
that the use of writing for literary purposes was
unknown before the classical period of Greek
history, and on the other hand from Astruc's
inference that the employment of different names
for the Deity in the Book of Genesis indicated
diversity of authorship.
It was in 1795 that Wolf's Prolegomena to
Homer was published, and the foundations laid

26 Historical Evidence
for that critical separation of ancient books into
their hypothetical elements which has since be
come such a favourite pastime in Germany. It
was obvious that neither the text nor the contents
of a literature which had been handed down
orally and not committed to writing could lay
any great claim to accuracy, and it was probable
that the tradition which assigned it to a single
author was merely a popular illusion. If writing
was practically unknown before the age of
Peisistratus and Solon in Greece, tradition might
safely be thrown aside, and a wide field was
opened for the labours and theories of the critic.
The Conjectures sur la Genese of Jean Astruc,
the French Protestant physician, were published
anonymously in Paris in 1753. Astruc himself
did not dispute the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch. But he maintained that the use
of Elohim in some passages of Genesis and
that of Yahveh (Jehovah) in others pointed to
a duality of sources, and that the book must
have been written by Moses in four parallel
columns, which were afterwards mixed together
by ignorant copyists.
This second theory was soon abandoned, if
indeed it had ever been adopted by other

Destructive 'Criticism' 27
students, but the first theory shared a different
fate. The existence of two names for God is
a fact which, once pointed out, cannot be gain
said, and Astruc's explanation of it became for
' criticism ' the only one. It was assumed that
a difference in the use of the Divine Name must
imply a difference in authorship ; and when to
this was added the further assumption of the
late introduction of the art of writing, the future'
march of criticism was assured. Tradition, even
the best attested, had to make way before it,
theory was piled upon theory, and a time came
at last when hardly any fragment of ancient
literature had escaped the knife of the critical
dissector, and the whole of ancient history, as
it had been handed down to us before the age
of Cyrus or the capture of Rome by the Gauls,
was wiped out with a sponge.

CHAPTER II
THE ANTIQUITY OF LITERATURE
TIJ*OR more than half a century after the publi-
cation of Wolf's Prolegomena the assumption
of the late use of writing for literary purposes
was one which no one who pretended to critical
scholarship ventured to dispute. Among the
Greeks, it was assumed, it did not go back
beyond the sixth century before our era ; among
the Hebrews only the more conservative critics
allowed that it might have been known in the
age of Solomon. But even this concession was
not universally admitted, and Biblical criticism
ended by denying the pre-exilic origin of the
larger part of the Old Testament literature.
The early Israelites could not read or write ;
how then could a mature literature such as we
find in the Old Testament have come into
existence at an early date ?
But this supposed late use of writing for
literary purposes was merely an assumption,

Writing not Late in Date 29
with nothing more solid to rest upon than the
critic's own theories and prepossessions. And
as soon as it could be tested by solid fact it
crumbled into dust. First Egyptology, then
Assyriology, showed that the art of writing in
the ancient East, so far from being of modern
growth, was of vast antiquity, and that the two
great powers which divided the civilized world
between them were each emphatically a nation
of scribes and readers. Centuries before Abra
ham was born Egypt and Babylonia were alike
full of schools and libraries, of teachers and
pupils, of poets and prose-writers, and of the
literary works which they had composed.
Egyptian literature goes back almost to the
earliest period of its history. From the days
of the founder of the First Dynasty onwards the
events of each year of the king's reign were
recorded in writing. Notes written in a cursive
hand have been found in the tombs of the First
Dynasty, and some of the chapters in the Book
of the Dead — the Prayer-book of the ancient
Egyptians — are older than King Menes himself.
The tombs and other monuments of the Fourth
Dynasty show that a knowledge of writing was
already as widely spread as it was in the later

30 The Antiquity of Literature
days of Egyptian history, and the walls of the
pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties are
covered with ritual texts which had been handed
down from a remote antiquity.
The Proverbs of Ptah-hotep, written in the
time of the Fifth Dynasty, remained an Egyptian
classic, and we may gather from them that edu
cation was generally diffused among the people.
Indeed, if Virey's translation can be trusted,
a sort of competitive examination was already
known1. At any rate the style of the book
belongs to an advanced period of literary culture.
It aims at attracting notice by its terseness and
complicated turns, and by its departure from the
language at once of ordinary life and of current
literature. The Proverbs of Ptah-hotep, in fact, though
written more than five thousand years ago,
represent the close of a period in the history
of Egyptian literature. They had been pre
ceded by earlier books, many of which survived
to a later day. One of them has come down to
1 ' Let (the pupil) win success by placing himself in the
first rank ; that is for him a position proper and durable, and
he has nothing (further) to desire for ever.' Records of the
Past, new series, III, p. 31 (1890).

Egyptian Education Early 31
ourselves in a mutilated form. It is a moral
treatise, the work of a certain Qaqemna, who
lived in the remote age of the Third Dynasty.
But even then there were already schools and
libraries in Egypt stored with papyrus books
written in a running hand.
Egypt continued to be a literary country
through all the vicissitudes of its political
fortunes. It was emphatically a land of readers
and scribes. The passing traveller scratched
his name upon the rocks, and the smaller
objects of every-day life were inscribed. The
articles of toilet that were made for the Egyp
tian lady had appropriate inscriptions carved or
painted upon them, and even the objects that
lay hidden away in the darkness of the tomb
were covered with written characters.
Not only the professional scribes, but every
one who pretended to be a gentleman was
required to be educated. The man of business,
the wealthier fellahin, even the overseers of
the workmen, were expected to be acquainted
with the hieroglyphic system of writing and the
hieratic or cursive hand which had developed
out of it. The dead man himself could not
pass in safety through the perils that sur-

32 The Antiquity of Literature
rounded him on his entrance into the other
world, unless he could read the inscriptions on
the walls of his sepulchre or the ritual of the
dead which was buried with him.
And the literature with which the libraries
of Egypt were stocked was of the most varied
character. Even the historical novel was re
presented in it, as well as political satires and
books of travel. One of the most popular
books written in the reign of the Pharaoh of
the Oppression is a sarcastic account of the
adventures of an Egyptian official in Palestine.
No one, in short, could live in Egypt without
coming under the spell of its literary culture.
Written characters literally stared him in the
face on every side, and all who were in any
way connected with the government were
obliged to read and understand them.
The literary culture of Egypt has its parallel
in Babylonia. There too we find a land of
books and schools and libraries and a nation of
readers and writers. Babylonia was a great
commercial community, and for the purposes of
trade a knowledge of reading and writing was
required among all classes who took part in it.
From a remote antiquity not only schools but

Babylonian Literature Ancient 33
libraries as well had been established in the
numerous cities of the country, and as in
Egypt, so too in Babylonia, the literature
represented in them was of the most varied
description. The cuneiform characters of Babylonia were
far more difficult to learn than the hieroglyphs
of Egypt. They were, in fact, a hieratic or
cursive hand developed at an early date out of
hieroglyphs of which but few traces have come
down to us. There was consequently nothing
in their forms to assist the memory, any more
than there is in the form of Chinese characters
to-day. Moreover, they had been the invention
of a people who spoke an agglutinative lan
guage, like that of the Turks or Finns, and
who had been subsequently supplanted by
Semites. When accordingly the Semites
adopted and adapted the old writing of the
country along with the rest of its civilization
they found it necessary to learn the language
which the writing embodied. There was
already a large literature composed in it, and
even after the Semitic occupation it long re
mained the language of those two conservative
branches of study, law and religion.

34 The Antiquity of Literature
Babylonian education thus included not only
a knowledge of the complicated cuneiform
signs, but also of the language of the older
Sumerian population. Sumerian became to
the Semitic Babylonian what Latin was to the
mediaeval European, the foundation and back
ground of his literary education, the language
of religion and law, and even of a part of the
literature which he was required to know.
What years of patient labour all this implies
may easily be conceived. An old Sumerian
proverb, used as a text for a copybook, declared
that ' he who would live in the school of the
scribes must rise like the sun,' and the exer
cise books of Babylonian learners who lived
before Abraham was born have recently been
found by the American excavators at Nippur
in Northern Babylonia. The pupil was first
taught how to form his characters, then he
committed them to memory from lists in which
they were arranged according to their forms.
For the acquisition of Sumerian he had gram
mars and dictionaries, vocabularies, phrase-
books and interlinear translations, as well as
grammatical analyses and explanations of
difficult passages.

Babylonian Education 35
But even with all this the young Babylonian
had far greater difficulties to contend against
than the young Englishman of to-day with his
simple alphabet of twenty-six letters, but they
were difficulties which had to be overcome
before he could even read the deed in which
he leased his house or bought his wool. That
education should nevertheless have been so
widely diffused in Babylonia as we now know
it to have been, women as well as men sharing
in it, is a truly astonishing fact. The Baby
lonia of the age of Abraham was a more
highly educated country than the England of
George III.
' Criticism ' so-called met the great fact of
the advanced literary culture of ancient Egypt ,
and Babylonia by either ignoring or minimizing '¦¦?
or denying it altogether. As late as 1862, Sir
George Cornewall Lewis denied it 1, and as late
1 An Historical Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients :
' Whoever calmly considers the long possession of Egypt by
the two most civilized nations of antiquity, while the sacred
language and writing of the ancient Egyptians were still
perpetuated by an unbroken tradition, will be slow to believe
that these supposed treasures, if they really existed, could
have remained untouched, or that they would have been left
to be opened by the laborious investigation of modern
C 2

36 The Antiquity of Literature
as 1 87 1 the eminent Semitic scholar Professor
Noldeke declared that the results of Assyrio-
logy in both linguistic and historical matters
had ' a highly suspicious air.' It was subjective
theory against objective fact, and in accordance
with the usual ' critical ' method fact had to give
way to theory.
But facts are stubborn things, and gradually
the accumulation of them forced an unwilling
and half-hearted assent from the disciples of
the 'critical method.' At last, in 1887, came
a discovery which revolutionized our concep
tions of ancient Oriental history, and made
the assumption of ancient Oriental illiteracy
henceforth an impossibility. This was the
archaeologists, more than 1,500 years after the key of this
secret had been lost. . . . The future discoveries of the
Egyptologists will be attended with results as worthless and
as uncertain as those which have hitherto attended their ill-
requited and barren labours ' (pp. 395-396). ' It must not be
assumed that any authentic memorials of the early Assyrian
history were in existence when Herodotus and Ctesias col
lected their information. Oral tradition would not have
carried them back with safety for much more than a century;
and we have no reason to suppose that any contemporary
chronicles or registers, of a historical nature, had been com
posed and preserved ' (pp. 432-433). So much for the value
of literary ' criticism ' !

Tel el-Amarna Tablets 37
discovery of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-
Amarna. Tel el-Amarna marks the site of a city which
stood on the eastern bank of the Nile, midway
between the modern towns of Minia and Assiut.
It was built by Amon-hotep IV, one of the last
kings of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty.
Born of an Asiatic mother, and himself a philo
sopher and visionary, he endeavoured to reform,
or rather to abolish, the state religion of Egypt,
of which he was himself the official head, and
to replace the worship of Amon of Thebes by
a sort of pantheistic monotheism. For Amon- s
hotep there was but one God, the creator and
upholder of all things, and in whom all things
exist. Omnipresent, omniscient, and all-good,
the visible symbol of this one God was the
solar disk.
But the reforming efforts of the Pharaoh
met with fierce opposition, and in spite of per
secution the followers of Amon succeeded in
holding their own against ' the heretic king.'
He retired northwards from Thebes, the capital
of his fathers, and founded a new capital where
the mounds of Tel el-Amarna now line the
river bank. Here he erected a temple for his

38 The Antiquity of Literature
God and a palace for himself, and here he died
surrounded by the adherents of the new faith,
and the foreigners from Canaan and other
parts of Western Asia, to whom he had en
trusted the higher offices of state.
When he died religious and civil war was
breaking out throughout the land. It was not
long before the national party were triumphant;
the city of the heretic Pharaoh, with the temple
and palace, was razed to the ground, and the
mummy of the Pharaoh itself dragged from its
sepulchre and torn into fragments. The city
of Khu-n-Aten, ' the glory of the Solar Disk,' as
the Pharaoh had renamed himself, lasted hardly
more than thirty years.
But while it lasted the Egyptian Foreign
Office was transferred to it from Thebes, and
an active correspondence carried on with the
Egyptian governors and vassal princes in the
subject provinces of Canaan and Syria, as well
as with the kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Meso
potamia and Asia Minor. It is this correspon
dence, including the letters and other documents
which had been brought from Thebes, which
was discovered in 1887.
The most astonishing and unexpected fact

