168 EEV. ANDREW CRAIG ROBINSON, M.A., ON THE BEARING OF 



Professor Bissel, as long ago as 1892, in a work of his, 

 Genesis in Colours (p. xiii), drew attention to the fact that the 

 Babylonian narrative contained in a united form the various 

 incidents which the critics in the case of the narrative in 

 Genesis distribute between the two supposed writers, the 

 Elohistic and the Yahvist. Professor Sayce in his work, Earhj 

 History of the Hehreivs (1897) pressed the same point and 

 repeated it in a later book, The Religions of Ancient JEgypt and 

 Bahylonia (1902), p. 444. The fact is that the effect of this 

 Babylonian Deluge Tablet is to place the critical analysis of 

 the Flood story in Genesis between the hammer and the anvil ; 

 between the hammer of the combined account in the Babylonian 

 tablet and the anvil of the combined account in Genesis. 



The critics have analysed the Biblical account of the Deluge 

 into two documents which, originally separate and independent, 

 they hold to have been intertwined. There is the priestly 

 writer P, who uses the Divine name Elohim and takes pleasure 

 in formal phrases, precise chronological statements and records 

 of genealogies, and to hnn certain incidents in the Flood 

 narrative are attributed. And then there is the imaginative 

 writer J, who uses the Divine title Yahveh, and whose narra- 

 tive is striking and picturesque ; and to him certain other 

 incidents are attributed. These two writers are held to be 

 quite independent of each other, and to write from completely 

 opposite points of view. 



But to trouble all this specious theory comes this incontestable 

 record from ancient Babylonia, and it shows that all these 

 incidents — formal or picturesque — supposed to be each so 

 characteristic as to denote different writers in the Pentateuch,, 

 and so diverse from one another as to indicate distinct and 

 independent points of view, existed as a matter of fact in a 

 state of absolute union in a document as ancient as the times- 

 of Abraham. 



If the formal and the picturesque could dwell amicably 

 together in the Babylonian narrative — what warrant is there 

 for inventing a formal writer and a picturesque for the narrative 

 in Genesis ? 



In the light, then, of the Babylonian Flood tablet, the theory 

 which we are expected by the critics to accept appears to be 

 supremely unreasonable. We are to believe that first came th(3 

 fully-developed story of the Flood in the Babylonian Deluge 

 tablet. Then followed deterioration by scission, or splitting, 

 one-half of the story being se])arated by the Elohistic writer P, 

 and the other half carried off by the Yahvist ; and then the 



