" -*■ - 'V'-'.i.'' -"•■liHt '' . ' ■ ■* ■!!■'■ y BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME PROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OP X891 :L..8:nA6.:6 _ !^Z1Z^! __ Cornell University Library BS1180 .S27 1894 [her criticism" and the verdict of th oiln 3 1924 029 281 108 5:2.7 THE "HIGHER CRITICISM" AND THE VERDICT OF THE MONUMENTS. W^^^Bj~~ — -— ■l^ff |h[^P w } ^ Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029281108 THE "HIGHER CRITICISM" AND THE VERDICT OF THE MONUMENTS. BY THE Rev. a. H. SAYCE, queen's college, oxford. Jfoucth ffibttiou. PUBLISHRD UNDKR THE DIRKCTION OF THE TRACT COMMITTEE. LONDON: SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C. ; 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. New York: E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. 1894. A- ^02.tG PREFACE. I AM well aware that the pages which follow will satisfy neither the " higher critics " nor their extreme opponents, and that every effort will be made to dispute or minimise the archaeological evidence which they contain. But the great body of the religious public happily consists neither of " higher critics " nor of uncompromising " apologists," and is honestly de- sirous of knowing what is the actual testimony which the marvellous discoveries of oriental archaeology are giving to the antiquity and historical character of the Old Testament. I have therefore endeavoured as it were to take stock of them, and to indicate the con- clusions to which they point. I have aimed at writing as an archaeologist rather than as a theologian, treat- ing the books of the Hebrew Bible as I should any other oriental literature which laid claim to a similar antiquity, and following the archaeological evidence whithersoever it may lead. Whether I have been successful in thus putting aside all those preposses- sions in favour of a peculiarly divine origin which an Anglican priest might be expected to feel for the Scriptures of his Church is for my readers to decide. That the evidence is imperfect the archajologist m PREKACE. of Goology ctnd Other branches of science, not to speak of history in the ordinary sense of the word. To this imperfection of the record must be ascribed the frequent cases in which we are obliged to use terms like " probable " and " it seems," and to sug- gest an inference instead of proving it mathematically. No doubt future research will diminish the number of such cases ; nevertheless there must always remain instances in which the amount of certainty really attainable in historical investigations as in common life can never be arrived at. We must be content with probability only. Still probability is better than the bare possibility which the critic so often extracts from his inner consciousness. A typical example of the "critical" method has just been brought under my observation. Dr. Chap- lin has in his possession a small hematite weight found on the site of Samaria and inscribed with letters of the eighth century B.C. (see p. 449). The letters are very clear, though one of the two lines of which they consist is somewhat worn. Dr. Neubauer and myself found that one of the words occurring in them is s/i{e)l " of." The " critics," however, had determined that this was a word of late date, and had used it as an argument for denying the early date of the Song of Songs. Consequently it became necessary to get rid of the archaeological evidence which had so incon- veniently turned up. First of all the genuineness of the inscription was denied, and when this argument failed it was asserted that the reading given by Dr. Neubauer and myself was false. The assertion was PREFACE. VJl based on an imperfectly-executed cast in which the letters of the word shel — the first of which happens to be a good deal rubbed — are only partially repro- duced. It might have been thought that before deny- ing the reading of those who had handled the original stone, the "critics" would at least have waited until they could have seen the weight itself. But such a pro- cedure is not in accordance with " the critical method," and so shel and the Song of Songs are alike pro- nounced to be post-Exilic. Ex hoc disce omnia ! I cannot do better than conclude with a quotation from an interesting and pertinent article by Prof. Hommel, the illustrious orientalist, in the Sunday School Times for March 5, 1893 : " It is the whole perception of history that divides all Old Testament theology into two opposing camps. The genuineness and authenticity of an account like that in Gen. xiv. involves a sweeping and destructive criticism of the now fashionable view as to the trustworthiness of the Old Testament traditions, and therefore this chapter will ever be a stumbling-block to those critics who will not allow a single line to be Mosaic, not even the Decalogue and the so-called Book of the Covenant ; and accordingly these men for a long time to come will bend their utmost energies, though with little success, to remove this stone of offence from their path." A. H. Sayce. Queen's College, Oxford, Oct. 9, 1893. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. An author may be expected to feel gratified at finding that his book has passed into a third edition in the course of a few months. But I confess that I should have been better pleased if the sale of it had not been quite so rapid, as owing to my absence from England I have been unable to see the criticisms which have been passed upon it, and so profit by the archaeological knowledge of my reviewers. As it is, all I can do is once more to emphasize the fact that the work is that of an archaeologist, not of a theologian. Whatever bearings, therefore, it may have upon theological controversies must be left to the treatment of professed interpreters and critics of the Bible : they do not fall within my province. All I have undertaken to do is to state the archaeological facts as clearly and fully as I can ; that they should not always harmonize with prevalent theories is perhaps inevitable. Theories that have been arrived at upon imperfect knowledge are likely to need revision when the area of knowledge is enlarged. But I cannot refrain from drawing attention to the remarkable way in which archaeological discovery has X PREFACE TO .THE THIRD EDITION. confirmed the judgment of the Jewish Church. It is from the Jewish Church that the Christian Church has received the Canon of the Old Testament, and the doctrine of the Jewish Church in regard to the Canon is lucidly stated by Coleridge in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Letter II.): "Between the Mosaic and the Prophetic inspiration [the Jewish teachers] asserted such a difference as amounts to a diversity ; and between both the one and the other, and the remaining books comprised under the title of Hagiographa, the interval was still wider, and the inferiority in kind, and not only in degree, was un- equivocally expressed. If we take into account the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great First Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes — a striking illustration of which may be obtained by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books; and if we further reflect that the distinction of the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking — at all events not into their mode of conveying their thoughts — the language, of the Jews respecting the Hagiographa will be found, to differ little, if at all, from that of religious persons among ourselves, when speaking of an author abounding in gifts, stirred up by the Holy Spirit, writing under the influence of special grace, and the like." The distinction thus drawn by the Jewish Church between the Hagiographa and the earlier books of the PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. xi Old Testament is strikingly reflected in the results of archaeological research. While these tend to sub- stantiate the historical trustworthiness of the older records of the Hebrew people and the antiquity of the documents which contain them, they also show that in the Hagiographa we have something of a different character. In the one case we have history, in the other case history transformed into a parable. A. H. Sayce. Cairo, Egypt, May 5, 1894. PREFACE OF TRACT COMMITTEE. The Tract Committee of the S.P.C.K. wish it to be understood that in pubh'shing this work, which throws so valuable a light on much of the Old Testa- ment, they do not commit the Society to an agree- ment with all the opinions expressed in it. The Author alone is responsible for them. But they do not think it fair to hold back any of the conclusions arrived at by one of the most distinguished Archae- ologists of the day, whose views, founded on the evidence of monumental inscriptions, must carry great weight, though possibly they may be hereafter modified, as he himself observes in these words (p. 554): " In some instances the facts are still so imperfectly known as to make the conclusions the oriental archaeologist draws from them probable only. It is also true that in some cases a conclusion which seems certain and evident to one student may not seem equally certain and evident to another." It may pre- vent rnisunderstanding in regard to his remarks upon the Book of Daniel to quote also his own words as to the Historical Records of the Old Testament. He says : " The facts contained in them are trustworthy, XIV PREFACE OF TRACT COMMITTEE. and have been honestly copied from older and in many cases contemporaneous documents. It is only their setting and framework, the order in which they are arranged, and the links of connection by which they are bound together, that belong to the later compiler" (p. 409). And throughout the work it is important to bear in mind (as the Author repeatedly reminds us) that he is " writing as an ArchjEologist, not a Theologian, and that therefore all questions of Inspiration or . Revelation lie quite outside his province." When, for instance, he tells us that the Sabbath and week of seven days had its first home in Babylon, or that the narrative of the Creation is ultimately of Babylonian origin, there is nothing in these statements incon- sistent with a belief in a Primitive Revelation. They merely assert that the earliest mention of them is to be found in Babylonian inscriptions, and that we have no equally early documents among the Mosaic records ; but, as the Author says in another place, they "may go back to an immemorial antiquity, when the ancestors of the Israelites and the Semitic Baby- lonians lived side by side." The great similarity and at the same time diversity between the Babylonian and Hebrew stories are evidence of a common kinship and not of conscious borrowing. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. THE HIGHER CRITICISM AND ORIENTAL ARCH/E- OLOGY ... ... ... ... I II. THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE ... 3 1 III. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS ... ... ... ... 61 IV. THE CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS ... ... 1 74 V. THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL ... 234 VI. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ISRAELITISH NATION 283 VIL GEOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE ... ... 329 VIII. THE MOABITE STONE AND THE INSCRIPTION OF SILOAM ... ... ... ... 361 IX. THE ASSYRIAN TESTIMONY TO THE OLD TESTA- MENT ... ... ... ... 389 X. THE LATER HISTORICAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT ... ... ... 4S7 XI. THE BOOKS OF DANIEL AND EZRA... ... 497 xn. CONCLUSION ... ... ... ... 554 INDEX ... ... ... ... 565 THE "HIGHER CRITICISM" AND THE VERDICT OF THE MONUMENTS. CHAPTER I. THE HIGHER CRITICISM AND ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY. What do we mean by the " higher criticism " of the Old Testament ? It is a phrase which has passed from books of a forbiddingly scientific nature, to the popular literature of a railway bookstall and the articles of a monthly review. We hear it over the dinner-table ; it is used not only in the lecture-room, but in the drawing-room as well. Like several other modern importations from Germany, it has been found to supply a want, and has accordingly made its way into the current language of England. But, like many current expressions, it does not always call up a clear and definite idea in the minds of those who hear it, or even in the minds of those E 2 THE HIGHER CRITICISM who employ it. It is used to shelter opinions about the Bible which are at variance with those of tradi- tional "orthodoxy," and is too often invoked to defend paradoxes which none but their author is likely to accept. Whoever rejects the popular views about the authority and credibility of Scripture considers he has a right to appeal to the "higher criticism " in support of his assertions. It is easier to invoke the aid of a phrase than to establish one's conclusions by solid arguments. By the " higher criticism " is meant a critical inquiry into the nature, origin, and date of the documents with which we are dealing, as well as into the historical value and credibility of the statements which they contain. The two lines of inquiry depend a good deal one upon the other. The degree of credibility we may assign to a particular narrative will largely depend upon the length of time which has elapsed between the period when it was written and the period when the event it records actually took place, and consequently upon the date of the document in which it is found. A contemporaneous document is more trustworthy than one which be- longs to a later age ; the statement of an eye-witness is always more valuable than that of a writer who is dependent on the evidence of others. On the other hand, an examination of the contents of a narrative ■will often throw light on the age to which the nar- rative itself must be assigned. The statement in Gen. XXXV. 31, that "these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel," shows that the list of Edomite kings which follows could not have been AND ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY. 3 incorporated into the Book of Genesis until after the rise of the Israelitish monarchy. The reference to the destruction of No-Amon or Thebes in Nahum iii. 8 indicates the date to which the prophecy in which it occurs must be referred. The cuneiform monu- ments have told us that the old capital of Egypt was destroyed by the Assyrian armies about 663 B.C., and it must therefore have been shortly after this event — when the recollection of it was still fresh in the memory of the Jews — that Nahum pronounced the approaching doom of Nineveh. A critical examination of a narrative will also help us to discover whether the document which embodies it is of a simple or a composite nature. It may often happen that the ancient book we are examin- ing may be, in its present form, of comparatively late date, and yet contain older documents, some of them indeed . being earlier than itself by several centuries. Modern research has shown that a con- siderable part of the most ancient literature of all nations was of composite origin, more especially ^here it was of a historical or a religious character. Older documents were incorporated into it with only so much change as to allow them to be fitted to- gether into a continuous story, or to reflect the point of view, ethical, political, or religious, of the later compiler. The most ancient books that have come down to us are, with few exceptions, essentially compilations. In this investigation, however, into the nature and Ofigiri of the documents with which it deals, the "higher criticism" is largely dependent on the aid of the "lower criticism." By the "lower criticism" 4 THE HIGHER CRITICISM is meant what we have been accustomed to call "textual criticism," a method of criticism which is wholly philological and palaeographical, busied with minute researches into the character and trustworthi- ness of the text, and the exact signification of its language. It is by means of philology that the higher critics have endeavoured to separate the Pen- tateuch into its original parts, and determine the various fragments which belong to each; and it is again mainly to philology that an appeal is made by those who would assign the later chapters of the Book of Isaiah to the age of the Babylonian Exile. The occurrence of Greek words in the historical chapters of the Book of Daniel forms an important argument in determining its date. The " lower criticism," accordingly, can be called "lower" only in so far as it is, as it were, the hand- maid of the " higher criticism," without whose help the "higher criticism" could not advance very far. Moreover a large part of the most certain facts upon which the " higher criticism " has to rely are furnished by the " lower criticism." A philological fact, once ascertained, is a fact which cannot be overturned or explained away ; it does not depend on the taste or sentiment or prejudices of an individual critic, but must be admitted by all scholars alike. Of course it may be denied by those who are not scholars — an easy method of answering unwelcome arguments which has often been adopted — but in the end the opinion of the scholars will always prevail. So far, therefore, from occupying a subordinate place, the "lower criticism" is indispensable to the "higher criticism," and the scholar who would be a " higher " AND ORIENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY. S critic must begin by being a " lower " critic as well. His philology must be sound before he can be trusted to speak on matters which involve the balancing of evidence and an appeal to questions of taste. Unfortunately, it has sometimes been forgotten that the "higher" and the "lower" criticism are alike branches of the same study, and that in science there is no " higher " or " lower," except in a conventional sense. The critic who has devoted himself to balanc- ing the evidence of historical or religious facts has sometimes fancied himself on a higher pedestal than the critic who confines himself to philological facts. It is true that he requires a more delicate appreciation of probabilities — an appreciation, however, which he does not always possess— and a wider and more catholic survey of facts ; but the method pursued by both ought to be one and the same, the difference between them being in degree only and not in kind. The arrogancy of tone adopted at times by the "higher criticism" has been productive of nothing but mischief; it has aroused distrust even of its most certain results, and has betrayed the critic into a dogmatism as unwarranted as it is unscientific. Baseless assumptions have been placed on a level with ascertained facts, hasty conclusions have been pat forward as principles of science, and we have been called upon to accept the prepossessions and fancies of the individual critic as the revelation of a new gospel. If the archaeologist ventured to suggest that the facts he had discovered did not support the views of the critic, he was told that he was no philologist The opinion of a modern German theo- logian was worth more, at all events in the eyes of 6 THE HIGHER CRITICISM his "school," than the jmost positive testimony of the monuments of antiquity. But the fault lay not with the " higher criticism " ' but with the " higher critic." He had closed his eyes to a most important source of evidence, that of archaeology, and had preferred the conclusions he had arrived at from a narrower circle of facts to those which the wider circle opened out by oriental dis- covery would have forced him to adopt. It was the old story ; it is disagreeable to unlearn our knowledge, and to resign or modify the beliefs for which we have fought and laboured, because of the new evidence which has come to light. The evidence must be blinked and discredited ; we refuse to accept it because certain unimportant details in regard to it have not yet been settled, or because we do not know whether it may not be suf)plemented by future discovery. We adopt the anti-scientific attitude of those who con- demned Galileo, because our old beliefs have become convictions, and we do not wish them to be disturbed. There are popes in the " higher criticism " as well as in theology. It is because these popes have of late been pro- claiming somewhat loudly the doctrine of their infal- libility, that it is desirable to test the conclusions of the " higher criticism," so far at least as the Oid Testament is concerned, by the discoveries of oriental archaeology. During the last half-century a new world has been opened out before us by the exca- vators and decipherers of the ancient monuments of the East, the great civilisations of the past have risen up, as it were, from their grave, and we find ourselves face to face with the contemporaries of Ezekiel and AND ORIENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY. 7 Hezekiah, of Moses and of Abraham. Pages of history have been restored to us which had seemed lost for ever, and we are beginning to learn that the old empires of the Orient were in many respects as cultured and literary as is the world of to-day. The Old Testament has hitherto stood alone ; the litera- ture which existed by the side of it in the oriental world seemed to have perished, and if we would test and verify, illustrate or explain its statements, we had nothing to fall back upon except a few scattered fragments of doubtful value, which had come to us through Jewish and Christian apologists, or the mis- leading myths and fables of Greek writers. The books of the Old Testament Scriptures could be explained and interpreted only through themselves; they were what the logicians would call "a single instance " ; there was nothing similar with which they could be compared, no contemporaneous record which could throw light on the facts they contained. From a "single instance'' no argument can be drawn ; we may analyse and dissect it, but we cannot make it the basis and starting-point for conclusions of an affirmative, and still less of a negative, character. To assume, for example, that writing was unknown for literary purposes in the Palestine of the age of Moses was to commit a logical fallacy, and recent oriental discovery has shown that it was ,the reverse of fact. The presumptions of the " higher criticism " were too often founded on want of evidence and the imper- fection of the historical record. The two lines of research, in fact, with which the " higher critic " is concerned, although they converge to the same point, nevertheless move along different 8 THE HIGHER CRITICISM planes, and are dependent on different kinds of evi- dence. On the one side the business of the " higher critic " is to analyse the documents with which he deals, to determine their origin, character, and relative age. The literary analysis implied by this sort of work is to a large extent of a philological nature, and it is not necessarily compelled to go beyond the documents themselves for the materials on which it relies. The evidence to which it appeals is mainly internal, and the facts by which it is supported are facts which have little or nothing to do with external testimony. The literary analysis of the Pentateuch, for example, is independent of the facts of history properly so called. But on the other side, the " higher critic " is also required to determine the authenticity or credibility of the historical narratives which the documents contain. For this part of his work his documents will not suffice ; he must compare their statements with those of other ancient records, and ascertain how far they are in accordance with the testimony derived from elsewhere. It is, in short, in his historical analysis that he is called upon to seek for external evidence, and if he neglect to do so he will be in danger of drawing conclusions from a " single instance." It is here that he must seek the aid of archaeology, and test the results at which he may arrive by the testimony of the ancient monuments. As I have already said, the two lines of research cannot be wholly separated from one another. Before we examine into the historical character of a narra- tive we ought to know what literary analysis has to tell us about the records in which it is found. We AND ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY. 9 ought to know whether these are composite or simple, what is their age in relation to the events they narrate, and what are the characteristics of their writer or writers. It makes a good deal of difference to our estimation of a historical narrative whether or not the writer was under the influence of a religious, political, or ethical theory. The impartiality of Grote's History of Greece has been impaired by the political theory it was written to support, and we have only to turn to ecclesiastical history to see what wholly contrary aspects will be assumed by the same facts in the works of two writers of opposite theological schools. On the other hand, the literary analyst cannot afford to neglect the help of historical criticism. Not only will a difference in the contents of the narrative assist him in distinguishing the documents which he finds to have been used or fused together in the ancient writing he is investigating ; the historian will sometimes be able to verify or overthrow the results to which his literary analysis may seem to have led him. Let us take, for instance, the tenth chapter of Genesis. The view that this chapter did not assume its present form until the age of Ezekiel is supported by the evidence of the Assyrian inscriptions. We learn from them that Gomer or the Kimmerians did not emerge from their primitive homes in the far north and come within the geographical horizon of the civilised nations of Western Asia until the seventh century before our era, and that the name of Magog can hardly be separated from that of Gog, who was none other than the Lydian king Gyges, the contem- porary of Jeremiah. Literary analysis paves the way for historical JO THE HIGHER CRITICISM criticism. It is fitting, therefore, that the "higher criticism" of the Old Testament Scriptures should have done its best, or its worst, before oriental archaeology enters the field. Let us hear all that the " higher critics " have to tell us after nearly a century of incessant labour and discussion, of minute examination of every word, if not of every letter, in the sacred records, and of subjecting the language of Scripture to almost every possible mode of inter- pretation. In the literary analysis of the Old Testa- ment certain general results have been arrived at, about which critics of the most various schools are agreed, and if in details there is still room for doubt and disputation, this is only what might be expected. Philology has already settled a good many questions which bear on the internal structure of the Biblical books. But the historical analysis of the Old Testament has necessarily lagged far behind its literary analysis. The critic has endeavoured to argue from a " single instance," and the result has necessarily been unsuc- cessful. Before we can accept his conclusions we must test them, and this can only be done by the help of the monuments of the ancient oriental world. Here alone can we find contemporaneous records which present us with a liviag picture of the world of the day, and inform us whether the picture presented by the Biblical records or by their critics is the more correct. It will be found more than once that the critics have been too ingenious, and have arranged past events more cleverly than they actually arranged themselves. The first and necessary result of the application of AND ORIENTAL ARCHiEOLOGY. II the critical method to the records of ancient history was scepticism. On the one hand, it was demonstrated by the literary analyst that documents hitherto supposed to be coeval with the events recorded in them were really centuries later, and that instead of being the work of eye-witnesses they were merely compilations embodying materials of very different age and value. On the other hand, a new spirit and mode of inquiry were at work in the educated world. It was the spirit of inductive science, cautious, tentative, and sceptical. It was a spirit which would no longer accept a belief because it was traditional, which demanded reasons, and insisted upon working back from the known to the unknown. Nothing was sacred to it ; everything had to be brought before the bar of human reason. Man became, as he had never become before, the measure of all things ; but it was as educated man, as a member of the scientifically- trained society of Europe. Between this new spirit of inquiry and the spirit which presided over the composition of most of the books and records of antiquity there was a gulf which could not be passed. The frame of mind which saw history in the myths of Greek deities and heroes, or with Livy placed showers of stones and impossible births on a level with Punic wars and Roman legis- lation, was a frame of mind which had not only passed away, but seemed impossible even to conceive. The literature in which it was enshrined was a literature which refused to stand the tests demanded from it by the modern canons- of criticism. The age of faith had been succeeded by an age of scientific scepticism, and the tests of truth required by the age of scientific 12 THE HIGHER CRITICISM scepticism had not been anticipated, and therefore had not been provided for, by the age of faith. The earlier history of Greece and Rome was filled with legends which we of to-day can see at a glance must have been the product of fancy and superstition, and the historical character of the narratives with which these legends are associated was at first suspected and then denied. We know that gods never fought with men on the plains of Troy ; it was therefore an easy step to take to deny the historical existence of Troy or the occurrence of its famous siege, and to point in proof of the denial to the want of contemporaneous record of the event. Greek prose literature does not begin until the sixth, or at most the seventh, century before our era ; how then can we be called upon to believe that a dynasty of powerful princes had ruled, centuries before, over Myk^nae, and had led a con- quering fleet to the shores of Asia Minor ? The legends connected with the names of Agamemn6n and Menelaos were interwoven with the actions of deities in whom we no longer believe, and with miraculous occurrences which those deities were asserted to have occasioned. The historical critic, accordingly, rejected them all ; to seek in them for grains of history, it was alleged, would be as useless a task as to seek in the sunshine for grains of gold. The myths and legends of early Greece or of early Rome were bound together in an indissoluble union ; to select a fragment here and there and declare it to be historical would be to ignore the rules of scientific evidence, and to lay claim to a power of divination. We must either accept the legends as a whole, like the historians of previous centuries, or reject them as a whole. And historical AND ORIENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY. 13 criticism had little difficulty in deciding which it was its duty to do. Twenty years ago little was left us of what had been handed down as the earlier history of civihsed man. Historical criticism had been ruthless in its iconoclasm. First one portion of ancient history had been relegated to the land of myth and fable, and then another. The destructive method of Niebuhr had been accepted ; the constructive side of his work, in which he had attempted to substitute a new history of his own for the history he had demolished, was rejected. Narratives, the historical truth of which had been admitted by the earlier critics, were even- tually condemned ; whatever did not satisfy the most stringent requirements of criticism was expunged from the pages of history. In the hands of Sir George Cornewall Lewis the history of Rome was made to begin with its capture by the Gauls ; the Greek history of Sir George Cox knows of scarcely anything that is historical before the age of Solon and Peisis- tratos. Havet not only threw doubt on the Egyptian and Babylonian histories of Manetho and Berdssos ; he denied the literary existence of Manetho and B^r6ssos themselves.^ The scepticism of historical criticism could hardly go any further. It was based on and supported by certain general assumptions. One of these was the unlikeness of the ancient oriental world to the Greek and Roman world of the classical age. The inferiority of the ancient oriental world in culture and education was assumed as a matter of course. It was taken for 1 E. Havet : " Mdmoire sur la Date des !l£crits qui portent las noms de B&ose et de Mandthon," Paris 1873. 14 THE HIGHER CRITICISM granted that no literature worthy of the name existed before Herodotos and ^skhylos, and that the idea of composing a history of contemporaneous events was a Greek invention. Writing, if known at all, was confined to the few, and was used chiefly for monu- mental purposes. That there was a literary age in the East long before there was a literary age in the West never entered the mind of the critic ; or if it did, it was dismissed with contempt. Anything, therefore, which seemed to imply the existence of such a literary age, or which appealed to it for con- firmation, was at once ruled out of court. The very fact that the authenticity of a particular narrative pre-supposed a widely-extended circle of readers and writers in the time of Moses was considered sufficient for its condemnation. Whatever ran counter to the dominant assumption had to be explained away, philology notwithstanding ; and so " the pen of the scribe " in the song of Deborah and Barak (Judges V. 14) became "the marshal's baton." There was yet another assumption by which criti- cism was largely, if unconsciously, biassed. This was the belief in the limited geographical knowledge of the ancient eastern world. The existence of regular high-roads, and the possibility of transporting large bodies of men to distant localities, were held to be among the dreams and fancies of an uncritical age. That Babylonian armies could have marched into Palestine in the days of Abraham, much less that Babylonian kings could have established their empire there, seemed wholly impossible. The documents in which such statements occurred appeared self- condemned. AND ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY. IS Still more prevalent was the assumption that the language and statements of an ancient oriental writer must be measured by the standard of a modern European. An exactitude was required of them which would not and could not be demanded of many modern writers of history. A single error in detail, a single inconsistency, a single exaggeration, a single anachronism, was considered sufficient to overthrow the credit of a whole narrative. And it sometimes happened that the error or inconsistency was of the critic's own creation, due to a false interpretation or a mistaken combination of the narratives before him. But even where this was not the case, it was expected that an ancient oriental annalist should express him- self with the sobriety of a Western European and the precision of a modern man of science. It is true that the critic would have been the first to disavow any such expectation. But it is also true that he has frequently acted on the tacit assumption that such must have been the case. A good deal of the historical criticism which has been passed on the Old Testament is criticism which seems to imagine that the compiler of the Book of Judges or the Books of Kings was a German scholar surrounded by the volumes of his library, and writing in awe of the reviewers. What may be called historical hair-splitting has been the bane of scientific criticism. It has been mainly due to a want of sympathy with the age and writers of the documents- which are criticised, and to a difficulty of realizing the conditions under which they lived, and the point of view from which they wrote. Even more frequent and more fatal than historical hair-splitting has been the habit of arguing from the l6 THE HIGHER CRITICISM ignorance of the critic himself. Time after time statements have been assumed to be untrue because we cannot bring forward other evidence in support of the facts which they record. The critic has made his own ignorance the measure of the credibihty of an ancient document. The earlier history of Jeru- salem before the Israehtish conquest of Canaan was unknown ; the story of the priest-king Melchizedek stood alone, unsupported by any fragment of antiquity that had come down to us; and accordingly it was asserted to be unhistorical. The mention of "the kings of the Hittites " in the account of the siege of Samaria by the Syrians (2 Kings vii. 6) was declared to be an error or an invention ; but it was only the ignorance of the critic himself that was at fault. It was to the histories of Greece and Rome that scientific criticism first applied its scalpel, and it was in the demolition of the legends and narratives with which they commenced that its method was formed, and the rules and principles laid down by which it has since been guided. From the histories of Greece and Rome it passed on to the history of ancient Israel. The method and principles of inquiry which were applicable to profane history were equally appli- cable to sacred history, and from the point of view of the historian no difference could be made between them. The critical standard was necessai-ily the same in both cases ; we cannot admit that an argument which would be just and conclusive in the case of Herodotos would be unjust and inconclusive in the case of the Pentateuch. In so far as the critical analysis of Greek and Roman history had been a success, it was right to expect that the same AND ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY. 1 7 critical analysis of Israelitish history would also be a success. Inevitably, therefore, the scientific criticism of the Old Testament followed upon the scientific criticism of the Greek and Roman historians, and if its tendency was destructive in the case of the one, it was only because it had already been destructive in the case of the other. The same canons of criticism that had relegated the story of Mykensean power or of the Trojan war to mythland, relegated also the earlier narratives of the Bible to the same unhistorical region. Abraham only followed Agamemndn ; and if the reputed ancestor of the Hebrew race was resolved into a myth, it was because " the king of men " had already submitted to the same fate. As it was in the early traditions of Greece that destructive criticism found its first materials and first elaborated its method and principles, so it was these same traditions which formed the starting-point for that i-econstruction of the history of the past which has built up anew what criticism had destroyed, and corrected the extravagances of an over-confident scepticism. With the excavations of Dr. Schliemann a new era began for the study of antiquity. Criticism had either demolished the literary tradition or thrown such doubt upon it as to make the scholar hesitate before he referred to it. The ages before the begin- ning of the so-called historical period in Greece had become a blank or almost a blank. They were like the maps of Central Africa made some forty years ago, in which the one-eyed monsters or vast lakes which had occupied it in the maps of an earlier epoch were swept away and nothing was put in their place. 1 8 THE HIGHER CRITICISM It has been reserved for modern exploration to supply the vacant space and to prove that, after all, the Mountains of the Moon and the lakes of the Portu- guese map-makers had a foundation in fact. It has similarly been reserved for the excavators and archae- ologists of the last, twenty years to restore the lost pages of the ancient history of civilisation, and to make it clear that the literary tradition, imperfect though it may have been, and erroneous in its details, was yet substantially correct. The spade of Dr. Schliemann and his followers has again brought to light the buried empire of Aga- memndn. Our knowledge of the culture and power of the princes of Myk6na; and Tiryns in the heroic age of Greece is no longer dependent on the question- able memory of tradition. We can examine with our own eyes and hands the palaces in which they lived, the ornaments they used, the weapons with which they were armed. We can trace their intercourse with the distant lands of the East and North, with the Egyptians of the Delta, the Phoenicians of Canaan, the Hittites of Asia Minor, and that northern population which collected the amber of the Baltic. The voyage of a Menelaos to Egypt or of a Paris to Sidon has ceased to be a historical anachronism which the critic can dismiss without further argument. We now know that although the heroic age of Hellas has left us no literary monument, it was nevertheless an age of culture and civilisation, the recollection of which lingered with astonishing accuracy down to the later ages of literary Greece. Excavation has proved that the "higher" critic was not justified in denying the credibility of the general picture pre- AND ORIENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY. 19 sented by the Greek tradition of the heroic age because in certain details it could not bear the test of criticism. The outlines of the picture were true ; it was only the colouring which reflected the ideas and fancies of a later day. The reconstruction of primitive Greek history was followed by the reconstruction of primitive Oriental history, Schliemann was followed by Petrie, as he had been preceded by Layard and Botta and the other great pioneers of excavation in the East. But the excavator in Egypt or Assyria or Babylonia had assistance which was denied to his colleague in the lands of the old Greek world. The culture of the East had been literary from the remotest epoch to which we can trace it back. The monuments it has yielded to us are for the most part written monu- ments. Babylonia and Assyria were filled with libraries, and the libraries were filled with thousands of books, while the Egyptian could not even hew a tomb out of the rock without covering its walls with lines of writing. In the East the decipherer of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform characters of Assyria and Babylonia walks hand in hand with the excavator. The one assists and supplements the work of the other. Greek archaeology has benefited in part from the work of the oriental archaeologist. The discoveries of Dr. Petrie in the Fayfim and at Tel el-Amarna have settled the date of the remains found at Myk^nae and Tiryns, by showing that the pottery which charac- terises them belongs to the age of the eighteenth and nineteenth Egyptian dynasties. They have further made it probable that colonists from the ^gean, and 20 THE HIGHER CRITICISM even it may be from the southern shores of Italy, were settled in the kingdom of the Pharaohs as far back as the era of the Twelfth dynasty.^ Indeed at a still older epoch, in the days when the Egyptian monarchs of the Sixth dynasty were erecting their pyramids, the Mediterranean was already known as " the great circle of the Uinivu " or lonians.^ A Yiv^na or "Ionian," a name which corresponds letter for letter with the Hebrew Javan, is referred to in one of the cuneiform tablets found at Tel el-Amarna, and written in the century before the Exodus, as being on a mission in the country of Tyre. We need not wonder any longer that objects of Egyptian manufacture have been disinterred at Mykenae, or that Greek tradition remembered the intercourse which existed between the Peloponnesos and the Delta in the heroic age of Hellas.^ But if Greek archaeology, and therewith the recon- 1 See W. M. Flinders Petrie : " Kahun, Gurob and Hawara," London 1890, and " Illahun, Kahun and Gurob," London 1891: This careful observer has since found Mykenaaan pottery among the ruins of the capital of Khu-n-Aten at Tel el-Amarna. As the city existed for only about thirty years {cir. B.C. 1400 — 1370) and was deserted after the death of its founder, we can fix the date of the pottery with astonishing precision. 2 Erman in the Zeitschrift fur dgyptische Sprache, xxix. i. ^ The passage in which the Ionian is mentioned is as follows (Winckler and Abel : " Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen," Pt. 2, Berlin 1890, No. 42) : "This year (certain) men have come into the presence of the king who is like the God Assur and the Sun-god in heaven ; they have reported to him : The sons of Ebed-Asherah have taken two horses of the king and chariots, according to their desires, and the men whom he sent have given them up ; and the Ionian is on a mission to the country of Tyre, doing this deed in it eight days.'" AND ORIENTAL ARCH/EOLOGY. 