to confound their language, and by such violent means brings about the dispersion of the human race by the unity of which He feels himself threatened.  In Q it is understood that men are scattered over the whole earth; they are never represented as all living at one point, and pains are accordingly taken to describe the flood as quite universal.  The division of the people comes about quite simply in the way of genealogy, and the division of the languages is not the cause but the result of it.  Accompanying this we find once more a notable difference in point of mental attitude; what JE regards as unnatural, and only to be understood as a violent perversion of the original order, is in Q the most natural thing in the world.

The period between the flood and Abraham is filled up in Q by another ten-membered genealogy, which, to judge from the analogy of Genesis iv., had probably only seven members in JE.  It cannot have been wanting there, and may have passed straight from Shem to Heber, and left out the grandfather Nahor (x. 21, 24, xxiv. 15, xxix. 5), who is even less to be distinguished from his grandson of the same name than Adam from Enos.  The original dwelling-place of the Terahites is, according to Q, not the Mesopotamian Haran (Carrhae), as in JE (xii. 1, xxiv. 4), but Ur Casdim, which can only mean Ur of the Chaldees.  From there Terah, the father of Abraham, Nahor, and Haran, is said to have emigrated with Abraham and Lot, the son of Haran, who was already dead.  If this was so, Nahor must have stayed at Ur Casdim, and Haran must have died there.  But neither of these assumptions is consistent with the indications of the narrative.  The different aspirates notwithstanding, it is scarcely allowable to separate the man Haran from the town Haran and to make him die elsewhere.  It is equally impossible to regard Ur in Chaldaea as the residence of Nahor, whether the grandfather or the grandson of the same name matters nothing; for it is obviously not without relation to real facts that the place, which in any case must be in Syria, where the Nahorides Laban and Rebecca dwell, is called in J the town of Nahor, and in E Haran.  Even in Q though Nahor stays in Ur, Laban and Rebecca do not live in Chaldaea, but in Padan Aram, ie., in Mesopotamian Syria.  What helps to show that Ur Casdim does not belong to the original form of the tradition, is that even in Serug the father of Nahor, we are far away from Babylon towards the West.  Serug is the name of a district which borders Haran on the North; how can the son of Serug all at once leap back to Ur Casdim?  What the reasons were for making Babylon Abraham’s point of departure, we need not now consider; but after having left Ur Casdim with Terah, it is curious how he only gets as far as Haran, and stays there till his father’s death.  In Q also it is from Haran that he enters Palestine.  Here, if anywhere, we have in the doubling of the point of departure an attempt to harmonise and to gain a connection with JE.