ia in
the seventh or eighth century before Christ. The most important of these
passages is in Isaiah. That prophet, in his denunciation of woe upon
Tyre, says, according to our translation,--"Behold the land of the
Chaldaeans this people was not, till the Assyrian founded it for them
that dwell in the wilderness; they set up the towers thereof, they raised
up the palaces thereof; and he brought it to ruin;" or, according to
Bishop Lowth, "Behold the land of the Chaldaeans. This people was of no
account. (The Assyrians founded it for the inhabitants of the desert,
they raised the watch-towers, they setup the palaces thereof.) This
people hath reduced her and shall reduce her to ruin." It was argued
that we had here a plain declaration that, till a little before Isaiah's
time, the Chaldaeans had never existed as a nation. Then, it was said,
they obtained for the first time fixed habitations from one of the
Assyrian kings, who settled them in a city, probably Babylon. Shortly
afterwards, following the analogy of so many Eastern races, they suddenly
sprang up to power. Here another passage of Scripture was thought to
have an important bearing on their history. "Lo! I raise up the
Chaldaeans," says Habakkuk, "that bitter and hasty nation, which shall
march through the breadth of the land to possess the dwelling places that
are not theirs. They are terrible and dreadful; their judgment and their
dignity shall proceed of themselves; their horses also are swifter than
the leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their
horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far;
they shall fly as an eagle that hasteth to eat; they shall come all for
violence; their faces shall nip as the east wind, and they shall gather
the captivity as the sand. And they shall scoff at the kings, and the
princes shall be a scorn unto them; they shall deride every stronghold;
they shall heap dust and take it." The Chaldaeans, recent occupants of
Lower Mesopotamia, and there only a dominant race, like the Normans in
England or the Lombards in North Italy, were, on a sudden, "raised"
elevated from their low estate of Assyrian colonists to the conquering
people which they became under Nebuchadnezzar.

Such was the theory, originally advanced by Gesenius, which, variously
modified by other writers, held its ground on the whole as the
established view, until the recent cuneiform discoveries. It was, from
th