ABRAHAM.

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume 26, Issue 8, 1 August 1936, Page 8

ABRAHAM.

(Continued from last month)

lt is true that Sir Leonard builds up what his publishers justly describes as "an extraordinarily convincing case" for the view that the traditional story of Abraham is an accurate, though simplified, account of what actually happened; but he adds to the picture such a wealth of details, and sets the Patriarch m such a vivid background of urban civilisation and culture, that the reader feels a new kinship with him.

Abraham now emerges a very different person from the Arab sheik of the Old Testament; and beneath the Bedouin cloak Sir Leonard enables us to see the civilised offspring of a great city. "Instead; 1 of being an unexplained phenomenon, the be-

getter of a nation, but himself without roots m the past, he takes his place m the rational process of evolution.'" Sir Leonard is largely concerned with the religious inheritance of Abraham, with a view to accounting for his conversion. That he underwent a definite process of conversion cannot be doubted. Ur appears as a city of the grossest polytheismno fewer than five thousand names of gods have come to light — m whicii every house had its private chapel despite the high value of land m. the overcrowded city of a quarter of a million inhabitants. Sir Leonard implies that an intellectual revolt, from the religion of his fathers was. the beginning of his new conception of the one God, albeit a very imperfect conception. Elsewhere, Sir Leonard has described the environment of Abraham's, youth. The system of law was that, of the famous and enlightened code, of Hammurabi; m the schools there were text-books dealing with astronomy, history, medicine and mathematics, and m the last-named subjects the students were set problems m the extraction of cube-root. They read the Akkadian classics as boys, to-day study those of Greece and. Rome. Not least, the people of Ur m Abraham's days had behind them a tradition of artistic achievement and craftsmanship which m soma respects has never been surpassed.. In the Babylonian galleries and m the Museum at Baghdad are to be seen some of the exquisite objects unearthed m the course of Sir Leonard's successive expeditions. In particular, the goldsmiths knew c very thing that is at present known of the craft, except such part of it as: employs chemical action. In his book on the development of Sumerian art, also published by Messrs. Fabar and Faber, Sir Leonard described very fully the evidence: for a high cultural development m. the fourth millennium B.C. m the ancient city of Ur. The point of interest it has m relation to his new book, which contains no illustrations, is that such abundance of finely designed and exquisitely wrought objects should belong to a period more, than a thousand years before the traditional date of the birth of Abraham round about the year 2000 8.C..