It is not to be supposed, however, that the books which thus came to be considered sacred were the inventions of priests and scribes of this later age. Doubtless they were based to a great extent on old traditions, legends, and written annals and records, compiled perhaps in the reigns of Solomon and his successors, but based themselves on still older materials. The very crudeness of many of the representations, and the barbarism of manners, point to an early origin. It is impossible to conceive any contemporary of Isaiah, or of the cultured court of Solomon, describing the Almighty ruler of the universe as showing his hinder part to Moses, or sewing skins to clothe Adam and Eve; and the conception of a jealous and vindictive Jehovah who commanded the indiscriminate massacre of prisoners of war, women and children, must be far removed from that of a God who loved justice and mercy. These crude, impossible, and immoral representations must have existed in the form of Sagas during the early and semi-barbarous stage of the people of Israel, and become so rooted in the popular mind that they could not be neglected when authors of later ages came to fix the old traditions in writing, and religious reformers to use them in endeavouring to enforce higher views and a purer morality. It is from this jungle of old legends and traditions, written and re-written, edited and re-edited, many times over, to suit the ideas of various stages of advancing civilization, that we have to pick out as we best can what is really historical, prior to the foundation of the Monarchy, from which time downwards we doubtless have more or less authentic annals, and meet with confirmations from Egyptian and Assyrian history. The first figure which arrests our attention in the Old Testament as possibly historical, is that of Abraham. Prior to him everything is plainly myth and legend. We have two accounts of the creation of the universe and of man in Genesis, contradictory with one another, and each hopelessly inconsistent with the best established conclusions of astronomy, geology, ethnology, and other sciences. Then follow ten antediluvian patriarchs, who live on the average 847 years each, and correspond manifestly with the ten reigns of gods or demi-gods in the Chaldæan mythology; while side by side with this genealogy is a fragment of one which is entirely different, mentioning seven only of the ten patriarchs, and tracing the descent of Enoch and Noah from Adam through Cain instead of through Seth.