230 EEV. JOHN TUCKWELL, M.E.A.S., ON AECH^OLOGY AND 



Hebrew story appearing in so close an approximation to the 

 same order in the Babylonian ? If, according to the commonly 

 held critical theory, the Genesis story was derived from the 

 Babylonian, then two theories more are necessary to complete 

 the explanation. First, that two Hebrew writers split up the 

 Babylonian story, each leaving out parts essential to its com- 

 pleteness, which the other selected, and one using the name 

 "Yaweh" and the other the name "Elohim" to designate the 

 Deity. Second, that a redacteur of a later period found these 

 two bi-sections and spliced them together again in almost the 

 same as their original Babylonian form. Can we be reasonably 

 expected to prefer such an anomalous congeries of theories as 

 this to the simple and obvious one that in the Hebrew and 

 Babylonian records we have two versions of one original event, 

 the former, simple, credible, and true, and the latter, distorted, 

 perverted, and heathenized, coloured by the customs and 

 prejudices, and debased by the false religious conceptions, of the 

 channel through which it flowed ? 



But, further, there is in the Pierpont Morgan Library of New 

 York a fragment of a tablet containing this story dated in the 

 reign of Ammi-zaduga of "The First Dynasty of Babylon," 

 some eighteen hundred years before Christ. Dr. Pinches also, 

 in a paper read before this Institute last year upon a fragment 

 discovered at Nippur and now in the Philadelphia Museum, 

 U.S.A., possibly the oldest fragment in existence, called our 

 attention to the fact that although its contents consist mainly 

 of the so-called " E " (P) element, yet it contains a reference 

 to the birds which are supposed to belong to " J." 



With all this evidence before us, what reason can there be 

 except the persistent adhesion to an arbitrary literary hypothesis 

 for supposing that the Hebrews, with a Babylonian parentage and 

 with the starry heavens whispering it to them night by night, 

 had no consistent and coherent story of the Deluge until two 

 thousand years later ? Surely, if modern Biblical scholarship 

 is to maintain its claim to the possession of a scientific spirit, it 

 must condescend, either to rebut this evidence or frankly to say, 

 with Professor Eerdmanns, concerning its late dates and composite 

 hypotheses, " I believed so myself for many years, but I no 

 longer hold that opinion." 



11. 



Anotlier part of the message which Archaeology has to convey 

 to modern Biblical scholarship is that the early history of man, 

 as it has come down to us, can no longer be treated as mythical. 



