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Ezekiel, who had been carried into the Babylonian territory some time before the ruin of his native country in the days of Zedekiah, began to perform his office among the Jewish captives in the land of the Chaldees, in the fifth year after Jehoiakim was made prisoner.
These tablets formed part of a great epic poem of which Nimrod, the mighty hunter, was the hero. Explorers are now looking for the palace of Nimrod, also that of Sennacherib, the Assyrian monarch who besieged Jerusalem. Ur of the Chaldees, birthplace of Abraham, father and founder of the Hebrew race, is a rich field for the archaeologist to plough.
"The glory of the kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency," is become "as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha." The traveller who passes through the land is at first inclined to say that there are no ruins, no remains, of the mighty city which once lorded it over the earth.
A little lower down in the same genealogical table we find attached to the posterity of Shem that Asshur who, as we are told in the verses quoted above, left the plains of Shinar in order to found Nineveh in the upper country. So, too, it was from Ur of the Chaldees that Terah, another descendant of Shem, and, through Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people, came up into Canaan.
Their bows shall also dash the young men to pieces, and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eyes shall not spare children. And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.
"The Chaldees believed in a celestial virgin who had purity of body, loveliness of person, and tenderness of affection, and she was one to whom the erring sinner could appeal with more chance of success than to a stern father. She was portrayed as a mother with a child in her arms, and every attribute ascribed to her showing that she was supposed to be as fond as any earthly female ever was."
It may be said of the religion of the Mayas, as I have had occasion to remark, what the learned author of the Five Great Monarchies says of that of the primitive Chaldees: “The religion of the Chaldeans, from the very earliest times to which the monuments carry us back, was, in its outward aspect, a polytheism of a very elaborate character.
When Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldees the power and influence of Babylonia had been firmly established for centuries throughout the length and breadth of western Asia.
So far as we can judge, Chaldæan civilization does not date from so remote a past as that of Egypt, but it appears certain that the principles of the vault were discovered and put in practice by the Chaldees long before the comparatively modern times in which the segmental and pointed arches of Nineveh were erected.
And before the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and long centuries before Nineveh or Calah or Asshur, there had been mighty kingdoms in Babylonia, of which the world had quite forgot the names, only vague rumors remaining in song or legend of Nimrod and Chedorlaomer and Ur of the Chaldees, only what was preserved in the dimmest records of the Hebrew Scriptures.
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