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BABYLONIAN LITERATURE.
“These two nations (the Canaanites and the Chaldæans) are descended from two brothers, both sons of Adam, and of the same mother, one of the wives of Adam; for Adam, according to those skilled in genealogy, had sixty-four children, of whom twenty-two were daughters and forty-two sons. These forty-two sons left eighty heirs. The others had no posterity which has descended to our times.” In a third passage[1] the question is again as to the nations which were the posterity of the children of Adam and as to those which were not descended from them.[2]
This direct form is not the only one under which the Biblical or apocryphal traditions of the Hebrews seem to have found their
- ↑ Page 61. See Ewald, Jahrbücher der Biblischen Wiss. 1857, p. 153. The name of Adam appears to have been known among the Babylonians and the Phœnicians (See Mem. de l’Acad. t. xxiii. 2nd part, pp. 267, 268; Hippolyti (ut aiunt) Refutationes Hæresium, Duncker et Schneidewin), p. 136; but the particulars cited here are evidently Biblical.
- ↑ In the book of Tenkelúshá which Dr. Chwolson believes much more modern than the Agriculture, but which, in my opinion, is of the same school, Cain, son of Adam, is also made to figure (pp. 142, 143). In the same book, there is mention of the Cherubins (ibid).
