little or no science, yet in every country there were certain answers
to these questions handed down from generation to generation and
generally accepted as true.

=Idolatrous stories of creation.=--When the Hebrews entered Canaan
they naturally were inclined to accept the ideas of the earlier
inhabitants of that country, whose knowledge in regard to many matters
was far beyond theirs. The Canaanites in turn had got most of their
ideas from the leading civilized nations of that day, the Egyptians,
and especially the Babylonians. From these sources had come certain
stories about the beginning of things.

Babylonian traders in the inns of Canaan used to tell a story of the
creation of the world, and also about a great flood which the gods
once sent upon the earth.

=How the Hebrews retold these stories.=--The best men among the
Hebrews knew that these stories were imperfect. Their forty years
training in the wilderness had made them wise in the ways of God. This
wisdom enabled them to sift the wheat from the chaff. They retold
these stories, omitting the error, and retaining the truth. Thus we
come to have the wonderful stories of the creation and the flood as we
find them in the Bible.

=How these stories were handed down.=--In the earliest days of the
settlement in Canaan very few Hebrews, if any, could read or write.
Possibly Moses understood the Egyptian picture-writing, or the
wedge-shaped letters of the Babylonian clay tablets. The Hebrew
letters, however, in which the books of the Old Testament afterward
were written, were invented by the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians