"The general result of the archaeological and anthropological researches of the past half-century has been to take the Hebrews out of the isolated position which, as a nation, they seemed previously to hold, and to demonstrate their affinities with, and often their dependence upon, the civilizations by which they were surrounded. Tribes more or less closely akin to themselves in both language and race were their neighbours alike on the north, on the east, and on the south; in addition to this, on each side there towered above them an ancient and imposing civilization,—that of Babylonia, from the earliest times active, enterprising, and full of life, and that of Egypt, hardly, if at all, less remarkable than that of Babylonia, though more self-contained and less expansive. The civilization which, in spite of the long residence of the Israelites in Egypt, left its mark, however, most distinctly upon the culture and literature of the Hebrews was that of Babylonia. It was in the East that the Hebrew traditions placed both the cradle of humanity and the more immediate home of their own ancestors; and it was Babylonia which, as we now know, exerted during many centuries an influence, once unsuspected, over Palestine itself. "It is true, the facts thus disclosed, do not in any degree detract from that religious pre-eminence which has always been deemed the inalienable characteristic of the Hebrew race: the spiritual intuitions and experiences of its great teachers retain still their uniqueness; but the secular institutions of the nation, and even the material elements upon which the religious system of the Israelites was itself constructed, are seen now to have been in many cases common to them with their neighbours. Thus their beliefs about the origin and early history of the world, their social usages, their code of civil and criminal law, their religious institutions, can no longer be viewed, as was once possible, as differing in kind from those of other nations, and determined in every feature by a direct revelation from Heaven; all, it is now known, have substantial analogies among other peoples, the distinctive character which they exhibit among the Hebrews consisting in the spirit with which they are infused and the higher principles of which they are made the exponent. …