206 



:\IIS5 A. M. HODGKIX ON 



" The Babylonia of the age of Abraham was a more highly 

 educated country than the England of George III.'' " From 

 one end of the civilized ancient world to the other men and women 

 were reading and writing and corresponding with one another; 

 schools abounded and great libraries were formed, in an age 

 which the ' critic ' only a few years ago dogmatically declared 

 was almost wholly ilhterate. ' "f 



From the Tel-el-Amarna tablets we find that even the Egyp- 

 tian court had to use this language when corresponding with 

 its Asiatic provinces. If Dr. Naville is right in his very interest- 

 ing paper for the Victoria Institute,** in believing that Moses 

 wrote the Pentateuch in cuneiform script on clay tablets, it 

 will prove a very awkward fact for the critics. The idea, as he 

 says, had already been put forward by Col. Conder and Pro- 

 fessor Sayce. The latter gives several instances t-o show that 

 " behind the present Hebrew text of certain portions of the 

 Old Testament lies an earlier text in the language of the Tel-el- 

 Amarna tablets, "if 



The discovery of the Code of Hammm'abi, a contemporary of 

 Abraham, proves that such a code as that of Moses was more 

 than possible. " That Babylonian law should have been already 

 codified in the age of Abraham deprives the ' critical ' theory, 

 which makes the Mosaic Law posterior to the Prophets, of one 

 of its two maia supports. The theory was based on two denials — 

 that writing was used for literary purposes in the time of Moses, 

 and that a legal code was possible before the period of the 

 Jewish kings. The discovery of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets dis- 

 proves the first assumption : the discovery of the Code of Ham- 

 murabi has disproved the second. Centuries before Moses the 

 law had already been codified, and the Semitic populations had 

 long been familiar with the conception of a code."* 



The Assyrian tablets containing the legends of Creation and 

 of the Deluge show a debased polytheism. Comparing the 

 Creation tablets with the first chapter of Genesis. Prof. Pinches 

 writes, " The important point is, that there is very little in all 

 this that implies borrowing, as has been stated, on the part of 

 the writer of the book of Genesis. In the opinion of the Baby- 

 lonians the heavens and the earth came into existence and were 

 not created . . . there is no appearance of the Deity as the 

 first and only cause of the existence of things. . . . The simple 

 theology which appears in the book of Genesis did not, there- 



+ Prof. Savce in " Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies." pp. 

 55, 42. ' 



**" V.I.," Vol. XLVII., p. 337. 



■»--^ " Homiletic Review." 1910. 



* Prof. Sayce, *' Monument Facts," p. 69. 



