strong might not injure the weak, to protect the widow and orphan. By the command of Shamash (the Sun god), the great Judge of Heaven and Earth, let righteousness go forth in the land.

Let the oppressed who has a case at law come and stand before my image as King of Righteousness, let him read the inscription, and understand my precious words. The inscribed stone will explain his case to him, and make clear the law to him, and his heart, well pleased, will say, "'Hammurabi is a master, who is as the father who begat his people!'"

The Yahwist writer was the fine flower, not of this Babylonic race, but of their kinsmen, the great nomadic tribe of the starloving Chaldean Abram, whose home for centuries was the wilderness and whose lives were spent in wandering with their flocks and herds over the vast country that stretched between the two superb civilizations of Egypt and Babylon.

About twelve hundred years after the days of the patriarch Abram this Israelite tribe had expanded into a nation - and had entered the "Promised Land" and built a temple to Yahweh and a palace that was the admiration of the world.

"Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the finest gold. There were six steps to the throne, and the top of the throne was round behind; and there were stays on either side by the place of the seat, and two lions standing beside the stays. And twelve lions stood there on the one side and on the other upon the six steps; there was not the like made in any kingdom."

THE YAHWIST BIBLE

The great Yahwist Bible was written when the Israelites were at the height of their success and prosperity as a nation, just after the notable reign of king Solomon. Three hundred years later came their downfall nationally. Their traitorous king Zedekiah broke his treaty with Nebuchadnezzar in favor of Egypt and the powerful king of Babylon naturally marched against Jerusalem, captured the city, destroyed the temple and palace and deported ten thousand of the leading families to dwell in Babylon by the banks of the Euphrates river.

If the Sacred Ark of the Covenant was rescued from the

flames by the Jewish priest, its location has never been revealed to the world.

But at the time of the writing of the Yahwist Bible, the world was at the feet of the Jewish king, who had married an Egyptian princess, and formed an alliance with the king of Tyre. The queen of Sheba had come even from Africa "the uttermost parts of the earth," to do him homage "and hear the wisdom of Solomon," with her own ears.

The unknown prophet who wrote this primitive document, perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most ancient part of our Scriptures, lived in the ninth century, B. C.

At this time, before the religion had assumed its elaborate ritual, men were on terms of closer intimacy with the Deity, and our author does not hesitate to use his personal name of Yahweh, the tribal God of the Hebrews, as freely as Christians use the name Jesus. His quaint and picturesque document was written centuries before the Pentateuch. Afterward about 400 B. С. came the priestly interpolations, the Elohist scripture, the "Book of the Priests" and Deuteronomy, the whole forming the first Jewish Bible known as the Torah or Pentateuch.

The "Book of the Priests" chiefly laws, ritual, genealogies and editorial comments written after the captivity was evidently deeply influenced by the culture and the gorgeous ritual of the Babylonian religion.

These interpolations added about five hundred years later, not only broke the continuity of thought, but almost utterly destroyed the artistic unity of this perfect little gem of ancient literature, the Yahwist Bible. They were also the source of many bewildering contradictions, especially in the first and second chapters of Genesis.

The explanation of these violent contrasts is very simple. The first chapter of Genesis was written, not by the Yahwist prophets, but by the Jewish priests, and was placed by them before the first chapter of the Yahwist Bible, as the prevailing belief of the people when the Pentateuch or Torah was compiled, in the days after the Babylonian captivity.

It is especially interesting as marking the wonderful growth of their religious ideals in the years that had elapsed since the days of Solomon. According to Dr. Bennett the Jewish priests particularly wished to counteract the ancient belief of the common people in the creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

In the first chapter the Deity is represented as an invisible spirit creating the animals in orderly procedure - and man last of all. "Male and female created he them," apparently equal. In the second chapter he is pictured as a man kind hearted but irate and living in a beautiful park or garden, creating Adam himself first of all, and the animals afterward to give him pleasure. Eve was not even a separate creation in this first myth, but was moulded from a rib taken from the side of Adam.

In the sixth and seventh chapters there is also an interesting contradiction. In the sixth chapter the animals are pictured as going into the Ark, "two by two." In the seventh chapter they go in "seven by seven" according to the Yahwist account. A few verses farther on they again are pictured as entering "two by two." The explanation is that the Jewish priests decided they must have gone in "two by two" and that Noah could not have known the distinction between clean and unclean and so they placed their version before the Yahwist one. As there was no division into chapters until the middle ages this served to counteract the belief that they entered "by sevens." The second mention of their entering "two by two," Dr. Bennett says was inserted by a mere scribe, to strengthen the position of the priests.

Constant delight has attended upon the task of detaching from their academic later overlay, this series of narratives, revealing in all their primitive beauty the personal charm and distinction of style of their great author.

Freed from this later overlay of interpolations we have a connected narrative of great interest, a partial restoration of the famous document, the great Yahwist Bible.

The unknown Yahwist genius found many of his stories in the works of an earlier day, especially the "Book of Jasher" and the "Book of the Wars of Yahweh." But his wonderful tales were chiefly the stories the ancient Israelites told under the starry skies around their camp-fires for hundreds of years. Sir James G. Frazer says: it is the pastoral age depicted "with a clearness of outline and a vividness of colouring which time has not dimmed and which under all the changes of modern life still holds the reader spell bound by their ineffable charm."

...

The picture of Rachel at the well "with the sheep lying round it in the noontide heat is as vivid in the writer's words as it is in the colors of Raphael."

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And to this exquisite picturesqueness in the delineation of human life he adds a charming naïveté, an antique simplicity in his descriptions of the divine. He carries us back to the days of old, when no such awful gulf was supposed to intervene between man and the deity. In his pages we read how God moulded the first man out of clay, as a child shapes his mud baby; how he walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and called the shamefaced couple, who had been skulking behind trees; how he made coats of skin to replace the too scanty fig-leaves of our first parents; how he shut the door behind Noah, when the patriarch had entered into the ark; how he sniffed the sweet savour of the burning sacrifice; how he came down to look at the tower of Babel, apparently because viewed from the sky it was beyond his reach of vision; how he conversed with Abraham at the door of his tent, in the heat of the day, under the shadow of the whispering oaks. In short, the whole work of this delightful writer is instinct with a breath of poetry, with something of the freshness and fragrance of the olden time, which invests it with an ineffable and immortal charm."

NOTE

The compiler wishes to acknowledge the deepest obligation to the great editors of the Century Bible, and to the distinguished author of "The Folklore of the Old Testament," Sir James G. Frazer, for permission to quote from these books. The text used in this word is based upon the revised English version of the Bible, although necessarily very much changed. С. М.