The early history of the Hebrews

by A. H. Sayce

The progress of archæological research has already in part fulfilled this expectation. ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ has been found at Muqayyar, and the contracts of early Babylonia have shown that Amorites—or, as we should call them, Canaanites—were settled there, and have even brought to light such distinctively Hebrew names as Jacob-el, Joseph-el, and Ishmael.[^[138]] Even the name of Abram, Abi-ramu, appears as the father of an ‘Amorite’ witness to a contract in the third generation before Amraphel. And Amraphel himself, along with his contemporaries, Chedor-laomer or Kudur-Laghghamar of Elam, Arioch of Larsa, and Tid’al or Tudghula, has been restored to the history to which he and his associates had been denied a claim. The ‘nations’ over whom Tid’al ruled have been explained, and the accuracy of the political situation described in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been fully vindicated. Jerusalem, instead of being a name first given to the future capital of Judah after its capture by David, is proved to have been its earliest title; and the priest-king Melchizedek finds a parallel in his later successor, the priest-king Ebed-Tob, who, in the Tel el-Amarna letters, declares that he had received his royal dignity, not from his father or his mother, but through the arm of ‘the mighty king.’ If we turn to Egypt, the archæological evidence is the same. The history of Joseph displays an intimate acquaintance on the part of its writer with Egyptian life and manners in the era of the Hyksos, and offers the only explanation yet forthcoming of the revolution that took place in the tenure of land during the Hyksos domination. As we have seen, there are features in the story which suggest that it has been translated from a hieratic papyrus. As for the Exodus, we shall see presently that its geography is that of the nineteenth dynasty, and of no other period in the history of Egypt.

Thus, then, directly or indirectly, much of the history contained in the Pentateuch has been shown by archæology to be authentic. And it must be remembered that Oriental archæology is still in its infancy. Few only of the sites of ancient civilisation have as yet been excavated, and there are thousands of cuneiform texts in the Museums of Europe and America which have not as yet been deciphered. It was only in 1887 that the Tel el-Amarna tablets, which have had such momentous consequences for Biblical criticism, were found, and the disclosures made by the early contracts of Babylonia, even the name of Chedor-laomer itself, are of still more recent discovery. It is therefore remarkable that so much is already in our hands which confirms the antiquity and historical genuineness of the Pentateuchal narratives; and it raises the presumption that with the advance of our knowledge will come further confirmations of the Biblical story. At any rate, the historian’s path is clear; the Pentateuch has been tested by the comparative method of science, and has stood the test. It contains history, and must be dealt with accordingly like other historical works. The philological theory with its hair-splitting distinctions, its Priestly Code and ‘redactors,’ must be put aside, along with all the historical consequences which it involves.

But it does not follow that because the philological theory is untenable, all inquiries into the character and sources of the Pentateuch are waste of time. The philological theory has failed because it has attempted to build up a vast superstructure on very imperfect and questionable materials; because, in short, it has attempted to attain historical results without the use of the historical method. But no one can study the Pentateuch in the light of other ancient works of a similar kind without perceiving that it is a compilation, and that its author—or authors—has made use of a large variety of older materials. Modern Oriental history has been written in the same manner; a book, for instance, like the Egyptian history of El-Maqrîzî, though the production of a single mind, nevertheless embodies older materials which have been collected from every side. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Chaldæan Epic of Gilgames, bears the same testimony. The growth of the Book of the Dead, the ritual which was needed by the souls of the Egyptian dead in their passage to the next world, can actually be traced.[^[139]] It included and combined the doctrines of more than one school of early Egyptian theological thought, and in later days was extensively interpolated and modernised. Not only were glosses, once intended to explain the obscurities of the archaic phraseology, incorporated into the text, but even whole chapters were added to the work. The Epic of Gilgames similarly embodies other poems or portions of poems, of which the Episode of the Deluge is an example. Yet no Assyriologist would dispute for a moment that from beginning to end it is the work of one author.

