MODERN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP. 



238 



roots, while that of the former is its triconsonantal. But in not 

 a few cases the Semitic roots have the appearance of being formed 

 out of the Sumerian by lengthening, by prepositional additions 

 or by reduplication, e/j. bar " to split," " to divide," ^"J^" " 

 cut," to carve," " to create," lam " to shut up," l^'I " to 

 curb," " to restrain," etc. 



At all events, with so much evidence at its command, 

 Archfeology may fitly urge that the early history of man which 

 has come down to us from Hebrew sources should not be treated 

 as mythical, and its compilation be thrust forward to a time 

 when the shattered fragments of the nation gathered themselves 

 up after seventy years of humiliating captivity under the 

 yoke of a kindred people far behind them in religious knowledge 

 and scarcely their superiors in any of the arts of civilized life. 



But it can go further, and show that instead of legendizing 

 the historic heroes of antiquity, we ought rather to reverse the 

 tendency, and liumanize the legendary heroes. In Egypt, 

 Menes, the founder of the First Dynasty, is now regarded as an 

 historical personage by Professor Flinders Petrie, and his tomb 

 is believed to have been discovered at Abydos ; so also with 

 Minos II., the Cretan sea-kiug and descendant of Zeus, and 

 even Father Zeus himself is in danger of losing his divinity. 

 The cave of Dicte, where his mother, Ehea, is said by one 

 tradition to have brought him forth, and Mount Juktas, where 

 he is said to have been buried, have been identified by the 

 excavators at Knossos. Just as in the case of Marduk or 

 ISTimrod, the chief deity of the later Babylonians, the cities 

 which constituted the beginning of his imperialism have, with 

 the excavations of the Philadelphia expedition at Nippur, all 

 been made known. 



What wonder then if Archaeology should be able to give an 

 emphatic denial to the theory that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 

 were Canaanitish demi-gods ? In 1869, Professor ISToldeke 

 declared that " criticism had for ever disposed of the claim " 

 that Genesis xiv was Instorical. But thanks to Dr. Pinches for 

 his decipherment of the Chedorlaomer Tablets the historicity of 

 that chapter has " for ever " been put beyond reasonable doubt. 

 With our knowledge of " The First Dynasty of Babylon " and 

 their successors, the Kassites, we are able to follow the history 

 of the Hebrew patriarchs as it flowed on side by side with the 

 Babylonian and Egyptian. Thus : — 



i. Abraham must have been born in the reign of 

 Sumu-la-ilu. 