The Babylonian Language 39
about this correspondence is, that it is in the
cuneiform script of Babylonia and for the most
part in the Babylonian language. It proves
that the Babylonian language was to such an
extent the language of diplomacy and inter
national intercourse that even the Egyptian
court had to use it when corresponding with its
Asiatic provinces. It also proves that the
culture and political ascendency of Babylonia
had exercised so long and so permanent an
influence upon Western Asia as to impose
upon it the language and syllabary of the
dominant state. Throughout Western Asia
there must have been schools and libraries
like those of Babylonia itself, in which the
literature of Babylonia was studied, and its
language and system of writing taught and
learned. The correspondence further shows that
letters, in what to most of the writers was
a foreign tongue and script, were constantly
passing backwards and forwards along the
high-roads of trade and war. The subjects
of them were often trivial ; and some of them
were written by Bedouin chiefs as well as by
women. The writers, in learning the Baby-

40 The Antiquity of Literature
Ionian script and language, had at the same
time to acquire a knowledge of Babylonian
literature. Among the clay tablets found at
Tel el-Amarna are fragments of mythological
poems in which the words have been divided
from one another in order to assist the learner,
and the legal code of Khammu-rabi recently
discovered makes it clear that Babylonian law
also was known in the West.
The Mosaic age, therefore, instead of being
an illiterate one, was an age of high literary
activity and education throughout the civilized
East. Not only was there a wide-spread
literary culture in both Egypt and Babylonia
which had its roots in a remote past, but
this culture was shared by Mesopotamia and
Asia Minor, and more especially by Syria
and Palestine.
Palestine, in fact, was the meeting-place of
the two great powers of the Oriental world,
and had long been under the influence of the
streams of literary culture which flowed from
them. The influence of Babylonian culture
must have been felt in it at least as early
as the era of Sargon of Akkad, who in
corporated it into his empire centuries before

Early Systems of Writing 41
the birth of Abraham ; the recent excavations
at Gezer have shown that monuments inscribed
with Egyptian hieroglyphs were erected on its
soil in the period of the Twelfth Dynasty.
But this is not all. Thanks to the dis
coveries of Dr. A. J. Evans and others in
Krete, we now know that long before the age
of Moses there was an advanced literary
culture in what was to be in after days the
Greek world, and that the hieroglyphs of
Egypt and the cuneiform characters of Baby
lonia were not the only systems of writing
which were in vogue. In Krete itself there were
three, if not four, wholly different systems, one
consisting of pictographs, the others of linear
characters which represented syllables.
One of these latter systems was widely used.
Inscriptions in it have been found in the island
of Melos as well as at Mykenae and Orcho-
menos in Greece ; some of its characters are
impressed on the Amoritish potsherds dis
interred at Lachish in Palestine; and the
syllabary of Cyprus, inscriptions in which have
been discovered at Troy and in Jerusalem, was
but a local form of it. In the 'Palace of
Minos' at Knossos hundreds of clay tablets

42 The Antiquity of Literature
have been disinterred, the majority of which
are older than the Mosaic age, and all alike
are covered with the characters of this still
undeciphered script. From one end of the
civilized ancient world to the other men and
women were reading and writing and corre
sponding with one another; schools abounded
and great libraries were formed, in an age
which the 'critic' only a few years ago dog
matically declared was almost wholly illiterate.
The second assumption, then, upon which
the method and results of the 'higher criticism'
rest has been disproved by archaeological
research. Moses not only could have written
the Pentateuch, but it would have been little
short of a miracle had he not been a scribe.
He had been brought up in the Pharaoh's court,
he was a law-giver, and the elders and over
seers of his brother Israelites in the land of
Goshen would have been required to know
how to read and write. Egypt, where the
Israelites dwelt so long and from which they
fled, was a land of writing and literature, and the
Canaan which they invaded was even more so.
For here three literary cultures met, as it were,
together — the culture and script of Egypt, the

Abraham's a Literary Age 43
culture and script of Babylonia, and the culture
and script of the Philistines from Krete.
The very potters scratched written charac
ters, and sometimes words or names, not only on
the pottery of Egypt but upon that of Canaan
and of Melos. In Palestine the handles of
the jars were impressed with the hieroglyphic
legends of inscribed scarabs, just as they were
at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt. The civilized world
was a world of books, and a knowledge of
writing extended even to the classes of the
population who were engaged in manual labour.
Professor Ramsay has drawn attention to
the contrast between the Latin Crusaders in
Asia Minor, who have left no written records
behind them because they could neither read
nor write, and the Greek and Carian mer
cenaries of the Pharaoh Psammetichus, who
employed their leisure at Abu Simbel in
covering its stone colossi with inscriptions at
a time when, according to Wolf's hypothesis,
the Greek world was still illiterate. We have
learnt many things of late years from archaeo
logy, but its chiefest lesson has been that the
age of Moses, and even the age of Abraham,
was almost as literary an age as our own.

CHAPTER III
THE DISSECTION OF THE PENTATEUCH
HPHE historian is necessarily a compiler. He
has to gather his materials from all sides, and
in so far as they are literary his work must be
to a certain extent a literary compilation. The
author of the Books of Kings tells us what some
of the sources were from which his narrative has
been derived ; they were the book of the Acts
of Solomon, and the official Annals of the Kings
of Judah and Israel. Other contemporaneous
sources are named by the chronicler — the book
of Nathan the prophet, the prophecy of Ahijah,
the Visions and Commentary of Iddo the seer,
the Genealogies of Shemaiah and Iddo, the
History of Jehu the son of Hanani, 'who is
mentioned in the book of the Kings of Israel,'
and the Vision of Isaiah.
Extracts from similar sources can be detected
even in the Pentateuch ; the list of the kings of
Edom, for example, given in the thirty-sixth

Early Historians Compilers 45
chapter of Genesis, must have been taken from
the state annals of the country, and the itinerary
of the Israelites in the thirty-third chapter of
Numbers implies an official and contempor
aneous record. As we shall see, the account
of the campaign of Chedor-laomer and his allies
which we find in the fourteenth chapter of
Genesis must have been derived from a Baby
lonian document.
But because the historian is a compiler it does
not follow that he is a divided personality.
Herodotus has embodied in his history numerous
quotations and extracts from his predecessors,
but for all that he was a single individual, and
not a collection of different writers living at
different periods of Greek history whom tradition
has comprehended under one name. Printing
has made us so familiar with footnote references
and marks of quotation that we fail to realize
how difficult it was for an ancient author to
indicate exactly where he himself was speaking
and where he was borrowing from others. The
fear of plagiarism was not before his eyes so
constantly as it is before the eyes of those who
live in an age of printing-presses and reviewers.
There are, nevertheless, modern books which

46 The Dissection of the Pentateuch
illustrate the method of the ancients. Little
more than half a century ago, for instance,
Bayle St. John wrote an account of his visit
to Egypt, in which he incorporated long extracts
from the works of other travellers without adding
marks of quotation, or indeed anything that
would enable the reader to distinguish between
his own narrative and that of earlier writers.
Had such a book been included in the Old
Testament Canon, and the older books from
which it has been borrowed been known, the
'critic' would have triumphantly pointed to it
as an indisputable example of composite author
ship. And yet it is really the work of a single
"author, and the greater part of it is devoted to
Jthe story of his own individual experiences.
,.. Archaeology has furnished us with the means
of actually testing the value of the ' critical ' theory
regarding the composition of the Pentateuch.
If there is any portion of it in which the sup
posed fact of divided authorship seems clearest,
it is the narrative of the Deluge. Here, if any
where, we seem to have evidence of a double
version of the story, the two sections of which
can be distinguished from one another, and
which appear to be characterized not only by

Epic of Gilgames 47
a different phraseology but by a different account
of the catastrophe as well. And yet, as has
already been said, the Babylonian story of the
event goes to show that such evidence is merely
illusive. The twofold description of the Flood
in Genesis is like the twofold text which, it has
been proved, is discoverable in some of the
works of Dean Stanley when the 'critical
method ' is applied to them \
The Babylonian story in its most complete
form is contained in the great Chaldean epic
of Gilgames. It there occupies the larger por
tion of the eleventh book, and is represented as
being told to the Babylonian hero by Xisuthros,
the Babylonian Noah, himself. As the epic was
composed in the age of Abraham, the episode
of the Deluge which has thus been introduced
into it must go back to at least as early a date.
Now when we compare the Babylonian story
with the account in Genesis we find that it does
not agree with only one or other of the two
versions which criticism has discovered and
distinguished in the Biblical narrative, but with
both. Like the 'Elohist' it makes Xisuthros
1 J. Carmichael, How Two Documents may he found in One
(Montreal, 1895).

48 The Dissection of the Pentateuch
the tenth in descent from the first man, it
ascribes the Flood to the sins of mankind, and
the preservation of Xisuthros to his piety ; it
asserts that all living things were destroyed
except such as had found shelter in the ark;
it states that the approach of the catastrophe
was revealed to Xisuthros by the god Ea, who
instructed him how to build the ark, which was
divided into rooms and storeys, provided with
a window, and pitched within and without ; it
tells us that ' the seed of life of all kinds ' was
taken into the vessel, along with the family of
Xisuthros, and that the waters covered ' all the
s high mountains ' ; and, finally, that when the
"Deluge had subsided and Xisuthros had offered
a sacrifice on the summit of the mountain, the
god Bel blessed him and promised that he would
never again destroy the world by a flood, while
the goddess I star 'uplifted' the rainbow, which
an old Babylonian hymn calls ' the bow of the
Deluge.' Like the ' Yahvist,' on the other hand, the
Babylonian story sees in the Flood a punish
ment for sin, and makes it destroy all living
things which were not in the ark ; it describes
how Xisuthros sent forth three birds, the swallow,

The Three Birds 49
the dove, and the raven, to discover if the waters
had subsided from the earth, and that, while the
dove turned back to the ark, the raven flew
away ; and it states that after the descent from
the vessel Xisuthros built an altar, and offered
sacrifice on the peak of the mountain where it
had rested, and where the gods ' smelt the sweet
savour ' of the offering.
The three birds of the Babylonian story
explain why it is that in the Biblical version
the dove is mentioned twice, though commen
tators long ago suspected that three birds must
originally have been named. Nor is this all.
The Biblical writer must have had the Baby
lonian version before him — if not in its literary
form, at all events in some shape or other — for
he has deliberately excluded and implicitly con
tradicted the polytheistic elements contained in
it. The swallow is omitted because its name,
' the bird of destiny,' brought with it super
stitious and idolatrous associations ; the Deluge
is not the work of one god, Bel, and the pre
servation of Xisuthros the work of another, Ea,
as the Babylonian account averred, but the
punishment of mankind and the revelation of
the coming catastrophe to the righteous man
D

50 The Dissection of the Pentateuch
are alike due to the One God, whether He be
addressed as Elohim or as Yahveh ; while the
statement of the Babylonian poet that the door
of the ark was shut by Xisuthros himself is
directly negatived by the Biblical writer, who
asserts that it was that One God who closed it.
If, then, the Babylonian account of the Deluge
agrees with the Biblical version as a whole, and
>not with one or other of the component parts
into which it has been separated by criticism —
and such, as we have seen, is the case — and if,
as is also the case, this Babylonian account goes
back to an age long anterior to that of Moses,
only one conclusion is possible. Even the nar
rative in which the marks of composite author
ship seem clearest is not really composite, at
any rate in the sense in which the term is
understood by ' criticism.' The other alter
native, that the ' Elohistic ' and ' Yahvistic '
elements already existed in the Babylonian
version, is one that no Assyriologist would
accept, nor would it assist the ' critical ' position,
as the Babylonian version had assumed its
present form before the Mosaic age.
But we can go yet a step further. When we
compare the Biblical with the Babylonian account

The Sprig of Olive 51
of the Flood, we find that its geographical set
ting has been changed. It is true that the ark
is made to rest on one of the mountains of
Ararat, but in other respects it has been given
a Palestinian colouring. Not only is the name
of the rescued patriarch no longer Xisuthros or
Utu-napistim but Noah, and the vessel itself
has been changed from a ship into an ark.
Unlike Babylonia or Egypt, Canaan possessed
no great rivers ; its population, except in the
Phoenician cities of the coast, was essentially
inland and unacquainted with the art of ship
building. The sprig of olive brought back by
the dove to the ark is another indication of
Western influence, for the olive was a tree
of Palestine and not of Babylonia. Still more
significant is the difference in the chronology
and calendar of the two versions. The rainy
season of Babylonia was the month Sebet, our
January and February, and it was in Sebet,
therefore, that the Flood was believed to have
taken place. But in Canaan the rainy months
were October and November, when the autumn
or 'former' rains fall, and March, with the
' latter ' rains of spring. In the Book of Genesis,
accordingly, 'the fountains of the great deep'
d 2

52 The Dissection of the Pentateuch
are said to have been broken up and 'the
windows of heaven opened ' in ' the second
month ' of the Hebrew year, that is to say, at
the end of October, while the subsidence of the
waters began in the middle of the seventh
month, when the rains of spring would be over.
The conclusion which follows is obvious.
Not only does the Babylonian story of the
Deluge agree with that of Genesis as a whole,
and thus utterly ignore the distinctive elements
which criticism has laboured to point out within
it; it further shows that the story must have
been known and modified in Canaan before it
found a place in the Hebrew Scriptures. How
this should have been the case we have again
learnt from archaeological discovery.
The Tel el-Amarna tablets, which have
revealed to us the literary activity and wide
spread education of the Mosaic age, have also
shown that Babylonian literature was studied
in the schools of Canaan. Even in distant
Egypt, in the Foreign Office of the Pharaoh,
as we have seen, fragments have been dis
covered of Babylonian legends, with the words
separated from one another for the assistance
of the foreign reader. The Babylonian account

A Philological Mirage 53
of the great catastrophe which had once
swept over the civilized earth must have been
known in Canaan long before Moses was born.
Indeed, it must have been familiar to Abraham
himself before he migrated from Ur. In the
' critical ' theory of the origin of the Biblical
narrative archaeology thus compels us to see
only a philological mirage.

