Amurru: The Home of the Northern Semites
"Amurru: The Home of the Northern Semites." By Albert T. Clay, Ph.D. Cloth. Price $1.25. The Sunday School Times Company, Philadelphia. Professor Clay primarily makes this volume an attempted demonstration of his thesis that the Babylonian Semites were of Amorite descent. Then he shows that in such a case, Israel could not have received its religion from Babylon, as the rationalists of the Pan-Babylonian school assert. However, Professor Clay equally as well demonstrates that, whatever be the ethnologic relations of the Babylonians, the Hebraic religion is not Babylonian. It is unfortunate that Dr. Clay interprets Oriental history according to the evolutionary hypothesis. Our knowledge of early Semitic life is exceedingly fragmentary. Semitic philology, upon which the major portion of this volume is based, is of itself a very precarious foundation as yet for any final explanation of the ethnology of Southwestern Asia. When such a science, legitimate only as we perceive its limitations, is combined with evolutionary theories, and their combined conclusions are dogmatically asserted to prove some such thesis as that of Dr. Clay's, we need not at all regard as the finalities of science the verdicts of such a method. Altho Dr. Clay does not regard the Jewish faith as of Babylonian origin, yet he does think it sprang from some heathen Aramean cult. One may pertinently ask if it makes any difference which of these theories a person accepts if he must accept one. At any rate Dr. Clay is not a Pan-Babylonian. He must be given credit for opposing many wild theories of the rationalists. And we trust that his historical appreciation may lead him to reject other fables which the men of this century are so prone to invent.