EECENT ORIKNTAL DISCOVEliIRS ON OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 157 



Israelites may have had with Mesopotamia was not with Ur of 

 the Chaldees ; yet it is hard to imagine what motive there could 

 be for making the place of Abraham's birth Ur of the Chaldees, 

 unless in point of fact in Ur of the Chaldees he was born. 



A very considerable number of the critics, however, deny that 

 Abraham was a real person at all ; they hold, or assert, that his 

 life as we have it in the Old Testament is an imaginative fiction 

 of later times, an edifying story composed to retiect back and 

 embody in the concrete person of an individual the religious 

 ideas of a later age. Thus Wellhausen says of Abraham, that 

 we may not regard him 



" as an historical person ; he might with more likelihood be 

 regarded as a free creation of unconscious art." Prolegomena, 

 p. 320. 



Tliis is more or less the general attitude of the critics. Dr. 

 Driver indeed seems to allow that there may have been some 

 historical basis for the narratives of the patriarchs. He writes : — 



" It is highly probable that the critics who doubt the presence of 

 any historical basis for the narratives of the patriarchs are ultra- 

 sceptical." Authmity and Archceology, p. 150. 



Now since Wellhausen believes that Abraham was the fictitious 

 creation of a later time, it seems to have puzzled him to conceive 

 why he should be represented as having belonged originally to 

 Babylonia : — 



" What the reasons were for making Babylon Abraham's point of 

 departure we need not now consider." Prolegomena, p. 313." 



But like so many of the rest of the critics he does not believe 

 that Ur Casdim belongs to the original form of the tradition. 

 It is no wonder that Wellhausen should be at a loss to explain 



*' what the reasons were for making Babylon Abraham's point of 

 departure ; " 



for on the supposition that the story of the life of Abraham was 

 an artificial one, what reason could there be for making it start 

 in Babylonia ? why, from such a point of view, should the early 

 chapters of Genesis be clad, as it were, in a " Babylonish 

 garment" ? There seems to be no other reasonable explanation 

 of why the narrative of Abraham's life begins in Babylonia but 

 one, and that is, that his history is a real one, and that, in point 

 of fact, it was from Babylonia that Abraham came. 



His very name Abram seems to have come from Babylonia. 

 No other Hebrew is recorded in the Bible as having borne that 

 name, but in a tablet of the reign of Abil-Sin, the fourth king 