CHAPTER IV
THE FOURTEENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS
AND THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF
OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY
TN 1869 the great Semitic scholar, Professor
Noldeke, published a treatise on the ' Un-
historical character of the fourteenth chapter
of Genesis'1. He declared that 'criticism'
had for ever disproved its claim to be historical.
The political situation presupposed by it was
incredible and impossible ; at so distant a date
Babylonian armies could not have marched to
Canaan, much less could Canaan have been
a subject province of Babylonia. The whole
story, in fact, was a fiction based upon the
Assyrian conquest of Palestine in later days.
The names of the princes commemorated in it
were etymological inventions ; eminent Semitic
philologists had already explained those of
Chedor-laomer and his allies from Sanskrit, and
1 Untersuchungen zvr Kritik des alien Testaments, Abhand-
lung III, pp. 156-172 (Kiel, 1869), and Jahrbucher fur
wissenschaftliche Theologie (1870), pp. 213 et seq. On the
' Iranian ' origin of Babylonian names see Renan. Histoire
gine'rale des Langues semitigues, pp. 62-64.

A Lost History Recovered 55
those of the Canaanitish princes were derived
from the events in which they were supposed
to have borne a part.
This was in 1869. In 1903 'criticism' is
discreetly silent about the conclusions which
it then announced with so much assurance. In
the interval the excavator and archaeologist
have been hard at work, regardless of the most
certainly ascertained results of ' criticism,' and
the ancient world of Western Asia has risen
again from the grave of centuries. A history
which had seemed lost for ever has been
recovered for us, and we can now handle and
read the very letters which passed between the
contemporaries of Abraham. We now know
almost as much, in fact, about the Babylonia
of the age of Abraham as we do about the
Assyria of the age of Isaiah or about the Greece
of the age of Perikles.
And the increase of knowledge has not been
favourable to the results of 'criticism.' It has
proved them to be nothing but the baseless
fabric of subjective imagination. It is the
Book of Genesis, and not the works of the
modern German critic, whose claim to credence
has been vindicated by the discoveries of

56 The Fourteenth Chapter of Genesis
archaeology. It is true that the discoveries
have been disputed by the ' critic ' inch by inch,
that first the philological scholarship of the
Assyriologist, and then his good faith was
questioned, and that now, when at length a
grudging assent to undeniable facts has been
extorted, we are told that the ' critical position '
still remains unaffected. Unaffected! When
the foundation upon which it rested is absolutely
gone !
We read in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis
that ' in the days of Amraphel king of Shinar,
Arioch king of Ellasar, Chedor-laomer king of
Elam, and Tid'al king of Nations (Goyyim) ;
that these made war with Bera king of Sodom,
and with Birsha king of Gomorrah, Shinab king
of Admah, and Shemeber king of Zeboiim, and
the king of Bela, which is Zoar. . . . Twelve
years they served Chedor-laomer, and in the
thirteenth year they rebelled.' And in the four
teenth year came Chedor-laomer and the kings
that were with him, and smote ' the Amorites of
Canaan as far south as the later Kadesh-barnea.'
There are several points worthy of notice
in this narrative. Though it is dated in the
reign of a king of Babylonia, the leader of the

Babylon Subject to Elam 57
forces, and the suzerain to whom the Canaanitish
princes were subject, was a king of Elam.
Elam, therefore, must have been the pre
dominant power at the time, and the Babylonian
king must have been its vassal. The narrative
nevertheless is dated in the reign of the Baby
lonian king and not in that of the king of Elam,
and it is to the reign of the Babylonian king
that the events described in it are attached.
Babylonia, however, was not a united country ;
there was another king, Arioch of Ellasar, who
divided with Amraphel of Shinar the govern
ment of it, and like Amraphel acknowledged
the supremacy of Elam. Finally the ' Nations,'
whoever they were, were also subject to Elam,
as well as the distant province of Canaan.
Now let us turn to the contemporaneous
monuments of Babylonia, and see what they
have to tell us in regard to the very period
to which the Book of Genesis refers. Elam,
we find, had conquered Babylonia, and the
sovereigns of Babylonia, accordingly, had be
come the vassals of the Elamite king. Along
with the conquest had gone the division of
Babylonia into two kingdoms ; while Khammu-
rabi or Ammu-rapi was reigning at Babylon —

58 The Fourteenth Chapter of Genesis
the Biblical Shinar in the north — Eri-Aku, the
son of an Elamite prince, was ruling at Larsa —
the Biblical Ellasar — in the south.
Eastward, in the Kurdish mountains, were
the Umman Manda or ' Barbarian Nations ' of
whom Tudghula appears to have been the
chief. Canaan had long been, in name, if not
always in reality, a Babylonian province, and
when Babylonia passed under Elamite domina
tion the Elamite king naturally claimed all the
provinces that had been included in the Baby
lonian empire. Indeed, Eri-Aku of Larsa gives
his father Kudur-Nankhundi the title of ' Father'
or ' Governor ' of the land of the Amorites, the
name under which Canaan was known at the
time in Babylonia.
Could there be closer agreement between
the fragment of old-world history preserved in
the Book of Genesis and the revelations of the
native monuments ? Even the proper names
have been handed down in the Scriptural
narrative with but little alteration. In the
name of Ellasar, indeed, there has been a
transposition of letters, but, apart from this, it
is only in the name of the king of Shinar or
Babylon himself that any serious difference is

Dynasty of Khammu-rabi 59
observable. Between Khammu-rabi, the usual
form of the royal name, and Amraphel the
difference is considerable, and long made me
doubt whether the two could, after all, be identi
fied together.
But, again, with the increase of knowledge
has come a solution of the difficulty. The
dynasty to which Khammu-rabi belonged was
not of Babylonian origin. It had conquered
the north of Babylonia in the troublous times
which followed the fall of a dynasty whose
capital had been Ur, The kings were of
Canaanitish and South Semitic origin, like
Abram the Hebrew, and their ancestral deity
was Samu or Shem. Though the language
spoken by them was Semitic it differed from
the language of the Semitic Babylonians, who
found some of the sounds which characterized
it difficult to pronounce.
Hence the Babylonian scribes did not always
represent them in the same way, and the same
royal name appears under different forms in
different documents. The first element in the
name of Khammu-rabi is the name of a god
which enters also into the composition of the
Hebrew names of Ammi-el, Ammi-nadab,

60 The Fourteenth Chapter of Genesis
Rehobo-am, Jerobo-am and Ben-Ammi, and
of which Ammon is merely a derivative. More
usually this was spelt Khammu by the Baby
lonians, but we often find the spelling Ammu
or Ammi as well. Even the spelling of the
second element in the name of Khammu-rabi
was not uniform, and, as Dr. Pinches was the
first to point out, Ammu-rapi is met with by
the side of Khammu-rabi.
Khammu-rabi, like others of his dynasty,
claimed divine honours, and was addressed by
his subjects as a god. In Babylonian Hit is 'god,'
the Hebrew el, and Ammu-rapi ilu would be
'Khammu-rabi the god.' Now Ammu-rapi ilu
is letter for letter the Amraphel of Genesis.
Thus the difficulty presented by the variant
forms of the name of the king of Shinar or
Babylon has disappeared with the progress of
archaeological knowledge. It is one more
illustration of the fact that ' critical ' difficulties
and objections commonly turn out to be the
result of the imperfection of our own know
ledge. Archaeological research is constantly
demonstrating how dangerous it is to question
or deny the veracity of tradition or of an
ancient record until we know all the facts.

Chedor-laomer 61
Chedor-laomer, once the despair of etymolo
gists, proves to be a good Elamite name. We
have only to turn to the older Hebrew lexicons
to see how helpless mere philology was in face
of it ; archaeological discovery has made it as
clear as the noon-day. There are numerous
Elamite names which are composed of two
elements, the second being the name of a
divinity, and the first the word kudur which
meant ' servant ' or something similar. The
father of Eri-Aku or Arioch, for instance, had
the name of Kudur-Nankhundi, ' the servant of
the goddess Nankhundi.' Lagamar was one
of the leading Elamite deities, and Lagamar is
letter for letter the Hebrew la'omer, which is
written logomor in the Septuagint. The name
of Chedor-laomer can be no Jewish invention.
Even the names of the Canaanitish princes
have been illustrated and verified by the
cuneiform inscriptions, and thus shown to be
no etymological 'fictions' suggested by the
story in which they are found. The name of
Shinab of Admah was borne by a king
of Ammon in the time of Tiglath-pileser III,
who writes it Sanibu, and perhaps means ' the
moon-god is (my) father,' while Shem-eber of

62 The Fourteenth Chapter of Genesis
Zeboiim reminds us of Samu-abi, the founder
of the dynasty to which Amraphel belonged.
The accurate preservation of these foreign
names of ancient date leads to two conclusions.
On the one hand the narrative in which they
occur cannot have been handed down orally.
It must have been copied from a written
Babylonian record and been written from the
outset in Hebrew as we find it to-day. In other
words, the Hebrew writer had before him a Baby
lonian chronicle from which he extracted just as
much as related to the subject of his own history.
This conclusion is confirmed by an examina
tion of some of the geographical names which
are mentioned in the story and which indicate
a cuneiform original. I have discussed them
elsewhere, and need not therefore repeat here the
philological details. Those who are interested
in the matter can refer to my Higher Criticism
and the Verdict of the Monuments, pp. 160, 161.
What the Babylonian record, was like is
not difficult to discover. The Babylonians
reckoned their chronology by the chief events
which occurred in each successive year of
a king's reign. ' The year of a king's accession,'
' the year in which such and such an event took

The Narrative in Genesis 63
place,' was the general formula. It was a
shorthand summary of the more detailed
history recorded elsewhere, which, however,
was similarly dated in the reign of a particular
king and in the particular year of it when
a certain event had happened.
Now if we turn to the beginning of the
narrative in Genesis we find that it, too, is
dated, not in the reign of the suzerain and
leader of the expedition, Chedor-laomer, much
less in that of a Canaanitish prince, or in the
life-time of Abram himself, but in the reign of
the king of Babylonia. It must have come,
therefore, from the official chronicles of Baby
lonia, from one of those historical works, in
fact, which we know to have been current
in Babylonia, which would have formed part
of the literature studied in the schools and
stored in the libraries of Canaan in the age of
Babylonian supremacy and influence.
It is even possible that one of the official
historical documents sent to the West in the
reign of the son and successor of Amraphel
has actually come down to us. A cuneiform
tablet is preserved in the Museum of Beyrut,
which is said to have been found in the

64 The Fourteenth Chapter of Genesis
Lebanon, and which Dr. Pinches has shown to
have been one of the memoranda or 'state papers'
sent by the Babylonian government to its
officials and scribes in order to notify to them
the special event or events from which the
year was to receive its name. As Canaan was
included in the Babylonian empire at the time
to which the tablet belongs, it is by no
means impossible that it was really found in
the district of the Lebanon, more especially
as Babylonian seal-cylinders of the same period
have been discovered there 3.
There is a second conclusion to be deduced
from the accuracy with which the names con
tained in the Babylonian record have been
preserved in the Hebrew text. Only one of
them has suffered from the carelessness of
scribes or the attacks of time ; in Ellasar for
Larsa two of the letters have been transposed.
The fact enhances our opinion of the Hebrew
1 See the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration
Fund for April and July, 1900 (pp. 123, 269-273). The
inscription reads, ' The year when Samsu-iluna the king
dedicated a polished shining weapon of gold and silver, the
glory of the temple, to Merodach E-Sagila (the temple of
Merodach at Babylon), like the stars of heaven it made
brilliant.' This was the seventh year of Samsu-iluna's reign.

