=7.= The subject of =Biblical Chronology=, as derived from data recorded in the Scripture, is necessarily unsettled; and this is so partly because[9] the sacred writers speak of descendants of a given progenitor as his sons, in accordance with Eastern custom, and partly perhaps from the use of letters, for figures, in the early manuscripts,[10] which have suffered changes in subsequent transcriptions. But although these variations occur, discoveries connected with the remains of other nations than the Jewish, and connected with other histories than the Jewish, are beginning to throw light upon the Scripture history and chronology. These collateral histories allude to persons and events of Jewish history and afford such data that in many instances we can determine from them the actual year of Scripture events. This aid is particularly important as derived from both Assyrian and Egyptian discoveries, and this we shall have reason hereafter to show. CHAPTER II. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NAMES. =1. In the earliest periods= of human history names, either for persons, places, or things, had meanings which were in some sense applicable to the person, place, or thing named. This was specially true in Hebrew history, and of this we have already had illustrations; for when Eve was brought to Adam “he called her name _woman_, because she was taken out of man,” but afterwards, because Eve in the Hebrew meant life, he “called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” Adam’s name denoted his relation to the ground (Hebrew, _Adamah_), from the dust of which he was taken; and as Eve’s body was derived from that of Adam, the name of the two was _Adam_ (Gen. 5:2), which was the name given by God “in the day when they were created,” and this name was exclusively the description of the first man and the first woman. In Gen. 2:23 we have the generic name given to the race in the Hebrew terms “_Ish_” and “_Ishah_” for “man” and “woman,” given by Adam to himself and to the woman: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman (Ishah), because she was taken out of man (Ish).” =2. The root=, or primitive meaning, of Ish is uncertain, but from its subsequent use we may infer that it denoted a characteristic of humanity higher than that expressed by the word Adam, and may have occurred to the father of men while naming the animals as an appellative distinguishing his own from the inferior order of the animate creation.[11] It is remarkable that the ancient Assyrian name for the first man is Admu or Adamu, the Assyrian form of the Hebrew Adam.[12]