Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Philosophy
English


ANCIENT BABYLONIAN AND EARLY HEBREW.

From the misty ages of bygone centuries to the present day there
has been a gradual interlinking of the literatures of different
countries. From the Orient to the Occident, from Europe to
America, this slow weaving of the thoughts, tastes and beliefs of
people of widely different races has been going on, and forms,
indeed, a history by itself.

The forerunner and prophet of subsequent Christian literature is
the Hebrew. It is not, however, the first complete written
literature, as it was supposed to be until a few years ago.

The oldest Semitic texts reach back to the time of Anemurabi, who
was contemporaneous with Abraham, five hundred years before
Moses. These Semites possessed a literature and script which they
largely borrowed from the older non-Semitic races in the
localities where the posterity of Thare and Abraham settled.

Recent researches in Assyria, Egypt and Babylonia has brought
this older literature and civilization to light; a literature
from which the Hebrews themselves largely drew. Three thousand
years before Abraham emigrated from Chaldea there were sacred
poems in the East not unlike the psalms of David, as well as
heroic poetry describing the creation, and written in nearly the
same order as the Pentateuch of Moses.