By Dr. Andrew Craig Robinson Rector of Ballymoney, Donnellan Lecturer at Dublin University
N ote .— The following article by Dr. Robinson, in which he declares the Graf-Wellhausen theory of the Pentateuch to be “logically and absolutely im possible to be true,” will be read with interest as a learned elucidation of a somewhat rarely-discussed topic.— E ditor .
to Abram as his wife, may always perhaps have appeared a strange and unnatural thing for Sarai to have done. Yet it was repeated by Rachel, who because she had no children, gave Bil- hah to Jacob as his concubine ; and by Leah, who, because she considered she had not enough children, gave Jacob her maid, Zilpah. And then after that we have no instance in the Old Testa ment of any other wife doing the same thing. This circumstance then stamps the narrative in Genesis with a peculiar mark which differentiates it from the succeeding portion of the Old Testa ment. If we ask what is the meaning of Sarai, Rachel, and Leah acting as they did the answer is supplied by the Code of Hammurabi, and it is this :
most wonderful dis- covery which has been made in recent years, of the Code of Laws of am mu r a b i , wh o
reigned over Babylonia c. 2000 B. C., has thrown a vivid light on one re markable incident in the life of Abra ham, and shown (as against the skep tical views of the Critics) that the story of the life of Abraham as relat ed in the Book of Genesis is a genuine history, and not as they assert a ficti tious story composed in the Early Centuries of the Monarchy to reflect into the past the ideas of that later age. The incident related in Genesis xvi, where Sarai, because she has no chil dren, gives her Egyptian maid, Hagar,
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