236 EEV. JOHN TUCKWELL, M.E.A.S., ON ARCHiEOLOGY AND 



such religious worship required to be rendered to Him 

 as those assigned to the beginning of the nation's 

 history, should ha,ve existed at that time. The national 

 faith at first must have been heathenish and polytheistic 

 until the conception of Jehovah as a tribal God had 

 had time to develop into that of a universal Deity. 

 {d) Impossible that the higher religious and spiritual 

 experiences attributed to the historic characters in 

 pre-prophetic times could have been true of them. 

 Accordingly with a strange want of knowledge of the 

 psychology of the religious .life, the keen sense of sin, 

 the humble submissiveness of will, as well as the lofty 

 and sublime ecstacies, attributed in the Book of Psalms 

 to David, are denied to that strong, passion-torn warrior. 

 To satisfy the theory, therefore, they are given over to 

 some unknown exilic or post-exilic writer whose 

 personality was not conspicuous enough to w^n for him 

 any known place in the nation's history, and whose very 

 name is lost in oblivion. 

 These are a few of the conclusions which follow from the 

 application of an evolutionary theory to the Biblical record. 

 To state them is almost sufficient to refute them, but Archeeo- 

 lo^iy in its message to the modern Biblical scholar has some- 

 thing to say concerning them. 



First, with regard to the Mosaic legislation. The scholarship 

 in question answers itself concerning the military element in it 

 by denouncing it as revolting! y cruel and therefvore by no 

 means anachronistic nor requiring any evolutionary theory to 

 explain or to post-date it. Yet, it should ever be remembered 

 that war is never a dainty business, and the little Hebrew 

 peoples had to take it upon the terms imposed upon 

 them by the older and greater and indeed by all the military 

 nations around them. Amongst these nations, however, in 

 later times, the reputation of the Kings of Israel is testified 

 to by the servants of Benhadad, king of Syria, who say to 

 him, " Behold now we have heard that the kings of the 

 House of Israel are merciful kings " (i Kings xx, 31). The 

 justness of this contrast cannot be doubted by anyone who has 

 read in the original the unabaslied boastfulness of Sennacherib 

 upon the Taylor Cylinder, in his description of the unmitigated 

 and disgusting cruelty with which he treated the living, dying and 

 dead upon the battlefield. There are no signs of an evolution- 

 ary process there. But when we are shocked at the militarism 

 of the past it may be well to remember that under the coming 



