ith Abraham and
with the Hebrew Scriptures. The early life of the "Father of the
Faithful" belongs to the time when Turanian and Semitic elements were
mingled in the Euphratean valley. Himself of the stock of Shem, he
dwelt in Ur of the Chaldees, a city in whose ruins, now known by the
name of Mugheir, Chaldean inscriptions have been found of a date
anterior to that of the patriarch. In the time of Abraham a
polytheistic religion already existed in Ur, for we are told that his
father "served other gods." Further, the legends of the creation and
the deluge, and the antediluvian age, with the history of Nimrod and
other postdiluvian heroes, existed in a written form; and, strange
though this may seem, there can be little doubt that Abraham, before
he left Ur of the Chaldees, had read the same creation legends that
have so recently been translated and published by Mr. Smith. But
Abraham's relation to these was of a peculiar kind. With a spiritual
enlightenment beyond that of his age, he dissented from the Turanian
animism and polytheism, and maintained that pure and spiritual
monotheism which, according to the Bible, had been the original faith
of the sons of Noah. But he was overborne by the tendencies of his
time, and probably by the royal and priestly influence then dominant
in Chaldea, and he went forth from his native land in search of a
country where he might have freedom to worship God. It is thus that
Abraham appears as the earliest reformer, the first of those martyrs
of conscience who fear not to differ from the majority, the father and
prototype of the faithful of every age, and the earliest apostle of
the monotheistic faith which still reigns among all the higher races
of men.

Did Abraham take with him in his pilgrimage the records of his people?
It is scarcely possible to doubt that he did, and this probably in a
written form, but purified from the polytheism and inane imaginations
accreted upon them; or perhaps he had access to still older and more
primitive records anterior to the rise of the Turanian superstitions.
In any case we may safely infer that Abraham and his tribe carried
with them the substance of all that part of Genesis which contains the
history of the world up to his time, and that this would be a precious
heir-loom of his family, until it was edited and incorporated in the
Pentateuch by his great descendant Moses. It seems plain, therefore,
that the original prophet or seer to whom the narr