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33. It is not difficult to trace the conditions of life which 
would entangle a faithful servant of “ the holy One that in- 
habited eternity ” in those days. 
34. All judicial determinations, for instance, and even many 
commercial bargains, were transacted in the temples, and 
confirmed by oaths on the gods and the king. 
35. Of laws affecting the home-religion, too, some fragments 
have reached us : for instance, “ [a man] has full possession 
of his sanctuary in his own high place. The sanctuary [a man] 
has raised is confirmed to the son who inherits.” 
36. But another law, or determination, enacts that “ for the 
future the [judge may] cause a sanctuary to be erected in a 
private demesne.” 
37. This law might, one would think, be made an instru- 
ment of persecution, such as the Jews believed their father 
Abraham to have suffered. 
38. It is clear that Terach and his house were of high 
position in their race. Indeed the very names Abram, Sarai,* 
Milcah, bear the stamp of rank and dignity. And in tho 
tablets the Semitic people appear as the great transactors of 
business. 
39. There would be no escape in obscurity for Abram. 
40. Once more men were multiplying their evil inventions, 
“ worshipping and serving the creature more than the 
Creator,” and once more a single family, like that of Noah, 
was chosen as the treasury of God’s truth. 
41. The tent of Abram was to be as the ark of Noah ; — the 
open desert as the levels of the great waters. 
42. But for this the time was not yet come. 
KHARRAN. 
“ This age,” writes Sir Henry Eawlinson of the era in question, “ seems 
to have been in a peculiar sense the active period of Semitic colonization. 
The Phoenicians removing from the Persian Gulf to the shores of the 
Mediterranean, and the Hebrew patriarch marching with his household from 
Chalda3a to Palestine, merely followed the direction of the great tide of 
emigration, which was at this time setting in from the East westward. 
Semitic tribes were, during the period in question, gradually displacing the 
old Cushite inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula. 
Assyria was being occupied by colonists of the same Semitic race from 
* Sara, from “ sar,” king. 
