222 EEV. JOHX TCCinVELL; M.E.A.S.^ OX ARCHiEOLOGY AXD 



The editor of that edition point? out that in Tom Paine's 

 denunciation of the Jewish wars ; his denial of the Mosaic 

 authorship of the Pentateuch ; his rejection of the Davidic 

 authorship attributed to so large a numl:>er of the Psalms : his 

 assertion of the composite character of the book of Isaiah ; his 

 views of the Virgin Birth predicted in the Old Testament and 

 recorded as a fact in the Xew ; and the discredit he casts upon 

 the authorship of Gospels and Epistles., he anticipated the Aiews 

 held by many German and English divines of the present day. 

 The same thinii is also shown by the late Dr. Parker in his 

 remarkable little book entitled Xone Like It. He says, " It must 

 be clearly understood that the name of Tom Paine was not 



introduced by me, but by ]\Ir. H ; and it must Ije further 



understood that I quote it to prove c^ne point only, namely, that 

 Paine anticipated in substance the main contentions in literary 

 criticism of the Higher Critics, and it can be further proved 

 that Paine himself , so far as this point is concerned, was only an 

 echo of a much older Deism. All this should be remembered 

 when cor.sidering the supposed originality of recent writers 

 (p. 216). Xow a statement would not be untrue because Paine 

 made it. and I offier these quotations in confirmation of the ^iew 

 expressed concerning the historic relationship between the 

 present and the past. 



My purpose in this paper is to present in as concise a form as 

 possible some of the best-known results of modern arcu^eological 

 research, and to claim for them a fuller recognition and a larger 

 place in the Biblical scholarship of the day, however it may have 

 arisen. The justice of this claim is forcibly represented by 

 Professor Eerdmanns who, himself, formerly accepted the con- 

 clusions of the Higher Critical school and still occupies the 

 professorial chair at Leyden in succession to the celebrated higher 

 critical scholar Kuenen. He says : *' The time in which the now 

 dominating school of criticism arose was prior to the many 

 discoveries made in Assyria, Babylonia, I^ypt and Syria . . . 

 The theoiy of evolution was then prevailine in science and 

 philosophy, and its influence was doubtless felt in critical and 

 historical studies on Old Testament subjects . . . The many 

 contradictions which even the ordinary careful reader of the Bible 

 was often able to discover gave the ardent scholar the means for 

 constructing a new building out of the scattered pieces of Hebrew 

 literature. In erecting this building, scholars did not always see 

 the great difficulties of their position and the traps that were 

 to ]:»e avoided.'" 



At the time to which Professor Eerdmanns refers Dr. Yoimg 



