afternoon to the study of the New Testament epistles in the original. The plan of the epistle, translation, exegesis, word-studies, doctrinal suggestions, homiletical hints-these after two weeks of special study on the part of each member were made the subject of severest inspection and criticism, with results of incalculable good to all. Undoubtedly various other organizations of a similar sort have existed in different localities. Untold benefit might be derived from such association on the part of brethren of contiguous charges; and far better for students is such a local guild than a school of correspondence, provided no precious time be frittered away in gossip, but the session be held rigidly to the important work in hand.

Summer Schools. In addition to the Conference organization and the local guild we notice one more type of organization, the summer school, which ignores Conference boundaries and proffers its inspirations to all. Of these the Ocean Grove Summer School of Theology, distinctly announced as "auxiliary to the Itinerants' Club movement," is one of the foremost in results achieved. This school seeks to furnish results of latest scholarship, to illustrate methods of critical work, and to give busy pastors opportunities to come face to face with great scholars and specialists. Nearly ten thousand dollars have been expended upon a single programme of ten days, and the enrollment fee of two dollars and fifty cents admitted to everything. The departments of systematic theology, Old Testament, New Testament, historical theology, hermeneutics, biblical theology and physical science, pastoral theology, and English literature, are represented by specialists. The evenings are given to popular lectures, and all concludes with a great musical festival, when the oratorios are rendered upon a scale of magnificence and with an artistic excellence in every way worthy. As this school is becoming known its phenomenal privileges are being appreciated, and last August several journeyed a thousand miles to attend this convocation, while one of the bishops remarked upon the programme that "no such constellation of talent and scholarship had been brought together for similar work anywhere upon the continent."

Post-Graduate Work. Naturally this work is receiving attention. Several Conferences have taken up the matter. The two Minnesota Conferences have organized a State Post-Graduate Association, whose course of study and reading for the year 1897-98 is as follows:

THE RENAISSANCE. 1. The Renaissance in Italy, Symonds; 2. The Renaissance, Philip Schaff; 3. The Renascence in Italy, Van Dyke; 4. The Divine Comedy, Dante. Supplementary Reading: 1. The Renaissance in Italy, J. A. Symonds, large edition, seven volumes; 2. The Renaissance, Burckhardt; 3. Makers of Florence, Mrs. Oliphant; 4. Florentine Painters, Berenson; 5. Renaissance of Art in Italy, Mrs. Baxter; 6. Two First Centuries of Florentine History, Villari; 7. Romola, George Eliot; 8. Lowell's Essay on Dante; 9. The Great Artist Series; 10. Encyclopedia Britannica, articles on the Medici, Renaissance, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michael Angelo, Raphael, etc.

A similar course is planned in comparative religion. The faculty of the Rock River Conference is arranging courses in apologetics, philosophy, history, sociology, and biblical criticism.

Thus much then, and far more than we have here indicated, has been already accomplished. But of this work with respect to any given Conference, and certainly with regard to the Church at large, we may well say, in the language of a correspondent who writes concerning his own Conference, "The larger possibilities involved in this advance educational movement in our Church still remain with us to be realized."

How to Prepare a Syllabus. Many students are perplexed by the requirement to prepare a syllabus of each book to be read, and examiners are given papers indicating widely diverse notions of what a syllabus should be. The following paper sent to the students of the Indiana Conference may prove acceptable:

It is required that a syllabus shall be made of each book "to be read " in the course of study. A syllabus is a short, concise statement of the argument of the book under consideration, and brings out the main points of the subject. It is neither an index nor a table of contents, but is a recapitulation of the thought contained in and developed by the author in his writing. Each statute of the enactments of Indiana are preceded by a syllabus of the statute, and may be studied as excellent examples of the syllabus. It is required that nothing shall be in the syllabus that is not in the statute, and nothing shall be omitted that is in the law. The Supreme Court has been called upon so often to pass upon the syllabus of a statute that we may look upon these as constructed after the most approved manner.

A carefully prepared syllabus is equal to a written or an oral examination upon the book. In reading, have paper and pencil at hand so as to note important matters that ought to enter into the syllabus of that book. Gather your material with care and the construction of the syllabus will be comparatively easy. In preparing a syllabus it is well to follow this outline: 1. Give the title of the book.

