It is only fragments of the life of Abraham that are brought before us in the pages of Genesis. They are like a series of pictures which have been saved from the shipwreck of the past. And the pictures are not always painted in the same colours. At one time the patriarch appears as ‘a mighty prince,’ as a rich and cultured Chaldæan immigrant, with armed bands of warriors under him with whom he can venture to attack even the army of the king of Elam. He is the confederate of the Amorite chieftains, the prince whom the Hittites of Hebron hear with respect. But at another time the colours on the canvas seem quite different. When the angels warn the patriarch of the approaching overthrow of the cities of the plain, they find him in the tent of a Bedâwi, leading the simple life of an uncultured nomad, and preparing the food of his guests with his own hands. Between this Bedâwi shêkh and the companion of the king of Gerar or the Pharaoh of Egypt the contrast is indeed great. To the Western mind, however, the contrast is greater than it would be to the Oriental. The traveller in the East is well acquainted with wealthy Bedâwin shêkhs who live in the desert in barbaric simplicity, but, nevertheless, have their houses at Cairo or Damascus, where they indulge in all the luxury and splendour of Oriental life. Moreover, the narratives which have been combined in the book of Genesis do not all come from the same source. Some of them have been taken from written historical documents which breathe the atmosphere of the cultured city, of the educated scribe, and the luxurious court. Others, derived it may be from oral tradition, are filled with the spirit of the wanderer in the desert, and set before us the simple life and rude fare of the dweller in tents. The history of the patriarchs is, in fact, like Joseph’s coat of many colours. It is a series of pictures rather than a homogeneous whole. The materials of which it is composed differ widely in both character and origin. Some of them can be shown to have been contemporaneous with the events they record; some again to have been like the tales of their old heroes recounted by the nomad Arabs in the days before Islam as they sat at night round their camp-fires. The details and spirit of the story have necessarily caught the colour of the medium through which they have passed. The life of Abraham, doubtless, presented the contrasts still presented by that of a rich Bedâwi shêkh; at one time spent in the wild freedom and privations of the desert; at another amid the luxuries and culture of the town; but the contrasts have been heightened by the difference in the sources through which they have been handed down. Naturally, while the scribe would record only those phases of Abraham’s history which brought him into contact with the great world of kings and princes, of war and trade, the nomad reciter of ancient stories would dwell rather on such parts of it as he and his hearers could understand. For them Abraham