Bible Review

Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).

Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was published in 1916 and became widely known after it was experimentally confirmed in November 1919, shortly after World War I. Einsteinian relativity—and the development of quantum mechanics—are very much Modernist theories in their implications, even though scientifically true.

Cited in Robert William Rogers, A History of Babylonia and Assyria (New York: Eaton Mains; Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye, 1900), p. 245.

For a concrete example of the dilemma posed by the monuments to a traditional reading of the Bible, see Steven W. Holloway, “The Quest for Sargon, Pul, and Tiglath-Pileser in the 19th Century,” in Syro-Mesopotamia and the Bible, ed. Mark W. Chavalas and K. Lawson Younger, Jr., Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, forthcoming).

Sayce wrote, for example: “The cuneiform annals of Tiglath-pileser have swept away all these ingenious schemes [of synchronization]. The Biblical chronology must be rejected, and the synchronisms established by the compiler must be regarded as based on an erroneous calculation of dates” (Higher Criticism, p. 406).

See B.Z. MacHaffie, “‘Monumental Facts and Higher Critical Fancies’: Archaeology and the Popularization of Old Testament Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Church History 50 (1981), pp. 323–328.

George Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World; or, the History, Geography, and Antiquities of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylonia, Media, and Persia, Collected and Illustrated from Ancient and Modern Sources, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1862–1867, rev. ed. 1871, repr. 1873, 1879, 1881, 1900); subsequently reproduced in The Seven Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World (London: John Murray, 1876, 1884, 1885, 1890, 1900).

The lectures were published as Rawlinson, Historical Evidences. Subsequent quotations are from this volume.