340 PROF. H. EDOUARD NAVILLE, D.C.L., LL.D., ON 



and written in Mesopotamia, the land from which the Hebrews 

 originated, but, above all, it had been nsed by the famous legis- 

 lator Hammurabi, the great law-giver, to whom the god Shamash 

 was said to have dictated his commands, and it would have been 

 extraordinary if Moses had not known the existence of this 

 remarkable code of laws. For Moses, Babylonian cuneiform 

 must have been the only language worthy of recording God's 

 words. 



This fact of Moses having written in Babylonian cuneiform 

 involves two consequences of the utmost importance. His 

 writings were not in books, in rolls of skin or papyrus, but on 

 clay tablets. This implies a complete change in our method of 

 studying these writings. We have to do away with the descrip- 

 tion and nature of what we call a book. A book has a definite 

 order. If it is divided into chapters, the middle ones or the last 

 will not be written before the earlier ones, especially if it is 

 written on a roll. The tablet is something quite different : it 

 is a whole composition in itself. It is not connected with 

 another so closely as two chapters of a book, and very often it 

 has no fixed place in a series. Tablets are not always quite 

 independent. They may form a running narrative, and then 

 the connection from one to the other is indicated by the last 

 word, or by the last sentence of one tablet being repeated on the 

 next. 



A cuneiform book is a collection of tablets, but such a collec- 

 tion, as in the case of Genesis, may have been made for a definite 

 purpose with a plan, which the author keeps in view. This plan 

 is not exactly like that of a book of the present day. It is more 

 like that of a lecturer who has a series of lectures to deliver on 

 a definite subject. He cannot do it without a very strict plan, 

 without an exact outline in his mind of what he has to teach or 

 to prove. Very often he will begin a lecture with a short 

 summary of what he has said in the preceding one, or he will 

 revert to a fact mentioned before, which will be the subject of 

 further development, or, if he is reading a narrative of some 

 piece of literature, he may merely read over again the last 

 sentence where he stopped. It is exactly so with the cuneiform 

 tablets and the apparent disconnection between them ; the 

 necessary repetitions from one to the other have been interpreted 

 as showing the hands of various writers : they are the founda- 

 tions on which rests, partly, the theory of the Elohist and the 

 J ah vis t. 



It is possible that Moses had already set apart the tablets 

 which form the book of Genesis, and which, as we said, are all 



