THE WITNESS OF ARCH.i:OLOGY TO THE BIBLE. 



205 



light thrown on the high culture of early Babylonia. Here, 

 long before the time of Abraham, we find ourselves in the midst 

 of cities, arts, letters, books, libraries; and Abraham's own 

 age — that of Hammurabi — was the bloom tide of this civilisation. 

 Instead of Israel being a people emerging from the dim dawn 

 of barbarism, we find in the light of these discoveries, that it was 

 a people on whom from its own standpoint the ends of the 

 earth had come. ... I read sometimes with astonishment of 

 the statement that Babylonian discovery has done little or 

 nothing for the confirmation of these old parts of Genesis. 



" Take that old tenth chapter of Genesis, the ' Table of 

 Nations.' Professor Kautzsch, of Halle, a critic of note, says 

 of that old table, ' The so-called Table of Nations remains, ac- 

 cording to all results of monumental exploration, an ethnogra- 

 phic original document of the first rank which nothing can 

 replace.' In this tenth chapter of Genesis, verses 8-10, we 

 have certain statements about the origin of Babylonian civiliza- 

 tion. We learn (1) that Babylonia is the oldest of civilizations; 



(2) that Assyrian civilization was derived from Babylonia; and 



(3) strangest of all, that the founders of Babylonian civilization 

 were not Semites, but Hamites — descendants of Gush. Each 

 of these statements was in contradiction to old classical notices 

 and to what was currently believed till recently about those 

 ancient people. Yet it will not be disputed that exploration has 

 justified the Bible on each of these points. Assyria, undoubtedly, 

 was younger than Babylonia; it derived its civilization, arts. 

 r?liofion, institutions, all that it had, from Babylonia. Strangest 

 of all, the originators of Babylonian civilization, the Accadians, 

 or Sumerians, were a people, not of Semitic, but apparently of 

 Turanian or what the Bible would call Hamitic stock."* 



The transformation of opinion is revolutionary. The effect 

 has been most marked on archaeologists themselves. Sayce, 

 Hommel, Halevy, all formerly advocates of the critical view, 

 have abandoned it."f 



The cuneiform script of the Babylonians was not only the 

 language of diplomacy and commerce, but the vast corre- 

 spondence which has come down to us on the clay tablets shows 

 that letters passed to and fro amonor the common people on the- 

 most trivial subjects. Evidence has been found of the establish- 

 ment of a postal system in Babylonia extending to its Palestine 

 province in the days of Naram-Sin, many centuries before the 

 time of Abraham.*- 



* "The Fundamentals/' Vol. VI.. p. 90. 

 + Dr. Orr, " The Problem of the Old Testament,^' p. 397. 

 '* " The Deciding Voice of the Monuments." p. 8^ 



