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How highly educated this old world was we are but just beginning to learn. But we have already learned enough to discover how important a bearing it has on the criticism of the Old Testament. It has long been tacitly assumed by the critical school that the art of writing was practically unknown in Palestine before the age of David. Little historical credence, it has been urged, can be placed in the earlier records of the Hebrew people, because they could not have been committed to writing until a period when the history of the past had become traditional and mythical. But this assumption can no longer be maintained. Long before the Exodus Canaan had its libraries and its scribes, its schools and literary men. The annals of the country, it is true, were not inscribed in the letters of the Phœnician alphabet on perishable papyrus; the writing material was imperishable clay, the characters were those of the cuneiform syllabary. Though Kirjath-Sepher (i.e., Book-Town) was destroyed by the Israelites, other cities mentioned in the Tell-el-Amarna tablets, like Gaza, or Gath, or Tyre, remained independent, and we cannot imagine that the old traditions of culture and writing were forgotten in any of them. In what is asserted by the critical school to be the oldest relic of Hebrew literature, the Song of Deborah, reference is made to the scribes of Zebulon “that handle the pen of the writer” (Judges v. 14); and we have now no longer any reason to interpret the words in a non-natural sense, and transform the scribe into a military commander (an officer who arranges men in a row instead of arranging letters and words). Only it is probable that the scribes still made use of the cuneiform syllabary, and not yet of the Phœnician alphabet. At all events the Tell-el-Amarna tablets have overthrown the primary foundation on which much of this criticism was built, and have proved that the populations of Palestine, among whom the Israelites settled, and whose culture they inherited, were as literary as the inhabitants of Egypt or Babylonia.