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KEV. ANDREW CEAIG ROBINSON, M.A._, ON 



should they at once conckide that the Scripture must be wrong ? 

 In the British Museum we had 150,000 tablets and tens of thousands 

 in other collections all over the world ; yet up to the present time 

 he did not know of a single case in which a cuneiform tal)let had 

 disproved any historical incident recorded in Scripture. With 

 regard to Belshazzar being called the son of Nebuchadnezzar, 

 among neither the Babylonians nor the Greeks did the expression 

 " son " always mean the direct offspring. Nabonidus himself 

 called Naram-Sin the " son " of Sargon, yet we had learnt from a 

 tablet recently discovered that two kings reigned beween them, so 

 that he may well have been a grandson or some other relation. In 

 the first chapter of Matthew, Joram is said to have begotten Ozias ; 

 yet he was his great-great-grandfather. We needed to guard 

 against the error of forcing our own narrow meanings upon the 

 expressions of ancient writers, and should seek to find the meaning 

 which the writers themselves intended. It was quite a mistake to 

 suppose that the tablets were infallible ; moreover, the records upon 

 the historical tablets, such for instance as those of Sargon and 

 Esarhaddon, were not always arranged in chronological order. 



Concerning the suggestion that, because Darius the Mede is 

 stated to have appointed governors (Dan. vi, 1), he has thereby 

 been confused with Darius Hystaspes, it would be found on page 1 3 

 of the present paper that Gubaru is distinctly stated to have 

 appointed " governors in Babylon," — an expression which does not 

 preclude the possibility that their jurisdiction may have been 

 much wider than the city, and have extended over the whole 

 country. 



Col. Van SOMEREN said that, as regarded the deciphering of 

 inscriptions, he felt hardly qualified to take part in the discussion ; 

 but he believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. Might 

 not the title " King of the Chaldeans," given to Belshazzar, be like 

 the title " Prince of Wales " given to the eldest son of the King of 

 England 1 He would like to ask whether " Tidal, King of Nations," 

 mentioned in Gen. xiv, should not be literally, " Tidal, King of 

 Gutium." If so, was he a King of Media 1 



Mr. Martin KouSE believed that the "queen" who came in to 

 advise Belshazzar at the banquet whereat his wives were already 

 present, was the true queen, the wife of Nabonidus. This intro- 

 duction of her as " the queen " without qualification, like the 



