What may have been the actual age of those “ancient tablets” which Assurbanipal caused to be copied and placed in his library, and of which we have treated, cannot at present be ascertained with any degree of precision. Sufficient data are not yet at hand to determine the points. Most probably they are not all of the same, or nearly the same, date. Perhaps light may be thrown on such questions by further decipherings of the mass of cuneiform writings. At present our judgment or our guesses must be based on two points: first, the occurrence, in the text deciphered, of certain local or historical references given as contemporary, or very recent, at the time when the inscription was written; and, secondly, such a minute knowledge on our part of the geography, history, and chronology of those regions as will enable us to decide accurately when and where such statements, allusions, or references can be verified. The difficulty is that, with all the progress made up to this in deciphering these inscriptions, we are still liable to mistakes, especially in such passing allusions and references as are for our purpose important data, but originally were to the writer almost obiter dicta. A second difficulty
is found in the obscurity and uncertainty which still hang around the vicissitudes of early Chaldean history and the geographical divisions then existing.
Mr. Smith, however, after studying the matter and weighing all the data, thinks that none of the original tablets we are considering can have been written less than fifteen hundred years before Christ. Most of them, indeed, especially the legends of Izdubar and the account of the creation, he believes should be dated back as far as 2,000, or even 2,200, years before Christ.
How many Voltairean sneers, and how many crude utterances of crude criticism by the so-called “advanced thinkers” in Germany and elsewhere, against Moses and his narrative, are deprived of all their force, and have been made utterly ridiculous and nonsensical, by the discovery of this ancient and indisputable corroborative testimony! Verily, the men of Ninive have risen up in judgment against them, and have condemned them.
It has been a standard line of argument with the apologists and defenders of Christianity, from the second century down, to prove the truth of our divine religion, and of the primitive facts recorded in Scripture, by the general and substantial agreement of all nations on those points. This agreement, it was evident, could only spring from the fact that originally such truths were known by men, and had been retained by them ever since in some form. Such truths are still to be found in the common principles of morality, in the agreement or similarity of national traditions; and philosophic research will show that they generally
constitute the central nuclei around which mythological fables subsequently gathered or grew up. Many modern writers have devoted themselves to this theme. One of the latest is the Abbé Gainet. In his very full and learned work, La Bible sans la Bible, he seems almost to exhaust the subject. Leaving aside, for argument’s sake, the testimony of the Bible itself, and loading his pages with quotations and testimonies, heathen, infidel, or Mahommedan, taken from every quarter, he strives to establish, by this independent and non-Biblical line of proof, the truth, one by one, of the chief Biblical statements. What a splendid chapter would he not have added to those in his work had these discoveries been made when he wrote! To appeal to men two thousand years or more before Christ—witnesses living in the very region of the earth where man was created, and which after the Deluge became, as it were, a second birthplace to him—to receive from such witnesses this clear, unimpeachable testimony as to the creation of man, the fall, the punishment, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, and the confusion of tongues, would indeed supply him with another irrefragable argument in support of divine revelation, in addition to those he had already collected. With our limited space, however, we can only take a simpler view.
Compare those Chaldean legends, fragmentary as they are, often turgid and verbose, with their poetic forms and Oriental license, and with the variations which are sometimes exhibited in different versions of the same legend—compare them, we say, with the clear, straightforward, and almost tame narrative of Moses. Need one ask which is the
simple narrative of truth, and which seeks to wear the adornment of human fancy?
Other questions on this matter call for an answer: How came it that Moses, born in Egypt, and trained in all the knowledge of the Egyptians, should, when undertaking to write his history in the desert, so utterly cast off all the ideas of Egypt, and write a simple narrative in absolute contradiction to all the science of Egypt in his day? Above all, how comes it that the truth of his narrative should be so unexpectedly and so strongly supported three thousand years later by the resurrection of long-dormant testimony from a land he had never visited and a people with whom he never had any communication?
Obviously, Moses wrote, not as the Egyptians or any other men taught him, but as the God of all truth inspired him to write.