21 struction of early Greek history, has benefited by the discoveries that have been made in the East, how much more important have those discoveries been to the student of the Old Testament Scriptures ! The criticism which spaced so little of early Greek history was inclined to spare still less of early Biblical history. The very fact that this history was popularly placed on a different footing from classical history, and re- garded as peculiarly free from errors, gave the critic an unconscious bias against it. It had, too, been written by orientals whose modes of thought were less in harmony with those of the European critic than the modes of thought of a Greek writer. He could less readily understand and sympathise with the one than he could with the other. The pages of the Old Testament were accordingly ransacked for arguments against itself. No point, however minute, which could tell against it was overlooked, no inter- pretation was neglected which could assist in the work of destruction. The accuracy of language and ex- pression demanded from the sacred historians was mathematical in its exactness; it was an accuracy which could not with fairness be demanded from any ancient writer, more especially one whose home was in the East. It is true that the " higher critic " was no worse an offender in this respect than the so-called " apologist," who presumed to apologise for the apparent imper- fections and inconsistencies of Scripture. The verbal hair-splitting of the one was matched by the verbal hair-splitting of the other. Unimportant details were placed on a level with the main facts of a narrative, words were tortured into senses which they could 22 THE HIGHER CRITICISM never have borne, and meanings were read into pas- sages of the Old Testament which belonged to the nineteenth century, and not to the age when the documents were originally composed. The "apolo- gist" showed himself only too .ready to rival the " higher critic " in demanding from the Biblical writers a mathematical accuracy of expression, and in order to support his views had recourse to arguments which sinned against the first principles of common sense. They were, at all events, arguments which would not have been admitted in the case of any other literature, and had they been produced on behalf of the Hindu Rig- Veda or the Qoran of Mohammed, the " apolo- gist " would himself have been the first to deny their validity. The " higher critic " and the " apologist " alike obscured the main point at issue by a micro- scopic attention to unimportant particulars, the one maintaining that small errors of detail were sufficient to cast doubt on the credibility of a historical narra- tive or to determine its age and character, the other that equally small matters of detail could be proved to be in accordance with the latest hypothesis of science. They were both alike the true descendants of the Jewish Massoretes, who considered counting the words and letters of the Old Testament a weightier business than ascertaining what they actually meant. The reaction against the extreme scepticism to which the method and principles of scientific criticism' had led began, as I have said, in the field of classical history. It was here that the work of reconstruction was commenced by the excavator and the archse- ologist. Biblical history followed in the wake of AND ORIENTAL AftCHiEOLOGY. 23 classical history. Criticism had rejected the larger part of the earlier history of the Old Testament, indeed in the hands of Havet and Vernes — the first of them, be it observed, being an eminent Greek scholar — it had gone further, and declared that before the Babylonian Exile there was little of it which could be believed. But meanwhile discoveries were being made in the Biblical lands of the East, which enable us to test these conclusions of the " higher criticism," and see how far the scepticism embodied in them can be justified. Discovery has been crowding on dis- covery, each more marvellous than the last, and bear- ing more or less directly on the Old Testament records. So rapidly has the work of the excavator and the decipherer been proceeding, that it has been difficult even for the oriental archaeologist to follow it, and estimate its consequences for the study of ancient history. Still less can it be expected that either the '' higher critic " by profession or the public at large has been able to follow it and realise the complete revolution it must make in our conceptions of the ancient oriental world. The assumptions and pre- conceptions with which the " higher criticism " started, and upon which so many of its conclusions are built, have been swept away either wholly or in part, and in place of the scepticism it engendered there is now a danger lest the oriental archaeologist should adopt too excessive a credulity. The revelations of the past which have been made to him of late years have inclined him to believe that there is nothing impos- sible in history any more than there is in science, and that he is called upon to believe rather than to doubt. 24 THE HIGHER CRITICISM We are but just beginning to learn how ignorant we have been of the civilised past, and how false our ideas have been in regard to it. We are but just beginning to realise that the fragments of Hebrew literature contained in the Old Testament are the wrecks of a vast literature which extended over the ancient oriental world from a remote epoch, and that we cannot understand them aright except in the light of the contemporaneous literature of which they formed a portion. We now know that this Hebrew literature was no isolated phenomenon, for the ex- planation of which extraordinary causes are required, and that the history embodied in it was based on literary records, and not on the shifting evidence of fantasy and tradition. The veil that has so long concealed the innermost shrine of the past has been lifted at last, and we have been permitted to enter, though it be as yet but a little way. It may seem, perhaps, that we ought still to wait before applying the results of oriental discovery to the historical records of the Old Testament, and testing by means of them the current conclusions of the "higher criticism." But enough has already been achieved in oriental archaeology not only to let us see what must be its general bearings on our conceptions of the Old Testament records, but also what is its direct relation to individual portions of them. Enough has been brought to light and interpreted by the student of oriental antiquity to enable us to test and correct the conclusions of the critic, and to demon- strate that his scepticism has been carried to an extreme. The period of scepticism is over, the period of reconstruction has begun. We shall find that the AND ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY. 25 explorer and decipherer have given back to us the old documents and the old history, in a new and changed form it may be, but nevertheless substantially the same. Moreover it is a good thing to take stock from time to time of the knowledge we have acquired. It is only in this way that we can tell how far we have advanced, and build as it were a platform for further research. To know how much has been accomplished is a spur to accomplish more. It is only lately that the results of the "higher criticism" have made their way to the mind of the general public, creating alarm in some quarters, satisfaction in others ; the results of recent oriental discovery, so far as they bear upon this " higher criticism," are either not known at all, or else only in a vague and indefinite way. The arguments of the " higher critic " seem so much more conclusive, so much more in accordance with the scientific require- ments of the day, than the counter arguments of the • "apologist," that the ordinary educated reader finds it difficult to resist them. It is well for him to learn, therefore, how far they are supported by the facts of archseology. A single fact has before now upset a dozen arguments which had appeared to be incon- trovertible. But let us not forget that in one important respect at least, both the " higher critic " and the archaeologist are agreed. Both alike are seeking for the truth, and this truth is historical and not theological. It is as historians and not as theologians that we must investigate the records of the Old Testament, if we are to obtain results that will satisfy the great mass of reasoning men. With questions of inspiration and 26 THE HIGHER CRITICISM the like we have nothing to do. As long as our researches are historical and archaeological, the Scriptures of the Old Testament must be for us merely a fragment of that ancient oriental literature, other fragments of which are being exhumed from the mounds of Egypt, of Assyria, or of Babylonia. They are historical documents which must be examined according to the same method and upon the same principles as other documents which claim to be historical. We must not apply to them a different measure from that which we should apply to the Chronicles of Froissart or the Histories of Herodotos. The arguments which are sound in the one case will be sound in the other, those which are unsound in the one case will be equally unsound in the other. We cannot grant the benefit of an argument to the author of the Books of Chronicles which we deny to Holinshed or Geoffrey of Monmouth. Old Testament history has been treated unfairly, alike by friend and foe. They have both sought to defend a thesis, instead of endeavouring to discover what it actually has to tell us. Any argument, how- ever trivial, which would throw discredit on it has been acceptable to the one, while the other has too often undertaken to defend the impossible. Had any other history been treated in the same way, the educated world would have protested long ago. But the Biblical records have been put into a category by themselves, to their infinite harm and abuse. Commentators have been more anxious to discover their own ideas in them, than to discover what the statements contained in them really mean. It is indeed strange how seldom we think of even trying AND ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY. 27 to understand what a passage of Scripture must have originally signified to the author and his readers, or to realise its precise meaning. It may be due to a want of historical imagination, or to over-great familiarity with the mere language of the Bible ; whatever be the cause, the fact remains. We read the Old Testament as we should read a fairy-tale, seldom realising that its heroes were men of flesh and blood like ourselves, and that the world in which they lived and moved was the same world as that into which we were born. Nothing is so striking as the way in which an unintelligible passage of the Authorised Version is passed over, not only by the ordinary English reader, but even by the commentator. It is to both " a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong," and the strength of the words seems completely to conceal the want of meaning. It is sufiScient if they attach to it some vague sense, though they may be quite sure that the sense they attach is the last which it could originally have borne. It must not be supposed that oriental archeology and the "higher criticism" are irreconcilable foes. On the contrary we shall see that in many respects the learning and acumen of the long line of critics who have laboured and fought over the words of Scripture have not been altogether in vain. Much has been established by them, which the progress of oriental research tends more and more to confirm. There are narratives and statements in the Old Testament as to which the scepticism of the critic has been shown to be justified. The judgment he has passed on the so-called historical chapters of the Book of Daniel has been abundantly verified by the 28 THE HIGHER CRITICISM recent discoveries of Assyriology. The same evi- dence and the same arguments which have demon- strated that the scepticism of the "higher criticism" was hasty and unfounded in certain instances have equally demonstrated that it was well founded in others. We cannot accept the evidence in one case and refuse to accept it in the other. If once we appeal to the judgment of oriental archaeology we must abide by its verdict, whatever it may be. The archjEologist is happily attached to no party ; he has no theories to defend, no preconceived theory to uphold. He is bound to follow the facts brought to light by the progress of discovery and research, wherever they may lead him. Whether they support the views of the " higher critic " or of the upholders of traditional opinions is no concern of his. His duty is to state and explain them regardless of their con- sequences for theological controversy. All he is bound to do is to point out cjearly where practical certainty ends and mere probability begins, where the facts tell their own tale and where their broken and dislocated character demands the hypothesis of the interpreter. But it is important to observe that at those points at which the " higher criticism " is brought into contact with oriental archaeology, even the theories of the archaeologist differ, or ought to differ, from those of the critic and of his " apologetic " antagonist. They are based on that essentially necessary foundation of all scientific truth, the comparison of at least two sets of facts which have been studied independently one of the other. The vice of all attempts to explain the Bible through itself is that the student is here deaUng AND ORIENTAL ARCH/EOLOGY. 29 with one set of facts only, with what I have already described in logical phraseology as a " single instance." The theories so formed may be very ingenious and very learned, but they are too largely dependent on the " inner consciousness " of their author to com- mand universal consent. Indeed it has not unfre- quently happened that consent has been granted to them by their author alone. Controversies have raged, and are still raging, over matters which could be settled at once by the discovery of a single inscription, or even it may be of a single potsherd. They have been raised where the materials at hand were insufficient to allow of more than a barely possible interpretation, and where accordingly the arguments urged on either side were equally inconclusive and unconvincing. All at once the spade of the excavator has disinterred some ancient monument, or the decipherer of lost languages has revealed the true sense of some hitherto unex- plained document, and the problem is solved forth- with. Light is poured in upon it from outside, and the ineffectual attempts to light it from within have been superseded for ever. It is time that the large section of the public which takes an interest in the history of the past, and more especially in that portion of the past which is recorded in the Old Testament, should know how widely the light has now begun to shine. The defenders of tradi- tional beliefs have been appealing with confidence to the testimony of the ancient monuments, and maintain- ing that the vindication it has already afforded of the truth of the old records is an earnest of what is yet in store. The " higher criticism " has in many quarters 30 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. adopted a more arrogant tone, and refused to listen to archaeological science except where its results are in accordance with its own. The object of the fol- lowing chapters will be to determine how far the confidence of the "apologist" is justified, and the arrogance of the critic condemned. CHAPTER II. THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. One of the most assured results of the hterary analysis of the Old Testament records has been the existence of documents of different age and authorship in the Pentateuch. Opinions may differ widely as to the authorship of certain passages and the dates to which the several documents are to be assigned, but about the general fact of the composite character of the Pentateuch competent critics of all schools are now agreed. The literary foundation upon which the history and religion of Israel rested is, in its present form, a composite work. The fact is fully in accordance with the teachings of oriental archaeology. The place occupied by the Pentateuch in the sacred literature of Israel was sub- stantially occupied by the so-called Book of the Dead in the sacred literature of Egypt, as well as by the religious hymns and the ritual of which they formed part in the sacred literature of Babylonia. The Book of the Dead was a collection of prayers and mystical formulae by means of which the soul of the dead was enabled to secure its final rest and happiness in the next world. Thanks to the labours of Mr. NavfUe we can now trace its history, from the 32 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. days of the pyramid-builders down to tlie age of tlie Persian conquest of Egypt.^ Its form changed from age to age. New chapters were embedded in it, old chapters were modified ; glosses added in the margm to e.xplain some obsolete word or phrase made their way into the text, and even glosses upon these glosses met with the same fate. The sacred book of the Egyptian, which the pious care of his friends caused to be buried with him and its chapters painted on the walls of his tomb or the sides of his sarcophagus, was an amalgamation of documents and beliefs of various ages and localities. As Professor Maspero has shown, more than one contrary belief is embodied in it, one belief being contained in chapters which emanated from one part of Egypt, and another belief in those whicli emanated from another part of the country.^ The same diversity of view which criticism has indicated to exist between the two accounts of the Creation given in the tv/o first chapters of Genesis has been shown to exist between different portions of the Egyptian " Book of the Dead." The same fact meets us again when we turn to Babylonia. Here, as Lenormant was the first to point out,^ two great collections of sacred literature existed, one of them consisting of magical charms by which the spirits of heaven and earth could be compelled to obey the will of the priestly sorcerer, the other of IE. Naville : "Das agyptisches Todtenbuch der i8 — 20 Dynastie," Berlin 1886, and Maspero: " Le Livre des Morts" in the Revue de I'Histoire des Religions, 1887. 2 Maspero : " Les Hypogdes royaux de Thdbes " and " La Mythologie dgyptienne " in the Revue de I'Histoire des Religions, 1888, 1889. 3 "La Magie chez les Chalddens," Paris 1874. THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 33 hymns to the gods. Both collections were embodied in an elaborate ritual, the rubrics of which contain minute directions for the correct recitation of the charms and hymns. Not only were the individual charms and hymns necessarily of different authorship and date, an examination of their language and con- tents makes it clear that many of them are of com- posite origin. We find passages in them which can be shown to be of later date than the rest of the poem into which they have been incorporated, as well as statements and points of view which are mutually inconsistent.^ Perhaps the clearest example of the growth of a literary work, as yet afforded by the clay tablets of Babylonia, is the great Epic of primitive Chaldaea. It centres round the adventures of the hero Gilgames, the prototype of the Greek Perseus and Herakles, and assumed its present form in the age of the literary revival under King Khammurabi (B.C. 2356 — 2301). The adventures have been woven together into a poem in twelve books, the subject of each book cor- responding with the name of the Zodiacal sign which answers to it in numerical order. Thus it is in the second book that Gilgames slays the winged bull sent by Anu, the god of heaven, to avenge the slight done to the beauty bf the goddess Istar, and it is in the eleventh book, corresponding with Aquarius, the eleventh sign of the Zodiac, that the Babylonian story of the Deluge is introduced as an episode. In its present form, in fact, the Epic has been arranged upon an astronomical principle ; and older poems, or frag- > .Sayce : Hibbert Lectures on "The Religion of the Ancient Babylonians " (1887), pp. 317 sgg. See also p. 447. 34 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. ments of older poems, have been interwoven into it in accordance with this arrangement. In one place, for example, we find a number of lines which have been taken bodily from another old Chaldsean poem, that which described the Descent of Istar into the world of the Dead. The story of the Deluge in the eleventh book, again, is not only an episode, plainly extracted by the author from elsewhere, but is itself an amalgamation of at least two earlier poems on the same subject. In this way we can explain how it is that the Flood is ascribed in it to two different deities; in one passage it is Bel, in another Samas the Sun-god who is spoken of as its author. The composite character of the Pentateuch, there- fore, is only what a study of similar contempora- neous literature brought to light by modern research would lead us to expect. The " higher " criticism of the Old Testament has thus been justified in its literary analysis of the Books of Moses. The ques- tions involved were mainly philological, and the critic consequently had sufficient materials before him for guiding and checking his conclusions. It was only when he was compelled to step into the field of the historian and determine the age of the several docu- ments he had discovered, that his materials failed him, and his results became a matter of dispiite. The critic has usually started with a conviction of the modernness of the application of writing to litera- ture in the true sense of the word. Classical scholars had impressed upon him the belief that literature as such had no existence before the age of Solon, or even of the Persian wars. It therefore became impos- sible to conceive of a Samuel, or still less of a Moses, THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 35 sitting down to compile a history and a code of laws. Moreover the exploration of Eastern lands had tended to strengthen this conviction. It was known that the Hebrews, like the other nations of Syria, used a form of the Phoenician alphabet. Now no in- scription in the letters of the Phoenician alphabet had been found which went back even to so early a date as the time of Solomon. . Multitudes of such inscriptions had indeed been discovered, but most of them belonged to the epoch of the Ptolemies. The shapes of the letters, furthermore, indicated that they were employed for purely monumental purposes. They were composed of angles, such as would be necessitated by their incision on stone or metal or wood, not of the curves which would be substituted for the angles in writing on parchment and papyrus. It seemed obvious to conclude that the application of the Phoenician alphabet to other than monumental uses was of comparatively late date. And yet we now know that such a conclusion is not really warranted by the facts. A Jewish inscrip- tion has been found, of the period of the kings, the letters of which, though engraved on stone, neverthe- less have rounded instead of square angles. The people who employed them must have been accus- tomed to write with a pen on papyrus and parch- ment rather than with the chisel on wood and stone. The earliest Hebrew text of which we know, a text which is probably contemporary with the reign of Ahaz or Hezekiah, thus points in the clearest possible way to the existence at the time of a true literature. What other conclusions may be drawn 36 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. from the inscription of Siloam must be reserved till we come to the period to which it properly belongs. For the present it is sufficient that the oldest Hebrew inscription yet discovered indicates the employment of alphabetic writing at Jerusalem in the age of the kings for literary, and not monumental, purposes. The comparatively late date to which we must assign the first text yet known to us which is written in the letters of the Phoenician alphabet is a fact which should not be pressed too far. " On the one hand it must be remembered that no systematic excavations have as yet been undertaken either in Phoenicia or in Syria or the lands eastward of the Jordan, and within the limits of Palestine itself the excavations begun by Dr. Flinders Petrie in 1890 for the Palestine Exploration Fund, and which resulted in the discovery of Lachish, are the first scientifically- conducted excavations that have been made. We are still quite ignorant of what lies buried beneath the soil. Before Botta and Layard brought to light the palaces of Assyria and the hundreds of written tablets which constituted the library of Nineveh, the cunei- form inscriptions known to the world were not only far fewer than the Phoenician inscriptions with which we are at present acquainted, but Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions were not known at all. A small glass case in the British Museum was sufficient to contain the whole collection of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities, and the greater part of them had come from Babylonia. No one could even dream that a vast literature was lying under the mounds of Assyria, waiting only for the spade of the excavator.^ ^ Mr. Bliss's recent excavations at Lachish (Tell el-Hesy) THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 37 Then on the other hand, the origin and history of the Phoenician alphabet — that alphabet from which most of the existing alphabets of the world have been derived — are by no means so easy to settle as appeared to be the case two or three years ago. For a long while past the view has prevailed that the Phoenician alphabet is derived from the alphabet of ancient Egypt. The suggestion was first made by Champollion, the father of Egyptian philology, and was adopted by Drummond in this country and Salvolini in Italy.'- But it was the famous Egypt- ologist Emmanuel de Roug^ who first brought forward arguments in behalf of it which could be accepted by other scholars.^ He showed that the number of letters in the alphabet of Phoenicia and Palestine agreed substantially with that which had been used by the Egyptians from time immemorial, and formed by them out of the vast body of hiero- have brought to light the fragment of a flat dish on which the word b-l-a " swallow ! " is incised in Phoenician letters, the first letter {pkK) being of a peculiarly archaic form. As the fragment was found at a depth of 300 feet, it would seem to be a good deal older than the ninth century B.C. (see my article in the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, January 1893, P- 31)- ^ See Sir William Drummond's " Origines " (1825), vol. ii. pp. 341 sqq. Drummond, however, had the " Tsabaists " on the brain, and would seem to have thought that these imaginary people had invented the hieroglyphics out of which the Phoenician letters were originated on the one hand and the hieroglyphs of Egypt on the other. 2 In a Paper read before the Acaddmie des Inscriptions in 1859. It was edited by his son Jacques de Rougfe in 1874 under the title " Mdmoire sur I'origine dgyptienne de I'Alphabet phdnicien." 38 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. glyphic characters they continued to employ by the side of it. He further showed that many of the Phoenician letters presented a surprising likeness in shape to the " hieratic " or cursive forms of the corresponding Egyptian alphabet as found in a papyrus of the age of the Twelfth dynasty. The argument of De Roug^ was clinched by Lenormant and Canon Isaac Taylor, the latter of whom, in his book on " The Alphabet," pointed out that the one Phoenician character which has no representative in the alphabet of Egypt is that which denotes the peculiarly Semitic sound of 'ayin, and that it has manifestly been originally a picture of the eye of which 'ayin is the Semitic name.^ The theory of De Roug^ was supported by the fact that the discovery of Phoenician inscriptions of earlier date than those he was acquainted with brought to light forms of the letters which bore a closer re- semblance to their supposed hieratic prototypes than the forms which he had been able to compare with them. But it was not universally accepted. Prof. Hommel endeavoured to show that the Phoenician letters were derived from ancient forms of certain Babylonian cuneiform characters,^ while Prof. Eduard Meyer suggested for them a Hittite parentage. One of the chief difficulties in the theory was the long interval of time between the earliest known example of Phoenician writing and the age of the Hyksos kings of Egypt, when the hieratic characters were supposed to have passed into the Phoenician letters. Between the Moabite Stone of Mesha, the contem- » " The Alphabet " (1883), vol. i. pp. lis, 116. ^ " Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens " (1885), pp. 54, 55. THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 39 porary of Ahab, or the dedication to the Baal of Lebanon which is believed to be about half a century older, and the epoch of the Twelfth Egyptian dynasty is a space of more than 1 500 years. We know how rapidly the forms of letters change, especially when they are transported from one people to another, and we may therefore well ask how it happened that the Phoenician letters continued to bear so close a resemblance to their supposed Egyptian prototypes during that long interval of time .' We may also ask how it is that no inscriptions have been discovered in Egypt or elsewhere which serve to bridge over the gulf between the epoch of the Hyksos and that of the dedication to Baal-Lebanon ? But the explorations of Dr. Glaser in Southern Arabia have lately put the question in a new and unexpected light.^ Dr. Glaser has re-copied a large part of the numerous inscriptions found on the rocks and ancient monuments of Yemen and Hadhramaut, and has added more than a thousand fresh ones to their number. The inscriptions were long known as Himy- aritic, but as they are in two different dialects, one of which is more archaic than the other, and belong to the two separate kingdoms of Ma'in and Saba, it is better to distinguish them as Minaean and Sabaean. Saba is the Sheba of the Old Testament whose queen came to visit Solomon, and the people of Ma'in are the Minasans of the classical writers, and, as Glaser and Hommel believe, the Maonites of Judges x. 12. At ^ " Skizze der Geschichte Arabiens von den altesten Zeiten bis zum Propheten Muhammad" (Munich 1889), besides various Papers contributed by him and Prof. Hommel to different periodicals. 40 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. any rate in the Septuagint Zophar, the friend of Job, is called "king of the Minaeans" (Job ii. ii). It has hitherto been imagined that the kingdoms of Ma'in and Saba were contemporaneous one with the other. But against this view Dr. Glaser has brought forward arguments which are difficult to answer. He points out that the Minsan inscriptions are scattered through the territory of the Sabaeans, Hke the fragments of the county of Cromarty in Scotland, and that conse- quently it is as impossible to believe them to be of the same age as it would be to believe that one dynasty of kings could rule in London and Oxford, while another dynasty was ruling in Reading and Banbury. And even supposing the possibility of such an occurrence, we should still have to explain why it was that the subjects of the one dynasty always used a particular dialect, while the subjects of the other, who were dispersed here and there among them, invariably used another. Dr. Glaser accerd- ingly concludes that the kingdom of Ma'in preceded that of Saba, and that we can thus explain why the Mina:an people were known to the geographers of the classical age, though not the Minjean kingdom. Now if the kingdom of Ma'in had already fallen before the rise of that of Saba, historical consequences of great importance will follow. The existence of the kingdom of Saba can be traced back to a con- siderable antiquity. In the time of Tiglath-pileser III. (I3.C. 733) the power of its princes extended to the extreme north of Arabia and brought them into con- tact with Assyria. Ithamar, the Sabaean monarch, paid tribute to Sargon as his predecessor had done to Tiglath-pileser. If the account of the visit of the THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 4I Queen of Sheba to Solomon is historical, — and, as we shall see hereafter, archaeological discovery tends more and more to dissipate the doubts that have been cast upon it, — Saba was already a kingdom three centuries before the time of Tiglath-pileser, and its northern frontier was sufficiently near the borders of Palestine for its ruler to have heard of the fame of Solomon. Yet the researches of Dr. Glaser have shown that the sovereign princes of Saba had been preceded by MakS.rib or " Priests." Like the High- priests of Assur who preceded the kings of Assyria, as we have learnt from the cuneiform inscriptions, or hke Jethro " the Priest of Midian " according to the Old Testament, the first rulers of Saba had been priests rather than kings. It was only in course of time that the Priests had transformed themselves into kings. The fall of Ma'in is thus pushed back far into the centuries. Nevertheless the monuments make it clear that Ma'in had not only been a powerful king- dom, it had also been a kingdom which enjoyed a long term of existence. The names of thirty-three of its kings are already known to us from the inscrip- tions. And these kings were obeyed throughout the larger part of the Arabian peninsula. Doughty, Huber, and Euting have discovered Minsean records in the north, in the neighbourhood of Teima, the Tema of the Old Testament (Isa. xxi. 14), which mention three of these kings, and show that Minsean rule extended as far north as the territories of Midian and Edom.i In days which, if Dr. Glaser is right, * Prof. D. H. MuUer : " Epigraphische Denkmaler aus Ara- bien" (Vienna 1889), pp. 2, 3. 42 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. were contemporaneous with the Exodus of Israel, Ma'in was a cultured and prosperous realm, the mart and centre of the spice merchants of the East, whose kings founded settlements on the frontiers of Edom, and whose people practised the art of alphabetic writing. Dr. Glaser has drawn attention to two Minaean inscriptions which confirm the other indications we possess of the northward extension of Minaean rule. In one of these Gaza is referred to as tribut?iry to the king of Ma'in ; in another, a war is mentioned between the rulers of Northern and Southern Egypt, which he believes to be the war of independence waged by the Theban princes against the Hyksos, since it led to the flight of the Minaean governor of Zar on the eastern frontier of Egypt. The inscrip- tions will thus be far earlier than the earliest known to us that are written in Phoenician characters. The silence of the Old Testament in regard to the kingdom of Ma'in will be difficult to explain if we do not adopt Dr. Glaser's belief in its antiquity. We hear repeatedly of Sheba or Saba, but rarely if at all of Ma'in. The merchants of Sheba are singled out by the prophets and the psalmist, and according to Gen. XXV. 3 Sheba was the brother of Dedan, and thus occupied that very district of Teima in which Minaean inscriptions have been found (comp. Isa. xxi. 13, 14, and Gen. x. 7). It is only in the Book of Judges (x. 12) that we meet with a possible reference to Ma'in ; perhaps, also, in the obscure Me'unim of the Chronicler (2 Chr. xxvi. 7). But in either case the reference is to a people and not to a kingdom. Admitting the antiquity of the kingdom of Ma'in, THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 43 and along with this the antiquity of its written monu- ments, a wholly new light is shed on the early history of the PhcEnician alphabet. Instead of de- riving the Minsean alphabet from the Phoenician, it becomes necessary to derive the Phoenician alphabet from the Minaean. The Phoenician alphabet ceases to be the mother-alphabet, and becomes the daughter of an older one. Now an examination of the two alphabets goes to show that this view of the matter is right. Philology has taught us that all the Semitic languages once possessed certain sounds which were subsequently lost in the dialects of Canaan, and ac- cordingly have no symbols to represent them in the Phoenician alphabet. But the sounds were preserved in the languages of A'rabia, including those of Ma'in and Saba, and in the alphabet of these two ancient kingdoms they are denoted by special sym- bols. Had this alphabet been derived from that of the Phoenicians, analogy teaches us that the addi- tional symbols would either have been modified forms of existing letters, or else would have been borrowed from the system of writing used by some neighbouring people. But the additional letters of the South-Arabian alphabet can be traced back neither to other already existing forms, nor to the written characters of Egypt ; they possess as inde- pendent an existence as the symbols which express the sounds of a, b, or c. It is evident that they belonged to the primitive Semitic alphabet, and whatever theory is proposed to explain the origin of the latter must take note of the fact. But there is another fact which equally goes to show that the Phoenician alphabet is not that primary source 44 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. of alphabetic writing we have been accustomed to believe it to be. Every Phcjenician letter had a name, and our very word alphabet is but a combination of the names of the two first letters in a Greek dress. In most instances the names bear little or no relation to the earliest forms yet discovered of the Phoenician letters. No amount of ingenuity for instance has been able to find any plausible resemblance between the earliest known forms of the letter k ox n and the meaning of their names kaph " the palm of the hand," and mm "a fish." But when we turn to the forms as they appear in the alphabet of Ma'in, the riddle is frequently solved. We begin to understand why the populations of Palestine gave the names they did to the letters they had borrowed from the merchants of Arabia. The problem is no longer so hopeless as it seemed to be a short while ago. It is not probable that a change of opinion as to the primitive form of the Semitic alphabet and a shifting of alphabetic primacy from Phoenicia to Yemen will oblige us to look elsewhere than to Egypt for the ultimate source of the alphabet itself. In fact Egypt and the hieroglyphic script of Egypt were nearer to Yemen than they were to the cities of the Phoenician coast. Intercourse between Egypt and the southern shores of Arabia went back to pre- historic times, and it is more than possible that the Egyptians themselves were emigrants from Yemen and Hadhramaut. At any rate Egypt stood in a closer relation to the people of Ma'in than Babylonia, the only other country from which the Minsean alphabet could have been derived. But though the substitution of Southern Arabia for THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 45 Phoenicia as the primaeval home of our alphabet need not shake our belief in its derivation from the hieratic script of the Egyptians, it will make a considerable difference in the views which we must hold about its use in the ancient Semitic world. We need no longer be surprised at not finding Phoenician inscrip- tions of an earlier age than that of Solomon, or at not discovering in the Delta the intermediate links which, according to the current theory, ought to attach the hieratic alphabet of Egypt to the monumental alphabet of Phoenicia. Above all, we shall no longer be required to regard the Israelites and their Semitic neighbours in the period of the Exodus or of the Judges as necessarily illiterate. On the contrary they were in immediate contact with a people of their own race, whose merchants were constantly passing and repassing through the countries occupied by the Hebrews, and who were at the same time a reading and a writing people. At no great distance from the Edomite frontier private individuals were erecting in- scriptions in alphabetic characters, while men who had actually lived in the border-fortress of Egypt were leaving written records behind them. So far, therefore, from its being improbable that the Israelites of the age of the Exodus were acquainted with writing, it is extremely improbable that they were not. They had escaped from Egypt, where the art of reading and writing was as familiar as it is in our own days, and had made their way into a desert, which was traversed by Minsean traders and which touched on one side upon Midian and on the other upon Edom, Midian and Edom were both of them settled countries, long in contact with the subjects of 46 THE HIGHER CRITICISM, Ma'in, and therefore necessarily also with the alphabet which they used. How can we refuse to believe that this alphabet had been handed on to the kinsmen of Jethro and the children of Esau, and that if ever the excavator can upturn the soil in Midian and Edom he will find beneath it inscriptions which rival in age those of the Minseans ? We no longer have any & priori reason for rejecting the history of Jethro on the ground that tradition alone could have trans- mitted it, or for refusing to believe that the list of the " kings that reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel" (Gen. xxxvi. 30) is really an extract from the official annals of Edom. We may indeed have d. posteriori reasons for our incredulity, reasons due to contradictions between the accounts given in the Bible and the results of oriental archaeology, but an ^ priori reason we have none. That Edomite and Midianite inscriptions have not yet been discovered, is no evidence that they do not exist. They have not yet been looked for. The fact that the art of writing was practised in Moab is known only through an accident. Had not the famous stSl^ of King Mesha survived the devasta- tions of past centuries to fall at last a prey to the international jealousies of European antiquarians, we should still be ignorant that such was the case. And the survival of the st616 to our own days is one of the marvels of archaeological discovery. But the testimony borne by the Minaean inscrip- tions—supposing, that is, that the conclusions of Glaser and Hommel are correct — does not stand alone. A discovery made in Egypt in 1887 has revolutionised THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 47 all our old conceptions of ancient oriental life and history, and has proved that the populations of Western Asia in the age of Moses were as highly cultured and literary as the populations of Western Europe in the age of the Renaissance. This discovery was that of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna.^ Tel el-Amarna is the name given by the modern fellahin to a long line of mounds which extend along the eastern bank of thfe Nile, about midway between the towns of Minieh and Assiout. They mark the site of a city which for a short while played an im- portant part in Egyptian history. The Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, which began by driving the Hyksos foreigner out of Egypt, ended by itself be- coming Asiatic. The wars of Thothmes III. had re- duced Palestine and Syria to the condition of subject provinces, and had planted the standards of Egypt on the banks of the Euphrates. Here the Egyptian king found himself in contact with another powerful sovereign, the king of a country called Naharanna by the Egyptians, and Aram-Naharaim in the Old Testament, but whose own inhabitants called it Mitanni. The daughter of the Mitannian monarch married the Egyptian Pharaoh and became the mother of Amendphis III. Amen6phis III. allied himself still further by marriage with the royal family of Mitanni, and his son Amen6phis IV., who followed him on the throne of Egypt, was not only half an Asiatic in blood, but half an Asiatic also in religion. At first the old gods of Egypt were respected, but * In the pronunciation of the natives of the place the final con- sonant of Tel is not doubled before the following vowel. To write " Tell," therefore, is to commit an act of incorrect pedantry. 