80 SEMITIC LANGUAGE 



Hanbal, held that religious truth had no other source than the 

 Quran and tradition, and that reason availed nothing. Ahmad, the 

 Mohammedan, was the Jacobi of Christianity, who said, " by my faith 

 I am a Christian, by my reason a heathen." The drift back to the 

 primitive monotheism of Mohammed, and the drift to an agnostic 

 mysticism, marks the thinking of many Mohammedans at the present 

 time, just as similar movements may be found among ourselves. 

 Starting out from practically the same principle of revelation, there 

 is a remarkable parallelism in the development of doctrine among 

 the followers of Mohammed with respect to the Quran to many 

 views held by our fellow Christians in different ages with respect to 

 our Scriptures. Christians will not admit the legitimacy of the 

 Mohammedan's reasoning with respect to his sacred Suras, though 

 it is in all essentials the same as their own. 



Just so long as Semitists and theologians were shut up to the use 

 of the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, it was easier to 

 hold to the historic ideas of revelation and inspiration. But the 

 thoughts of men are widening with the emergence into view of the 

 life and thought of other branches of the Semitic family. No one 

 needs now to be told of the immense literature that fills the museums 

 of the world, which, during the last few decades, has been recovered 

 from many mounds in the traditional ancestral home of the Hebrews. 

 In the light of these histories, legends, myths, cosmogonies, these 

 epics, hymns, prayers, religious rituals, and incantations, legal codes, 

 etc., we read anew the life and thought of Israel. The first twelve 

 chapters of Genesis clearly draw from a Babylonian source. The 

 original matter came to the Hebrews by the way of Babylon. The 

 whole is recast in the spirit of the later prophetic and priestly mono- 

 theistic schools,, but none of us can hereafter look upon these chapters 

 as possessing that kind or degree of inspiration which, until lately, it 

 has been customary to ascribe to them. The two accounts of creation 

 in the first and second chapters of Genesis, it has long been recognized, 

 are utterly irreconcilable. The story of the building of the tower in 

 the land of Shinar, Gen. 11, and the " confusion of tongues," with 

 its impossible accounting for the name of Babel, are removed at once 

 from the sphere of history to that of legendary fiction, and Volks- 

 Etymologie. The laws purporting to have been revealed to Ham- 

 murabi by the god Shamash, twenty-three hundred years B.C., are in 

 many instances as wise, humane, and ethical, in others more so, as 

 those commonly supposed to have been given to Moses by Yahwe 

 one thousand years later. 



When we come to the history of " Yahwe's Wars, " we read such an 

 account as that of the destruction of the Amorites at Gibeon in the 

 light of the victories of other gods " beyond the River." " And Yahwe 

 discomfited them before Israel, and he slew them with a great slaugh- 



