ABSTRACT
While sir frederic is not himself an archaeologist, he naturally has had, as Librarian of the British Museum, much opportunity to follow archaeological discoveries in the Near East. One would expect that his work on the text of the Bible would naturally prepare him to see the significance of these discoveries in relation to the interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. The work before us turns out to be a useful summary of the results of the excavations, but it does not add much to our knowledge of Hebrew history beyond what we already have in Barton’s Bible and Archaeology. Even in his account of the Ras Shamra or Ugariat texts, where he follows the publications of Shaeffer, Jack, and Montgomery, he has to admit that they do not as yet add directly to our actual knowledge of Jewish history, but, at best, only throw some light on the religion of the Canaanites before the Hebrew conquest.
