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THE OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS CORRUPTION 261

not ruled by the Israelites for more than 250 years, beginning from the
time of David (c. 1000-962 B.C.E.) and ending with the surrender of Samaria
and the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel (721 B.C.E.). God's promise
of an everlasting ownership clearly goes against historical reality in this
case. One has to discard either God's proclamation or the interpolated verses
which banish Ishmael and his progeny. And if we choose to discard the
latter then God's promise will have been fulfilled, since Canaan has always
been in the possession of the children of Abraham.
A brief passage from Genesis 13 furthers this idea:

14 And the Lord said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from
him, Lift up now thine eyes, and lookfrom the place where thou art
northward, and southward, and eastward,and westward:
15 For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy
seedfor ever.
16 And I will make thy seed as the dust if the earth: so that if a man can
number the dust of the earth, then shallthy seedalsobe numbered.136

This passage, and a similar one in Genesis 15, place additional weight
against the interpolated verses of Genesis 17. Throughout history there
have been far fewerJews than Arabs, the descendants of Ishmael, so that
the appellation 'dust of the earth' cannot be used to describe only them.
History compels us to view the expulsion of Ishmael from God's Covenant
as a deliberate distortion fuelled by prejudice.

9. Conclusion

In the numerous centuries that lapsed between Moses' ascent to Mount
Sinai and the eventual standardisation of a Hebrew text, by nothing short
of a miracle could the text have been preserved free of errors, alterations,
and interpolations. Indeed, every facet of Jewish history seems to proclaim
that there never was any such miracle. We can easilyobserve that the political
situation in Palestine, even during the presence of a unitedJewish state,
was not at all favourable for the proper and sanctified propagation of the
O'T; rarely did a king bestow any affection or devotion on it, with the
majority erecting idols instead and some even carrying out pagan rituals
of child sacrifice etc. On top of all this the text itself disappeared repeatedly,
and for centuries at a time.
The foundations ofJewish literary and religious culture were themselves
derivative of other societies, causing further infiltration into the O'T from

136 Genesis 13:14-16; emphasis added. Seealso Genesis 15:3-5.