it for the
coming of the Messiah. The Babylonian influence which had been working
in the West for four thousand years received, as it were, a fresh
impulse, and affected the religion and life of Judah in a new and
special manner. Nor has the influence of Babylonian culture vanished
even yet. Apart from the religious beliefs we have received from Israel,
there is much in European civilisation which can be traced back to the
old inhabitants of Chaldaea. It came through Canaanitish hands; perhaps,
too, through the hands of the Etruscans. At all events, the system of
augury which Rome borrowed from Etruria had a Babylonian origin, and the
prototype of the strange liver-shaped instrument by means of which the
Etruscan soothsayer divined, has been found among the relics of a
Babylonian library.

CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

Our task is finished. We have passed under review some of the facts
which have been won by modern discovery from the monuments of the
nations who helped to create the history of Israel. That history no
longer stands alone like a solitary peak rising from the plain. Egypt,
Babylonia, and Assyria have yielded up their dead; Canaan and even
Arabia are now beginning to do likewise. The Oriental world of the past
is slowly developing before our eyes; centuries which were deemed
pre-historic but a few years ago have now become familiar to us, and we
can study the very letters written by the contemporaries and
predecessors of Abraham, and read the same books as those that were read
by them. A new light has been poured upon the Old Testament; its story
has been supplemented and explained; its statements tested and proved.

The Israelites were but one out of many branches of the same family.
Their history is entwined around that of their brethren, their
characteristics were shared by others of the same race. The Canaan they
occupied was itself inhabited by more than one people, and after the
first few years of invasion, its influence became strong upon them. In
race, indeed, the Jew was by no means pure; at the outset a mixture of
Israelite and Edomite, he was further mingled with Moabite and
Philistine elements. The first king of Judah as a separate kingdom had
an Ammonite mother, and bore an Ammonite name, while the portraits which
surmount the names of Shishak's conquests in southern Palestine show
that the old Amorite population was still predominant there. It was
religion and history that made the Je