The date of the Yahudean migration into Syria was certainly not earlier than about B.C. 250, despite the declaration of interested parties that these people were known as Israelites and Jews for centuries before that time. The following quotation from Major-General Forlong’s “Rivers of Faith” is worth reproducing on this point:—“The first notice of the Jews is, _possibly_, that of certain Shemitic rulers of the Aram, paying tribute about 850 B.C. to Vool-Nirari, the successor of Shalmaneser of Syria, regarding which, however, much more is made by Biblicists than the simple record warrants. This is the case also where Champollion affirms that mention is made on the Theban temples of the capture of certain towns of the land we call Judea, this being thought to prove the existence of Jews. Similar assumption takes place in regard to the hieratic papyri of the Leyden Museum, held to belong to the time of Rameses II.; an inscription read on the rocks of El-Hamamat, and the discovery of some names like Chedorlaomer in the records of Babylonia; but this is all the ‘evidence’ as to the existence of ancient Jews which has been advanced, and the most is made of it in Dr. Birch’s opening address on ‘The Progress of Biblical Archæology,’ at the inauguration of that Society. The only _logical_ conclusion justifiable, when we give up the _inspiration_ theory, is that Arabs and Syro-Phenicians were known to Assyrians and Egyptians, and this none would deny. Indeed, we readily grant with Dr. Birch that, ‘under the nineteenth and twentieth Egyptian dynasties, the influence of the Armenœan nations is distinctly marked; that not only, by blood and alliances, had the Pharaohs been closely united with the princes of Palestine and Syria, but that the language of the period abounds in Semitic words, quite different from the Egyptian, with which they were embroidered and intermingled.’ Could it possibly be otherwise? Is it not so this day? Is a vast and rapidly-spawning Shemitic continent like Arabia not to influence the narrow delta of a river adjoining it, or the wild highlands of Syria to its north? Of course, Arabs, or Shemites, were everywhere spread over Egypt, Syria, and Phenicia, as well as in their ancient seats of empire in Arabi Irak (Kaldia), and on the imperial mounds of Kalneh and Kouyunjik, _but not necessarily as Jews_. I cannot find that these last were anything more than possibly a peculiar religious sect of Arabs, who settled down from their pristine nomadic habits, and obtained a _quasi_ government under petty princes or sheks, such as we have seen take place in the case of numerous Arabian and Indian sects.”