12. Critics Undervalue the Totality of the Evidence

Critics Undervalue the Totality of the Evidence

Thus, the vicissitudes of the life of the English people for the last fifteen hundred years can be traced in the foreign words that have been taken over into its literature during that period. So also with the Hebrew people for the last four thousand years, and in the first part of sixteen hundred years no less than since that time. And in the study of the Hebrew literature in the light of the foreign elements that are embedded in it, we find that the truthfulness of the history is incidentally but convincingly confirmed. In each stage of the literature the foreign words in the documents are found to belong to the language of the peoples that the Scriptures and the records of the nations surrounding Israel unite in declaring to have influenced and affected the Israelites at that time. The critics of the Old Testament have never given sufficient weight to the totality of this evidence. That the presence of Babylonian terms in the first chapter of Genesis points to a time when Babylonian influence was predominant, no one will dispute; but the same influence is manifest in the second chapter and also in Daniel. This influence can easily be accounted for in all three instances on the supposition that the contents of Genesis 1 and 2 were brought by Abraham from Babylon and that the book of Daniel was written at Babylon in the sixth century B.C. While it might be accounted for in Genesis 1 if it were composed at Babylon during or after the exile, how can it have influenced Genesis 2, if, as the critics assert, it were written somewhere between 800 and 750 B.C.? How, also, can we account for the Babylonian influence in Daniel if, as the same critics assure us, it were written in Palestine in 164 B.C.?