Excerpt from The Heroes and Crises of Early Hebrew History: From the Creation to the Death of Moses Every man consciously or unconsciously makes his own working canon of the Bible. Sometimes this working canon includes every thing that is found in the Scriptures, irrespective of relative values; sometimes it is pitiably limited, and fails to include many exceedingly important passages. To use the Bible intelligently and profitably it is important to realize that it is a great library, containing many different books, written by a great variety of authors, who lived in periods widely remote, and who wrote with diverse aims and points of View. Over twelve centuries lie between Moses and Paul, and each century contrib uted its part to the gradually growing records of God's revelation of his character and will in the experiences, the hearts and the minds of men. The men of later ages, who have given us our present canons of the Old and the New Testaments, in their zeal to preserve all the existing records, included certain writings, which possess only a secondary historical and religious value. Sometimes, as in the case of the Gos pels, they have also preserved three or four distinct yet parallel records of the same events; and sometimes, as in the case of the opening books of the Old Testament, they have closely blended together the Older and later records into one continuous narrative. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.