Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 31:121 (Jan 1874)
Article: Historical Illustrations Of The Old Testament
Author: George H. Whittemore

BSac 31:121 (January 1874) p. 159

Historical Illustrations Of The Old Testament

Rev. George H. Whittemore

This is the title of a small volume by the Rev. George Rawlinson, M.A., Camden Professor of Ancient History, Oxford, of which an American reprint, with additions by Professor Horatio B. Hackett, of Rochester Theological Seminary, has lately been published.1 Externally its choice style is worthy of the famous Riverside Press, Cambridge; while the names above given are a guarantee of the intrinsic value of the work. It is a happy day when the “Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge” can command the services of so accomplished a scholar as Professor Rawlinson, who fourteen years since gave a course of Bampton Lectures on the same subject, and who, in the prefatory words of the American editor, “is well known as the author of our ablest works relating to the old Asiatic monarchies connected with Jewish history, and occupying a prominent place in the Old Testament.” Dr. Hackett, fresh from his great task of marshalling American scholarship for the perfecting of Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, may certainly indulge the modest aspiration that his supplementary contributions to this small, but comprehensive treatise, so much in the line of his life’s employment, “will be found to harmonize with the author’s design, and may prove acceptable to the reader.”

The object of the book is to exhibit the testimony of profane history to the trustworthiness of the biblical records. The Bible is peculiarly adapted to receive such confirmation, if it can be shown to exist, because it is so largely made up of personal and national history. It is so human, as well as so divine a book. The connection of religion and history has been well set forth by Auberlen, in his “Divine Revelation,” remarking

BSac 31:121 (January 1874) p. 160

upon Jehovah’s declaration to Abraham, that the object of his being chosen was that he might command his children, and his house after him, to walk in the way of the Lord (Gen. 8:19): “Here the careful transmission of the divine revelation is made a duty; for, as in the Acts (18:25; 19:9, 23; 9:2) and elsewhere, genuine religious instruction has always been historical. It consisted of the declaration and explanation of the facts, and the careful impressing of the words of revelation on the mind. So there was formed, without doubt, a certain form of the account of the main facts. The New Testament furnishes an instructive analogy in the synoptic tradit...