One may see in this debate over Babylonia, the first attempt to create a secular synthesis that encompassed Egypt to Elam and the many millennia of the pre-Greco-Roman world: that unity would have been appealing to William in the library of his parents constructing imaginary worlds in his mind (Cross 1973:4). Regardless of whether Pan-Babylonianism was right or not, it represented the attempt by an individual to bring order to this newly revealed ancient universe, precisely as Albright himself would do in From the Stone Age to Christianity in 1940. It was the effort and not the merit of the claim which warrants attention.This is the second IHARE essay by Peter Feinman on the influence of Methodism on the biblical-scholarly ambitions of the young William Foxwell Albright . I noted the first one here.
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