There are many histories of Israel, but this is the first attempt to write one from a purely archæological point of view. During the last few years discovery after discovery has come crowding upon us from the ancient East, revolutionising all our past conceptions of early Oriental history, and opening out a new and unexpected world of culture and civilisation. For the Oriental archæologist Hebrew history has ceased to stand alone; it has taken its place in that great stream of human life and action which the excavator and decipherer are revealing to us, and it can at last be studied like the history of Greece or Rome. The age of the Patriarchs is being brought close to us; our museums are filled with written documents which are centuries older than Abraham; and we are beginning to understand the politics which underlie the story of the Pentateuch and the causes of the events which are narrated in it.

Over against the facts of archæology stand the subjective assumptions of a certain school, which, now that they have ceased to be predominant in the higher latitudes of scholarship, are finding their way into the popular literature of the country. Between the results of Oriental archæology and those which are the logical end of the so-called ‘higher criticism’ no reconciliation is possible, and the latter must therefore be cleared out of the way before the archæologist can begin his work. Hence some of the pages that follow are necessarily controversial, and it has been needful to show why the linguistic method of the ‘literary analysis’ is essentially unscientific and fallacious when applied to history, and must be replaced by the method of historical comparison.

Even while my book has been passing through the press, a new fact has come to light which supplements and enforces the conclusion I have drawn in the second chapter from a comparison of the account of the Deluge in the book of Genesis with that which has been recovered from the cuneiform inscriptions. At the recent meeting of the Oriental Congress in Paris, Dr. Scheil stated that among the tablets lately brought from Sippara to the museum at Constantinople is one which contains the same text of the story of the Flood as that which was discovered by George Smith. But whereas the text found by George Smith was written for the library of Nineveh in the seventh centuryB.C., the newly-discovered text was inscribed in the reign of Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi or Amraphel, in the Abrahamic age. And even then the text was already old. Here and there the word khibi, ‘lacuna,’ was inserted, indicating that the original from which it had been copied was already illegible in places. Since this text agrees, not with the ‘Elohist’ or the ‘Yahvist’ separately, but with the supposed combination of the two documents in the book of Genesis, it is difficult to see, as the discoverer remarked, how the ‘literary analysis’ of the Pentateuch can be any longer maintained. At all events, the discovery shows the minute care and accuracy with which the literature of the past was copied and handed down. Edition after edition had been published of the story of the Deluge, and yet the text of the Abrahamic age and that of the seventh century B.C. agree even to the spelling of words.

It is the ‘higher critics’ themselves, and not the ancient writers whom they criticise, that are careless or contemptuous in their use of evidence. In the preface to my Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments I have referred to a flagrant example of their attempt to explain away unwelcome testimony. Here it was the inscription on an early Israelitish weight, which was first pronounced to be a forgery, then to have been misread, and finally to have been engraved by different persons at different times! The weight is now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to which it was presented by Dr. Chaplin, and the critics have conveniently forgotten the dogmatic assertions that were made about it. They have, in fact, been busy elsewhere. Cuneiform tablets have been found relating to Chedorlaomer and the other kings of the East mentioned in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, while in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence the King of Jerusalem declares that he had been raised to the throne by the ‘arm’ of his god, and was therefore, like Melchizedek, a priest-king. But Chedorlaomer and Melchizedek had long ago been banished to mythland, and criticism could not admit that archæological discovery had restored them to actual history. Writers, accordingly, in complacent ignorance of the cuneiform texts, told the Assyriologists that their translations and interpretations were alike erroneous, that they had misread the names of Chedorlaomer and his allies, and that the ‘arm of the Mighty King,’ in the letters of Ebed-Tob, meant the Pharaoh of Egypt. Unfortunately, the infallibility of the ‘critical’ consciousness can be better tested in the case of Assyriology than in that of the old Hebrew records, and the Assyriologist may therefore be pardoned if he finds in such displays of ignorance merely a proof of the worthlessness of the ‘critical’ method. A method which leads its advocates to deny the facts stated by experts when these run counter to their own prepossessions cannot be of much value. At all events, it is a method with which the archæologist and the historian can have nothing to do.

This, indeed, is tacitly admitted in a modern German work on Hebrew history, which is more than once referred to in the following pages. Dr. Kittel’s History of the Hebrews is partly filled with an imposing ‘analysis’ of the documents which constitute the historical books of the Old Testament, and we might therefore expect that the history to which it forms an introduction would be influenced throughout by the results of the literary disintegration. But nothing of the sort is the case. So far as Dr. Kittel’s treatment of the history is concerned, the ‘analysis’ might never have been made; all that it does is to prove his acquaintance with modern ‘critical’ literature. The history is judged on its own merits without any reference to the age or character of the ‘sources’ upon which it is supposed to rest. The instinct of the historian has been too strong for the author to resist, and the results of the linguistic analysis have accordingly been quietly set aside.

But history also has its canons of evidence, and criticism, in the true sense of the word, is not confined to the philologists. There is no infallible history any more than there is infallible philology; and if we are to understand the history of the Hebrews aright, we must deal with it as we should with the history of any other ancient people. The Old Testament writers were human; and in so far as they were historians, their conceptions and manner of writing history were the same as those of their Oriental contemporaries. They were not European historians of the nineteenth century, and to treat them as such would be not only to pursue a radically false method, but to falsify the history they have recorded. No human history is, or can be, inerrant, and to claim inerrancy for the history of Israel is to introduce into Christianity the Hindu doctrine of the inerrancy of the Veda. For the historian, at any rate, the questions involved in a theological treatment of the Old Testament do not exist.