In this work came a further evolution
of the truths and methods suggested by Bentley, Wolf, and Niebuhr,
and their application to sacred history was made strikingly
evident. Milman, though a clergyman, treated the history of the
chosen people in the light of modern knowledge of Oriental and
especially of Semitic peoples. He exhibited sundry great biblical
personages of the wandering days of Israel as sheiks or emirs or
Bedouin chieftains; and the tribes of Israel as obedient then to
the same general laws, customs, and ideas governing wandering
tribes in the same region now. He dealt with conflicting sources
somewhat in the spirit of Bentley, and with the mythical,
legendary, and miraculous somewhat in the spirit of Niebuhr. This
treatment of the history of the Jews, simply as the development of
an Oriental tribe, raised great opposition. Such champions of
orthodoxy as Bishop Mant and Dr. Faussett straightway took the
field, and with such effect that the _Family Library_, a very
valuable series in which Milman's history appeared, was put under
the ban, and its further publication stopped.
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