90
The Fundamentals The other point on which I dissent is the idea that the Israelites began their religious history without the idea of the one true God, Maker of heaven and earth; that they began with a tribal god, the storm god of Sinai or some other local deity, and gradually clothed him from their own minds with the attributes which belong to Jehovah. This, which is the product of the evolutionary theory of religion, and not a fair deduction from any evidence we possess, I entirely disbelieve, and I am glad to say that this view also is being greatly modified or parted with. I t is this theory, however, which lies behind a great deal of the criticism of these early narratives of Genesis. Those things, it is said, could not be; those great ideas could not be there; for man at that early stage could not have evolved them. Even God, it appears, could not have given them to him. Our “could be’s,” however, will have to be ruled by facts, and my con- tention is that the facts are adverse to the theory as currently set forth. I come now to the question, Is there any external corrob- oration or confirmation of these early narratives in Genesis? Here let me say a little of the relation of these narratives to Babylonia. Everyone has heard something of the wonderful discoveries in Babylonia, and it would be difficult to exag- gerate the brillance and importance of these marvelous .dis- coveries. The point which concerns us chiefly is the extraor- dinary light thrown on the high culture of early Babylonia. Here, long before the time of Abraham, we find ourselves in the midst of cities, arts, letters, books, libraries, and Abra- ham’s own age—that of Hammurabi—was the bloomtime of this civilization. Instead of Israel being a people just emerg- ing from the dim dawn of barbarism, we find in the light of these discoveries that it was a people on whom from its own standpoint the ends of the earth had come—h eir to the riches of a civilization extending millenniums into the past. If you say this creates a difficulty in representing the chronology
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker