suggest anything properly said of Hammurabi, except that the names have two out of four letters in common. But we are told that this identification is supported by the identification of Rîm-Sin of Larsa with Arioch of Ellasar. Rîm-Sin and Arioch have only one letter in common, though Larsa and Ellasar have three. It is a perfect triumph of ingenuity to identify Rîm-Sin and Arioch, and it has been done on various suppositions. But it is also clear that on no supposition was a Hebrew right in reading Rîm-Sin as Arioch, nor has the former name been yet found written in the form which he has been supposed to have so misread. The confirmation of one blunder turns out to be the assumption of another as bad or worse. But the others, Chedorlaomer King of Elam and Tidal king of ‘Nations’, are also accounted for by a series of misreadings either in cuneiform or out of it into Hebrew or in Hebrew. Grant, then, all that is claimed for this astounding blunder-exegesis. Amraphel was meant for Hammurabi by a man who persistently misread cuneiform. The cuneiform account being reliable history, we can reconstruct what it said about Hammurabi and Rîm-Sin with two somewhat vague allies in Palestine. But what credence are we to give to this Hebrew writer’s reading of cuneiform in the case of the name of Abraham? At what period of Hammurabi’s reign was an alliance with his life-long enemy Rîm-Sin likely or even possible? When did either make an expedition to the West under the suzerainty of Elam? But we might consume hours discussing each thread of the web of fancies which some modern scholars have woven over and about the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. There is no mention in Babylonian or Assyrian documents of any one of the persons there named, nor any event recorded similar to those there placed. This fact neither confirms nor contradicts the Hebrew narrative. The doubts thrown on the historicity of the chapter by higher critics were based on arguments which, sound or not, are in no way touched by any cuneiform texts.