Early Scribes Accurate 65
text of the Pentateuch; it cannot be so un
certain or corrupt as it has sometimes been the
fashion to believe. Even the proper names
contained in it have been handed down cor
rectly. The text, in short, must have been
transcribed and re-edited from time to time
with the same official accuracy as we now
know to have been enforced in the case of
Assyrian and Babylonian literature.
In Assyria and Babylonia the work was
entrusted to the hands of professional scribes.
And the minute care which was bestowed upon
the accurate transcription of the texts was
extraordinary. Where we can compare a text
compiled, let us say, for one of the Babylonian
libraries of Amraphel with a copy of it made
for the library of Nineveh fifteen hundred
years later the differences are slight and un
important. Indeed, the tablets are full of
examples of the scrupulous honesty with which
the copyists set about their work. If the copy
before them was defective, they state the fact
and make no attempt to fill in the missing
characters by conjecture or by recourse to
more perfect tablets ; if the original Babylonian
character was uncertain, its various Assyrian
E

66 The Fourteenth Chapter of Genesis
equivalents were given ; if a date or fact was
omitted in the original, the scribe honestly tells
us that he does not know it. The reproduction of
the older documents was carried out with almost
Massoretic exactitude ; we look in vain for that
free handling of the original authorities about
which the ' higher criticism ' has so much to say.
The accuracy with which the Babylonian
names have been preserved in the fourteenth
chapter of Genesis is evidence that the literary
methods of Babylonia and Assyria were in use
also in the schools and libraries of Israel and
Judah. They were not the methods pre
supposed by the modern critic, but they were
methods consecrated by the usage of centuries
wherever the influence of Babylonian culture
had penetrated. In Judah also, where we hear
of the scribes of Hezekiah's library copying the
proverbs of Solomon (Prov. xxv. i), the older
literature must have been re-edited and handed
down with the same care and accuracy and the
same permanence of literary tradition as in
the kingdoms of the Euphrates and Tigris,
and we may therefore place the same con
fidence in the letter of its texts as we do in
that of the clay tablets of Nineveh.

CHAPTER V
THE LAWS OF AMRAPHEL AND THE
MOSAIC CODE
A T the end of the year 1901 an important
discovery was made among the ruins of
Susa — ' Shushan the palace,' as it is called in
the Book of Daniel. There M. de Morgan's
excavations brought to light the three frag
ments of an enormous block of polished black
marble, thickly covered with cuneiform charac
ters. The characters were engraved with the
highest artistic skill, and at the top of the
monument was a low relief representing the
Babylonian king Khammu-rabi or Amraphel
receiving the laws of his kingdom from the
Sun-god before whom he stands. When
the characters had been copied and read, it
was found that they embodied a complete code
of laws — the earliest code yet discovered,
earlier than that of Moses by eight hundred
years, and the foundation of the laws promul
gated and obeyed throughout Western Asia.
The compilation of the code marked the
E 2

68 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
overthrow of the Elamite domination, the re
covery of Babylonian independence, and the
establishment once more of a Babylonian
empire. Amraphel was in more senses than
one the father of his people ; he cleared his
country not only of its foreign enemies but also of
the bandits which foreign invasion had brought
in its train, he saw that justice was done to the
least as well as to the greatest, and he took
care that all his subjects should know the laws
under which they were called upon to live.
The individual laws had been in existence
before. They embody for the most part the
decisions of the judges in the special cases
brought before them, Babylonian law being,
like English law, 'judge-made' and based upon
precedent. Hence it is that the code follows
no scientific order, and is arranged upon no
single principle. Laws stand side by side in it
which belong to the infancy and to the old age
of a state, and we can trace in the code the
same curious mixture of a patriarchal and an
advanced state of society that we find in the
Book of Genesis.
This may, perhaps, be partly due to the
mixture of population in Babylonia. Amraphel

Babylonian Law 69
himself belonged, like Abraham, to the Canaan
ite or South Arabian branch of the Semitic
family, which was in many respects socially
behind the Semites of Babylonia, with their
inheritance of ancient Sumerian civilization.
Ideas and principles, therefore, which charac
terized two different stages of social culture
existed side by side in the mind of the legis
lator, and the people for whom he legislated
similarly stood on two different levels of culture
and thought.
In Babylonia, as in Israel, the desert and
the city adjoined each other. Thus trial by
ordeal was admitted, incompatible though it
was with the elaborate system of fines and the
demand for judicial evidence which otherwise
distinguished the Babylonian code, and the
doctrine of 'an eye for an" eye' and 'a tooth
for a tooth ' finds a place by the side of laws
which imply that the primitive doctrine of
retaliation had made way for the conception
of impartial and passionless justice.
That Babylonian law should have been
already codified in the age of Abraham
deprives the ' critical ' theory, which makes the ,
Mosaic Law posterior to the Prophets, of one

70 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
of its two main supports. The theory was
based on two denials — that writing was used
for literary purposes in the time of Moses, and
that a legal code was possible before the period
of the Jewish kings. The discovery of the Tel
el-Amarna tablets disproved the first assump
tion ; the discovery of the code of Khammu-
rabi has disproved the second. Centuries
Ibefore Moses the law had already been codified,
and the Semitic populations had long been
familiar with the conception of a code.
The code of Khammu-rabi was in force in
Canaan as well as in Babylonia. His empire
extended to the shores of the Mediterranean,
and in one of the inscriptions relating to him
the only title he bears is that of ' king of the
land of the Amorites.' When the Israelites
invaded Palestine, accordingly, we may con
clude that, like the Babylonian language and
script, the Babylonian code of Khammu-rabi
was still current there. Its provisions, in fact,
must have been enforced and obeyed wherever
the political power and influence of Babylonia
were felt.
The codification of the law, therefore, was
no new thing in the days of Moses. On the

Similarities of the Codes 71
contrary, it was a very old fact in the history of
Western Asia, a fact, too, with which Abraham
and Jacob must alike have been acquainted.
Not only could the Hebrew leader have com
piled a code of laws ; we now see that it would
have been incredible had he not done so.
Certain German Assyriologists have been at
great pains to discover similarities between the
codes of Khammu-rabi and Moses, and to infer
from this a connexion between them. And
there are cases in which the similarity is strik
ing. The free man, for example, who had been
enslaved for debt was to be manumitted after
three years according to the code of Khammu-
rabi, after seven years according to that of
Moses. Kidnapping again, was punished in
both codes by death, and there are some curious
resemblances in the laws relating to death
from the goring of an ox. If the owner of the
ox could be proved to have been negligent or
otherwise responsible for the accident, the
Babylonian law enacted that he should be fined
half a maneh of silver, or one-third of a maneh
if the dead man were a slave ; in Israel the
penalty of death was exacted in the first case
and a fine of half a maneh in the second.

72 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
Where, however, the owner was not in fault,
he went unpunished in both codes, though the
Mosaic code required that the ox should be put
to death.
The difference between the two codes in this
last particular is characteristic of a difference
which runs through the whole of them, and
makes the contrast between them far greater
and more striking than any agreement that can
be pointed out. The code of Khammu-rabi
presupposes a settled state, a kingdom, in short,
in which law is supreme and the individual is
forbidden to take it into his own hands. The
; code of Moses, on the other hand, is addressed
to a more backward community, which has not
yet become a state, but is still in the condition
! of a tribal confederacy. The principle of blood-
> revenge is still dominant in it ; the individual is
still allowed to avenge himself, and even cities
of refuge are provided in which the homicide
may find protection from the ' pursuers of
blood.' The law can defend him from private
vengeance only as it were by a subterfuge.
It is this principle of blood-revenge — of
blood for blood — that necessitates the death
of the ox which has caused the death of a

Differences of the Codes 73
man. ' Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man
shall his blood be shed,' is the keynote of the
Mosaic legislation ; in the legislation of Baby
lonia the keynote is rather the security of
property and the omnipotence of the law. In
only two instances is the individual allowed
to forestall the action of the law, either when
a brigand is caught red-handed or when a man
is found robbing the house of a neighbour
which has been set on fire. The contrast
between the two legislative systems cannot
be too forcibly emphasized : the one is intended
for a state, the other for tribes which are still
in the unsettled condition of the wandering
Arab of to-day.
But there is yet another difference between
the codes of Babylonia and Israel. The Baby
lonian code is marked by greater severity, more
especially where offences against property are
concerned. Doubtless this was partly due to
the necessity of suppressing the brigandage
which foreign and civil war had left behind
it; but the main reason is to be sought in a
difference of social organization. Babylonia
was a great trading community ; its wealth was
derived from commerce and agriculture, and

74 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
offences against property therefore struck at
the foundations of the prosperity of the state.
The Israelitish tribes, on the contrary, were
neither traders, nor agriculturists, and while
every individual life was of importance to the
community the individual's private property
was of comparatively little account. The com
parative humanity of the Mosaic code in respect
of theft and robbery has the same origin as the
prominence given in it to the right of private
revenge. A third point of contrast between the two
codes is to be found in the laws of inheritance.
The Babylonian father was able to make a will
and leave a ' favourite son ' — ' the son of his
eye,' as the phrase goes — ' an estate, garden, or
house' over and above the share in the property
to which he was entitled upon his father's death.
Of this there is no sign or trace in the Mosaic
code. Testamentary devolution presupposes
not only an advanced stage of civilization, but
also advanced ideas in regard to the tenure of
property. In a tribal confederacy the will was
necessarily unknown.
The little that is said in the Mosaic code
about the woman's rights of inheritance has

Woman's Inheritance 75
a similar explanation. The code of Khammu-
rabi contains minute directions about the wife's
share in the estate left by her husband. The
dowry she brought with her at marriage reverts
to her, the property settled upon her by her
husband is secured to her, and along with her
children she has a claim to the usufruct of the
rest of the estate. In case there was no
marriage settlement she obtains a share of the
estate equal to that of each of the children. If
the widow marries again she loses the property
settled upon her by her first husband, and if
her children are still under age she and the
second husband are required to support and
educate them.
For all this we look in vain in the Mosaic
code. Even the dowry brought by the wife
is unknown to it. The fact is rendered the
more significant by a notice in the Books of
Joshua and Judges, which shows that though
the gift of the dowry was not prescribed by the
Mosaic law it was known in Canaan down to
the moment of the Israelitish invasion. When
Caleb 'the son of Kenaz,' we read, gave his
daughter Achsah in marriage to Othniel upon
the capture of Kirjath-sepher ' she moved him

76 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
to ask of her father a field.' The Israelitish
woman under the Mosaic code did not enjoy
the same measure of independence as the Baby
lonian woman ; she was more in the position of
the Arab woman of to-day.
The contrast between the two codes is really
a contrast in the social organization and
advancement in civilization of the two peoples
for whom they were compiled. As compared
with the cultured inhabitants of the Babylonian
empire, the Israelitish tribes for whom Moses
legislated were in a backward state. The
supremacy of the law was not yet acknow
ledged ; the individual still claimed the privilege
of taking it into his own hands ; the status of
the woman was still that of the mere 'helpmeet'
of the man, and laws about property were still
but little required.
When we pass from the more general
principles which underlie the two codes and
their particular provisions the same contrast
and difference are apparent. Both, for instance,
prohibit the creditor from depriving the in
solvent debtor of his all. The creditor who
took the debtor's ox in payment of a debt was
fined the third of a maneh, or ^3, by the

Contrasts of the Codes 77
Babylonian law ; the law of Moses forbade
him to take his ' neighbour's raiment to pledge '
after nightfall, ' for that is his raiment only '
(Exod. xxii. 26, 27). Moses was addressing a
body of nomad tribesmen for whom the cloak
in which they slept at night was of primary
importance, whereas the law of Khammu-rabi
was intended for a settled population, a large part
of whom were agriculturists dependent on their
ploughing oxen for their means of support.
There is a similar contrast observable in
other provisions of the two codes, a contrast
which has its roots in the difference between
a great and powerful kingdom far advanced in
culture and civilization, and desert tribes who
have as yet no land that they can call their own.
Certain of the laws of the Babylonian code, for
example, relate to the surgeon and veterinary,
who were already distinguished from one an
other in the old civilization of the Euphrates.
' If a surgeon,' we read, ' performs a serious
operation on a man with a bronze lancet, and
the man recovers after a tumour has been
opened with the lancet or a disease of the eye
has been cured, he shall receive ten shekels of
silver' (£1 ios.).

78 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
' If the operation has been performed on a
poor man, he shall receive five shekels of silver.
'If the operation has been performed upon
a slave, the slave's master shall pay him two
shekels of silver.
'If the surgeon has performed a serious opera
tion with a bronze lancet upon a man, and the
man die, either through his opening a tumour
with his lancet or destroying the man's eye, his
hands shall be cut off.
' If the surgeon has performed the operation
upon a slave (or) poor man, and the man dies,
slave for slave shall he render.
' If he has opened the tumour unsuccessfully
or destroyed the eye, he shall pay the equivalent
of the slave's value.
' If the surgeon heals a man's broken limb, or
has cured a disease of the intestines, the patient
shall pay the surgeon five shekels of silver.
' If a veterinary has performed an operation
on an ox or an ass and has cured it, the owner
shall pay the veterinary a fee of the sixth part
of a shekel (5^.).
' If he has performed an operation on an ox
or an ass and the animal dies, he must pay the
owner a fourth part of its value.'

