THE DISPERSION 187 



brutality, have nothing in common with our narrator, 

 and cannot possibly understand his statements. 



2. The document does not profess to be a series 

 of ethnological inferences from the present or ancient 

 characters of different nations, but an actual his- 

 torical statement of the known migrations of men 

 from a common centre in Shinar, the Sumir of the 

 Chaldeans. 



3. It relates only to the primary distribution of 

 men from their alleged centre over certain districts 

 of Western Asia, Eastern Europe, and Northern 

 Africa, and does not profess to know anything of 

 their subsequent migrations or history. 



4. It is thus not responsible for those later, even 

 if very ancient, changes which displaced one race by 

 another, or obliged one race to move on by the 

 pressure of another, nor for any changes of language 

 or mixtures of races which may have occurred in 

 these movements. 



5. It affirms nothing as to the physical characters 

 of the races referred to, except as they may be 

 inferred from heredity, but it implies some resemblance 

 in language between the derivatives of the same 

 stock, and this, be it observed, notwithstanding the 

 added narrative of the confusion of tongues at Babel, 1 

 which the narrator does not regard as interfering 

 with the fact of languages originally forming a few 

 branches proceeding from a common stock. 



1 Held by some to belong to another (Jahvistic) document, but 

 certainly incorporated by the early editor. 



