The Book of History, Vol. 5

Excerpt from The Book of History, Vol. 5: A History of All Nations From the Earliest Times to the Present, With Over Illus By far the best known of all Oriental u peoples are the tribes which form the last components of the second great Semitic migration of the Nearer East. These are the Hebrew tribes, whose home, the farthest toward the desert, would in itself indicate that they came as the last of the great "Canaanite" migration, driven on by the precursors of the next, the Aramćan. These are the tribes which combined themselves into the people of Israel, and their neighbours who dwelt still further toward the desert, the Edomites, Moabites, and Ammonites. The Tell el-Amama letters prove the advance of Hebrew tribes in the land as early as the fifteenth century B.C.; one nation in particular comes prominently forward, which expanded from the north - namely, the Amorites. These appear to the Israelites, in the writing which presents the oldest form of their tradition, as the inhabitants from whom they must wrest the land; when the Israelites marched in, the former had already become occupants instead of immigrants. We may thus regard the Israelites as the next stratum after the Amorites, and may place their immigration somewhat ater. The earliest mention of Israel is contained in an inscription of the Pharaoh Meneptah II., about 1200 B.C. Whether that is, however, the tribal federation which we understand by this name, or some forgotten tribe, of which no record is left in Biblical tradition except the name of the collection of tribes banding round it and its sanctuary, must remain at present an unsolved question. Within recent years much progress has been made in the true understanding and interpretation of the books of the Bible which have come down to us, and it has been demonstrated that the Biblical narrative is of a more composite character than had formerly been supposed, and embodies traditions of widely different origin and value. Historical criticism assumes that the Biblical narratives are to be treated as human documents, and are to be submitted to the same critical tests which are applicable to all other records of antiquity. It will, of the course, on the other hand, be maintained that such methods are invalid when applied to the sacred narrative, and that any conclusions reached thereby must be rejected. From that point of view any historic account that deviates from the Biblical narrative will be repudiated. The historical, or, as they should rather be termed, narrative books of the Bible, in the form in which they are now extant, are the work of a late period. The peculiar nature of the use made in antiquity of separate documents allows us to dissect the books into their component parts, so that we are in a position to distinguish the different authorities with some confidence, and to weigh the evidence of one against another. The result of this division of sources, which is most apparent in the Pentateuch, is as follows. Two ancient documentary writings, designated, according to the name used for God by their respective writers, as Elohist and Jehovist, had been combined in very early times. The writing Elohist is indeed the more ancient, because it alone still preserves recollections of the actual conditions of remote antiquity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com