The Early History of the Hebrews
9781465538987
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There are many histories of Israel, but this is the first attempt to write one from a purely archæological point of view. During the last few years discovery after discovery has come crowding upon us from the ancient East, revolutionising all our past conceptions of early Oriental history, and opening out a new and unexpected world of culture and civilisation. For the Oriental archæologist Hebrew history has ceased to stand alone; it has taken its place in that great stream of human life and action which the excavator and decipherer are revealing to us, and it can at last be studied like the history of Greece or Rome. The age of the Patriarchs is being brought close to us; our museums are filled with written documents which are centuries older than Abraham; and we are beginning to understand the politics which underlie the story of the Pentateuch and the causes of the events which are narrated in it. Over against the facts of archæology stand the subjective assumptions of a certain school, which, now that they have ceased to be predominant in the higher latitudes of scholarship, are finding their way into the popular literature of the country. Between the results of Oriental archæology and those which are the logical end of the so-called ‘higher criticism’ no reconciliation is possible, and the latter must therefore be cleared out of the way before the archæologist can begin his work. Hence some of the pages that follow are necessarily controversial, and it has been needful to show why the linguistic method of the ‘literary analysis’ is essentially unscientific and fallacious when applied to history, and must be replaced by the method of historical comparison. Even while my book has been passing through the press, a new fact has come to light which supplements and enforces the conclusion I have drawn in the second chapter from a comparison of the account of the Deluge in the book of Genesis with that which has been recovered from the cuneiform inscriptions. At the recent meeting of the Oriental Congress in Paris, Dr. Scheil stated that among the tablets lately brought from Sippara to the museum at Constantinople is one which contains the same text of the story of the Flood as that which was discovered by George Smith. But whereas the text found by George Smith was written for the library of Nineveh in the seventh centuryB.C., the newly-discovered text was inscribed in the reign of Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi or Amraphel, in the Abrahamic age. And even then the text was already old. Here and there the word khibi, ‘lacuna,’ was inserted, indicating that the original from which it had been copied was already illegible in places. Since this text agrees, not with the ‘Elohist’ or the ‘Yahvist’ separately, but with the supposed combination of the two documents in the book of Genesis, it is difficult to see, as the discoverer remarked, how the ‘literary analysis’ of the Pentateuch can be any longer maintained. At all events, the discovery shows the minute care and accuracy with which the literature of the past was copied and handed down. Edition after edition had been published of the story of the Deluge, and yet the text of the Abrahamic age and that of the seventh century B.C. agree even to the spelling of words. It is the ‘higher critics’ themselves, and not the ancient writers whom they criticise, that are careless or contemptuous in their use of evidence. In the preface to my Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments I have referred to a flagrant example of their attempt to explain away unwelcome testimony.