Contrasts of the Codes 79
The code of Moses knows nothing of either
surgeon or veterinary. The doctor and the
medical school had been left behind in Egypt ;
there was as yet no need to legislate for them.
Until Canaan had been conquered, with its
Babylonian culture and medicine and its Baby
lonian law, the law-book was necessarily silent
in regard to medical jurisprudence.
The Mosaic code contains indeed a law ana
logous to those we have been considering, but
in it the place of the doctor is taken by the
ordinary tribesman. ' If men strive together,'
it is enacted, 'and one smite another with
a stone, or with his fist, and he die not, but
keepeth his bed; if he rise again, and walk
abroad upon his staff, then shall he that smote
him be quit ; only he shall pay for the loss of
his time, and shall cause him to be thoroughly
healed' (Exod. xxi. 18, 19). We are at once
transported from the civilized monarchy of
Babylonia to the rude life of the Arabian
wilderness. The contrast which a comparison of the
Babylonian and Israelitish codes thus shows
to exist between them is enhanced by another
and significant fact. Usages and laws are

80 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
referred to in the patriarchal history as de
scribed in the Book of Genesis for which we
can find no parallel in the Mosaic legislation.
They are explained, however, by the newly-
found code of Khammu-rabi. I have long
since pointed out that the details of the purchase
of the cave of Machpelah by Abraham are in
strict conformity with the requirements of Baby
lonian commercial law as it was administered in
the Abrahamic age. Even the technical term
'shekels of silver' was borrowed from Baby
lonia, as well as the description of the property
as consisting of 'field,' 'rock-chamber,' and
' trees.' But we are now learning that in other respects
also the law which lies behind the narratives of
Genesis is the law, not of Moses, but of Khammu-
rabi. Thus the action of Sarah in giving Hagar
to Abraham and of Rachel in giving Bilhah to
Jacob when they themselves were childless was
in strict accordance with the Babylonian code.
This ordained that the wife could present her
husband with a concubine, and if she had had
no children it was even permitted him to take
a second and inferior wife. As a corollary of
this it was further enacted that ' if a man has

Adoption 81
married a wife, and she has given a concubine
to her husband by whom he has had a child,
should the concubine afterwards have a dispute
with her mistress because she has borne children,
her mistress cannot sell her ; she can only lay
a task upon her and make her live with the
other slaves.' Now, therefore, we can under
stand the conduct of Sarah after her quarrel
with Hagar ; the law did not allow her to sell
her former maid, and all that could be done
was to induce Abraham to drive Hagar from
his camp.
Equally striking is the explanation now
afforded us of the words of the childless Abra
ham when speaking of his house-steward, Eliezer,
as his heir. Adoption plays a prominent part
in the code of Khammu-rabi as well as in the
family life of later Babylonia, and by the act of
adoption the heir to the property of a free man
became himself free, even though his status
originally was that of a slave. Adoption, in
fact, whether of the slave or of the free man,
was as familiar to the Babylonian code as it
was unfamiliar to the code of Israel.
Even the infliction of death by burning, with
which Judah threatened his daughter-in-law

82 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
Tamar on the supposition that she was a
widow, finds its explanation in the Babylonian
code, where the same punishment is enacted
against a nun who has been unfaithful to her
vows of virginity or widowhood. Perhaps, too,
we may see in Jacob's admission that whoever
had stolen Laban's gods should be put to death
(Gen. xxxi. 32), a reference to the Babylonian
law, which punished sacrilege with death.
The conclusion that must be drawn from the
foregoing facts is obvious. A comparison of
the code of Babylonia with that of Israel has
made it clear that the latter was intended for
a body of nomad tribes who were not yet
settled in a country where the laws of Babylonia
were still in force. In other words, the Mosaic
code must belong to the age to which tradition
assigns it, and presupposes the historical con
ditions which the Biblical narrative describes.
Not only has the code of Khammu-rabi proved
that the legislation of Moses was possible, it
has also shown that the social and political
circumstances under which it claims to have
arisen are the only ones under which it could
have been compiled.
And yet more. While the Mosaic code, in

Mosaic the Code of the Desert 83
contradistinction to the Babylonian code, be
longs to the desejrt rather than to the city,
the laws implied in the narratives of the Book
of Genesis are those which actually were current
in Canaan in the patriarchal age. No writer of
a post-Mosaic date could have imagined or
invented them ; like the names preserved in
Genesis, they characterize the patriarchal period
and no other. The answer of archaeology to r
the theories of modern ' criticism ' is complete : 1
lKe,v Law preceded the Prophets, and did not '
follow them.
At present it is the civil law alone which we
can compare with that of Babylonia. The
Babylonian ritual code has not yet been dis
covered. But many of its provisions are known
to us from the religious and magical texts, and
their resemblance to the provisions of the ritual
law of Israel is at times startling. Even the
technical terms of the Mosaic ritual are found
again in Babylonia. Those who wish to study
the subject may turn to my Gifford Lectures on
the Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia,
where the chief points of likeness and connexion
are pointed out.
There was, in fact, a closer connexion between
f 2

84 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
the ritual code of Babylonia and that of Israel
than there was between their civil codes ; and
before long we may hope to have clear archae
ological evidence that the ritual enactments of
the Pentateuch, which have been assigned to
different periods of history and religious de
velopment, all alike have their analogues in
a ritual that was in force in Babylonia centuries
i before Moses was born.
At all events the civil code of Khammu-rabi
explains the form under which the civil code of
Moses has come down to us. The formula
of the individual laws is the same in both.
Each law is introduced by the particle 'if.'
The reason of this has been furnished by the
cuneiform documents. Babylonian law was,
like English law, 'judge-made,' each law em
bodying a decision of the royal judges in some
special suit. The code of Khammu-rabi, in
fact, consists of a collection of judicial decisions;
Babylonian law resting as much on precedent
as the law of our own country.
The code of Moses, the several enactments
of which have the same verbal form as the
enactments of the Babylonian code, must there
fore have been based on similar decisions. A

Origin of the Laws 85
more remarkable confirmation of the Biblical
narrative could not have been afforded. We
read in the Book of Exodus how, before the
codification of the law at Sinai, judges were
appointed who 'judged the people at all
seasons ' ; only the more important cases being
reserved for Moses himself. Moses thus
occupied the same position as a court of final
appeal as that which was occupied by the king
in the Babylonia of Amraphel or by the high-
priest in the Babylonia of an earlier age, and it
is noteworthy that the arrangement was sug
gested to him by the high-priest of Midian — a
country that had once been within the Baby
lonian sphere of influence.
The origin of the several laws of which
the Babylonian and Mosaic codes are com
posed explains their heterogeneous and un
systematic character. The different groups into
which they fall are not connected with one
another by any general principle running
through them, and enactments which belong
to different stages of social development and
organization stand in them side by side. It is
not that the codes themselves consist of com
pilations made at various dates, but that the

86 Laws of Amraphel and the Mosaic Code
individual laws which constitute them are
decisions of the courts, and consequently were
not pronounced at one and the same time.
In the body of the code Khammu-rabi
assumes the credit of the legislation ; it was
he alone who had collected and published the
laws of which it was composed. But the code
is preceded and followed by an address to the
gods of the Babylonian cities, at the head of
whom stands 'the supreme god,' the special
deity, it may be, of the monarch himself. And
at the top of the monument on which the code
is engraved is a bas-relief representing the king
receiving the laws from the Sun-god, 'the
divine judge of heaven and earth.' The ulti
mate source consequently to which the laws are
referred is the inspiration of the god. This is
in accordance with the older Babylonian belief,
which assigned the first law-book to the creator-
god Ea, and made him the instructor of man in
all the arts of life.
The parallelism between the Babylonian
belief and the history of the Mosaic legislation
is too obvious to need emphasizing. Moses
was the legislator of Israel, and his civil code
consisted in large measure of the legal 'judge-

Effect of the Discovery 87
ments ' of himself and his fellow judges. With
all this, however, it was nevertheless derived
from God; the inspiration of Yahveh was the
true source from which it had come. It was
the same spirit of inspiration as that which
fell on the seventy ' elders ' and judges of the
Israelitish tribes, and in regard to which
Moses declared that he would 'that the Lord
would put His Spirit upon ' the whole people
(Numb. xi. 24-29).
We may now sum up the results of the latest
discovery in Assyriology. It has for ever
shattered the 'critical' theory which would
put the Prophets before the Law, it has thrown
light on the form and character of the Mosaic
code, and it has indirectly vindicated the
historical character of the narratives of Genesis.
If such are the results of a single discovery,
what may we not expect when the buried
libraries of Babylonia have been more fully
excavated, and their contents copied and
read ?

CHAPTER VI
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENTATEUCH
TT is now time to turn from Babylonia to
Egypt, from the clay tablets and monoliths of
Assyria or Babylonia to the papyri and temples
of the valley of the Nile. We have seen how
the most confidently announced assumptions
and * results ' of ' criticism ' have crumbled into
dust before the facts of archaeology in the
departments of history and law ; we must now
consider whether the same is the case in the
province of geography. That the geography of
Palestine itself and the lands immediately ad
joining it should be correctly described in the
Old Testament narratives proves little either
one way or another for their authenticity and
age; on any supposition the writers of them
lived in the country wherein the scene of the
narratives is laid, and except in an intentionally
' Haggadic ' production like the apocryphal Book
of Judith the details of its geography would be
correctly given.

\ \

Contact of Palestine and Egypt 89
Bu\ it is otherwise when we pass from
Palestine to Egypt. The political changes
which svept over the monarchy of the Nile
profoundly altered from time to time the geo
graphy of the Delta and its relations to Asia.
Fortified cities were built and deserted, capitals
were shifted, and canals opened or blocked up.
The geography of the Eastern Delta differed
essentially at different periods of Egyptian
history. A map of it drawn in the age of
the Nineteenth Dynasty would have presented
wholly different features from one drawn at any
other time.
There are three periods when Old Testament
history comes into contact with that of Egypt,
the patriarchal period, the period of the Exodus,
and the period of the Israelitish kings. Of these
the period of the Exodus is the only one which
concerns us at present. If the ' critic ' is right,
the story of the Exodus was written down
centuries after the supposed event, and was ,
derived, not from contemporaneous documents,
but from popular tradition and legend. Let us
once more apply the archaeological test, and
see what is the verdict.
Egyptologists were long since agreed that if

90 The Geography of the Pentateuch
there is any truth in the story of the Exodus
Ramses II, the great Pharaoh of the Nineteenth
Dynasty, must have been the Pharaoh of the
Oppression. One of the chief objects with
which the Egypt Exploration Fund was started
was to put this conclusion to the proof, and it
was not long before the object was achieved.
We are told in the Book of Exodus that the
two cities built by the Israelites for the Pharaoh
were Pithom and Raamses. That Raamses was
built by Ramses II was already known from
a papyrus which gives an account of the city,
and in 1884 Dr. Naville discovered the ruins
of Pithom. Excavations soon revealed the
further fact that Pithom too owed its foundation
to the same Pharaoh, and thus established once
for all — if the Biblical statement is correct — that
Ramses II and the Pharaoh at whose court
Moses was brought up were one and the same.
It is thus clear that the Exodus took place
while the Nineteenth Dynasty was still reigning
in Egypt. If, therefore, the Biblical account of
the Exodus is historically true, the geographical
details involved in it must correspond with the
map of the Delta as it existed at that particular
epoch. If, on the other hand, the map pre-

Geography of the Delta 91
supposed by them is of a later date, the critical
contention will be justified and the story of
Moses evaporates into mist.
Now it so happens that we know a good deal
about the geography of the Eastern Delta in the
age of the Nineteenth Dynasty, thanks to the
papyri which have come down to us from that
period. Egypt was protected from Asia by
a great line of fortifications, the Shur, or ' Wall,'
as it is called in the Pentateuch, which followed
much the same course as the Suez Canal of
to-day. The passages through the Wall were
strongly guarded, and to the west of it was the
district of Thukot or Succoth, of which Pithom
was the capital. Goshen stretched westwards of
this in the Wadi Tumilat along the banks of
the modern Freshwater Canal and in the direc
tion of Belbeis and Zagazig.
Meneptah.the son and successor of Ramses II,
built a Khetem or ' Fortress ' in the district of
Thukot, which may have been the Etham of the
Pentateuch. But Khetem was a generic name
corresponding to the Semitic Migdol, and there
was another Khetem built by Ramses II which
was nearer to the Wall. Both Khetems would
have been ' on the edge of the wilderness.'

