234 The Fundamentals (•I may touch on this later), I answer that it gives much greater help by showing how the knowledge of very ancient things could be safely handed down. For us the chief inter est of these discoveries is the help they give us in answering the question, How far do these narratives in Genesis embody for us the oldest traditions of our race ? There are two rea sons which lead us to look with some confidence to Baby lonia for the answer to this question. For one thing, in early Babylonia we are already far back into the times to which many of these traditions relate; for another, the Bible itself points to Babylonia as the original city of those traditions. Eden was in Babylonia, as shown by its rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris. It was in Babylonia the Ark was built ; and on a mountain in the neighborhood of Babylonia the Ark rested. It was from the plain of Shinar, in Babylonia, that the new distrib1:1tion of the race took place. To Babylonia, therefore, if anywhere, we are entitled to look for light on these ancient traditions, and do we not find it? I read sometimes with astonishment of the statement that Babylonian discovery has done little or nothing for the confirmation of these old parts of Genesis-has rather proved that they belong to the region of the mythical. Take only one or two examples. I leave over meanwhile the Babylonian story of the creation and the flood, and take that old tenth chapter of Genesis, the "Table of Nations." Professor Kautzsch, of Halle, a critic of note, says of that old table, "The so-called Table of Nations remains, accord ing to all results of monumental exploration, an ethnographic original document of the first rank which nothing can replace." In this tenth chapter of Genesis, verses 8-10, we have cer tain statements about the origin of Babylonian civilization. We learn (1 ) that Babylonia is the oldest of civilizations; (2) that Assyrian civilization was derived from Babylonia; and (3) strangest of all, that the founders of Babylonian civ ilization were not Semites, but Hamites-descendants of
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