p. 7 | LET GOD BE TRUE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 28, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 22.

LET GOD BE TRUE.

It is not long ago when men declared that the civilization of Egypt extended back many thousands of years,—twenty to thirty millenniums. About the same thing was talked regarding Babylon and Assyria. But later researches are correcting these ideas.

As to Babylon one inscription carries us back to B.C. 3800 as the date of Sargon I. Lehmann argues for a reduction of a thousand years in this. Rogers considers the date a tentative one, “pending further light on the subject.” And he further tells us concerning Babylonian chronology (History of Babylon and Assyria, vol. 1, p. 321): “Every chronological scheme that has been proposed has in some way made accommodations, either by altering the figures or by rejecting some of them altogether.” The figures are not consistent.

And now Egypt’s antiquity is suffering. The distinguished Egyptologist, Prof. William Flinders Petrie, is reported as saying that recent finds have added more historical information than was before known. As stated by the Scientific American, the explorers “had completed the most important historical work that had yet come into their hands, settling, in a manner which had hitherto seemed beyond hope, the very foundations of Egyptian history. . . . No such complete materialization of history had been obtained by one stroke in any other country or age.” Inscriptions on tablets and vases give much information of dynasties ruling 6,600 years ago. These discoveries were made at Abydos. This carries us back to less than 5,000 years before Christ. Back of these, it is said, lie earlier dynasties. But the progress that is being made under truer investigation will at last reduce all these fabulous dates to much more modest estimates. For it is only estimates, or rather guesses; for as Rogers again tells us (vol. 1, p. 335): “From the Egyptian inscriptions scarcely anything of value may be obtained for chronological purposes.”

In all these investigations we need not fear for the Bible. In every just conclusion, the Word of God will be vindicated.