48 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. after awhile Amendphls declared his adherence to the worship of Aten, the solar disk, the supreme Baal of the Semitic peoples of Asia, and endeavoured to force tlie new creed upon his unwilling subjects. A fierce persecution ensued ; the name of Amon, the god of Thebes, was erased upon the monuments wherever it was found, and the king changed his own name to Khu-n-Atcn, " the glory of the solar disk." But the powerful hierarchy of Thebes proved too strong even for the Pharaoh ; he retired from the capital of his fathers, and built himself a new capital further north, at the spot where Tel el-Amarna now stands. Here he reigned for a few years longer, surrounded by the adherents of the new creed, most of whom seem to have been of Canaanitish extraction. When Khu-n-Aten died, or was murdered, the Egyptian empire was at an end. The troops which had garrisoned the subject provinces were needed at home, and Syria and Palestine passed out of Egyptian hands. Egypt itself was distracted by civil and religious wars, and the capital of Khu-n-Aten was deserted, not to be inhabited again. When peace was once more restored, it was under a Pharaoh who had returned to the national faith. On his departure from Thebes Khu-n-Aten carried with him the official correspondence received by his father and himself. It consisted of letters from the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia, Kappadokia, and Northern Syria, as well as from the Egyptian governors and protected princes in Palestine and the adjoining countries. It is this correspondence which has been discovered at Tel el-Amarna, and its contents are of the most unexpected character. THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 49 In the first place the letters are all written upon clay in the cuneiform characters of Babylonia. In the second place the language of almost all of them is the Babylonian. In two or three instances only does the writer use his own language, though it is expressed in the Babylonian cuneiform characters. Not once is the Egyptian language or the Egyptian script employed. The fact is alike novel and startling. It proves that in the century before the Exodus the Babylonian language was the common medium of literary intercourse throughout the civilised East, from the banks of the Nile to those of the Tigris and Euphrates, and that the complicated syllabary of Babylonia was taught and learned along with the Babylonian language throughout the whole extent of Western Asia. The letters are written by persons of the most diversified race and nationality; many of them are from officers of the Egyptian court, and they are sometimes about the most trivial of matters. They testify to an active and extensive correspond- ence, carried on, not by a select caste of scribes, but by every one who pretended to the rank and edu- cation of a gentleman. It is clear that the foreign culture of Babylonia must have penetrated deeply into the heart of the populations of the ancient Orient ; there must have been schools and teachers in their cities in which it could be learned, and libraries and archive-chambers in which books and letters could be stored. The fact that in some few instances the Babylonian language is discarded and the cuneiform syllabary adapted to the necessities of a native dialect only brings into stronger relief the widespread and per- So THE HIGHER CRITICISM. manent impression that Babylonian culture must have made upon the multifold peoples of Western Asia. Here and there we actually find Egyptian governors of districts in Canaan who have adopted Babylonian names, and when the vassal-king of Jerusalem wishes to mention the god whose worshipper he was, he speaks of him under a Babylonian name. The "most High God" whose sanctuary stood near Jeru- salem is identified with Uras or Nin-ip, the Sun-god of Babylonia. So thoroughly had the cuneiform system of writing been adopted throughout Western Asia, and so long had it had its home there, that each district and nationality had had time to form its own peculiar hand. We can tell at a glance, by merely looking at the forms assumed by the characters, whether a particular document came from the south of Palestine, from Phoenicia, from the land of the Amorites, or from the natives of Northern Syria. The use of the Baby- lonian script by the nations of Western Asia must have been earlier by many centuries than the time of Khu-n-Aten. It was difficult enough for the foreigner to learn the language of the Babylonians sufficiently well to be able to write it. But it was far more difficult to learn the cuneiform system of writing in which it was expressed. The cuneiform syllabary contains nearly five hundred different characters, each of which has at least two different phonetic values. In addition, each character may be used ideographically to denote an object or idea. But this is not all. The cuneiform script was invented by the primitive population of Chaldsea who spoke, not a Semitic, but an agglu- THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 5 1 tiaative language, and in passing to the Semitic Babylonians not only did the pre-Semitic words denoted by the single characters baeeme phonetic values, but words denoted by two or more characters became compound ideographs, the characters in com- bination representing a Semitic word the syllables of which had no relation whatever to the phonetic values of the separate characters that composed it. It thus became necessary for the learner not only to commit to memory the actual syllabary, but also the hundreds of compound ideographs which existed by the side of it. When we further remember that the cuneiform characters are not pictorial, and that their shape therefore, unlike the Egyptian hieroglyphics, offers nothing to assist the memory, we shall begin to understand what a labour it must have been to learn them, and consequently to what a wide extension of knowledge and literary activity the letters of Tel el- Amarna testify. Schools and libraries, in fact, must have existed everywhere, and the art of writing and reading must have been as widely spread as it was in Europe before the days of the penny post. The cuneiform cha- racters, moreover, were usually written upon clay, a material that is practically imperishable. Papyrus and parchment are preserved only in the dry and frostless climate of Egypt ; the clay tablet will endure for ever unless it is destroyed by man. The clay books, therefore, that were stored in the cities, the official correspondence which was laid up in the archive-chamber, were not likely to be destroyed. As long as there were readers who could understand the characters and language in which they were written, 52 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. the annalist and historian had ready to hand a mass of documents which reflected the events of each suc- ceeding year- as truly as the newspapers reflect the events of to-day. So far from being dependent on tradition or the play of his own fancy, he could consult a vast body of materials which had been written by the actors in the scenes he undertook to depict. A considerable portion of the tablets of Tel el- Amarna were sent from Palestine and Phoenicia. Canaan was, in fact, a centre of the correspondence which was going on with the Egyptian court in the reign of Khu-n-Aten. Letters are dated from Lachish and from Jerusalem, from Gaza of the Philistines and Gaza near Shechem, from Megiddo and the plateau of Bashan. There are others which have come from the cities of Phoenicia, from Gebal and Zemar, from Tyre and Sidon. The letters imply answers and frequently demand them. There must consequently have been archive-chambers in the cities from which the letters were despatched like the archive-chambers at Thebes and the capital of Khu-n-Aten to which they were brought. Why, then, should the writer of a later day have had any lack of materials for a truthful and detailed history of Palestine before the Israelitish conquest ? Even if the library and archives of Jerusalem or of Lachish perished or were buried among the ruins of the cities upon their conquest by the Israelites, there were other places like Gaza which never underwent a similar fate. Hence there was no reason why the older archives of the city should not have been preserved, together with a knowledge of their contents. THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 53 And even in the case of Jerusalem it is not easy to believe that there was ever such a blank in its exist- ence as to obliterate all recollection of the past. On the contrary, the Old Testament tells us plainly that after its capture by David, the Jebusite population was allowed to live as before on the summit of Moriah ; it was only on Mount Zion, where the "stronghold" or outpost of the Jebusites had stood, that the Jewish "city of David" was built. The site of the temple itself was purchased by the Israelitish king from Araunah the Jebusite.^ We learn from the first chapter of Judges that several of the most important of the cities of Canaan held out successfully against the Israelitish invader. Some of them, like Jerusalem, did not pass into the permanent possession of the Israelites until the days of the monarchy ; others, like Gibeon, came to terms with the invaders and escaped the horrors of capture and destruction. The cities of the Philistines re- mained untaken and more or less independent down to the time of the Babylonian Exile ; so also did the cities of the Phoenician coast, while such centres of ancient Canaanitish power and culture as Gezer and Megiddo (Judg. i. 27, 29) were left in the hands of their original possessors. When the Israelitish monarchy was at last consolidated, at a period to which it is agreed on all hands that certain portions of the Books of Samuel reach back, it was still possible for the historian to find in the chief cities of Palestine an abundance of materials, which had all the weight of contemporaneous evidence, for writing the history of the past. The letters which had been ' See also Judg. i. 21 54 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. sent by Khu-n-Aten to Megiddo and Gezer, to Askkelon and Acre, might still be lying in the archive-chambers where they were first deposited, permanently legible, and accessible to whoever desired to make use of them. There are statements in the Old Testament itself which are in full harmony with the conclusions to which the tablets of Tel el-Amarna have led us. The statements have been neglected or explained away, it is true, but it is no less true that they exist. One of the chief exploits of Othniel, the Kenizzite, and the deliverer of his people from the yoke of Aram-Naharaim, was the capture of Kirjath-sepher, "the city of Books." The name implies the cha- racter of the place ; it must have been the seat of a library like those of the great cities of Babylonia and Assyria, — a library which doubtless consisted in large measure of books on clay that may yet be brought to light. In one passage (Josh. xv. 49) the city is called Kirjath-sannah, "the city of instruc- tion." We are no longer obliged to see in this name a corruption of the text ; we now know that there must have been many cities " of instruction " in Palestine, where the books stored in them were studied by numerous pupils.^ * Kirjath-sannah may be referred to under the name of Bit- 'Sani in a fragmentary letter of Ebed-tob, the vassal-king of Jerusalem, contained in the Tel el-Amarna collection (Winckler and Abel : Mittheilungen aus der orientalischen Sammlungen, Pt. III., No. 199). We there read: "Behold, the country of Gath-Carmel has fallen away to Tagi and the men of the city of Gath. He is in Beth-Sani ; and we have effected that they should give Labai and the country of the Sute (Beduin) to the district of the Khabiri (Hebron?)." A re-examination of the THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 55 Kirjath-sannah, we are told, was also known as Debir, a word which is rendered "the oracle" in the Authorised Version of i Kings vi. 5. It meant the inner shrine of the temple, the Holy of Holies, where the deity " spoke " to his worshippers. It was essentially " a place of speaking," wherein the oracles of the god were delivered to his priests. It was thus a fitting spot for the site of a great library. The libraries of Assyria and Babylonia were similarly situated in the temples, and were under the patronage of Nebo, whose name signifies "the prophet" or "speaker." It may be that, as at Delphi in Greece, so in Canaan the first impulse towards the formation of a library had been the oracles delivered by the deity and afterwards collected into a book by the priests ; however this may be, it is sufficient to know that in establishing the great library of Southern Canaan in a city famous for its "oracle," the Canaanites were but following the example of the people of Babylonia. Kirjath-sepher was overthrown ; its library buried under its ruins, and its very site forgotten. After ages remembered that it had stood in the neighbour- hood of the great sanctuary of Hebron, but beyond this tradition remembered only its name. But the name with all that it indicates has been abundantly justified by the latest discoveries of oriental archae- ology. Kirjath-sepher is an evidence that libraries existed original tablet has enabled me to correct Winckler's copy of the passage and consequently of the translation of it which I have given in the new series of the Records of the Fast, vol. v., p. 73. 56 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. in Canaan at the epoch of the Israelitish invasion, and that the fact was known and recollected by the invaders. We have another evidence that the invaders themselves were not the illiterate Beduin tribes it has long been the fashion to suppose. The antiquity of the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges (chap, v.) is admitted by critics of the most sceptical tendency. It is allowed on all sides that the poem is contemporary with the event which it records, and the "higher criticism" regards it as the oldest fragment of Hebrew literature that has been preserved to us. And yet it is precisely in this Song that allusion is made to Israelitish scribes. " Out of Machir," we are told (ver. 14), "came down lawgivers, and out of Zebulun they that handle the pen of the writer." The statement is so definite and yet so contrary to modern dogmas that criticism has con- tradicted its own primary rule of interpreting the words of the text in accordance with their natural and ordinary signification, and has endeavoured to transform " the pen of the writer " into a " marshal's baton." But neither philology nor archaeology will permit the change. The word sopher or " scribe " defines the word shebhet, "rod," with which it is conjoined. What is meant by " the rod of the scribe " is made clear by the Assyrian monuments. It was the stylus of wood or metal with the help of which the clay tablet was engraved or the papyrus inscribed with characters. The scribe who wielded it was the associate and assistant of the " lawgiver." The Hebrew word rendered " lawgiver " is m'khoqeq. It is a participle derived from a root which signifies THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 57 " to engrave." Other derivatives from the same root in the sense of "engraving" are met with in the Old Testament. In Ezekiel xxiii. 14 the words itikhuqqeh and khaquqqim are used of sculptures which were engraved on the stuccoed walls of the Chaldsean palaces and then marked out in red. In Isaiah xlix. 16 the verb khaqah is employed to denote the engraving or tattooing of letters in the flesh, and in Ezekiel iv. i the same verb describes the scratching or engraving of the plan of Jerusalem on a clay tablet. In Isaiah x. i the kho(^qiin khiqqi- aven, or "engravers of unrighteous decrees," are associated with "the writers of perverseness," and it is said probably of both that " they have written " the unjust laws. In the time of Isaiah, therefore, the iiikhoqeq and the scribe performed a similar work ; the one used the pen, the other recorded his decrees in an equally durable form. But the 7n'khoqeq or " lawgiver " held a higher place than the scribe. He made the law, while the scribe merely recorded it. The one was a ruler of men, the other but a clerk. The decrees made by the " law- giver " were of more importance than the writings of the scribe, and consequently needed to be preserved with more care. The scribe might be content with parchment and papyrus, but the statutes of the " law- giver " needed to be engraved on durable materials, like stone or wood or metal. Hence it was that the " lawgiver " took his name from a root which signified " to engrave," and the decrees he laid down for the guidance of the state were like the Ten Command- ments, " engravings " upon stone. Now the Iiikhoqeq or " lawgiver " is closely associated S8 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. with the " scribe " not only in the Song of Deborah, but also in another ancient Hebrew poem, the Blessing of Jacob. Here, too (Gen. xlix. lo), the "lawgiver" is coupled with the shebhet or "rod" which is explained in the Song of Deborah to be the rod or pen of the scribe, such as^we often see depicted on the monuments of Egypt. That the Song of Deborah and the Blessing of Jacob contain rerftiniscences either one of the other or of some common source of quotation is shown by the question ; "Why abodest thou among the sheepfolds to hear the bl eatings of the flocks ? " (Judg. v. i6). The question contains exactly the same expression as that which in the Blessing of Jacob (Gen. xlix. 14) is translated by the Authorised Version " crouching down between two burdens." The word rendered " sheepfolds " in the one passage and " two burdens " in the other occurs only in these two verses of Scripture. In each case we should translate "lying down between two sheepfolds." In Genesis the metaphor is fully worked out; in Judges the ass which thus lies down is implied but not named. In the Song of Deborah, therefore, admittedly one of the oldest portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, we find a definite reference to the art of writing. Machir on the eastern side of the Jordan provides the nikhoqeq or " lawgiver," while out of Zebulon on the western bank comes the " scribe." The decrees of the one are " engraved " on metal or stone, the other writes with his stylus on the more perishable materials of parchment and papyrus. What the shape of this stylus was we may learn from certain paintings in the old tombs of Egypt, in which the scribe is repre- THE ANTIQUITY OF ORIENTAL LITERATURE. 59 sented either using it or holding it behind his ear.^ The stylus of the Egyptian scribe was sometimes merely a reed, cut obliquely at one end ; this, how- ever, was not the case in Assyria and Babylonia, and the Hebrew word shebhet shows that it was also not the case among the early Israelites. It is needless to invoke other testimony of a more doubtful and disputable nature to the early knowledge of writing in Israel. We do not know when "the Book of the Wars of the Lord " was composed (Numb. xxii. 14), and " the Book of Jasher " cannot have been compiled until after the beginning of David's reign (2 Sam. i. 18). But the name of Kirjath-sepher and the references to the m'khoqeq and sopher are enough to show that the evidence of the Old Testa' ment is in strict conformity with that of oriental archaeology. The Old Testament and the discoveries of oriental archseology alike tell us that the age of the Exodus was throughout the world of Western Asia an age of literature and books, of readers and writers, and that the cities of Palestine were stored with the contemporaneous records of past events inscribed on imperishable clay. They further tell us that the kinsfolk and neighbours of the Israelites were already acquainted with alphabetic writing, that the wanderers in' the desert and the tribes of Edom were in contact with the cultured scribes and traders of Ma'in, and that "the house of bondage" from which Israel had escaped was a land where the art of writing was blazoned not only on the temples of the gods but also on the dwellings of the rich and powerful. ^ See Sir Gardner Wilkinson's " Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians," edited by Birch (iS^S), ii. p. 298. 60 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. If we are to reject the narratives of the eariier books of the Bible it must be for other reasons than the absence of a contemporaneous literature. If we are to throw discredit on the history of the campaign of the Babylonian kings and the payment of tithes to Melchizedek, or to refuse belief to the archjeological statements of the Deuteronomist, we must have re- course to other arguments than those which rest upon the supposed ignorance of the art of writing in the early age of Palestine. The " higher " critic may be right in holding that the historical books of the Old Testament in their present form are compilations of comparatively late date, but he is no longer justified in denying that the materials they embody may be contemporaneous with the events recorded in them. Modern oriental research has proved the possibility of their being of the antiquity to which they seem to lay claim : we will now sec if it can go further, and show that this antiquity is a fact. CHAPTER III. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS. Like the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Phceni- cians and the Egyptians, the Hebrews also had a system of cosmology. Or rather, we ought to say that, like the nations who surrounded them, they had more than one system of cosmology. There was more than one doctrine current as to the precise way in which the world as we see it came into existence and of the exact manner in which man was first formed. When Hebrew history came to be written, notice had to be taken of these current doctrines, and accord- ingly, as B6r6ssos the Chaldaeap historian begins his History of Babylonia by amalgamating together more than one Babylonian legend of the Creation, or as the Phoenician Sanchuniathon, in the pages of Philo Byblius, fuses into a whole the divergent CDsmological theories of the Phoenician cities, so too the Book of Genesis commences with two different accounts of the creation of man. In the one account man is the last of created things, made male and female in the image of God on the last of the six days of creation ; in the other man is formed of the dust of the earth on " the day that the Lord God made 62 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. the earth and the heavens/' and woman is not formed out of him until he has been put into the garden of Eden " to dress it and to keep it." Reflections of both accounts are found in the cuneiform tablets of Babylonia and Assyria. Portions of an Assyrian Epic of the Creation, describing it as taking place in a series of successive acts, were first brought to light by Mr. George^Smith. He pointed out the remarkable correspondence which existed between the order of the days in Genesis and the order of the tablets or books in the Assyrian poem, the first book of which describes the beginning of all things and the watery abyss of primeval chaos, while in the fifth tablet comes the appointment of the heavenly bodies to rule the day and the night, and in the sixth an account of the creation of the animals. - Since the death of George Smith other fragments of the Epic have been discovered, and we now know more exactly what it was like. It was an attempt to throw together in poetic form the cosmological doctrines of the chief Assyrian or Babylonian schools and combine them into a connected story. But the attempt breathes so thoroughly the air of a later philosophy which has reduced the deities of earlier belief to mere abstractions and forces of nature, that I much doubt whether it can be assigned to an earlier date than the seventh century B.C. The materials incorporated into it are doubtless ancient, but the treatment of them seems to presuppose an age of rationalism rather than an age of faith. A translation of the fragments we possess will be the best commentary on their contents. The first tablet or book reads as follows — THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 63 When on high the heavens proclaimed not, (and) earth beneath recorded not, a name, then the abyss of waters was in the beginning their gener- ator, the chaos of the deep (Tiamat) was she who bore them all. Their waters were embosomed together, and the plant was ungathered, the herb (of the field) uagrown. When the gods had not appeared, any one (of them), by no name were they recorded ; no destiny [had they fixed]. Then were the [great] gods created, Lakhmu and Lakhamu issued forth [the first ;] Until they grew up [and waxed old,] (when) the gods Sax and Kisar (the Upper and Lower firma- ments) were created. Long were the days [until] the gods Anu [Bel and Ea were created ;] Sar [and Kisar created them]. Here the tablet is broken, and we have to pass on to what seerrjs to be the seventeenth line of the third book in the series. The gods have surrounded "her {i. e. Tiamat), all of them ; Together with those whom ye have created, I (Merodach) marched beside her. When they had armed themselves (?) beside her, they ap- proached Tiamat. (Merodach), the strong one, the glorious, who desists not night or day, the exciter to battle, was disturbed in heart. Then they marshalled (their) forces ; they create darkness (?). The mother of Khubur,'^ the creatress of them all, multiplied weapons not (known) before ; she produced (?) huge snakes whose teeth were pointed, unsparing was [their] edge. She filled their bodies with poison like blood. She clothed with terror the raging vampires. She uplifted the lightning-flash, on high she launched [it] She fills them with venom (?), so that with . . . 1 Perhaps " Mother of the Confederacy." 64 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. their bodies abounded though their breasts bent not. She stationed the dragon, the great serpent and the god Lakha[ma], the great reptile, the deadly beast and the scorpion-man, the devouring reptiles, the fish-man, and the zodiacal ram, lifting up the weapons that spare not, fearless of battle. Strong is her law, not previously repeated. Thereupon the eleven monsters like him {i.e. Kingu) she sent forth. Among the gods her forces she [launched]. She exalted Kingu (her husband) in the midst ; [beside] her (he was) king. They marched in front before the army [of Tiamat]. The lines that follow are so broken as to render a translation impossible. But we gather from what is left that the news of the preparations made by Tiamat was brought to the gods by Sar or An-sar, the primaeval god of the Firmament. Then, it would seem, Sar sends forth one god after another among his family, beginning with Anu, the Sky-god, to oppose the forces of evil : " 1 sent forth Anu ; he did not go forth. Ea feared and returned. I sent Merodach, the seer of the gods ; he felt the courage to face Tiamat. He opened his mouth and said . . , ' I am [your] avenger ; I will bind Tiamat.' " Once more the mutilated state of the fragments makes further translation impossible, but we learn that event- ually the gods made a feast, after having created the vine for the purpose, and retired to the highest heaven, leaving the issue of the conflict in the hands of Merodach.^ 1 The beginnings of the last fourteen lines of the tablet have been recovered by Mr. Pinches, who gives the following render- ing of them^ THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 6$ The fourth tablet or book of the Epic is in an almost perfect condition, and runs as follows — They (the gods) established for him {i. e. Merodach) the mercy- seat of the mighty ; before his fathers he seated himself for sovereignty. " Yea, thou (O Merodach), art glorious among the great gods, thy fortune is unrivalled, thy festival (that) of Anu ! O Merodach, thou art glorious among the great gods ; thy fortune is unrivalled, thy festival (that) of Anu ! Since that day unchanged is thy command. High and low entreat thy hand : may the word that goes forth from thy mouth be established ; unopposed is thy festival. None among the gods has surpassed thy power, the sustainers of the . . . (and) the mercy-seat of the god of the canopy of heaven. May the place of their gathering (?) become thy home ! O Merodach, thou art he who avenges us ! We give thee the sovereignty, (we) the hosts of all the universe ! Thou possessest (it), and in the assembly shall thy word be exalted. Lakhkha and Lakhamu heard, they . . . The Igigi (spirits of heaven) all of them she had nourished (?), the son . . . " What foe, until he was wise, did he . . . We do not know what Tiamat . . . They have become multitudinous, and he goes . . . The great gods, all of them, determiners [of fate]. They have entered, and like a vessel (?) An-sar has filled . . . Violence is done (?). The enemy of my brother (?) in the assembly . . . Thy tongue has made. In the garden the god . . . He has eaten the asnan, he has separated . . . Its sweet fruit (?) he has destroyed (?)... The strong drink, in drinking, injures (?) the body (i') . . . Greatly the sin ; . . For Merodach the avenger he determines the fate." (" Babylonian and Oriental Record, " iv. z, p. 32.) F 66 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Never may thy weapons be broken; may they reach thy foes ! lord, be gracious to the soul of him who putteth his trust in thee, and pour out the soul of the god who has hold of evil." Then they laid upon their friend a robe ; to Merodach, their firstborn, they spake : " May thy destiny, O lord, be before the god of the canopy of heaven ! A word and (the gods) have created ; command that they may fulfil (it). Open thy mouth, let the robe perish ; Say to it : ' Return ! ' and the robe will be there." He spake with his mouth, the robe perished ; he said to it " Return ! " and the robe appeared again. When the gods his fathers saw the word that came forth from his mouth they rejoiced, they reverenced Merodach as king, they bestowed upon him the sceptre, the throne and reign ; they gave him a weapon unsurpassed, consuming the hostile. " Go " (they said), " and cut off the life of Tiamat ; let the winds carry her blood to secret places." The gods his fathers determine the destiny of Bel (Merodach). The path of peace and obedience is the road they cause him to take. He made ready the bow, he prepared his weapon, he made the club swing, he fixed for it the thong (?), and the god lifted up the curved-sword,^ he bade his right hand hold (it) ; the bow and the quiver he hung at his side ; he set the lightning before him ; with the swift-glancing gleam he filled his body. He made also a net to enclose the Dragon of the Deep (Tiamat). He seized the four winds that they might not issue forth, any one of them, the south wind, the north wind, the east wind and the west wind. 1 A weapon of peculiar shape, like a boomerang, and sacred to Merodach. •THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 6/ He brought to his side the net, the gift of his father Anu ; he created the evil wind, the hostile wind, the storm, the tempest, the four winds, the seven winds, the whirlwind, a wind un- rivalled, and he caused the winds he had created to issue forth, the seven of them, confounding the dragon Tiamat as they swept after him. Then the lord (Bel) raised the deluge, his mighty weapon. He mounted the chariot, a thing not (seen) before, terrible. He stood firm and hung the four reins at its side. [He held the weapon] unsparing, overflowing, rapid. The next few lines are much broken ; then we read — On that day they beheld him, the gods beheld him, the gods his fathers beheld him, the gods beheld him. And the lord (Bel) approached, by the waist he catches Tiamat ; she seeks the help (?) of Kingu her husband, she looks, and seeks his counsel. But his plan was destroyed, his action was ruined, and the gods his allies who marched beside him beheld how [Merodach] the first-born held the yoke upon them. He laid judgment on Tiamat, but she turned not her neck. With her hostile lips she announced opposition. [Then] the gods [come to the help] of Bel, they approach thee, they gathered their [forces] together to where thou wast. ^.-^Sid Bel [launched] the deluge, his mighty weapon, [against] Tiamat, whom he requited, sending it with these words : " [War and] trouble on high thou hast excited ; [strengthen] thy heart and stir up the [battle] ! " Then come five more mutilated hnes, and after that the poem continues — "... Against my fathers thou hast directed thy hostility. May thy host be fettered, may they bind thy weapons ! 68 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Stand up and I and thou will fight together." When Tiamat heard this, she uttered her former spells, she repeated her plan. Tiamat also cried out vehemently with a loud voice. From its roots she strengthened her seat completely. She recites an incantation, she casts a spell, and the gods of battle demand for themselves their arms. Then there stood up Tiamat (and) Merodach the seer of the gods; they hurried to the combat, they met in battle. Then Bel spread out his net, he enclosed her. He sent before him the evil wind which seizes from behind, and he opened the mouth of Tiamat that she should swallow it; he made the evil wind enter so that she could not close her lips. With the violence of the winds he fills her stomach, and her heart was prostrated and her mouth was twisted. He swung the club, he shattered her stomach, he cut out her entrails, he dissected the heart ; he took her and ended her life. He threw down her corpse, he stood upon it. When Tiamat who marched in front was conquered, he dispersed her forces, her host was overthrown, and the gods her allies who marched beside her trembled (and) feared (and) turned their backs. He allowed them to fly and spared their lives. They were surrounded by a fence, without power to escape. He shut them in and broke their weapons ; ~ he cast his net and they remain in the meshes. [All] the quarters of the world they filled with mourning ; they bear their sin, they are kept in bondage, and the eleven monsters are filled with fear. As for the rest of the spirits who marched in her rear (?) he laid cords on their hands . . . At the same time he [treads] their opposition under him. And the god Kingu who had marshalled their [forces] hejjound, and assigned him [to prison] along with [the other] gods. And he took from him the tablets of destiny [that were] upon him. ^ With the stylus he sealed (it) and held the . , . of the tablet. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 69 After he had fettered (and) laid the yoke on his foes, he led the illustrious enemy like an ox, he established fully the victory of An-Sar over the foe. Merodach the hero obtained the reward (?) of Ea. Over the gods in bondage he strengthened his watch, and Tjamat whom he had bound he turned head backwards ; TOen Bel trampled on the underpart of Tiamat. With his blows unceasing he smote the skull, he broke (it) and caused her blood to flow ; the north wind carried (it) away to secret places. He beheld, and his countenance rejoiced (and) was glad. The presents of a peace-offering he caused them {i. e. the foe) to bring to him. So Bel rested ; his body he feeds. He strengthens his mind (?), he forms a clever plan, and he broke her like a dried fish in two pieces ; he took one half of her and made it the covering of the sky ; he stretched out the skin, and caused a watch to be kept, enjoining that her waters should not issue forth. The sky is bright (?), the lower earth rejoices (?), and he sets the dwelling of Ea (the Sea-god) opposite the deep. Then Bel measured the circumference (i") of the deep ; he established a great building like unto it (called) E-Sarra (the firmament) ; the great building E-Sarra which he built in the heaven he caused Anu, Bel and Ea to inhabit as their stronghold. The fifth tablet describes the creation of the heavenly bodies and their appointment for signs and seasons. But unfortunately only the beginning of it has as yet been discovered — He prepared the mansion of the great gods ; he fixed the stars that corresponded with them, even the Twin-stars.* 1 Professor Hommel has lately shown {Ausland, Nos. 4 — 7, 1892) that the spheres of the three "great gods," Anu, Bel and Ea, into which the Chaldjeans divided the sky, corresponded to thirds of the Ecliptic, the sphere of Anu extending from the 70 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. He ordained the year, appointing the signs of the Zodiac over it : for each of the twelve months he fixed three stars, from the day when the year issues forth to (its) close. He founded the mansion of the Sun-god who passes along the ecliptic, that they might know their bounds, that they might not err, that they might not go astray in any way. He established the mansion of Bel and Ea along with himself.^ Moreover he opened gates on either side, he strengthened the bolts on the left hand and on the right, and in the midst of it he made a staircase. He illuminated the Moon-god that he might be watchman of the night, and ordained for him the ending of the night that the day may be known, (saying) : " Month by month, without break, keep watch in (thy) disk. At the beginning of the month rise brightly at evening, with glittering horns, that the heavens may know. On the seventh day halve (thy) disk." The rest of the tablet is destroyed, and of the sixth only the opening lines have been preserved — At that time the gods in their assembly created [the beasts]. They made perfect the mighty [monsters]. They caused the living creatures [of the field] to come forth, the cattle of the field, [the wild beasts] of the field, and the creeping things [of the field]. [They fixed their habitations] for the living creatures of the field. Bull to the Crab, that of Bel from the Lion to the Scorpion, that of Ea from Sagittarius to Aries. The Twin-stars were (l) "the Great Twins," Castor and Pollux in Gemini, (2) "the lesser Twins," ;8 and S Scorpionis, and (3) a & ;8 Arietis. 1 The poet has forgotten that it is Merodach, and not Anu, who has been described as the creator. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 7 1 They distributed [in their dwelling-places] the cattle and the creeping things of the city. [They made strong] the multitude of creeping things, all the offspring [of the ground]. The following lines are too mutilated for continuous translation, but we learn from them that " the seed of Lakhama," the brood of chaos, was destroyed, and its place taken by the living creatures of the present creation. Among these we may expect man to be finally named ; whether or not, however, this was the case we cannot say until the concluding lines of the old Assyrian epic of the creation have been disinterred from the dust-heaps of the past. /^The resemblances and differences between the Biblical and the Babylonian accounts are alike striking. The polytheism which underlies the one with the thinly-veiled materialism which overlies it, is not more profoundly contrasted with the devout monotheism of the other than is the absolute want of mythological details in Genesis with the cosmological myths embodied in the cuneiform poem. We pass as it were from the Iliad to sober history. Where the Assyrian or Babylonian poet saw the action of deified forces of nature, the Hebrew writer sees only the will gf the' one supreme God. And yet in spite of the contrast between mythology, polytheism, and materialism on the one side and an uncompromising monotheism on the other, the re- semblances between the two accounts of creation are too great to be purely accidental. They extend even to words. The word with which the Book of Genesis opens, the first picture with which we are presented, is berhhith "in the beginning," while th? 72 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Assyrian poem equally tells us that the watery deep was the rist'/i. or " beginning " of the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew tekSm or " deep " is the Assyrian ti{}i)am-tu, though the Assyrian word has become a mythological being, Tiamat, the impersonation of chaos and darkness. The fragments of Phoenician cosmogony preserved by Eusebius from the pages of Philo Byblius similarly begin with a watery chaos, over which, as in Genesis, a " spirit " or " wind " brooded and inspired it with a yearning for life.^ Thanks to the discoveries made in Babylonia and at Tel el-Amarna, we have learnt how deep and lasting was the influence of Babylonian culture and literature upon pre-Israelitish Canaan. We need, therefore, no longer hesitate to accept the statements of Philo Byblius, disfigured though they may be by their Greek dress and the philosophical ideas of a late epoch, as representing on the whole the ancient conceptions of the Phoenicians in regard to the creation of the world. They were conceptions which had had their first home in Babylonia, and however much they may have been modified in their migration to the West, they retained in all essential points their original features. The belief in a chaos of waters within which the future heavens and earth lay as it were in a womb went back to the early dwellers on ' "The beginning of all things was a dark and condensed windy air, or a breeze of dark air, and a chaos turbid and black as Erebos ; and these were unbounded and for a long series of ages destitute of form. But when this wind became enamoured of its own first principles (the chaos) and an intimate union took place, that connexion was called Desire ; and it was the beginning of the creation of all things " (Cory's translation in " Ancient Fragments," edited by Hodges, 1876^ p. 2). THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 73 the banks of the Euphrates and the shores of the Persian Gulf. , The Assyrian Epic gives especial prominence to an episode in the work of the creation, no trace of which appears in the pages of Genesis. It is, however, an episode to which allusion is made elsewhere in the Bible, but in a passage which belongs to the age of the Roman empire. The episode is that which describes the war of the gods and the final victory of the Sun- god Merodach over Tiamat and the powers of darkness. It is an episode which forms the keystone of the Assyrian poem. The poem is on the one hand a psean in honour of the Sun-god of Babylon ; on the other it seeks to show how the world of light and humanity developed out of a pre-existing world of chaos and darkness which was in sharp antagonism with it. The present creation is described as the result of the victory of light over darkness, of law and order over confusion. Such ideas are the very reverse of those which inspire the narrative of Genesis. Here there is no antagonism between the world of chaos and the world of to-day, between the present creation and that which preceded it. Both alike were the creation of the one supreme God whose breath moved upon the waters of the deep and whose word they alike obeyed. It was not until after the Babylonian Exile, it may be not until the wars of Alexander had spread Greek culture over the East, that the story of the conflict in heaven between Merodach and the great dragon made its way into western lands and there became a subject of metaphor and imagery. In the history of the creation in Genesis we look for traces of it in vain. 74 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. t On the other hand the narrative of Genesis con- cludes with a statement which carries us back to Baby- lonia, though it is probable that it is a statement which was not found in the Assyrian Epic. We are told that God "rested on the seventh day from all His work which He made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it; because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made." The Sabbath-rest was a Babylonian, as well as a Hebrew, institution. Its origin went back to pre-Semitic days, and the very name. Sabbath, by which it was known in Hebrew, was of Babylonian origin. In the cunei- form tablets the Sabattu is described as "a day of rest for the soul," ^ and in spite of the fact that the word was of genuinely Semitic origin, it was derived by the Assyrian scribes from two Sumerian or pre- Semitic words, sa and hat, which meant respect- ively " heart " and " ceasing." The Sabbath was also known, at all events in Accadian times, as a " dies nefastus," a day on which certain work was forbidden to be done, and an old list of Babylonian festivals and fast-days tells us that on the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of each month the Sabbath-rest had to be observed. The king himself, it is stated, " must not eat flesh that has been cooked over the coals or in the smoke, he must not change the garments of his body, white robes he must not wear, sacrifices he may not offer, in a chariot he may not ride." Even the prophet or soothsayer on whose reading of the future the move- ments of armies were dependent was not allowed to practise his art, " to mutter," as it is termed, " in a 1 W. A. I. it. 32, 16. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 75 secret place." The rest enjoined on the Sabbath was thus as complete as it was among the Jews in the period after the Babylonish Exile. ^ Now, as Prof. Schrader has pointed out,^ the sacred- ness of the seventh day among the Babylonians hangs together with their respect for the number seven. Seven in fact was their sacred number, connected originally, it may be, with the seven planets which their astronomers had noted from the earliest times. We first find notice of the week of seven days among them. Each day of the week was consecrated to one of the seven planets or planetary divinities, and it is from the Babylonians through the medium of the Greeks and Romans that our own week, with its days dedicated to Teutonic deities, is ultimately derived. In the exorcisms of the Accado-Sumerian population of primaeval Chaldaea references to the number seven are frequent. There were seven evil spirits who had been born in the watery deep of chaos and who laid siege to the moon at the time of its eclipse, the dragon of darkness was endowed with seven heads, and the magical knots which should free the sick man from his pains were required to be twisted seven times seven.