92 The Geography of the Pentateuch
The land of Goshen, we are expressly informed
by Meneptah, had been left 'as pasture for cattle'
and handed over to Asiatic nomads ' since the
days of his forefathers.' In the fifth year of his
reign, when Libyan invaders were overrunning
Egypt, it was still in the possession of the
' foreigners,' and on the skirts of it accordingly
the invaders and their allies had pitched their
tents. Shortly afterwards, however, the Asiatic
herdsmen had disappeared, and the whole district
was without inhabitants. A letter written to
the Pharaoh in the eighth year of his reign by
an official stationed on the frontier makes this
clear. The writer says in it : ' We have allowed
the tribes of the Bedawin from Edom to pass
the fortress (Khetem) of Meneptah in the district
of Thukot [and go] to the lakes of Pithom of
Meneptah in the district of Thukot, in order to
feed themselves and their herds on the great
estate of the Pharaoh.' This ' great estate ' may
be 'the farmstead' which the Septuagint sub
stitutes for Pi-hahiroth in Exod. xiv. 9. At any
rate, the lakes lay to the west of Pithom, and
their site can still be recognized.
That the district was regarded as a private
domain of the Pharaohs may be gathered from

Letter sent to Seti II 93
the Old Testament narrative. It was given by
the Pharaoh to Jacob and his sons, as Meneptah
repeats had been the case ; and when the
Israelites were transformed into royal serfs it
must have been upon the plea that the land on
which they dwelt was peculiarly a possession of
the king ; their exodus left it deserted, and the
jealously guarded gates of the great Wall were
accordingly opened, to let new settlers enter the
vacant pastures.
There is yet another letter on papyrus which
supplements the geographical information of
the first. It was sent to Meneptah's successor
Seti II, and describes the pursuit of two fugitive
slaves who had escaped along the same road as
that which had been followed by the Israelites : —
' I set out,' says the writer, ' from the hall of the
royal palace on the ninth day of the month
Epiphi, in the evening, in pursuit of the two
slaves. I reached the fortress (Khetem) of
Thukot on the tenth of Epiphi. I was informed
that the men had resolved to take their way
towards the south. On the twelfth I reached
the fortress. There I learnt that grooms who
had come from the neighbourhood [had reported]
that the fugitives had already passed the Wall

94 The Geography of the Pentateuch
to the north of the Migdol of King Seti,' who
may be either Seti I, the father of Ramses II,
or Seti II, his great-grandson.
The Wall extended southwards until it met
an arm of the Gulf of Suez. Dr. Naville has
shown that this must have extended a good deal
further north than it does to-day, and the fugitive
from Egypt would have found it difficult to
evade the vigilance of the Egyptian garrisons.
Such was the geography of the Delta at the
time when, if the historical details of the Book
of Exodus may be trusted, Moses was born in
the land of Goshen and his fellow-countrymen
escaped finally from their house of bondage.
It was a geography that was not true either of
the age which preceded the Nineteenth Dynasty
or of the centuries which followed it. After the
fall of the successors of Ramses II we hear no
more of Thukot and its Khetem, of Migdol on
the line of fortification, or even of the Wall itself.
The district of Goshen is no longer set apart
for the Semitic herdsmen of Canaan. The
political situation was changed, and with the
change in the political situation came a change
in the map of the land.
It is, however, with the map of the Delta in

Geography of the Exodus 95
the age of the Nineteenth Dynasty that the
geography of the Exodus agrees. Pithom and
Raamses were built for the Pharaoh of the
Oppression, and when the flight from Egypt
took place in the reign of his successor the
Israelites passed from their old homes in the
land of Goshen to Raamses and Succoth, and
from thence to the Khetem ' on the edge of the
wilderness.' Here they found themselves con
fronted by the Wall with its Migdol, while the
sea barred their way towards the south (Exod.
xiv. 2). The desert had ' shut them in,' and it
seemed as if they would fall an easy prey to the
pursuing forces of their late masters.
This agreement of the geography of the
Exodus with the actual geography of the Delta
in the time of the Nineteenth Dynasty could
hardly be explained, if the Biblical narrative
had been compiled two or three hundred years
after the event, in an age when the map of
Egypt had been altered and the older geography
forgotten. Still less could it be explained, if the
whole story had been invented or thrown into
shape in Palestine. There was no atlas to
which the Hebrew writer could have turned,
much less an atlas which represented geo-

96 The Geography of the Pentateuch
graphical conditions that had long since passed
away. History fixes the Exodus of Israel in
the epoch of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and
geography assigns it to the same date. To
that period, and to that period alone, does the
geography of the Pentateuch apply.
The fact admits of only one explanation.
The story of the Exodus, as it is set before us
in the Old Testament, must have been derived
from contemporaneous written documents, and
must describe events which actually took place.
It is no fiction or myth, no legend whose only
basis is folk-lore and unsubstantial tradition,
but history in the real sense of the word. We
may rest assured, 'criticism' notwithstanding,
that Israel was once in Egypt, and that the
narrative of its flight under the leadership of
Moses is founded on sober fact.

CHAPTER VII
HEBREW AND BABYLONIAN COSMOLOGY
T T has long been recognized that the earlier
A chapters of Genesis have a Babylonian
colouring and background. Two of the rivers
of Paradise are the Tigris and Euphrates, and
it was at the Tower of Babel that the confusion
of tongues took place. The discovery of the
Babylonian story of the Deluge proved that
the Biblical account of the Flood also had
a Babylonian parallel and prototype, and the
discovery of the Babylonian story of the Deluge
was followed by that of the Babylonian story
of creation, which showed that here too the
cuneiform tablets and the Book of Genesis were
in close accord. The cosmology of Genesis
looks back to that of Babylonia.
The fragments of an epic poem which
contained one of the versions of the Babylonian
story of the creation were discovered by Mr.
George Smith. Other fragments have since
been found, more especially by Mr. L. W. King,
G

98 Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
and we now possess the poem in a fairly
complete form. It is really a poem in honour
of Merodach, the patron god of Babylon, and
must have originally been composed by a
Babylonian writer. As the inhabitants of Baby
lon regarded their patron god as the creator,
the epic naturally includes an account of the
way in which the heavens and the earth were
made. Babylon, however, was a comparatively
modern city in Babylonia, and its god did not
become the supreme deity of the country until
his city had been made a capital by Khammu-
rabi. Before that date he was but one among
a host of minor divinities, over whom the
' great gods ' of the older sanctuaries presided.
Chief among these were Anu, the god of heaven,
whose seat of worship was Erech, in the centre
of Babylonia, Bel, the god of the earth and air,
who was adored at Nippur in the north, and
Ea of Eridu, on the coast of the Persian Gulf,
the culture-god of Chaldaea, whose domain was
in the flood.
When Merodach and his city usurped the
place of the older divinities and the earlier
centres of Babylonian religion, the attributes of
the older gods passed to him. He became the

Babylonian Epic of Creation 99
son of Ea and took upon him the name and
prerogatives of Bel. Both Ea and Bel had
been creators in the cosmologies of their re
spective worshippers, and when their powers
were transferred to the younger deity he
necessarily was made the creator of the world.
But in the epic the creation of the world is
but an episode in the story of the war between
Tiamat, the dragon of chaos and darkness, and
Merodach, the champion of the gods of light.
It was his victory over the dragon which gave
Merodach the right to be supreme among his
divine peers and to create the present world of
law and order. The heavens and earth were
fashioned out of the two halves of his defeated
foe, while ' bolts ' were driven in and ' watchmen '
set, that the anarchic 'fountains' of Tiamat
might not again break forth from above the
firmament and destroy the world of gods and
men. In its present shape the epic consists of
seven tablets or books. The first is an
introduction embodying the atheistic philosophy
of a late age, when the divine personages of
mythology had been resolved into the material
forces and elements of Nature, and creation was
g 2

too Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
regarded as a process of self-evolution. The
second and third books recount the war of the
gods, and the fourth ends with the victory of
Merodach and the creation of the heavenly
firmament. The fifth tablet describes the
appointment of the heavenly bodies for signs
and seasons and days and years. They were
not created like the firmament, since in the eyes
of the Babylonians the sun and moon and stars
were deities, and consequently had come into
existence at the same time as Merodach himself.
What the creator did, therefore, was to fix their
places and duty, to ' ordain the year ' with its
twelve months, and to bind the whole together
by inviolable laws, ' so that none might err or
ever go astray.'
In the sixth book the creation of man is
narrated. Man was made of bone which the
god had fashioned, and of the blood of life
which he had drawn from his own veins. For
Babylonian religion held that the gods were in
the likeness of men, and hence that, conversely,
men were made in the image of the gods. It
was in order ' that the service of the gods might
be performed and their shrines (built)' that man
was created and bidden to ' inhabit ' the earth.

Tiamat 101
The seventh and last book of the epic is
a hymn of praise sung by the gods in honour
of Merodach, in which the attributes and powers
of the other ' great gods ' are transferred to him.
It formed originally no part of the story of the
creation or even of the legend of Merodach ; it
was an independent poem, going back to pre-
Semitic times, and incorporated by the author
of the epic in his work. Fragments have come
down to us of some of the commentaries that
were written upon the original text. All that
the author of the epic has done has been to
tell us that it was sung in the council-chamber
of the gods, and to add a few lines of epilogue
at its end.
Tiamat, the dragon of chaos, is the im
personation of the primaeval deep, of that
formless abyss of waters in which the Babylonians
saw the beginning of all things. Babylonian
theories of creation first grew up in the city of
Eridu, the primitive sea-port of the country,
where new land was continually being formed
by the accumulation of silt. We possess a pre-
Semitic, Sumerian account of the creation, which
differs entirely from that of the epic, and
constituted one of the hymns that were sung in

102 Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
the temple of Ea at Eridu. In it Ea was still
the creator of the world ; he is the lord of the
deep, out of which the dry land arose through
the settlement of mud around a bundle of reeds
that the creator had planted in the shoreless sea.
Once the land was formed, Ea stocked it with
' the beast of the field ' and ' the green herb ' ;
of the creation of the heavens no word is
said. The cosmological legends of Babylonia must
have been known to Abraham before he left Ur
of the Chaldees. They were pictured on the
walls of the Babylonian temples and taught in
the Babylonian schools. With the rest of
Babylonian culture they passed to the West.
Even in Upper Egypt fragments of Babylonian
legends have been found among the cuneiform
tablets of Tel el-Amarna, and the points which
separate the words in them one from another
indicate that they must have been used as
exercises at school. Long before the age of
Moses the Babylonian theory of creation and
the myths and poems which embodied it would
have been familiar to the educated native of
Canaan. A German scholar, Gunkel, has demonstrated

The Epic Known in Palestine 103
that there are references to the Babylonian story
of the creation and the dragon Tiamat in pas
sages of the Old Testament, which the most
sceptical criticism allows to be of early date.
There is no longer any need to prove that
Jewish writers could have become acquainted
with the cosmology of Babylonia only during
the Exile. That it was known in Palestine
long before that period is now admitted on all
hands. Those who, like the contemporaries of
Moses, could read the cuneiform tablets of
Babylonia would have been familiar not only
with the general belief of the Babylonians
concerning the creation of the world, but also
with the literary form or forms which that belief
had assumed.
The resemblance between the Babylonian
Epic of the Creation and the first chapter of the
Book of Genesis is too striking not to have
attracted attention from the outset. In both
alike there is ' in the beginning ' a watery chaos,
above which the darkness brooded, while ' the
earth was without form and void.' In both
alike the creation of the present world com
mences with the creation of light ; it was the
destruction of the powers of darkness by the

104 Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
gods of light that made it possible for the
Babylonian creator to begin his work. In both
there is a firmament dividing the imprisoned
waters above it from the waters beneath, and in
both, too, the creation of the heavens and earth
precede the appointment of the heavenly bodies
to mark and measure time. In both the creation
of man is the final consummation of the creator's
acts, and the artificial division of the Babylonian
epic into seven books corresponds with the
seven days of the Hebrew account.
This, however, is not all. With all the resem
blance that exists between the Babylonian and
the Biblical narratives, there is yet a profound
difference. Yet the difference is one which
indicates not only the priority of the Babylonian
version, but also the deliberate purpose of the
Hebrew writer to contravene and correct it.
We have seen, for instance, that in both accounts
the heavenly bodies are appointed to measure
time, and that the appointment follows not only
the creation of the heavens and earth, but also
of light itself. Indeed, in the Hebrew cosmology
it even follows the creation of vegetation. The
fact has often been a cause of difficulty, since
according to the Book of Genesis the celestial

