p. 579 | The Hittites

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 1, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 37.

The Hittites.

We recently alluded to the progress of error and to the concessions far too readily made to the critics of the holy Scriptures, who assert that they find inconsistencies and errors in the Bible. These critics have made many mistakes. A record of their blunders would go far to destroy their credit and lead men to look upon them with suspicion. One of their notable and quite recent blunders has been in regard to the Hittites. Of this people, figuring on the sacred page from the day of Abraham, Rev. Wm. Wright, D. D., says:

"We see the serried lines of chariots opposing Joshua on his entrance into the promised land, and in the decisive battle by Lake Merom. We see their soldiers of fortune leading the hosts of David and Solomon and their women in the harems of the same powerful monarchs; and finally we see the Syrian army flying in panic from the siege of Samaria for fear of the kings of the Hittites."

The scriptural writers make them a great and powerful people; but no trace of the Hittites had been found in classical history. In fact, all known records, the Bible excepted, had not one word in regard to this people. So the destructive critics on the continent and their imitators in England, with various degrees of emphasis, asserted that these scriptural recognitions of the Hittites had no foundation in fact; that no such people had existed during Old Testament times; that this part of the Jewish history was indisputably not true, and that this want of accuracy destroyed the theory of inspiration as well as the credibility of the record. Even in the "Encyclopedia Britannica," to-day only a little more than half published, Rev. T. K. Cheyne, of Oxford University, writing about the Hittites, said the scriptural references to them are unworthy of belief.

For some time these skeptics had the field to themselves. They could not be contradicted. Apart from the scriptural writers there was no recognition of the Hittites in ancient records so much as by a single word. The outlook for believers in the Old Testament was forbidding and gloomy. How was it possible that a people so great, so warlike, so powerful as the Bible represented the Hittites to be, were not even named by the old historians? The critics were very confident. They had applied the much-lauded "historic method" to the Scriptures, and the Scriptures had been unable to endure the test. So confident were they that when a Presbyterian missionary declared in 1872 that certain inscriptions, found two years before, were of Hittite origin, his announcement was received with ridicule and derision, but it turned out that the missionary was right. The inscriptions proved to be Hittite records, beyond all cavil. Soon afterwards additional testimony came from Egypt. As the monuments there were more carefully examined, and as the work of deciphering inscriptions proceeded, behold the Hittites appeared as one of the enemies most feared by the Egyptians, as a great people occupying a vast territory, and as one of the chief of then existing peoples.

Nor was this all; the Assyrian tablet and cylinders added their testimony and carried the history of the Hittites back to 1,900 years before Christ, declaring that at that remote period they were a mighty people; and these discoveries have so multiplied that the unbelieving critics, full of sneers only a few years ago, are now actually asserting that the Hittites were the fathers of early civilization. So in this the word of God has been fully vindicated.—Intelligencer.