(S of el-Lisān), which by a partial subsidence of the ground might have been formed within historic times.[1] But even if that were the true explanation, the manner of the statement is not that which would be used by a writer conversant with the facts.—The improbabilities of the passage are not confined to the four points just mentioned, but are spread over the entire surface of the narrative; and while their force may be differently estimated by different minds, it is at least safe to say that they more than neutralise the impression of trustworthiness which the precise dates, numbers, and localities may at first produce.—(2) The second class of considerations is derived from the spirit and tendency which characterise the representation, and reveal the standpoint of the writer. It would be easy to show that many of the improbabilities observed spring from a desire to enhance the greatness of Abraham's achievement; and indeed the whole tendency of the chapter is to set the figure of the patriarch in an ideal light, corresponding not to the realities of history, but to the imagination of some later age. Now the idealisation of the patriarchs is, of course, common to all stages of tradition; the question is to what period this ideal picture of Abraham may be most plausibly referred. The answer given by a number of critics is that it belongs to the later Judaism, and has its affinities "with P and the midrashic elements in Chronicles rather than with the older Israelite historians" (Moore, EB, ii. 677). Criticism of this kind is necessarily subjective and speculative. At first sight it might appear that the conception of Abraham as a warlike hero is the mark of a warlike age, and therefore older than the more idyllic types delineated in the patriarchal legends. That judgement, however, fails to take account of the specific character of the narrative before us. It is a grandiose and lifeless description of military operations which are quite beyond the writer's range of conception; it contains no trace of the martial ardour of ancient times, and betrays considerable ignorance of the conditions of actual warfare; it is essentially the account of a Bedouin razzia magnified into a systematic campaign for the consolidation of empire. It has been fitly characterised as the product of a time which "admires military glory all the more because it can conduct no wars itself; and, having no warlike exploits to boast of in the present, revels in the mighty deeds of its ancestors. Such narratives tend in imagination towards the grotesque; the lack of the political experience which is to be acquired only in the life of the independent state produces a condition of mind which can no longer distinguish between the possible and the impossible. Thus the passage belongs to an age in which, in spite of a certain historical erudition, the historic sense of Judaism had sunk almost to zero" (Gu. 255).
It remains to consider the extent and origin of the historic element whose existence in the chapter we have been led to admit. Does it proceed from an ancient Canaanite record, which passed into the Hebrew tradition, to be gradually moulded into the form in which we now find
- ↑ Cf. Dri.'s elaborate Note, p. 168 ff.; also Robinson, BR, ii. 187 f.; Gautier, EB, 1043 f., 1046; Hull, DB, i. 576b.