Genesis View of Creation 105
bodies were created on the fourth day as well
as set to measure time.
But the difficulty is solved when we compare
the Biblical account with the Babylonian epic.
Here the sun and the moon and stars could not
be created ; they were gods, and consequently
had existed before the creation of the world was
begun. But for the writer of Genesis there was
but one God, and the heavenly bodies were as
much His creation as the green herb or the
beast of the field. It is probably for this reason
that he avoids calling the sun and moon by
names which in Babylonian belief were the
names of deities ; for him the ' sun ' and the
'moon' are the 'two great lights,' while 'the stars'
take the place of the goddess I star, who in the
Babylonian story stood at the side of the ' sun '
and ' moon.' But in thus ascribing the creation
of the celestial bodies to the one and only God
the Biblical writer has been unable to avoid the
difficulty of making the morning and evening to
have followed one another, and vegetation to
have come into being before the sun or the
moon. In the Babylonian version evening and
morning naturally succeeded each other as soon
as the gods of light appeared upon the scene,

106 Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
and the heavenly bodies were merely appointed
afterwards to mark out the seasons of the year ;
the fact that the writer in Genesis, while declar
ing that their appointment was accompanied by
their creation, nevertheless adheres to the order
of creation as described in the Babylonian epic,
is a plain proof that that order of creation was
already known to him, and was too firmly estab
lished to be altered.
But it is also a proof that he has changed and
corrected the Babylonian version with deliberate
intention. The heavenly bodies, he implicitly
teaches, are creatures, and not gods. Even at
the risk of throwing the story of creation into
confusion and introducing into it elements of
difficulty, he has formally contradicted and
denied the polytheism of his Babylonian pro
totype. The polytheistic elements it contained
are not merely rejected, they are contradicted
and denied.
The same fact is apparent in other parts of
the Biblical cosmology. The polytheism and
mythology of the Babylonian theory are met with
a stern negative, along with the materialism of
the preface to the epic. The legend of the war
in heaven between Merodach and Tiamat finds

Genesis Cosmology 107
no place in the narrative of Genesis, whatever
references to it may be discoverable elsewhere
in the Old Testament, and the declaration that
man was created to worship the gods and build
their sanctuaries is similarly excluded from it.
There is no dragon Tiamat out of whom, as in
the Babylonian legend, the firmament of heaven
may be made, even though the Babylonian con
ception of a firmament is retained, and equally
there is no impersonation of the deep whose
waters should be gathered into seas. By the
side of the Creator of Genesis no other god can
exist. The materialistic philosophy of the introduc
tion to the epic is banished from the pages of
Genesis like the polytheistic mythology which
accompanies it. It expressed beliefs that had
long been current in the philosophic schools of
Babylonia, and endeavoured to harmonize the
religious legends of the people with the more
scientific knowledge of the few. The epic
commences with the description of a formless
matter, independent of the Creator, generating
itself and developing into the divine. ' In the
beginning was the deep, which begat the heavens
and the earth, the chaos of Tiamat, who was the

108 Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
mother of them all.' Against this, on the fore
front of Genesis stands the declaration that ' in
the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth.' The earth was indeed a formless chaos
resting on the dark waters of the primaeval deep
— thus far the conceptions of the Babylonian
cosmology are adopted, but the chaos and the
deep were not the first of things ; God was
already there, and His breath or spirit brooded
« over the abyss. While the letter of the Baby-
,'f Ionian story has been followed, the spirit of it
„ has been changed. The Hebrew writer must
have had the Babylonian version before him, and
intentionally given an uncompromising denial
to all in it that impugned the omnipotence and
unity of God.
It is true that one or two expressions have
been left in the Biblical narrative which are
; derived from the polytheism of its Babylonian
prototype. The name of Tehom, 'the deep,'
the Babylonian Tiamat, is used without the
article, and we read that God said : ' Let us
' make man in our image.' But such expressions
merely show how closely the letter of the Baby
lonian system of cosmology has been adhered
to ; they impair in no way the stern monotheism

Creation 109
of the Biblical narrative, and only serve to bring
into greater relief the twofold fact that the
cosmology of Genesis is the cosmology of
Babylonia in a fundamentally changed form.
Perhaps nowhere is the change of form more
striking than in the different conception of the
mode of creating which distinguishes the Book
of Genesis and the Babylonian epic. In the
epic creation is either the result of evolution
on the part of godless matter, or else the creator
works like a craftsman, fashioning the universe
out of pre-existing materials and putting it
under bolt and key. In the Book of Genesis,
on the other hand, God speaks, and it is done.
Creation by the word is indeed known to the
author of the epic ; in the assembly of the gods
Merodach is described as destroying and re
creating by the simple power of his word, and
thereby proving himself a fitting champion of
them in the struggle with the dragon ; but in
the actual creation of the world the word is
never employed. In the mind of the Babylonian
polytheist the gods were in the image of men,
and as men therefore they were compelled to
work. The conclusion to which a comparison of the

no Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
Hebrew and Babylonian accounts of the creation
has thus brought us is unmistakeable. On the
one hand the cosmology of Genesis presupposes
the cosmology of Babylonia; fhe same con
ceptions underlie both, and the watery abyss of
Genesis has its first home among the seafaring
natives of Eridu. But on the other hand
between the two, as they lie before us in the
Bible and in the cuneiform literature of Baby
lonia, there is an impassable gulf. The cos
mology of Babylonia is thickly overgrown and
intertwined with polytheistic, mythological, and
even materialistic elements ; in the cosmology
of Genesis these are all swept away, and in place
of them the doctrine is proclaimed that there
is but one God, the Creator of the whole
universe. The same contrast meets us elsewhere, when
we examine the religious literature of Babylonia
and the contents of the Old Testament side by
side. Babylonian literature is full of hymns and
penitential psalms, of prayers and addresses to
the deity which breathe a deep spiritual earnest
ness, and often rise in accents of passionate
devotion. From time to time we find language
in them which reminds us of the psalms of

The Spirit of Genesis in
David or even the evangelical utterances of an
Isaiah, and we are tempted to ask whether after
all there was so profound a religious difference
as we have been taught to believe between the
inspiration of the ' chosen people ' and that of
their Semitic kindred, whether after all the
spirit of the Hebrew scriptures may not have
been the common heritage of the Semitic race.
But hardly is the question asked before we are
suddenly brought, as it were, to a stand by
passages and words that express the grossest
polytheism or the puerilities of a grotesque and
stupid superstition. Passionate outpourings of
deep spiritual contrition for sin or the most
exalted descriptions of the divine attributes are
mingled with expressions of belief that are at once
degrading and grotesque. To us the mixture
seems incomprehensible, to the Babylonian it
was natural and right. His mind was so steeped
in polytheistic beliefs and practices, in the
superstitions of magic and the dark rites of
sorcery, that he could see no incompatibility
between them and the purer and more spiritual
thoughts that came from time to time to his
soul from the light ' that lighteth every man that
cometh into the world.' The Israelite stood

112 Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
alone among the Semitic peoples of the ancient
East in maintaining that besides Yahveh there
was no other god, and that the law of Yahveh
was a law of righteousness.
And yet the Israelite was not better educated
or more advanced in philosophic thought than
his kinsfolk in Babylonia and Canaan. On the
contrary, he stood on a lower level of culture and
civilization, and his legal code, as we have seen,
implies a less developed social organization than
that which Babylonia possessed several centuries
earlier. How, then, can we explain the gulf,
fathomless and impassable, which lies between
the cosmology of Genesis and the cosmology of
Babylonia, or between the Old Testament litera
ture as a whole and the religious literature of
the Euphrates, without calling in the aid of an
agency other than human ? Whence came the
revelation of the true nature of God, and His
relation to man, which is announced in the first
verse of the Pentateuch, and which stamps the
literature of the Old Testament to the end ?
It was certainly not from Babylonia or Canaan
that it was derived, still less from Egypt ; like
the gift of reason and speech which distinguishes
man from the lower animals, it remains solitary

Monotheism 113
and unique, a fact which we must accept, but
which purely human science has failed to explain.
We can analyse and trace the origin of the
material elements that underlie the fact; but
between the material elements and the fact
itself there is a break of connexion which the
forces at present known to us are unable to
unite. The revelation of monotheism is not confined
to the cosmology of Genesis or the writings of
the later prophets. We find it also in the Ten
Words or Commandments, which even the
'critic' allows us to believe were Mosaic in origin.
It goes back to the Mosaic age, to the time
when Israel fled from Egypt and was still under
the tutelage of the wilderness. On the other
hand, the cosmology and legends, the myths
and gods of Babylonia were known to the
Canaan of the Mosaic age. Long before the
Exile the Hebrew literature which has survived
to us shows that the Israelitish people also were
well acquainted with the cosmological theories
and mythological monsters of Babylonia. The
Babylonian story of the creation could have
been known to the great Hebrew legislator, and
it is quite as easy to believe that it was he who
H

114 Hebrew and Babylonian Cosmology
found in it the material for his work, as that this
[was done by some later and unknown author.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the
writer of the first chapter of Genesis had a
cuneiform document before him which he was
able to read ; and we know of no periods when
this could have been the case except the Mosaic
and the epoch of the Exile. But the epoch of
the Exile is excluded, if for no other reason,
at all events for the very sufficient one that
no Jew would then have borrowed from his
enslavers a story of the creation which was
saturated with their superstitions and idolatry.
The simplest hypothesis is, after all, that
which agrees with tradition.

CHAPTER VIII
THE DOCTRINE OF RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION
THRIVEN from its first assumption of the late
~^*use of writing for literary purposes, the
'higher criticism' has fallen back on the doc
trine of evolution. Evolution is the keynote of
modern science, both physical and psychological,
the magical key with which it hopes to unlock
the secrets of the universe. There has been
evolution and development in history, as well
as in the forms of life, in the systems of the
material universe or in the processes of thought.
There must have been evolution also in
religious and moral ideas, in political concep
tions and theological dogmas. If once we
could discover its law, we should be able to
trace the course it has followed, and know what
is first and what is last in the religious systems
of the past.
The disciples of the ' higher criticism ' have
assumed not only that the law is discoverable,
H 2

116 The Doctrine of Religious Evolution
but also that they have themselves discovered
it. They know precisely how religious ideas
must have developed in the past, and can con
sequently determine the relative age of the
various forms in which they are presented to
us. Certain conceptions of the priesthood or
ithe sanctuary, the ' critic ' tells us, are older
than others ; therefore, if there are books or
passages which do not conform to his ruling,
they must be forced to do so by an alteration
of the traditional dates. What the critic believes
to have been the order of evolution is thus
made the measure of their age and authenticity.
But it does not follow that what the ' critic '
believes must have been the order of evolution
was necessarily so. In all probability it was
not. The European critic of the twentieth
century, writing in his library of printed books,
has little in common with the Oriental of the
ancient world. The thoughts of the one are
not the thoughts of the other ; the very world
in which they move is not the same.
The ' critical assumption,' in fact, is an in
version of the true method of science. We
must first know what was the order of the
phenomena before we can discover the law of

'Critical' Assumptions 117
evolution which they have followed. It is only
when we have ascertained what forms of life
or matter have succeeded others that we can
trace in them a process of development. We
cannot reverse the method, and determine the
sequence of the phenomena from a hypothetical
law of evolution.
This, however, is just what the 'higher
critics' of the Old Testament have attempted
to do. They have assumed that what seems
to them the natural order in the development
of spiritual or moral ideas was the actual order,
and they have mutilated and re-dated the
literary material in order to support the
assumption. It has seemed to them that the institution
of an Aaronic priesthood must have grown
out of an earlier Levitical system, and that the
codification of the law of Israel must have
followed and not preceded the development
of prophecy; and, consequently, setting tradi
tion at defiance, they have remodelled the
ancient history of Israel, rewritten its sacred
books, and forced the evidence into, conformity
with their historical scheme. What archae
ology has to say to their second assumption,

n8 The Doctrine of Religious Evolution
that of the late date of the codification of the
Mosaic Law, we have already seen ; when the
ritual code of Babylonia is discovered, it is likely
that the ' critical ' theory of the priority of the
Levitical to the Aaronic priesthood will fare
no better than the theory that the Law is later
than the Prophets.
In fact, the whole application of a supposed
law of evolution to the religious and secular
history of the ancient Oriental world is founded
on what we now know to have been a huge
mistake. The Mosaic age, instead of coming
at the dawn of ancient Oriental culture, really
belongs to the evening of its decay. The
Hebrew legislator was surrounded on all sides
by the influences of a decadent civilization.
Religious systems and ideas had followed one
another for centuries; the ideas had been
pursued to their logical conclusions, and the
systems had been worked out in a variety of
forms. In Egypt and Babylonia alike there
was degeneracy rather than progress, retrogres
sion rather than development. The actual
condition of the Oriental world in the age of
Moses, as it has been revealed to us by archae
ology, leaves little room for the particular kind