* * See my Hibbert Lectures on the " Religion of the Ancient Babylonians," pp. 70 — TJ. " "The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament," Engl, translation, vol. i. p. 21. * " Bind the knot twice seven times ; lay (upon it) the spell of Eridu ; bind the head of the sick man ; bind the neck of the sick man ; 76 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. We must therefore admit that we first find traces of the week of seven days, with the rest-day or Sabbath which fell upon the seventh, in Babylonia, and that it was intimately connected with the astronomical belief in the existence of seven planets. But between the Babylonian and the Hebrew conception there are certain differences which must not be over- looked. In the first place the Hebrew Sabbath is entirely divorced from all connection with Baby- lonian astronomy and the polytheistic worship with which it was bound up. The week remains with its seventh-day rest, but its days are no longer dis- tinguished from one another by their consecration to the planets and the planetary deities. It is a mere space of time and nothing more. The Sabbath, moreover, ceases to be dependent upon the changes of the moon. The festival of the New Moon and the weekly Sabbath are separated from one another; instead of a Sabbath which occurred on each seventh day of the lunar month, with a still unexplained Sabbath on the nineteenth,* the Old Testament recognises only a Sabbath which recurs at regular intervals of seven days, irrespec- tive of the beginning and end of the month. The bind his life ; bind firmly his limbs .... May the disease of the head, like the eye when it rests itself, ascend to heavert ! " ("Religion of the Ancient Babylonians," p. 460.) Similar expressions are found in other magical texts. 1 Prof. Jensen's explanation, which accounts for it as being the forty-ninth (or seven times seventh) day from the first day of the preceding month, is ingenious but doubtful. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. ^^ institution of the Sabbath is divested of its heathen asscciations and transformed into a means of bind- ing together more closely the chosen people, and keeping them apart from the rest of mankind. In place of the astronomical reasons which preside over the institution of the Babylonian Sabbath, two reasons are given for its observance in Israel, one that on the seventh day God had rested from His work of creation, the other that Israel had been " a servant in the land of Egypt'' and had been brought out "thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm." ^ How far the strictness of the observance may have increased in the course of centuries, or how far the ideas of the Jews in regard to it may have differed before and after the Exile, is not for the archaeologist to say. It is true that there is little or no reference to it in the Books of Samuel and Kings ; but so also in the historical inscriptions of Assyria is there no reference to the Babylonian Sabbath. The relation between the Sabbath of the Baby- lonians and the Sabbath of the Old Testament is parallel to the relation between the Assyrian Epic of the creation and the first chapter of Genesis. The Biblical writer, it is plain, is acquainted, either directly or indirectly, with the Assyrian and Babylonian tradi- tion. With him it is stripped of all that was distinct- ively Babylonian and polytheistic, and is become in his hands a sober narrative, breathing a spirit of the purest and most exalted monotheism. In passing from the Assyrian poem to the Biblical narrative we ^ Exod. XX. II, Deut. v. 15. 78 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. seem to pass from romance to reality. But this ought not to blind us to the fact that the narrative is ultimately of Babylonian origin. If archaeology thus speaks with no uncertain tones on the sources of the first chapter of Genesis, the same cannot be said of the age to which the chapter must be referred. All it can do here is to show that an early date is quite as possible as a late one. The tablets of Tel el-Amarna have proved that Babylonian influence and literature were strongly felt and widely known in Canaan before its conquest by the Israelites. They agree with the evidence of the inscriptions found in Babylonia itself. These too show that as far back as B.C. 3800 the land of the " Amorites " had been overrun by Babylonian arms, and that a Baby- lonian monarch was erecting records of victory on the shores of the Mediterranean, while in the age of Abraham another Babylonian king claims to be ruler of Palestine. It is only by a long continuance of Babylonian culture and power in the West that we can explain the universal use there of the Babylonian language and the cuneiform characters. Babylonian traditions and legends must have been almost as well known in Canaan as they were in Babylonia itself. Indeed there has been found among the Tel el-Amarna letters the copy of a Babylonian myth which has been employed by the scribes of the Egyptian king as an exercise in learning the Babylonian language. The words of the text have been separated from one another by means of points to facilitate the labour of the pupil. As has already been noticed, the writers of the THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. ^g letters usually give Babylonian names to the deities of Canaan. As the writers of Rome identified the gods of Greece with their own, transforming Poseiddn into Neptune and Aphrodite into Venus, so too the correspondents of the Egyptian court identified their own divinities with those of Chaldaea, and like the scholars of the Renaissance, went on to call them by their Chaldsean names. The god of Jerusalem becomes the Babylonian Uras, and the goddess of Gebal the Babylonian Beltis. How long and largely the custom must have prevailed may be judged from the number of places in Palestine which continued to bear names compounded with those of Babylonian deities. Anah or Anu the Sky-god and Anath his wife, Rimmon the Air-god, and Nebo the god of prophecy, are names which meet us frequently on the map. Moses died on the summit of Mount Nebo, and Anathoth the city of Jeremiah must have taken its name from the images of Anath which once existed there. Even Moloch, "the king," claims connection with the Assyrian Malik, and when Amos (v. 26) declares that Israel in the wilderness had made to itself "Sikkuth your king and Chiun your images, the star of your gods," he is naming the Babylonian Sakkut and Kaivan, the planet Saturn.^ But, as I have pointed out elsewhere,* and as has now been conclusively confirmed by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, there is yet more striking evidence of ^ See Schrader in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 1874, pp. 324-32. ^ Hibbert Lectures on the " Religion of the Ancient Baby- lonians," pp. 252 sqq. 80 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. the intense hold that Babylonian religion must have taken upon the peoples of the West. From the time of the Exodus downward the chief goddess of Canaan, the object of passionate and universal worship, was Ashtoreth, or as the Greeks termed her — " Astarte, with the crescent horns, To whose bright image nightly by the moon Sidonian maidens paid their vows and songs." As Baal absorbed all the other gods of Canaan, so Ashtoreth came to absorb all the other goddesses of Canaan, and they are accordingly summed up under the general names of the Baalim or " Baals," and the Ashtaroth or " Ashtoreths." ^ And yet Ashtoreth was not really of native origin. She was the Istar of Babylonia, the evening-star, whose name and worship had travelled west. In the south she passed to the people of Southern Arabia under the name of Atthar, from whence the Egyptians possibly derived their Hathor, while in the north she was adored in Syria as Atthar and in Canaan as Ashtoreth. Istar, as the evening-star which in the early days of astronomical lore had been confounded with the star of the morn- ing, was at once both male and female; but in the West the male and female sides of her nature were distinguished, and while in Moab the male Atthar was identified with the national god Chemosh, in Canaan the feminine suffix {-t) was attached to the name, and Istar became definitely a goddess. In Canaan, moreover, she underwent still further change. On the one hand she ceased to represent the evening- star and became instead the moon, which in Babylonia 1 See Judges x. 6, etc. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 8 1 was a god (Sin), and on the other hand she took the place and absorbed the attributes of the old Canaanitish goddess called Asherah in the Old Testament and Asirtu and Asratu in the letters of Tel el-Amarna. Asherah was the goddess of fertility, and as such was worshipped under the form of a cone of stone or the branchless trunk of a tree. Both goddess and emblem were called by the same name, a fact which has induced the translators of the Septuagint, and after them of the Authorised Version, to render them both by the false term " grove." But in the pages of the Old Testament Asherah plays a very subordinate part to Ashtoreth ; it is Ashtoreth who is emphatic- ally the goddess of Canaan, as in the eyes of the Greeks she was also emphatically the goddess of Phoenicia. /Nothing can prove more completely the early influence of Babylonian culture upon the populations of Canaan. It was an influence which extended beyond the literary classes and must have penetrated deeply into the heart of the people. When a national religion is so transformed under foreign influence that the deity of the stranger takes the place of the older divinity of the country, it means that the religion of the stranger and the culture associated with it have been more than half absorbed. In the Canaan which was conquered by the Israelites we must expect to find not only Babylonian gods and forms of faith, but also Babylonian traditions, te;^bylonian beliefs, and Babylonian legends. ( There is no longer, therefore, any need of looking to the Babylonian Exile for an explanation of the Babylonian ideas which underlie the account of the 82 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. creation in the first chapter of Genesis. On the contrary, these ideas will have been already prevalent in Canaan before the Israelites entered the Promised Land. The similarities presented by the PhcEnician doctrine of the origin of things with that of Genesis on the one side and of Babylonia on the other, may equally be due to a far older intercourse between Babylon and Phoenicia than that which existed in Grgek times. In fact the doctrine of the early Greek philosophers which found in the watery abyss the origin of the world, or the doctrine of Anaximander, which taught that the present creation was preceded by a creation of chaos and confusion, goes to show that the cosmological conceptions of Babylonia had made their way into Phoenicia, and from thence to Jijie Greek cities of Asia Minor, long before the days of Alexander and Seleucus. The doctrines of Baby- lonian cosmology must have been already well known in Palestine in the age of Moses, and if the critic can discover no allusion to them in the writings of the pre-Exilic prophets, neither can he do so in the writings of the prophets after the Exile. The prophets had no occasion to describe how the world had come into existence, and their silence is as com- patible with an early date for the first chapter of Genesis as it is with a late one. We can build no argument on the silence, and archaeology has now informed us that the beliefs which underlie the cosmology of Genesis had made their way to Canaan centuries before the time of the Hebrew prophets. There is a further fact which must not be over- looked when we are considering the date of the opening chapter of Genesis. It will have been THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 83 noticed that the Assyrian epic of the creation pre- sents marked similarities not only to the "Elohistic" account of the creation in Genesis, but to the "Jehovistic" account as well. When we come to the narrative of the deluge we shall find that the same is there also the case. Different as the two accounts of the creation may be, they are neverthe-^ less united in the cosmology of Babylonia. If the very words of the Assyrian poem are repeated in the description of the watery chaos contained in the first chapter of Genesis, the introduction to the account of the creation in the second chapter offers an almost equally verbal agreement with one of the introductory lines of the poem. The Bible' declares that on the day of creation "every plant of^ the field" had been made "before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew " ; the cuneiform tablet asserts that before the gods had emanated from the abyss " the plant was ungathered, the herb ungrown." The word siakh used by the Hebrew writer in the sense of " plant " is used by the Assyrian writer in the sense of " grown," but the word I have translated " plant " answers exactly to the Hebrew "plant of the field," since it denotes the produce of the cultivated land. As ip the Hebrew text, the young blades of corn are specially signified. The word which I have rendered " herb " was peculiarly " the herb of the field," and the lexical tablets of the library of Nineveh accordingly tell us that it was equivalent to Edinu or " Eden," " the field." " Now it may be argued that if the "Elohistic" narrative of the creation were of late date it would, 84 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. like the Assyrian Epic, combine together the diver- gent cosmological views which prevailed in Baby- lonia, and that the fact of its presenting the views of one school only indicates for it an older origin. However this may be, the use of the word Elohim, " God," which stands as it were on its forefront, takes U3 back again to the pre-Israelitish age of Canaan. Elohim is a plural noun, and its employment in the Old Testament as a singular has given rise to a large amount of learned discussion, and, it must also be added, of a learned want of common sense. Gram- marians have been in the habit of evading the difficulty by describing it as a " pluralis majestatis," "a plural of majesty," or something similar, as if a term in common use which was grammatically a plural could ever have come to be treated as a singular, unless this singular had once been a plural. We can construe the word " means " with a singular verb, but nevertheless there was once a time when "means'' was a plural noun. We may take it for granted, therefore, that if the Hebrew word Elohim had not once signified the plural "gods," it would never have been given a plural form, and the best proof of this is the fact that in several passages of the Old Testament the word is still used in a plural sense. Indeed there are one or two passages, as for example Gen. i. 26, where the word, although referring to the God of Israel, is yet employed with a plural verb, much to the bewilderment of the Jewish rabbis and the Christian commentators who followed them. It is strange how preconceived theories will cause the best scholars to close their eyes to obvious facts. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 85 The Israelites were a Semitic people, and their history down to the age of the Exile is the history of a perpetual tendency towards polytheism. Priest and prophet might exhort and denounce, and kings might attempt to reform, but the mass of the people remained wedded to a belief in many gods. Even the most devoted adherents of the supreme God of Israel sometimes admitted that he was but supreme among other gods, and David himself, the friend of seers and prophets, complains that he had been driven out of "the inheritance of Yahveh" and told to go and "serve other gods" (i Sam. xxvi. 19). What can be plainer than the existence of a per- sistent polytheism among the bulk of the people, and the inevitable traces of this polytheism that were left upon the language and possibly the thoughts of the enlightened few ? Now the tablets of Tel el-Amarna have shown us how it was possible that a word which signified " gods " could come to signify the one supreme Deity. Time after time the Canaanite correspond- ents of the Egyptian monarch address him as "my Sun-God (and) my gods." The Pharaoh in the eyes of his subjects was not only the " Son of the Sun," but he was himself an incarnation of the deity as truly as the Grand Lama of Tibet is believed to be an incarnation of the Buddha, or as the Russian Czar is regarded by many of the peasants as " a god upon earth." The Canaanite was already accustomed to the idea that the local Baals who were worshipped on the manifold high-places of the country were in some way or other forms or manifestations of a single Baal, and it was not difficult, therefore, for him^ 86 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. to conceive of the Egyptian Pharaoh as representing all the various forms of divinity that were worshipped in Egypt or Canaan. At any rate, long before the entrance of the Israelites into Palestine, we find the inhabitants of that country already familiar with the application of the plural " gods " to a single in- dividual. The usage was part of that " language of Canaan" (Isai. xix. i8) which the Hebrews adopted, arid It must consequently have gone back to the earliest days of their history. The deification of the Egyptian Pharaoh on the part of the Canaanite population was probably the result of Babylonian rather than of Egyptian in- fluence. Babylonian influence in Canaan, as we have seen, had been long and deep, whereas that of Egypt seems to have been but slight. Babylonian kings had been deified by their subjects from the oldest times. Among those of them who are entitled " gods " was Naram-Sin, the son of Sargon of Accad, the two founders of the first Semitic empire on the banks of the Euphrates, whose campaigns in Pales- tine and Midian prepared the way for the later domination of Babylonia in the West. On the other hand, the tendency to regard the local Baalim as so many forms of one and the same deity was not con- fined to the Canaanites of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. The Moabite Stone teaches us that the MoabiteSj like their Hebrew kinsfolk, recognised but one supreme national god, Chemosh, who admitted of no rival by his side. Just as Assur, the national god of Assyria, stands alone of the Assyrian gods without a consort, so Chemosh had no wife with whom to share his divide honours. Though the worship of the THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 87 Babylonian Istar had made its way into Moab as into the other countries of the West, it was wholly absorbed by that of the national god. Istar was adored as a male divinity, not as the female Ash- toreth, and as such was identified with Chemosh. King Mesha in his inscription knows only of Atthar-Chemosh, not of Atthar by the side of Chemosh. The use, accordingly, of the plural Elohim in a singular sense, which meets us on the threshold of Genesis, had its origin, linguistically, among the people of Canaan long before the Israehtish invasion, and, psychologically, in a general tendency which the Israelites shared with their Moabite neighbours. It is consequently a use with which we may well suppose the contemporaries of Moses to have been fajuiliar. / The name of Yahveh, which is united with Elohim in the second account of the creation in Genesis, and by which the national God of the Hebrews was dis- tinguished from the gods of the heathen, is a name upon which oriental archjeology has as yet shed but little light. Even its meaning and origin are obscure, though we now know that the full form Yahveh, or rather Yahavah, and the shorter form Yeho, Y6, or rather Yahu, existed side by side from an early date. In the cuneiform texts Yeho, Y6, and Yah are written Yahu, as for example in the names of Jehu (Yahu-a), Jehoahaz (Yahu-khazi), and Hezekiah (Khazaqi- yahu). But there are also contract-tablets found in Babylonia on which the names of Jews occur, and these names are compounded, not with Yahu, but with Ya(h)ava(h). Thus as was first pointed out by Mr. 88 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Pinches, we have Gamar-Ya'ava or Gemariah, and Ya'ava-natanu or Jonathan.'- -^uch names as these prove that both the longer and the shorter forms of the sacred name could enter into composition, and the fact that in the present text of the Old Testament it is only the shorter name which is so found is due to that philological levelling which the text of the Hebrew Scriptures has undergone. The names also prove that in the time of the Baby- lonian Exile there was as yet no superstitious objection to pronounce the name of the national God such as had become prevalent before the Greek translations of the Old Testament books were made. The substitu- tion of Adonai or " Lord " for Yahveh was the work of a more modern age. It was a substitution which had curious consequences when the study of Hebrew revived in Western Europe. The vowel-points of Adonai were read with the letters of Yahveh, thus producing the new and monstrous form of Yehovah. As if this were not enough, the German spelling of the new word, with an initial J, was adopted in France and England, and the J pronounced, not Y as in Germany, but in accordance with the sound given to it in the French and English alphabet. Is Yahu (Yeho) merely a contracted form of Yahaveh (Yahveh) ">. It is hard not to think so, although philologically Yah(a)vah ought to be the feminine of Yahu. At all events, the two forms were used interchangeably in Israel, though the longer form was preferably employed by itself, as on the Moabite * See Pinches in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archseology, xv. i (Nov. 1892), and the "Records of the Past," New Series, iv. p. 187. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 89 Stone, where "the Arels of Yahveh" are stated to have been carried away from the tribe of Gad, while the shorter form was used in composition. The employment of either form of the name by any other people than the Israelites is a matter of doubt. It is true that in the time of Sargon there was a king of Hamath who was called Yahu-bihdi, and since the name is also written Ilu-bihdi in one of Sargon's inscriptions, where ilu or el " God " takes the place of Yahu, it is plain that Yahu must here be the Yahu or Yeho of Israel. But Yahu-bihdi was an ally of the Jewish king, and it is therefore quite possible that he may have been of Jewish descent. It is also quite possible that his earlier name was Ilu-bihdi, which was changed to Yahu-bihdi after his alliance with Judah, just as the name of Eliakim was changed to Jehoiakim after his accession to the throne (2 Kings xxiii. 34). It would seem that this had really happened in the case of another Hamathite prince. After David's victory over the Syrian armies, we are told, Toi king of Hamath "sent Joram his son to king David, to salute him, and to bless him " (2 Sam. viii. 10). Now in the corresponding passage of Chronicles (i Chr. xviii. 10) Joram is called Hadoram, Hadu or Hadad, the supreme god of the Syrians, being substituted for Jo or Jeho, the sijpreme God of Israel. '"^ Apart from the names of Jews and Israelites and that of Yahu-bihdi, the cuneiform inscriptions, in spite of the wealth of proper names which they contain, show us none that are compounded with the name of the God of Israel. Until, therefore, further evidence is forthcoming, we may conclude that it go THE HIGHER CRITICISM. was not used beyond the limits of Israelitish in- fluence. That it was known, however, is evident from a cuneiform tablet, now in the British Museum, which gives a list of the various equivalents of the word ilu, "god."^ Among them we find Yahu. The Babylonian scribe has attempted an etymology of the name which he has connected with words signify- ing "myself" in his own language. Such etymolo- gies, however, have no scientific foundation, and consequently are valueless. Before we pass finally from the first to the second chapter of Genesis, it is necessary to take note that the Chaldaean Epic of the creation did but sum up in a half philosophical, half mythical, form certain of the beliefs and legends which prevailed in Babylonia respecting the creation. Besides those which have been incorporated in the Epic we know of others, one of which was first pointed out by Mr. George Smith. He regarded it as that story of the creation which was embodied in the tradition of the city of Cutha, sinde the tablet on which it is preserved was copied from one which came originally from the library of that city. In this story, mention is made of a sort of first creation, when the earth already existed, but when the elements of order had not as yet been evolved out of chaos. The products of this first creation were, accordingly, the brood of Tiamat, monsters of various shapes, who might be regarded as the first attempts of nature to produce life, and who lived underground. . " Warriors with the body of 1 The tablet is numbered 83, 1-18, 1332, and has been published by Dr. Bezold in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical ArchKoIogy, Dec. 4, 1888. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 9I a bird of the valley," it is said, " men with the faces of ravens, did the great gods create. In the ground the gods created their city. Tiamat gave them suck. Their progeny the mistress of the gods created. In the midst of the mountains they grew up and became heroes and increased in number." The description almost reminds us of the Gibborim or "mighty men" of the sixth chapter of Genesis, who were begotten of the union of the sons of God and the daughters of men. y/^ clearer and more definite story of the creation is one which has lately been discovered by Mr. Pinches. While the Epic belongs to the Semitic period of Babylonian history, and in all probability to a late epoch, the legend discovered by Mr. Pinches goes back to Sumerian times. The original Sumerian text of it, in fact, has been preserved, together with an interlinear translation into Semitic Babylonian. The following is the rendering given by Mr. Pinches of the commencement of the text — ^ 1. "The glorious house,^ the house of the gods, in a glorious place had not been made. 2. A plant had not been brought forth, a tree had not been created. 3. A brick had not been made, a beam had not been formed. 4. A house had not been built, a city had not been constructed. 5. A city had not been made, earthly things had not been made glorious. 6. Nipur had not been built, E-kura' had not been constructed. 1 Academy, Nov. 29, 1890 (pp. 508, 509); "Records of the Past," New Ser., vol. vi. * The name of the chief temple of Eridu (now Abu Shahrein), an early Chaldasan city and seat of culture on the shores of the Persian Gulf. ' The name of the chief temple of Nipur (now Niffer). 92 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. 7. Erech had not been built, E- Ana 1 had not been constructed. 8. The deep had not been made, Eridu had not been con- structed. 9. (As for) the glorious house, the house of the gods, its seat had not been made. 10. The whole of the lands, the sea also (had not been formed). 1 1. When within the sea the current was, 12. in that day Eridu was made, E-sagila was constructed, 13. E-sagila which the god Lugal-du-azaga founded within the deep. 14. Babylon was built, E-sagila ^ was completed. 15. He made the gods and the spirits of the earth all together. 16. The glorious city, the seat of the joy of their hearts, supremely they proclaimed. 17. Merodach bound together amam before the water. 18. Dust he made, and he poured it out with the flood. 19. The gods were made to dwell in a seat of joy of heart. 20. He made mankind. 21. The god Aruru, the seed of mankind, they made with him. 22. He made the beasts of the field (and) the living creatures of the desert. 23. He made the Tigris and Euphrates and set (them) in (their) place. 24. Well proclaimed he their name. 25. The 2^ jjM-plant, the diUu-'pla.nt of the marshland, the reed and the forest he made. 26. He made the verdure of the plain ; 27. the lands, the marshes, and the greensward also ; 28. oxen, the young of the horse, the stallion, the mare, the sheep, the locust ; 29. meadows and forests also. 30. The he-goat and the gazelle brought forth (?) to him." Here the resemblance is with the "Jehovistic" account of the creation in the second chapter of 1 " The temple of Anu," the Sky-god, the name of the chief temple of Erech. 2 The name of the chief temple of Babylon, which seems to have been a colony of Eridu. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 93 Genesis rather than with the " Elohistic " account in the first chapter. A habitation is already prepared for men and gods, even before mankind and the beasts of the field have been formed, and while the plants and trees still remain uncreated. We shall see later on that the Babylonian garden of Eden, with the tree of life in its midst, was in the neigh- bourhood of the sacred city of Eridu, and con- sequently the likeness between the old Sumcrian story of the formation of the world and that which is described by the " Jehovist " becomes exceedingly striking. In the "Jehovistic" account also the earth had been made "before" the plant of the field was " in the earth " or " the herb of the field " had grown, and a garden was planted " eastward in Eden " before a man had been prepared to till it. It was not until the garden had been made ready for his reception that man appeared upon the scene, and it was not until after his creation that "the beast of the field" and the " fowl of the air " came into being. It was then, too, that the plants and herbs were produced, ■for "a man" had been found to cultivate the ground. So exact, indeed, is the parallelism of ideas between the two narratives, and so precisely similar is the order of the creative acts described in them — strange as it seems to us to be — that it is impossible not to believe in a connection between the two. The antiquity of the Sumerian legend, and its close dependence upon the foundation of the great temple of Eridu show that it must be the older, and we must therefore see in it the earliest starting-point yet known to us of that form of the story of the creation which we find in the second chapter of Genesis. 94 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. But it must not be supposed that what we may call the story of the creation according to the tradi^ tion of Eridu exhausted the various accounts of the £reation which were current in ancient Babylonia. The fragment of a legend discovered by myself a short while ago introduces us to yet another version of the origin of man. In this the first man — " the seed of mankind " — is named Adapa (or Adama), and he is made the son of Ea, the culture-god of Eridu. Ea, it would seem, had been his creator, and had originally made him like the animals. But Anu, the god of heaven, intervened, raising Adapa into an upright position, and changing the food and raiment with which Ea had provided him.^ The words of the ancient Babylonian poem offer a curious analogy to the statements of Scripture that after the ex- pulsion from Paradise Adam was condemned to " eat the herb of the field" (Gen. iii. 17, 18), while "the Lord God made coats of skins " for him and Eve. A subsequent portion of the myth of Adapa has been discovered among the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna. We learn from this that the Babylonian hero was summoned to appear before the throne of An,u in heaven on the charge of breaking the wings of the southern wind. There he was offered "the food of life " and " the water of life." But instructed by his father Ea, he touched them not. He put on, however, the garment that was given him, and anointed himself with oil. And when Anu asked I him wherefore he had not eaten and drunken, so that "the gift of life" could not now be his, he replied that he had attended to the warnings of his father 1 See my letter to the Academy, July 23, 1892, p. 72. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. QJ Ea, since the food and water of life would have been to him the food and water of death.^ In these older legends of Babylonia we look in vain for the philosophical theories and conceptions which underlie the cosmology of the Epic. We look equally in vain for points of contact with the first chapter of Genesis. It is only in the Epic that we can hear the voices of which the " Elohist " has caught the echo. ^'''But if the " Elohistic " account of the creation contains echoes of Babylonian philosophy, the " Jehovistic '' account carries us directly to Babylonia. In this the creation of the heavens and the earth is but a preparation for that of the Garden which stood eastward in Eden, in the centre, as it would seem, of the world. The garden was watered by a river which after fulfilling its work was parted into " four heads " and flowed in four different streams. Of these two were the great rivers of the Babylonian plain, the Tigris and the Euphrates ; the others bear names which have not as yet been identified with certainty. The scenery, however, is entirely Babylonian. The Eden itself, in which the garden was planted, was the plain of Babylonia. This we now know from the evidence of the cuneiform texts. It was called by its inhabitants the Edinu, a word borrowed by the Semites from the Accado-Sumerian edin "the (fertile) plain." To the east of it lay the land of the " Nomads," termed Nod in Genesis and Manda in the inscriptions. The river which watered the garden ^ See Dr. Zimmem in the Sunday School Times, June i8, 1892, pp. 386, 387. g6 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. was the Persian Gulf, known to the Babylonians as " the river," or more fully " the bitter " or " salt river," It was regarded as the source of the four other rivers, whose " heads " were thus at the spots where they flowed into the source which at once received and fed them. Chief among these rivers was the Euphrates, a name which has come down to us from Accadian times. The Greek " Euphrates " was borrowed from the Old Persian Ufratu, which was in its turn taken from the Semitic Babylonian Puratu or Purat. Purat was formed like Ashtoreth by the addition of the Semitic feminine suffix (-/) from the genderless Accado-Sumerian Pura, " the water " par excellence, as the Euphrates was called by the primitive dwellers in the Chaldsean plain. At times it was also called Pura-nun " the great water," but the shorter designa- tion was the more usual, and was that which survived to a later age. As the modern Egyptian terms the Nile el-bahhr " the sea,'' so, too, the Chaldaean termed the river which supplied him with the means of life " the water," and a recollection of the fact still lingers in the pages of the Old Testament, where the Euphrates is known as han-ndh&r " the river." The name of the Hiddekel or Tigris was also Accadian. In the old language of Babylonia it was termed Idiqla and Idiqna " the encircling," which the Semitic successors of the Accadians changed into the feminines Idiqlat and Idiqnat. From Idiqlat the Persians formed their Tigra with a play upon a word in their own language which signified an "arrow." The Hiddekel, we are told, flowed "to the east of Asshur," But the Asshur meant is not the land of THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 97 Assyria, as the Authorised Version supposes, but the city of Assur, the primitive capital of the country, now represented by the mounds of Kalah Sherghat. The land of Assyria lay to the east as well as to the west of the Tigris. Though it is questionable whether the names of the Pison and the Gihon have hitherto been detected on the cuneiform monuments, it is not difficult to determine the rivers with which they must be iden- tified. The head of the Persian Gulf is slowly filling up ; large deposits of soil are annually brought down to it by the Euphrates and Tigris, and the land is continually gaining on the sea. In the time of Alexander the Great, Charax, the modern Moham- mcrah, stood on the coast ; it is now more than seventy miles inland. At a still earlier period, perhaps some 6000 years ago, the great sea-port of Babylonia was the city of Eridu, the site of which is now marked by the rubbish-heaps of Abu Shahrein. The position of Eridu caused it to play a leading part in the primaeval history of Babylonia. Much of the oldest literature of the country was connected with it, as well as the beliefs and ordinances of religion and the traditions of primitive culture. It was, in fact, to Eridu that the Sumerian culture-god, Ea, belonged, together with his son, Merodach the Sun-god, and Babylon itself, the chosen city of Merodach, would seem to have been a colony of the old maritime state. When Eridu still stood on the sea-coast, not only the Tigris and the Euphrates but other rivers also flowed into the Persian Gulf The great salt " river," as it was termed, received the waters of four in all H 98 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. at no great distance from the walls of Erldu. To the east of the Tigris came the modern Kerkhah, the Khoaspes of classical antiquity, while to the west of the Euphrates was a stream afterwards represented, it would seem, by the Pallakopas Canal.^ The Kerkhah rose among the mountains of the Kassi, a •tribe who were probably the Kossseans of classical geography, and who gave Babylonia a long and important dynasty of kings. The western river encircled the northern borders of the great sandy desert which stretched westward to the mountain- chains of Midian and Sinai. In the first of these two last rivers it is plain that we must recognise the Gihon of Genesis, which " compasseth the whole land of Cush." Here, as in another passage on which we shall have to comment hereafter, some copyist of the Biblical text has wrongly vocalised the geographical name. Kas, the land of the Kassites, has been confounded with the district south of Egypt, which the Egyptians called Kas and the Hebrews knew as Cush. As. elsewhere in the Hebrew text, the vowel was not originally expressed in writing. In the second river we have the Pison, which " com- passeth the whole land of Havilah." Havilah, as Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch points out, means "the region of sand," and its situation is indicated in two passages of the Bible (Gen. xxv. i8, i Sam. xv. 7). We learn from these that the Ishmaelites as well as 1 I have discovered the name of the Pallakopas in contracts of the reign of Nabonidos, the last king of Babylonia, vifhere it is called the Pallukat (see Strassmaier : Inschriften von Nabo- nidus, ii., Nos. 333 and 539). THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 99 the Amalekites "dwelt from Havilah to Shur that is before Egypt." The Amalekites were synonymous with the Bedawin of to-day who range from the Euphrates to the Nile, while the Ishmaelite tribes inhabited the whole of Northern Arabia, from the eastern frontier of Egypt — the Shur, or " Wall," as it is called in Scripture— to the western boundary sii Chaldaea. The name of the Nabatheans or Nebaioth, "the first-born of Ishmael," is found alike at the two extremities of this desert region. Since Shur lay on its western side, Havilah must have been at its eastern end, and consequently in the situation where it would have been " compassed " by the river whose later successor was the Pallakopas Canal. Whether or not the name of the Pison has been found in the cuneiform inscriptions is doubtful. There is indeed a word Pisannu, which Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch supposes to mean a "water-course," but even this signification is not certain. Equally doubtful is the occurrence of the name of the Gihon on the Babylonian and Assyrian monuments. In a lexical tablet a name which may be read as Gikhan is giveir as a synonym of the Euphrates, and Prof. Delitzsch has noted that Gukhan-de " the flood of the Gukhan " is stated to have been the pre-Semitic title of the Arakhtu or river of Babylon. But neither the Euphrates nor the small branch of it on which Babylon stood is the Kerkhah, and it is the Kerkhah whose ancient name we want to find. It is possible, however, that both the Gihon and the Pison of Genesis are referred to by Tiglath-pileser III. under their later Semitic Babylonian names. .The Assyrian king tells us that at the beginning of his lOO THE HIGHER CRITICISM. reign he overran not only the northern part of Babylonia but also its southern portion, subduing the " Aramean " tribes who lived there " on the banks of the Tigris and the Surappi as far as the river Uknu on the shore of the Persian Gulf." Here the Surappi and the Uknu seem to occupy much the same position ^as the Biblical Gihon and Pison. The word Uknu, moreover, signifies a precious stone which perhaps was lapis lazuli. Now it is observable that there was another precious stone, called samtu or siamtu in Assyrian, which is stated to have been brought from the land of Melukhkhi.i Melukhkhi " the salt-land " was the desert which lay to the east of Egypt — the Biblical desert of Shur in fact, — and in the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets was nominally subject to the Pharaoh. In the samtu of the Assyrian inscriptions Assyriologists have long since agreed to recognise the skohem of Gen. ii. 12, which is translated "onyx stone" in the Authorised Version, and is said to be found in Havilah. Havilah and the desert of Me- lukhkhi are thus brought into close connection with one another, more especially when it is remembered that the samtu stone was probably the turquoise of Sinai. It is possible, therefore, that in the name of the river Uknu we must see a name suggested by the fact that just as one of the chief precious stones used in Babylonia was brought from the neighbourhood of the river Surappi, so another precious stone of equal celebrity was found on the banks of a rival stream. The garden with the tree of life in its midst was "Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia," ii. 51, 17, v. 30, 68. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. lOt planted " in Eden, eastward," for such is the correct rendering of the Hebrew text, and not " eastward in Eden " as the Authorised Version has it. Not only the garden, but Eden also lay to the east of the land where the writer lived. The garden and its mystical tree were known to the inhabitants of Chaldaea in pre- ' Semitic days. A fragment has been preserved of an old Accado-Sumerian hymn with a Semitic Babylonian translation attached to it which tells us something about them. The garden stood hard by Eridu, " the good city" as it was called by its Sumerian founders, and thus in the very region where the salt " river " of the Persian Gulf was divided into its four heads. The hymn begins as follows ^ — In Eridu a palm-stalk grew overshadowing ; in a holy place did it become green ; its root was of bright lapis {ukmi) which stretched towards the deep ; [before] the god Ea was its growth in Eridu, teeming with fertility ; its seat was the (central) place of the earth ; its foliage (?) was the couch of Zikum the (primaeval) mother. Into the heart of its holy house which spread its shade like a forest hath no man entered. [There is the home] of the mighty Mother who passes across the sky. [In] the midst of it was the god Tammuz. The sacred tree whose branches reached to heaven while its roots were nourished by the primaeval deep was the tree which supported the world. It was emphatically a "tree of life," and is accordingly represented time after time on the monuments of Babylonia and Assyria. Not unfrequently it was * See my Hibbert Lectures on the " Religion of the Ancient Babylonians," p. 238. I02 THE I-IIGHEK CRITICISM. watched by two guardian spirits, " kirubi " as they were called in Assyrian, " cherubim " in. Hebrew, who stood or knelt on either side, with wings behind their shoulders and the heads sonrietimes of eagles and sometinaes of men. In their hands they usually hold a fruit, which Dr. Tylor has recently shown to repre- sent a cluster of dates with which they are fertilising the sacred tree. The tree, consequently, must have been the palm, so characteristic of Babylonia, where its fruit formed the staple food of the people, while the juice was made into wine. In Accado-Sumerian days the wine was called " the draught of life," and after the importation of the vine into Babylonia one of the numerous divinities of primaeval Chaldaea was called " the goddess of the tree of hfe " in the dialect of the north, and " the goddess of the vine " in the dialect of the south. In the pre-Semitic period of Babylonian history the site of " the holy tree of Eridu '' was still remembered, and an oracle existed under its branches. One of the inscriptions left us by Eri-aku of Larsa, who was, as we shall see,' the Arioch of the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, makes special mention of it. As the inscription is curious it will not be out of place to give a translation of it in full, according to the version of Prof. Hommel : " To the god Nin-girsu, his king, Eri-Aku, the shepherd of the possessions of Nipur, the executor of the oracle of the holy tree of Eridu, the shepherd of Ur and the temple E-Udda- im-tigga, king of Larsa, king of Sumer and Accad ; on the day when Anu, Bel and Ea, the great gods, gave into my hands the ancient city of Erech, I built to the god Nin-girsu, my king, the temple Dugga-summu THE BABYLONIAN ELE:MENT IN GENESIS. I03 the abode of his pleasure, for the preservation of my life." Enough has been said to demonstrate the close dependence of the " Jehovistic " account of the crea- tion and fall of man upon Babylonia. We have not, it is true, as yet discovered a cuneiform text which bears the same relation to the second and third chapters of Genesis that the cuneiform story of the deluge does to the Biblical narrative, but there are many indications that such a text must once have existed. As we have seen, not only the conception, but even the name of the cherubim who guarded the tree of life, has a Babylonian origin, and besides the tree of life there are references in the cuneiform tab- lets to another tree, which might be described as that of knowledge. At all events a magical text into which the fragment about the sacred tree of Eridu has been embedded, in describing the means whereby Merodach is to heal a man possessed by " the seven evil sprits," orders him to go to " the cedar-tree, the tree which shatters the power of the incubus, upon whose core the name of Ea is recorded." The belief, moreover, that woman was created out of man is alluded to in an ancient Sumerian exorcism. Here we read of the storm-demons that " they bring forth the woman from the loins of the man." ^ The flaming sword of the cherubim is matched by that of Merodach, of which we are told in a Sumerian hymn that it was a " weapon of fifty heads," " whose light gleams forth like the day," and " the terror of whose splendour [overwhelms] the world." The "wicked serpent," " the serpent of darkness," was mentioned * " Religion of the Ancient Babylonians,'' p. 451. 