2. Give the approximate number of hours spent in reading and preparing the syllabus.

3. State in what respect the theme of the book differs from the title. 4. Give an analysis of the book, as follows:

(1) Object of the author in writing this book, and how well he has carried out his design. Defects as well as excellences may be pointed out.

(2) Development of the argument, analytically.

(3) Conclusions drawn by the author from his arguments.

(4) Conclusions drawn by the reader from the arguments.

5. State, in a few lines, the benefits derived from reading the book and the preparation of the syllabus.

6. Be neat, careful, and thoughtful in your work.

In the above two points merit special commendation. The "short, concise statement" is greatly to be preferred to a small volume of diffuse manuscript. Here, as elsewhere, brevity is indeed "the soul of wit." Neither "an index nor a table of contents" should rob any examination paper of the quality of individuality-one of its chief merits-and one of the best evidences of honest, thorough-going work.

9-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XIV.

ARCHEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL RESEARCH.

THE FOURTEENTH CHAPTER OF GENESIS.

THIS chapter, containing an account of the first war mentioned in the Bible, has been for many years a stumbling-block in the way of the destructive biblical critic. Uninteresting as it may seem to the ordinary lay reader, it still stands out prominently by itself, like some lofty peak from whose summit one may obtain, at least in outline, a general view of the mighty empires in Abraham's day. A man not having a theory to support will find no difficulty in regarding this entire chapter as a literal record of actual facts. Not so, however, with those of the Wellhausen school of critics; for they brand this chapter, as well as almost everything that precedes, as mythical or legendary, the invention of some patriotic Jew of a literary turn of mind, merely "to invest Abraham with a halo of glory." A charming story, say they, but nothing more, written by some priest or Levite who had seen or read of the military campaigns under Tiglath-pileser or Sennacherib, many centuries after the time of Abraham-a story painted in very vivid colors, so as to magnify the prowess and military greatness of the "father of the faithful." The author, as Hommel has ironically said, like a novelist of the nineteenth century, in search of local color wanders into distant Babylonia for his antiquarian details. The unhistorical character of these verses becomes evident, we are told, from the fact that the writer does not represent Abraham as waging war with the petty kings of Palestine, but with such monarchs as Arioch, Chedorlaomer, and Tidal, the mighty rulers of faraway empires.

In order to show the attitude of the destructive critics who are intent upon depressing all the early dates of the Old Testament books, we shall now cite two passages, both noticed by Hommel in The Ancient Hebrew Traditions. The first is from Professor Edward Meyer's History of Antiquity, published in 1884. This learned Halle professor wrote: "It would seem, therefore, that the Jew who inserted the account [Gen. xiv], one of the latest portions of the whole Pentateuch, in its present position must have obtained in Babylon exact information in regard to the early history of the country, and, for some reason which we are unable to fathom, mixes up Abraham with the history of Kudur-Lagamar; in other respects his version of the story accords perfectly with the absolutely unhistorical views held by the Jews in regard to primitive ages."

Even as early as 1869 Nöldeke characterized the entire chapter, so different from anything else in the story of Abraham, as the biased invention of a much later, though, possibly, preexilic, date. Wellhausen, the high priest of modern destructive criticism, writing twenty years later (1889), notwithstanding the fact that Assyriology had shown the weakness of

Nöldeke's position, still puts his seal of approval upon it, for in his book* we find in substance the following:

Nöldeke's criticism [of Gen. xiv] remains unshaken and unanswerable. That four kings from the Persian Gulf should, in the time of Abraham, have made an incursion into the Sinaitic Peninsula; that they should on this occasion have attacked five kinglets on the Dead Sea littoral and have carried them off prisoners; and finally that Abraham should have set out in pursuit of the retreating victors, accompanied by three hundred and eighteen men-servants, and have forced them to disgorge their prey-all these incidents are sheer impossibilities which gain nothing in credibility from the fact that they are placed in a world which had passed away.

