Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS. 373
tion on the Babylonian tablets, wonderfully like the two
leading Hebrew narratives in Genesis, and that the latter
were undoubtedly drawn from the former that the ;
" garden
of Eden " and its mystical tree were known to the inhab-
itants of Chaldea in pre-Semitic days ; that the beliefs that
woman was created out of man, and that man b}^ sin fell
from a state of innocence, are drawn from very ancient Chal-
that Assyriology confirms the belief
dean-Babylonian texts ;
that the book Genesis is a ; compilation that portions of it
are by no means so old as the time of Moses that the ex-
;
pression in our sacred book, " The Lord smelled a sweet savour"
at the sacrifice made by Noah, is " identical with that
of the Babylonian poet " ; that " it is impossible to believe
that the language of the latter was not known to the biblical
writer"; and that the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife
was drawn in part from the old Egyptian tale of T/ie Two
Brothers. Finally, after a multitude of other concessions,
Prof. Sayce allowed that the book of Jonah, so far from being
the work of the prophet himself, can not have been written
until the Assyrian Empire was a thing of the ; past that the
book of Daniel contains serious mistakes ; that the so-called
historical chapters of that book so conflict with the monuments
that the author can not have been a contemporary of
Nebuchadnezzar and ; Cyrus that " the story of Belshazzar's
fall is not historical " ; that the Belshazzar referred to in it as
king, and as the son of Nebuchadnezzar, was not the son of
Nebuchadnezzar, and was never king ; that " King Darius
the Mede," who plays so great a part in the story, never ex-
isted ; that the book associates persons and events really
and that it must have been written at a
in it for its own
many years apart,
period far later than the time assigned
origin.
As to the book of Ezra, he tells us that we are confronted
by a chronological inconsistency which no amount of ingenuity
can explain away. He also acknowledges that the book
of Esther " contains many exaggerations and improbabilities,
and is simply founded upon one of those same historical
tales of which the Persian chronicles seem to have been full."
Great was the dissatisfaction of the traditionalists with their
expected champion ;
well might they repeat the words of