104 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. in Sumerian texts, and Mr. Boscawen has lately found a Babylonian fragment forming part of the third tablet in the Creation-series, in which the fall of man seems to be described in plain terms. He gives the following translation of it — In sin one with another in compact joins. The command was estabhshed in the garden of the god. The Asnan-tree they ate, they broke in two, Its stalk they destroyed, The sweet juice which injures the body. Great is their sin. Themselves they exalted. To Merodach their Redeemer he (the god Sar) appointed their fate.^ But it is not only in the matter of geography and in the general outlines as well as in the details of the narrative, that the Biblical account of the Fall gives evidence of its derivation from Babylonia. The very words that are used in it betray their Babylonian origin. We have already noticed some of these, but they are only a few out of many. When, for ex- ample, it is said that " there went up a mist from the land, and watered the whole face of the ground," the word translated " mist " is the Babylonian edu or "flood," while that which is rendered "watered" signified in Babylonian the " irrigation " which served to fertilise the soil instead of rain. "Adam" itself is the common Babylonian word for " man," and I have shown elsewhere that the name "Eve" finds its coun- 1 " The Babylonian and Oriental Record," iv. 1 1 (1890). Asnan signifies " the pine cone " ; see my Lectures on the " Religion of the Ancient Babylonians," p. 529, note i. According to Mr. Pinches ("Babylonian and Oriental Record," iv. 2, 1890) the lines translated by Mr. Boscawen form the conclusion of the third tablet of the Chaldean Epic of the creation. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 10$ terpart in the Babylonian ivat or " breath." ^ When we read that man was formed out of the dust (dph&r) of the ground we are reminded of the letters of Tel el-Amarna in which the writers describe themselves as " the dust (epiri) beneath the feet of the king," and the " living soul " or nephesh of Genesis is the Babylonian napsat " life," which was bestowed upon man by the gods. If we pass on to the sequel of the narrative of the Fall which is contained in the fourth chapter of Genesis we shall find that Babylonian analogies are more difficult to discover. Dr. Oppert indeed has suggested that in the name of Abel we have the Babylonian ahV "a son," and, as has been already stated, the land of Nod or "the nomads," eastward of the edin of Babylonia, is the Manda of the cunei- form inscriptions. Methusael, moreover, the father of Lamech, is a purely Babylonian name, Mutu-sa-ili " the man of God." But we look in vain for other traces of Babylonian influence. The name of Cain claims connection with that of the Kenites or "Smiths" rather than with Babylonia, and hitherto, at all events, nothing has been found in the cuneiform tablets which resembles any portion of the narrative of Cain and Abel. While the second and third chapters of Genesis are stamped with a Babylonian impress, the continua- tion of the narrative in the fourth chapter seems to take us to a wholly different part of the ancient world. The conclusion, then, at which the archaeologist is inclined by his evidence to arrive is that the Biblical writer has drawn his materials from different sources. But those materials, it is important to remember, were * " Religion of the Ancient Babylonians," p. 99. I06 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. presumably all literary. We know that the Baby- lonian rrtaterials were so ; it is therefore reasonable to Conclude that the other materials which have been employed along with them, and which do not differ from them in character, were literary also. As to the question of date to which the combina- tion of these materials must be assigned, archaeology can return only a doubtful answer. All it can do is to show that an early date is just as possible as a late one. We now know that not only Babylonian beliefs, but the literature itself in which these beliefs were enshrined, had been brought to Palestine before the age of Moses. We also know that the beliefs which have left their traces on the Biblical history of the fall of man had been recorded in writing at a very early period. And furthermore there are pas- sages in this history like the statement that Eden was eastward, or that Adam and Eve clothed themselves with the leaves of the fig-tree, which tend to show that the writer of it was a native of a more westerly country than Babylonia. In this case he could hardly have been a contemporary of the Babylonian Exile, much less one of the exiles themselves. On one point, however, we may feel sure. The geo- graphical statement that the Tigris flowed eastward of the city of Asshur points either to a fairly early, or to a very late date. As long as Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, it would have been named, rather than Asshur, in describing the direction in which the Tigris ran. Asshur was supplanted by Calah and Nineveh in the ninth century before our era, and did not recover its ancient position until after the destruc- tion of the two latter cities and the overthrow of the THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. I07 Assyrian empire. In the time of Cyrus the city of Asshur was again the representative of Assyria. In finding a date, accordingly, for the Jehovistic account of Paradise we must either go back at least to the age of Solomon, or forward to the time of the Cap- tivity. And the objections against choosing the latter epoch have already been urged. It is not until we come to the history of the deluge that oriental archaeology again claims the attention of the Biblical student. Mr. George Smith's discovery, more than twenty years ago, of the Babylonian version of the story of the flood has now become a common- place of books on the Old Testament or ancient history. We have only to compare it with the narra- tive in Genesis to see how startlingly alike the two are. This is the way in which the old Chaldaean poet described the great catastrophe — 1. Sisuthros spake unto him, even unto Gilgames : 2. " Let me reveal unto thee, O Gilgames, the tale of my preservation, 3. and the oracle of the gods let me declare unto thee. 4. The city of Surippak, which, as thou knowest, is built [on the bank] of the Euphrates, * 5. this city was (already) old when the gods within it 6. set their hearts to cause a flood, even the great gods 7. [as many as] exist : Anu the father of them, 8. the warrior Bel their prince, 9. Uras their throne-bearer, En-nugi (Hades) their chief. 10. Ea the lord of wisdom conferred with them, and 11. repeated their words to the reed-bed:* 'Reed-bed, reed-bed ! Frame, O frame ! 12. hear O reed-bed, and understand O frame ! * The frame of the ship was constructed of reeds. Hence the reeds were called upon to be ready to lend themselves to the work of building the boat. Io8 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. 13. O man of Surippak, son of Ubara-Tutu, 14. frame the house, build a ship : leave what thou canst ; seek life ! 15. Resign (thy) goods, and cause (thy) soul to live, 16. and bring all the seed of life into the midst of the ship. 17. As for the ship which thou shalt build, 18. . . . cubits (shall be) in measurement its length ; 19. and . . . cubits the extent of its breadth and its height. 20. Into the deep [then] launch it.' 21. I understood and spake to Ea my lord : 22. 'As for the building of the ship, O my lord, which thou hast ordered thus, 23. I will observe (and) accomplish (it) ; 24. [but what] shall I answer the city, the people and the old men?' 25. [Ea opened his mouth and] says, he speaks to his servant, even to me : 26. ' [If they question thee] thou shalt say unto them : 27. Since (?) Bel is estranged from me and 28. I will not dwell in (your) city, I will not lay my head [in] the land of Bel ; 29. but I will descend into the deep ; with [Ea] my lord will I dwell. 30. (Bel) will rain fertility upon you, 31. [flocks?] of birds, shoals of fish.' 32 — 42. ***** 43. On the fifth day I laid the plan of it (z. e. the ship) ; 44. in its hull (?) i*s- walls were \o gar (120 cubits ?) high ; 45. 10 gar were the size of its upper part." Another version of the account of the deluge, of which a fragment has been preserved to us, puts a wholly different speech into the mouth of Ea, and gives the hero of the story the name of Adra-khasis. This fragment is as follows — " I will judge (him) above and below. [But] shut [not thou thy door] [until] the time that I shall tell thee of. [Then] enter the ship, and close the door of the vessel ; THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. I09 [bring into] it thy corn, thy goods, [thy] property, thy [wife], thy slaves, thy handmaids and the sons of [thy] people, the [cattle] of the field, the beasts of the field, as many as I appoint . . . I will tell thee of (the time) and the gate [of thy ship] shall preserve (them)." Adra-khasis (the reverently intelligent) opened his mouth and says, he speaks to Ea [his] lord : " [O my lord] none has ever made a ship [on this wise] that it should sail (?) over the land ..." Here the fragment is broken off. The other version proceeds thus — 46. I fashioned its side, and closed it in ; 47. I built six storeys (?), I divided it into seven parts : 48. its interior I divided into nine parts. 49. I cut worked (?) timber within it. 50. I saw the rudder and added what was lacking. 51. I poured 6 sars of pitch over the outside ; 52. [I poured] 3 sars of bitumen over the inside ; 53. 3 sars of oil did the men carry who brought it . . • 54. I gave a sar of oil for the workmen to eat ; 55. 2 sars of oil the sailors stored away. 56. For the ... I slaughtered oxen ; 57. I killed [sheep ?] daily. 58. Beer, wine, oil and grapes 59. [I distributed among] the people like the waters of a river, and 60. [I kept] a festival like the festival of the new year. 61. ... I dipped my hand [in] oil : 62. [I said to] Samas : The storeys (?) of the ship are complete ; 63. . . . is strong, and 64. the oars (?) I" introduced above and below. 65. . . . they went two-thirds of it. 66. With all I had I filled it ; with all the silver I possessed I filled it ; 67. with all the gold I possessed I filled it ; 68. with all that I possessed of the seed of life of all kinds I filled it no THE HIGHER CRITICISM. 69. I brought into the ship all my slaves and my handmaids, •JO. the cattle of the field, the beasts of the field, the sons of my people, all of them did I bring into it. 71. The Sun-god appointed the time and 72. utters the oracle : In the night will I cause the heavens to rain destruction ; 73. enter into the ship and close thy door. 74. That time drew near (whereof) he utters the oracle : 75. In this night I will cause the heavens to rain destruction. 76. I watched with dread the dawning of the day ; 77. I feared to behold the day. 78. I entered within the ship and closed my door. 79. When I had closed the ship to Buzur-sadi-rabi the sailor 80. I fentrusted the palace with all its goods. 87. IVIu-seri-ina-namari (the waters of the morning at dawn) 88. arose from the horizon of heaven, a black cloud ; 89. the Storm-god Rimmon thundered in its midst, and 90. Nebo and Merodach the king marched in front ; 91. the throne-bearers marched over mountain and plain ; 92. the mighty god of Death lets loose the whirlwind ; 93. Uras marches causing the storm (?) to descend ; 94. the spirits of the underworld lifted up (their) torches, 95. with the lightning of them they set on fire the world ; 96. the violence of the Storm-god reached to heaven ; 97. all that was light was turned to [darkness]. 98. [In] the earth like . . . [men] perished (?). 99-100. ****** 1 01. Brother beheld not his brother, men knew not one another. In the heaven 102. the gods feared the deluge, and 103. hastened to ascend to the heaven of Anu. 104. The gods cowered like a dog, lying in a kennel. 105. Istar cried like a woman in travail,"- 106. the great goddess spoke with loud voice : 107. ' The former generation is turned to clay. 108. The evil which I prophesied in the presence of the godSj 109. when I prophesied evil in the presence of the gods, 1 10. I prophesied the storm for the destruction of my people. 111. What I have borne, where is it? ^ A variant text has " like one filled with wrath." THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. Ill 112. Like the spawn of fish it fills the deep.' 113. The gods wept with her because of the spirits of the underworld. 114. the gods sat dejected in weeping, 115. their lips were covered . . . 1 16. Six days and nights 117. rages the wind ; the flood and the storm devastate. 1 1 8. The seventh day when it arrived the flood ceased, the storm 119. which had fought like an army 120. rested, the sea subsided, and the tempest of the deluge was ended. 121. I beheld the deep and uttered a cry, 122. for the whole of mankind was turned to clay ; 123. like the trunks of trees did the bodies float. 124. I opened the window and the light fell upon my face ; 125. I stooped, and sat down weeping ; 126. over my face ran my tears. 127. I beheld a shore beyond the sea ; 128. twelve times distant rose a land. 129. On the mountain of Nizir the ship grounded ; 130. the mountain of the country of Nizir held the ship and allowed it not to float. 131. One day and a second day did the mountain of Nizir hold it. 132. A third day and a fourth day did the mountain of Nizir hold it. 133. A fifth day and a sixth day did the mountain of Nizir hold it. 134. When the seventh day came I sent forth a dove and let it go. 135. The dove went and returned ; a resting-place it found not and it turned back. 136. I sent forth a swallow and let it go ; the swallow went and returned ; 137. a resting-place it found not and it turned back. 138. I sent forth a raven and let it go. 139. The raven went and saw the going down of the waters, and 140. it approached, it waded, it croaked and did not turn back. 112 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. 141. Then I sent forth (everything) to the four points of the compass ; I offered sacrifices, 142. I built an altar on the summit of the mountain. 143. I set libation-vases seven by seven ; 144. beneath them I piled up reeds, cedar- wood and herbs. 145. The gods smelt the savour, the gods smelt the sweet savour ; 146. the gods gathered like flies over the sacrificer. 147. Already at the moment of her coming, the great goddess 148. lifted up the mighty bow which Anu had made according to his wish (?). 153. ' These gods, by my necklace, never will I forget ! 154. Those days, I will think of them and never will forget them. 155. May the gods come to my altar ; 156. (but) let not Bel come to my altar, 157. since he did not take counsel but caused a flood and counted my men for judgment.' 158. Already at the moment of his coming Bel 1 59. saw the ship and stood still ; 160. he was filled with wrath at the gods, the spirits of heaven, (saying) : 170. Let no living soul come forth, let no man survive in the judgment ! 171. Uras opened his mouth and says, he speaks to the warrior Bel : 172. Who except Ea can devise a speech? 173. for Ea understands all kinds of wisdom. 174. Ea opened his mouth and says, he says to the warrior Bel: 175. ' Thou art the seer of the gods, O warrior ! 176. Why, O why didst thou not take counsel, but didst cause a deluge ? 177. (Let) the sinner bear his own sin, (let) the evil-doer bear his own evil-doing. 178. Grant (?) that he be not cut off, be merciful that he be not [destroyed]. 179. Instead of causing a deluge let lions come and minish mankind ; 180. instead of causing a deluge let hyaenas come and minish mankind ; THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. II 3 181. instead of causing a deluge let there be a famine and let it [devour] the land ; 182. instead of causing a deluge let the plague-god come and minish mankind ! 183. I did not reveal (to men) the oracle of the great gods, 184. but sent a dream to Adra-khasis and he heard the oracle of the gods.' 185. Then Bel again took counsel and ascended into the ship. 186. He took my hand and caused me, even me, to ascend, 187. he took up my wife (also and) caused her to bow at my side; 188. he turned to us and stood between us ; he blessed us (saying) : 189. Hitherto Sisuthros has been mortal, but 190. henceforth Sisuthros and his wife shall be like unto the gods, even unto us, and 191. Sisuthros shall dwell afar at the mouth of the rivers. 192. Then he took us afar, at the mouth of the rivers he made us dwell. It has already been stated that this history of the deluge has been introduced as an episode into the eleventh book of the great Chaldsean Epic, and that in its present form it gives evidence of being a com- bination of at least two earlier poems on the subject, in one of which, for example, the flood is described as having been caused by the Sun-god, while in the other its author is said to have been Bel. The Epic was probably composed in the age of the literary revival under Khammurabi, who first made Babylon the capital of a united kingdom (B.C. 2350), and it was consequently already ancient in the time of the writers of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. They may easily, therefore, have been acquainted with it and with the story of the great flood which it contains, A comparison of it, accordingly, with the two accounts I 114 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. of the deluge which criticism has discovered in the Book of Genesis becomes of importance. At the outset we are struck by the same contrast as that which met us in a comparison of the " Elohistic " account of the creation with the account given by the cuneiform tablets. While the Baby- lonian poem is intensely polytheistic, the Biblical narrative of the deluge is as intensely monotheistic. It does not matter whether it is the " Elohist " or the " Jehovist " who is speaking, each alike allows of no rival by the side of the God of Israel. In the second place, the resemblances between the Scriptural and the Babylonian narratives are common to both the " Elohist" and the "Jehovist." It is true that on the whole the "Jehovistic" narrative exhibits a more striking 'similarity to that of the Babylonian poem, at all events as regards details, but nevertheless it is also true that there are many points of contact between the Babylonian and the " Elohistic '' accounts. If the Babylonian poem agrees with the " Jehovist " as regards the sending forth of the birds, the building of an altar, and the use of the number seven, it agrees with the " Elohist " in its reference to the rainbow and attribution of the flood to the wickedness of mankind. The last point is particularly noticeable, as it had been often observed by commentators on the Book of Genesis before the discovery of the Chaldaean story that the Biblical narrative stood alone among stories or traditions of the deluge in making the great catastrophe a punishment for sin. The observation, we now see, was incorrect ; the " Elohist " had already been anticipated by the Babylonians in ascribing the deluge to a moral cause. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. II5 The resemblances between the Babylonian and Scriptural accounts are so obvious that instead of dwelling upon them it will be more instructive to note the points of difference between the two. Apart from the polytheistic framework of the Babylonian story we have, first, a different name for its hero. The Noah of Genesis, who was the son of Lamech,is in the Babylonian version Xisuthros the son of Ubara-Tutu. Then, too, we read of a " ship " instead of an " ark." The difference here is doubtless due, as Mr. George Smith remarked, to a difference of geographical position. The cry of the Chaldaeans was "in their ships " ; the southern portion of Babylonia lay upon the Persian Gulf, and Surippak the city of Xisuthros was situated on the Euphrates. The inhabitants of Palestine, on the other hand, had no great rivers, and the sea-coast was occupied by Philistines and Phoenicians, not by Jews. As regards the size of the ship or ark, again, the two accounts are in disagree- ment. Though the exact number of cubits men- tioned on the cuneiform tablet is doubtful on account of a fracture, we know at any rate that the height and breadth were said to have been the same. In the Bible, however, the breadth is given as fifty cubits, whereas the height is stated to be thirty. The Bible, moreover, omits all reference to the fear of Xisuthros that he will be mocked at by the people, and it seems to exclude the admission of slaves and handmaids within the ark, as well as of property in gold and silver. The door, furthermore, which was closed by Xisuthros himself according to the Baby Ionian version, was closed by God according to the " Jehovist." Genesis, also, knows nothing of a pilot, Il6 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. while the Babylonian poet on his side knows nothing of a breaking up of " the fountains of the great deep." He differs, too, from both the "Elohist" and the " Jehovist" as to the length of time the flood lasted, as well as in the fact that the ship of Xisuthros rested on the summit of the mountain of Nizir, the modern Rowandiz, not upon the mountains of Ararat. Here, however, there is probably no real discrepancy. Nizir might easily be regarded as an easterly pro- longation of the Kurdish mountains, the Ararat of Scripture and of the Assyrian inscriptions, which are called Gordyaean in the account of the deluge given by the Chaldaean historian Berdssos. But in the description ot the sending forth of the birds the variations are considerable. The swallow is not mentioned in Genesis or the olive leaf by the Babylonian writer. In fact instead of sending forth a swallow Noah sends forth the dove a second time, while it is the dove and not the raven which an- nounces that the earth is dry. Lastly the covenant of which the rainbow was the token appears only in the Scriptural narrative, where, moreover, it is Enoch and not Noah who " did not see death." ^ The conclusions we ought to draw from all this seem pretty clear. On the one hand, the " Elohistic" and " Jehovistic '' narratives must alike be ascribed to the same Babylonian source ; we cannot say of the one that it is Palestinian in its origin, and of the other that it was copied, or rather paraphrased, from the cuneiform tablets in the age of the Babylonian Exile. On the other hand, both narratives can be ' We must not forget, however, that it is said of Noah as well as of Enoch that " he walked with God " (Gen. vi. 9, v. 24). THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. II7 called Babylonian in origin only in so far as their setting is concerned ; the mode in which the materials have been treated, the spirit which pervades them, is purely Hebraic. Both, too, are coloured as it were by the geographical position of Palestine. In both alike it is an ark and not a ship that is spoken of, and while the " Elohist " refers to the "gopher wood" of which the ark was made, the " Jehovist " states it was an olive leaf which was brought back by the dova, The vegetation is that of Palestine rather than of Babylonia. Even in the season of the year at which the flood took place according to Genesis we may trace a Palestinian colouring. In Babylonia it was assigned to Sebat, the eleventh month of the " curse of rain " as it was called, which would corre- spond to our February. In Palestine, however, the first rains are over before February, and the " latter rains " have not yet begun ; we are not surprised, therefore, at finding that the flood of Noah com- menced on the seventeenth day of the second month, that is to say at the beginning of November. It must be granted, then, that the Biblical narrative of the flood, whether told by the " Elohist " or by the "Jehovist," has much which is similar to the Babylonian account. Can we go further and say that it is derived from the Babylonian version of it discovered by Mr. George Smith } This cannot be maintained. We know that there were several ver- sions of the story in Babylonia, aind though the one we possess may have been the most popular, it was nevertheless but one out of many. There is nothing either in the similarities or in the contrasts between the " Elohistic " narrative and the Babylonian that Il8 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. can make us suppose there was any direct relation between the two, unless it be the mention of the kopher with which the ark was pitched ; on the con- trary the resemblances are of so general a character, the contrasts so much what might have been expected from the different points of view of the authors, that the probabilities are all on the other side. It is different when we turn to the " Jehovistic " narrative. Here there are three passages which even in their divergency from it seem to imply an acquaintance with the Babylonian poem. One of these is the statement that the Lord shut the door of the ark (Gen. vii. i6). This differs from the Babylonian account, according to which. Xisuthros closed it himself. The final act in the drama of Noah's pre- servation was due, not to his own powers, but to the God of Israel, who was the one and only author of it from first to last. The second passage is that which describes the sending forth of the birds. Now it is clear that the Babylonian version is older than the Hebrew record, and the position of the raven of Genesis seems less logical than in the Babylonian version. It was because the raven did not return that Xisuthros knew that the waters were abated ; it was to discover whether this was the case or not that it had been sent forth. In Genesis the reason for the despatch of the raven is not so clear, since it is not followed by Noah's departure from the ark. It seems like a fragment of some older building which has been incorporated into a more modern edifice, with the architecture of which it does not fully harmonise. And on account of this position of the raven, it is to the dove that the part falls of proving the sufficient THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. II9 fall of the waters. The dove has thus taken the place not only of the swallow but, to some extent, of the raven as well. There was, however, a reason for this. The swallow was intimately connected with the super- stitions of Babylonian heathenism. From Accadian days it had been known as " the bird of destiny," and it was doubtless on this account that it was said to have been selected by the Chaldjean hero. The raven, on the other hand, was an unclean bird, and it was not fitting that one who had been chosen from amongst all mankind to be an example of divine mercy, should be guided by it to leave the ark of his salvation. It must have been the dove, not the swallow or the raven, which had been God's instru- ment in leading Noah back to the earth. The third passage is that which tells us how when Noah offered his sacrifice " the Lord smelled a sweet savour." The expression is identical with that of the Babylonian poet, and it is impossible not to believe that the language of the latter was known to the Biblical writer. But if the expression has been borrowed, it has been borrowed only in form. The Babylpnian gods have been swept aside like the flies with which they were compared, and in place of them we have the One and only God of Israel, who was at once the author of the deluge and the saviour of the righteous Noah. As in the first passage, so in the third, the silent correction of Babylonian polytheism is an eloquent testimony to the writer's knowledge of the poem in which that polytheism was expressed. Let us now pass on to the tenth chapter of Genesis, "the ethnological table" as it has often been termed. The title, however, is incorrect. The 120 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. chapter is concerned, not with races, but with geography. It is, in fact, a descriptive chart of Hebrew geography, the various cities and countries of the known world being arranged in it genealogi- cally in accordance with Semitic idiom. The idiom is not quite extinct even in our own day and in our own language. We still speak of a " mother-country," and our German neighbours write about their " father- land." But an idiom which is exceptional with us is the rule in Semitic tongues. The " sons of Canaan " are the Canaanites, the "daughter of Jerusalem" means the inhabitants of Jerusalem. When Ezekiel says of Jerusalem that its " father was an Amorite and its mother an Hittite," he means that Amorites and Hittites had taken part either in its foundation or in its subsequent history. So, too, when we read that Sidon " the fishers' town " was " the firstborn " of Canaan, all we are to understand is that it was the earliest of Phoenician cities. We are not to look, then, to the tenth chapter of Genesis for a scientific division of mankind into their several races. We are not even to demand from it that simple and primitive division of them according to colour which we find on the walls of the tomb of a Theban prince, Rekh-m^-Ra, who lived in the time of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. As a matter of fact, all the tribes and nations mentioned in the chapter belonged to the white race. Even the Negroes are not referred to, though they were well known to the Egyptians, and the black-skinned Nubians are carefully excluded from the descendants of Cush. The white race, however, is distinguished into several varieties whirh the ethnologist is not at THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 121 present able to trace back to a single original type. The Semitic race must be distinguished from the Aryan, and the Aryan probably from the Kelto- Libyan ; both again are separate from the Hittite with his Mongoloid features, or from the Egyptian who claims connection with the population of South- ern Arabia. But in Biblical times all these various sub-races were mingled together in that square of the earth's surface which constituted the known world to the civilised peoples of the East. It was a very important square of the earth's surface, comparatively small though it may have been, where the chief acts of the drama of human history have been played, and of whose culture we are the heirs. It was a square, too, which has witnessed the rise and growth of the civilisation which mainly has an interest for us ; it is only the civilisations of India, of China, of Peru and Central America which lie outside it. In the tenth chapter of Genesis this square is divided into three zones, a northern, a tentral, and a southern.^ The northern zone is represented by Japhet, the central zone by Shem, the southern zone by Ham. In one direction, however, along the coast of Palestine, Egyptian conquest caused the southern zone to be extended into the zone of the centre. In the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets Kinakhkhi or Canaan was an Egyptian province, and was therefore necessarily grouped along with Mizraim or Egypt. It was like a tongue of land thrust forward into territory that belonged to Aram and Eber. How purely geogi aphical the table is may be seen from the list of peoples who are all alike declared to ' See my " Races of the Old Testament," pp. 41 sqq. 12 2 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. be the children of Canaan. The Semitic Zidonian, the Mongoloid Hittite invader from the far north, the Amorite with his fair hair and bhie eyes, are all associated together under a common title. But this common title made them sons of Canaan in a geograph- ical and not an ethnological sense. It was because the Hittite had established himself at Kadesh on the Orontes, while the Amorite occupied the highlands, that they were classed along with the Semite. The ethnical relation of the latter was really with the sons of Cush on the one side, and the sons of Shem on the other. But among the sons of Shem also there is one name, that of Elam, which is ethnologically out of place. Geographically, however, Elam was situated in the central zone, and needed to be classified accord- ingly. The Elamites, therefore, who were Semites neither in blood nor in speech, are grouped with Assyrians and Aramaeans. There was one people whom modern discovery has shown to have belonged to two geographical zones. The Sabsean kingdom, like that of Ma'in which pre- ceded it, extended from the extreme south to the extreme north of the Arabian peninsula. There were Sabseans in Yemen, but there were also Sabeeans whose territory lay not far distant from that of the Philistines. Accordingly we find that Sheba, like the desert land of Havilah, is mentioned twice. Sheba and Havilah are not only sons of Cush and so natives of the southern zone, they are also sons of Shem in the central zone. There is, however, a passage in the chapter which disturbs its orderly arrangement. This is the pas- THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 1 23 sage which describes the rise of the kingdom of Nimrod. While elsewhere we have to do only with tribes or cities, here it is an individual man who is suddenly brought before us. His history, moreover, violates the whole plan upon which the chapter is based. He is introduced into the middle of the list of nations belonging to the southern zone, although his kingdom formed a portion of the zone of Shem. Asshur, moreover, who is mentioned in his right place in a later verse (22), is here associated with the south- ern nations of the known world. Like Babylonia, he has been shifted from the central zone to the southern world of Cush. It is plain, therefore, that the passage which relates to Niniirod can have had no place in the original design of the tenth chapter. It is an interpolation, but art interpolation which seemed to be justified, partly by the fact that Nimrod was a son of " Cush," partly by the geographical details which the reference to his kingdom occasioned. Nevertheless the justifi- cation of the insertion of the passage makes it none the less an interpolation, and we shall therefore defer considering it until the rest of the chapter has been examined. There are few other parts of the Old Testament on which so much light has been shed by oriental re- search. It is more especially the cuneiform records which have enabled us to identify the tribes and places named in the chapter, and to correct the erroneous guesses of past days. Gomer, the first name which confronts us, has ceased to be the occa- sion of the wild hypotheses it was to former com- mentators. Thanks to the Assyrian monuments, it 124 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. has fallen into its proper place in geography and history. The Hebrew Gomer appears in Assyrian under the form of Gimirra. The Gimirra were the Kim- merians of Herodotos, who, according to the Greek writer, had been driven by the Scyths from their original seats on the Dniester and the Sea of Azof.^ They first settled north of the Araxes, from whence their name had made its way through an atmosphere of myth to the poets of Greece [Od. xi. 14). Their stay here, however, was not long, and they soon descended upon the rich kingdoms and states of the south. Sweeping through Ararat they first attempted to enter Assyria, which was governed at the time by Esar-haddon. He met them on the northern frontier of his empire (B.C. ^jy), and in a decisive battle defeated them so signally that they were forced to turn westward into Asia Minor. Here they com- mitted depredations the memory of which lasted for years. The Greek colony of Sin6p6 was captured and destroyed, city after city fell before them, and they finally penetrated into the kingdom of Lydia, where Gyges had lately founded a new dynasty. Gyges, called Gugu in the cuneiform texts, Gog by Ezekiel, sent an embassy to Nineveh in the hope that the powerful monarch of Assyria would lend him aid against his adversaries. It was some time before an interpreter could be found who could understand the strange language of the ambassadors, and it would seem that after all Assur-bani-pal, who had succeeded Esar-haddon on the throne, accepted the presents and flattering messages of Gyges but did not send him 1 Hdt. i. 15, 104, iv. II, 12, THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 12$ troops. At all events not long afterwards Gyges fell in battle against the Kimmerians, and his head was carried off in triumph by the victors. In this the Assyrian monarch saw a punishment sent by the gods upon Gyges for the part he had taken in assisting the revolt of Egypt from Assyria, and he tells us that it was only when Ardys, the son and successor of Gyges, had again returned to allegiance, that victory, was granted him over the Kimmerian foe. However this may have been, the fact remains that the Kimmerians were extirpated or enslaved in Lydia by Ardys, and Asia Minor was not troubled again by them. The appearance of Gomcr on the horizon of civilised Asia was thus of but short continuance. Magog is associated with Gomer in Genesis, with Gog also in the Book of Ezekiel (xxxviii. 2, xxxix. 6). Gog is described by the prophet as belonging to "the land of Magog," the situation of which is defined by its proximity to " the isles " of the .^gean. It is clear that Lydia is meant, and that by Magog we must understand " the land of Gog." The philo- logical explanation of the name is more obscure. Magog may be a contraction of the Assyrian Mat Gugi " the land of Gog," or in the first syllable we may have the Lydian word for " country." We are told that this was mdys, to which Mai-onia, the old name of Lydia, has been supposed to be akin. Whatever be the explanation, Magog was not the only country we know of, in the name of which the initial Ma appears as a separable prefix. There was another northern region mentioned in the Assyrian inscriptions which is termed indifferently Ma-zamua and Zamua. In Ezekiel Gyges of Lydia has become the repre- 126 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. sentative of the power which had its seat in Asia Minor, and was already threatening the Semitic popu- lations of the south. Meshech and Tubal had been for many centuries the two nations of Asia Minor who had been in hostile contact with Assyria ; the Lydian dynasty which had now risen to the west of them was about to include them in its empire and give them a strength they had never possessed before. Eastward the Lydian empire stretched to the Halys, where it met the outposts of the Median monarch ; westward it had incorporated into its army the wretched relics of the once formidable Kimmerians. Lydia or Magog thus stood midway between Gomer and the Mede. This is precisely the position in which Magog is placed in the tenth chapter of Genesis. Gomer, the first of Japhet's sons, is followed by Magog, and Magog is followed by Madai. We first hear of the Madai upon the Assyrian monuments about B.C. 840, when they are called AmadS. and found by the Assyrian army in Media Atropat^nS. The name is written Madi in an inscription of Rimmon-nirari III. (B.C. 810 — 781), and from this time forward is referred to frequently. The Mada, in fact, were the Kurdish tribes who lived eastward of Assyria, and whose terri- tory extended as far as the Caspian Sea. They were for the most part Indo-European in language and Aryan in descent, and lived like the Greeks in small states, each of which obeyed a " city-lord " of its own. It was a combination of the Median tribes with the king of the Manda or " nomads " which brought about the rise of the Median empire, and paved the way for the empire of Cyrus. But the Lydian not only stood midway between THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 127 the Kimmerian and the Mede, he also stood midway between the Greek world and the populations of Asia Minor east of the Halys. He was the inter- mediary who carried to the West the traditions and culture of Asia Minor. From early days Greeks had been settled in the islands of the .^gean Sea and on the western coasts of the adjoining continent. Stories were told of maritime expeditions under the princes of Mykente which had sailed in old times to Asia, and had beleaguered for ten long years the city of Troy, Alexander, who had wooed the fair Helen, it was said, had brought rich embroideries from Sidon, and Menelaos the Spartan king had sought her at the court of the Egyptian monarch, while in still earlier days Pelops the son of the Lydian Tantalos had fled to Greece with the golden treasure of his father's kingdom. Modern excavation has shown that there was truth at the bottom of all these tales. The peculiar pottery found at Mykfinse and Tiryns and other " prehistoric " sites in Greece has been found again in Egypt among the ruined dwellings and in the tombs of northern strangers who had lived there in the time of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties. At Myk^nae, on the other hand, the products of Egyptian skill have been discovered — fragments of porcelain, engraved ostrich-eggs, and bronze daggers inlaid in gold with scenes of life in the Egyptian Delta. In Egypt and the East the Greek was known as the " Ionian." In the cuneiform inscriptions Cyprus is called the island of Yavni or " the lonians," and as far back as the age of the Fifth and Sixth Egyptian dynasties, in the texts which cover the walls of 138 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. certain pyramids, the Mediterranean is entitled " the circle which surrounds the Huinivu." Huinivu, as we know from the famous Rosetta Stone, was the Egyptian form of the word "Ionian," and the face of a " Huinivu " depicted on the walls of Karnak among the northern prisoners of Hor-m-hib is a typical Greek face of the classical period. In looking at it we find ourselves looking at the type which Pheidias and his disciples impressed upon stone.* Apart from the old Egyptian name of the Mediter- ranean, the earliest mention of Javan the " Ionian " is in one of the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Here, the writer, the governor of the Phoenician city of Gebal, states that it has been reported to the Egyptian king that " the Ionian " is on a mission to the country of Tyre.^ The name of the " Ionian " is wrjtten Yivina, which is the exact counterpart in Assyrian of the Hebrew Yavan (Javan). Already, therefore, before the birth of Moses, not only was the name of the " Ionian " well known in Egypt, but there were lonians in the service of the Pharaoh who might be despatched to Palestine on the business of the king. It was doubtless through the Greeks of Cyprus that the name of the " lonians " first became familiar to the people of Western Asia. It is possible that Sargon of Accad at the very dawn of history had crossed to Cyprus ; at all events when he erected an image of himself on the shores of the Phoenician coast he would have seen the outline of the island on the horizon, and General di Cesnola obtained 1 See the illustration on p. 156 of my "Races of the Old Testament." * See above, p. 20. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 1 29 there a Babylonian cylinder the original possessor of which calls himself "a worshipper" of Sargon's son and successor "the deified Naram-Sin." In the days of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty the island was known as Asi, and it was one of the subject provinces which sent tribute to the Pharaoh. On its eastern coast lived the Zakkur, as we have recently been informed by a papyrus in the possession of M. Gol^nischeff.^ They were allies of the Shardana or Sardinians, of the Shakalsh or Siculians, of the Aqaiush and of the Libyans in a great invasion of Egypt that occurred in the reign of Meneptah II., the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and a century later they again took part in another invasion in which the populations of " the North " united with the Hittites and Philistines and the king of Aram- Naharaim in attacking the valley of the Nile. In this second invasion the Daanau or Danaans took the place of the Aqaiush, in whom we must recognise the Achaeans of Greek history. The Achseans of the Egyptian monuments, however, did not occupy the same portion of the Greek world as the Achaeans of Homer. They were near neighbours of the Zakkur, and must consequently have lived in Cyprus. The Zakkur were the Teukrians, the ruling tribe at Salamis, and in the Aqaiush we may therefore see ' The papyrus gives an account of an embassy sent by Hir- Hor of Egypt to Zakar-Baal king of Gebal. On their way to the latter city the Egyptians stopped for the sake of obtaining certain kinds of wood at Dela (?) on the coast of the Zakkur in "the sea of Khalu." As the sea of Khalu was the north-eastern basin of the Mediterranean, the geographical position of the Zakkur is fixed. See my " Races of the Old Testament," p. 152. K 130 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. the "Achaeans" of the north-eastern coast of the island. 1 The tenth chapter of Genesis says nothing of either Achaeans or Teukrians. On the contrary, the sons of Javan whom it enumerates are " Elishah and Tarshish, Kittim and Rodanim." In Elishah we probably have the name of Hellas, in Rodanim that of the Rhodians. Kittim is Kition in Cyprus, the site of which is now occupied by Larnaka. Kittim was of PhcEnician foundation, but it was surrounded by Greek colonists, and eventually passed into their hands. Tarshish was called Tartessos by the Greeks. It formed the western limit of the Mediterranean, and stood not far from the modern Gibraltar. From early times it had been visited by Phoenician merchants, and the ships that traded to it were known as the "ships of Tarshish." So numerous were they that the name became synonymous with trading ships generally^ whatever might be their destination. A merchantman could be termed a "ship of Tarshish," even though its voyages were in the Indian seas. ' Tubal and Meshech, the Tabali and Muskd of the Assyrian i monuments, were the representatives of Eastern Asia Minor. Their territory originally ex- tended far to the south. In the time of Sargon and Sennacherib that of the Tabali adjoined Cilicia, while the Muski inhabited the highlands to the east of them, where they were in contact with Melit6n6 and the Hittites. In later days, however, both Tubal and Meshech had retreated to the north, and the classical geographers place the Tibar^ni and the Moschians at no great distance from the Black Sea. ' See Strabo, p. 682. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 131 The name of Tiras mentioned with that of Meshech is still enveloped in obscurity So also are the names of Riphath and Togarmah, since Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch's identification of the latter with the Til- Garimmi of the cuneiform inscriptions in Melitdn^ is not very probable. For Ashkenaz, however, it would seem that we must look to the east. It is true that Ashkenaz is called a son of Gomer, but the Kim- merians first entered Asia on the north-eastern frontier of Assyria, and certain texts which relate to the closing days of the Assyrian monarchy speak of them as in alliance with the Medes and the Manni, and thus show that it was only a portion of the nation which made its way into Asia Minor. More- over the geographical position of Ashkenaz is settled for us by the Book of Jeremiah. Here (li. 27, 28) "the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz" are summoned to join " the kings of the Medes " in overthrowing the Babylonian power. The Minni, called Manni by the Assyrians, lived on the south- eastern frontier of Ararat, and Ashkenaz consequently must have occupied the country which intervened between the Manna and the Madi. It is just here that the inscriptions of Sargon place the peofile of Asguza. In Asguza, therefore, it would appear that we should recognise the Ashkenaz of Scripture. Such, then, according to the tenth chapter of Genesis, were "the chief nations of the northern zone of the known world. It was by them that " the isles of the Gentiles" were peopled in the north and in the west. The nations of the southern zone are next enumer- ated. The list is headed by Cush in the extreme south. 132 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. The name of Cush was derived from Egypt. To the Egyptians Kash denoted the districts south of the First Cataract, inhabited for the most part by races of a Nubian origin. After their conquest by the kings of the Eighteenth dynasty, the eldest son of the Pharaoh took the title of " Prince of Kash," a title analogous to that of " Prince of Wales " borne by the eldest son of the reigning sovereign of England. It was to Kash that the surviving members of the Twentieth dynasty fled after the successful usurpation of the crown by another line of princes, and at Napata, under the shadow of the holy mountain, Gebel Barkal, they founded a kingdom, modelled in every respect upon that of Egj'pt. A temple was built similar to that at Karnak, and the kings claimed to be high-priests of Amon as well as rulers of the country. For several centuries the language and customs of Egypt continued to prevail, but gradually the Egyptian emigrants lost the purity of their blood, and the court became more and more barbarised. When Egypt was conquered by the Ethiopian Sabako or So, the royal names had ceased to be Egyptian. The name of Sabako, like that of his second successor, Tirhakah, is Nubian rather than Egyptian. Kash was the Ethiopia of the classical geographers, and in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna it is called Ka'si. In the later Assyrian inscriptions the name is written Ku'si, and it is this form of the name which we find in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, however, the name has a much wider signification than it had either in Egypt or in Assyria. It embraces not only the African Kash of the Egyptian monuments, but also the southern coasts of Arabia. Like the land of THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 1 33 Pun of the Egyptian inscriptions, it thus includes the regions on either side of the Red Sea. There was a reason for this. From early times emigrants had come from Southern Arabia and founded colonies on the opposite coasts of Africa. The intercourse between the two sides of the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb had always been active. It had produced a mixed population on either side, and the tribal names of Southern Arabia were met with again in Africa. It was often difficult to distinguish between the Arabian and the African Cush. The Cushite tribes, however, mentioned in Genesis belonged to Arabia. Seba and Sheba seem to be but two different forms of the same name, the one denoting the kingdom of Saba in the south of the peninsula, the other the Sabaean colonies in the north. Havilah we have already had to speak of; Dedan was the leading tribe whose head-quarters were in the north in the neighbourhood of Teima, and which carried the spiceries of the southern coast to the populations of Palestine. Next to Cush, as we descend the Nile, comes Miz- raim, "the two Matsors." Matsor was the Hebrew name of the great fortification which ran across the isthmus of Suez and protected Egypt from the attacks of its eastern neighbours. The name served also to denote the country which lay behind the line of forts, and accordingly we find it used of the Delta in more than one passage of the Old Testament. Thus in Isaiah xix. 6 we read that "the Nile-arms of Matsor shall be emptied and dried up," and in xxxvii. 25 Sennacherib declares that he has " dried up all the Nile-arms of Matsor," where the Authorised 134 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Version has misunderstood the sense in both passages. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets Matsor appears as Mitsir, a form of the name which survived in Baby- lonia, though in Assyria it was changed into Mutsur in consequence of its confusion with another Mutsur H'hich was the name of a district to the north-east of Nineveh. In the cuneiform inscriptions Mitsir or Mutsur represents the whole of Egypt. In the Old Testa- ment, however, when Egypt is referred to as a whole the dual Mizraim is more correctly used. From the beginning of history, in fact, Egypt had been a dual country. The Pharaohs were kings of " the two lands," and wore the separate crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. Pathros, or Pa-to-ris " the land of the south" (Isaiah xi. ii), called Paturissu in the cuneiform texts, was as distinct from Matsor as England is from Scotland. It was only the united monarchy that held them together.^ The sons of Mizraim were the various nationalities who obeyed the rule of the Egyptian Pharaoh. First among them are mentioned the Ludim or Lydians. It may at first sight seem strange to find Lydians in the southern zone and reckoned among the natives of Egypt. But the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal have cleared up the mystery. Wc learn from them that the successful revolt of Egypt from Assyrian domination in the seventh century B.C. was due to the assistance furnished by Gyges of 1 In one of the Egyptian papyri which have been preserved to us, a scribe writing to his master complains that his orders were as difficult to understand " as the words of a man of Athu (in the Delta) talldng to a man of ElephantinS " (opposite Assuan). THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 1 35 Lydia to the Egyptian prince Psammetichus. The soldiers with whose help Psammetichus made Egypt independent were not only lonians and Karians, as the Greek writers assert ; they had been sent from Lydia, and were Lydians by name if not by birth.^ The assistance rendered by these foreign mercenaries was not forgotten by the Egyptian kings ; they became the body-guard of the Pharaohs of the Twenty-sixth dynasty, and played an important part in the politics of the day. High in favour at court they stood next to the monarch, and accordingly it is not surprising to find them named first among the various peoples whom Mizraim " begat." The Lydian mercenaries are alluded to elsewhere in the Old Testament books. Jeremiah (xlvi. 9) describes the Egyptian army as consisting of Ethio- pians, of Phutites, and of Lydians, and similarly Ezekiel (xxx. 5) prophesies that Cush and Phut and Lud shall fall by the sword along with the Egyptians. But it was not in Egypt only that Lydian mercenaries were to be found. We see from Ezekiel xxvii. 10 that they also hired their services to Tyre, and formed part of the Tyrian " men of war.'' The Anamim who are mentioned next after the Lydians have not yet been identified. The Lehabim, however, are the fair-haired, blue-eyed Libyans, who as far back as the age of the Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties had been incorporated into the Egyptian army. At one time they occupied much the same place in Egyptian history as was subsequently * I have during the past winter (1892-3) discovered a Lydian inscription — the first yet found — of two lines on a roclc a little fo the north of Silsileh in Upper Egypt. 136 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. occupied by the Lydians, and it is probable that the Twenty-second dynasty, that of Shishak, was of Libyan extraction, and owed its rise to power to the influence of the Libyan troops. In the Naphtuhim it is possible that we should recognise the people of Napata, the capital of Cush ; the Pathrusim are the inhabitants of Pathros or Southern Egypt ; and the Casluhim^ still remain as obscure as the Anamim. Who the Caphtorim were has been explained by Prof. Ebers. Kaft was the Egyptian name of Phoenicia, and in the Caphtorim we must see an Egyptian Kaft-ur or "Greater Phoenicia," a title given to the coast-land of the Delta, which was more thickly peopled by Phoenician colonists than the mother-country itself. The refer- ence to the Philistines has been misplaced. Other passages in the Old Testament make it clear that their original home was among the Caphtorim and not among the Casluhim. Jeremiah (xlvii. 4) de-- scribes them as " the remnant of the country of Caphtor," and in Amos (ix. 7) it is said that they had been brought from Caphtor.^ The geographical position of Phut, who is named next to Mizraim, has not yet been cleared up. All we can say with certainty is that the name stands midway between those of Mizraim and of Canaan, and ought therefore to be looked for on the eastern frontier of Egypt. It is only quite recently that the name has been met with on an ancient monument. A fragment of the annals of Nebuchadrezzar in which his campaign against Egypt is narrated ^ ' See Note at end of chapter, p. 173. 2 Published by Dr. Strassmaier in his " Babylonische Texte " Pt. 6, No. 329, and translated by me in the Academy. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 1 37 states that in his thirty-seventh year he marched against " Egypt to make war [and battle with Amajsis king of Egypt," and that in the course of his invasion he defeated " the soldiers of the city of Pudhu-y&van " or Phut of the lonians, " a distant land which is within the sea." We may accordingly conclude that Phut was inhabited by Ionian Greeks ; it may therefore have been Pelusium or some other settlement of the Greek mercenaries in Egypt. That Canaan should be reckoned along with Mizraim is natural enough. It had once been an Egyptian province, and the Tel el-Amarna tablets have shown us how close were the bonds which at that time united it with the monarchy on the Nile. In the tablets the name appears as Kinakhkhi, and is applied to the coast-land of Phoenicia as distinguished from " the land of the Amorites " in the highlands north of Mount Hermon. The name, indeed, as has often been pointed out, signifies " the lowlands," and it must have been long after it was first given that it came to be extended to the interior of Palestine. Like the name of Palestine itself, which originally denoted the territory of the Philistine cities, it grew in meaning and application in the course of centuries. In the tenth chapter of Genesis it is already used in its widest sense. Canaan, we are told, "begat Sidon his first-born " on the sea-coast, and then other tribes and nations whose seats were inland. Heth, the Hittite, is included among the children of Canaan, not so much because of the Hittite tribe which had settled at Hebron as because Kadesh on the Orontes, "in the land of the Amorites," had become the southern capital of the Hittite invader 138 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. before the age of the Exodus. In the time of the Tel el-Amarna tablets the Hittites were already threatening the Egyptian province of Syria. Urgent requests for troops were sent to the Pharaoh by his governors in the north, and as the years passed on the requests became more and more frequent and pressing. At length we hear that the Hittite forces had joined those of Babylonia and Aram-Naharaim, and that Phoenicia itself was in danger of invasion. It would seem that no answer was returned to these appeals for help. The Egyptian Pharaoh was sur- rounded by enemies at home, and it was not long before the Egyptian empire fell amid the troubles of civil war. When light falls once more upon the scene with the rise of the Nineteenth dynasty, we find the Hittites in possession of Kadesh, from which all the power of Ramses II. was unable to dislodge them. There is a reason for coupling the Jebusite with the Hittite on the one hand and with the Amorite on the other. Ezekiel (xvi. 3, 45) tells us that the "father" of Jerusalem "was an Amorite," and its " mother an Hittite." At the period of the Israelitish conquest of Canaan, Jerusalem was in the hands of the Jebusites, and it is probable, therefore, that we must look upon them as a mixed tribe, partly Hittite and partly Amorite in descent. The Hittite and Amorite, however, were not only different in nationality, they were also different in race. What the Amorites were like we may see upon the monuments of Egypt. Here they are depicted as members of the blond race, tall of stature,- with fair skins, light hair, and blue eyes. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 1 39 They have, in fact, all the characteristics of that portion of the white race to which the ancient Libyans belonged, and to which their modern de- scendants in Algeria or Morocco belong to-day. The characteristics are specially those which we are ac- customed to associate with the so-called " Red Kelt," and it has been proposed to call the race which was distinguished by them " Kelto-Libyan." The foot- steps of this race are marked by megalithic monu- ments, tombs and cairns formed of large blocks of stone over which earth or other stones have been afterwards piled. Now it is noticeable that these same megalithic structures are met with on either side of the Jordan in the very districts where the Bible and the Egyptian texts place the Amorites, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that as in Northern Africa they were the burial-places of the Libyan, so too in Syria they were the burial-places of the Amorite. The old white race of Palestine has survived to the present day, and travellers may still see individuals there who have all the charac- teristic features of the Amorites of the Egyptian monuments.-"^ The modern Kabyle of Algeria, the descendant of the ancient Libyan, is dolichocephalic or long-headed, like the skeletons found in the old cairns and cromlechs of the country. We may accordingly con- clude that the Amorite, with whom in other respects he claims physiological connection, was also long- headed. He was thus a complete contrast to the Hittite, whose portraits show him to have had a ^ See my article on " The White Race of Ancient Palestins " In the Expositor, vol. viii. I40 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. markedly round skull. The Hittite portraits have come to us from two different sources, whose agree- ment is the best proof possible of the accuracy of each. They have been drawn, on the one hand, by the hostile hand of the Egyptians on the monuments of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties ; on the other hand we can now study them in the hieroglyphs and sculptures of the Hittites themselves. The face was distinguished by a retreating forehead and chin, and a large protrusive nose. It was, in fact, excessively ugly. That the ugliness cannot be ascribed to the malice of the Egyptian artists is shown by the native portraits, in which the general repulsiveness of the features is even more pronounced than it is in the pictures of their Egyptian enemies. The eyes were black and lozenge-shaped, the lips full, the beard scanty, the hair dark, and the skin yellow. The physiological type, in short, was that of the Mongolian, in marked contrast to the Aryan type of the blond Amorite. Like the Chinaman, the Hittite gathered the hair behind his head into a '' pig-tail." It is sometimes asserted that the Hittites repre- sented on the Egyptian monuments belong to two different types, one beardless, the other bearded. But the latter type is not really Hittite at all. The Hittites with whom the Egyptian Pharaohs waged their wars had conquered the territory of Semitic tribes, and they formed among them merely a dominant military caste. The Hittite prisoners, accord- ingly, who served as the models of the Egyptian artist, included Semitic Aramseans as well as Hittites of genuine descent. In Northern Syria Hittite and Aramaean were mingled together, as Hittite and THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 14I Amorite were mingled in Palestine. Some of the names of the commanders of the Hittite forces are of Semitic origin, and the commanders who bore them were doubtless Semitic in race. The Hittites had originally occupied the eastern ranges of the Taurus. Sir Charles Wilson has found their physiological type still surviving among the peasantry of Kappadokia. On the southern side of the Taurus they came into contact with Babylonian culture in the early days before the rise of the Assy- rian kingdom. They adopted the general principles of Babylonian civilisation and art, modifying them in accordance ■with, their own habits and genius. At a later period, after the Egyptian wars, their art was still further modified by contact with Egypt, and at a yet later age by the influence of Assyria. But whatever its origin and the influences to which it submitted, it retained to the last its own peculiar characteristics, and handed them on to the nations of Western Asia Minor. It holds as independent a place in the history of art as does the art of Egypt, of Assyria, or of Phoenicia.^ The tablets of Tel el-Amarna enable us to trace the southern progress of Hittite invasion. As the power of Egypt grew weaker, the Hittites began to threaten the northern frontiers of the empire. Tunip, now Tennib, to the west of Aleppo, was the first to fall of the Egyptian fortresses in Northern Syria, and 1 See W. Wright : " Empire of the Hittites," 2nd edition, 1886; Perrotand Chiprfez : "Histoire de I'Art," vol. iv., trans- lated into English under the title of " A History of Ancient Art in Sardinia, Judaea, Syria, and Asia Minor," and my own " Hittites" (Religious Tract Society, 1888). 142 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. from this time forward the resistance made to the Hittite invader seems to have been but slight.^ We soon hear of the Hittites joining with the Babylo- nians, the forces of Aram-Naharaim and the Bedawin, in driving the Egyptian governors out of the land of the Amorites, and before the rise of the Nineteenth Egyptian dynasty they had placed their southern capital in the old sacred Semitic city of Kadesh, on the Lake of Horns. Here, however, their further progress was at length checked. Egyptian armies once more marched into Palestine, and twenty years of conflict exhausted both the Hittites of Kadesh and their Egyptian foes. A treaty was made between Ramses H., the Pharaoh of the Oppression, and "the great king of the Hittites," and from this time forward the name of the Hittite fades out of the annals of Egypt. The Hittite dress was as characteristic as the Hit- tite face. It was distinguished by the use of a boot with upturned ends, such as is still worn by the mountaineers of Asia Minor and Greece. The boot is in fact a snow-shoe, and betrays the northern origin of its wearers, just as the use of a similar shoe betrays the northern origin of the modern Turk. As we learn from the sculptures of the Ramesseum at Thebes, the Hittites of Kadesh still clung to the 1 Thus the Egyptian general Aziru or Ezer writes to Dudu, the vizier of the Pharaoh : " O my lord, the king of the land of the Hittites has marched into the country of Nukhasse (in Northern Syria), but has not yet conquered the cities there." In a later letter to his brother, he says : " The king of the Hittites is staying in the country of Nukhasse, and I am afraid of him and have defended myself. He ascends to Phoenicia, and if the city of Tunip falls he will be (close at hand)." This was about 1380 B.C. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. I43 native boot even in the hot valleys of Syria, where it was eminently unsuitable. An ancestral dress seems even more difficult to discard than an ancestral language. The monuments of Egypt know only of Hittites in Syria, the records of the Assyrian monarchs know of them only in the neighbourhood of Carchemish, the cuneiform inscriptions of the kings of Ararat know of them only in the Taurus. Their own monu- ments are scattered over Asia Minor and Syria as far south as Hamath. In the Bible also we have references to these northern Hittites. It was for them that the merchants of Solomon exported horses and chariots from Egypt (i Kings x. 29), and it was they whom the Syrian besiegers of Samaria believed to have been "hired" by the Israelitish king (3 Kings vii. 6). From the Vatican manuscript of the Septuagint, again, we gather that the true reading of the mysterious " land of Tahtim-Hodshi," in 2 Samuel xxiv. 6, is "the Hittites of Kadesh," from which we may conclude that Kadesh was still in Hittite hands in the age of David. But besides these northern Hittites, the Bible also knows of another tribe of Hittites, in the extreme south of Palestine, at the ancient sanctuary of Hebron. We hear of them in Genesis, as well as in other parts of the Pentateuch. Hebron is described in one pas- sage as Amorite, in another passage as Hittite, though the Amorites and Hittites are carefully distinguished from one another wherever they are mentioned together. The " higher criticism " has thrown doubt on the historical character of the Hittites of Hebron. But 144 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. the existence of Hittites in Southern Palestine is certified by Ezekiel (xvi. 3), who assigns to Jeru- salem a Hittite and an Amorite parentage. More- over, what Mr. Tomkins has called the "dovetailing" of the Hittites and the Amorites in the south, is exactly analogous to their "dovetailing" in the north. If Hebron and Jerusalem were Amorite as well as Hittite, so too was Kadesh on the Orontes. Furthermore, the Egyptian monuments afford a curious piece of testimony on behalf of the Biblical statements. Among the prisoners of Ramses H. represented on the walls of Karnak are natives of Ashkelon, whose features and mode of wearing the hair are Hittite. The contrast between their type and that of the inhabitants of other Philistine cities is very striking ; they have, in fact, nothing in com- mon. Here then we have contemporaneous evidence of a very unmistakable character to the existence of the Hittite race in Southern Palestine. How they came to be there is another question, which we have at present no means of deciding. It is sufficient to know that the accuracy of the Biblical narrative has been fully vindicated by archaeological research.^ We must now return to the list of the descendants of Canaan. The Girgasite whose name follows that * See my "Races of the Old Testament," pp. 127, 132, where an illustration is given of the monument in question. The later Assyrian custom of extending the name " Hittite " to the whole of Syria and Palestine has of course no bearing on the question. Shalmaneser II. (B.C. 851) on the Black Obelisk (line 61) even includes the kings of Israel, Arabia and Ammon among " the kings of the country of the Hittites." This incorrect extension of the name may, however, have influenced the use of it in the tenth chapter of Genesis. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. I45 of the Amorite has not yet been identified with cer- tainty. But it is possible that Chabas was right in seeing in the Girgasite of Scripture the Qarqish of the Egyptian monuments. In the famous poem of Pen- taur, a sort of Homeric poem on the vaHant deeds of Ramses II., "the country of Qarqish" is twice mentioned, once immediately before the name of Carchemish, and once after that of Iliuna or Ilion. The initial syllable in the name is written like that in the name of Carchemish, which is spelt " Qar " in Egyptian, "Gar" in Assyrian, and "Car" in Hebrew, and it is worth noting that the Assyrian inscriptions know of another local name in the same part of the world which also commences with the same syllable, the district in which Damascus stood being called by them " Gar-Emerisu." The Hivite was the " villager," the fellah of modern Egypt, who cultivated the soil, and was distinguished from the inhabitant of the town. The name was specially applied to the country population of Northern Palestine ; the " Hivite " of Genesis xxxvi. 2, whose grand-daughter was married by Esau, should be cor- rected into "Horite," as we learn from the succeeding verses of the chapter. The generic name " Hivite " is followed by five geographical ones. Arka, Sin, Arvad and Zemar were cities of Northern Phoenicia, all of which except Arvad stood a little inland, while Hamath lay to the north of Kadesh, on the river Orontes. Sin is referred to by Tiglath-pileser III.; Arka, Arvad and Zemar are mentioned repeatedly in the tablets of Tel el- Amarna. Zemar was at that time an important fortress of the Egyptian Pharaoh^ and it is said to 146 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. be in a "strong" position' like the nest of a Lird. Arvad was joining the enemies of Egypt with ils ships, and Arka is stated in one despatch to have been already captured by the foe. We hear of all three cities in the later Assyrian inscriptions, and Zemarwas still sufficiently important to be laid under tribute as a separate state. In classical times the three cities were known as Ark6, Arados and Simyra ; they are now represented by Tell 'Arka, Ruad and Sumra. The catalogue of Phoenician cities is remarkable. Of those of Southern Phoenicia Sidon alone is named. No notice is taken even of Tyre, whose wealth is already celebrated in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, or of the holy city of Gebal. On the other hand, the Northern Phoenician cities are carefully enumerated, including the obscure and unimportant Sin. It is difficult to resist the conviction that the larger par^ of the list of the sons of Canaan has been derived from a northern source. Shem is the representative of the central zone of the known world. His children were the Elamites, who belonged to a round-headed and prognathous race and spoke an agglutinative language ; the Semitic Assyrians and Aramaeans ; Arphaxad, whose name contains that of Chesed or the Babylonians ; and the enigmatical Lud. What Lud can be it is difficult to say ; all that is certain is that the reading is corrupt. I have elsewhere suggested that it was originally Nod, that land of the " nomads " on the east of Baby- lonia, where the Manda of the cuneiform inscriptions had their home. The Aramaean territory was a wide one. It extended northwards to Mesopotamia and Syria, where Aramaean tribes occupied the two banks THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 1 47 of the Euphrates, and southwards to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Wandering Aramaean tribes like the Pekod (Jer. 1. 21) encamped in the Babylonian plain, the Semites of Syria whose cities were taken by the Hittites were of Aramaean origin, and in the south- west the Nabathasans who established themselves at Petra also belonged to the Aramaean stock. Among the four sons of Aram whose names are given in the tenth chapter of Genesis, the situation of Mash has been fixed by the cuneiform texts. The name recurs under the form of Mesha in the thirtieth verse of the chapter, and denoted the southern part of the desert which lay between Syria and the Euphrates. Another list of the Aramjean tribes is found in Gen. xxii. 21, 22, where it is rather the northern tribes than the southern ones who are enumerated. First among them come Khazo and Buz, the Khazu and Bazu of the Assyrian inscriptions, who lived to the south of the Hauran ; Bazu being described by Esar-haddon as " a distant country," '* a desert- land," " a place of thirst,'' and Khazu as a mountain- ous region. Chesed in the second list takes the place of Arphaxad (Arpha-Chesed); while Uz, written Huz in the Authorised Version, is called the first-born of Nahor. Aram himself, instead of being the father of Uz, becomes his nephew.^ 1 The four tribes who traced their descent to the concubine of Nahor (Gen. xxii. 24) represented the tribes of mixed Aramaic and Canaanite or Amorite origin on the northern frontier of Palestine. The situation of Maachah has long been Icnown, and Thahash is the Takhis of the Egyptian texts, in which the city of Kadesh on the Orontes was situated. It was in this district that the cairn of Gilead stood, the dividing line between the dialects of Aram and Canaan (Gen. xxxi. 47). 148 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. With the descendants of Shem the geographical table of the tenth chapter of Genesis comes to an end. The three zones of the world, so far as it was known, have been marked off one from another, and their leading nations and cities have been described. This threefold division of the world seems to have been due neither to Egyptian nor to Babylonian influence. The Egyptians divided mankind into four races and the world into four regions, while its population was separated into nine chief nations. In Babylonia from the earliest times the world was similarly divided into four regions, the centre of which was occupied by Babylonia itself. In the threefold division of Genesis, therefore, we should probably see a geographical conception of native origin. The harmony of this conception, as has been said, is marred by the introduction of an episode which once more refers us to Babylonia. The mention of the African and South Arabian Cush has served as an occasion for the mention of the Babylonian hero Nimrod. But Nimrod stands on a wholly different footing from the names with which he is associated. They are geographical expressions ; he is a living man. Nor was the Cush of whom he is called the son the same as the Cush who was the son of Ham. Like the Cush of another passage relating to Babylonia (Gen. ii. 13), the Cush from whom Nimrod sprang were the Kassite conquerors of Chaldsea. It has already been noticed that the Kassites gave a dynasty to Babylonia which lasted for 576 years (B.C. 1806— 1230). The fact that the rulers of the country were Kassites by race, and that their army largely consisted of Kassite troops, caused the neigh- THE BABYLONIAN EtEMENt iN GENESIS. 140 bouring populations to identify the Babylonians with their conquerors and lords. Hence it is that in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna, the Canaanite writers in- variably term the Babylonians the "Kasi." The " Kasi " or Cush, we are told, had overrun Palestine in former years and were again threatening the Egyptian province. In calling Nimrod, therefore, a son of Cush the Book of Genesis merely means that he was a Babylonian. But the designation takes us back to the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. It was not a designation which could have belonged to that later age when the Babylonians were known to the Israelites as the "Kasdini" only. Indeed there is a passage in the Book of Micah (v. 6) which proves plainly that in that later age " the land of Nimrod " was synonymous not with Babylonia but with Assyria. The Nimrod of Genesis must have come down to us from the time when the Kassite dynasty still reigned over Babylonia. This conclusion is borne out by what is said about him. The proverb quoted in regard to him is Canaanite and not Babylonian. Yahveh was not worshipped in Babylonia, nor was the expression "before Yahveh" to be found in the Babylonian language. It must have been a proverb which origin- ated in Canaan when the Kassite was still known there, and when Babylonian influence was still strong in the West. We are referred to the days when Baby- lonian books were imported and studied in Palestine, and when the history of Babylonia was as well known as the history of Palestine itself. We are told that " the beginning " of Nimrod's kingdom were Babylon, Erech and Accad in Northern I50 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Babylonia, and Calneh, the Kulunu of the cuneiform texts, in Shinar. Shinar is the Sumer of the native inscriptions, that is to say Southern Babylonia, which remained in the possession of its original non-Semitic population longer than the cities of the north. We are thus referred to the earlier days of the Kassite dynasty in Babylonia, when their power was already consolidated in the northern half of the country, but was not as yet fully established in the south. Nimrod was not satisfied with his Babylonian dominions. "Out of that land he went forth into Assyria, and builded Nineveh, and Rehoboth 'Ir (the city boulevards), and Calah and Resen." That such is the correct translation of the Hebrew text, and not the rendering of the Authorised Version, is shown not only by the passage in Micah which identifies " the land of Nimrod " with Assyria, but also by the fact that Asshur was a deity who derived his name from the ancient metropolis of the country. The city of Asshur was of Accado-Sumerian foundation, and if we are to believe the cuneiform tablets, the etymology of its name was to be found in two Sumerian words which meant " water " and " bank." However this may have been, the city and its god came to bear the same name, and the " high-priest " of the god became the ruler of the city. Scribes who were learned in all the wisdom of the Babylonians soon found a Baby- lonian origin for the deity who watched over their state. They identified him with the ancient Accadian An Sar, or " god of the hosts " of the Upper Firma- ment, who was remembered in Babylonia only as a cosmological divinity, and whose name appears in Greek utjder the form of Ass6ros. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 15I The city of Asshur had been long in existence when Nimrod led Jiis Kassite followers to it, and so made its " high-priests " tributary to Babylon. It stood on the high-road to the west, and it is not surprising, therefore, that the Kassite kings, after making them- selves masters of the future kingdom of Assyria, should have continued their victorious career as far as the shores of the Mediterranean. We may conjecture that Nimrod was the first of them who planted his power so firmly in Palestine as to be remembered in the proverbial lore of the country, and to have intro- duced that Babylonian culture of which the Tel el-Amarna tablets have given us such abundant evidence.^ Ninua or Nineveh, with its Rehoboth or suburbs, is now represented by the mounds of Kouyunjik and Nebi Yunus opposite Mosul. Calah lay a little further south at the junction of the Tigris and the Upper Zab, where the rubbish-heaps of Nimrud conceal the ruins of its palace. Midway between the 1 It is possible that the story of Nimrod is referred to in the fragment of a legend which has been rescued from the old library of Nineveh (K 4541). Here we read: "In the [centre?] of Babylon he regards the construction of this palace. This prince beholds misfortune, his heart is sick. Until the foundation of his kingdom battle and conflict were not hindered. In that age brother devoured his brother ; people sold their children for silver ; all countries were in distress ; the freeman deserted the handmaid and the handmaid deserted the freeman ; the mother bolted the door against the daughter ; the possessions of Babylon entered into Aram Naharaim and Assyria. The King of Babylon, in order to be Prince of Assyria, caused himself, his palace (and) his possessions to [enter] into [Assyri]a." The resemblance between these lines and what we are told in Genesis about Nimrod is striking. 152 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. two cities stood Resen, the Assyrian Res-eni, or " Head of the spring." Nineveh was made the capital of Assyria in the ninth century before our era, but it already had long been in existence. So probably also had Calah, though Assur-natsir-pal assures us that it was built by Shalmaneser I. (B.C. 1 300). But the building meant by Assur-natsir-pal was doubtless the building which allowed it for the first time to take rank as the capital of the country, and dispossess the older capital Asshur. For a time Calah lay waste and deserted, but was restored by Assur-natsir-pal (B.C. 883—858). We are now in a position to consider the results to which our archaeological commentary on the tenth chapter of Genesis would lead us. The episode re- lating to Nimrod forms part of what we may call the Babylonian element in the Book of Genesis, and must be left until we have the whole of that element before us. For the present it is enough to notice that the episode is foreign to the original plan of .the tenth chapter, and that its insertion can be justified only on the ground of the geographical information which it gives about Babylonia and Assyria. But even so, the geographical information is given in the wrong place, since Babylonia and Assyria belonged to the central and not to the southern zone. As for the subject- matter of the episode, it is in full accordance with the discoveries of archeeological research and may easily have been derived from documents older than the age of Moses. The case is otherwise as regards the main part of the chapter. Here we are referred unmistakably to the period when the Kimmerians first appeared on the THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 153 geographical horizon of the civilised nations of West- ern Asia. It was the period, moreover, when Gyges the Lydian flourished, and when Lydians served as mercenaries in the army of Egypt. It is in short the period to which Ezekiel belonged, in whose prophecies we again meet with the names of the descendants of Japhet which are enumerated in the tenth chapter of Genesis. The geographical chart of the Pentateuch thus presents us with a picture of the Jewish world as it existed in the seventh century B.C. The eleventh chapter takes us back once more to Babylonia. Except, perhaps, for the Jewish exiles in Babylonia, the account of the building of the city and tower of Babylon, can have had a primary interest for none but a Babylonian. But it hangs together with the other references to Babylonian tradition and history of which the earlier chapters of Genesis are full, with the account of the Garden of Eden, of the Flood, of Nimrod, and of the campaign of Chedor- laomer. Like them it is directly dependent on the cuneiform rdtords of the Chaldaean scribes. The Babylonian version of the story of the Tower of Babel has not yet been discovered. But we know that it must have once existed. Mr. George Smith found the fragments of a tablet in which references are made to it. Here we read of " the holy mound," how "small and great mingled" it {yuballu) in " Babylon," and how the god " in anger destroyed the secret design " of the builders, and " made strange their counsel." This " holy mound " gave its name to one of the Sumerian months, the seventh of the Babylonian year, the first of the Jewish civil year, corresponding with our September and October. It 154 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. was the site of the great temple of Bel-Merodach, the god of Babylon, which continued to be called by its primitive Sumerian name of E-Saggil " the House of the lofty head" down to the last days of the ex- istence of Babylon. It is probable that the mounds now called Babil by the Arabs mark where it stood. A copy in miniature of this "holy mound" was placed in the inner shrine of the temple of E-Saggil, where it formed the " mercy-seat " on which Bel de- scended from heaven and sat each year at the festival of the New Year, delivering prophecies of the future to his priests. The " Du-azagga ki-namtartarene " as it was termed in Sumerian was rendered parak simati or " the seat of the oracles " in Semitic Babylonian. Nebuchadrezzar refers to it as the " Du-azagga ki- 7iamtartarene of Ubsuginna, the seat of the oracles, whereon at the festival of Zagmuku, the beginning of the year, on the eighth and eleventh days, the king of the gods of heaven and earth, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with bowed heads." Every Babylonian temple was provided with a zig- gurat or " tower," on the summit of which, as on the " high-places " of Palestine, the worshipper seemed to approach heaven more nearly than he could on the plain below. The name by which the temple of Bel-Merodach was known from the earliest times indicates that its summit was more than usually exalted. The tower to which it belonged was indeed one "whose top" might be said to " reach unto heaven." It rose high above the city, and marked from afar the site of Babylon. The name of Babylon is written in Semitic Baby- THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 155 Ionian, Bab-ili "the Gate of the god." It was a literal translation of the old Sumerian Ka-Dingirra, and in " the god " whose " gate " it was we must doubt- less see Bel-Merodach himself. Here in his temple of E-Saggil was " the Gate of heaven," where he revealed himself to his worshippers. In the words of Nebu- chadrezzar it was the place wherein at each new year's feast he enthroned himself and uttered his oracles. When we read in Genesis that the Lord said " Go to, let us go down," we are irresistibly reminded of the primitive meaning of the name of Babylon. The colouring of the narrative in Genesis is Baby- lonian throughout. It was in the east, on the mountain of Nizir, that the ship of the Babylonian Noah had rested, and " the mountain of the East," " the mountain of the world," continued to be a central figure of Babylonian mythology. From the east, therefore, the survivors of the deluge must have made their way to the " plain in the land of Shinar." The land was pre-eminently one of bricks and bitumen. Stone there was none, and the buildings of Babylonia, public and private alike, had to be constructed of brick. But the brick was usually baked in the sun, not burnt in the kiln. It was only when the brick wall had been built, that brushwood was sometimes heaped up against it, and its surface consolidated by means of fire. The dream of the builders of Babel was a dream which must have been indulged in more than once by the inhabitants of Babylonia. As Mr. Pinches has pointed out, the tablets of Tel el-Amarna show that in the century before the Exodus it was partially realised in fact. All over the civilised world of is6 THE aiGHtek Criticism. Western Asia there was but one literary language, and that was the language of Babylon. And at a much earlier period we find Sargon of Accad aiming at universal empire. It is said of him that after his conquest of Syria " he appointed that all places should form a single (kingdom)." But the multiphcity of languages spoken in Baby- lonia itself was a standing witness against the practical realisation of the dream. Besides the old agglutinative Sumerian in which so much of the earlier literature of the country was composed, and the Semitic dialects of the later occupants of Chaldsea, there were the un- related languages of Kassites and Elamites which con- quest or trade had introduced. As Ber6ssos the Chal- d.