CONCERNING THE COMPOSITION OP HOLY SCRIPTURE. 183 



his posterity the very best elements of the civilization and 

 culture in which he himself had been brought up. How 

 true this is which the Scripture records quietly take for 

 granted as a thing not needing to be said, the recently 

 recovered laws of Khammurabi, the contemporary of Abraham, 

 and many other modern discoveries amply testify. In Egypt 

 also both the people and their leaders were brought into 

 contact with one of the greatest and foremost nations of 

 antiquity. A shipload of English people going to America or 

 Australia do not need to revert to an imaginary prehistoric 

 savagery before they establish a national constitution ; why 

 then should it be thought necessary to doubt the veracity of a 

 record which does not assert that an offshoot from Babylonia 

 did so ? And why should it be thought necessary to conciliate 

 an irrational unbelief by l^reaking up the Scripture records into 

 inexplical:>le fragments and rearranging them in an incredible 

 order ? 



Next we may be permitted to inquire whether such 

 indubitable facts as are known to us and a legitimate use 

 of the Scripture records themselves will bear out this 

 hypothesis. In spite of Professor Delitsch's lecture on Bahel 

 Wild Bihcl, no Assyriologist in the world has yet been able to 

 disprove that the historical records of Holy Scripture have 

 received great and remarkable confirmation from the recent 

 discoveries of archaeology. If this be not so let us be told 

 categorically the historic errors which archaeology has dis- 

 covered. Babel, Erech, Accad and Calneli, the cities over 

 which even Mmrod ruled ; Asshur, Mneveh and Kalah the 

 first cities of Assyria ; Karchemish, the great Hittite capital, 

 and other cities without number are all found in the very 

 localities indicated by the Biblical records, while historic events 

 almost innumerable connected with other nations contemporary 

 with the Hebrews, with their chief promoters and actors, are 

 directly or indirectly confirmed. Thanks to Dr. Pinches, 

 Chedorlaomer, Arioch, and Tidal have started up out of the 

 buried records of the past, while Sennacherib and Hezekiah, 

 Mesha and Ahab, Sargon and Merodach-Baladan, Shalmaneser 

 and Jehu, " the noble Asnapper," and Artaxerxes, Nebuchad- 

 nezzar and Cyrus, possess the same features, speak in the same 

 tones, and display the same characters in the records of archae- 

 ology as they do upon the pages of Holy Scripture. No more 

 striking instance of the careless theorizing on the basis of this 

 principle of historic progression could perhaps be found than 

 that afforded by the moderate and temperate Canon Driver. 



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