Age? And yet, the critics notwithstanding, the Patriarchal Age has
actually existed. While criticism, so-called, has been busy in
demolishing the records of the Pentateuch, archaeology, by the spade of
the excavator and the patient skill of the decipherer, has been equally
busy in restoring their credit. And the monuments of the past are a more
solid argument than the guesses and prepossessions of the modern
theorist. The clay tablet and inscribed stone are better witnesses to
the truth than literary tact or critical scepticism. That Moses and his
contemporaries could neither read nor write may have been proved to
demonstration by the critic; yet nevertheless we now know, thanks to
archaeological discovery, that it would have been a miracle if the
critic were right. The Pentateuch is, after all, what it professes to
be, and the records it contains are history and not romance.

The question of its authenticity involves issues more serious and
important than those which have to do merely with history or
archaeology. We are sometimes told indeed, in all honesty of purpose,
that it is a question of purely literary interest, without influence on
our theological faith. But the whole fabric of the Jewish Church in the
time of our Lord was based upon the belief that the Law of Moses came
from God, and that this God "is not a man that He should lie." And the
belief of the Jewish Church was handed on to the Christian Church along
with all its consequences. To revise that belief is to revise the dogmas
of the Christian Church as they have been held for the last eighteen
centuries; to reject it utterly is to reject the primary document of the
faith into which we have been baptized.

It is not, however, with theological matters that we are now concerned.
Patriarchal Palestine is for us the Palestine of the Patriarchal Age, as
it has been disclosed by archaeological research, not the Palestine in