Gives Picture of Jewish Life in Patriarchal Age

A graphic picture of the life of the Jewish people from the Patriarchal age to the period of the exile, was unfolded here last night before the savants who assembled from all parts of the country to attend the 204th annual meeting of the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in America. These leaders of thought and culture listened with rapt attention as Dr. Wm. F. Albright, Professor of Semitic Languages at Johns Hopkins University, formerly Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, in his own fascinating manner, traced the various stages of development of the Jewish people showing incidentally, that the biblical accounts of the events in the life of Israel were absolutely accurate when compared with archaeological research.

BOOK OF GENESIS ACCURATE

Taking for his theme, “A Millennium of Biblical History in the Light of Recent Excavations,” Professor Albright pointed out that “it is now becoming increasingly clear that the traditions of the Patriarchal Age, preserved in the book of Genesis, reflect with remarkable accuracy the actual conditions of the Middle Bronze Age, and especially of the period between 100 and 1500 B. C. The ancestors of Israel are represented as semi-nomadic Hebrews, migrating into Palestine from northern Mesopotamia, where their home had been and where their base continued to be. In Palestine they wandered in the central highlands, between the Canaanite and Amorite towns which were scattered sparsely over it.”

The commercial proclivities of the Jews, Professor Albright declared, had their origin in these early archaeological times. “It is quite certain,” Dr. Albright declared, “that the commercial expansion of Jewry under the conditions of the Diaspora was by no means so sudden as used to be thought, but was simply an acceleration of an other-