'Critical' Assumptions 119
of evolution of which the ' higher criticism ' has
dreamed. But in truth the archaeological discoveries
of the last half-dozen years in Egypt and Krete
have once for all discredited the claim of
' criticism ' to apply its theories of development
to the settlement of chronological or historical
questions. It is not very long since it was
assuring us that the civilization of Egypt had
little or no existence before the age of the
Fourth Dynasty, that no records had been kept
or monuments preserved of so 'prehistoric'
a period, and that the kings whom tradition
assigned to it were but the 'half-fabulous'
fictions of later centuries.
And yet these half-fabulous fictions have
turned out to have lived in the full blaze of
Egyptian culture ; their tombs and public works
were on a grandiose scale, their art was far
advanced, their political organization complete.
The art of writing was not only known, but an
alphabet had been invented, and a cursive hand
formed. A chronological register of time was
kept year by year, and the height of each
successive Nile minutely recorded. The civiliza
tion of Egypt in the reign of Menes was as

120 The Doctrine of Religious Evolution
high as it was under the Pharaohs of the
Fourth Dynasty. The application of the canons
of the 'higher criticism' to the earlier history
of Egypt has signally failed.
Nor is it better when we turn to the eastern
basin of the Mediterranean, and the islands and
coasts which were afterwards Greek. Here,
we were told, there was nothing but the dark
ness of an illiterate barbarism before the begin
nings of the classical age. The traditions
which had survived of an earlier period were
resolved into myths and fabrications, and we
were bidden to believe that the pre- Hellenic
history of the JEgean could never be recovered,
for none had existed. A knowledge of writing,
we were assured, was unknown in the age in
which the Homeric poems first took shape,
and art sprang ready-made, like Athena from
the head of Zeus, in the stormy epoch of the
Persian wars. Backed by his favourite appeal
to the want of evidence, and fortified with his
doctrine of development and his assumption of
the late introduction of writing, the ' critic ' was
confident that his negative conclusions could
never be gainsaid, and that what had passed
for the earlier history of Greek lands had

The Awakening 121
been dismissed by him for ever to the realm
of myth.
The awakening has come with a vengeance.
The scepticism of the ' critic ' has been proved
to have been but the measure of his own
ignorance, the want of evidence to have been
merely his own ignorance of it. The spade of
the excavator in Krete has effected more in
three or four years than the labours and canons
of the ' critic ' in half a century. The whole
fabric he had raised has gone down like a
house of cards, and with it the theories of
development of which he felt so confident.
Not only have we discovered that the tradi
tions of the empire and splendour of Minos were
right, that even the stories of the Labyrinth and
the Minotaur had a foundation of fact, but we
have also learnt that the art of classical Greece
was no self-evolved thing, but as much a
renaissance as the European renaissance of the
fifteenth century. The culture of the lands
of Krete in the age of Moses was equal to
that of their Egyptian contemporaries ; their
architectural conceptions were far advanced,
their fayence and inlays of the first order, the
art of their engraved gems unsurpassed even in

122 The Doctrine of Religious Evolution
the palmiest days of later Greece. Indeed, in
the age of Moses the art of the eastern
Mediterranean was already decaying, strange
conventional designs and figures had come into
existence, and forms which we associate with
the art of the Roman empire were already in
fashion. As for illiteracy, there was writing and in
plenty. No less than three different scripts — if
not four — were in use in Krete alone, and traces
of their use have been met with as far north as
Bceotia and the Troad. The clay tablets of
Babylonia were employed as well as the papyri
of Egypt for writing purposes, and the charac
ters of a linear script were inscribed in ink on
shreds of pottery. And all this plenitude of
literary culture and luxury was being enjoyed
by the islands and coastlands of the eastern
Mediterranean centuries before Homer told of
its departed glories, or Hellenic civilization took
up again the broken threads of the past. The
development which the ' critic ' has imagined —
a development out of barbarism, illiteracy, and
the rude beginnings of art — is simply a dream
and nothing more.
It would be affectation, however, if not dis-

The False Method 123
ingenuousness to pretend that the work of the
' critic ' has been altogether barren. This is far
from being the case. We have only to compare
a history of early Greece, as it was written
a hundred years ago, with the history of early
Greece, as it is being rewritten by archaeology
to-day, to see how much there was which needed
to be cleared away. We can never return to
the point of view of our forefathers in regard
either to Greek or to Hebrew history.
But where ' criticism ' went wrong was in its
belief that, unaided, it could solve all the prob
lems of history. The result was the adoption
of a false method, resting, in default of any
thing better, on assumptions and theories which
have been shown to be without foundation, an
exaggerated scorn of tradition, and a neglect
of those facts of archaeology which are the only
scientific criteria we possess for testing the truth
of the traditions of the past.
But within the lawful domain of philology the
work of the critic has been fruitful. We have
learnt much about the text of the Old Testament
Scriptures which was hidden from our fathers,
and above all we have come to take a truer and
more intelligent view both of the text itself and

124 The Doctrine of Religious Evolution
of the literature to which it belongs. We have
learnt that the Old Testament Scriptures are as
truly a literature as the classical productions of
Greece or Rome, that they were written by men,
not by machines, and that they reflect the
individual qualities of those who wrote them,
and the colouring of the various ages at which
they were composed.
If criticism has effected nothing else, it has
obliged us to look more closely into the
language and relations of the books with which
it deals, not to rest satisfied until we can under
stand the real meaning of the author and the
connexion of his words with the context in
which they are found. There was a time
when the Christian regarded his Bible as the
orthodox Hindu regards his Veda, as a single
indivisible and mechanically-inspired book, dic
tated throughout by the Deity, and from which
all human elements are jealously excluded.
But heathen theories of inspiration ought to
have no place in the Christian consciousness.
Christ was perfect Man as well as perfect God,
and in the sacred books of our faith we are
similarly called upon to recognize a human
element as well as a divine. The doctrine of

'Criticism' Conflicts with Faith 125
verbal inerrancy is Hindu and not Christian,
and if we admit it we must, with the Hindu,
follow it out to its logical conclusion, that the
inerrant words cannot be translated into another
tongue or even committed to writing.
Nevertheless, between the recognition of the
human element in the Old Testament, and the
' critical' contention that the Hebrew Scriptures
are filled with myths and historical blunders,
pious frauds and ante-dated documents, the
distance is great. Beyond a certain point the
conclusions of 'criticism' come into conflict with
the articles of the Christian faith. The New
Testament not only presupposes, but also rests
upon the Old Testament, and, in addition to this,
the method and principles which have resolved
the narratives of the Old Testament into myths,
or the illusions of credulous Orientals, must
have the same result when applied to the New
Testament. From a ' critical ' point of view
the miraculous birth of our Lord rests upon no
better evidence than the story of the exodus
out of Egypt.
'Criticism' professes not to deal with the
abstract question of the possibility of miracles.
But it does so indirectly by undermining the

126 The Doctrine of Religious Evolution
credit of the narratives in which the miraculous
is involved. In fact, the presence of a miracle
is of itself accounted a sufficient reason for
'suspecting' the truth of a story, or at all
events the credibility of its witnesses. If there
was no record of miracles in the Old and New
Testaments, it may be questioned whether so
much zeal would have been displayed in en
deavouring to throw doubt on the authenticity
of their contents. We find no such display of
' critical ' energy in the case of the Mohammedan
Koran. But putting the question of miracles aside,
there is one point on which we have a right to
demand a clear answer from the advocates of
the 'higher criticism' who still maintain their
adherence to the historical faith of Christendom.
It was to the Old Testament that Christ and
the early Church appealed in proof of His
divinity. ' Search the Scriptures,' said our Lord,
for ' they are they which testify of Me.' It was
in them that the life and death, the resurrection
and the work of Christ were foreshadowed and
predicted (Luke xxiv. 25-27), and upon this
fact He based His claim to be believed.
Was our Lord right, or must we rather

Was our Lord right? 127
hearken to the modern ' critic ' when he tells us
that the endeavour to find Messianic prophecies
in the Old Testament, in the sense in which
Christ and His Church understood the phrase,
is an illusion of the past ? We cannot serve
two masters ; either we must believe that in
the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah we have a real
portraiture of Christ, or else that Christ was
mistaken, and that the portraiture was only
read into the chapter in later days. The words
of Canon Liddon in reference to the critical
theory of the origin of the Pentateuch still hold
good : ' How is such a supposition reconcilable
with the authority of Him who has so solemnly
commended to us the Books of Moses, and
whom Christians believe to be too wise to be
Himself deceived, and too good to deceive His
creatures ? '

INDEX

Abraham, culture at the time
of, 43- 4
Amon-notep IV, creed of, 37.
Amraphel, see Khammurabi.
Analysis, value of critical, 19.
Astruc, Conjectures sur la
Gcnesc of, 26.
Archaeology, value of, 12.
' Argument from silence,*
the, 23.
Ark, the, 51.
Babylonia, culture in, 32 ;
writing of, 33 ; alphabet of,
35 ; language of, 39 ; laws
of, 60; ritual of, 183.
Bayle St. John, work of, 46.
Bilhah, 80.
Birds of the Flood, the three,
49.
Blood revenge, 72.
Book of the Dead, the, 29.
Carmichael, J., quoted, 47.
Challenge, a, iS.
Chedor-laomer, campaign of,
22, 56.
Christ, witness of, 1 27.
Codes of Moses and Am
raphel compared, 67 sq.
Concubines, 80.
Contemporaneous evidence,
test of, 11.
Copyists, honesty of, 65.
Creation, stories of, * com
pared, xoo sq.
Creditor and debtor, relation
of, 76.
Death penalty, the, 81.
Delta, the, 89.
Deluge, the, stories of, 20, 46.
Doctors, 79.
Dynasties of Egypt, 24.
Ea, the god, 49, 102.
Egypt, date 'of literature of,
29; education in, 31;
libraries of, 32.
Elam, power of, 57.
Eliezer, 81.
Elohist element, the, ao, 50.
Epic. Babylonian, 97 sq.
Eri-Aku, 58.
Etham, 91.
Euphrates, the, 97.

Evans, Dr. A. J., discoveries
of, 41.
Evolution, appeal to, 15; true
value of, 17.
Exodus, the, date of, 89.
Flood, the, stories of, 20, 46.
Gilgames, epic of the De
luge, 20, 47-
Goshenj 91, 92.
Greek inscriptions, 41 ; its
civilization and criticism,
120 ; writing, 122.
Gunkel, 102.
Hagar, 80.
Herodotus, 45.
Inheritance, law of, 74.
Inspiration, theories of, 124.
Israelites, the, state of, 1 12.
Khammu-rabi, date of, 57 ;
story of, 59 ; code of, 67.
Khetem, 91.
Khu-n-Aten, 38.
Kings, Books of, sources of,
44.
Knossos, tablets at, 41.
Krete, discoveries in, 41.
Kudur-Nankhundi, 58.
Letters quoted, 92, 93.
Lewis, Sir G. C., quoted, 35.
Literary tact, 13.
Literature, date of, 28.
Meneptah, 91.
Menes, 24.
Merodach, story of, 98.
Migdol, 91.
Miracles, 126.
Morgan, M. de, 67.
Moses, character of, 42.
Naram-Sin, 25.
Naville, Dr., discoveries of,
90, 94.
Newman, Dr., quoted, 16.
Noah, 51.
Noldeke, Professor, quoted,
36, 54-
Objective method, the, 17.
Olive, the sprig of, 51.
Operations, fees for, 77.

Oriental character of the
Bible, 9.
Pentateuch, the, analysis of,
10 ; criticism of, 21 ; au
thorship of, 42 ; sources of,
44 ; composition of, 46;
geography of, 88.
Philology, exaggerated es
timate of value of, 13.
Pinches, Dr., quoted, 64.
Pithom, 90.
Polytheism, Babylonian, 106
„ S(l*
Pottery, inscriptions on, 43.
Priesthood, the Aaronic, 117.
Proverbs of Ptah-hotep, the,
30.
Qaqemna, 31.
Raamses, 90.
Rains, the former and the
latter, cr.
Ramses 11, 90.
Ritual codes, 83.
Sargon, 25, 40.
Shur, the, 91.
Slavery, 71.
Stanley, Dean, quoted, 47.
Strife, penalties for, 79.
Subjunctive method, the, 17.
Sumerian proverb, quoted, 3 4.
Surgeons, 77. '
Susa, discoveries at, 67.
Swallows and the Ark, 49.
Tablets, discoveries of, 41.
Tehom, 108.
Tel el-Amarna, discoveries
™atJ37-Thukot, 91.
Tiamat, 101.
Tigris, the, 97.
Tudghula, 58.
Umman Manda, 58.
Veterinary, the, 77.
Virey, quoted, 30.
Wives, position of, 75.
Wolf, quoted, 25.
Writing, use of, date of, 28.
Xisuthros, 47.
Yah vistic element, the, 20, 50.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 03918 1897