Preface

Sacred Biblical history should rightly occupy the first place among the historical sciences, since it is an inexhaustible source of moral and higher historical education for everyone who is more or less capable; to the serious intellectual life of man.

If any history educates a citizen of the homeland and gives mental development, then the Holy Biblical history in this respect stands above all other histories, because its subject is the deep foundations of the human spirit, in it the deepest laws of world-historical development are revealed. It clearly shows that there is nothing accidental or arbitrary in the history of peoples, that any attempt to "make history" is senseless and harmful, because everything awaits and demands the "fulfillment of times", and these times can neither be brought closer nor postponed.

The Holy Biblical history vividly and instructively reveals the mystery of God's economy, which consists in the salvation of man who has fallen away from God. The idea of the salvation of the human race is the main idea of the entire biblical story. It shows how for thousands of years there has been a stubborn struggle between the forces of good and evil for human souls. Speaking in the apt words of the great Russian writer F. M. Dostoevsky, we can characterize the entire content of the Holy Biblical history as follows: "Here the devil fights with God, and the battlefield is the heart of men."

The center of Biblical history, to which all historical paths in the past converged and from which they diverge into the future, is Golgotha, crowned with the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Christ is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega of the entire history of the salvation of the human race. But, speaking of the main idea of Holy History, one must always remember that the Biblical stories are not, as skeptics assert, some kind of fantasy of the human religious mind, which has nothing in common with the historical past. Sacred history describes real events that have taken place and are taking place in the history of the human race. This is evidenced not only by the believing human heart; but also modern historical science.

An extraordinary movement is taking place in historical science at the present time, thanks to the amazing discoveries that are made on the forgotten ashes of the historical life of the ancient peoples of the Near East. From that happy hour, when archaeologists and historians took up spades and shovels and began to dig up the rubbish of the ruins in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, as well as in other parts of the Near East, a whole world of new historical knowledge opened up before the eyes of researchers: the pale and gaunt pages of the history of ancient peoples were greatly enlivened and expanded, even the existence of new, peoples and monarchies completely unknown before, the knowledge of which shed new light on the entire fate of ancient mankind.

From under the sands of the desert, archaeologists have brought to the surface remarkable monuments of forgotten cultures - sanctuaries and tombs of pharaohs, as well as the ruins of temples and royal palaces of Khorsabad, Nineveh, Babylon, your, Ugarit and many other ancient cities of Mesopotamia and Syria. Countless written documents, literally entire huge libraries and archives were found in the excavations. For example, in the ruins of the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, 30 thousand clay tablets with cuneiform texts have been preserved: there are diplomatic correspondence, treatises, prayers, literary monuments, and religious pagan myths of past centuries, including the epic of Gilgamesh, which contains a story about the Flood.

In the middle of the last century, archaeological excavations also began in Palestine. Most of the cities have already been discovered, the names of which we previously knew only from the Bible. In the ruins of these cities, confirmation of the authenticity of a number of facts mentioned in the Bible was found. Thanks to the efforts of archaeologists, the remains of buildings from the time of Saul, David, and Solomon, as well as traces of the devastating invasions of Palestine by the Aramaeans, Assyrians and Chaldeans, appeared to the surface of the earth from under the thickness of dust deposits and debris on the surface of the earth.

All these extraordinary archaeological discoveries are dear to us because they are closely connected with biblical history, and not only shed a lot of new light on it, often clarifying its most difficult pages, but also provide miraculous confirmation of many biblical facts and events that could previously be rejected with impunity by criticism of skepticism. All this suggests that our faith in the truth of the biblical stories is not blind, and especially in our skeptical age it is confirmed by many archaeological finds. The words of our Lord Jesus Christ are truly true, that stones will glorify God if human hearts become incapable of this! (Luke 19:40).

Introduction

The Holy Bible is a book of books.

The sacred chronicle of mankind is contained in the Holy Bible. Among the greatest books that exist in the literary treasury of mankind and serve its spiritual enlightenment, the Holy Book of Books - the Bible - occupies an absolutely exceptional position. Any book contains the word as the embodiment of the spirit or mind of man, and the higher and more perfect the spirit or mind of man, the more highly his literary word is valued and the more precious his book itself becomes for us. But the Book of Books contains the Divine Word as the embodiment of the infinite Spirit and the all-perfect all-embracing absolute Mind. Hence the Holy Bible is as much higher than all other books as the Divine infinite Mind is higher and more perfect than the finite, limited human mind. Therefore, the Bible occupies a more important position among the greatest lights of literature than the sun among the planets. Not only has it always been the source of true spiritual light, the rays of which shine through only occasionally and faintly in simple human books, but for centuries and millennia it has illuminated the mind of mankind with supernatural light, revealing to its spiritual gaze such truths as it vainly wanted to comprehend by its own efforts.

When reading the Holy Bible, one must always remember that it is not a scientific treatise or a philosophical doctrine, but a Book that contains divinely revealed truths about the salvation of mankind. The Bible does not tell us how the heavenly bodies move, but how we ascend to the spiritual heaven. It tells us how and what the Lord did in His love for mankind through the people of Israel in order to give salvation to all nations and all people. Those who want to get acquainted with natural science and history should read natural science and history books. But whoever wants to know how to be saved must read the Bible: on these questions we will not find a single error or contradiction in the Bible. If one sometimes thinks of seeing errors and contradictions in the Bible on religious matters, it is not in the Bible, but in people who misinterpret the Bible.