-ean historian remarks, Babylon was a spot where people of " various races " were gathered together. Here, therefore, where the cultured classes had dreamed of a universal language, and where in actual fact almost as many languages were spoken as are spoken in Constantinople to-day, it was natural that belief should be strong in a primaeval confusion of tongues. It must have been at Babylon, the first meeting-place of civilised men who belonged to different races and spoke different languages, that the single tongue used in the ark had divided into the manifold languages of the world. The Hebrew writer found support for this view in an etymology furnished by his own language. He plays upon the name of Bab-ili " the Gate of the god," and connects it with the Hebrew balbH " to confound." But the root is not met with in Babylonian, and we may therefore infer that the etymology is of Palestinian THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 157 It is important to notice that it was the city and not the tower which was left unfinished by the scattered workmen. The assumption that it was the tower has caused the latter to be identified with the Birs-i-Nimrud, the gigantic mass of ruined brickwork which alone remains of the great temple of Nebo at Borsippa. Borsippa was at the outset an independent city, though its proximity to Babylon caused it to become in time merely the suburb of its more im- portant neighbour. But it was never Babylon ; up to the last it continued to bear its own separate name. The tower of its temple, consequently, could never have been termed the tower of Babel. The theory which has identified it with the latter has been due to an erroneous translation of an inscription of Nebu- chadrezzar made in the infancy of cuneiform research. All that the inscription states is that " the tower of Borsippa " had been built by " a former king," who had raised it to a height of forty-two cubits but had never " completed its top." The result was that rain and storm washed away its bricks and destroyed the tiles of its roof. Nebuchadrezzar accordingly under- took its restoration and made it a fitting habitation for the priests of the god. In all this there is no reference either to Babylon or to a confusion of tongues. The theory which sees in the Birs-i-Nimrud the tower whose summit was to "reach unto heaven " really rests on conjectures made before the decipher- ment of the cuneiform characters, when the distinction between Babylon and Borsippa was unknown, and when travellers saw in the vitrified bricks of the ruined tower traces of the lightning which had punished the pride of its builders. 158 . THE HIGHER CRITICISM. The genealogy which follows the story of the confusion of tongues contains nothing which carries us to Babylonia. It is not until we come to the end of the chapter that we find ourselves once more on the plain of Shinar. Haran, it is said, " died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, Ur of the Chaldees." Afterwards " Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran," and they departed from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran where Terah died. Ur, the Uru or '' city " of the cuneiform texts, is now represented by the mounds of Mugheir on the western bank of the Euphrates. The bricks of its ancient temple of the Moon-god have given us the names of kings who claimed rule over Chaldsea long before Babylon became its capital. But in calling it a city of the Kasdim — the " Chaldees " of the English version — the Biblical writer makes use of a term which was not employed in Babylonia itself Kasdim is a name of Palestinian origin, and its derivation is obscure. It was the Hebrew name of the Baby- lonians ; among the Babylonians themselves it was unknown.! Its English rendering is misleading : the Chaldees or Chaldaeans of Greek and Latin literature took their name from the Kaldi, a tribe of whom we first hear in the twelfth century B.C., when they lived 1 There was a city called Kasda, but the position of it is uncertain. The word Kasidu means " conqueror " in Assyrian, and may be the origin of the BibHcal Kasdim. But since we learn from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna that the Babylonians were known as Kassi or Kasi in the Canaan of the fifteenth century B.C., it seems more probable that the Biblical term is in some way or other connected with the latter name. In W. A. I. iii. 66, 31, mention is made of a goddess of the Sutu or Bedawin who is called " the Mother of the city of Kasda." THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 1 59 in the marshes to the south of Babylonia. It was to this tribe that Merodach-baladan belonged, and after his seizure of Babylon, his fellow-tribesmen became so important an element in the Babylonian popula- tion, as in time to give their name to it. Indeed it seems probable that Nebuchadrezzar was a Kaldu or Chaldsean by descent.^ If so, the use of-the word by the writers of Greece and Rome would be fully accounted for. While Ur was a city of the Babylonians, Haran, where Terah died, lay far away in the north, in Mesopotamia. But it had been connected from a remote epoch with Babylonia, and its temple was dedicated to the Babylonian Moon-god like the temple of Ur. Between Ur and Haran there was thus a natural connection, and a native of Ur would have found himself more at home in Haran than in any other city of the world. Moreover Haran was one of the most important of the stations which lay upon the high-road from Babylonia to the West. The name Haran, in fact, signified " road " in the language of Babylonia, and was a word which had descended to the Semitic settlers from Sumerian times. The name of Abram — Abu-ramu "the exalted father" — is found in early Babylonian contracts. Milcah, again, is the Babylonian Milcat or " Queen." It maybe that in the curious addition "and the father of Iscah " we have a marginal gloss which indicates ■ acquaintance on the part of the writer with the cuneiform literature. Iscah is not only not mentioned 1 See Winckler : " Untersuchungen zur altorientalischen GescTiichte" (1889), pp. 47 sqq.; Delattre : "Les Chald^ens jusqu' k la Formation de I'Empire de Nabuchodonoser " (1889). l6o THE HIGHER CRITICISM. again, the name is without an etymology. But in the cuneiform syllabary it so happens that the same character may be read indifferently mil and is, and that only quite recently the first decipherers of the Tel el-Amarna tablets read is-ku instead of mil-ku "king" in a proper name. What has occurred in the nineteenth century may easily have occurred before, and it is therefore quite possible that Iscah owes her existence to an error in reading a cuneiform character. If so, we shall have in her name direct evidence of the use of cuneiform books on the part of a Biblical writer. In the fourteenth chapter of Genesis we meet with further evidence of the same kind. Mention is there made {v. s) of " the Zuzim in Ham." Now in Deuteronomy (ii. 20) these same people are called Zamzummim, and the country in which they are said to have lived is not Ham but Ammon. Ammon is a lengthened form of the name of the god Am or Ammi, and accordingly in Gen. xix. 38 it is stated that Ben-Ammi " the son of Ammi " was the ancestor of the Ammonites. In Hebrew the word Ham and Am or Ammi would be written with different letters ; but this would not be the case in the cuneiform system of writing, where they would both be ex- pressed by the same character. The transcriber consequently could make his choice between repre- senting the name either by Ham or by Am. The difference between the forms Zuzim and Zamzum- mim admits of the same explanation. In the cuneiform syllabary the sounds which are denoted in the Hebrew alphabet by the letters m and w ox u were represented by the same characters. Some THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. l6l Assyriologists accordingly write m in transcribing the text where other Assyriologists would write w, and an ancient Hebrew writer who did not know the true pronunciation of the word would be similarly puzzled as to whether he should write Z-m-z-m or Z-w-z-w. Here then we have an adequate explanation of the incorrect forms Zuzim and Ham which we find in Genesis. They have been transcribed from a cunei- form document, and are therefore different from those which a native of Palestine would have used. In Deuteronomy we find the names as they were actually pronounced, in Genesis the names as they appeared to read on some Babylonian tablet. The conclusion is important, firstly because it shows that we have in this fourteenth chapter of Genesis the copy of a cuneiform text, and secondly because the text in question must have been Babylonian. These inferences receive a striking confirmation when we examine the chapter in the light of archaeological research. On the one hand the campaign of Chedor-laomer and his allies has been proved to be historical. The account of it no longer stands alone, like a single page torn from some ancient book which has long since perished. The " higher critic " can no longer assert that Elamite or Babylonian invasions of the distant West in the age of Abraham are incredible and unsupported by authentic history. It is no longer permissible for him to maintain that the whole story is a reflection of the Syrian campaigns of a Tiglath-Pilescr or a Sennacherib, and that the names of the Palestinian kings afford etymological evidence M 1 62 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. of the mythical character of the narrative. Oriental archaeology has vindicated its authenticity in a re- markable way, and disproved the ingenious scepticism of a hasty criticism. We have learned from the tablets of Tel el-Amarna that Syria and Palestine must have come under the direct influence of Babylonia long before the period to which the Exodus of Israel can be referred. We have further learned from them that Babylonian armies had marched as far as the south of Palestine, and that even in Jerusalem the victories of the Kassite kings were known and dreaded. The state- ment of Manetho, the Egyptian historian, that the Hyksos had fortified Jerusalem against the attacks of the Assyrians, has been fully verified, mocked at though it has been by an over-wise criticism. The Babylonians, or the Assyrians as they were termed in the days of Manetho, had already established their power by the shores of the Mediterranean when the Hyksos princes were driven from the valley of the Nile. Allusions to these early conquests of the Baby- lonians in the West have been discovered in Babylonia itself As long ago as B.C. 3800 Sargon of Accad, the founderof the first Semitic empire, as well as of one of the most famous libraries of Chaldsa, had carried his arms to the coast of the Mediterranean. Four times did he march into the " land of the Amorites," and on the fourth occasion he caused an image of himself to be engraved upon the rocky cliff of the sea-shore. Even Cyprus seems to have submitted to his dominion, and it is declared that " over [the countries] of the sea of the setting sun he crossed. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN GENESIS. 163 and during three years his hand was conquering [all countries] at the setting sun." Naram-Sin, his son and successor, continued the victorious career of his father. He made his way into Magan, that is to say Midian and the Sinaitic peninsula, from which bronze had been exported into Babylonia from time immemorial, as well as the hard diorite stone, out of which the sitting figures of Tello, now in the Louvre, were carved before the days of Naram-Sin himself. The road pursued by Naram-Sin in his march from Syria to Magan must have been that which was taken by Chedor-laomer, according to Genesis. Chedor-laomer and his allies, indeed, fol- lowed it only half-way, having turned westward from it to the sanctuary of Kadesh-Barnea, now 'Ain Qadis. It was a road which was closed to the invader in later times by the increasing power of Edom, but it was a road with which we now know the Babylonians to have been acquainted centuries before Abraham was born. To Mr. Pinches we owe the discovery of a tablet, on which a later king of Babylonia, who reigned when Babylon had become the capital of the realm, claims sovereignty over Syria.^ Ammi-satana (B.C. 2241 — 2216) calls himself "the King of the land of the Amorites," the general name imder which Syria and Palestine are included in the cuneiform inscriptions.^ We are reminded of the fact that 1 See " The Records of the Past," New Series, v. 102—105. ^ Written Martu in Sumerian, Amurru in Semitic Babylonian. Amurru was formerly erroneously read Akharru, and explained as "the hinder-land." It is only quite recently that the true- reading of the name has been discovered, though it was sust. pected long ago by Norris. 164 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. among the tribes " smitten " by Chedor-laomer were the Amorites of Hazezon-tamar. But Ammi-satana was not the only Babylonian prince of the age of Abraham who ruled in Canaan as well as in Chaldnea. On the bricks of the Babylonian prince Eri-Aku, "the servant of the Moon-god," we read that his father, Kudur-Mabug, was "the father of the land of the Amorites." Kudur-Mabug was an Elamite, and his name signified in the language of Elam " the minister of the god Mabug.'' It is a name of precisely the same form as that of Chedor-laomer, which would have been written in Elamite Kudur-Lagamar, " the minister of the god Lagamar." Lagamar, it may be mentioned, was one of the chief deities in the Elamite pantheon. Neither Kudur-Mabug nor his father Simti- silkhak are said by Eri-Aku to have been Babylonian kings. But the fact that Eri-Aku was one himself, and that he bore a Sumerian and not an Elamite name, makes it pretty plain that Elamite domination was firmly established in Baby- Ionia. Eri-Aku ruled at Larsa, now Senkereh, where there was an ancient and famous temple of the Sun-god. But Babylonia was not as yet a united kingdom. While Larsa was the capital of one part of the country, Babylon was the capital of another, and it is possible that a third prince was reigning in the south, in the land of Sumer. /Before the death p{ Eri-Aku, however, a great Lift thyself up ! ' She said to him, ' No one has had to do with me except thy younger brother, since when he came to take seed-corn for thee, he found me sitting alone and said to me, " Come, let us make merry an hour and repose ! Let down thy hair 1 " Thus he spake to me, but I did not listen to him (but said), " See, am I not thy mother, and IS not thy elder brother like a father to thee .■' " Thus spoke I to him, but he did not hearken to my speech, and used force with me that I might not tell thee. Now, if thou allowest him to live, I will kill myself.' " The husband believed his wife's words, and in the fury of the moment seized a knife and hurried out to the stable to kill his younger brother. But there the cattle befriended their innocent keeper, and told him that his brother stood behind the door ready to slay him. He escaped accordingly, pursued by his elder brother, and was eventually saved by the god Horus, who interposed between himself and his pursuer a lake full of crocodiles. It is impossible not to conclude that there is some connection between the Egyptian story and the Biblical narrative of Potiphar's wife. It is clear on the one hand that the story is at least as old as the 212 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. age of the Exodus, when it was introduced into a tale written for the heir of the Pharaoh ; and on the other hand that it had its origin in Egypt. The first fact is important in considering the period to which tlie narrative of Joseph must be assigned. Several leading Egyptologists have lately expressed a conviction that the narrative cannot be older than the epoch of the Twenty-sixth dynasty (B.C. 664 — 525), or at all events the age of Shishak, some three centuries previously. Their opinions are based on the Egyptian proper names which occur in it. Asenath, the wife of Joseph, is explained as the Egyptian Nes-Nit " belonging to Neith," while Potiphera and its abbreviated form Potiphar have long been recognised as representing the Egyptian Pa-tu-pa-R& "the gift of the Sun-god." Names compounded with that of the goddess Neith point to the period of the Twenty- sixth dynasty, while it is alleged that names of the form of that of Potiphar first came into fashion in the time of Shishak and his successors. But, as Mr. Tomkins has remarked,^ the " supposed proof of a negative from the limitation of one's own knowledge is not to be called a proof at all," especially in Egyptology. It has been proved again and again that in archaeology we can argue only from observed facts, not from the want of facts. At any moment a discovery may be made which will show that our negative conclusions were the result only of our ignorance of the evidence, and such discoveries have been made time after time. Because we have not as 1 "The Life and Times of Joseph" (1891) — an excellent little work in which all the archaeological facts bearing upon the history of Joseph are put together in a compact form. CANAANITISn AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 21 3 yet met with names of the form of Potiphera on the older monuments of Egypt, we cannot be certain that they did not exist. Indeed, Mr. Tomkins has quoted a stel^ now in the Louvre of the age of Thothmes III., in which mention is made of an ancestor of Semitic origin who hved five generations before it was erected, and who bore the name of Pa-t-Baal. In this it is probable that we have a variant spelling of Pa-tu- Baal. As to the name of Asenath it must be remembered that the etymology, first proposed by Dr. SteindorfT, who sees in it the name of the goddess Neith, is merely a guess, like the older etymologies which have been suggested by other scholars. We cannot venture to base upon it any wide-reaching conclusions any more than we can upon the title given to Joseph, Zaphnath-paaneah, until the precise meaning of the latter has been satisfactorily cleared up. At present the origin of the first syllable is still doubtful, and though the latter part of the name is certainly the Egyptian n-ti-pa-ankh " Df the life," it is difficult to say in which of its different senses the expression pa-ankh "the life" is employed. In one of its uses it designated the Pharaoh as " the living one," and Pi-inkhi was the name of no less than three Ethiopian kings. It was also the name of a son of Hri-Hor the priest of Amon, who assisted in founding the dynasty which preceded that of Shishak. But this, again, throws little light on the age to which the composi- tion of the Biblical narrative must be referred. Equally little light is shed by another fact, which is, however, of a somewhat startling character. While the title given to Joseph by the Pharaoh is of Egyptian 214 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. derivation, that which the people shouted before him after his investiture with power is of Babylonian origin. An Egyptian etymology has been sought in vain for the word Abrek, which the Authorised Version renders " bow the knee," and the hieroglyphic dictionary has been tortured to no purpose to find terms into which it could be resolved. The cuneiform tablets of Baby- lonia, however, have come to our rescue. We learn from them that there was a word abrik in the Sumerian language which signified " a seer," and was borrowed by the Semitic Babylonians under the varying forms of abrikku and abarakku} It is abrikku which we have in Genesis, and the title applied by the people to the "seer" Joseph proves to be the one we should most naturally expect. He was a seer of seers, and it was in virtue of his seership that the Pharaoh had raised him to a dignity next to his own. How such a word as abrikku could have made its way to Egypt and Canaan is not difficult to under- stand after the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Among the tablets is a mythological text, the words of which have been carefully divided from one another by some Egyptian scribe who used it as an exercise in the study of a foreign language, and the foreign words which we learn in our exercises are very apt to creep into the language which we use ourselves. Technical terms like abrikku are peculiarly ready to make their way from one language to another with which it is in literary contact, and Babylonia rather than Egypt was specially the land of seers. The Asiatic prophet and interpreter of dreams needed an ' The explanation of the Sumerian abrik is given in the bilingual tablet 82, 2, 18, now in the British Museum. CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 21$ Asiatic title by which he could be addressed. The mention of his divining cup in a later chapter (Gen. xliv. 5) shows that Joseph continued to exercise his functions as a seer after his accession to power.^ There is a curious parallelism between the position of Joseph and that of another native of Canaan, as it would seem, in the reign of "the Heretic king" of Egypt, Khu-n-Aten. Several of the cuneiform letters found at Tel el-Amarna are addressed by a certain Aziru or Ezer, a Phoenician officer in the Egyptian service, to his " lord " and " father " Dudu. Dudu is the Dodo of the Old Testament, a name which has the same etymological origin as the Hebrew David and the Phoenician Dido, and the language in which Dudu is addressed shows that he was second to the Pharaoh alone. Like the king he is called the " lord " at whose feet " his servants " prostrated themselves, and Aziru declares in one passage that he does " not depart from the commands of " his " lord," his " god," his "Sun-god, and from the commands of" his "lord Dudu," thus coupling together the Pharaoh and his 1 The excavations made by Prof. Flinders Petrie at Tel el- Amarna in the spring of 1892 have further helped us to under- stand how technical ternis like the Sumerian abrik and the Babylonian abrikku could make their way into the language of Egypt. He has found several fragments of lexical tablets which were made use of by the scribes who conducted the cuneiform correspondence. Some of these give Sumerian words, written both ideographically and phonetically, with their Semitic Babylonian equivalents ; others are comparative dictionaries, containing lists of foreign words with their Babylonian explana- tions set over against them. It is obvious that such lexical tablets would make the learned classes well acquainted with the title by which an interpreter of dreams was known in the Asiatic East. 2l6 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. minister.! It is probable that the tomb of Dudu at Tel el-Amarna in which Lepsius found a hymn to the Solar Disk was the last resting-place of the Canaanite minister of the Egyptian monarch. The changes which the administration of Joseph is said to have made in the land-tenure of Egypt find support in Egyptian history. In the earlier days of the monarchy the country was in the hands of great feudal lords, over whom the Pharaoh at times held merely nominal sway. They inherited their estates and power ; the land belonged to them absolutely, and it was only their service which they owed to the king. But after the convulsion caused by the Hyksos Conquest and war of independence this older system of land-tenure was entirely changed. When the later Egypt emerges under the monarchs of the Eighteenth dynasty the feudal princes have passed away, and the Pharaoh is the fountain-head not only of honour but of property as well. In the hands of the Pharaohs of the Nineteenth dynasty the government became still more centralised and autocratic. The people ceased to have any rights of their own, and Egypt became a nation of slaves, at the head of whom was a single irresponsible individual. His power was tempered by two classes only, the priests whom he was obliged to flatter and caress, and the soldiers, mostly mercenaries, who could make and unmake him. These, accord- ingly, were the only two classes whose property did not belong to the state. We know that such was the fact in the case of the priests from the monuments, in the case of the soldiers from the classical authors and * See my translations of two letters of Aziru in the " Records of the Past," New Series, iii. pp. 67—70. CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 217 Greek papyri. It is true that the Pharaoh did at times lay impious hands on the estates belonging to the temples, but the act was regarded as sacrilege, and the perpetrator of it was visited with the vengeance of the gods. Thus a demotic papyrus now in Paris describes how Amasis robbed the temples of Memphis, of On, and of Bubastis of the property which former kings had bestowed on them, and transferred it to the Greek mercenaries, but by so doing he brought down the anger of heaven upon his country, and prepared the way for the Persian conquest.^ The seven years of plenty followed by the seven years of famine have lately received a curious illus- tration from a hieroglyphic inscription discovered by Mr. Wilbour in the island of Sehdl. Seh61 lies almost in the centre of the First Cataract, midway between Assuan and Philae, and was for long centuries the sacred island of the locality before it was supplanted by Philse in the age of the Ptolemies. The inscription is of late date, probably not older than the third century B.C., and seems to have been engraved by the * Revillout in the Revue igyplologique, i., 2, pp. 57 sqq. According to Revillout the papyrus makes the following state- ments about the transference of the revenues of the temples to the Greek mercenaries by order of the Council under Amasis : " The vessels, the fuel, the linen, and the dues which were given to the temples of the gods before the reign of Amasis, for the sanctuaries of Memphis, On, and Bubastis, the Council ordered : Do not give them to them ! Let a seat be given to the mer- cenaries in the ... of the district of Sais (?). Let them have the vessels and the fuel. Let them bring their gods ! As for the corn of the three temples mentioned above, the Council ordered : Divide what is given them ! As for what was given to the soldiers in these three temples, it ordered : Give them more ! " f2l8 THE HIGHER CRITICISM., priests of Khnum for the purpose of securing the tithes and imports of the districts which, they asserted, had been granted to them by an anci nt king. The inscription begins in the 'following way : " In the year 1 8 of the king, the master of diadems, the Divine incarnation, the golden Horus . . . [the reading of the royal name is doubtful], when Madir was prince of the cities of the South Land and director of the Nubians in Elephantine, this message of the king was brought to him : ' I am sorrowing upon my high throne over those who belong to the palace. In sorrow is my heart for the great misfortune because the Nile-flood in my time has not come for seven years. Light is the grain, there is lack of crops and of all kinds of food.' " ^ In the end the god Khnum came to the rescue of the Pharaoh and his subjects, and the years of famine were followed by endless plenty. In return for this the god, or rather his priests were endowed with certain gifts which it is the object of the inscription to record. Apart from this doubtful testimony, however, we have historical evidence of a famine which lasted seven years in consequence of too low a Nile. The Arabic historian El-Makrizi paints in terrible colours the results of one which began in A.D. 1064 and ended in 107 1, and consequently lasted for seven years. It happens also, as Brugsch Pasha was the first to notice, that there is contemporaneous evidence of the occurrence of a famine in Egypt at the very period to which the lifetime of Joseph would belong. ^ The translation is given by Brugsch : "Die biblischen sieben Jahre der Hungersnoth" (Leipzig, 1S91). CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 219 At El-Kab, the residence of those native Pharaohs of the Seventeenth dynasty whose revolt against the Hyksos restored Egypt to its independence, is the tomb of a certain Baba, who must have lived whenl the struggle with the foreigner was still going onJ On the wall of the tomb is a hieroglyphic inscription in which the good deeds of its owner are recorded with nal've simplicity. Among other acts of charity which Baba performed, he states that "when a faminei arose, lasting many years, I issued corn to the cityl each year of famine." ''■ The expression " many years signalises it as one of no common severity. Like the famine of Joseph's day it was of long duration, and differed from it only in being described as in the south of Egypt instead of in the north. But a famine in Egypt would have been felt equally in the south and in the north of the country. It was the result of an insufficient Nile, and the cause affected the Delta as much as it did the neighbour- hood of El-Kab. It was only the administration and prevision of Joseph which did not extend to the latter locality ; the evil against which his measures were taken must have been felt as far as the Cataracts. The age of Baba and of Joseph will have coincided, if any credence is to be placed in the Biblical narra- tive. When Joseph entered Northern Egypt it would still have been under Hyksos rule. According to George the Synkellos Aphdphis, the Hyksos prince under whom the war of independence commenced, was the Pharaoh who befriended him. The assertion 1 Brugsch : " History of Egypt,'' English translation, 2nd edit., i. p. 304. 220 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. is doubtless founded on the chronological calculations of the Byzantine writer, but it nevertheless is pro- bably not far from the truth. If Meneptah, the son of Ramses II., is the Pharaoh of the Exodus — and the Egyptian monuments exclude any other reign for that event — the chronology of the Pentateuch (Exod. xii. 40) would place the arrival of Israel in Egypt long before the expulsion of the Hyksos and the rise of the Eighteenth dynasty. Prof. Mahler upon astronomical grounds has determined the year B.C. 1 28 1 to be the last year of the reign of Ramses II., while the founder of the Eighteenth dynasty began his reign about B.C. 1S90. The family of Joseph, therefore, would have settled in Egypt towards the time when the struggle between the Hyksos kings and the princes of the south first broke out. We know from the scanty relics they have left us how thoroughly Egyptianised the Hyksos conquerors had long been. The titles they assumed, the official language and writing they used, the arts and sciences they cultivated, were all Egyptian. The court of the Hyksos kings at Zoan was in all respects modelled on that of the ancient Pharaohs. It was only their names and their worship which continued foreign. The city of On was within their dominions, and Joseph might well have married the daughter of its priest. Whatever excesses they may have com- mitted against the Egyptian temples on their first invasion of the country, the monuments have shown must have been momentary only. The worship in the great temple of the Sun-god at On would have suffered no interruption at their hands. In fact, CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 221 the papyrus which describes in legendary form the history of the expulsion of the Hyksos not only prefixes the name of Ra, the Sun-god, to that of the Hyksos monarch Apophis, but speaks of his foreign adherents as dwelling in On "the city of Ra."^ On the other hand, under the Hyksos Pharaohs of Zoan intercourse between Egypt and Canaan would have been easy and constant. No prejudice would have been felt against a Hebrew stranger by those who were themselves strangers in the land, and his rise at court would not have been difficult. The Pharaoh and his "ministers" would have had no hesitation in granting the land of Goshen to a pastoral tribe from Asia. They would have seen in them friends rather than enemies, and possible allies against the conquered Egyptians. They were them- selves called Aamu or " Asiatics " by their subjects, and an inscription of Queen Hashepsu gbove the Speos Artemidos^ describes them under this name^ as ruling in Avaris and "ignoring the god Ra." Goshen lay between the cultivated land of Egyp and the Asiatic tribes of the eastern desert ; it was 1 See Professor Maspero's translation in " Records of the Past," New Series, ii. pp. 37 — 44. 2 The inscription was first copied in full, and the reference to the Hyksos in it discovered by Mr. Gol^nischeff (" Recueil de Travaux relatifs k la Philologie et k I'Archdologie dgyptiennes et assyriennes," iii. i, 1881, and vi. I, 1885). The passage in which the Hyksos are mentioned is as follows : " Hear me, all ye men, all ye mortals as many as exist ! I have done this in my modesty without taking advantage of what I have done to add to it what is false. I restored that which was in ruins, and I completed what was left unfinished, for there had been Aamu in the midst of Northern Egypt and in Avaris, and foreign hordes from among them had destroyed the monuments (of old)." 222 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. within the Egyptian frontier and yet was not in- habited by Egyptians of pure race, while it was fitted for the pasturage of flocks rather than for the growth of corn. The foreigners could dwell here without fear of assault on the part of the Egyptians or of intermixture with them, while they were suffi- ciently near the Hyksos capital for their services to be at the disposal of the foreign Pharaoh in case of need. The Hyksos supremacy in Egypt, accordingly, meets all the requirements of the history of Joseph and the Israelitish settlement in Goshen. The wel- come Joseph and his family met with would be fully explained ; at the same time the Hyksos court would have been a genuinely Egyptian one so far as the continuation of the customs and ceremonial of the ancient Pharaohs was concerned. There is only one other period in ancient Egyptian history to which the settlement could be assigned. This is the period which has recently been revealed to us by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Under "the heretic king " Khu-n-Aten Egypt and Canaan were again in close union with one another, and the Canaanite was supreme in the Pharaoh's court and virtually master of the land of Egypt. We have found the vizier Dudu actually occupying the same position as that of Joseph. But it is impossible to harmonise the date of the Exodus with that of the arrival of Joseph in Egypt if the latter did not happen till the closing years of the Eighteenth dynasty. Khu-n-Aten's reign falls only one hundred and fifty years earlier than that of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. It is indeed possible that in the later CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 223 perspective of the writer of Genesis the age of the Hyksos and the age of Khu-n-Aten have as it were melted into one ; but this can be only the historical perspective of a later time like that which in the Book of Kings makes the murder of Sennacherib follow immediately upon his retreat from Jerusalem. Egypt had been overrun by the Hyksos or Shep- herd kings in the last days of the Fourteenth dynasty. How far south their rule extended it is difficult to say. We know, however, that Memphis fell into their possession, and a monument of one of their kings has been found in the Fayyftm. It would seem, moreover, that their suzerainty was acknowledged in Upper Egypt, even if they did not bear personal sway there. Manetho, the Egyptian historian, with all his prejudices against them, is obliged to admit the Fifteenth and Sixteenth dynasties of Hyksos Pharaohs as alone legitimate, and even if his Seventeenth dynasty consists of native Theban princes, he places beside it another - Seventeenth dynasty of Hyksos kings. That the latter dynasty was the one which really exercised supreme power we learn from a papyrus which, though written by an Egyptian scribe, gives the Theban prince the title merely of hiq or " chieftain," and describes how his suzerain lord, the Hyksos Apophis, sent messengers to him, ordering him to worship the god of the foreigner alone. The foreign lord who resided at Zoan must have been feared in Southern Egypt as well as obeyed in the North.i ' The name of a Hyksos king has been found at Gebel6n, south of Thebes, and the fragments of a Hyksos sphinx have been discovered still further south at El-Kab. 224 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Prof. Erman has shown that Manetho ascribed to the Hyksos rule the long duration of 95 3 years.^ This included the seven years of anarchy which followed immediately upon their invasion, before they had as yet chosen their king, Salatis, in whose name some scholars have seen the Hebrew shallidh or " ruler." It is the word which is used in Genesis xlii. 6, where it is said that "Joseph was the governor over the land." It was during the reign of Apophis XL, of the Seventeenth Hyksos dynasty, that the war of inde- pendence commenced on the part of the Egyptian people. The princes of Thebes carried on a heroic struggle through at least five generations. Little by little the foreigner was driven from the lands he had so long possessed ; first Memphis and Heliopolis were recovered for Egypt, then Zoan was captured and destroyed, and the Hyksos were forced into their last- remaining fortress of Avaris. But the walls even of Avaris did not hold out long, and a time came when Ahmes, the founder of the Eighteenth dynasty, stormed the city and pursued its defenders as far as Sherohan, midway between Egypt and Palestine. Sherohan, too, was captured, and accord- ing to Manetho the fugitives fled northwards, where they built Jerusalem as a protection against the Assyrians. Egypt was at last free from the " impure " foot of the hated Hyksos, and the Pharaohs of the Eighteenth dynasty now waged a war of revenge in Asia itself. Canaan became an Egyptian province, Northern Syria was garrisoned with Egyptian soldiers, and the 1 Zeitschrift fur agyptische Sprache (1880), pp. 125 — 127. CANAANITISII AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 225 boundaries of the empire were fixed at the banks of the Euphrates. But in conquering Asia, the Pharaohs themselves were conquered. The victories of Thoth- mes III. prepared the way for the marriage of his descendants with the royal family of Mitanni and the return of the Asiatic to power in Egypt in the reign of Khu-n-Aten. Such was the story of the Hyksos domination in the valley of the Nile. It was followed by the most brilliant epoch in the annals of Egypt, and the creation of an Egyptian empire. But the empire lasted barely two centuries. It rose and fell with the Eighteenth dynasty, and the efforts of a Seti or a Ramses to revive it proved unavailing. We are now in a position for judging how far the history of Joseph's life is in agreement with the requirements of secular history. Assuming the Pharaoh whom he served to have been a Hyksos prince, can it be said that the narrative in Genesis is in harmony with the teachings of the monuments .' Is the condition of Egypt as described by them compatible with the historical character of the Biblical story ? To this there can be only one reply. There is nothing in the monumental evidence which throws doubt on the general credibility of the Biblical narrative. On the contrary, the picture presented by the latter agrees remarkably in general features as well as in detail with the picture presented by the monuments. The history of Joseph is as Egyptian in its colouring, and as true to the facts of Egyptian archaeology, as the story of the flood and the campaign of Chedor-laomer are Babylonian in origin Q 226 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. and form. If we may speak of a Babylonian and an Edomite element in Genesis, we may also speak of an Egyptian element. At the same time, this Egyptian element has assumed a thoroughly Hebraic character. Not only is the language Hebrew in which the narrative of Joseph is written, the ideas and point of view which underlie it are Hebrew as well. The Egyptian scenery which it sets before us is seen through Hebrew eyes. Egypt and Canaan are as closely united in the narrative as they were in the days of Khu-n-Aten, when Canaan was an Egyptian province. The famine which can be caused in Egypt only by a failure of the waters of the Nile is regarded as spreading also to Canaan, where it would be due to a want of rain. Here we may see a trace of the age of Khu-n-Aten, when Canaan was at times dependent upon Egypt for its corn— as we know to have been the case from one of the Tel el-Amarna letters — and when conse- quently a failure of food in the valley of the Nile would have affected also the Asiatic province.