Human Origins

by S. Laing

The historical portion of the Old Testament is singularly deficient in this essential point of confirmation by monumental evidence. Of Hebrew inscriptions there are none except that of the time of Hezekiah in the tunnel which brought water from the Pool of Siloam into the city; and the Moabite stone, which confirms the narrative in 2 Kings of the siege of Rabbah by Jehoshaphat and Jehoram, and their repulse after the sacrifice of his eldest son in sight of the armies by the King of Moab. Both of these inscriptions are of comparatively modern date, and close to or within the period when contact with the Assyrian Empire removes all uncertainty as to the history of Judæa and Israel under their later kings. The capture of Jerusalem by David and the building of the Temple there by Solomon are doubtless historical facts, but they cannot be said to receive any additional confirmation from monuments. There have been so many destructions and rebuildings of temples on this site, that it is difficult to say to what era the lower strata belong. It is apparent, moreover, from the Egyptian tablets of Tel-el-Amarna, the city founded by the heretic king, Amenophis IV., about 1500 b.c., that Jerusalem was a well-known city and sacred shrine prior to the Hebrew conquest, and even to the date of the Exodus. Professor Sayce tells us that on one of these tablets is written, "The city of the mountain of Jerusalem (or Urasalim), the City of the temple of the God Uras, whose name there is Marra, the City of the King, which adjoins the locality of the men of Keilah." Uras was a Babylonian deity, and Marra is probably the Aramaic Mare, "lord," from which it may be conjectured that Mount Moriah received its name from the Temple of Uras which stood there.

Some of the other tablets show that in the century before the Exodus, Jerusalem was occupied by a semi-independent king, who claimed to have derived his authority from "the oracle of the mighty King," which is explained to mean a deity, though he acknowledged the superiority of Egypt, which still retained the conquests of the eighteenth dynasty in Palestine. This, however, relates not to the Hebrews, but to the state of things prior to their invasion, when Palestine was occupied by comparatively civilized races of Amorites and Canaanites, and studded with numerous fenced cities.

A glimpse at the later state of things, when those earlier nations and cities were overwhelmed by an invasion of a rude nomad race, as described in the Books of Joshua and Judges, has been afforded quite recently by the exploration by Mr. Flinders Petrie of a mound on the plain of Southern Judæa, which he is disposed to identify with the ancient Lachish. A section of this mound has been exposed by the action of a brook, and it shows, as in Dr. Schliemann's excavations on the supposed site of Troy at Hissarlik, several successive occupations. The lowest and earliest city was fortified by a wall of sun-burnt bricks, 28 feet 8 inches thick, and which still stands to a height of 21 feet. It shows signs of great antiquity, having been twice repaired, and a large accumulation of broken pottery was found both outside and within it.

This city, which Petrie identifies with one of those Amorite cities which were "walled up to heaven," had been taken and destroyed, and the wall had fallen into ruins. Then, to use Professor Sayce's words, "came a period when the site was occupied by rude herdsmen, unskilled in the arts either of making bricks or of fortifying towns. Their huts were built of mud and rolled stones from the Wady below, and resembled the wretched shanties of the half-savage Bedouins, which we may still see on the outskirts of the Holy Land. They must have been inhabited by the invading Israelitish tribes, who had overthrown the civilization which had long existed in the cities of Canaan, and were still in a state of nomadic barbarism."

Above this come newer walls, which had been built and repaired three or four times over by the Jewish kings, one of the later rebuildings being a massive brick wall 25 feet thick, with a glacis of large blocks of polished stone traced to a height of 40 feet, which Petrie refers to the reign of Manasseh. Then comes a destruction, probably by the Assyrians under Sennacherib, and then other buildings of minor importance, the latest being those of a colony of Greeks, who were swept away before the age of Alexander the Great.

This discovery is of first-rate importance as regards the early history of the Hebrews, and especially as to their relations with Egypt, their sojourn there, and the Exodus. If Abraham really came from Ur of Chaldæa, the seat of a very old civilization; and if his descendants really lived for 400 years or longer in Egypt, mixed up a good deal with the native population, and for a great part of the time treated with favour, and occupying, if the legend of Joseph be true, the highest posts in the land; and if they really left Egypt, as described in the Exodus, laden with the spoils of the Egyptians, and led by Moses, a priest of Heliopolis skilled in all the lore of that ancient temple, it is inconceivable that in a single generation they should have sunk to such a level as that of the half-savage Bedouins, as indicated by Petrie's researches. And yet who else could have been the barbarians whose inroad destroyed the walled city of the Amorites; and how well does this condition of rude savagery correspond with the bloodthirsty massacres, and the crude superstitions, which meet us at every turn in the traditions of the period between the departure from Egypt and the establishment of a monarchy, which have been used by the compilers of the Books of Exodus, Joshua, and Judges?

If we are ever to know anything beyond legend and conjecture as to this obscure period, it is to the pick and the spade that we must look for certain information, and the exploration of mounds of ruined cities must either confirm or modify Petrie's inference as to the extreme rudeness of the nomad tribes who broke in upon the civilized inhabitants of older races.

Another exploration by Mr. Flinders Petrie, that of the ruins of Pi-thom and Ramses, gives a certain amount of monumental confirmation to the statement in Exodus i. 2, that during the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt they were employed as slaves by Ramses II. in building two treasure cities, Ramses and Pi-thom. Some wall-paintings show slaves or forced labourers, of a Jewish cast of countenance, working at the brick walls under the sticks of taskmasters.

The first certain synchronism, however, between the Egyptian monuments and Jewish history is afforded by the capture of Jerusalem by Shishak in the reign of Rehoboam in the year 974 b.c. Among the wall-paintings in the temple at Thebes commemorating the triumphs of this campaign of Shishak, is a portrait of a captive with Jewish features, inscribed Yuten-Malek. This has been read "King of the Jews," and taken to be a portrait of Rehoboam, but it is more probable that it means "Kingdom of the Jews," and that the portrait is one representative of the country conquered. In any case this gives us the first absolutely certain date in Old Testament history. From this time downwards there is no reason to doubt that annals substantially correct, of successive kings of Judah and Israel, were kept, and after the reign of Ahaz, when the great Assyrian Empire appeared on the scene, we have a full confirmation, from the Assyrian monuments, of the principal events recorded in the Book of Kings. In fact, we may say that from the foundation of the Jewish Monarchy by Saul and David, we are fairly in the stream of history, but that for everything prior to about 1000 b.c. we have to grope our way almost entirely by the light of the internal evidence afforded by the Old Testament itself.

The first point evidently is to have some clear idea of what this Old Testament really consists of. Until the recent era of scientific criticism, it was assumed to constitute, in effect, one volume, the earlier chapters of which were written by Moses, and the later ones by a continuance of the same Divine inspiration, which made the Bible from Genesis to Chronicles one consistent and infallible whole, in which it was impossible that there should be any error or contradiction. Such a theory could not stand a moment's investigation in the free light of reason. It is only necessary to read the two first chapters of Genesis to see that the book is of a composite structure, made up of different and inconsistent elements. We have only to include in the first chapter the two first verses printed in the second chapter, and to write the original Hebrew word "Elohim" for "God," and "Yahve" or Jehovah for "Lord God," to see this at a glance.