to the long
sojourn of the Jews in Babylonia during the twenty years of the Exile.
But we now know that the traditions and legends of Babylonia were
already known in Canaan before the Israelites had entered the Promised
Land. It was not needful for the Hebrew writer to go to Chaldaea in order
that he might learn them; when Moses was born they were already current
both in Palestine and on the banks of the Nile. The Babylonian colouring
of the early chapters of Genesis is just what archaeology would teach us
to expect it would have been, had the Pentateuch been of the age to
which it lays claim.

Here and there indeed there are passages which must be of that age, and
of none other. When in the tenth chapter of Genesis Canaan is made the
brother of Cush and Mizraim, of Ethiopia and Egypt, we are carried back
at once to the days when Palestine was an Egyptian province. The
statement is applicable to no other age. Geographically Canaan lay
outside the southern zone to which Egypt and Ethiopia belonged, except
during the epoch of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, when all
three were alike portions of a single empire. With the fall of that
empire the statement ceased to be correct or even conceivable. After the
era of the Israelitish conquest Canaan and Egypt were separated one from
the other, not to be again united save for a brief space towards the
close of the Jewish monarchy. Palestine henceforth belonged to Asia, not
to Africa, to the middle zone, that is to say, which was given over to
the sons of Shem.

There is yet another passage in the same chapter of Genesis which takes
us back to the Patriarchal Age of Palestine. It is the reference to
Nimrod, the son of Cush, the beginning of whose kingdom was Babel and
Erech, and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar, and who was so
familiar a figure in the West that a proverb was current there
concerning his prowess in the chase. Here again we are carried to a date
when the Kassite kings of Babylonia held rule in Canaan, or led thither
their armies, and when the Babylonians were called, as they are in the
Tel el-Amarna tablets, the Kassi or sons of Cush. Nimrod himself may be
the Kassite monarch Nazi-Murudas. The cuneiform texts of the period show
that the names borne by the Kassite kings were strangely abbreviated by
their subjects; even in Babylonia, Kasbe and Sagarta-Suria, for
instance, being written for Kasbeias and Sagarakti-Suryas, the latter of
which even appe