Page:The Evidences of Christianity.djvu/26

ANTIQUITY. 19 mon use, from the time of the seventy years' captivity of the Israelites in Babylon. Babylon has long lain in ruins; and, far back beyond the period of her final overthrow, we look through the years of her gradual decline, to the days of her highest glory, when Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of the Jews, proudly exclaimed, "Is not this great Babylon which I have built?" At this time Rome was in its infancy, and, except the poets Hesiod and Homer, not one of the Greek and Roman authors whose writings form our libraries of ancient literature, had then lived. But long before the age of these writers Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Herodotus, who is styled the father of history, lived about 1000 years after Moses; and, though the Greek poets Hesiod and Homer lived before Herodotus, they were long posterior to Moses. We admit that a deeper search into antiquity discloses the fact that there were writers more ancient than even Homer and Hesiod. The earliest of whom we have any account, was the Phoenician historian Sanchoniathon; yet even he was long posterior to Moses. Porphyry, a learned heathen writer of the third century, has determined the comparative dates of these two most ancient writers, by informing us that Sanchoniathon received materials for his history from persons who lived "near to the time of Moses" (57 b). Of the work attributed to this ancient author, only a few fragments now remain; and some men learned in antiquity seriously doubt whether the whole work was not a forgery of a comparatively modern period (74 a). Yet the genuine writings of Moses, though more ancient, are still extant, and in common use. Malachi, the last of the Old Testament writers, was contemporary with Herodotus: and hence the whole of the Old Testament