statements which we find in the tenth chapter of Genesis? There we read
that "unto Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg," the
ancestor of the Hebrews, while the name of the other was Joktan, the
ancestor of the tribes of South Arabia. The parallelism between the
Biblical account and the latest discovery of archaeological science is
thus complete, and makes it impossible to believe that the Biblical
narrative would have been compiled in Palestine at the late date to
which our modern "critics" would assign it. All recollection of the
facts embodied in it would then have long passed away.

Even while I write Prof. Hommel is announcing fresh discoveries which
bear on the early history of the Book of Genesis. Cuneiform tablets have
turned up from which we gather that centuries before the age of Abraham,
a king of Ur, Ine-Sin by name, had not only overrun Elam, but had also
conquered Simurru, the Zemar of Gen. x. 18, in the land of Phoenicia. A
daughter of the same king or of one of his immediate successors, was
high-priestess both of Elam and of Markhas or Mer'ash in Northern Syria,
while Kimas or Northern Arabia was overrun by the Babylonian arms.
Proofs consequently are multiplying of the intimate relations that
existed between Babylonia and Western Asia long before the era of the
Patriarchs, and we need no longer feel any surprise that Abraham should
have experienced so little difficulty in migrating into Canaan, or that
he should have found there the same culture as that which he had left
behind in Ur. The language and script of Babylonia must have been almost
as well known to the educated Canaanite as to himself, and the records
of the Patriarchal Age would have been preserved in the libraries of
Canaan down to the time of its conquest by the Israelites.

Perhaps a word or two is needed in explanation of the repetitions which
will be found here and there in the following pages. They have been