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Authority and archaeology, sacred and profane (1899)
Authority and archaeology sacred and profane - 1899 Author:David George Hogarth Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ///. The Kings and After We may pass now to the Books of Kings. The intermediate books, though the inscriptions furnish some elucidations of the names of deit... more »ies, or places, or foreign tribes occurring in them from time to time,1 supply no examples of really important light being thrown upon the narrative by archaeology. During the whole period from Merenptah to the division of the kingdom under Rehoboam, there is no mention, upon the monuments at present known, either of the Israelites in general, or of individual leaders or kings, or of any of the foreign wars or invasions by which, during this period, the Old Testament describes them as being assailed : so far as the inscriptions are concerned, the history of Israel during this entire period is a blank. But when we come to the period embraced by the Books of Kings, there is a change. Omri and Ahab are named in a contemporary Moabite inscription. In particular, Assyria, from the ninth century B.C., enters into more direct relations with Israel and Judah than (so far as we know) she had done previously. It was the most brilliant period of Assyrian history ; and the kings of Nineveh, in their almost annual military expeditions, often came into hostile contact with the peoples of Western Asia: they had thus in their inscriptions frequent occasion to mention by name the kings of Israel or Judah, or to notice public events recorded in the Old Testament. More than this, the 1 Some instances will be found below, pp. i ,9 fF. First] THE PEOPLE OF SHEBA 8l information which the monuments supply of the movements and policy of the Assyrian kings not unfrequently sheds a valuable light upon the writings of the prophets, and throws a new meaning into their words. The writer regrets that the limits of space at his disposal do not per...« less