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The Historical Poetry of the Ancient Hebrews (1879)
The Historical Poetry of the Ancient Hebrews - 1879 Author:Michael Heilprin 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: III. What is the historical value of the traditions concerning the Hebrew patriarchs, preserved to us by the author or authors of Genesis, and here and there ... more »alluded to by the prophets and psalmists '. Ewald, whose constructive and reconstructive propensity often prevailed over his critical acumen, was delighted to discover in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis a fragment of a really historical narrative, a true picture of the highest antiquity—as he believed—in which he saw Abraham in real life, free from supernatural associations, and waging war, ' of which, as not very befitting to a prophet and saint in the Mosaic sense, the other accounts nowhere give the remotest indication.' The patriarch, thus saved from the general wreck wrought by skeptical research in this period of Biblical history, appeared to him as one of the leaders of small bands of Hebrews advancing from the north toward Egypt, and at first rather sought by the older inhabitants of Canaan as serviceable allies in war ; a migration which probably continued for centuries, resembling that of the Germans toward Rome, and of the Turks in the same Eastern regions in the middle ages. This, Ewald believed, was the historical hero of the Hebrews, whom the later legendary accounts of Genesis cast over into the type of a father, theoldest of three, whose combination compares to those of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ulysses, and of Anchises. JEneas, and Ascanius, and to similar type-triads of the East. ' Isaac stands beside Abraham, lower, but resembling him, under the conception of a son who in all things faithfully follows his father. Jacob is then introduced as the third of this series, though in a different character. He also, as father of the nation, is a type.' Historically, Jacob is conceived as another Hebrew chief ...« less