Bible -- Antiquities; Bible. Old Testament -- Evidences, authority, etc.
This is perhaps the very earliest coincidence of archeology with the
records of the Scripture. In the various lists of races who were to be
displaced by Israel, according to the covenant God made with Abraham,
the Hittites are frequently named. Without any reservation or
qualification whatever, this text which we have just cited states that
the Hittites were Canaanites. According to Genesis 10:15, the
Canaanitish people came through the line of Sidon and Heth. It is
apparent also from Genesis 10:6, where Canaan the son of Ham first comes
into the record, that these Hittites, if they had existed, would have
been akin to the early population of Chaldea and Babylon. It is an
interesting fact to note that the monuments of antiquity which have
restored these Hittites to their proper place in secular history, show
them to have had a mixture of Semitic and Mongolian characteristics.
In the various appearances of these people in the Old Testament records,
it is to be noted that several characters married Hittite wives.
Bathsheba, who was the mother of Solomon, and thus infused a Gentile
strain into the genealogy of Mary, who was the mother of our Lord, was a
Hittite woman. In I Kings 11:1, it is also stated that Solomon, among
his many political marriages, had taken to himself wives from among the
Hittites.
These people, although unknown in the orderly annals of human history,
might have been recognized had the scholarly ability of earlier
generations been able correctly to interpret obsolete systems of
writings. The Assyrians called them the “Khatti.” In the Egyptian
inscriptions they are known as the “Kheta.” The fact that these names
referred to the Hittites was not known until the Hittite inscriptions
themselves were read and interpreted and the fact of their reality
established. It is to be regretted that in a work as short as this one
we have not room to recapitulate their long and fascinating history. The
romance of their recovery of their rightful place in the annals of human
conduct is all that we can present in this chapter. They were thrust by
human ignorance into the outer darkness of forgotten things, but we can
trace the hand of God in bringing them back into the light of
remembrance and establishing them in their proper place of glory and
prominence among the empires of antiquity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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