THE BIBLE RECORD OF NAMES AND PLACES VINDICATED
By M. E. Cornell
Interesting Extracts. No. 16.
THE BIBLE RECORD OF NAMES AND PLACES VINDICATED.
"The mounds of Mesopotamia, lately opened, furnish records buried for nearly three thousand years, which show the existence of such places as were before supposed to be only names, perhaps of imaginary localities. 'Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar,' all unknown before, come thus to light. Calah and Resen in the country peopled by Asshur, Eleazar and Ur of the Chaldees are found thus to have been real and well known places of that remote age. The confusion of tongues at Babel, and the consequent dispersion of mankind are facts confirmed by an inscription discovered at Birs Nimroud, read by Oppert before the Royal Society of Literature. The three-score cities of Og, fenced with high walls, east of the sea of Galilee, are certified to by modern discoveries of the ruins of such walled cities. So also the researches in the Dead Sea and the valley of Jordan, all confirm these ancient scriptures as being true history. Oftentimes the very things which skeptics have regarded as proofs of ignorance in the writer, have only proved the ignorance of the objector."-Jacobus' Notes on Genesis, p. 25. It is claimed that science has positively decided in favor of the days of indefinite periods; and that no other interpretation is consistent with scholarly views or abreast of the time. But Geological science is less and less satisfied with this concession. The order of the creation as here given is disputed, and the long periods are used to favor a notion of pre-Adamic man, and a theory of development that would push the creative fiat far back out of view, and enthrone impersonal nature in the place of the personal God. No attempt which has yet been made to identify these six periods of the Mosaic days with corresponding geological epochs can be pronounced satisfactory. "As a literal view exalts our estimate of the week, and of the Sabbath, that God actually made the present heavens and earth in six days, and actually rested on the seventh day, and blessed and hallowed the Sabbath-day for us,-not by any fiction, nor according to any forced construction, but as a bona fide pattern for us; and as the foundation of the statute in the decalogue for a permanent obligation as long as weeks and days shall last."-Id. pp. 47, 50. GEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT EXPOSED.
"In 1840 the gravel beds of Abbeville were alleged to have yielded such human remains as to prove an antiquity for the race far back of that allowed by the received understanding of Biblical Chronology. But recently the Abbeville Jawbone, about which already the English savans were much in doubt, is proved to have been a fraud practiced by the French laborers. A London paper thus exposes this latest imposture: "Although nothing has been said in the newspapers, we believe discoveries have been made of the character of the osseous fragments, which now change the doubt felt by the English geologists into certainty. Mr. Godwin Austin after skillfully conducted inquiries of one of the French laborers, procured the exhumation of certain remains that had been interred by the individual referred to; and upon the exhumation of a particular skeleton which wanted the jaw, the Abbeville bone was found to fit exactly."-Id. pp. 83, 84.