Archæology has already shown us that we are right in believing that the Pentateuch also has been compiled out of earlier materials. The story of the campaign of Chedor-laomer must have been derived from a cuneiform tablet; the story of Joseph seems to have been taken from a hieratic papyrus. The account of the Deluge has made its way from Babylonia to Canaan in the days when the culture of Chaldæa extended to the Mediterranean. We thus have narratives which presuppose an acquaintance not only with Babylon and Egypt, but also with Babylonian and Egyptian documents.

So, too, the list of Edomite kings contained in the thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis must have been extracted from the official annals of Edom. It is a proof that such annals existed, that the Edomites, like the rest of their neighbours, were acquainted with the art of writing, and that their official records were accessible to a Hebrew scribe.

We cannot doubt the authenticity of the list, even though the ancient territory of Edom has not yet been explored, and no Edomite inscriptions consequently have as yet been found to verify it. The list, therefore, does not yet stand in the same fortunate position as the account of Chedor-laomer and his allies, which has been verified by archæological discovery. Here even the names of the foreign kings have been preserved in the Hebrew text with marvellously little corruption. The whole account must have come from a cuneiform document coeval with the event it narrates. That is to say, we can here trace one of the Pentateuchal narratives not only to a written source, but to a written source which is at the same time a contemporaneous record.

We may conclude, then, that the Pentateuch has been compiled from older documents—some Babylonian, some Egyptian, some Edomite; others, as we may gather from the nature of their contents, Canaanite and Aramæan—and that many of these documents belong to the periods to which they refer. This, however, is not all. In certain cases we can approximately fix the latest date at which they could have been employed and combined in the form in which we now find them. Thus in the geographical chart of Genesis (x. 6), Canaan is made the brother of Cush and Mizraim. This takes us back to the time when Canaan was a province of the Egyptian empire; when that empire came to an end the description ceased to be possible. After the epoch of the nineteenth dynasty and the Hebrew Exodus, Canaan and Egypt were cut off from one another geographically and politically, and Canaan could never again have been called in Semitic idiom the brother of Mizraim. It became instead the brother of Aram and Assur.

Here, therefore, the limit of age prescribed by archæology forbids us to pass beyond the Mosaic epoch. Moses, in short, is the compiler to whom the archæological evidence indicates that the tenth chapter of Genesis goes back in its original shape. But by the side of this evidence there is other evidence also which tells a different tale. Gomer, or the Kimmerians, as well as Madai, are named among the sons of Japhet, and the Assyrian monuments assure us that neither the one nor the other came within the geographical horizon of Western Asia before the ninth century B.C. It was in the ninth century B.C. that the Assyrian kings first became acquainted with the Medes, while the Gimirrâ or Kimmerians did not descend upon Asia from their seats on the Sea of Azof until about B.C. 680. The same reasoning which gives us the Mosaic age as that of the geographical chart of Genesis in its primitive shape gives us the seventh century B.C. or later for the date of another portion of the same chapter.

The list of the kings of Edom, again, is introduced by the remark that ‘these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.’ It was not inserted in the book of Genesis, therefore, until after the age of Saul, a conclusion which is supported by the fact that the first king named seems to be Balaam, the son of Beor, who was a contemporary of Moses. If, accordingly, the Pentateuch was originally compiled in the Mosaic age, it must have undergone the fate of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and been enlarged by subsequent additions. Insertions and interpolations must have found their way into it as new editions of it were made.

That such was the case there is indirect testimony. On the one hand the text of the prophetical books was treated in a similar manner, additions and modifications being made in it from time to time by the prophet or his successors in order to adapt it to new political or religious circumstances. Isaiah, for instance, has copied a prophecy directed by one of his predecessors against Moab; and after breaking it off in the middle of a sentence, has adapted it to the needs and circumstances of his own time. On the other hand, a long-established Jewish tradition, which has found its way into the Second Book of Esdras (xiv. 21-26), makes Ezra rewrite or edit the books of Moses. There is no reason to question the substantial truth of the tradition; Ezra was the restorer of the old paths, and the Pentateuch may well have taken its present shape from him. If so, we need not be surprised if we find here and there in it echoes of the Babylonish captivity.