Abstract
IN promoting excavations on archaeological sites in Palestine, Sir Charles Marston, who has earned the gratitude of all archaeologists and students of Biblical research, has shown himself throughout a staunch supporter of tradition, as against the destructive efforts of textual criticism. Here he summarises the inferences which in his view may be drawn from recent excavation in the Near East in corroboration of the Biblical narrative. Of this material the evidence for the flood at Ur and Kish are generally well known; but the implications of Prof. W. Garstang's discoveries at Jericho, which fix the fall of the city before Joshua at 1400 B.C. with but little margin of error, and the finds of Ras Shamra and the new light they throw on the use of an alphabetic script and the problem of monotheism, are not yet so widely appreciated. Sir Charles argues forcibly for the earlier dating by two hundred years of the Exodus and the entry of the Hebrews into Palestine, as a solution of the difficulties which arise in other parts of the Biblical text on the later dating. His explanation of the silence of the Hebrew records in regard to subsequent events mentioned in the Tel el Amarna letters is ingenious, and in the light of later history, plausible.
The New Knowledge about the Old Testament.
By Sir Charles Marston. Pp. 182 + 6 plates. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1933.) 5s. net.
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[Short Reviews]. Nature 132, 555 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132555b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132555b0