portant, except in the contents of each roll. When the books were put into a volume the order became necessarily fixed.

It must always be remembered that the Bible as known and read in Western Europe until the time of the Reformation was the Vulgate, or Jerome's Latin version. It was from the Vulgate, Exodus 34:29, for example, that Michelangelo derived his authority for placing horns on the head of his statue of Moses. The Vulgate was back of the literature and art of Western Europe from the time that Christianity became the prevailing religion.

The Rheims-Douay version differs in the names of some books. Nehemiah is called II Esdras, Ezra being

called I Esdras, as was formerly done in all Bibles. I and II Samuel, and I and II Kings are I, II, III and IV Kings, while Chronicles appears as Paralipomenon, from the Septuagint title.

In the New Testament we have quotations from thirty books of the Hebrew canon, but no quotation, as such, from any of the books of the Apocrypha, although there are many passages, which will be discussed in another connection, which indicate that the New Testament writers were familiar with some of the books of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.1

1 The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, edited by R. H. Charles, Cambridge, 1913, is the first complete English edition of the non-canonical Jewish literature of the period extending from about 200 B. C. to 100 A. D. Under the title The Apocryphal New Testament, the non-canonical books of the early Christian centuries have been reprinted (1906) from an edition of 1820, printed in London for William Hone.

CHAPTER II

THE BACKGROUND OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

BACK of the Old Testament was an extensive literature, the product of high culture.

The Old Testament historical writings cover, in detail at some places, and in broad outline at others, the history of Jehovah's dealings with the descendants of Abraham, at first as the patriarchs, then as the tribes, and later as the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Dispersion, the building of cities, the confusion of tongues-these occupy the first eleven chapters of Genesis. The twelfth chapter records the call of Abraham, an event which occurred about twenty-two centuries before the Christian era. In addition to history, are the laws governing the religious ceremonies and social organization of the Jews, and there are also examples of various kinds of poetry, of wisdom literature, of stories of remarkable people and events, and the utterances of the prophets with their messages directly from Jehovah himself.

Probably the most interesting and important result of the work of the archeologists in their researches in the Orient has been in the reconstruction of much of the background of the Old Testament writings. The general reader no longer regards the ancient Hebrew Scriptures as shrouded in mystery as to their sources, and as representing ages in which the life of man was lived in a manner unlike that of any other time. The Tell el Amarna tablets, discovered in 1887, some of which

contain correspondence between Egypt and Palestine of about the time of Moses, indirectly throw light on the story of Joseph, for example, by indicating that close relations existed between the two countries, involving, probably, frequent communication by means of just such commercial caravans as that which passed along the ancient road and purchased Joseph as a slave from his conspiring brothers. The Code of Hammurabi, discovered in 1901 on a stone column at Susa, throws a flood of light on the Law of Moses as given in the Pentateuch. Hammurabi has been identified with Amraphel, King of Shinar, Genesis, 14:1, thus making him contemporary with Abraham. As Professor Driver says: "The civilization, including the history, the institutions, the art, and the society. of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, is now known to us in many respects more completely than that of ancient Egypt. Mr. Leonard King's Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi, King of Babylon in the twenty-second century B. C., contains almost as vivid a picture of life and character as do the Life and Letters of some statesman or prelate deceased among ourselves a few years ago.

The Code, elaborate in its details, which specify offenses and punishments, resembles in many ways the contents of Leviticus and shows that the Law of Moses was for the Jews a Code such as other peoples possessed in even earlier times. Inscriptions have been found containing records of Kings mentioned in Genesis, ch. 14, once pronounced, by some confident critics, mere "etymological inventions of imaginary characters," and it has been proved by these independ

1 S. R. Driver, Modern Research as Illustrating the Bible, The Sweich Lectures, 1908, London, 1909, p. 7.