6io LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1887 



In the present volume the analytical process is not only 

 kept quite in the background, but has really very little 

 influence on the author s conclusions. The faculty of 

 imagination, or, as M. Renan prefers to say, of divination, 

 rules supreme, and controls the use made of critical results. 

 It would not be fair to pronounce a final judgment on 

 M. Renan s work from the fragment now before us, but 

 hitherto the auspices are far from favourable. He tells 

 us himself that nothing in the history of Israel is explicable 

 without the patriarchal age, and it is plain, even at this 

 stage, that his reconstruction of the patriarchal age is 

 altogether wrong, and must equally be wrong whether the 

 Pentateuchal narrative is historical or legendary. On the 

 former supposition cadit quaestio ; it would be idle to ask 

 whether M. Renan s view of the history can be reconciled 

 with a literal adhesion to tradition. His position is that 

 the patriarchs never existed, but that Genesis and the 

 book of Job depict with a certain amount of idealisation a 

 life which did exist in the patriarchal age. Abraham is 

 not an historical character, in truth he was borrowed by 

 the imagination of the Hebrew nomad from the figure of 

 an ancient king of Ur, which they had opportunities of 

 seeing on Babylonian cylinders. 1 But the colour of the 

 stories of Genesis is true ; they represent the life of the 

 nomadic Semites as it really was, as it still is among the 

 Arabian Bedouins, or as it is described in the legends of 

 the Arabs before Mohammed, especially in the &quot; Kitab 

 al-Aghani,&quot; to which M. Renan makes constant references, 

 but always and very prudently without descending to 

 particulars. A generation ago it was fashionable to call 

 Abraham an Arab sheikh : M. Renan is content to say 

 that he is the type of an Arab sheikh ; but in point of fact 



1 By a prodigious feat of philological audacity, M. Renan conjectures 

 that Abraham means &quot; father Orham,&quot; the letters he and heth being 

 confounded in the most ancient Semitic. But this act of prowess, 

 which few will venture to imitate, is unhappily thrown away. The 

 Babylonian word may be read Uruk, or Amilapsi, or Urbagas, or Lik- 

 bagas, or no one knows how, 



