INTRODUCTION
On the other hand not only laymen but professional bible students have in fact been seriously misled by denial of the title library to these collections. Library is the plain colloquial term for collections of written or printed material and denial of the name has quite generally meant to the non-professional a denial of the fact of very many or very extensive collections of written documents before the libraries of Alexandria or at earliest the time of Ashurbanapal. This in turn leads to a wholly mistaken, often absurdly mistaken mental picture of the environment in which the writers of the Old Testament lived, moved and wrote, and not by lay students alone, by any means.
It need not and cannot be denied that the word library may be and has been used in such a way as to mislead. this is true of most words and true of this word in the field of Assyriology. It is not enough to use the right word, it must
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