and not in the Desert of Arabia.  They contain many Chaldaisms.  An Egyptian would not speak of the Mediterranean Sea as being west of him, an Assyrian would.  Their scenery and machinery, if such expressions may with propriety be used, are altogether Assyrian, not Egyptian.  They were such records as one might expect to meet with in the cuneiform impressions of the tile libraries of the Mesopotamian kings.  It is affirmed that one such legend, that of the Deluge, has already been exhumed, and it is not beyond the bounds of probability that the remainder may in like manner be obtained.

From such Assyrian sources, the legends of the creation of the earth and heaven, the garden of Eden, the making of man from clay, and of woman from one of his ribs, the temptation by the serpent, the naming of animals, the cherubim and flaming sword, the Deluge and the ark, the drying up of the waters by the wind, the building of the Tower of Babel, and the confusion of tongues, were obtained by Ezra.  He commences abruptly the proper history of the Jews in the eleventh chapter.  At that point his universal history ceases; he occupies himself with the story of one family, the descendants of Shem.

It is of this restriction that the Duke of Argyll, in his book on “Primeval Man,” very graphically says: 

In the genealogy of the family of Shem we have a list of names which are names, and nothing more to us.  It is a genealogy which neither does, nor pretends to do, more than to trace the order of succession among a few families only, out of the millions then already existing in the world.  Nothing but this order of succession is given, nor is it at all certain that this order is consecutive or complete.  Nothing is told us of all that lay behind that curtain of thick darkness, in front of which these names are made to pass; and yet there are, as it were, momentary liftings, through which we have glimpses of great movements which were going on, and had been long going on beyond.  No shapes are distinctly seen.  Even the direction of those movements can only be guessed.  But voices are heard which are as the voices of many waters.”  I agree in the opinion of Hupfeld, that “the discovery that the Pentateuch is put together out of various sources, or original documents, is beyond all doubt not only one of the most important and most pregnant with consequences for the interpretation of the historical books of the Old Testament, or rather for the whole of theology and history, but it is also one of the most certain discoveries which have been made in the domain of criticism and the history of literature.  Whatever the anticritical party may bring forward to the contrary, it will maintain itself, and not retrograde again through any thing, so long as there exists such a thing as criticism; and it will not be easy for a reader upon the stage of culture on which we stand in the present day, if he goes to the examination unprejudiced, and with an uncorrupted power of appreciating the truth, to be able to ward off its influence.”