^ J Thus Rib-Hadad, the governor of Gebal, says in one of his despatches (Winckler and Abel, No. 48) to the Egyptian kings that he had complained : " ' I have no corn : corn to eat I have none. What is to be done for the men my allies ? All their sons, their daughters and their households have been handed over to the land of Zarimuta in order to preserve their lives.' Then the king hears the words of his faithful servant, and sends corn in ships and preserves his servant and his property, and de- spatches 400 men and 30 convoys of horses as a present to Suta (Seti, the Egyptian Commissioner), and they will defend the city for thee. Again since Yankhamu says : ' Thou hast given corn to Rib-Hadad,' give [com also] to him [when] thou enterest [the city] of Tyre." CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 22; Throughout the narrative it is Palestine rather than the kingdom of the Pharaohs which occupies the first place in the writer's thoughts. But the narrative is not Palestinian in its spirit, and there are statements in it which imply that its composition could not be earlier th^n the rise of the Nineteenth dynasty. The land of Goshen is said " proleptically '' to have been " in the land of Rameses " (Gen. xlvii. n), though the latter name had no existence until it was given to the district by the Pharaoh Ramses. The rule of Joseph is obeyed throughout " all the land of Egypt," as it would have been in the time which followed the expulsion of the Hyksos, and the fifth part of its produce is accord- ingly handed over to the Pharaoh as continued to be the case " unto this day." It was only in Northern Egypt that the minister of a Hyksos ruler could have thus changed the tenure by which the land was held. Equally instructive is the statement that Abel-mizraim "beyond Jordan" derived its name from "the mourning of the Egyptians'' (Gen. 1. ii). It is true that Abal in Hebrew signifies " to mourn," but the geographical name Abel or Abila, which is found in so many parts of Palestine, has a wholly different origin, and means simply "meadow-land." The list given by Thothmes III. of the places he had conquered in Canaan shows how many of these Abels already existed in the country. There is an Abil in the north near Atar, identified by Mr, Tomkins with Abila in the Decapolis, an Abil near "Atar the greater" in the south, an Abil in the district of Gath, and an Abil in the neighbourhood of Jericho. The fact that Canaan had been an 228 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Egyptian province, and that its towns had been garrisoned by Egyptian troops would sufficiently account for the epithet of Mizraim being applied to one of them. Abel-mizraim, in short, is but an "Abel of the Egyptians," a testimony to the Egyptian empire in Palestine in the age of the Eighteenth dynasty. Even the use of the title Pharaoh indicates at once the Hebraic character of the history of Joseph, and the fact that its composition in the form in which we possess it cannot have been coeval with the events it records. Pharaoh is the Egyptian Per-^a, or " great house," the title often applied in the inscriptions to the ruling monarch, as the title of " Sublime Porte " is still often applied to the Sultan of Turkey. But in native and contemporaneous documents the title does not stand alone. Not only the Pharaoh himself, but his subjects also, employed the personal name that belonged to him. An Egyptian might indeed speak of " the Pharaoh," but it was because he had already specified by name the Pharaoh to whom he referred. It was naturally otherwise in the case of the foreigner. Just as the Egyptian inscriptions mention "the king of Megiddo," "the king of the Hittites," " the king of Naharaim," without adding their names, so the Hebrew who wrote for Hebrews would know the king of Egypt by his title only. We ourselves seldom mention the ruler of Turkey by his individual name ; we prefer to speak of him as the " Sultan " or " the Porte " ; and among those who are familiar with the title of the " Shah of Persia," it may be questioned whether there are many who know his actual name. CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 229 The individual name of a king is of little interest to a stranger, however important it may be to those who draw up legal documents at home. And if it can be so readily neglected by the stranger who is a con- temporary of its owner, how much more readily will it be neglected by him if he lives at some later date. Jeremiah knew that the Egyptian monarch of his own day was Pharaoh-Necho ; he would have been content to allude to an earlier one by his title only. The part played by dreams in the history of Joseph seems Egyptian rather than Palestinian, though the prophetic character of dreams was recognised by all the nations of antiquity, and in Babylonia the interpretation of them was a regular branch of science. But among "so pious a people as the Egyptians,'' to quote the words of Professor Wiedemann, " it was only natural" that dreams should have been regarded as a means of personal intercourse with the deity. Dreams were thus in great measure prophetic, like that in which Ra- Harmakhis appeared to Thothmes IV. when he lay asleep, wearied with a day of hunting, at the feet of the sphinx. "Some thousand years later a dream commanded King Nut-Amon of Ethiopia to march to Egypt." By sleeping in a temple which was the scat of an oracle, it was possible to receive " true answers" to the questions asked of the god. "The meaning of the dream was generally made out by the dreamer himself from the connection in which it stood. At times, however, recourse was had to special interpreters of dreams," like Joseph in the narrative of Genesis. A Greek inscription mentions such an §30 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. official in the Serapeum at Memphis. The belief in these prophetic dreams, in which remedies for sick- ness were especially looked for, is found in other countries as well as Egypt ; but Egypt was its centre, so that the poet Claudian, in the later days of the Roman empire, is still able to call prophetic dreams by the name of " Egyptian." The gods sent these dreams if they thought fit, and the people usually contented themselves with praying for them. If, however, they were not sent, recourse could be had to magic, and the gods be thus compelled to bestow them on the sleeper.^ A comparison, then, of what the Egyptian records have to tell us with the later chapters of Genesis seems to lead to the following results. On the historical side we have no reason to question the credibility of the narrative,, so far, at any rate, as it can be tested by oriental archaeology. It is in accordance with the general facts of Egyptian history ; while in matters of detail, such as the .shaving of the head before an audience with the Pharaoh (Gen. xli. 14), the connection of the " kine " with the river Nile, or the Egyptian words and names which are introduced, it displays a striking accuracy. On the literary side it is in its present form thoroughly Hebraic, though the materials it em- bodies are of Egyptian origin. But it cannot be earlier than the age of the Nineteenth dynasty ; how much later it may be, archaeology at present offers no means of deciding. The evidence derived from the 1 Wiedemann : "Die Religion der alten .^Egypter," pp. 142, 143- CANAANITISH AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 23 1 names of Potiphera and Asenath is not sufficiently conclusive to establish the point. With the death of Joseph we reach the end of the Book of Genesis. One fact which our archseo- logical survey of it has brought to light cannot fail to strike the reader. It is that a large part of the book is drawn from literary sources which were not Palestinian ; while in one place — the history of Melchizedek — it is probable that a Palestinian docu- ment was also used. Elsewhere, however, the sources which we can detect are Babylonian,. Edomite, and Egyptian, and in the case of the first we can state with a considerable degree of assurance that they were employed by Elohist and Jehovist alike. But whereas in the hands of the Elohist they have been recast, like the Egyptian chapters at the end of the book, the Jehovist sometimes repeats the actual words of his literary authorities. The fact raises the question whether the time has not arrived for correcting and supplementing the literary analysis of the Pentateuch by an analysis based on the archaeological evidence. It may yet turn out that below the documents which the higher criticism claims to have discovered there is an earlier stratum of literature which in its origin is partly Babylonian, partly Egyptian, partly Aramaic, partly Edomite, and partly Canaanitish. It is this literature which may after all prove to be the true source of the Book of Genesis, just as the chronicles of Israel and Judah, and the writings of the prophets, were the source of the Books of Kings. The questions both of age and of authenticity would then assume a wholly new aspect, and require to be decided upon evidence 232 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. wliich the archaeologist can alone supply. The period to which the composition of Genesis in its present shape should be assigned would be no longer of any consequence. We might, if we chose, accept the old Jewish tradition, which finds expression in the Second Book of Esdras,^ and regard Ezra as its author; but our views as to the character and authority of the work would be in no way affected. It is not the work as a whole, but the elements of which it is composed, which are of importance in the eyes of the historian. If the archaeologist can show that these elements are ancient and genuine, and that the statements contained in them are historically trustworthy, the historian has secured all that he requires. The Book of Genesis will take rank by the side of the other monuments of the past as a record of events which have actually happened and been handed down by credible men. It will cease to be a mere literary plaything, to be sliced and fitted tof^ether again according to the dictates of modern philology, and will become a collection of ancient documents which have all the value of contem- poraneous testimony. We have seen that in many instances oriental discovery has shown that such documents actually exist in it, and that the statements they contain are as worthy of belief as the inscriptions of Babylonia or Egypt. It has further shown that the age of these documents can be approximately fixed by a com- parison of the statements contained in them with the monuments of the past which modern research has restored to us, and that the results are not always in 1 xiv. 21 sqq. CANAANITISII AND EGYPTIAN ELEMENTS. 233 accordance with the conclusions and assumptions of the "higher criticism." What has been achieved already is an earnest of what will be achieved here- after, when the buried cities and tombs of the East have all been made to deliver up their dead. We cannot expect to find everything verified, but the historian will be content if it is permitted him to turn with the same confidence to the Books of Moses as he does to Thukydid^s or Tacitus. CHAPTER V. THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. The Book of Genesis has left us in Egypt ; the Book of Exodus still finds us there. Exodus, in fact, is emphatically the Egyptian portion of the Old Testament. The larger part of the history contained in it has for its stage the valley of the Nile, and even when the wilderness has been reached, and the law is promulgated from the summit of Mount Sinai, it is still Egypt to which the narrative looks back. In the first half of the book Egypt is the foreground of the story, in the second half it is the background. The Israelites have multiplied and filled the land. The context shows that it is the land of Goshen which is referred to, not the land of Egypt as a whole. The determination of the geographical position of this land of Qoshen has been the work of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The excavations carried on in the Delta at the expense of the Fund, and the skill of Mr. Naville in reading the evidence of the inscriptions brought to light by them, have at last enabled us to fix with some degree of certainty the limits of the district occupied by the children of Israel. Goshen has ceased to be the property of fanciful theorists and has passed into the possession of the scientific map-maker. l-HE fiGvpTIAN TUTELAGE Ot ISRAEL. 23$ It was in 1885 that Mr. Naville made the excava- tions for the Fund which have chiefly led to this result.^ They were made at a place now called Saft el-Henneh, about six miles to the east of Zagazig. Here hieroglyphic monuments were found from which the explorer learned what was the old name of the place. While its I'eligious title was Pi-Sopd "the house of the god Sopd," from whence the modern Saft is descended, in the language of every-day life it was known as Kosem. Kosem in later times was abbreviated into Kos, and with the prefix Pi or " house " became the Phakusa of classical geography. A century ago a Dutch scholar, Van der Hardt, had already suggested that Phakusa and Goshen embodied the same name. In the hieroglyphic texts Kosem denotes not only Saft el-Henneh, the metropolis of the name, but also the district in which the metropolis stood. This extended from Zagazig on the west to Tel el-Kebir on the east, and from a little north of the railway between Zagazig and Ismailiyeh to Belbeis in the south. Here then must have been the land of Goshen in which the Israelites were settled. In the age of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Egyptian dynasties this district was still comprised in the nome of HeliopoHs or On, which thus stretched from the neighbourhood of Cairo almost as far as the Suez Canal At a later date new nomes were carved out of the older ones, and the land of Kosem or Goshen was separated from the city of On. Bubastis, the 1 " Goshen and the Shrine of Saft el-Henneh," by Edouard Naville. Fourth Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund (1887). 236 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. mounds of which lie close to the modern town of Zagazig, became a capital of one nome, while another took its name from the adjacent desert of Arabia. In this Arabian nome the district of Kosem was included. The translators of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament were still acquainted with the position of Goshen, and so too were the writers and travellers of a yet later age. In the Septuagint the name is written as it is in the hieroglyphic inscriptions, Gcsem, and it is added that it was in the nome of " Arabia." The same spelling and the same state- ment recur in the Coptic translation of the Bible ; and the narrative of a pilgrimage made by a Christian lady (Silvia of Aquitaine) in the fourth century, which has recently been discovered at Arezzo in Italy, bears testimony to the same fact. The pilgrims, we are told, wished to go from Clysma near Suez to "the land of Gesse, that is to the city which is called Arabia."^ It was not until the Mohammedan invasion of Egypt that the site of Goshen seems to have been forgotten. There appears to have been a good reason why the land of Goshen remained dependent on the distant city of On up to the time of the Exodus. An Egyptian document which was written at that period, in speak- ing of the region about Pi-Bailos, the modern Belbeis, states that " the country around is not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle, because of the strangers. It was abandoned since the time of the ancestors." As ' Gamurrini : " I Mysteri e gl' Inni di San Ilario ed una Peregrinazione ai Luoghi Santi nel quarto Secolo ; " and Naville : " Goshen," p. 1 7. THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 237 Mr. Naville remarks, there seems here to be a reference to its occupation by the Israelites ; at any rate the passage proves that the district was used for pasturage and not for cultivation, and that consequently it had been in the hands of the nomadic Semitic shepherds from Asia. Jacob and his family brought with them into Egypt " their flocks and their herds " ; their "trade had been about cattle from their youth," and accordingly they dwelt " in the land of Goshen." It was only after the Exodus that Egyptian fellahin settled in Goshen, and grew corn in its fertile fields. When the Exodus can have happened has at last been settled* by Egyptological research. There is only one period in Egyptian history when it could have taken place, and the history of this period which has been recovered from the native monuments is in striking harmony with the requirements of the Scriptural narrative. Though we cannot find the name of "Hebrew "or "Israelite" in the Egyptian texts, we have found the Pharaoh of the Oppression and the Pharaoh of the Exodus. "There arose up a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph." The Tel el-Amarna tablets, as we have seen, have at last thrown a flood of light on this statement. It was not the founder of the Eighteenth dynasty, as had been imagined, but the founder of the Nineteenth, who represented a national reaction against the domination of the Semitic stranger and his religion. Under the later kings of the Eigh- teenth dynasty Egypt had passed more and more into the hands of its subjects from the provinces of Canaan " and Syria. The court had become Asiatic, the 238 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. country was governed by foreigners or by Egyptians who had adopted a foreign creed, the old capital had been forsaken by the Pharaoh, and a crusade had been carried on against the national faith. The death of Khu-n-Aten and the destruction of his capital marked the beginning of a new order of things. The movement which led to the rise of the Nineteenth dynasty resembled the movement of Arabi in our own day. But unlike the movement of Arabi it was successful. The supremacy of the stranger was over- thrown, and the old religion of Egypt was restored to its former place of honour. A Canaanite like Dudu could no longer stand next to the monarch, and be addressed in language similar to that which was addressed to the Pharaoh himself. Joseph had been forgotten, and for the Asiatics who still lingered in Egypt the day of reckoning had arrived. Heavy burdens were imposed upon them ; their free nomadic life was past, and they were reduced to the condition of state slavery. The edict went forth that their male children should be destroyed ; only in this way could they be prevented from again multiplying in the land. As public slaves they were employed in making bricks and building cities for the Pharaoh. Pithom and Raamses were the two cities which were the fruits of Israelitish labour. The name of Raamses indicates the date to which the narrative refers. The. first Pharaoh who bore the name was Ramses I., the leader of the Nineteenth dynasty. But his reign was brief and unimportant, and it must have been his grandson Ramses II., the Sesostris of Greek legend, under whom the city was founded. Ramses II. was THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 239 emphatically the building Pharaoh of Egypt. During his long reign of sixty-seven years the country was covered with his buildings from one end of it to the other. It is difficult to find a place, however remote and obscure, where he has not founded, restored or usurped the monuments of his predecessors. The towns of the Delta were specially indebted to him. Zoan rose from its ruins -and became a favourite residence of the Egyptian king. Bubastis, on the western edge of Goshen, was adorned with his monu- ments, and at Saft el-Henneh itself Mr. Naville has found the fragments of a huge statue of the king. The site of the city of Ramses, which gave its name to " the land of Rameses " (Gen. xlvii. 1 1), has not yet been discovered. But there are allusions to Pi-Ramses "the house of Ramses" in the hieroglyphic texts, and at least two places of the name existed in the Delta. One of them seems to have been near Zoan, the other is mentioned in the great papyrus of Ramses III., who calls it Pi-Ramses-Meri-Amon, "the house of Ramses 11." As it is named in the -papyrus between Pi-Bailos and Athribis, the present Benha, it could not have been far distant from Goshen. This agrees with the statement of Exodus (xiii. 37) that when the Israelites fled from Egypt they started from " Raamses." If the discovery of the site of the city of Ramses still awaits the explorer, this is not the case as regards , Pithom. One of the first achievements of the Egyp- tian Exploration Fund was the disinterment of this monument of Israelitish toil. Mr. Naville was the fortunate discoverer, but he was led to its site by a 240 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. passage on a monument found during the construction of the Suez Canal.^ A few miles to the south-west of Ismailiyeh and on the southern side of the railway Hne are some ancient mounds called Tel el-Maskhutah "the Mound bf the Image." Here Mr. Naville excavated and brought to light a number of inscriptions which have settled the history and geography of the place. It is the site of a town which was built by Ramses II., and dedicated to Tum, the setting sun, in consequence of which it received the sacred name of Pi-Tum or Pithom "the house of Tum." The civil name of the city was Thuku or Thuket, derived from the name of the district in which it was situated and which was called by the same name. Brugsch long ago pointed out that Thuku or Thuket is the Biblical Succotb, which has been assimilated to a Hebrew word mean- ing " booths." Succoth, it will be remembered, was the first stage in the exodus of the Israelites, at which they arrived after leaving "Raamses" (Exod. xiii. 37). Among the papyri preserved in the British Museum is a letter to the king from a scribe written in the eighth year of Meneptah II., the son and successor of Ramses II., and consequently the Pharaoh of the Exodus. It throws light not only on the geographical situation of Pithom, but also on the relations of the Egyptian government with the Shasu, or Bedawin kinsfolk of the Israelites, whose tribes asked permission from time to time to feed their flocks within the eastern borders of Egypt. The letter is as follows — "Another matter for the satisfaction of my master's 1 " The Store-city of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus," by Edouard Naville. Egypt Exploration Fund (1885). THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 24I heart. We have allowed the tribes of the Shasu from the land of Edom to pass the fortress of Meneptah in the land of Thuku (and go) to the lakes of Pithom of Meneptah in the land of Thuku, in order to feed themselves and to feed their herds on the great estate of Pharaoh, the beneficent Sun of all countries. In the year 8." ^ Another papyrus-letter now in the British Museum,* which is dated in the twenty-third year of Ramses II., alludes to "the fortress of Ramses Meri-Amon, which is in the country of Zar." Zar " the desert-plain " lay on the eastern frontier of Egypt, and the city of Zar was held by a garrison which defended Egypffrom attacks on the side of Asia. If we place Zar at Kantarah, midway between Port Said and Ismailiyeh, the dis- trict attached to it would have adjoined Thuku. This, however, is a matter to which we shall have to return presently. The chief fact which concerns us just now is that the two cities built by the Israelites in Egypt have been shown, the one by the name, the other by inscriptions, to have been founded during the reign of Ramses II. He, therefore, must have been the Pharaoh of the Oppression. The conclusion is supported by other evidence. The Tel el-Amarna tablets have made it clear that we must find "the new king which knew not Joseph" in the Pharaohs of the Nineteenth dynasty. They have further made it clear that Canaan could not have been invaded by the Israelites until after the fall of the Eighteenth dynasty. When Khu-n-Aten * See Brugsch : " Egypt under the Pharaohs," Engl, transl., and edit., ii. p. 133. 2 " Select Papyri " Pt. cxviii. 242 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. died, it was still an Egyptian province, garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and administered by Egyptian gov- ernors. Among the tablets are letters from Lachis'h which, we are told in the Book of Joshua, was one of the first of the Hebrew conquests in Palestine, while 'the whole of the hill-country of what was afterwards Judah as well as that of which Shechem became the ' capital was subject to Egyptian authority. The fragmentary annals of Ramses II. make it equally clear that Canaan in his time also was not yet Israelite. Time after time his armies marched through it to oppose the Hittites, and the Pharaoli erected monuments of himself at the mouth of the Dog River near Beyrout in the second and the seventh years of his reign. In the eighth year of his reign the interior of the country was overrun. Not only was Ashkelon taken on the sea-coast, but also Shalam or Jerusalem, Merom and Tabor in the inland parts of Palestine. There is still no sign that the Israelite is as yet in the land. The reign of Ramses II. had the long duration of sixty-seven years. The date of his death has recently been fixed by Dr. Mahler upon astronomical gi-ounds in 1 28 1 B.C. He was succeeded by Meneptah, the four- teenth of his sixty sons. The heritage was a stormy one, and Meneptah's reign was troubled by foreign •invasion. Egypt was assailed by a great confederacy of Libyan tribes, who had allied themselves with " the peoples of the north." Among the latter Sicilians, Sardinians and Akhaeans appear for the first time on the Egyptian monuments.^ The invaders were de- ^ The " Serdani " or Sardiniai;s, however, are mentioned in two of the Tel el-Amarna letters from Phoenicia, as already employed as mercenaries in the Egyptian service. THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 243 feated in a decisive battle fought in the fifth year of the king's reign, and from this time forward Meneptah seems to have hved in peace. Gaza was still an Egyptian possession, and copies of despatches exist which were despatched from it to Tyre and other cities on the Phcenician coast. With the Hittites also peaceful relations were maintained, and we hear of corn having been sent to them by the Pharaoh in a time of famine. Notice has already been taken of the permission which was granted to some Edomite shepherds to settle in the pasture-lands of the eastern Delta during Meneptah's reign. But beyond this we know little about the events which marked the latter years of the Pharaoh's life. His reign does not seem to have been a very long one, although a hymn to the Nile^ speaks of his dying in a good old age. His tomb is in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, and is one of those which were visited by Greek tourists in the days of Diod6ros. Meneptah's successor was his son Seti H. To his reign belongs an official letter, a copy of which has happily been preserved. Dr. Brugsch's translation of it is as follows — " I set out from the hall of the royal palace on the 9th day of the month Epiphi, in the evening, after the two servants. I arrived at the fortress of Thuku on the loth of Epiphi. I was informed that the men had resolved to take their way towards the south. On the 1 2th I reached the fortress. There I was informed that grooms, who had come from the ^ Translated in the " Records of the Past," First Series, iv. p. 49- 244 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. neighbourhood . . . [had reported] that the fugitives had already passed the wall to the north of the Migdol of King Seti Meneptah." The letter offers a curious commentary on the narrative of the Exodus. We are carried by it into the same historical and geographical atmosphere, as it were, as that of the Pentateuch. The route and its successive stages are precisely what they were when the Israelites fled from their "house of bondage"; Thuku, or Succoth, Migdol, and the great wall or "Shur," belong to the geography of the Exodus; they belong also to the geography of the Nineteenth Egyptian dynasty. Seti II. was buried by the side of his father in a sumptuous sepulchre in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. His death was followed by internal and external war. Rival kings arose at Thebes, famine oppressed the people, and Egypt fell once more under foreign dominion. Ramses III. tells us that " the people of Egypt lived in banishment abroad. . . . The land of Egypt belonged to princes from foreign parts. They slew one another, whether noble or mean . . . Arisu, a Phoenician, had raised himself among them to be a prince, and he compelled all the people to pay him tribute. ... So passed away long years until other times came."^ It was then that Set-nekht, the father of Ramses III., and founder of the Twentieth dynasty, again drove away the foreigner and united the kingdom under his sway. If Ramses II. is the Pharaoh of the Oppression, either Meneptah or Seti II. must be the Pharaoh of ^ Brugsch : " Egypt under the Pharaohs," Engl, transl., 2nd edit., ii. p. 143. THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 245 the Exodus. The choice of the Egyptologists has fallen on Meneptah, partly in order to lengthen the period of the judges in Israel, partly because of the magnificence of the tomb of Seti. But it must be I remembered that the narrative in Exodus does not lassert that the Pharaoh was drowned in the passage lof the sea, while the fact that he was regarded as an nmpious oppressor by the Israelites does not prove jthat he was regarded in the same light by the (Egyptians themselves. In their eyes, at all events, his attempt to bring back the runaway slaves of the state was in no way more reprehensible than the attempt to bring back the two runaway servants described in the letter which has been quoted above. Egyptian tradition, however, clearly pointed to Meneptah as the Pharaoh in whose reign the Exodus took place. Josephus calls him Amenephthes (the son of Ramses II.), a name which has been corrupted into Palmanothes by Artapanos (as quoted by Eusebius).^ Josephus has further preserved the Egyptian version of the event from the pages of Manetho, the Egyptian historian.^ The story ran thus. The Pharaoh, Amendphis, desired to see the gods as his predecessor, Oros, had already done. Thereupon he was advised by the seer, Amendphis, the son of Paapis, to clear the land of the leprous and impure. He acted upon the advice, and collected 80,000 persons from all parts of Egypt, whom he separ- 1 " Praeparatio Evangelica," ix. 27. 2 Josephus, cont. Ap. i. 26. Amen&phis, son of Paapis, belongs to history. He is Amen6phis, son of Hapi, who erected the colossal statues of " Memnon " at Thebes, as well as a temple at Deir el-Medingh, in the reign of Amenophis IIL Chaeremon, however, makes the name Phritiphantes. 246 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. ated from the other inhabitants of the country, and condemned to work in the quarries on the eastern side of the Nile. Among them, unfortunately for the king, were some priests. When the seer came to hear of the sacrilege that had been committed against their persons, he prophesied that the impure people would find allies and with their help govern Egypt for thirteen years. Not daring to tell the king of this, -he put it in writing, and then took away his own life. After a time the impure workers in the quarries asked the Pharaoh for Avaris, the old fortress of the Hyksos, which lay desolate and uninhabited. He granted their request, but they had no sooner settled in Avaris than they rose in rebellion, and chose as their leader, Osarsiph, a priest of On. He gave them new laws, forbidding them, among other things, to revere the sacred animals, and set them to rebuild the walls of Avaris. He then sent to the descendants of the Hyksos, who lived at Jerusalem, begging for their assistance. A force of 200,000 men was accord- ingly despatched to Avaris, and the invasion of Egypt decided upon. Amen6phis retired before the invaders, after ordering the images of the gods to be concealed, and sending to a friend his son Sethos, who was at the time only five years old. This Sethos was also called • Ramesses, after the name of his grandfather, Rhampses. Amen6phis carried the sacred bull Apis and other holy animals away with him in his flight. They were placed on board the fleet, which sailed up the Nile into Ethiopia. Here Amen6phis remained for the destined thirteen years, while Osarsiph, who had taken the name of Moses, together with his allies from THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 247 Jerusalem, committed innumerable atrocities. Towns and villages were reduced to ashes, the temples plundered; the sacred animals killed, and the priests massacred. At last, however, Amen6phis and his son Ramesses returned, each at the head of an army ; the enemy were utterly defeated and pursued to the frontiers of Syria. We know from the dynastic tables of Manetho that RhampsSs is the Ramses II. of the monuments, while Sethos-Ramesses, called Ramesses in the tables, is the Seti II. of the native texts, the son and successor of Meneptah. Amen6phis therefore must be Meneptah, who appears under the name of Amenephthes in the list of dynasties. As for Osarsiph, the name is a compound of the Egyptian Osar or Osiris, and the second syllable in the name of Joseph. In the Psalms (Ixxxi. 6) the latter name is written as though it were a compound of Yahveh and a word seph, and it is this view of its origin which has been adopted in the Egyptian legend where the Hebrew God is identified with Osiris. It may be added that the term " impure " is merely a Greek translation of a common epithet applied to foreigners in the hieroglyphic inscriptions. The legend has combined a memory of the great invasion which was shattered by Meneptah in the fifth year of his reign with that of the Israelitish Exodus. The Hyksos and the person of Joseph have further been introduced into it from a distant past. But it is of value, as indicating on the one hand that the flight of the Israelites was not altogether forgotten in Egypt, and on the other hand that the event was assigned to the reign of Meneptah. We may therefore acquiesce in the general opinion of 248 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. scholars which sees in the immediate successor of Ramses II. the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Surprise has sometimes been expressed that no allusion to the Israelites has been found on the Egyptian monuments. The fact is, however, by no means strange. In the eyes of their Egyptian con- temporaries the Israelites were but one of many Shasu or Bedawin tribes who had settled in the pasture-lands of the eastern Delta. Their numbers were comparatively insignificant, their social standing obscure. They were doubtless as much despised and avoided by the Egyptians of their day as similar Bedawin tribes are by the Egyptians of the present time. They lived apart from the natives of the country, and the occupation they pursued was re- garded as fit only for the outcasts of mankind. Such political influence as they had, they possessed only in so far as they were confounded with the other Semitic foreigners who were settled in Egypt. It was these — the " mixed multitude " of Exod. xii. 38 — who seemed dangerous to the Egyptian politicians ; the Israelites by themselves were as harmless and insignificant as the Bedawin whose tents are seen by the modern traveller among the gardens of Ramleh. Centuries had passed since the age of Joseph ; the new king of Egypt and his people knew nothing of him ; and the family to which Joseph had belonged had become merely one of the numerous Bedawin tribes who were allowed to feed their flocks in the waste-lands of the country. They had suffered from the reaction against Semitic supremacy which had characterised the rise of the Nineteenth dynasty, but they had suffered in common with their other Asiatic THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 249 kinsfolk who still remained in the land of the Pharaohs. We are not to suppose that the Israelites only were oppressed ; the oppression was part of a general scheme for breaking down the free spirit of the Bedawin, and reducing them to the condition of public slaves. Those who know modern Egypt and the difficulty experienced by the police in dealing with the Bedawin of to-day will feel some sympathy with the policy of B-amses and his dynasty. The Exodus itself is not an event which need surprise a student of Egyptian history. Indeed a similar migration of Bedawin tribes from the very district occupied by the Israelites has been witnessed in our own days. Yakub Artin Pasha has told me that his father-in-law, the famous Hekekyan Bey, always maintained that he had seen with his own eyes the Israelites departing out of Egypt. Mohammed Ali wished to introduce the manufacture of silk into the country over which he ruled, and accordingly planted the Wadi Tumil^t, the Goshen of the Bible, with mulberry-trees, and attracted to it, not only Syrians from Damascus, but also large bodies of Bedawin Arabs from the Nejd and Babylonia, to whom he promised fertile pasture-grounds and immunity from taxation and the liability to serve in the army. For many years the new population inhabited the Wadi, cultivating the mulberry-trees and spinning silk. After the death of Mohammed Ali, however, an attempt was made to subject them to the ordinary burdens of taxation and conscription. A protest was naturally raised by the Bedawin settlers, to which, however, no attention was paid. Thereupon one night the whole population moved away, along 250 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. with their herds and flocks, leaving their hous^: standing open and deserted. They made their way back to their kinsfolk to the east of Egypt, and the Wadt fell into the state of desolation in which it was found by M. de Lesseps when he excavated the Freshwater Canal. If the date to which the Exodus must be assigned has been the subject of much controversy, the route followed by the Israelites in their departure out of Egypt has been the subject of much more. The abundance of geographical details furnished by the Book of Exodus has itself been the cause of per- plexity. The excavations and researches of recent years, however, have at last begun to throw light on the perplexing question. Little by little we have recovered the geography of the Delta in the age of Moses, and are at last beginning to trace the march of the Hebrews in their flight from Egypt. It is true many points still remain doubtful, and upon these discussion is still possible ; but more points have been finally cleared up, and the main outlines of the ancient map of the Delta can now be filled in. The discovery of Pithom has given us a fixed point from which to start. So also has the settlement of the situation of Goshen and the identification of Succoth with the Thuku of the monuments. Up to this point the route of the Israelites is pretty clear. It followed the canal excavated by Ramses II., which united the Red Sea with the Nile, and watered the Wadi Tumilat. The canal is represented by the Freshwater Canal of to-day. When Succoth was left the Israelites still found themselves within the line of fortification which THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 25,1 guarded Egypt on the east, and was known as the Shur or " Wall " to the Semitic peoples. Two main roads led through it to Palestine. One passed by Zar, in the neighbourhood, probably, of the modern Kantarah, and after proceeding northward to Pelusiura' ran along the coast of the Mediterranean to Gaza and the other cities of the Philistines. It is this road which is called " the way of the land of the Philis- tines" (Exod. xiii. 17); but it was not the road by which the Israelites were led. Zar is a Semitic word, identical with the Babylonian zeru to which reference has already been made. It signified " a plain " or " plateau,'' and was thus ap- plied not only to the great alluvial plain of Babylonia, but also to the plain of the desert. In the Tel el-Amarna tablets the land of Bashan is called Ziri- Basana, " the field of Bashan," and the same name is found in an Egyptian text discovered at Abydos, which tells us that the prime minister of the first year of Meneptah's reign was a native of " Zar-Basana." ^ Similarly in the list of places in Northern Syria, the conquest of which is recorded by Thothmes III. on the walls of Karnak, we meet with Pa-Zaru or " the plain." 2 Zar is thus the equivalent of the Hebrew midhbdr or •' desert." Now an Egyptian report already quoted speaks of " the fortress of Ramses Meri-Amon which is in the district of Zar." The word rendered fortress 1 Mariette : " Abydos," p. 42 1 . The, " prime minister's " native name was Ben-Azna or Ben-Mazna, which he exchanged for the Egyptian Ramses- Pi-Ri. His father's name was Yau "the great." 2 No. 154- 252 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. is Khetem or Khctmu, which seems to have been originally borrowed by the Egyptians from a Semitic language. However this may be, it has sufficient resemblance to the Etham of Exodus (xiii. 2o) and Numbers (xxxiii. 6 — 8) to make it probable that Brugsch is right in identifying the two. The Khetem or fortress stood on the edge of the wilderness — on the edge of the district of Z^r as the Egyptians would have called it — and prevented the marauders of the desert from entering the fertile lands of the Delta. But "the fortress of Ramses II." was not the only Khetem which blocked the way from Asia into Egypt. The letter written in the reign of Seti II. describing the pursuit of the slaves refers to two Khetems, one of them being " the fortress of Thuku," while the other may be that of Ramses Meri-Amon. It is possible that " the Khetem of Thuku '' is the Etham of the Pentateuch. Whether or not this is the case, the situation of the two places could not have been far apart. The people had made their way from Succoth to "the edge of the wilderness"; they had reached the spot where the Egyptian forti- iication lay across their path, and the fortress of Zar, " the desert-plain," protected the road to the land of the Philistines. But at this point the order was given that they should " turn," lest they should " repent when they saw war," The next stage in the journey is described with great minuteness of detail. The camp was pitched " before Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, over against Baal-zephon." Here the fugitives were in- structed to '' encamp by the sea. For Pharaoh will say THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 253 of the children of Israel, They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in." The last words are usually supposed to refer to the position in which the Israelites found themselves in their encamp- ment by the sea. But in this case it would rather have been "the sea "than "the wilderness" which enclosed them, since their escape from the pursuing army of Egypt was subsequently made through " the midst of the sea." The words of the Pharaoh there- fore must be the reason he assigned for the sudden change made by the Israelites in the direction of their flight. They might have passed into the wilderness by the high-road which led through Zar ; the Egyptian officers who guarded the wall had received instructions to allow them to leave the house of their bondage ; but instead of taking advantage of their opportunity they had shifted the line of march and were still on the Egyptian side of the great Wall. The wilderness had " shut them in " ; when they looked out upon the desert region which lay beyond the fertile fields of the country they were leaving, their hearts failed them and they turned back. Such seemed to the Egyptian king the natural explanation of the conduct of his fugitive slaves. Where was this "sea" by the side of which the Israelites pitched their camp ? The answer is hard to give, in spite of the precision of geographical detail with which its position is defined. Mr. Naville would identify Pi-hahiroth (" the mouth of the canal " i") with Pi-Qerhet " the House of the goddess Qerhet," the name of a sanctuary in or near Pithom. But the identification is philologically impossible. On the 2^4 THE HIGHER CRITICISM. Other hand, the Migdol or " Tower " of Egypt, which was upon the eastern frontier of the kingdom, is said by the classical geographers to have been only twelve miles from Pelusium, .and the references to it in Eze- kiel (xxix. lo, xxx. 6) agree with the position they assign to it. There must, however, have been a second Migdol or " Tower." This is evident from the letter which relates to the pursuit of the two slaves. Here "the Migdol of King Seti Meneptah" is stated to be on the east side of the great wall, southward of " the Khetem of Thuku." Similar evidence to that of the letter is borne by the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, made, it must be remembered, by Jews living in Egypt. Instead of Pi-hahiroth the Septuagint has " the farmstead," a reading which is followed by the Coptic version. Now the Edomites who were per- mitted to enter Egypt in the eighth year'of Menep- tab's reign wished to settle in " the great ahu " or " farms-tead " of the Pharaoh, and this was either in -the land of Thuku or in its immediate vicinity. The name of Baal-zephon "Baal of the north "is of Phoenician origin. It implies the existence of a Phceflician sanctuary, where the god of the north wind was propitiated by Phoenician sailors. It must 'therefore have been situated in a locality which was -visited by the ships and merchants of Phoenicia, and so probably was on the sea-coast. We learn from the Assyrian inscriptions that there was another Baal- ^ephon on the shores of Syria, high on the summit of Mount Kasios, and some colour is thus given to the ■theory of Brugsch, which localises the Baal-zephon of Egypt in the Kasios that jutted out into the THE EGYPTIAN TUTELAGE OF ISRAEL. 255 Mediterranean, midway between Pelusiura and El- Arish. But this would have been on that very "way of the Philistines " which the Israelites were forbidden "to follow. Moreover, it is expressly stated that in place of this way of the Philistines, "God led the people about by the way of the wilderness of the Yam S6ph" (Exod. xiii. 18). If we turn to the list of the stages in the march of the Israelites recorded in the thirty-third chapter of Numbers, we find that after leaving Etham the people " turned again unto Pi-hahiroth, which is before Baal- zephon : and they pitched before Migdol. And they departed from before Pi-hahiroth, and passed through the midst of the sea into the wilderness, and went three days' journey in the wilderness of Etham, and pitched in Marah." From Marah they went to Elim, and there encamped "by the Yim S