OF BABYLONIAN CONCEPTIONS ON JEWISH THOUGHT. 331 



(as contained in the Bible) to the question of " religion " in 

 general. 



No one, however, can fairly find fault with the Victoria Institute j 

 for allowing this matter to come up for discussion, even though the >. 

 present rather laboured effort may be felt by some of us to be but aj 

 very lame apology for the " Higher Critics." j 



Mr. John Schwartz, Jun., writes : — 



Our able lecturer has clearly enunciated the main point at issue 

 (on p. 300) " Unless we were to assume that the historical and 

 scientific setting in which religious conceptions are enshrined was 

 directly and infallibly revealed to men by God ; " and this assump- 

 tion it is increasingly difficult to hold with an ampler knowledge 

 and broader point of view. 



He deals on p. 303 with that difficult problem that in Manephthah's 

 reign (the reputed Pharaoh of the Exodus) Israelites were conquered 

 in Canaan ; and again on p. 310 to the Tel-el-Amarna tablets which 

 record Amenhetep III.'s conquest of the Abiri or Hebrews in 

 Palestine 150 years earlier. This king married a Semitic princess 

 Thi, and his son introduced a pure monotheistic worship, probably 

 inherited from his mother. Lieut.-Colonel Conder, in his interesting 

 book The Hittites, argues very forcibly that the Exodus took place at 

 this earlier date, about 1480 B.C., which agrees with the Babylonian, 

 Assyrian and Hebrew chronology, I Kings vi, 1, and asserts that the 

 Sosthic year Egyptian calculations are inconclusive. 



Canon Girdlestone writes : — 



I have read Archdeacon Potter's paper with surprise. Whatever 

 its object, its effect would be to reduce the historical character of the 

 Bible, which it is the desire of the Victoria Institute to uphold. Its 

 sting is in its tail, for we are told (p. 316) that Christ must have been 

 limited in his historical and scientific knowlege because He questioned 

 the doctors ! 



Going back to the beginning, the narrative concerning Eden 

 is dismissed as a J. story (p. 315), and the text of Genesis 2 is 

 read in such a way as to produce the impression that man was made 

 before the animals, the words " first " and " afterwards " being 

 calmly inserted to prove it. Petrie's date for the Exodus is appa- 

 rently accepted (p. 314), although it is, in the judgment of Canon 

 Cook, Colonel Conder, and others, quite inconsistent with the 

 scripture, and then a reference to Israel lately found, and inconsistent 



