CANAANITE BELIEFS ABOUT THE WORLD

There are certain questions which awaken the curiosity of everyone.  How did this wonderful world come into existence?  How is it that you and I happen to be here?  How did things in general come to be as they are?  Some of these difficult questions are to-day being partly answered by careful students of science.  In ancient times there was little or no science, yet in every country there were certain answers to these questions handed down from generation to generation and generally accepted as true.

=Idolatrous stories of creation.=—­When the Hebrews entered Canaan they naturally were inclined to accept the ideas of the earlier inhabitants of that country, whose knowledge in regard to many matters was far beyond theirs.  The Canaanites in turn had got most of their ideas from the leading civilized nations of that day, the Egyptians, and especially the Babylonians.  From these sources had come certain stories about the beginning of things.

Babylonian traders in the inns of Canaan used to tell a story of the creation of the world, and also about a great flood which the gods once sent upon the earth.

=How the Hebrews retold these stories.=—­The best men among the Hebrews knew that these stories were imperfect.  Their forty years training in the wilderness had made them wise in the ways of God.  This wisdom enabled them to sift the wheat from the chaff.  They retold these stories, omitting the error, and retaining the truth.  Thus we come to have the wonderful stories of the creation and the flood as we find them in the Bible.

=How these stories were handed down.=—­In the earliest days of the settlement in Canaan very few Hebrews, if any, could read or write.  Possibly Moses understood the Egyptian picture-writing, or the wedge-shaped letters of the Babylonian clay tablets.  The Hebrew letters, however, in which the books of the Old Testament afterward were written, were invented by the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians passed on their invention to the old Canaanites.

After the Hebrews came it was not long before ambitious Hebrew boys and girls were staring at the queer marks in the inscriptions which they found here and there, over the gates of Canaanite cities or on the tombs of Canaanite kings.  Gradually they learned to spell out syllables, words, and sentences, and then they learned to copy these same letters, so that in time the Hebrews were making inscriptions and books of their own.  Among the earliest of these books was one containing the stories of the creation and the flood.  They had been handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another, until finally they were gathered into a book.  This became a part of the book of Genesis in our Bible.

NEW TENDENCIES TO SELFISHNESS IN CANAAN