The Early History of the Jews 113 ^ Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very civil- ized or united people. Probably only a very few of them could read or write. In their own history one never hears of the early books of the Bible being read ; the first mention of a book is in the time of Josiah. The Babylonian captivity civilized them and consolidated them. They returned aware of their own literature, an acutely self- conscious and political people. '■ ~] Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old Testament as we know it. In addition, as separate books they already had many of the other books that have since been incorporated with the Penta- teuch into the present Hebrew Bible ; Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for example. The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and Eve and of the Flood, with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with similar Babylonian legends ; they seem to have been part of the com- mon beliefs of all the Semitic peoples. So too the stories of Moses and of Sanvson have Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with the story of Abraham and onward begins something more special to the Jewish race. Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in Babylon. He was a patriarchal Semitic nomad. To the book of Genesis the reader must go for the story of his wanderings and for the stories of his sons and grandchildren and how they became captive in the Land of Egypt. He travelled through Canaan, and the God of Abraham, says the Bible story, promised this smiling land of pros- perous cities to him and to his children. And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of wandering in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, the children of Abraham, grown now to a host of twelve tribes, invaded the land of Canaan from the Arabian deserts to the East. They may have done this somewhen between 1600 B.C. and 1300 B.C. ; there are no Egyptian records of Moses nor of Canaan at this time to help out the story. But at any rate they did not succeed in conquering any more than the hilly backgrounds of the promised land. The coast was now in the hands, not of the Canaanites but of newcomers, those ^gean peoples, the Philistines ; and their cities Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa successfully withstood the Hebrew attack. For many genera- tions the children of Abraham remained an obscure people of the hilly back country engaged in incessant bickerings with the Philistines
