The Early History of the Hebrews
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
_Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d._
THE EGYPT OF THE HEBREWS AND HERODOTOS
CONTENTS.—The Patriarchal Age—The Age of Moses—The Exodus—-The Hebrew
Settlement in Canaan—The Age of the Israelitish Monarchies—The Age of
the Ptolemies—Herodotos in Egypt—In the Steps of Herodotos—Memphis and
the Fayyûm—Appendices—Index.
‘Professor Sayce has written a charming work, which every lover of
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vitality of accurate research and of sympathetic explanation; he has
produced one of the most readable, useful, and instructive books we
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‘Professor Sayce has a story of singular fascination to tell. Every
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‘Truly a valuable addition to existing works on Egypt.’—=Western
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‘On the whole, we know of no more useful handbook to Egyptian
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LONDON: RIVINGTONS
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS
BY
The Rev. A. H. SAYCE
PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY AT OXFORD
AUTHOR OF ‘EGYPT OF THE HEBREWS AND HERODOTOS’
RIVINGTONS
_KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN_
LONDON
1897
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
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 century B.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.
The present writer, accordingly, must be understood to speak throughout
simply as an archæologist and historian. Theologically he accepts
unreservedly whatever doctrine has been laid down by the Church as an
article of the faith. But among these doctrines he fails to find any
which forbids a free and impartial handling of Old Testament history.
Perhaps it is necessary to apologise for the multitude of unfamiliar
proper names which make the first chapter of this book somewhat
difficult reading. But they represent the archæological discoveries of
the last few years in their bearing upon the history of the Patriarchs,
and an attempt has been made to lighten the burden of remembering them
by repeating the newly-discovered facts, at all events in outline,
wherever it has been needful to allude to them. Those, however, who find
the burden too heavy and wearisome may pass on to the second chapter.
A. H. SAYCE,
23 CHEPSTOW VILLAS, W.
_September 25, 1897._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE HEBREW PATRIARCHS
Who were the Hebrews?—Origin of the Name—Ur and its Kings—Amraphel or
Khammu-rabi—Canaanites in Babylonia—Harran—The Amorites—Abram in Canaan
and Egypt—The Campaign of Chedorlaomer—Melchizedek—Sodom and
Gomorrha—Circumcision—Name of Abraham—Hebrew and Aramaic—Moab and
Ammon—Amorite Kingdoms—Dedan—Sacrifice of the Firstborn—Mount
Moriah—Purchase of the Field of Machpelah—The Hittites—Babylonian
Law—Isaac as a Bedâwi Shêkh—Esau and the Edomites—Jacob—Settles at
Shechem—His Sons—The Israelitish Tribes—Joseph—The Hyksos in
Egypt—Egyptian Character of Joseph’s History—Goshen—Deaths of Jacob and
Joseph ... Pp. 1-99