Ilasis-adra, his" Noah," consigned to writing the learning of the old world boforo the Flood, impressing it on tablets of baked clay, which he buried at Sippara, and exhumed after the Flood had subsided. 1 Existing Babylonian inscriptions upon bricks and gems 2 are believed to date from before n.c. 2000. Ewald remarks, 3 that the words expressive of "writing" (:lnJ), " book " (7ElD), and " ink " (l'i), are common to all the branches and dialects of Semitic speech, except that the Ethiopic and the Southern Arabian have pnit for "to write," and deduces from this fact the conclusion that writing in a book with ink must have been known to the earliest Semites before they separated off into their various tribes, nations, and families. 4 The Hittites were certainly acquainted with letters before the time of Moses ; for not only had they written treaties with the Egyptians at a period anterior to the Exodus, 6 but a Hittite author is mentioned by Pentaour, a royal scribe of the reign of Rameses the Great. 6 Alphabetic writing was probably an art well known in the greater part of Western Asia from a date preceding not only Moses but Abraham. The Egyptian system of hieroglyphic writing was also beyond all doubt complete several centuries before Abraham. This system is sometimes supposed to be little more than a representation of ideas by pictorial forms; but in reality it is almost wholly phonetic. 7 There would be no difficulty in transliterating the Pentateuch into hieroglyphic characters, 8 which one familiar with them would read off so as to be intelligible to a Jew. If Moses, therefore, did not possess an alphabetic system of his own, and was acquainted with the hieroglyphic system, which is not impossible, since he was bred up at the court, and "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts vii. 22), he might have written the Pentateuch in that character. At any rate, it would have been easy for him to adopt the cursive hieratic character, which, while based upon the hieroglyphics, presents no pictures of objects, but only a set of straight or curvilinear lines. The hieratic writing was certainly in use as early as too time of the twelfth or thirteenth dynasty,9 and therefore long anterior to the Exodus. With regard to the objection of De W ette, that a work so perfect as the Pentateuch is altogether beyond the literary capabilities of the age of Moses,
1 Frag. 7 (in C. Miiller's • Fragm. Hist. Grmc.,' vol. ii. p. 501). 2 Rawlinson, • Ancient Monarchies,' vol i. pp. 80, 87, 199; 'History of Herodotus,' ,ol. i. pp. 360-2, 2nd edition. • ' Geschichte des Volkes lsre.el,' vol. i. p. 77. • The argument is analogous to those dra.wn by Professor Me.x Miiller from the words common to e.11 Aryan dialects, and seems to be quite unanswerable • 'Records of the Past,' vol. iv. pp. 27-32. • Brugsch, 'Histoire d'Egypte,' p. 139. ' Lenonnant, ' Manuel d'Histoire Ancienne,' vol. i. p. 500 ; Birch, in Bunsen's ' Egypt, vol. v. pp. 599-617 • For the details of the process, see Canon Cook's essay' On Egyptian Words in the Penta.- tench,' published in the 'Speaker's Commentary,' vol. i. pp. 476--492. 8 'Records of tho Past,' vol. vi. p. 134. Compare Birch, 'Ancient Egypt,' p. 49. INTRODUCTION.
the present wi:iter may perhaps be allowed to quote a passage which he wrote twenty years ago, and which he has never seen answered:-" Do VI. ett.e's stawment is a gross exaggeration of the reality. Considered as a literary work, the Pentateuch is not the production of an advanced or refined, but of a simple and rude ag·e. Its characteristics aro plainness, inartificiality, absence of rhetoric,a,l ornament, and occ,a,sional defoctivo arrangement. The only style which it can be truly said to bring to perfection, is that simple one of clear and vivid narrative which is always best attained in the early dawn of a nation's literature, as a Herodotus, a· Froissart, and a Stow sufficiently indicate. In other respects it is quite untrue to say that the work goes beyond all later Hebrew efforts. We look in T"ain through the Pentateuch for the gnomic wisdom of Solomon, the eloquent denunciations of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, or the lofty flights of Isaiah. It is absurd to compare the song of Moses, as a literary JJroduction, even with some of the psalms of David, much more to parallel it with Ezekiel's eloquence and Homeric variety, or Isaiah's awful depth and solemn majesty of repose. In a literary point of view it may be questioned whether Moses did so much for the Hebrews as Homer for the Greeks, or whether his writings had really as great an influence on the after pro- ductions of his countrymen. And if his literary greatness still surprises us, if Hebrew literature still seems in his person to reach too suddenly a high excellence, albeit not so high a one as has been argued-let us remember, in the first place, that Moses was not, any more than Homer, the first writer of his nation, but only happens to be the first whose writings have come down to us. ' Vix.ere fortes ante Agamem.nona.' Moses seems so great because we do not possess the works of his predecessors, and so are unable to trace the progress of Hebrew literature up to him. Had we the 'Songs of Israel' (Num. xxi 17), and the 'Book of the Wars of the Lord' (ib. 14), which he quotes, we might find him no literary phenomenon at all, but as a writer merely on a level with others of his age and nation.'' 1 Moreover, recent research has shown that in Egypt, long prior to the time at which Moses wrote, literature had become a profession, and was cultivated in a variety of branches with ardour and considerable success. Morality, history, epistolary correspondence, poetry, medical science, novel- writing, were known as separate studies, and taken for their special subjects by numerous writers, from a date anterior to Abraham. 2 In the times of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, under one or the other of which the Exodus almost certainly took place, Egyptian literature reached its acme : lengthy works were composed, such as that contained in the "Great Harris Papyrus," which is 133 feet long by nearly seventeen inches broad; 3 writers enjoyed 1 • Aids to Faith,' Essay vi. pp. 245-6 (published in 1861) • See Goodwin, in 'Cam bridge Essays ' for 1858, pp. 230-2(;0 1 ' Records of the Past,' vol. vi. p 21 INTRODUCTION. XJ