722 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tiquity fatal to the sacred chronology of the Hebrews. He also 

 cast aside a mass of doubtful apologetics aud dealt frankly with 

 the fact that very many of the early narratives in Genesis belong 

 to the common stock of ancient tradition, and, mentioning as an 

 example the cuneiform inscriptions which record a story of the 

 Accadian king Sargon how " he was born in retirement, placed 

 by his mother in a basket of rushes, launched on a river, rescued 

 and brought up by a stranger, after which he became king " he 

 did not hesitate to remind his readers that Sargon lived a thousand 

 years before Moses ; that this story was told of him several hun- 

 dred years before Moses was born ; and that it was told of vari- 

 ous other important personages of antiquity. The professor dealt 

 just as honestly with the inscriptions which show sundry state- 

 ments in the book of Daniel to be unhistorical ; candidly making 

 admissions which but a short time before would have filled ortho- 

 doxy with horror. 



A few years later came another testimony even more striking. 

 Early in the last decade of the nineteenth century it was noised 

 abroad that the Rev. Professor Sayce, of Oxford, the most emi- 

 nent Assyriologist and Egyptologist of Great Britain, was about 

 to publish a work in which what is known as the " higher criti- 

 cism " was to be very vigorously and probably destructively 

 dealt with in the light afforded by recent research among the 

 monuments of Assyria and Egypt. The book was looked for 

 with the most eager expectation by the supporters of the tra- 

 ditional view of Scripture ; but, when it appeared, the exulta- 

 tion of the traditionalists was speedily changed to dismay. For 

 Prof. Sayce, while showing some severity toward sundry minor 

 assumptions and assertions of biblical critics, confirmed all their 

 more important conclusions which properly fell within his prov- 

 ince. A few of the statements of this champion of orthodoxy 

 may be noted. He allowed that the week of seven days and the 

 Sabbath rest are of Babylonian origin ; indeed, that the very 

 word " Sabbath " is Babylonian ; that there are two narratives of 

 Creation on the Babylonian tablets, wonderfully like the two 

 leading Hebrew narratives in Genesis, and that the latter were 

 undoubtedly drawn from the former ; that the " garden of Eden " 

 and its mystical tree were known to the inhabitants of Chaldrea 

 in pre-Semitic days ; that the beliefs that woman was created out 

 of man, and that man by sin fell from a state of innocence, are 

 drawn from very ancient Chaldsean-Babylonian texts; that As- 

 syriology confirms the belief that the book Genesis is a compila- 

 tion ; that portions of it are by no means so old as the time of 

 Moses; and that the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife was 

 drawn in part from the old Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers. 

 Finally, after a multitude of other concessions, Prof. Sayce al- 



