The Land of the Beginnings

(MAP)

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"And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads."-Gen., 2, 10.

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MAP intended to guide us as to the positions

and geographical outlines of man's earliest days must necessarily be imperfect. Of the location of the Garden of Eden we have no knowledge except from the biblical description which places it amid four rivers and names the Euphrates as one of these. Students have usually guessed its location as suggested on the map, near the mouth of the Euphrates, a region where the garden might include seashore, river-meadows, and mountains.

Noah's landing place, Mt. Ararat, the centre from which his descendants went forth for the second peopling of the earth, is fairly settled upon as being in the great culminating range of Armenia, the tremendous peaks which tower at the Euphrates' source. The site of Babylon or Babel has been definitely established by modern research, as has also that of Ur, the city whence Abraham set out upon his journeyings. These are traced on the map, showing how he went with his father to Haran, how he wandered as far as Egypt, and then finally settled in Palestine, the land promised to his descendants by the Almighty.

HIS issue of the Bible aims to bring the Sacred Book more vividly before the minds of readers, especially youthful readers. For this purpose all the great picture galleries of the world have been consulted and compared, and copies from over a thousand of the most celebrated religious paintings have been arranged in sequence so as to depict each successive step of the holy story.

Illustrations of the Bible are as old as Christianity itself. Of earlier date they could not be, for the ancient Hebraic law, like the Mohammedan law today, forbade all "graven images," all carved or painted reproductions of living figures. This sweeping prohibition rose from the effort to repress idolatry, that pagan instinct which Moses found so persistent among his followers. The higher and stronger faith of the early Christians knew no such cause for distrust of art. We are told that St. Luke painted a portrait of the holy mother, and that the face of Jesus Himself remained imprinted on the cloth which wiped the beads of agony from His brow. In the ancient catacombs, homes of the first three centuries of the faith, we find rude drawings of Jesus, of Noah, and of many biblical incidents. When Christianity rose to power in Rome and again in the mediæval world, its devotion was expressed in vast paintings and elaborate mosaics covering the splendid walls of churches. Even as early as the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great called these church walls "the layman's Bible.' And when in the fifteenth century there arose the marvellous renaissance of art, Raphael illumined the arches of the papal palace with a pictured Bible, and Michelangelo covered the ceiling of the papal chapel with his mighty visions of the creation. Since then art has ever been at the service of religion. Luther often expressed most earnestly his desire for objective teaching. "Would to God," he once exclaimed, "I could bring the people and the rulers

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

to such a mind that they would have the whole Bible written and painted within and without their houses before every man's eye! That would be indeed a great Christian work." Much of the religious knowledge of the ignorant peasantry in past centuries has been gleaned from such church pictures or from rude woodcut drawings of the Bible scenes. Earnest artists have made the illustration of Scripture their life effort. Not only was the renaissance painting almost wholly religious, but our own day has had its masterpieces. The last half century has seen at least four artists, Doré, Schnorr, Tissot and Hoffmann, who, like Raphael, have created each a Bible series of his own.

Now, from all these sources, combining all, have been gathered here over a thousand illustrations; and these have been arranged in one vast connected series, far more extensive than that of the most prolific of individual artists. This series by itself tells without words all the story of the Bible. Yet to bring home more fully the beautiful and holy tale, every picture is described upon its protecting tissue, and the descriptions are so linked together that even a child, turning these pages only for the pictures, may yet learn from them the whole wonderful narrative of God's dealing with man.

The scriptural text here followed is that which, through three centuries of use, has become accepted and endeared to every Englishspeaking reader, the "authorized" or "King James" translation. Not a word has anywhere been changed. Within the last quarter century, however, there have been two very important revisions of the English Bible. The first of these was made by a great concourse of English and American divines, and published in 1885; the second presenting the still more radical corrections urged by the American members of the conference, was published in 1901. Neither of these newer translations seems likely to usurp the place of the revered and established "King James" version, which continues to be used in all our churches. But in order that readers may understand the Sacred Book to its fullest extent, the present work has been compared word by word with the recent translations and every important change, every one, that is, which causes any alteration in the meaning, has been pointed out in a footnote.

These appended notes are of the briefest. The aim here, in offering the biblical text, is to concentrate the attention of the reader upon the Sacred Scripture itself, not to distract attention from it by a multiplicity of comments and explanations in the midst of which the original sense may become lost, especially to youthful readers. There