UR OF THE CHALDEES

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XIV.1, who was one of the four kings of the East that formed a coalition against the rebellious kings of the Westland-the five kings of the cities of the plain.... In December, 1901, and January, 1902, M. J. de Morgan, the indefatigable French archaeologist and excavator, found on the site of the old acropolis of Susa (Shushan of Esther) portions of a broken stèle of black diorite, a stone much in favor in the Persian gulf countries for the production of statues and obelisks.... This ancient stèle carried on its surface Hammurabi's code of civil laws.

IRA M. PRICE, Ph.D., Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the University of Chicago, The Monuments and the Old Testament, pp. 301-303.

5. Was there such a place as Ur of the Chaldees?

BIBLE EVIDENCE.

Genesis 11:31-And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there.

SECULAR EVIDENCE.

The home of the nativity of Abraham was long a lost city. The excavations of Mr. Taylor, in 1854, and the discovery by Major Rawlinson of important historical documents, have settled beyond reasonable dispute the location of Ur of the Chaldees.

IRA M. PRICE, Ph.D., The Monuments and the Old Testament, p. 99.

The discoveries in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia have restored to us the inscribed records and monuments of great civilizations which preceded or existed concurrently with the Hebrew people and held contemporary intercourse with them. The history of the Hebrew people as recorded in the Old Testament has been found to be a part, and an important part, of the wider study of Oriental history.... The migration of Abram, apparently a movement of a small tribal family from Ur of the Chaldees, is now shown to be part of a vast heaving of the nations, extending from the banks of the Tigris to the lowlands of Egypt.

6.

W. ST. CHAD BOSCAWEN, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; Member of the Society of Biblical Archaeology.

Is the Bible story of the flood a myth?

BIBLE EVIDENCE.

Genesis 6:7, 17-And the Lord said,... And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.

Genesis 7:11, 12, 23, 24-In the sixth hundreth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows

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GREAT ASSYRIAN SCHOLAR FAINTS

of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty Noah only remained alive, and they that And the waters prevailed upon the earth

days and forty nights.... were with him in the ark. an hundred and fifty days.

Matt. 24:37-39-But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

SECULAR EVIDENCE.

These are the days that we study the Bible with the spade. Our fathers were content to commit the Bible to memory, verse by verse, and the passages they could not understand they believed were beyond human understanding; but the modern scholar, with spade in hand, has gone to the Bible lands to dig up the Bible cities, and as they are uncovered, their very stones cry out the story of the long-forgotten past.....

In the year 1872, after the tablets from the Nineveh library had been taken to the British Museum, George Smith, who in his day was the greatest of Assyrian scholars, took up the fragment of a broken tablet and read these words: I released a dove; it flew about, but finding no resting place, returned.

They were familiar words, and so significant that their appearance on the little fragment of clay overcame Mr. Smith; he recognized all that the words meant, and fell senseless to the floor. He had discovered a Babylonian story of the flood!

The discovery was heralded throughout the world, and at once a London paper, the Daily Telegraph, provided funds to send Mr. Smith to Nineveh in search of the missing fragments of the tablet. In the chamber of the palace of Assurbanipal, where the library was stored, Mr. Smith found the fragment he most desired. Since then other excavators have discovered other copies of the same story, and at last the narrative has became fairly complete.

The Babylonian and Hebrew stories so closely resemble each other that evidently they are related....

It is often stated that the Hebrews borrowed the story from the Babylonians, or that the Babylonians borrowed it from the Hebrews, yet it can hardly be said that one can borrow that which is one's own. Babylonia was the birthplace of the Hebrews; the scenes of the first two thousand years of their history were along the Euphrates, and the stories of the creation, of the Garden of Eden and of the deluge, belonged to them as much as to the Babylonians. The stories of King Alfred belong not only to the English; they belong also to the English colonists wherever they have gone. Thus Babylonian history and literature, until the days of Abraham, was the only history and literature the Hebrews had. It is then not correct to say that the Hebrews borrowed the story from the Babylonians; it was the story of their

"The Babylonians divided their history into two great periods: the one before, the other after, the Flood." ("Babel and Bible," by Frederick Delitzsch, page 42.) And the Babylonians had just ten "kings before the Flood, just as the Bible has ten antediluvian patriarchs. No reputable scholar now doubts that these accounts of the deluge represent a real historical fact.