was ready for the press, two such discoveries have been made by Mr.
Pinches, to whom oriental archaeology and Biblical research are already
under such deep obligations, and it has been possible only to glance at
them in the text.

He has found a broken cuneiform tablet which once gave an account of the
reign of Khammurabi, the contemporary of Chedor-laomer and Arioch, of
the wars that he carried on, and of the steps by which he rose to the
supreme power in Babylonia, driving the Elamites out of it, overthrowing
his rival Arioch, and making Babylon for the first time the capital of a
united kingdom. Unfortunately the tablet is much broken, but what is
left alludes to his campaigns against Elam and Rabbatu--perhaps a city
of Palestine, of his reduction of Babylon, and of his successes against
Eri-Aku or Arioch of Larsa, Tudghulla or Tidal, the son of Gazza ... and
Kudur-Lagamar or Chedor-laomer himself. The Hebrew text of Genesis has
thus been verified even to the spelling of the proper names. The other
discovery of Mr. Pinches is still more interesting. The name of Ab-ramu
or Abram had already been found in Babylonian contracts of the age of
Khammurabi; Mr. Pinches has now found in them the specifically Hebrew
names of Ya'qub-ilu or Jacob-el and Yasup-ilu or Joseph-el. It will be
remembered that the names of Jacob-el and Joseph-el had already been
detected among the places in Palestine conquered by the Egyptian monarch
Thothmes III., and it had been accordingly inferred that the full names
of the Hebrew patriarchs must have been Jacob-el and Joseph-el. Jacob
and Joseph are abbreviations analogous to Jephthah by the side of
Jiphthah-el (Josh. xix. 14), of Jeshurun by the side of Isra-el, or of
the Egyptian Yurahma by the side of the Biblical Jerahme-el. As is
mentioned in a later page, a discovery recently made by Prof. Flinders
Petrie has shown that the name of Jacob-el was actually borne not only
in Babylonia, but also in the West. Scarabs exist, which he assigns to
the period when Egypt was ruled by invaders from Asia, and on which is
written the name of a Pharaoh Ya'aqub-hal or Jacob-el.

Besides the names of Jacob-el and Joseph-el, Mr. Pinches has met with
other distinctively Hebrew names, like Abdiel, in deeds drawn up in the
time of the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged. There were therefore
Hebrews--or at least a Hebrew-speaking population--living in Babylonia
at the period to which the Old Testament assigns t