THE BABYLONIAN PERIOD
thousand years after real history begins — but secular historians fall little short of the others in unfettered imagination, especially when it comes to figures. All this legendary matter is treated in sundry works which will be mentioned in a later chapter on Bibliography but the alleged facts do not belong to history and need not be discussed here.
When all has been said the outline maps of Biblical history and of human history are pretty nearly one up to six centuries or so B.C. and indeed to the end of the New Testament except for the omitted period between the Old and the New Testament. The tenth chapter of Genesis is commonly taken, even by exacting critics, to be "historical," whether it is accurate or not, and its field is the known world, while the history of the chosen people itself takes from Mesopotamia to Palestine, Palestine to Egypt, back again to Palestine, back to Babylon and yet
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