“For lo, I raise up the Chaldeans,
    A bitter and hasty nation,
    Which marches far and wide in the earth,
    To possess the dwellings that are not theirs. 
    They are terrible and dreadful,
    Their decrees and their judgments proceed only from themselves. 
    Swifter than leopards are their horses,
    And fiercer than the evening wolves. 
    Their horsemen prance proudly around;
    And their horsemen shall come from afar and fly,
    Like the eagle when he pounces on his prey. 
    They all shall come for violence,
    In troops,—­their glance is ever forward! 
    They gather captives like the sand!”

As they were in the time of Habakkuk, so are they to-day.  Shut up on every side in the Persian Empire, their ancestors, the Carduchi, refused obedience to the great king and his satraps, just as the Curds refuse to obey the grand seignior and his pashas.  They can raise a hundred and forty thousand armed men.  They are capable of any undertaking.  Mohammed himself said, “They would yet revolutionize the world.”

The ancient Chaldees seem to have been fire-worshippers, like the Persians.  They were renowned for the study of the heavens and the worship of the stars, and some remains of Persian dualism still linger among their descendants, who are accused of Devil-worship by their neighbors.

That Abraham was a real person, and that his story is historically reliable, can hardly be doubted by those who have the historic sense.  Such pictures, painted in detail with a Pre-Raphaelite minuteness, are not of the nature of legends.  Stories which are discreditable to his character, and which place him in a humiliating position towards Pharaoh and Abimelech, would not have appeared in a fictitious narrative.  The mythical accounts of Abraham, as found among the Mohammedans and in the Talmud,[350] show, by their contrast, the difference between fable and history.

The events in the life of Abraham are so well known that it is not necessary even to allude to them.  We will only refer to one, as showing that others among the tribes in Palestine, besides Abraham, had a faith in God similar to his.  This is the account of his meeting with Melchisedek.  This mysterious person has been so treated by typologists that all human meaning has gone out of him, and he has become, to most minds, a very vapory character.[351] But this is doing him great injustice.

One mistake often made about him is, to assume that “Melchisedek, King of Salem,” gives us the name and residence of the man, whereas both are his official titles.  His name we do not know; his office and title had swallowed it up.  “King of Justice and King of Peace,”—­this is his designation.  His office, as we believe, was to be umpire among the chiefs of neighboring tribes.  By deciding the questions which arose among them, according to equity, he received his title of “King of Justice.”  By thus preventing the bloody arbitrament of war, he gained the other name, “King of Peace.”  All questions, therefore, as to where “Salem” was, fall to the ground.  Salem means “peace”; it does not mean the place of his abode.