It is the easiest thing possible to stamp that which runs counter to our theories as incredible or a mere invention. This is exactly what the critics have done with the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. Perhaps none but the more advanced of these will deny the historical character of Abraham. That he lived and acted, in the main, as described in Genesis will no longer be doubted. It used to be, and to some extent still is, different with Amraphel, Arioch, Chedorlaomer, and Tidal. Those four names, as far as history was concerned, were found nowhere outside of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is therefore to the destructive critic a prima facie evidence of their ungenuineness. It was confidently asserted that these four men never existed, but that their names were pure inventions, some

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thing like " Weller," Snodgrass," Tupman," or "Winkle," in the

Pickwick Papers. But granting that such men had really existed, Wellhausen still insists that "all these incidents" recorded of them in the Hebrew Bible "are sheer impossibilities." He, however, forgets to adduce sufficient proof for such a strong and sweeping statement. Those of our readers who are at all familiar with Babylonian and Egyptian history will have no difficulty in believing that an incursion in the days of Abraham from the Persian Gulf to the Sinaitic Peninsula was possible. Even as early as 3800 B. C. the great Sargon led his victorious hordes over nearly the same route. There is abundant evidence in the inscriptions that his dominion extended far and wide, from east to west, and, as McCurdy says, his sovereignty "was almost coterminous with that possessed by the most powerful kings of Assyria and Babylonia, three millenniums later." His son, Naram-Sin, according to the inscriptions, is said to have marched southward through Palestine to the Red Sea. It is no wonder that these monarchs styled themselves "King of the four quarters of the world." If Sargon I and his immediate successors could have made these military campaigns, where then is the logic of calling similar expeditions which were made fifteen hundred years later "sheer impossibilities?"

Fortunately we are not left to mere speculation, for during the past few years numerous tablets have been discovered which, according to one

* Die Composition des Hexateuchs, 2d ed., pp. 310-312.

of the best archeologists, contain the names of the four kings mentioned in Gen. xiv. Three of these, Chedorlaomer, Arioch, and Tidal, have been identified beyond a reasonable doubt with Kudur-Lagamar, Ariaku, and Tudkhul respectively. And some have gone so far as to see in Amraphel, King of Shinar, the mighty monarch Khammurabi of Babylonia. It is generally agreed that Shinar and Babylonia are synonymous and refer to the same country. The Babylonian form of "Khammurabi" is, according to Hommel, "Khammurapaltu." Sayce, however, proposes another explanation: "Amraphel," according to him, may be from "Ammi-rabi-pal," that is, " Ammi-rabi, the son." It seems clear that Khammu was sometimes written Ammi. The consonants in both the Hebrew and Babylonian forms are nearly the same. Arioch is the Eriaku of the inscriptions, and his capital Ellasar, beyond doubt, the Larsa of the cuneiform tablets, in southern Babylonia. This monarch's name is frequently found in the inscriptions. There is a tablet on which Eriaku calls his father Kudur-Mabug, "the father of the land of the Amorites." The very fact that Kudur-Mabug is styled the prince of "Martu" shows clearly that his dominion extended to Syria and Palestine, for these countries are known in the inscriptions by the term Martu," or "Amartu." "Chedorlaomer," in Hebrew, is clearly the same word as "Kudurlagamar " of the Babylonian inscriptions, whether or not they refer to the same person. The letter "g" in the Babylonian name is probably for the y silent in Hebrew. "Tidal " bears a remarkable similarity to the "Tudkhul" of the tablets. If we remember that the name is written in our Hebrew Bibles with any between the "d" and the "1," the "kh" of the Babylonian form is not difficult to understand. The Septuagint has Oapyaλ. This is interesting, showing that the transcriber in copying the word by mistook the for and reproduced y by the Greek y. The reader who has carefully compared the names as given in Gen. xiv and in the inscriptions is by this time convinced that they present a striking similarity, so much so as to satisfy Hommel, Sayce, and many others that they are identical. To be sure, a mathematical demonstration that they are the same has not been given; nevertheless the probability is so great as to render it almost certain that the four kings of Gen. xiv, on whom Abraham is represented as making an attack, are no other than those mentioned in the inscriptions.

If they are not identical it is a strange coincidence that Mr. Pinches, of the British Museum, one of the foremost Assyriologists of Europe, should have discovered some broken tablets on which are found the names of at least three of them, Eriaku, Kudurlagamar, and Tudkhul. There is also a fourth name, which, owing to the fact that the tablet is broken right in the middle of the name, cannot be deciphered. The first part is clearly written and gives "Khammu." It certainly requires no great imagination to complete the word with "rabi,” and thus read "Khammurabi," especially since we know that the great Khammurabi was a