The "Higher Criticism" and the Verdict of the Monuments

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1895. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER III. THE BABYLONIAN ELEMENT IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS. LIKE the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Phoenicians and the Egyptians, the Hebrews also had a system of cosmology. Or rather, we ought to say that, like the nations who surrounded them, they had more than one system of cosmology. There was more than one doctrine current as to the precise way in which the world as we see it came into existence and of the exact manner in which man was first formed. When Hebrew history came to be written, notice had to be taken of these current doctrines, and accordingly, as Berdssos the Chaldaean historian begins his History of Babylonia by amalgamating together more than one Babylonian legend of the Creation, or as the Phoenician Sanchuniathon, in the pages of Philo Byblius, fuses into a whole the divergent cosmological theories of the Phoenician cities, so too the Book of Genesis commences with two different accounts of the creation of man. In the one account man is the last of created things, made male and female in the image of God on the last of the six days of creation; in the other man is formed of the dust of the earth on " the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens," and woman is not formed out of him until he has been put into the garden of Eden " to dress it and to keep it." Reflections of both accounts are found in the cuneiform tablets of Babylonia and Assyria. Portions of an Assyrian Epic of the Creation, describing it as taking place in a series of successive acts, were first brought to light by Mr. George Smith. He pointed out the remarkable correspondence which existed between the order of the days in Genesis and the order of the tablets or books in the Assyrian poem, the first book of which describes the beginning of all things and the wate...