The Bible and the Monuments.
By William Hayes Ward
IN two cases in the Bible story of the kings it has seemed like a plain mistake that Babylon is mentioned instead of Nineveh. How could Hezekiah have sent ambassadors with presents to Meradach-baladan, king at Babylon, while Nineveh was the capital? The monuments solve the riddle. They tell the whole story of the revolt of Meradach-baladan at Babylon against the king at Nineveh. The embassy sent to the rebel was a great political blunder, and Isaiah was right in rebuking it. The other case of difficulty is where the Bible tells us that Manasseh was taken captive by the king of Assyria and carried to Babylon. The annals of Esar-haddon are very imperfect, but they mention Manasseh as a tributary king, and we learn from them that he (Esar-haddon) was the only king of Assyria who held his court at Babylon. The Bible is confirmed on both these points. Before passing from the monuments of Assyria to those of Babylon, we may recall briefly the now well-known Moabite stone, with its remarkable confirmation of the Bible story. The Bible tells us that after the death of Ahab, and the accession of Jehoram, Mesha, king of Moab, rebelled. There was discovered, ten years ago, in Dibon, the capital of Moab, a stone column on which this very Mesha, otherwise unknown, had given an account, engraved nearly nine hundred years before Christ, of the success of his rebellion. In a long story, which reads like a chapter of the Bible, he tells of his victories, and how he captured the cities of Israel by the help of his god Chemosh. The scene of the stories of the book of Daniel is laid in Babylon during the time of the later empire, which had its seat there. No book has been so severely assailed by destructive criticism. Those who reject it agree in assigning its date to a very late period,—that of Antiochus Epiphanes, about two centuries before Christ. It was almost impossible, until within a very few years, to make any conclusive reply to these critics, especially as the book of Daniel has reached us with what is probably not a very pure text. It is written in two different languages, of which one, the Chaldee, is perhaps a translation of an original, lost Hebrew. Very likely we owe to this late translator the Greek name, which cannot be denied, of the musical instruments. But what is of vastly more importance than the verbal alterations, or errors of translation, or transcription, the monuments prove to us conclusively that the whole color and atmosphere of the historical chapters of Daniel are genuine Babylonian. Such a book could not have been written three or four hundred years later, when the civilization of Babylon had perished. There was no antiquarian learning of the day which could have drawn a true picture of the Babylonian Empire at a period as far removed from that of Antiochus as we are from that of Luther, and separated from it by the overthrow of the Babylonian by the Persian power, or the overthrow of the Persian in its turn by the alien Greek. The chief of all the objections to the book of Daniel is that it says that the last king of Babylon was Belshazzar, and that he was killed at the capture of the city. But all Greek historians agree that the last king of Babylon was Nabonidus, and that he was not killed. Indeed, he was not in Babylon at all when it was captured, but with the army in Borsippa, and lived for some time after. Greek historians mention no Belshazzar. The contradiction was absolute, and could not be explained. But the monuments have now been recovered, and give us abundant proof that both are right. They tell us that there was a king Belshazzar as well as a king Nabonidus. He was son of Nabonidus, and was for three years associated with his father on his throne. There is extant a prayer of Nabonidus in which he beseeches the gods to bless his son Belshazzar. We are told on inscriptions very lately discovered, that in previous years Nabonidus had remained at home, and sent his son Belshazzar to command the army in the field, but that in this last year he took the army himself, and left his son in command at Babylon. And this explains another curious fact. There have been found the records, thousands of them, on little clay tablets, kept for over a century in the office of the recorder of deeds in Babylon. Out of one hundred and sixteen years there is not one lacking in which from one to thirty deeds have not been found recorded, all dated. We find one, just one, dated in the third year of King Belshazzar. His first two years are credited to his father, with whom he reigned, while in this third year he was in Babylon alone. And the third year of Belshazzar is the only one mentioned in Daniel. We can now understand why Belshazzar promised to make Daniel the "third ruler in the kingdom." He could not make him the second, as he was only second himself. The difficulty is more than removed. We are told in Daniel that Babylon was captured on the night of a great feast to the idol gods, at which the wives and concubines joined in a wild revelry. But the women were not in the habit of feasting with men—how is this? An account, by Cyrus himself, of his capture of Babylon, was dug up only three or four years ago. In it he declares that Babylon was captured "without fighting," on the fourteenth day of the month Tammuz. Now the month Tammuz was named in honor of the god Tammuz, the Babylonian Adonis, who married their Venus, or Ishtar; and the fourteenth of Tammuz was the regular time to celebrate their union with lascivious orgies. On this day, of all others, the women took part in the horrible rites; and it was in this feast of king, princes, wives, and concubines that Babylon was taken and Belshazzar slain. The Bible is here fully and wonderfully corroborated. How could a writer three hundred and fifty years later know all this? These are but specimens selected from many of the abundant and constant corroborations which the monuments give to the historical accounts of the Bible. I do not mean to say that they have yet solved all difficulties, or that they have not raised any difficulties of their own. But the difficulties that remain are chiefly chronological or verbal, like the dates in a king's reign; or the apparent substitution of "Darius" for "Gobryas," and of "Ahasuerus" (Xerxes) for "Artaxerxes" in Daniel. Such errors are liable to occur, and need give us no concern. The essential fact is proved beyond cavil, that the historical parts of the Old Testament are proved, by contemporaneous records just dug up and translated in our generation, to be substantially true. We find no record of miracles, and we should expect none, for they belong to Hebrew history or private life. Nor do we find confirmation, only illustration, of the Bible account of the creation and the deluge. The old Babylonian tales of these beginnings of things, as I have said, antedating history, are of the highest interest to the Bible student, but are quite apart from my present purpose, which is satisfied with the plain annals of kings, without entering the mythology of these old nations whose gross polytheism is the most instructive contrast to the pure monotheism of the Hebrews which, more emphatically even in its cosmogony than in its history, offers to human worship only one God, Creator, and Preserver of all things, one God holy and merciful, such a God as our nineteenth-century culture need not be ashamed to worship as he was worshiped by Enoch, Abraham, and Moses.