nature to evoke that centripetal 'intensification of memory' which Höffding emphasises as the distinguishing mark and the preserving salt of legend as contrasted with myth. In the second place, the appearance of a prophetic personality, such as Abraham is represented to have been, is a phenomenon with many analogies in the history of religion. The ethical and spiritual idea of God which is at the foundation of the religion of Israel could only enter the world through a personal organ of divine revelation; and nothing forbids us to see in Abraham the first of that long series of prophets through whom God has communicated to mankind a saving knowledge of Himself. The keynote of Abraham's piety is faith in the unseen,—faith in the divine impulse which drove him forth to a land which he was never to possess; and faith in the future of the religion which he thus founded. He moves before us on the page of Scripture as the man through whom faith, the living principle of true religion, first became a force in human affairs. It is difficult to think that so powerful a conception has grown out of nothing. As we read the story, we may well trust the instinct which tells us that here we are face to face with a decisive act of the living God in history, and an act whose essential significance was never lost in Israelite tradition.
The significance of the Abrahamic migration in relation to the
general movements of religious thought in the East is the theme of
Winckler's interesting pamphlet, Abraham als Babylonier, Joseph als Aegypter (1903). The elevation of Babylon, in the reign of Ḫammurabi,
to be the first city of the empire, and the centre of Babylonian culture,
meant, we are told, a revolution in religion, inasmuch as it involved the
deposition of Sin, the old moon-god, from the supreme place in the
pantheon in favour of the 'Deliverer Marduk,' the tutelary deity of
Babylon. Abraham, a contemporary, and an adherent of the older faith,
opposed the reformation; and, after vainly seeking support for his
protest at Ur and Ḥarran, the two great centres of the worship of Sin,
migrated to Canaan, beyond the limits of Ḫammurabi's empire, to
worship God after his fashion. How much truth is contained in these
brilliant generalisations it is difficult for an ordinary man to say. In
spite of the ingenuity and breadth of conception with which the theory
is worked out, it is not unfair to suggest that it rests mostly on a
combination of things that are not in the Bible with things that are not
in the monuments. Indeed, the only positive point of contact between
the two data of the problem is the certainly remarkable fact that tradi-
